6

Ford, Minnesota

Still Thursday, 13 September

Debbie, assuming that is her name, puts our plates down. Mine has a burger on it, Violet’s the previously frozen French toast. Otherwise both plates are blank.

Garnish: the life crutch you never appreciate till it’s gone.

The burger looks good, though. Or at least the bun’s toasted, which gets you halfway there on its own. “What else for you guys now?” Debbie says.

Violet says “Can you tell us anything about White Lake?”

Debbie turns outraged so fast it’s like a split-second werewolf movie.

“What? Motherfucking WHAT?”

“Uh…” Violet says.

“WHAT did you just say? You people come in here pretending to be cops, and—what are you, anyway? Goddamn reporters?”

“No,” Violet says. “We’re scientists.”

“Sure you goddamn are. And you just happen to come in here, asking who I am, asking about the goddamn White Lake Monster—”

I’m out of my bench seat by then, but I stop. “Did you say—”

“I didn’t say shit. And I sure as hell didn’t say it to you people.”

“But—”

“You two just get the hell out of my restaurant. Get.”

“Can I just—”

She picks up my plate and smashes it to bits on the table. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY RESTAURANT!”

By the time the burger parts hit the floor I’ve got Violet out of her own seat and am scanning it in case she’s left a purse. She hasn’t. Violet Hurst, alone among women wearing cargo pants, actually uses the pockets.

At the door I turn back for one more try. “Can—”

“You want a monster? Go find Reggie Trager!” Debbie yells, winging the other plate at my head.

I get the door shut just as the plate bursts against the plywood.

★★★

“Jesus fuck,” Violet says as we back toward our rental. The car’s a chunky station wagon from a division of GM that I thought went out of business five years ago. “What the fuck was that about?”

“Lady doesn’t like scientists,” I say.

“No shit. It’s too bad: the French toast looked good.”

“It was frozen.”

“Really? That bitch! How do you know?”

“I saw her take it out of the freezer.”

Violet stops with her hand on the handle of the passenger door. “Were you going to tell me that?”

“I thought you would enjoy it more if I didn’t.”

“That’s some kind of joke, right?”

Luckily, just then there’s a noise from behind the restaurant like someone knocking a bunch of garbage cans over while they or someone else shouts in pain.

I slide the keys to Violet over the roof. “Start the car and stay here.”

“Fuck that.”

“Do it. If I’m not back in three minutes, call the cops.”

★★★

Out back there are a dozen or so teenage boys stomping the shit out of what looks like another teenage boy, though it’s hard to tell because they’re packed around him pretty tightly and his face has blood all over it. Not a lot of technique happening, but the enthusiasm’s good.

I ignore the attackers and let the blood pull me through to where I’m kneeling over the kid on the ground and shielding him. He’s unconscious but breathing. Laceration over one eye you can see bone through. A bunch of less serious cuts on his face and scalp. His skin is strangely cool.

His eyelids start to flutter. “Don’t move,” I say.

He scrambles onto his back. Touches his face and sees the blood on his hand. “Aw, shit!”

So much for a C-spine check. While he’s distracted, I pick a gory canine tooth off the asphalt and put it in my jacket pocket. “Stop moving. Tell me if this hurts.”

“It hurts!”

“Wait till I start.”

“Hey!” someone shouts. “Mister!”

I look up. Despite my ignoring them, the other teenage boys don’t seem to have vanished.

They’re a weird range of ages. Thirteen and childlike to about seventeen and shaggy. Different species from each other, practically, though they all have on the same outfit: oversize coat and baggy jeans, both so covered in brand names they look like downtown Los Angeles in Blade Runner. At least these kids seem healthier than the born-to-be-wired lardtards I usually see dodging their grandparents on the cruise ship. Like they spend a lot of time outdoors, even if it’s just to kick someone’s ass.

On the other hand, a lot of them are now pointing guns at me.

Mostly shotguns and hunting rifles, but—particularly among the older kids—some expensive-looking handguns as well. The kid who seems oldest, in the center, has a Colt Commander that’s as shiny as a disco ball.

“Yeah, you,” this kid says. “Mister Dumbass.”

I have no idea what to do.

Nonviolent crowd control is the hardest part of the martial arts. You can’t spend your nights just heart-punching the heavy bag in the officers’ gym and expect to stay good at it. You have to practice your joint locks and your leg sweeps and so on—something I can’t really say I’ve been doing, at least not to the level where I feel confident I can defuse ten close-together firearms without someone getting hurt.

