“That’s just it. Nothing was missing, except Scar. As soon as Traci saw the state of their trailer, she drove over to my place, figuring Scar and I would be out fishing, but he never showed up. I followed her back to the enclave and we asked around. Clyde—he runs the joint—was the last person who talked to him. Clyde said he asked Scar if he wanted to hang out and have a beer, but Scar told him that he was heading out for my joint. Then he vanished. We went to the cops Saturday morning when he still hadn’t shown up.”
Jimbo must have been worried if he’d actually brought in the police. “What did they say?”
“You know how they feel about the bikers. They keep hoping the whole lot will just disappear, and since they can’t raid the place without a good reason, they’re not about to do anything to help find a biker gone AWOL. They were total assholes.”
“I can’t believe they’d just ignore the fact that he was missing.” I knew several of the officers, including my best friend Murray who had made detective earlier in the year. The Chiqetaw police were usually responsive to the public.
“Oh, they took a report all right, but then that paunchy old dude—what’s his name? He’s the head of detectives?”
“Coughlan?”
“Yeah, thanks. Coughlan, that’s it. He took one look at the report and passed it off. He said that Scar was probably off on some road trip. Traci told them about the trailer, but they ignored it. Just said that they’d ask around at the bars. Real big freakin’ help, huh?”
Jimbo scratched his chin, his beard still braided in the long cornrows that I’d suggested. The first day he’d showed up with them, I realized that I had no business offering fashion tips to bikers, but he seemed to like them so I refrained from commenting other than to murmur an “Oh yes, how nice.”
“Coughlan, huh? That figures.” The officers I knew took complaints seriously, checking things out as much as their constrained budget and limited force allowed, but Coughlan was another matter. Murray’s supervisor, he’d made her life miserable ever since she got a promotion to his unit. They’d managed to achieve a truce, but I didn’t expect it to last.
He shook his head. “Remember, we’re talking about the Klickavail Valley bikers. The cops suspect all sorts of trouble out there, most of it the product of their overactive imaginations. Since the enclave is housed on private property and the boys have permission to live there, and since there’s no proof that anything illegal is actually going down, the cops ignore the place, hoping the group will get bored and leave. They’re not gonna help anymore than they’re forced to. Anyway, so Scar’s vanished and Traci’s freakin’.”
“They have a fight, maybe?”
“Nope, no way. She’s pregnant and they’re happy as a pair of lovebugs. Kid’s due to pop in about a month. I told the cops Scar would never run out on his old lady. All he can talk about lately is having the kid and settling down. He wants two or three more, after this one.” Jimbo shrugged, but I thought I glimpsed the ghost of a smile behind his worry.
Curious. I’d have thought that anybody living in the biker’s enclave out there would want to remain free, unattached. “What about you? Have you ever considered getting married?” The question slipped out before I could stop myself.
Jimbo picked at the crumbs of his cake. “Me? Nah . . . I mean, it just ain’t the life for a woman. Hell, you know me. I spend most of my time in the woods. What would I do with a wife and kids? I got my land and my house and that’s enough. Heck, I was here before most of those guys even knew the valley existed. I’m about as settled as I’m ever gonna get.”
Jimbo’s home, from what I had seen, had been built one room at a time; he just kept adding on as he needed to and it resembled a sprawling shack more than a house, but I wasn’t going to nitpick over subtleties.
He continued. “But after years on the road, some of the boys need to settle down, plant some roots. Don’t mean they get kicked out of the gang, they just keep the home fires burning for the rest. Anyway, so you see, Scar wouldn’t leave Traci, and he sure as hell wouldn’t run off without his new Harley. He just bought that baby and she cost him over thirty grand.”
“Thirty grand?For a bike?”
“Hey, it’s a customized Screamin’ Eagle Electra Glide. They don’t come cheap.”
I didn’t ask how Scar had managed to get his hands on thirty thousand dollars; the less I knew about the financial dealings of Jimbo’s friends, the better. But something about the situation intrigued me. I’d shed a lot of my stereotypes over the past few months. If Jimbo was right about his friend, then Scar wouldn’t have up and taken off without letting somebody know. On the other hand, could the man still have a wild streak that Jimbo had overlooked?
“Has anything else happened that strikes you as suspicious?”
He glanced around to see if anybody was eavesdropping. God knows, somebody probably was. I loved my customers but a select handful were firmly ensconced in the busybody boot camp. My tearoom had become a hotspot for the tea-and-crumpet set to pick up a little gossip along with their daily “cuppa.” Whenever I had a few moments, I joined them, doing my best to keep tabs on local rumors and squash anything I knew to be wrong.
“My chickens have been disappearing. Last week, something tore up my fence—that’s pure barbed wire, babe, and ain’t much fun to tangle with.”
“Cougar? Bear maybe? This is the time of year when they pack on the weight for winter, so they’ll be out and about.” Chiqetaw was nestled out in the boonies off Highway 9, about fifteen miles southeast from Bellingham. Quite a few wild animals wandered in from the woods to the outskirts of town, especially out near Miner’s Lake and up on Jumping Jack Ridge.
Jimbo shook his head. “I don’t think so. Whatever did it trampled my carrot patch and got into the corn. I found footprints in the dirt, and O’Brien, they weren’t made by any four-legged animal. They were big and barefoot. Bigger than my feet.” Jimbo stretched out his leg. Yep, his boot was mighty big, at that.
He leaned in closer. “My guess is that something’s tromping around Miner’s Lake, something dangerous. A few of the guys in Klickavail Valley told me that they’ve come up short on stuff lately. Food . . . blankets . . . stuff like that. Terry-T said his sleeping bag disappeared off the clothesline a couple weeks ago. And they’ve been hearing strange things in the woods out there, too. Noises, and seeing shadows that shouldn’t be there.”
A tingle pulsed in the back of my neck and it felt as if I stood poised on the edge of a cliff. “You said you thought Scar is dead. Why?”
He sighed. “I can’t prove that he’s dead, but I got one of those awful feelings in my gut that I ain’t ever gonna see him again. This week I’ve had a couple dreams about him calling my name, but in them, I could never find out where he was. And then last night, I had another dream, and he was there, and he was all bloody and holding out his hands. Scared me shitless.”
“So you want me to go ghost-hunting.”
“Yeah,” he said with a bob of his head. “Come out to Miner’s Lake and take a look around. You can see these things better than me.”
I took a deep breath. The situation didn’t sound good, that was for sure. “What exactly do you want me to do?”