Randy, even if, by some rare chance, he wanted to snoop in on a call between Lonnie and yourself when he has a bar to run. No offence, Cleave, but you’re not the President of the United States.” Spencer held his brother’s eyes until Cleavon nodded his agreement. “You have nothing to worry about, Cleave,” he added. “None of us do. Some out-of-towners crashed their car. On their way to find help they came across Lonnie’s place. Something happened, it doesn’t matter what, and his son died. Lonnie shot two of them, but not before he got shot himself. The five others fled into the woods. The sheriff will conduct a search, of course. But the national park is twenty thousand acres of dense woodland. It will be like looking for needles in a haystack. When no one turns up, the conclusion will be they got lost and died. And that’s it. All we have to do is sit tight and wait this out.”
“You’re forgetting ’bout the girl who got away, Mr. Pratt,” Jesse Gordon said, blowing a purple bubble and swallowing it again. “She saw Cleavon and Earl and Floyd. If she gets to town tonight, tells the sheriff about them…”
“Jess’s right,” Cleavon said. “And we’re wasting talk standing round here shooting the shit. Jess, me and you, we’ll take the El Camino. The bitch hasn’t seen it. She’ll think she’s flagging down help. By the time she finds out it’s us, it’ll be too late.”
They were correct, Spencer knew. The young woman getting to town would be a disaster—but this was a disaster Spencer wanted. “You’re overreacting, Cleave,” Spencer told him in a calm, rational, slightly patronizing tone. “It’s highly unlikely she could make it to town on foot. That would be a good ten mile hike—”
“She could—”
“She won’t. Not in the middle of the night. Moreover, she’ll know you’ll be out there looking for her. As soon as she hears a vehicle approach, she’ll duck into the woods. You’ll drive straight past, never the wiser.” He shook his head. “No, she’ll bunker down somewhere until morning, when she feels safer. She won’t think you’ll still be looking for her then. That’s when you’ll get her.”
“I don’t know,” Cleavon said. “She gets to town—”
“She won’t.”
“But if she does—”
“She won’t,” Spencer said with enough decisiveness to signal the discussion was over. “Besides, we have other matters to attend to. We have to get rid of the other out-of-towners in case Sheriff Humperdinck comes by questioning you boys about Lonnie. Speaking of which, where are the other two? There should be—”
“I gave ’em to Toad and Trapper,” Earl said in his giddy, booming voice. He shifted his bulk from one foot to the other, almost as if he had to urinate. “Cleave said I could, I asked, and he said I could, ’cause they’d just shed, and they were real hungry, and it would save us giving ’em rabbits.”
“You fed them to your snakes?” Spencer said skeptically.
“Yeah, Spence,” Earl said, obviously tickled blue by the idea. “They’re two happy snakes right now, I’ll tell you that, you should see them—”
“Show me.”
Earl led Spencer through the ramshackle house, down one cracked-plaster hallway, then another, until they stood before a solid oak door.
Earl had purchased the snakes from a pet store in Akron some ten years ago. They were green anacondas, the largest species of snake in the world, though they had only been a few inches long then. They grew fast. After two years they were nine feet in length and devouring a couple rabbits each a fortnight. When they became too big for the timber and wire-mesh melamine cage Cleavon had built for them, Earl demanded they be relocated to the room he and Spencer stood before now. Cleavon put down linoleum tiles to make cleaning the floor easier—they defecated like horses—and he installed a thermostat and humidifier to keep the temperature at eighty-five degrees with ninety degrees humidity. It was a lot of work, and Cleavon wasn’t happy about doing it, but when Earl got something in his mind, there was no talking him out of it. There was no ignoring him either, not unless you were prepared to deal with four hundred pounds of single-minded, unreasoning fury.
And then, of course, there was the time one of the snakes tried to make a meal of Cleavon. He especially wasn’t happy about that. This wasn’t long after the snakes moved from the cage outside into the house. Earl would often