And it is kind of important to me that no one get hurt here. Does not Sensei Dragonfire tell us, “Control rather than hurt, hurt rather than maim, maim rather than kill, kill rather than be killed”? Ought not I, of all people, to take that admonition personally? And did I not inject myself into this conflict in order to keep a child from being injured?

I decide to bluff it out. “That’s Doctor Dumbass to you,” I say, standing up with the injured kid in my arms.

The kid with the Commander blocks my way. “I thought you had to have brains to be a doctor.”

I step around him. “That’s a common misperception.”

“It’s none of your business!” he whines.

“You’ve made it my business.”

I’m almost past him—and by extension, I’m guessing, past the rest of them too—when he steps in front of me again, this time jamming the Colt into the left side of my neck.

It’s a very stupid move. The thing it causes to rise up in me doesn’t give a fuck that everyone around me is a child, or that so many of them have guns. The thing wants me to throw the kid in my arms to one side, pull this kid’s gun past my head, step on his left foot while kicking his right knee out sideways, then palm-strike his throat and hold on. So that when I stomp his chest and he goes backward, both his gun and his larynx come off in my hands. Take it up with Sensei Dragonfire later.

The thing scares me more than the gun. Particularly since Colt Commanders are single-action, and this kid’s neglected to pull the hammer. I shrug past him, causing him to jump out of the way of the feet of the kid I’m carrying.

When I’m almost to the edge of the building, Violet Hurst appears from the other side. Holding her cell phone up and yelling “Nobody move, you fucking cocksuckers! I’ve got the cops on the phone right now.”

“You get reception here?” one of the kids behind me asks. He sounds genuinely astonished.

I hear the kid with the Commander say “Fuck!” as he tries to pull the trigger on us. Then I bowl into Violet, taking us and the kid in my arms back around the corner just as gunfire tears open the plaster, showering it all over our backs.

Violet’s a badass about it. She lands on her feet, turned around and already running. We pass Debbie, who’s standing in front of the plywood door, one hand shading her eyes, and screaming “Don’t shoot the fucking restaurant, you assholes!”

“Give me the keys,” I say to Violet.

“They’re in the ignition.”

Like I say: badass. I throw the kid in the back and start the car with the gas so flat we jump the curb in front of the parking space before we fishtail out of the lot.

★★★

Sport-driving always reminds me of Adam Locano, who was my best friend from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-four—the ages at which a man does most of his sport-driving, unless he goes on to be a professional racer or a dipshit. Adam and I were already dipshits. We both worshipped his father, whose advice on cars was to treat them like women: steal them, strip them, dump them when they get too hot, don’t overly rely on them. I’m sure he had other cheap metaphors I’m forgetting.^[24]

Not that the rental’s all that sporty. I’ve still got the gas pedal all the way down, and the automatic transmission keeps trying out new gears and then realizing they suck and going back to try gears it unsuccessfully tried earlier. I pull the emergency brake through the first right turn, and it doesn’t affect things at all.

Just before the second right I see a pickup truck enter the rearview. Rifle barrels like bristles.

At the third right turn Violet says “Where are we going?”

I’ve just turned us away from the highway and back toward Debbie’s. “Shake these fuckers off.”

At Debbie’s I cut diagonally through the lot, heading out again on the street I took three minutes ago.

In the rearview, I see the pickup truck wrench to a stop in front of the plywood door. Now that they know we’re willing to come back to their home base—for whatever reason—they’ll have to stay and defend it. Or at the very least split up.

“Hey,” I say to the kid in the back. “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the nearest hospital?”

“I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

“That wasn’t the question. Where is it?”

“Ely. But my doctor’s right near here.”

“Forget it. Unless he’s got a CT scanner in his office, he’s just going to send you to a hospital anyway.”

“He does have a CT scanner in his office.”

“Not too likely.”

“Dude, I know what a CT scanner is,” the kid says. “It takes a bunch of X-rays in a row. Like cross-sections. My half-brother got a million of them.”

“Why?”

“He had a brain tumor.”

“And he got scanned here?”

“Yeah.”

I think about it. Ely, where Violet and I are supposed to spend tonight in a hotel, is half an hour farther up Route 53.

“Fine,” I say. “Where’s your doctor?”

The kid sits up enough to see out the windshield. “Turn left right now.”

