“I know, I’m sorry. Jesus.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I hung up and we sloshed out into the parking lot. John’s Jeep was parked there, so we’d apparently gone back to get it at some point. A sign on the Venus Flytrap door announced they had closed until further notice, due to flood conditions. The entire neighborhood wasn’t under water, not yet, but at this point it was a few islands of dry land where certain lots and patches of road were elevated. Everything else was swamped by a couple of inches of swirling brown water, the currents carrying sticks and garbage and clumps of dead grass.
We went upstairs to find the apartment pretty much as I’d left it, aside from the fact that there were now boxes piled everywhere. There were ten cases of Mountain Dew Code Red stacked by the door. There was a shipping invoice on the card table—apparently I had spent part of the Mikey Payton reward money having a bunch of soda overnighted to the apartment. Nearby were eight much larger boxes labeled VELVETSOFT EROTIC SILICONE BUTTOCKS. One of us, hopefully John using his credit card, had apparently bought every single rubber ass sex toy from the shop downstairs. I looked at John and started to ask if this was his doing, but he just shook his head, slowly.
“No memory either way.”
I dug out a bottle of Mountain Dew and told him about the missing kids.
“Wait. Just … hold on. If they’re decoys, could they just brainwash a whole group like that? A whole community?”
“That,” I said, “is what we have to figure out first.”
I went into the bathroom to take a piss and saw that scrawled on the mirror were three words, written backward in what was hopefully black Dry Erase marker:
ATTEROL OT KLAT
It was “Talk to Loretta” written in a mirror image, which made no sense because the text was written on the mirror itself, so it still read backward to me. If they’d written it on the wall behind the mirror, that would have worked. I recognized the handwriting as John’s.
I said, “I think we’re supposed to go talk to Ted’s wife.” I rubbed the ink on the mirror. It was not Dry Erase.
John looked it over and said, “Why didn’t we just go talk to Loretta instead of leaving ourselves a note to do it later?”
“Maybe we … no. John…”
“What?”
“You didn’t leave a bunch of cryptic clues behind because you wanted to do a Dude, Where’s My Car? situation. You did not do that. Please tell me.”
“Well if I did, I’m sure I had a good reason. You know what, I bet the butts are a clue, too.”
“Oh my god.”
“Look, what matters is that we go talk to Loretta. Like the note says. Maybe she’ll have the next clue.”
“Fuck you. We’re going to the Roach Motel. That’s where Amy is.” I thought for a moment and said, “It just occurred to me that she said ‘we’ when she said she was at the motel. I wonder who’s with her?”
“Maybe it’s the cops? Or it’s that dude from work she’s having an affair with.”
* * *
On the way to the motel, we came across several side streets that had been closed by the city for being under water—not enough to drown in, but definitely enough to ruin your traction if you weren’t paying attention. I could only remember one really bad flood in my time living here, when I was ten. They had canceled school for three weeks and then everything smelled like fish for a month after the water went down. This looked worse.
The entrance to the Roach Motel parking lot was blocked by a pair of scary-looking biker dudes. We pulled up and the bigger of the two said, “We’re closed.”
Up from behind the men walked, not Amy, or Chastity, but that goddamned NON agent, Helen Tasker. She muttered something to the big biker and he stepped aside, giving us the stinkeye as we passed.
I said to John, “You didn’t happen to bring a gun, did you?”
“Just let me do the talking.”
We parked and as soon as John jumped out, he said to Tasker, “So you’re not dead, then?”
“Why would I be?”
“You got shot right in the chest like two days ago.”
“How high were you when you came to see me Friday night?”
“I came to see you?”
“So pretty high, then. I’m not repeating the conversation. My employers administered first aid and I was back on duty within an hour. There’s not even a scar.”
“Impressive. Is your partner around?”
“His brain was hit with a neuron scrambler and his entire upper body was crushed by an SUV. He won’t be back on duty until later this afternoon.”
John nodded. “Sure. So can you give me a brief summary of what we talked about Friday night?”
“You asked for my help.”
“I did?”
“Yes. With a bunch of children who were about to go missing.”
Amy approached from behind Tasker, wearing her red raincoat that made her look like the little girl from Schindler’s List. She walked right up to Tasker and said, “I got him to talk to me, he says half of the CR thinks the kids were taken by a rival gang called the Flatlanders. Some think they were raptured by God and that this is the end of the world. The rest think it was the Batmantis, some say they even saw it that day.” Amy glanced at me and John and said, “You guys look awful.”
Tasker said, “What was that third thing?”
I said, “It’s not relevant to the case. A YouTube video of a winged monster went viral around town, now people think they’re seeing it everywhere. Typical Bigfoot shit. So, uh, you two are partners now?”
Exasperated, Amy looked at John and said, “You told her to come find me!”
I said, “All right, calm down.” To Tasker I said, “The bikers are talking to you, despite the fact that you staged a weird battle in their parking lot like two days ago?”
Amy said, “They think she’s with the FBI. She has credentials from every agency.”
I said, “Great, have you broached the subject with the agent here that there might not be any missing kids at all, that it’s all just a series of false memories planted by a hive of mind-controlling shape-shifting bug monsters?”
The look on Agent Tasker’s face confirmed that Amy had not in fact broached that subject.
John said, “Wait, were you withholding that from her for a reason? In that case, forget we said anything.”
Amy hand-waved it away. “They’ve got documents, pictures. They’re real kids.”
John scrunched up his eyebrows in thought. “Can we see the pictures?”
We followed Tasker into the front office, which had apparently been commandeered by the “FBI.” It stank of cigarettes and engine grime. Tasker had the documents in a folder she pulled from a flat-black briefcase that automatically unlocked when she spoke to it in Latin. She pulled out a handful of pages and handed them to John.
He flipped through them and said to Tasker, “And these all check out? They’re not forgeries or anything?”
“No. Why would they be?”
He said to Amy, “You’ve looked at them, too? They look genuine?”
“They don’t look like Photoshops or anything. I’m not an expert. Why?”
John handed me the pages.
Every single one of them was blank.
I sighed. “You explain it. My head hurts.”
John took a breath, not sure where to start. Finally, he turned to Amy and said, “While I was on my Soy Sauce trip, I saw something. A memory, replayed from the third person. It was me showing up at the Knoll house, meeting with Detective Bowman. And we’re talking and Bowman asks for a recent photo and Ted opens his wallet, and hands the detective an old membership card from Blockbuster video. The detective looks at it, and starts talking like he’s looking at a photo—asking if the girl’s hair is still that long, and so on. Then he hands it to me, and I showed it to Dave when he arrived. Always that plastic blue-and-yellow Blockbuster card, each time we see a little girl’s face. Which makes sense, because if the fuckroaches can rewrite memories from a certain distance away, then they can make you ‘remember’ seeing what they want you to, a split second after you look. So the cops or somebody could devote a whole weekend to searching through government databases for these kids and they’d have a vivid memory of successfully finding page after page of records. But if Dave and I were watching them work—and I mean right now, while we’re still under the effects of the Sauce—we’d see them staring at a blank computer screen. Or doing nothing at all.”