by Gregory Ashe
“I’m sorry,” Tean said. “We’ll be quiet.”
Ammon muttered something and laid his head against the window again.
“We went through that whole place. We didn’t see anything. That means it has to be a code that they knew how to decipher without a physical object.”
“They might have destroyed whatever they needed,” Jem said. “Just to be safe.”
“They might have, but then why keep the phone? Why keep the message? Why not destroy all of it if they’re trying to be safe?”
Jem chewed his lip. The only sound was the wind whistling along the truck’s frame. “It couldn’t be a very complicated list of keywords if they memorized it.”
“I don’t think it’s a list at all. And I don’t think they’re keywords.”
“Then it has to be something they could have decoded without special resources, because we went through their stuff and they didn’t have anything.”
“Why don’t you google it?” Ammon said.
“I understand that you’re upset,” Tean began, “but you don’t need to—”
“Actually,” Jem said, “that’s a good idea.”
So Tean typed replaces, broadly, shall into a search engine. He got results on blockchain analysis, robot overlords, and a replacement manual for some obscure Medicare policy. “Nothing.”
“What if you add something like ‘code’ or ‘decrypt’?”
“More blockchain. More of California’s civil code.”
“Maybe,” Ammon said without opening his eyes, “you should try typing in ‘google please help me decode replaces, broadly, shall.’”
“Look, dickhole,” Jem said, “if you don’t have anything constructive to say, keep your mouth shut.”
“I’m a big enough person that I’m not enjoying watching you two get outsmarted by a pair of meth heads, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little satisfying.”
“You haven’t been able to decode it either.”
“I’m not trying to.” After a moment, though, Ammon asked, “What about giving each number a letter and adding them up?”
“Coordinates are always given in pairs,” Tean said. “A set of three doesn’t make sense.” Then, doubtfully, he said, “Unless they included elevation.”
“It was just an idea. Too bad we can’t do what Jem always does and make someone else solve the problem for us.”
“Next time we stop,” Jem said, “I’m going to knock his teeth out.”
Tean squeezed Jem’s arm.
“With your jerkoff sock you carry around in your pocket?” Ammon said, eyes still closed.
“And I’m going to break his nose,” Jem said.
“Enough,” Tean said.
“Tean’s pretty good at playing nurse,” Ammon said. “You’ll probably get some decent sex out of him for once if he’s taking care of you. Tean, tell him about when I hurt my ankle. Tell him about some of the stuff we tried.”
“All right.” Jem guided the truck toward the highway’s shoulder. “I guess we’re doing this right now.”
“Ammon, stop being a jerk.” Tean grabbed the wheel. “Jem, stop letting him bait you so easily.”
“I—” Ammon said.
“He—” Jem said.
“No. Both of you shut up. I’m tired of it.” Taking out his phone, Tean placed a call on speakerphone. It rang several times.
“Who are you calling?”
“Ammon was right. We’re not using all our resources; maybe this requires local knowledge, just like the Enigma machine.”
The ringing cut off, and a young man answered. “Pinyon-Pine Lodge. This is Russell. How may I help you?”
“Russell, this is Tean. Remember me? We were talking about Dasein and Kierkegaard’s views on the cross as symbol of—”
“I remember,” Russell cut in. “Things are really busy here, so I can’t talk right now. Sorry, gotta go. Bye.”
“Hold on,” Jem said. “Hi, Russell. It’s Jem.”
“Oh.” Then, his voice muffled as though he’d cupped a hand around the phone’s receiver, “Hail Satan.”
“Uh huh. Listen, we’ve just got a couple of questions for you. And, I suppose, for the Prince of Everlasting Suffering. If he’s available.”
“That’s not funny,” Russell said in a furious whisper. “And you shouldn’t take His name in vain. When the Earth’s festering corpse is writhing with maggots and the rest of humanity is slowly fed to the great serpent in the pit, we, the chosen and the unsanctified, will frolic in the eternals flames—”
“Frolic?” Ammon said. “Who the hell is this guy?”