“Hold on to something,” I say. “And give me some lead time.” I try the emergency brake again through the turn. It still doesn’t do anything.

“Go as far as you can, then turn right,” the kid says. “It’ll be a dead end.”

“In front of that big brick building?”

“Yeah.”

“We also need to call the police,” Violet says.

“Aw, come on, lady!” the kid says.

My sentiments exactly. “You don’t want us to?” I say to the kid.

“No fucking way.”

I sigh. “Fine.”

“What?” Violet says.

“I think we should respect the kid’s wishes. Besides, we don’t really know what would have happened if I hadn’t butted in.”

“They would have beaten him to death.”

“Nah. It looked like they were pretty much finishing up.” I catch the kid looking suspiciously at me in the rearview.

“They tried to shoot us,” Violet says.

“Shoot near us. What is that building?”

“It’s the old mine factory,” the kid says.

I don’t know what that means. It’s impressive, though: red brick and iron, left for the weeds.

“What’s your name?” I say.

“Dylan.”

“Dylan, what day of the week is it?”

“Fuck should I know?”

“It’s Thursday. Remember that. I’m going to ask you again in a few minutes. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Got any medical conditions?”

“Yeah. I just got the shit kicked out of me.”

“Other than that.”

“No.”

“You really don’t think we should call the police?” Violet says to me.

“Dylan? What do you think?”

“Seriously: no fucking way. They’d just make things worse.”

I look at Violet and shrug. Ask Dylan if he takes any medications.

“No.”

Even from up front I can smell the ammonia evaporating out of the blood that’s all over him. May explain his aversion to cops.

I say “You know, where I come from, the people on meth beat up the people not on meth, not the other way around.”

“Maybe I should move there.”

“Maybe you should. How much are you using?”

“I’m not ‘using.’ I’ve done meth twice. Once last night and once a couple of hours ago.”

“Is that why those guys were kicking the shit out of you?”

“I’m not a mind reader, dude.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Got any allergies?”

“Yeah. To people kicking the shit out of me.”

“You know, I’m beginning to see why that happens.”

“Lionel!” Violet says. “Dylan, I’m Violet, and this is Lionel. I still think you should consider going to the police.”

“Your name is Lionel?” the kid says to me.

“What about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, then. Turn here or go straight?”

“Straight.” Past a row of aluminum-sided houses with various amounts of sky-blue tarping on their roofs. Not the first such row we’ve seen.

“Dylan, what’s up with Debbie the waitress?” I say.

“How should I know?”

“And what does she have against Reggie Trager?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You’re going to pull that shit?”

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to rescue me.”

“You’re right. We should drop you back off.”

“Lionel!” Violet says. “I think he means well,” she says to Dylan.

The ground along the road to our left falls off steeply. I can see water flashing up at us through the trees. “Is that White Lake?” I ask.

“Are you kidding?” Dylan says.

“No. Is it funny?”

“That’s not White Lake. It’s Ford Lake. I take it you people aren’t from around here.”

“No, we’re not.”

Dylan says “The road is gonna curve to the right, but we’re taking the soft left out of it.”

“The first one?” I say.

“Yeah.”

I take it. It puts us into a cul-de-sac that follows the line of the water. The houses on the shore side are huge. The ones on the inland side are smaller and higher up so they can see the lake.

It’s obviously the expensive part of town. Most of the houses look just as derelict as they do everywhere else in Ford, but there are three in a row on the lake side that still have well-maintained lawns and trees and no broken windows. One even has an American flag on a pole over the doorway.

“It’s the green one,” Dylan says.

I park on the street in front of the house. Pointed the wrong way along the sidewalk, but ours is the only car I see. Maybe some of the garages have others, or maybe there’s just no one around.

“Dude, I can walk,” Dylan says when I try to help him out of the car.

“How do you know?”

“Watch and learn.” He winces and limps all the way to the porch at the side of the house, then up the steps.

The porch has two doors, one of which is steel-plated and has a plaque on it: “MARK McQUILLEN, MD.” I ring the bell.

I’ve heard the name somewhere before, but Violet figures it out before I do. Whispers “The Dr. McQuillen Tape.”

Right. The thing eating the duck on Rec Bill’s DVD. Even now it gives me the creeps.

We hear footsteps, and the lock being undone on the other side of the door.

“Lionel,” Dylan says.

“What?”

“It’s Thursday.”