“Two sets,” Simon whispered. Eyes toward the dirt, he started following them.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked.
“Find the asshats who were poking into our van? Yeah.”
“What if they’re the same asshats that did that?” I jerked my chin toward the mine and the body within.
Simon halted, one foot in the air. “Oh. I was imagining teenagers.” He set his foot down and considered the earth again. “The prints aren’t any bigger than mine. I wear a nine. Do you really think someone my size…?”
Simon was only a couple of inches taller than I am, maybe 5’8”, and with his slender build, weighed less than I did, a fact I didn’t advertise, though it’s hardly my fault that girls have extra curves that account for these discrepancies. The point was that Simon would be lucky to bench press his own weight-tearing heads off was out of the question. With his bare hands anyway.
“They might be just like you,” I said, “the sort of kids who got stuffed into their lockers repeatedly in school, thus giving them both the lust for revenge and the quiet time spent in confined solitude required to come up with megalomaniacal plots to take over the world with computers.”
Simon propped a hand on his hip.
“Before you try to tell me that you weren’t like that in school,” I said, “I’d like to remind you that you’re wearing an Apple T-shirt from the 80s.”
“I was just going to say that there’s nothing you could do with computers that would tear off someone’s head.” He lowered his hand. “Robotics maybe.”
“Right, let’s get out of here.”
Simon started to turn away from the slope where the prints were headed, but halted midway. “Wait, there’s something shiny up there.”
“Sure, and good things always happen when people wander off after shiny objects,” I muttered, but I followed him up the hill anyway. I had the keys to the van, but he had the detailed terrain maps on his phone, so I had better keep him out of trouble. I wasn’t positive I could find my way back through the maze of forest service roads we’d traveled on my own.
We didn’t need to go far before the shiny object came into view. Two shiny objects actually, though they were almost as dusty as the van, so it was surprising he’d spotted them. The black Harleys rested in the shade of a pine. The only sign of the owners were two black helmets hanging from the handlebars. The bikes had Montana license plates. Not the expected birthplace of megalomaniacal robotics geeks, but one never knew. I took out my smartphone and snapped a picture of the plates.
“Maybe we should do something to delay them,” Simon said. “Keep them from following us, you know? We could siphon the gas out of their tanks or do another… thing that would require them to make repairs.” His scrunched brow suggested he didn’t know what that thing might be.
“I’ll let you figure out how to do that if you don’t mind hiking back to town.” I wouldn’t leave him, and he knew I wouldn’t leave him, but I said, “I’m getting out of here.” Anything to hurry him along. I wanted to get off this mountain before… I shook my head and rubbed at the gooseflesh that had arisen-or perhaps never completely left-on my arms. It was a warm autumn day, but I wasn’t feeling it.
I jogged back to the van, threw the sliding door shut, and jammed the key into the ignition. Fortunately, Zelda was in a good mood and started on the first try. I performed something that should have been a three-point turn in about ten points, thanks to the copious boulders, logs, and stumps surrounding our parking spot, then leaned over and pushed the passenger door open for Simon.
He trotted out of the trees and hopped in. “How’d you know I’d be right down?”
As soon as he shut the door, I started down the hill. “Because when we got stranded in Allie’s new car before graduation, you asked if putting up the hood would void the warranty. I imagine we’d have to be in some crazy alternate reality for you to know how to effectively sabotage a motorcycle, car, truck, or skateboard.”
“Shows what you know.” Simon pulled out a Swiss Army Knife. “I jabbed a hole in the tires.”
I gaped at him. “Did you really?”
“I’m hoping they’ll still be stuck up here when the sheriffs and rangers arrive.”
“Then I’m hoping they weren’t bright enough to get our license plate number. Or our business name that’s printed on the side of the van. Or my cell number. Damn it, Simon, if any creepy mouth breathers call me, I’m making you talk to them.”
He had the grace to look sheepish at the possible ramifications to his impetuousness, but only said, “Fine. I’m going to see if anything’s missing.”
As he poked around in the back of the van, I began plotting escape routes out of Prescott. For a touristy mountain town, it was a decent size, but not so big that I thought we’d be safe from anyone cruising along the roads, looking for a blue Vanagon.
“Bastards,” Simon grumbled, his voice muffled. He had his head stuck into the storage area under the long seat that pulled out into a bed.
“What’d they take?”
“The Dirt Viper.”
I groaned. “The we-have-to-spend-thousands-of-dollars-that-we-can’t-really-spare-to-get-a-quality-metal-detector Dirt Viper?”
“Yeah.”
I almost complained that we were having the worst luck ever, but the memory of the dead man flashed into my mind, the image more sobering than a gunshot wound. Someone had experienced much, much worse luck that day.
CHAPTER 3
We drove toward our parking slot at the White Spar, an inexpensive campground outside of town that lacked electricity, water hookups, and anything one might classify as a scenic view. Behind a stand of trees, less than twenty meters from our spot, the highway traffic buzzed past. Not exactly posh, but the accommodations were perfect for penny-pinching entrepreneurs saving up for high-priced luxury items, such as gas and groceries. Simon’s tent was still set up next to the picnic table along with two lime-green folding lawn chairs a college friend had donated to our enterprise. They’d once been called easy chairs and had held prime real estate in front of the television in his dorm room.
Only one thing had changed since we left the campground that morning: a sleek silver Jaguar convertible with the top down sat in our spot. There was room for me to park in front of it, but I came to a stop without turning in. If not for our stuff set up to the side, I would have assumed I’d forgotten our lot number, but there was no way someone else in the campground had those chairs. Nor was there any way someone with a Jaguar would be caught dead with chairs like that.
“Simon?” I asked over my shoulder. “What do you think about this?”
After we’d spent two hours at the sheriff’s station-and given our phone numbers, lodging details, and sworn on our childhood pets’ graves that we wouldn’t leave town before they’d given us the okay-he’d set up at the table with his MacBook so he could “run calculations and see how much of our inventory we’ll have to sell to afford a new Dirt Viper.” As far as I could tell, this involved little more than sitting and sulking, but I wasn’t in a much better mood, so I didn’t argue. I had been vaguely amused that during our interrogation session-the deputies had called it “asking a few questions”-he’d spent more time pleading with them to hunt for his lost tool than relaying information about the dead man in the hills.
Simon plopped into the passenger seat beside me. “I think someone’s lost.”
“There’s a camp host.” I waved toward the big trailer and truck set up at the park entrance. “That’d be the place to go for directions.”
“Maybe they saw our chairs, were impressed with our taste, and figured we’d naturally be the ones to ask for advice.”
“Right.”
“New Mexico plates,” Simon observed. “Someone you know?”
“The people I know drive clunker trucks capable of hauling dozens of tires at a time.”