Track Seven

YOU PEOPLE

Thursday ...

The thing that kills me about you people—and by that I mean everyone but me—is how you’ve built the world to compensate for your shortcomings. Everything, but everything, has to always be the same. Same Exxon. Same Kwik-Pik. Carbon-copy brands in carbon-copy stores on carbon-copy streets in carbon-copy towns. As bad as an old Deputy Dawg cartoon.

Sure, you complain about this too. And yet you keep queuing up, keep ordering your Chicken McNuggets with two too many sweet- and-sour packets—just to be safe. You talk a good game when it comes to the unexpected, and yet you keep paying for more of the same. One of the great gifts of forgetting, it seems to me, is that it absolves you of the need for any consistency between your words and your wallet, not to mention your Scripture and your porn collection.

It all comes down to the bottom line, doesn’t it? You childproof your existence to better secure your illusion of control, and so continue gliding on autopilot while you focus on your appetites and your vanities. All of it—the mass-production franchises, the shake-and-bake blockbusters, the commercial-jingle pop songs, the seen-one-seen-them-all subdivisions—is simply an extension of your sloth and your amnesia. Stretchy pants for the fat ass of your soul.

Did I tell you I was a cynic?

I say this because I want you to understand why I was sick of Ruddick before I had even arrived—and why I found walking from door to door, across lawn after neat, orderly lawn, so painful.

Fawk.

Why sometimes simply breathing bored me to the point of contemplating suicide. And why the hairy tongue of my soul had been numbed beyond the ability to taste, let alone to crave or appreciate. The contents of the world are like words: repeat them enough and they lose all significance.

Even Molly, as young as a college diploma, as fresh as only a wannabe can be—even she was beginning to bore me. She brought her laptop with her to breakfast, eager to show me her small capsule story the Post-Gazette had printed for that day’s edition. “Page A13,” she said with a shrug, “beneath a story about a mad cow hoax in Amish country.” She bounced her head back and forth with a grin. “Imagine being beat out by a cow.”

“My sister was quite the heifer,” I replied with a What-are-you-going- to-do? squint.

She laughed in that way women use to tell you you’re being mean and they love it. “Here,” she said, sliding her laptop around. “Check it out.”

“Huh ...” I said.

“Not much,” she admitted, crinkling her nose. “I fairly screamed at Cynthia, my editor, to include the term ‘female’ in the header, but she pooh-poohed the idea. They usually hate it when hacks try to upsell their stories.”

“It would have been better if they’d run a larger photo,” I said, “one that showed her wearing a tank or something like that. But it’s the cult stuff that’s the real hook. Trust me, they’ll be back for more.”

Molly pressed a sheepish face into her forearm. “God, I hope so ... “

For whatever reason, door after door went unanswered that day—as if we had stumbled upon the gainfully employed subdivision or something. It was pretty much a waste of time, as the ever-helpful Molly pointed out on more than one occasion. I had resolved to return to the Framer Compound, of course, but I wanted to steep myself in the town that encircled them first. Like I explained to Molly, it’s hard to figure out a fish when it’s flopping around on the dock of your assumptions. You gotta get wet.

I was also waiting for Albert to get back to me with his research.

Because so many doors ended up being duds, the two of us had ample opportunity to talk, about Dead Jennifer some, but more about ourselves and our “aspirations.”

Molly possessed an optimism that could only be called young. Had she been in her thirties, I would have said stupid—or maybe naive if I happened to be in a forgiving mood. But she was still smoking the bong of possibilities, and had yet to hit the hard bottle of fact. She wanted, wanted, wanted. Prizes. Fame. Ultimately she hoped to work for none other than The New York Times, the newspaper of selective record. To live in Manhattan, where the beautiful go to enjoy the labour of the ugly.

Otherwise, she was pretty much the product of what you might expect. She had a west coast education to correct her east coast reserve. Her siblings lacked her vision. Her friends were, like, the coolest ever. Her parents sunburned easily.

Every once in a while she even said “Daddy.”

She admitted that her motives were probably as crass as could be when it came to Dead Jennifer. A cousin of hers who worked as a trainer for the Pittsburgh Penguins had caught wind of the story for some reason, and she had thought, “Eureka!” Jennifer Bonjour had all the elements that made news news, which is to say, a missing blond hottie, a crazy cult leader, and no relevance whatsoever to the lives of those who would be interested.

Her rationale was that she could only help.

To which I replied, “Really.”

“I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

“Nip down to the doughnut shop and get me a coffee, will ya?”

She laughed as if I had been joking.

All in all, we got along pretty well. After I had bludgeoned her finer scruples to death with a barrage of clever crudities, she even began to laugh. I only genuinely pissed her off once, when I bailed between radio stations in the middle of this incredibly sappy tune.

“So let me guess,” she said, her eyes fluttering in irritation. “You hate Kelly Clarkson too.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “She makes me want to light some candles, draw a steaming bath, and shave my vagina.”

That earned me several minutes of fuming silence. But I’m pretty sure I caught a head-shaking smile reflected in the passenger window.

Now, a career counsellor would tell you that a job like mine is “soft- skill intensive,” which is just a fancy way of saying you need to be a “people person” of some description to do it well. As you might have surmised, I am not a people person. I tend to hate people, as a rule. What I am good at is disarming people, getting them to say things they might not otherwise say. I have a gift for manipulation, or so Dr. Ken Shelton told me on June 11, 1999.

I mention this because the more people I asked about the Framers, the more troubled I found myself. You see, by this point I was pretty much sucking on the idea of the Framers like oxygen. Like I said, I had never worked a cult member’s disappearance before, and I fell on the novelty of it all like a homeless guy on a half-smoked cigarette.

This probably made me a little more sympathetic to their cause than I should have been. Surround a guy with enough smiles and he’ll prize the first angry asshole he meets—sure as shit. So I found myself poking the unsuspecting citizens of Ruddick with the fact of the Framers, mentioning them the way I might note a strange-looking mole on their skin—you know, with that You-should-get-that-checked-out tone—just to see what kind of reaction I would get.

