Amy said, “That … no. It can’t work like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then how could you trust anything you saw or heard?”
I thought, Exactly.
Agent Tasker said, “You’re going to need to back up. What exactly are you suggesting?”
So, we told her. When we finished, she got an expression on her face like a short-order cook who just saw a huge group of hungry drunks walk in five minutes before closing time.
She said, “I have to take this to my superiors.”
I said, “Sure. Let us know what they say.”
“You wouldn’t be capable of understanding what they say. Go home and wait there, don’t talk to anyone. The news media will find out about the missing children eventually, but the longer we put that off the better chance we have at containment. Are you listening?”
I said, “Huh? Yes, thank you, I’ve been doing a lot of squats.”
She turned and banged through the door, showing no reaction to the driving rain. As soon as she was gone, I said to Amy, “We found a clue pointing toward Loretta, Ted Knoll’s wife. We need to go talk to her.”
“A clue?”
John said, “I had written, ‘Talk to Loretta’ on your bathroom mirror. Any idea why, that you can think of?”
“It sounds like a Dude, Where’s My Car? situation to me.”
“No, I mean why we’d need to talk to Loretta specifically.”
Amy said, “Well, I think Loretta has Maggie. Or”—Amy made one set of air quotes with her fingers—“she has ‘Maggie.’”
John said, “Oh. Right.”
I said, “So, we just have to go and, uh, explain the situation. She’ll understand, right?”
John said, “You think twenty silicone sex butts would convince her?”
17. JOINING MAGGIE FOR BREAKFAST
The three of us headed to Loretta’s house, but had decided that we wouldn’t stop if Ted’s car was parked there, since we assumed he still was determined to shoot me on sight.
No Impala. Still, we took the minor precaution of parking at Taco Bill instead of in front of Loretta’s house. The restaurant had a spray-painted sign in the window that said:
STILL OPEN
FUCK THE FLOOD
… though it looked like they had maybe forty-eight hours before the cooks would be standing in puddles while they grilled the flank steak. Cars were creeping down the street, swerving out across the painted lines to avoid the overflowing gutters.
To John, I said, “So, this meeting you had with the NON agent Friday night. You’ve no recollection of it?”
“Well, you know how it is on the Sauce. You see things. Seems like a dream, or the memories from when you’re a little kid, the ones where you’re not sure if they happened or if your brain just cobbled the memory together after you’d heard the story secondhand. So, I have this memory of running out of the Beanie Wienie building and I think, ‘I need transportation.’ Then this guy on a crotch rocket Suzuki motorcycle—just like the one I owned years ago—rides up and asks if I’m John, says he got a letter five years ago telling him to deliver a motorcycle to that specific place and time. So, I jump on and I ride and I run into the NON convoy. I somehow know which truck has Agent Pussnado in the back—”
Amy said, “Excuse me, who?”
“The agent we just talked to? Anyway, I jump off the motorcycle onto the hood of the truck—no, this is how I remember it—and they screech to a stop and I yell at the driver that I need to talk to her, that it’s for everyone’s safety. She lets me in the back of the truck and it’s just me and her. I tell her I need five minutes, she says she needs eight inches.”
Amy said, “Oh my god.”
I said, “That is not what happened.”
“That’s how I remember it, I swear!”
“Do you remember anything else from when you were out? Anything that’s not completely fucking stupid? Anything about Loretta, or Maggie, anything that would help prepare us for what we’re about to walk into here?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. You?”
“No. I had a vision I ran into Nymph and he tried to tell me the meaning of life, then I woke up.”
Amy said, “Anyway. Obviously I have to go in again, because I assume Maggie and Loretta both still think you’re the kidnapper.”
“You’re not going in there alone. Not after what happened last time. If we have to just barge in and do it by force, we will.”
Amy said, “Do what by force?”
“Take out Maggie?”
“The sign said ‘Talk to Loretta,’ not ‘Murder Loretta’s child.’”
“It’s not a child!”
“We don’t know that yet. Look, you guys feel free to keep debating it, I’m going in. I’ll stick my phone in my coat pocket and you can watch—”
I said, “But what if Maggie turns into—”
“Shh. Let me finish. The danger isn’t Maggie turning into a big snake monster or something, the danger is she messes with my brain somehow. If she turns into a big monster I’ll scream and run away. If she starts messing with my head, you guys will need to get me out of there and slap sense into me.”
I said, “I don’t like it either way.”
“Sure, and you can sit out here and contemplate how much you don’t like it while I go inside.” She opened the door. “Love you.”
“I love you, too.”
We watched from afar as Amy’s red coat bounced through the rain. She knocked on Loretta’s door, then apparently got an okay to come in. I started watching on my phone, but didn’t have a great view—the camera was just barely peeking up over the pocket of her coat. Amy pushed in through the door and appeared to be responding to a friendly greeting that I couldn’t quite hear over the rustling of her coat against the microphone.
I said, “I don’t like this.”
John said, “Yeah, I think you said something about that. We’ll give her one minute, then we bust in.”
Amy entered the living room. We could faintly hear Loretta talking from the kitchen, saying, “… actually she’s handling it better than the grown-ups. But you know, kids are tough. John was here yesterday, he explained everything. I know you’re trying to help, despite what Ted thinks. And now all those other kids are missing … awful.”
Amy said, “Oh, I didn’t know John had come by. What, uh, did he explain, exactly?”
On Amy’s camera, we watched Loretta step into view, holding a mug of coffee.
Half of her was missing.
She looked like she’d been torn apart by a great white. Most of her neck was gone, to the point that it should have been impossible for her to hold her head upright—just a white spinal column and a yellowish ligament surrounded by ragged meat and open air. About a third of her torso had been ripped away, from armpit to hip.
She continued talking like everything was fine. I could see her windpipe twitching, her exposed lung inflating and deflating with each breath.
That woman should not be alive.
John gave a start and I knew he could see it, too. But Amy replied politely to the conversation, oblivious.
Loretta said, “John told me the police had turned you loose, that the bad guy had the same build and hair color as your David but that they’d eliminated him as a suspect. Still, I’d prefer he not come in. Maggie is still in bed but I don’t want to scare her. So, what do you need?” Through the video feed I watched as the woman’s stomach twitched and quivered as it digested some bit of breakfast.