“Who the heaven is this guy?” Jem corrected. “Russell, I need to ask you a question.”
“—under the dark, necrotic gaze of the High Lord of Air and Shadow—”
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to make Tean talk to you about why everything we do is meaningless.”
“No!” Russell squeaked. He was silent for a moment. Probably, Jem guessed, trying to bring his voice down to sound like he’d been through puberty. Then he said, “I mean, I don’t have a lot of time, so you have to be fast.”
“What do these words mean to you? ‘Replaces, broadly, shall.’”
“Nothing. No, Mom, don’t come over here! Stop it! I’m not talking to anybody.” A few moments passed, and he whispered. “You got me in trouble.”
“You’re sure? You’ve never heard them before? It’s not something local.”
“Mom, they’re my friends! And they’re asking me something really important. I can’t unclog the shower right now!”
“Russell, I need you to focus.”
“I don’t know. It sounds like what hikers and climbers do. Mom, I told you I’d do it later! It’s my room. I can leave it messy if I want to. No, don’t touch my stuff!”
“Russell! What about hikers and climbers?”
“They use this website to change coordinates into words.”
When Jem glanced over, Tean grabbed his phone, pulled a browser, and began searching.
Russell was still talking. “They leave each other clues. It’s so stupid. They think they’re so cool because they can get on a dumb, stupid rock. I bet they won’t feel so cool when the Great Beast is sucking the marrow from their bones—”
“Got it,” Tean whispered. He held up the screen. A pair of coordinates were displayed. Tean tapped the phone a few more times, and when he showed Jem the phone again, a pin on a map marked a location northeast of Moab.
“Thanks, Russell. Say hi to the Prince of Fabric Softeners for us.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Is this about your friend?”
“What friend?”
“The one who was around here yesterday, asking about you.”
“Who was asking about us?” Tean said.
“He didn’t tell me his name. He had long hair. He was kind of, um, gay. Oh, and he had that really messed up ear he was trying to hide. He got pretty mad when I couldn’t tell him where you were. Shit—I mean, shoot. Mom, I said shoot! I’ve got to go.”
The call disconnected.
“Nick was looking for us at the lodge?” Tean said.
“The same day the sheriff and the chief of police disappeared,” Ammon said, finally sitting up, his blue eyes cold and alert. “Sounds like someone is tying up loose ends.”
36
They drove for another ten miles of scrub and bone-bright hardpan before Jem looked over at Ammon and said, “You think he was trying to kill us?”
“I think he was going to kill you if he found you. You and Tean showed up at his and Kalista’s door, asking questions about Tanner. They already knew you might be trouble. Then you found the drugs—”
“We don’t know that,” Tean said.
“They weren’t going to walk away from their stash of drugs, Tean. They had that place under observation; they were waiting until night to retrieve them.”
When T
ean glanced over, Jem shrugged and said, “He’s probably not wrong.”
“So,” Tean said, the mangled glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, “Antonio shows up. They’re not expecting that. They’re certainly not expecting Antonio to turn on them. Somehow, they get out of that situation alive.”
“Probably by running like hell.”
“By that point, they had to leave town. But they didn’t go far.” Tean frowned. “They couldn’t go far; they had to be back by Tuesday for the pickup.”
“And in the meantime, they need to start cleaning up after themselves.” Ammon stretched, taking up way more of the cab than he needed to. “The sheriff’s compromised; sooner or later, people are going to wonder what happened to Weckesser, and that kid doesn’t seem smart enough to keep his own neck out of the noose. He needs the drugs so he can get out of town and set himself up somewhere else. Tanner needs the drugs for the same reason; he’s got multiple murder charges hanging over his head.”
“I don’t understand Kalista and Nick,” Tean said. The taped-up glasses had already fallen halfway off his face again.
“You heard Jager: she’s stabbing her boyfriend in the back, and she’s going to run off with his drugs.”