And I discovered that for a goodly number of the good inhabitants of Ruddick, the Framers were a matter of rote, reflex—as simple as simple could be. Guilty, probably. Symptom of some social malaise, certainly. Otherwise, they were a bunch of dangerous fools.

Of course, this made me think they were harmless.

Only Xenophon Baars kept me guessing ...

The day was pretty much a strikeout as far as Dead Jennifer was concerned. Sure, there was old Dane Ferrence, who insisted that God was simply trying to tell the Framers to turn to Jesus. And there was sixteen-year-old Sky Armstrong, who had taken swimming lessons with Jennifer at the local YMCA the previous summer. “She was weird,” she said in that tone people reserve for declarations of peer-group solidarity. Then immediately contradicted herself by saying, “She was really normal, though.”

But otherwise, nobody knew nothing.

Rather than return to our rooms, Molly and I drove directly to Odd- Jobs—to spare me the embarrassment of dodging traffic on foot as much as anything. For a time we just stared at our menus in that witless way, soaking in the damp hum of summer exhaustion. The tailings of what counted as rush-hour traffic in Ruddick roared up and down the road beyond our window. Nolen walked in almost the instant after we had placed our order: the turkey surprise for Molly and a BLT for me.

He looked like a man run ragged, too skinny for his police shirt, too fat for his uniform pants. But true to type, he smiled and laughed at nothing when I hailed him. I introduced him to Molly, whom he thought he recognized. He sidled in beside her without a wisp of embarrassment: he was used to being welcome, I could tell.

“What’s that I smell on your breath?” he said, fixing me with a smiling frown. He must have caught me exhaling or something. Either that or he was just fucking with me, which would mean he was more clever than I had credited.

I shrugged and said, “Mint?”

He had this way of laughing, hands held close yet flared out like a magician, and a stiff-necked backward lean. Adolescent self-consciousness hardened into adult habit.

“So you talked to the Morrows?” I asked.

“Yeah ... But first I have to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“What’s this I hear about you, um, taking a, ah, collection?”

I could feel Molly’s eyes boring into my profile. Funny the way their stares cut so much deeper before you’ve slept with them.

“Just part of the cover, Caleb.”

His frown made him look like a mascot for some kind of mattress or furniture company.

“Look,” I added quickly, “you know how people get ...” I had already accumulated around nine hundred bucks, thanks to Dead Jennifer. When it came to missing persons, pretty chicks were almost as lucrative as blond children. A couple more and I would have a good chunk of my Bally’s Visa paid off, and I could go back to playing craps for real Cover my odds instead of rolling naked. “There’s a big difference between what they say when they think everything is off the cuff as opposed to, you know, all official.” I made a Who-likes-that-crap?face for emphasis.

“Well ...”

I grinned and waved dismissively. “Don’t worry, Caleb. We’re keeping close track of who gave us what. It’ll be all returned.” I turned to prod some expression of affirmation from Molls. “Even the nickels and dimes.”

Nolen laughed at that. I think an excuse to laugh it off was all he really wanted.

I steered the conversation back to what mattered and away from the dope on my breath and the dough stuffed in my pocket by asking him how things went with Jill and Eddie Morrow. I couldn’t resist a you-people grin at Molly when he pulled out his notebook. I could have hung silver dollars from his forehead, his frown lines were so deep. Pressing the thing flat like a Gideon on the table, he gave me the rundown on his interview, responding to each of my successive questions with what seemed more and more anxiety. He was one of those guys who became more nervous the more he heard the sound of his own voice. Molly watched with the look of patient boredom women often get while waiting for men to confirm their mutual intelligence.

“So neither of them said anything about Eddie going out after dropping Jill off?” This was a rhetorical question: Nolen had already told me that he interviewed the two together, and I had gathered enough from my short conversation with Jill to know this was something both would be keen to paper over with silence. This is the glue that holds most relationships together: things unspoken and wilfully overlooked.

“No ... I mean, yeah, that’s right. You mentioned something about that, didn’t you?”

Do you see why I feel like I’ve been stranded in a life skills class for the developmentally challenged? Don’t laugh. The whole world rides the short bus, you included.

“Letme look into it,” I said.

Okay, just because I score large with the ladies doesn’t mean I understand them. They always seem to come at me sideways. Here I think we’re taking a pleasant stroll in the park heading toward soft pillows and cool sheets and suddenly, click—

I’m standing on a land mine.

Nolen beat an awkward retreat partway through our dinner. Neither of us said much—just munched in that silent too-much-fun-in-the-sun way. It seemed a joke, driving the car across the street to the motel. It happened too fast for me to pick up on any telltale signs. In all honesty, I was doing cartwheels of joy inside, the way she simply followed me to my door after we got out of the Vee-Dub.

Naked time, I thought as I ushered her in. I could almost feel the soft skin of her ass.

“Us?” she cried the instant the door clicked shut. “Us?”

The thing about carnal fantasies, I find anyway, is their stickiness. Typical daydreams wink into nothingness at the first sign of trouble. Spike them with the promise of sex and they get as hard to flick as boogers or gum.

So I could only stare at her, trying to blink her clothes back on. Fawk.

“Don’t play stupid, Disciple. You’re not stupid.”

That was when I realized she was talking about my collection scam.

“Well, technically, you are standing next to me when they break open their wallets.”

Now I know you know exactly the kind of bewildered gaze she shot me, either because you’ve weathered it a thousand times, like I have, or because you’ve looked it just as many.

“Are you a sociopath, Disciple? Are you a fucking lunatic?”

“No, babe. Just stupid.”

“Ah!” she cried. “Fucking aaaah!”

“Molly ... C’mon.”

But she was laughing to herself—rarely a good sign. “You know, Disciple, I fucking knew this would happen. I glanced at you on my way in and said to myself, ‘Now that guy, Molly my girl, is bad fucking news.’”

I was actually relieved to hear this, vain prick that I am. Here all along I’d worried she had said “Eew” because of my age.

“Well there you go,” I said with a grin. “News is news. You had no choice but to cover me ... “

The shadow of a smile.

“This routine of yours actually work?”

I tugged her closer by the hands. Maybe I could turn this around after

all.

“Only on intelligent, sensitive, highly educated nymphomaniacs.”

“Nymphomaniacs?”she cried. “Is that word even, like, legal anymore?”

