Relentless Page 0,95
know.”
Milo said, “But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
When nothing was left but short bristles, I switched from the trimmer to the standard shaver head and buzzed away the stubble.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Slick.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Let’s go.”
Indicating the hair mounded like dead rats on the floor, Milo said, “Don’t we have to clean up?”
“We’re desperate fugitives. We live by our own rules.”
“Cool.”
At the top of the stairs, I lifted him into my arms and told him to close his eyes until further notice. I carried him down to the foyer.
In the hallway, around the three cadavers, Penny had laid a carpet of green-plastic trash bags to avoid getting more blood on the soles of her shoes. The scene wasn’t from a conventional TV commercial, but it effectively sold the point that the product was versatile, its many uses limited only by the consumer’s imagination.
Penny came into the foyer with a smaller white-plastic trash bag containing what she had harvested from the dead.
I thought of my uncle Tray’s methamphetamine-amped buddies gathering wallets and purses from the many victims in Uncle Ewen’s farmhouse twenty-eight years earlier, and I wondered at the complex and often eerie patterns evident in every life.
Seeing the new me, Penny said with dismay, “Oh, no. Where’s your wonderful weird thatch?”
“Crawling around on the bathroom floor. Turns out, it has a life of its own, tried to attack us. Car keys?”
She fished them out of the white trash bag.
I said, “You drive us back to pick up Lassie while I make a phone call.”
Outside, when I got a closer look at the dull-green sedan in which Rink and Shucker had arrived, I said, “Looks like standard government-issued wheels.”
A three-inch-square sticker had been applied to the inside of the lower left-hand corner of the windshield, facing out to be read by security scanners. At the bottom were a number and data in the form of a bar code.
The primary element of the overall-gray sticker was a white circle that enclosed a symbol: three muscular red arms radiating from the center, joined at the shoulder and forming a kind of wheel, each arm bent at the elbow, each hand fisted.
“It’s a triskelion,” Penny said. “I’d guess the fists symbolize power, red endorses violence, and the wheel form promises unstoppable momentum.”
“So you think they don’t work for the Bureau of Compassionate Day Care.”
“They might.”
I put Milo in the backseat and got in the front with Penny as she started the engine. “We have to abandon the Mountaineer. Besides Lassie, is there anything in it we’ve absolutely got to have?”
“One suitcase,” she said. “I can grab it in ten seconds.”
“Milo?” I asked.
“That sack of special stuff Grimpa got me. I haven’t used most of it yet.”
“What about the bread-box thing you wouldn’t let me carry out of the house on the peninsula?”
“Oh, yeah. That for sure. That is monumentally crucial.”
“Did I say you can open your eyes now?”
“I figured it out back on the porch.”
“My little Einstein.”
“‘Weird little Einstein,’ he called me,” Milo remembered. “He wants to know weird, he should look in a mirror.”
As Penny followed the driveway toward the state road, I keyed in Vivian Norby’s disposable-cell number on my disposable cell and prayed she would pick up.
Since only I possessed her new number, Vivian answered with, “Cubby?”
“Viv, I’m so sorry about this, but the bad guys are going to have your Mountaineer soon.”
“Are you all right?” she asked worriedly.
“I’m bald, but otherwise we’re all fine.”
“You remember I told you I smelled something funny about all this and that it was a stink I smelled before somewhere, sometime?”
“Yes, I do. I remember the stink conversation.”
“Well, like twenty-five years ago, Wilfred worked for this police chief who took this homicide case away from him with a lame excuse.”
Wilfred Norby was Vivian’s deceased husband, the ex-marine and detective. The name Wilfred comes from two Old English words, willa and frith, which together mean “desire for peace.”
“Turned out,” Vivian continued, “the chief and a half dozen of his top staff were corrupt. They were doing business with a drug gang that committed the homicide Wilfred got pulled from. The stink is corruption in high places, Cubby. This isn’t just some wingnut on your case. This is something bigger.”
“We’re on the same page, Viv. Listen, as soon as the bad guys have the Mountaineer, they’ll be coming to you, and when they find out you’re Milo’s sitter, they’ll know you gave it to us.”
“Just let