“If she doesn’t get a bullet in the head courtesy of Tanner,” Jem said. “Which she will.”
“No, it’s something else. Something that keeps nagging at me.”
“His ear,” Jem said.
Tean nodded. “That’s what I was thinking too. Russell’s the second person to mention that; Jager pointed it out too. I didn’t notice anything about his ear when we met him. Did you?”
Jem shook his head. “He had his hair covering his ears.”
“His ear?” Ammon waved one hand in front of Tean’s eyes. “Hello? What are you two talking about? I’ve seen his ear. He’s got a nasty scar; it makes one ear stick out a little bit, and it’s ugly, but it’s not exactly a red flag.”
“You’ve seen it?” Tean said.
“I walked in on him in the restroom at Tafone; I went over to check them out after you called me the other night. He was standing in front of the mirror, fixing his hair.”
“Men’s Room Confessionals,” Jem said, “the Ammon Young story.”
“It’s not exactly a secret; his ear is hard to miss—I’m surprised he hasn’t had plastic surgery to make it less noticeable.”
“What did the scar look like?” Tean said.
“Have you ever seen a scar? It looked like that.”
“Ammon, what did it look like?”
“It looked like somebody tried to cut his ear off.”
Jem felt his jaw slacken. He managed to say, “No fucking way.”
Tean was already tapping frantically on his phone. Jem tried to read over his shoulder until they hit the rumble strip, and then Ammon said, “Eyes on the road.”
“Is it—” Jem asked.
“Hold on.” Tean was still typing. “I think so, but hold on.”
A fire had burned through this part of the world. Everything south of the interstate had been scorched: a black crust, shining where it caught the sun, covered the ground, and the skeletons of scrub and sage looked brittle enough to flake apart on the next strong wind. It was hard to tell when it happened. A part of Jem remembered the hand between his shoulder blades, the pain between his legs, Tanner’s jumpy breathing, the smell of jalapeño Cheetos. A part of him knew Tean would say that fires cleared out undergrowth, dead brush, made way for new vegetation. A part of him knew about seeds that only opened after the passage of tremendous heat. But he looked out at the scorched deadlands and thought that sometimes, fire just burned the hell out of a place, and nothing could grow there again. He remembered the first time Tanner had thought of choking him, and how the older boy had gotten so excited that he’d come in two stuttering thrusts.
“It’s him,” Tean whispered. More loudly, “Holy shit, it’s him.”
Tean turned the phone to show Ammon. Then he showed Jem. Jem barely had time to process the Facebook page that he was seeing, and then his eyes narrowed in on the primary photograph. There he was: the man who had called himself Nick, maybe five years ago, long hair hiding his ears. But the name on the page was Nathaniel Dayton.
“How’d you find him?” Jem asked.
“I went back to the article I told you about. The story of Tanner assaulting that girl, and the boy who tried to stop him. He’s not named in the story itself, but plenty of people seemed to know who he was in the comments.” Tean turned the phone back toward himself, tapped a few more times, and held it up again. Jem was looking at the woman who had called herself Kalista, only now, the name below her picture said Kristine Colin-Bowman. “She’s even friends with Nick online.”
Ammon was already on the phone again, reciting the names and pausing to listen. “I heard you, Kat. And I’m saying they’ve got no leadership and, from what I can tell, no fucking clue that they’ve got a shitstorm blowing in. Get Highway Patrol down here. Light a fire under them.” He listened again for what felt like several minutes. “Ok. Email it over. Yes, I said please.” When he disconnected, his hand tightened around the phone until his knuckles were white. “Nathaniel Dayton has a string of misdemeanor charges for prostitution. He’s spent time in the county jail—most of last year, in fact. The last time he got picked up, a patrol car found him lying in the street. A john had used a knife on him. He was in the hospital for a long time; they didn’t think he’d make it.”
“What about Kalista, Kristine, whatever we want to call her?” Jem asked.
“No criminal record.”