She laughed aloud this time, and I really thought I had clinched things—I really did. But she abruptly pushed back against my chest, backed away looking down, shaking her head with four fingers held to her forehead.

“No ...” she said, her eyes fluttering. “No. I’m not going to let you charm your way into my pants. This is serious, Disciple. I have a fucking career I’m trying to build here. A fucking career! And not to mention poor fucking Jennifer Bonjour! But does Disciple Manning give a shit? Noooo. Apparently Disciple thinks—”

She was on one of those finding-her-way-back-to-her-anger rolls. I remember it all word for word, of course, but I suspect you’ve pretty much heard the whole thing before. The important thing, the crucial thing, was that she had mentioned Dead Jennifer, who had become, without me realizing it, a trigger of some kind.

And a strange one.

You know that feeling you have when you’re fighting with your husband or your wife, that aimless disgust which seems to blanket the world corner to corner? It has no bottom, believe me.

“The whole thing is a murderous con!”Mandy Bonjour cried.

“And if you suspect us,”Xenophon Baars said, “you will waste time and resources investigating us, time and resources that I fear Jennifer Bonjour desperately needs.”

“We’regoingto do this, aren’t we?”Caleb Nolen asked around a mouthful of potato chips. “We’re going to save this girl. ”

There was too much crosstalk for me to recognize, let alone solve, the problem fuming before me. “I have some Xanax,” I heard myself say, not so much as an insult but because I knew that was where I was headed.

She glared at me in horror.

(“You want some Xanax? You could probably use it more than I could.”)

She stormed out, leaving my door swinging, then slammed the door to her room (which was immediately adjacent) so hard that the goofy floral prints hanging on my wall rattled. I thought that was uncalled for.

“Drama queen!” I bellowed. But all I could hear through the wall was her TV cranking out the theme song to Jeopardy.

Can you believe that? Fucking Jeopardy ...

Women like that make me happy to be banging my secretary.

Now I know her sociopath comment has got you thinking. My army therapist used to tell me I have nothing to worry about, that unlike true sociopaths I actually have the neural machinery for “social emotions,” as the eggheads like to call them: guilt, shame, compassion—all that bullshit. The only way I can explain it is this: think of your worst long- term relationship, the way it just got to a point where you just couldn’t feel anymore, the crap was piled so high. Well, that’s pretty much how I feel all the bloody time.

Burnt out, not emotionless.

But still, I worry sometimes. It seems to me that even though I’m not a sociopath per se, I am kind of one, you know, for all practical and romantic purposes. I mean, when I think about all those people forking over their cash to help the Bonjours hire me to find their dead daughter when they had, like, already hired me, I know I should feel guilty ... But then I think about Vegas and hookers and Jimmy Beam and I smile.

Circus Circus, baby. Where the cheapskates go to win.

Perhaps I am a kind of “as if” sociopath, pretty much indistinguishable from the real deal—except, of course, for the odd times when all that unfelt remorse comes crashing back in and I try to kill myself.

I continued mentally arguing with Molly as I drove into downtown Ruddick, looking this way and that for the bar, Legends, where Dead Jennifer was last seen alive. I pretty much kicked her verbal ass—same as you, I always win the fights in my head. I was about to land the argumentative death blow, some comment about her mother (whom I knew nothing about), when I sighted the joint on the corner of Talbot and Ross. Chapped paint. Covered windows. Half the sign’s neon had died, so that LEG S was all that glowed.

All in all, it struck me as my kind of place. Like school in July: no class.

A smart-ass-opath, I decided. That’s what I am. Fawk.

This is something I do quite often, pretend that I’m working a case when I’m actually looking for a way to get blotto. I’m a huge fan of booze, always have been, always will be, simply because I’m not a big fan of feelings.

Feelings fuck you up.

The irony, of course, is that booze turns you into an emotional slob. Drinking generally points you in the right direction—good times, baby—but things always turn, and like any rock tossed skyward, you end landing in the same dirt. Only harder.

So why do it? Why go toe-to-toe with the law of psychological gravity? Why hide in a bottle when that’s where the floodlights are certain to find you?

I could just as easily ask why you waste your money on lottery tickets. The laws of probability are just as ironclad, pretty much.

But you never know, do you? You could be a winner. I drink for the exact same reason. Someday I might find that perfect bottle of Jack or Johnnie or CC and blast myself into orbit. Good times forever.

That, and because it’s less addictive than crack.

So there I was, Legends, pretending to be working the case, wanting to get wasted, scoping the dance floor for poon. The place was gloomy in that bricked-in way. It smelled like an old houseboat, dank, like the underwear you peel from the bottom of the hamper. An asthmatic’s nightmare.

I had expected as much, but I had also expected to see a fair number of people, freshly showered and showing off the latest rural fashions. John Deere caps and bling and leather jackets—that kind of shit. What I had forgotten was that this was a weeknight in a small town. Christ, the place was as dead as Jennifer.

So I kind of stood there like an idiot—the way everyone does when they wander into an empty restaurant or bar. I stood there and blinked at the gloom, and felt kind of sorry for myself ... for being alone in a lonely place, I suppose.

Lights flashed across a mostly bare dance floor. Two dolled-up fat- bottoms swayed to the ponderous beat, their eyes clicking across various upward angles, anywhere they could avoid the gazes of the shadowy men who sat hunched here and there through the darkness. There were no shouts, no squeals or laughter. Just a living room filled with nervous strangers.

The last place Jennifer was seen alive.

And the perfect place to get drunk, I decided. Normally, when you get drunk alone, you want your surroundings to be noisy enough that you can at least pretend to be “partying.” Put enough losers in a pile and soon you have a heap of winners—such is the human contradiction. But the pathetic ambience of the place resonated with my hard-done-by mood. Legends had become Exhibit A, if not in the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour then in how the world was out to get me.

I ambled toward a stool at the bar. I’m something of a talker, if you haven’t noticed, and I had an overriding need to pepper someone (I didn’t really care who, though a sense of humour would help) with various cynical observations, mostly about how everyone is so full of shit. You know, play the Philosopher Dick.

