Prayers For Rain Part 99

"Then I'd say he's hiding pretty well," Angie said.

I started the car, dropped my elbow over the wheel, stared at the trees.

"He knows me."

"What?"

I glanced at the shed in the center of the cross.

"Pea.r.s.e. He knows me. He's got my number."

"And you have his," Angie said.

"Not as well," I admitted.

The stand of trees seemed to whisper. They seemed to groan.

Stay away, they said. Stay away Stay away.

"He knew I'd find this place eventually. Maybe not as quickly as I did, but eventually."

"So?"

"So, he's gotta move. He's gotta move fast. Whatever he's planning, it's either about to happen, or it's already in motion."

She reached out and her palm found my lower back.

"Patrick, don't let him in your head. He wants that."

I stared at the trees, then the shed, then the b.l.o.o.d.y, misting bog.

"Too late," I said.

"This is a s.h.i.+tty Xerox," Bubba said. He looked down at the copy we'd made of the cranberry bog grid from the aerial map.

"It's the best we could do."

He shook his head. "Intel like this, my headstone would be in Beirut."

"How come you don't talk about that?" Vanessa sat on the bar stool behind him.

"Which?" he said absently, his eyes on the Xerox.

"Beirut."

He turned his huge head, smiled at her. "Lights went out, things went boom. I lost my sense of smell for three years. Now I've talked about it."

She backhanded his chest with her fingers. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

He chuckled, looked back at the Xerox. "That's wrong."

"What?"

He lifted the magnifying gla.s.s we'd brought, held it over the grid. "That."

Angie and I looked over his shoulder through the gla.s.s. All I could see was a clump of green, a bush photographed from two thousand feet.

"It's a bush," I said.

"Ah, duh," Bubba said. "Look again."

We looked.

"What?" Angie said.

"It's too oval," he said. "Look at the top. It's smooth. It's like the top of this magnifying gla.s.s."

"So?" I offered.

"So bushes don't grow like that, ya f.u.c.king slug head. They're bushes, you know? That makes them, ah, bushy."

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. We both shook our heads.

Bubba thumped his index finger down on the bush in question. "See? It's curved perfectly, like the top of my fingernail. That's not nature. That's f.u.c.king man, dude." He dropped the magnifying gla.s.s. "You want my opinion, it's a satellite dish."

"A satellite dish."

He nodded, walked to the fridge. "Yup."

"For what purpose? To call in air strikes?"

He pulled a bottle of Finlandia from the freezer. "Doubtful. I'm guessing so's they can watch TV."

"Who?"

"The people living under that forest, stupid."

"Oh," I said.

He nudged Vanessa's shoulder with the vodka bottle. "And you thought he was smarter than me."

"Not smarter," Vanessa said. "More articulate."

Bubba took a swig of vodka, then belched. "Articulatedness is overrated."

Vanessa smiled. "You do make that case, baby. Trust me."

"She calls me 'baby.'" Bubba took another shot from the bottle, winked at me.