Tean was scrolling through photos on social media. “Skiing in Aspen. Drinks on the beach in Maui. Shopping in Madrid. Ok, either she’s very good at faking this stuff, or she’s legitimately got money.”
“The money angle makes sense,” Jem said. “Tanner came from money too, so it makes sense that Kristine is from that same crew.”
“She looks like she’s had a pretty normal life. She was on the rifle team at the University of Utah.”
“Makes sense too; she told us she’s an excellent shot, and she’s obviously got good reflexes and great hand-eye coordination. Remember how she caught that tumbler Nathaniel whipped at her head?”
“Nathaniel, on the other hand,” Tean tapped the phone a few times, “mostly has local pictures, and his page is pretty scanty.”
“So let’s play this out,” Ammon said. “He and Kristine are kids. Tanner, this nascent psychopath, tricks them into making themselves vulnerable and then tries to rape Kristine. When Nathaniel intervenes, he gets his ear ripped halfway off. Then nothing. Kristine goes off to live her life, presumably enjoying the benefit of Daddy’s money. Nathaniel, on the other hand, falls apart. He’s gay. He’s traumatized. Somehow, he ends up doing sex work, skating in and out of jail. And then, one day, they decide, what? They’re going to ask this asshole from their childhood to help them steal a shipment of drugs?”
“What if there are no drugs?” Jem said slowly, staring out at the charred slope of the valley. “What if the whole thing is a setup?”
Tean was already nodding. “Nathaniel is already on the brink, psychologically. He’s had this horrible life, and he blames it on Tanner, the attack, and never really being able to come back from it. Then a john nearly kills him. It takes him back to Tanner, where his life went wrong. That’s the trigger. That’s what makes him snap. He wants revenge, so he plans this whole thing to murder Tanner.”
“And so he calls up his childhood gal pal, and she agrees to go along with this?” Ammon shook his head. “No way.”
“Maybe not like that,” Tean said. “They may have stayed in touch. They were both traumatized by Tanner. This could have been something they talked about before. This could be something that’s been building for years.”
“Could have. May have. Maybe.”
“What’s your competing theory?” Tean asked.
Ammon sh
ifted in his seat. “Here’s another thing—”
“That means he doesn’t have one,” Jem said.
“—why wait? I mean, let’s say I agree with you. Let’s say Nathaniel snaps, and he and Kristine agree that they’re going to kill Tanner. Why not figure out where he lives, wait for him to come home late one night, and put a bullet in his head? Why not run him down with a car? Why not burn down his house? This whole thing, it’s . . . elaborate. It’s over the top. They come down here, they hang around. She pretends to be someone else, and she lures him into this drug deal scenario. I mean, Jesus, Tean, could it be any more complicated?”
“I still haven’t heard a competing theory,” Jem said. “Just want to note that.”
“It’s complicated, but maybe not as complicated as you’re making it sound,” Tean said. “And I really don’t think it would be that hard to get Tanner interested in a big score. How would you do it, Jem, if you were running a con like this?”
“They’re all the same when you get down to it.” Jem shrugged. “People believe you because they want something to be true or because they’re afraid it is. They want to believe that they can get rich quick—that they’re smart enough, savvy enough, connected enough, whatever, to seize an opportunity that other people are going to miss. They’re afraid, at the same time, that they’ll miss out on a chance to make a ton of money. Boil any game down, and that’s what you get.”
“Where would Kristine and Nathaniel have to start?”
Jem frowned. “You do the legwork in advance—in this case, getting enough drugs to make your story convincing, like the stash we found in the villa. You have to set it all up first. The only really tricky part is the next one: you have to meet the mark, and you have to do it in a way that doesn’t make them suspicious. The best thing is if you can get them to come to you; if you have to approach them, you’ve already given up some of the power. With Tanner, she probably just tracked him until she knew his patterns and then hung out at the clubs he visited, waiting for her opportunity. If you have time, you wait until the connection happens naturally. Then you make them work for it: they ask about your job, you give just enough to set the hook, and then you wait until they ask another question.”