Of course, the whole time I would tell myself that I was working the bartender or whoever it was for information. But really, deep down, I was just trying to look smart—distinguish myself from the run-of-the- mill losers who get drunk alone on weeknights.

Then I heard: “Disciple! Hey! How’s it hanging, man?”

It was Tim Dutchysen, or, as he liked to be called, Dutchie. I had walked by his table without even noticing him.

“Same as always,” I said. “Nine parts bullshit, one part air freshener.”

Maybe I would accomplish something after all.

I joined him at his table, where he’d been sitting alone. He claimed to be waiting for some friends—just finished his shift at the Kwik-Pik, he said—but I didn’t believe him. Unlike me, he hadn’t come here to get drunk alone, he had come hoping to bump into somebody, anybody to fill the verbal void of another night alone. He would keep an eye out for chicks, of course, but I could tell he had encountered too much rejection to take search-and-inseminate missions all that seriously anymore. Besides, my guess was he had learned to make do with internet porn. The chicks were hotter.

He asked me about the fundraising and the state of the investigation. I quizzed him about the Framers, using a What-the-fuck-is-up-with-that tone to cover the systematic nature of my questions. He did little more than parrot several of their more outrageous claims—refracted through the lens of rumour—in the funny singsong voice people use to report the other, offending half of an argument: you know, the “and then she said, ‘mew-mew-mew-mew-mew’” bullshit, where people use mocking tones to make others look stupid.

“We laugh at them, sure,” he said. “Hard not to. The Reverend says they’re a sign.”

“Sign? Like for handicap parking?”

He had a strange laugh, like his sense of humour had never developed past the age of five. In a bizarre way it actually made me feel, well ... protective.

“No-no! A sign, you know, for the end of days—Armageddon.”

I found this boggling. A religion using an end-of-the-world cult as proof the world was about to end? The World Court really needed to start prosecuting crimes against irony.

“Has anyone from your church tried to convert them?”

I had a hard time keeping a straight face asking that one. Baars may have been crazy as a shithouse rat, but I could see him giving Tim’s reverend the intellectual equivalent of a body-cavity search. Then saying something like, “So sorry, my friend, but there’s nothing up your ass but more ass.”

Tim shrugged. “Not us. No use talking to crazies. But they used to recruit all the time, handing out flyers and whatnot. Apparently there were quite a few arguments ...” He trailed off to take a long drink. He had that look people get when talking about something they’re not sure they should be talking about, not because they’ve been told to keep it quiet, but because they’ve suddenly realized they’ve never heard anyone else discussing the matter. Nothing quite so spontaneous as small-town conspiracies. “Then the Reverend went out to visit that Baars guy and they agreed to, you know, split the difference. They agreed to leave us alone, Ruddick alone, and we agreed not to burn their Compound to the fucking ground ... ”

I took a moment to absorb what he had said. He was still young enough to marble his talk with kick-ass bravado, so I chalked the burning comment up to that. The idea of a gang war between a cult and a church was just too rich.

“I was still in high school back then,” Tim nervously added. “So this is all, you know, hear-talk ... or whatever it’s called.”

“Hearsay,” I said.

I drank three beers, all the while pining for whisky. I really didn’t think that hard about what was said, knowing that I could sift through it all afterward anyway. Wasn’t in the mood.

Besides, the kid was starting to reek of dead ends. I meet a lot of mouthpieces in my line of work, people who desperately want to contribute and yet have nothing whatsoever to add. It pays to be able to identify them early, otherwise they suck the time right out of you.

“You should come out to the barbecue day after tomorrow,” he said. “Really.”

“Church, huh?”

He grinned, as if unconsciously sensing my rekindled interest. “Yeah. Our annual pig roast.”

I crinkled my nose.

“Not a church guy, huh?”

This is always a touchy question, no matter who happens to be asking it. It could be a little old lady with a baby’s daft smile and you could find yourself wiping spit off your face in seconds flat. One wrong word is all it takes. So all I said was, “Nope.”

“C’mon. You gotta believe in something.” The implication being, of course, that everybody believed in something, which meant that most everybody believed wrong, given that everybody believed so many contradictory things. But I wasn’t about to say as much. I said something worse instead ...

“Too easy to be fooled.”

“How do you mean?”

I shrugged, took a long draw on my Bud. “A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store,” I said. “What is he?”

Tim jerked his head back like a turkey. “What?”

“Play along with me for a sec. A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store. What is he?”

A big, gum-revealing grin. Tim was one of those kids who was so gratified to be included in whatever that he was pretty much game for whatever.

“A robber,” he said. “What else?”

“Yeah, but he’s got a badge.”

Tim laughed as if he had suddenly seized the entire point. “Okay. So he’s a cop.”

“There’s a Brinks truck parked out front.”

Now he frowned. “So he’s a security guard?”

“Yeah, but there’s two men in their underwear bound and gagged in the back of the Brinks truck.”

He rolled his eyes in what I had already pegged as a characteristic Tim expression. “He is a robber, then! Like I said.”

I raised my shoulders, shot him a look of heavy-lidded skepticism. “Yeah, but there’s a camera crew next to the canned goods, filming him.”

Now the kid was thoroughly perplexed. “So he’s an actor?”

“But what about the News 7 van parked behind the Brinks truck?”

“Then I was right in the first place! He’s a robber!”

“Yeah, but he has a beard, and he’s wearing a vest stuffed with explosives.”

“You mean he’s a terrorist?”

I let him hang for a moment—watching people intellectually squirm is one of the few genuine pleasures life offers me. The fact that I never finished high school makes it particularly gratifying. “Do you get my point, Tim? This isn’t about what the guy ‘really is,’ it’s about you— about the traps everybody falls into when hearing or reading language. At each stage it seemed pretty clear, didn’t it—what the gunman was? But each time I complicated the background, he suddenly became something different.”

“So?”

“So, it demonstrates two things. First, that what words mean depends on the background we bring to them, contexts—and contexts can potentially go on forever. Second, that people are prone to jump to conclusions. You can’t see what you don’t see, so you simply assume that what you do see is all there is. That it’s simple, clear as day. The guy’s a robber.”

“But he is a robber, isn’t he?”

