He swung in fury to face Amy. “You knew!”
Amy shrugged, absolutely unintimidated. “Guessed. Might as well go on in and get a night’s sleep.”
He glared at the pixie, his eyes slits. Then he relaxed. “Good advice. See you in the morning.” He wheeled and strode his way up the broad white stairs to Ms. Doree’s back door. Finding it unlocked, he let himself in. As soon as he reached his room, he turned on the light, moved around here and there, sure Amy must still be down there watching, then extinguished the light. He rolled around on the bed for a few seconds, pulling back the covers, ruffling the sheets. For an instant, his body sank into fatigue like a warm bath, but he didn’t allow himself to stay there. He rolled sideways off the bed, crawled to the window, looked down. No sign of Amy. He couldn’t even see his car in the darkness, and he noticed the moon cast hardly any shadow. A good night for hunting. A frail sliver of moon slid from behind a cloud, confirming his assessment. He sat down and thought. Hunt with what? He held up his hands. Well-trained weapons. He preferred them to guns anyway. He hadn’t lost everything after all.
He let his back rest against the wall under the window. An hour’s rest. Sitting up. He didn’t trust the soft bed he longed for. One hour. Then go.
The hour passed, he lunged to his feet, did a few limbering stretches, then like a black cat crept down the stairs to let himself out the back door. It still wasn’t locked, at which he tsked, until he remembered he was in the land of Kizzy and Amy.
He took the side paths one by one, figuring that with many of the four hundred population tucked cozily up by the hotel, he could scan from house to house for a forty-year-old man without it taking all night. He had a detail he hadn’t shared with Amy. The man had a tattoo of a knife etched onto the back of his left hand. A jailhouse tattoo, which meant it was blue and homemade fuzzy, probably nearly invisible after so many years. The point of the knife aimed at the fugitive’s left middle finger, recording a knifing he’d done in Juvenile many years ago, his way of refusing a jailhouse romance. A matter of pride for a punk kid, to have killed an enemy and gotten away with it. For no proof had ever pointed to Edgar Fallon except that he’d never shown up in the clinic with a torn-up ass, and then the sudden appearance of the tattoo. Health and a tattoo were proof of nothing in court, although crystal-clear evidence inside. And Edgar was left-handed.
Keeping his head down and low, wishing fervently for his monocular night vision headgear and the Game Finder scope, he made do with his own eyes and crept through the Hollow. At both cabins and houses, going slow, he found that the Hollow residents had an uncommon love for dogs. One cabin even had pigs roaming free. He’d read that pigs were smarter and even more vicious than dogs, so he skirted this place nervously. Finally, the sky lightened and made his stealth ineffective. Not having gotten even close to one cabin, one bedroom window, or one man of the right age, he turned to creep home, then said, “Fuck it,” and straightening himself, scuffed like a native directly down the middle of the street.
In his room, he threw himself onto the soft bed and totally disgusted, fell into an intense, dreamless sleep. As the sun moved high enough to enter his window, he woke long enough to remember breakfast, then fell asleep again.
In the early evening he finally came to. His dusty sweat had dirtied the sheets, a detail he knew would anger the formidable Ms. Doree Zendall. He peeled himself off the hot bed and climbed naked into the curvy tub with legs and a shower nozzle like a sunflower. The shower curtain, a daisy-covered film of plastic, glued itself to his thighs as he stood in the hot downflow of water. Washing away his sins, he thought to himself with a snort. His stupidity in thinking all people were the same, all methods would work the same everywhere. He should’ve farmed out this chore to a fellow skip tracer from a nearby area, one used to country ways.
He put on clean clothes and descended the stairs. Ms. Zendall stood waiting, a stony expression on her flushed face as she watched him descend. He felt like he was approaching doom, not a landlady. He wondered if the glistening coat of sweat on her brow was from the heat or anger at him for missing breakfast.
“I’ll pay for—” he started, but she chopped off his words with a jab of a fat hand.
“Ms. Bearclaw is waiting to talk to you. Her and Amy.” She wheeled and marched away, her errand fulfilled.
Eyebrows high, Tyree whistled away the ghosts of last night’s failure as he strode easily down the middle of the road again, aimed for the path to the Bearclaw home.
Again seated in the kitchen, Tyree waited. Amy clearly had some things to say. Eyeing him with amusement, Amy asked, “Any luck last night?”
“You know the answer to that.”
She tapped her foot on the linoleum floor. “Ready to meet Kizzy now?”
He thought about it. “Whyn’t you offer this meeting last night?”
“’Cause you weren’t in any mind to listen to anybody. You knew what you wanted, and what you wanted was no interference. Now. Ready to meet Kizzy?”
He sighed. “Sure.”
In minutes he found himself climbing a hill along a path he doubled he’d have found without Amy’s guidance. A small, square cabin sat up high, tucked among the treetops and wedged into the hillside. With no knock, Amy opened the screen door and waved him through. The front door was in direct line with a back screen door, and as a result, a slight breeze cooled the small house, and the air felt pleasant to his baked skin. Amy pointed to a scoop-shaped bench of a sofa, padded with patterned Indian blankets, so he sat. The blankets smelled of sweet chamomile.
An old woman of an age he couldn’t guess, using a stick to lean on, was ushered into the room by Amy and helped to lower herself into a rocking chair padded so thickly it looked like a catcher’s mitt. Her balding head was outlined against the sun coming through the back door, and her hair looked like wiry fuzz in shadow. He stood to be polite, but she patted the air, motioning him to sit down.
“I’m Kizzy, hon. Amy’s told me about you and said she told you about me, so that starts us both off square.”
Tyree blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Amy told you to rest yourself last night; you shoulda taken her advice. But you didn’t.”
“Ah, no ma’am.”
“Wasted yourself, din’tcha, son.”
Tyree settled back into the sofa with a sigh.
“I understand your feelings,” Kizzy said. “Now fill me in about this boy you’re after.”
Tyree told her all he knew. And this time included the tattoo and the left-handedness.
Amy frowned. “You held back on me.”
Tyree shrugged. “Sorry.”
Kizzy tapped her stick on the floor twice, turned to Amy, said. “Fetch ’im, hon. Hurry up afore he takes off.”
Amy said, “I kept watch on Elroy all night. He’s still here, but not much longer.”
Kizzy nodded and waved Amy away. “So run, then.” Amy darted for the door and was soon out of sight.
“You tellin’ me this little girl is going to fetch my perpetrator to me while I sit here?”
“Rather be bit by a pig?”
Tyree shut his mouth, shifted his broad shoulders within his T-shirt.
Kizzy smiled.
Despite slamming the flimsy screen door of Barstow’s Dry Goods store in her haste, then her boots tromping loudly on the wood slat floor. Amy composed her face in a pleasant, hopefully sociable smile. “How ya doin’, Mrs. Barstow?”
Mrs. Barstow nervously fingered a bolt of flowered cotton material still draped across her counter from some earlier customer. “Just fine, Amy. ’N’ you?”
“Oh, good, good.” Amy lounged against the counter to show her worry-free state.