Katy turned off the water. She didn't even set the dirty dishes in the sink to soak. Let Gordon wash his own damn dishes. It was his house, after all. His and his dead wife's.
"Go upstairs and throw some things in your knapsack," she said, the weariness lifting from her body. "Clothes, toothbrush, pajamas. Just enough stuff for a few days. We'll come back and get the rest after I've had a chance to talk with Gordon."
Jett raced across the room and lifted her arm, open-palmed. Katy did the same and Jett leaped and slapped a high five. "You rock, Mom. I love you."
"A hug and a kiss aren't cool enough?"
Jett hugged her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. "Ooh, gross, Mom. Where did you get that stinky perfume?"
"I'm not wearing perfume."
"Smells like flowers."
"Must be the cinnamon I put on the sweet potatoes."
"Whatever. Let's blow this nutty little peanut shack."
Katy followed Jett up the stairs, wondering if she was making another mistake. She had probably stayed in her relationship with Mark several years too long, but what if she was skipping out before she'd given Gordon a chance? No doubt Gordon could explain everything and ease their fears, show them that ghosts weren't real and scarecrows were nothing but straw and cloth.
No, he'd had plenty of chances. Katy couldn't love him or even trust him, despite his pledge to protect her and take care of Jett. All she had to do was imagine his face during that morning they'd had intercourse, when he'd opened his eyes and seemed shocked to find her on top of him. As if he was expecting someone else.
Besides, as Jett would say, Solom was one seriously fucked-up piece of real estate.
Alex fired up a bowl of sweet, homegrown weed and puffed it until his lungs were scorched. Despite the pleasant buzz from the smoke, Alex couldn't relax. Something heavy was coming down in Solom. He had a feeling it wasn't the secret agents he'd always feared, or the Internal Revenue Service coming to seize his land as punishment for his income tax evasion. No, this had all the vibes of a world-class cluster fuck.
Alex had convinced Meredith to stay in her apartment near the college. Despite her physical gifts and generosity, Alex liked his space. He needed to get his head together, which seemed to be a full-time job these days. He put the pipe away and went outside to check on the garden. The garden did what drugs and sex couldn't do: it filled him with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Growing good crops, especially mythical mother-lode mind-fuck marijuana, was about as close to God as a human being could get. Crops made the world a better place, especially dope, which was the equivalent of Eden's apple when it came to granting wisdom. As a fringe benefit, self-reliance also stuck it to the Man, because the government couldn't tax such products.
Alex peeked through the curtains to make sure nobody was watching from outside. Dope possessed the strange power to make him feel bulletproof and paranoid at the same time. Behind the safety of locked doors, he was master of his fate. When he stepped under the big sky, all manner of rules and laws took effect, whether they were natural or contrived by the two major political parties to ensure that nothing changed that all the stars stayed fixed in the heavens and all the crooks in Congress defended their incumbency.
Looked safe outside. No cops, no Weird Dude Walking. The sun was about half an hour from hitting the tops of the trees on the western mountains. In September, dusk arrived quickly and the shadows stretched longer and longer until they tangled in dark armies. It was nearly six o'clock, which meant the bell in the steeple of the Free Will Baptist Church would soon sound its Sunday call. Birds twittered in the surrounding trees, as sacred a music as any that had ever droned from a church organ. If the birds were talking, that meant everything was normal, despite the eerie flutter in the pit of his stomach.
Alex went out onto the deck, binoculars in hand. Through a cut where the road wound among the trees, the Smith farm was visible. Focusing the lenses, he saw me new Smith woman, the redhead walking toward the barn. Alex didn't like spying, because it was too close to what the CIA practiced against its own citizens. But survival instinct told him there was a big difference between being nosy and being informed. As he watched the redhead veered toward the fence, then pulled back as a clutch of goats came trotting toward her from the rear of the barn. Probably the same damn goats that had eaten Weird Dude Walking.
Alex shortened the lenses so he could scan his fence line. The spot he'd repaired near me garden was still intact. He'd fantasized about planting some sort of booby trap, maybe a razor-studded spring that could be triggered by a trip wire. But the fence was technically on Smith property, and that would be crossing the line. Neighbors deserved a little extra tolerance, even if their livestock fed on old preachers as if they were a Jesus biscuit in a Catholic chow line.
Alex put down the binoculars. All was right with the world, at least his portion of it.
Then he saw the shed.
The doors were open, one of them hanging askew on a single hinge. The grow bulbs threw their blue-tinted light against the greater might of the orange sun. Something had forcibly broken in, or maybe out. Except there was nothing in the shed but…
Thirty-seven beautiful creatures. His babies. His family.
Alex hurtled down the deck steps three at a time, the binoculars swinging from the strap and banging against his chest. One of his paranoid fantasies was that someone would learn about his hobby and try to rip him off, a fellow stoner who didn't groove on the righteousness of karma. That's why he was careful in choosing his customers. And the government was to blame for criminalizing a harmless flower and linking it to violence and theft, when it was put on earth to be shared in peace.
He ran the fifty feet to the shed and looked in, barely able to breathe. Most of the pot plants had been ripped up by the roots, though a few bare and broken stalks poked toward the ceiling like skeletal green fingers. Stray leaves lay scattered along the floor, and one light fixture had been torn from the wall. The black plastic sheeting beneath the buckets was ripped and gouged. And on the cinder blocks that served as a step was a mucusy gray-white smear that could only be one thing.
Goat shit.
The fuckers had trespassed onto his land, broken into his shed, chomped down on the fruit of his labors. He didn't know how they'd circumvented the fence, but the ground was scarred by cloven-hoofed footprints. Alex, his heart pushing broken glass through his chest, followed the tracks behind the shed to the fence. There, the wire had been trampled as if pressed down by a great weight, dragging down several locust posts. The wire was pocked with tufts of goat hair, and the musky stench of a rutting billy tainted the air.
On the Smith side of the fence, leaves had been scuffed and scooted around. Clearly evident against the dark humus was the imprint of a horseshoe. As if some rider had urged his horse to stomp down the fence and allow the goats access. Maybe the horse had even kicked in the shed door for them. Alex was sure that, if he checked beside the padlock, he'd find the arc of a horseshoe embedded in the wood.
Alex wondered if Weird Dude Walking was no longer walking. Maybe he'd mounted up in order to make better time. On whatever road he was headed down.
Didn't matter.
The Dude had fucked with private property. And so had those creepy-eyed, stink-making, beard-pissing goats.
The Bible said to forgive trespasses, but Alex didn't hold to the Bible. In Alex's belief system, trespasses meant one of two things: either you build a bigger fence or you go after those who didn't respect boundaries.
Alex went back to the house, to the walk-in closet that held his arsenal. There was hell to pay and Alex planned on delivering the invoice.