Uncertainty had wired him, I could see that much. But whether he was freaked because he understood what I was saying or because he didn’t have the slightest clue, I couldn’t tell.

I looked away to the dance floor. Some old sunglass-wearing drunk had taken the place of the two heifers, smiling with rotten pride, dancing with his arms held out—to some Ozzy tune whose title I couldn’t remember because I had only read it. “Suicide Solution,” I think.

“So what?” Tim finally said. “You don’t believe anything?”

“I believe plenty.”

“Like what?”

“That you and I are sitting in a bar drinking beer, for one.”

A scowl furrowed his narrow face. He was taking our conversation seriously—dreadfully so. “No, I mean, like, you know, the big picture.”

I shrugged. “Big picture? Well, I believe that humans are survival machines, and that pretty much everything else is plumage.”

“What’s plumage?”

“Something for show,” I said in the quick way you use to dismiss a conversation. “You know what? I think I will take you up on the church pig roast thing. Check it out ...” I made a show of rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ve been feeling a little, I dunno ... hollow lately.”

It would be a free meal at least, and at most it would allow me to further penetrate Ruddick’s social marrow. Fucking church pig roast— hilarious. When you remember as many things as I do, you really come to appreciate little gems like that.

“Awesome!” he exclaimed. “You could hit the Reverend with that whole-whole context thing—let him sort it out.”

I winced at that, realizing that Tim was more than just a little naive. Everyone, but everyone, makes noises about being critical and open- minded—even extreme believers like Baars. But confirmation is really the only thing they’re interested in. People are as allergic to contradiction as they are to complexity and uncertainty—and none more so than those who devote their lives to bullshit.

I already knew how to get to the Church of the Third Resurrection, but Tim seemed to take so much pride in his knowledge of the town thatI listened like someone oblivious. I used my cigarettes as an excuse to bail after that. I kind of felt bad leaving him alone there drinking, but then I kind of felt jealous as well.

Truth was, I had completely slipped back into a working mindset. According to my cell, it was almost ten, which struck me as a likely hour for a high school administrator to go to sleep on a work night.

As good a time as any to stake out Eddie Morrow.

I parked about twenty yards or so down from the Morrows’, in front of a house too dark not to be filled with sound sleepers. I spend quite a bit of my time in my old Golf, watching this or that residence—primarily waiting for husbands. Typically, I kill the time either banging my head to heavy metal (during the day) or arguing with my memories (during the night).

Talking to yourself doesn’t necessarily amount to anything. You can do it for years without experiencing any personal growth or cognitive decline. Listen to yourself long enough, however, and you eventually become a comedian, whether you want to or not. It’s the only way to stay interested.

Eddie Morrow slipped out his door at exactly 11:13. No porch light, as expected. A quiet tug to close the Saturn door, as expected. He had backed into his driveway so he could slip out without bathing the front of the house with light. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t back in when he returned. I found myself wondering whether Jill ever noticed that the car had done a magical one-eighty while they were asleep. I’d witnessed enough of these capers to grasp their furtive Gestalt. This was my eighty- seventh, to be exact.

But then, none of them had ever involved a missing cult member before.

I fired up the Vee-Dub, winced the way I always wince at its tractor roar and rattle, then began following him at a discreet distance. Ruddick was small enough that I didn’t have to follow him far.

He turned down an unkempt street, Omeemee, where every other house seemed abandoned—yet one more demographic relic of better days. Idling at the intersection, I watched his Saturn cruise through the glow of its lights, slow, then park before a low brick bungalow—a place that had an un-illuminated sign of some kind posted out front. I waited until he had disappeared into the building before turning to follow.

I did a cursory drive-by, caught enough of the sign in my headlights to read

Then I turned around and parked along the curb opposite the house. I rolled down the window, sparked a J, absorbed that magical combination of boarded windows and sixty-year-old trees. To tell the truth, it almost felt like home sitting there, periodically glancing at the hooded picture window, pondering the sordid shenanigans behind the drapes. Summer darkness surrounding an orange-glowing world.

Ah, Eddie ... Did you lie awake in shame? Cringe from the enormity of your petty crimes? Think Oh-my-god-if-Jill-ever-found-out...

Or were you a different animal altogether? Had your appetites slipped their leash, compelled you to commit atrocities? To do things that convinced our ancestors we needed hell?

What about Jennifer, Eddie? Did you hurt her? Hide her?

Eddie was definitely more relaxed leaving 113 Omeemee than he was 371 Edgeware. I heard feminine laughter as he bantered back and forth with someone at the side door. The fear didn’t climb back into his face until he climbed behind the wheel of his car. He pulled farther down the street, turned around in someone else’s driveway, then passed within spitting distance of me on his way back home. He had the clutched look of someone running through worst-case scenarios.

I cracked open my door, crossed the street, walked the narrow slot between the brick wall and the Ford F-150 parked in the driveway. I came to a screen door, which I knocked on because its wood companion was already ajar. I could see linoleum and half a kitchen hutch in dim light through the screen. Moths and gnats tapped at the light above me.

After a moment, a woman answered the door dressed in a tank and panties. Jenny—obviously and immediately. She was too petite to be a model, and she had a friendly, farm-girl face, but I found her horribly attractive. Eddie was making more sense to me with every passing moment.

“Do you take walk-ins?” I asked.

She looked me up and down, smiled, and rubbed her cheek into her shoulder like a kitten. When they look like you, her eyes said. But her voice asked, “Sore shoulders, honey?”

“Like I’m carrying the weight of the world.”

She welcomed me in with a swing of her arm—clipped enough to tell me she was sober. I really hadn’t known what to expect from the sex trade industry out here in the backwoods. A part of me had expected rotten teeth and hilly-billy diction—but Jenny seemed all right. The house was tidy, nary a single dirty dish on the ceramic countertop. The floors were slightly bowed: old houses tend to sag in the middle—kind of like people that way. The furniture was newish—veneer, but hey, who the hell was I to judge? Two massage tables dominated the living room; they almost looked like gurneys with the white sheets that had been draped over them. The couch, the flat screen, and the coffee table pushed beneath the picture window suggested that Jenny broke the tables down during the day and used the space the same way civilians did: to rot in front of the tube.

“So what can I do you for, handsome?”

“The works,” I said, fishing out the wad of fives and tens I’d scored over the course of the day. What can I say? Sex is just one of those horses I ride backward. “That ... and ... some questions.”

She did her best not to roll her eyes. Hookers generally don’t like guys—guilt-ridden nerds, mostly—who ask a lot of questions. All the questioners want is to get fucked, and yet they go through all the motions of “empathizing with the plight” of the women they’re fucking as a way of servicing their moral debt. I actually knew this one hooker who had CASH ONLY tattooed above her shaved pussy. “Read the sign,” was the only answer she would give to questions. “Money ain’t the only thing that talks,” she told me once, “un-fucking-fortunately.”

“Well, really, I only have one question.”

Jenny had already grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room gloom. “Shoot.”

“You know that guy who was just here?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, undoing my belt and tearing open my button fly. “Brad.”

I smiled. “Brad. Exactly.”

“What about him?” She said this while palming the crotch of my boxers. The auto-tease. Most hookers are as mechanical as a car wash.

“Did he swing by here last Saturday night, say around midnight?”

She stopped, took a confused step back, which was kind ofembarrassing because she had peeled my jeans down to my knees. “You mean when that girl went missing ...” she said. “The other Jennifer.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you a cop or something?”

“Hell no. Just a private dick. Her parents hired me to assist the police.”

I could tell she had already guessed as much. It was pretty obvious that the two of us had come from the same side of the tracks, even though I was urban and she was country. The side that called cops “pigs.”

“Do you think they’ll find her?” she asked.

The way she said this told me she had been following the story closely. I supposed it was unnerving having someone with your name vanish in a town this small—especially doing what Jenny did for a living.

“No,” I said with a what-can-you-do shrug. “Not in one piece, anyway.”

“I think so too,” she said, her look wandering from sharp to vague to sharp again. “I just have this feeling, you know?”

Fucking feelings. Only do you any good in the movies.

“So what about Brad?” I pressed. Otherwise known as Edward Morrow.

“Brad? Oh. Yeah-yeah. He was here last Saturday around then, you know ...” A fatalistic hitch of the shoulders. “Balling me.”

“I figured as much,” I said with a sly glance at my dropped drawers. “Just needed to be sure, you know?”

She sidled back up to me with a husky chuckle, pulled my jeans to my ankles with the palm of her right foot. “So they hired you, huh? Her parents?”

“Yeah,” I replied, pressing my boy against her midriff. “I’m famous.”

Afterward, I quizzed her more generally, knowing that she, more than anyone, would know who the town freaks were. We had pushed the two massage tables together for the purposes of our transaction. She answered me with her chin on my chest. Periodically her hand would crawl down to my groin to tweak and twiddle. I chalked it up to force of habit.

When she had heard about Jennifer—or “the other Jennifer” as she called her—the same questions had occurred to her. Some of her clients liked the rough stuff, but they tended to be the ones she thought the least likely to do anything “wonky,” as she put it.

“No one much fucks with me,” she said, tossing a negligent thumb in the direction of the hall that led off the kitchen—to the bedrooms, I suppose.

“Why’s that?”

“Because my brother’s always out back, playing his video games.”

“Brother?”

“Well, stepbrother. Jerome. Nobody fucks with Jerome.”

“Could you introduce me to him?”

“Not unless you want to fuck wi—”

That was when the riff from “Back in Black” began wailing in miniature from my pants where they lay crumpled. My cellphone.

“Sorry,” I said, peeling myself from Jenny’s sweaty side. “I’m on the clock, you know.”

She just snorted. “Me too.”

God, I love hookers. Almost as much as I love the drugs that make them hook. It was making my skin itch just knowing that somewhere near, beneath the couch or in a cupboard or drawer, there was a bag of goodies.

According to the display, it was Molly. “Yep,” I said into the phone.

“Disciple. Disciple! Where are you?”

“At a rub-and-tug,” I answered in a querulous Where-else-would-I-be tone.

“A rub and what?”

“A rub-and-tug. You know, a jack shack.”

“Spare me the bullshit, Disciple,” she snapped, all, like, time-is-money and shit. “You need to meet me at the corner oflnkerman and Kane. “

“What? Why?”

“Nolen. He’s found a severed finger. “

A classic pan-in-zoom-out moment. Molly, it turned out, owned a police scanner, an item I had thought about getting several times but had just never seemed to muster the scratch for. Bad dice and the odd Jenny will do that to you, I suppose. Apparently while I was out busy investigating my vices, she was in her room watching CSI reruns and keeping tabs on what the state-sanctioned professionals were doing.

“Wait,”she snapped. “Wait!”

I could hear her scanner squawking in the background ...

“Shit-shit-shit,” she gasped, her voice taut with genuine fear.

“What? What’s going on?”

“Another one,”she exclaimed. Frantic. She was genuinely frantic. “They found another finger just a couple ofblocks away!”

“How?” I asked, hopping with one leg in my jeans. Jenny’s laughter told me I had forgotten to put on my boxers. Bouncing around, my dick flopping like a tassel. Fuck it, I would go commando. “Did they say anything about how?”

“I can’t talk now, Disciple,” she called over my stream of muttered curses. “I gotta be out there. I’m going. I’ll meet you, ’kay?”

“Molls!” was all I managed before the line went dead.

It’s strange. I had no bonus arrangement with the Bonjours, so it really didn’t matter whether I was instrumental to what happened or not—I would get paid no matter what. And yet, beneath the move-move-move urgency, there was this crushing sense of failure...

I had known that she was dead all along, hadn’t I?

I kissed Jenny full on the lips, left her standing naked with the full roll of bills in her left hand and my boxers hanging from her right. I suffered a pang of remorse driving away. I had really liked those boxer shorts: a National Geographic number depicting The Whales of the World. They even sported a blue whale arching across the fly, boding the appearance of the purple.

Forgotten gauchies. As good an excuse as any, I supposed, to find my way back to 113 Omeemee.

My phone began riffing literally the second I shut the car door. It was Albert—and about fucking time.

“Heeeey! ” he cried over the sound of music and voices. “Disciple, he- heee... Didn’t think I would catch you. What you doing so late, man?”

He was more than a little drunk, I could tell.

“Jerking off to War and Peace. I always get wood when the French are defeated. You?”

Breathless laughter. Great, I thought. Albert was one of those guys who became cool on a blood alcohol gradient. His cat’s-ass tone told me he thought he was pretty much the coolest thing going, which meant he’d hiked a good distance up shit-face hill.

“Impromptu grad party,”he said. “Talkingbullshit. Scoping hotties—you know how it is ... ”

“So what di—”

“Smoked the last of that green,” he interrupted. “If you know what I mean.”

A mental frown. “I’m sure I can hook you up.”

“Bonus! You put the Weeeee! into weed,, you know that? ”

He found this pretty funny. Over his laugh I heard a young feminine voice say, “Is that your guy? Is that your guy?” in the background. “He’s a riot! “ I heard Albert reply.

“And you put the Hurray! in shut-the-fuck-up,” I said, not at all comfortable with being Albert’s “guy.” “Have you been telling people about our little arrangement?”

Another guffaw, as if I had been joking. “Seriously, though. Dude. I meant to call earlier, but I fucking forgot... so I thought, heeey! I’ll just leave him a message! You’re my favourite round-eye bad-ass, you know that?”

“And you’re my favourite gook-geek. What did you find out, Albert?”

“Yah-yah-yah, sorry. I called this oldbuddy ofmine who did a philosophy post-doc at Berkeley. Baars was already gone by then, but apparently he was still big news...”

Like most drunks, Albert overestimated the drama of his stories, and so kept decent people hanging with trivia.

“And?” I said.

“Brilliant. Eccentric. Divorced...”

His tone told me he was saving the juicy bits. “And?”

“Rumour was he knocked up one ofhis sophomores...”

That was interesting, at least. But I knew there was more. “C’mon, Albert. Cut me a fucking break over here. What else?”

“Well, it seems he taught a course on cults ... Cults, Disciple!”

He fairly shouted this, so I knew he thought it was significant, at least.

“So?”

“Soooo, think about it, dude! The guy knows ...”

“Knows what?”

“All of it. The psychology. The sociology. The history. Which means he knows how to act, how to organize, what kind ofclaims to make ... “Music and droning voices swelled to fill the silence. “There’s just no way, Disciple. ”

“No way what? For him to believe his own guff?”

“Sure, there’s that. But there’s also no way for him to not be manipulating these people. It’s at least as bad as L. Ron Hubbard. Worse! “

I drove in a state of blank absorption. It made a kind of dreadful sense, to be sure.

“Hey ... about the weed,,”he said, signalling super-cool, drunk Albert’s return. “You wouldn’t happen to have a ... you know, a number I could call or anything? ”

“Try Kimmy,” I said, knowing I needed to shrink-wrap this latest twist, save it for some future lull. “She should be getting off about now ... I’ll text you her number.”

I found Molly looking smart and forlorn on the corner of an intersection that seemed surprisingly urban. Three Ruddick cruisers blocked the street at angles, bathing the bricked-in spaces with rolling lights. A thin crowd of onlookers had gathered in clutches here and there on the sidewalks. But otherwise things seemed surprisingly sedate. Only one uniform was visible.

The first words out of her lips were, “Jack shack, huh?” “I’s got needs,” I said.

“Why do you do that? Why do you always lie when people ask you where you are?”

“Keeps me sharp,” I replied, surprised that she would have anything other than this latest twist on her mind. “Reminds me I’m a captive of the facts as the world presents them.”

“Weird, you know that?” she said, shaking her head. “You gotta be the strangest man I’ve ever known.”

“We should all be so lucky,” I said. Then, intentionally shifting gears, I added, “So which fingers are we talking about?”

“The index and bird fingers,” she said.

“Bird finger?”

“Yeah. You know.” She flipped me the bird.

I sometimes have this fear that the women I’m interested in are actually psychic, that they can see the truth of me all the way down to the grimy bottom but just play along because they like the attention. The superstition struck me like a bolt right then.

Molly filled me in on the rest of the details. The first finger had been found just a couple of blocks over, in the backyard of an old amputee—a Vietnam vet or something. Apparently by sheer dint of coincidence, the second had been called in less than an hour after, found by a bunch of high school kids who had “wandered into” the abandoned warehouse looming before us, “looking for a lost dog.”

One of Nolen’s men—a guy so tired he had to have been dragged off the day shift—barred the way, and refused to even discuss the matter with us, let alone let us past. So we just stood there, every bit as tired, cooling our heels. I studied the small crowd of onlookers, knowing the chances were good that our perp would be keen to survey the social consequences of his handiwork first-hand. I described the males to Molly in a low murmur, just to be sure they would stick ...

“Skinhead dude with forehead wrinkled like scrotum ...

“Soccer coach dreaming of teenage ass ...

“Punk who should sell me whatever it is he’s smoking ...

“Guy who looks like BO ... Yeesh, that fucker is ugly.”

It didn’t take much to get Molly laughing. Always makes me feel smug, killing two birds with one stone.

When Nolen finally came out, he looked ragged and more than a little shell-shocked. Dust feathered his left shoulder, and he seemed to have lost his cap. “The fingers are bagged,” he said, holding a hand out to pre-empt our questions. “We’re sending them to Pitt to get them DNA typed—just to be sure they belong to Jennifer. We also need to know whether they were cut from her while she was, ah, you know, alive ... But the doctor ...” Something caught in his throat, something that demanded to be swallowed. “Um, he seems to think the cuts were, ah ... well, post-mortem.”

This occasioned a moment of silence. Laughter warbled from a group of kids assembled on a nearby corner.

“What about the scenes?” Molly pressed. “Could you let us check out the scenes?”

“Scenes? You mean where we found the fingers?”

“Ofcourse,” she said, with enough exasperation to earn a gentle elbow in the ribs from me. You have to be careful with people like Nolen, I had learned, not because they could be prickly, but because they were unlikely to take offence. Some people are so dispositionally agreeable that the urge to take liberties is well-nigh irresistible. The sad fact is that people primarily harass others not because the others deserve to be harassed but because they can. The easier a guy is to bully, the more likely we are to invent reasons why he needs to be bullied. Often our fuse is long or short depending on what we unconsciously think we can get away with.

“Not much anything to see,” he said, scratching the back of his head.

“So no notes?” Molly asked.

“Notes?”

“Yeah.” Again the telltale impatience. “You know, like ransom demands or anything.”

“‘Fraid not. Just fingers in these queer little cages.”

“Cages?” Molly asked in a ragged voice. Things were just beginning to sink in for her, I could tell.

Nolen shrugged. “Yeah. You know, like to keep them from getting snatched by wildlife or something.”

“To make sure they would be found,” I said.

Fawk.

Guitars crunched from my pants pocket. Another call. Kimberley this time, probably calling to bitch me out for telling Albert she could hook him up. I didn’t answer. As it was, Molly was all over me about leaning on Nolen to let us check out the two places—as bad as an ex-wife carping about child support.

“Get used to it,” I said. “This is the way it works for people like you and me. Most of the time you’re stuck on the outside looking in.”

“But what if there’s any, you know, clues ?”

The thing about popular misconceptions, I’ve found, is that they typically involve people knowing more rather than less. We always know less than we think. We always control less than we hope. Even forensics is so hit-and-miss that there’s a real question as to whether it should be called a science.

“You were watching CSI again tonight, weren’t you?”

I took the fact that she said nothing as a big fat yes.

A moment of silence passed between us, one that seemed to cement the fact that we were stranded on a cracked sidewalk, walled in by dead brick buildings. Funny, the way you can just sense things, like how late it is by how cool the cement is ... I felt a distinct absence of daytime heat.

“What are the chances?” she asked in a numb voice I had never heard before. My second therapist once told me that this was why I womanized—not because I was carrying out some ancient evolutionary program to spread the sperm, but because I could only love women when they were new.

I found myself gazing at Molly, arrested by her profile in the oscillation of red and blue lights. “Chances?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said, blinking tears before turning to me. “You know ... that the fingers belong to Jennifer.”

“You’re serious?” I asked. I managed a sombre shrug even though I wanted to laugh. “A town this size? ... Things ain’t looking so good, Molls.”

“So she’s ... shes ...”

“Of course she is.”

We were dog-tired by the time we got back to the motel. Call me weird, but I found the act of driving with her in separate cars powerfully erotic—like road rage turned on its head. Road lust. My heart muscled through the seconds we spent saying nothing while standing in the gap between our motel room doors. I couldn’t resist grinning yippee! when she followed me ...

She made an act of it, as though she were just too goddamned tired to resist my relentless advances. But the fact was, she wanted it, maybe even needed it. Who’s to say? Most of the time I’m just stumped when it comes to the reasons women—especially beautiful ones like Molly— condescend to sleep with me. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t have any staying power.

We kissed, in that long way that makes magic of fumbling hands and fingers. There’s glory in feminine yielding, in the shyness of a woman still unnerved by her desire. We flopped like two tangled ropes across the bed. I pressed her onto her back, snuggled my pelvis between her legs, and without warning she gasped, “Wait-wait! What’s your favourite band?”

“Um ... huh?”

“You can tell a lot about a man,” she sighed.

Believe it or not, I was utterly unsurprised. It could have been the exhaustion, I suppose, but the fact was I had been asked plenty of things by plenty of women the moment before first contact. Loopy things.

“Monster Magnet,” I said.

“Never heard of them. What’s their thing?”

“I dunno. Comic books and metaphysics ...”

She frowned in a This-feels-too-too-good way. “I’m ... I’m not sure ... What’s your second favourite band?” “Tool.”

“Tool? Eew. I ... ah ... hate ... “

I was grinding against her now, slow and languorous. “But Tool loves you,” I said, grinning like a cat pinning a budgie. “Tool loves you long time, baby.”

She laughed, groaned. “You idiot ... How can you ...” She exhaled, like I was a birthday candle or something. Score.

I woke up in the middle of the night, the way I always seem to do. Molly lay tangled in the sheets, splayed like her parachute had failed to open. I clicked on the TV with the volume muted, scrounged my bag of weed. I sat upright in the surgical light, watching the drip of soundless images across the screen while rolling a fat one. Her voice startled me. “What’s it like?”

Her face was still squashed into her pillow. For all the world I had thought she was sleeping.

“Sticky,” I said, spinning the doob into a perfect cylinder. “Skunky ... Everything weed should be.”

The pillow scrunched her smile into her cheek. “No ...” she said, rolling onto her back. She brushed her hair from her face with a groggy hand. “What’s it like being you?”

I inhaled. Like cigarettes, joints buy you several seconds to cook something up when a chick asks you a hard question. Time I squandered for some reason.

“Hard ... sometimes.”

“Why?” she asked, staring at the ceiling. Televised colours danced across the cheap stucco swirls.

I exhaled a ghostly horn of smoke across our legs, shrugged. “You know the radio, how they play the same hit parade over and over?”

“Sure. That’s why I got satellite in my rental.”

“Well, I have a hit parade all my own.”

She turned to gaze at my profile. “Memories,” she said. “You mean memories.”

“The thing is, it’s the bad ones that stick. And I don’t mean like a hazy flash of images, but moments of ... of reliving, I guess. With the smells, the surge of emotion ... like a miniature dream or something.”

“Can you give me an example?”

I was afraid she was going to ask that.

“Like ... well ... your eyes, they remind me of my mother, so sometimes when I look at you, I’m also sitting in my folks’ kitchen, and my mom, she’s at the sink grabbing me some tea. And there’s this fly walking across the window’s reflection in the counter, you know, like it’s pacing out a treasure map in fast motion, fifteen paces this way, stop, twenty paces that way, stop. And Mom,, she’s smiling—she always had a sunny disposition, my mom, always giving me the gears about being negative—well, she’s smiling and looking out the window, and I notice there’s tears in her eyes. So I say, ‘Whazzup, Mom?’ and she turns to me, blinks a couple of diamonds, grins her best You’re-such-a-good-boy grin, and says, ‘I have cancer, Disciple. They say I have only a few months.’”

“Oh gawd ...” Molly whispered.

“And that’s one of the love songs.”