Skunk Hunt (17 page)

"I don't ever remember Skunk going to
church," said Barbara. Another pertinent observation.

"He didn't find Jesus in prison," Jeremy
said. "That's a good trick, when you think 90% of the G.P.'s spend
most their time yanking God's chain."

"G.P.?"

"General prison population."

The way he said it, you would have thought he
was explaining the periodic table. We circled around the cross
again and again. Passing drivers slowed down for a gander, probably
goofballs hoping Barbara had broken down and were hoping to trade a
lift for a tumble once they dumped the two goofballs with her. But
no one stopped to ask or volunteer.

"Got it," I said finally. Yeah, with a
smirk.

"What?" Jeremy asked.

"Look closer." My smirk broadened.

"I will, as soon as I wipe that smirk off
your mouth."

I lost the smirk.

Concerned that his jailbird education might
be upstaged by his numbskull brother, Jeremy studied the cross from
every angle—except the important one.

"Are you putting me on?" Jeremy said, balling
his fist. "Because if you are—"

"Look at the sides," I said.

"They aren't painted."

"That's right, but whoever did this wasn't
being cheap," I said.

Barbara and Jeremy stood on opposite sides of
the cross, scrutinizing the profile, their eyes rising and rising
until they met in a joint scowl.

"Okay, look at the scorch marks left by the
circular saw," I told them, removing all trace of superiority from
my voice.

"Yeah?"

"They aren't scorch marks."

Jeremy looked again and grimaced like the guy
who'd missed the fly on his nose. Barbara squinted, then yelped,
breaking out in a little dance.

"I see it!"

Why someone would go to the trouble of
disguising the message as friction burns from a dull blade belonged
to the realm of artistic paranoids. I could be just as loony, as
witness my recent justifiable paranoia. But leave the artist out of
it. The detail work was impressive: on one side of the vertical
stick was written '1149', on one side of the transverse 'Old', on
the other side of the transverse 'Petersburg' and on the opposite
side of the vertical 'Road'. The letters were slanted in a
high-speed scrawl, like someone writing on a moving train, with a
downward spin. For all the world like a saw on the verge of
sticking, although perfectly legible once you saw the trick.

"It's like whoever is doing this doesn't
really want us to find the money," said Jeremy, poking the address
into his phone's database. "I mean, why go to the trouble? Why not
just hand it over?"

I was sure 'whoever' had his reasons,
unknown reasons that were making me increasingly nervous. The
letter and temporary website were tolerable, the message
on
the bottle chancy, and these
imitation scorch marks outright ridiculous. It was like someone was
obliged to leave clues but was making them increasingly arcane.
Either it really was a game to him, or he didn't really want us to
get the money. But it was the final possibility that set me on
edge: whoever was doing this was scared shitless.

"Funk," said Barbara.

We glanced at her. She pointed at the
cross.

"The fish and the skunk," she explained. "Put
them together and you get 'funk'."

I suppose she felt the need to contribute
something to the process. Between this and her mascara she was a
regular Van Pain.

"Any idea where this place is?" Jeremy asked,
shooting me a sly glance. I got the impression he thought I was in
on some secret. Hey, just because I was the one spotting all the
clues didn't mean I knew anything in advance. He just couldn't get
over the possibility that I was smarter than him.

"No," I said reluctantly, losing some of my
smart-ass veneer. "Isn't that a 'smart' phone? Can't you look it up
on that?"

Jeremy frowned. He might have a Porsche, but
his phone was stupid. Absence of technology is as much a glitch as
technology itself.

"I can Mapquest it on the laptop," Jeremy
said. I presumed he was showing off his geek-ness. "Any Wi-Fi
around here?"

"You mean like a Starbucks—"

The cross exploded at the intersection of the
upright and crossbar.

Fragments flew in every direction, nicking
all of us. We all sort of just gaped.

"Booby-trapped!" I said, feeling like a
booby.

"Dumb ass!" Jeremy cried, dropping to the
ground. "That was a rifle! Get down!"

Barbara gave a squeal of fear. Or it might
have been me letting go with an involuntary high pitch as my
stomach hit the weeds and gravel. Barbara beat me to the
sprawl.

"Someone's shooting at us?"
Now
she was squealing.

I tried to gauge the angle of the shot. For
someone to have hit the cross between 'William' and 'McPherson' he
would have to be facing dead-on. But I had to assume one or all of
us had been the target, and the lucky shot had actually been a
miss. The cross had been facing oncoming westbound traffic. I
looked up the road. It was empty, which made sense if the shooter
had been waiting for a clear field of fire.

"Those woods," said Barbara, craning her
neck.

"Get down!" Jeremy hollered. He began to roll
on the ground, his arms sticking over his head. I had the
impression that he had learned this maneuver from some
lone-commando-vs.-rabid-hordes action movie. There was a thump
followed by a yelp as he fell in the ditch. He began yelling "Don't
shoot! Don't shoot!" as though Barbara and I were the ones holding
guns on him. The long-range shooter certainly couldn't hear. With
his voice muffled by the ditch, even I had a hard time hearing
him.

"Barb," I said, forgetting her pet name in
the tension of the moment.

"Yeah?"

"Those woods are on a hill," I observed.

"I can see that."

"But that means even laying down like this he
still has a clear shot at us."

"Oh shit," she said in low sob.

A car approached, slowing down as it neared
us. I caught a glimpse of a silver-haired woman whose chin
disappeared under a dropped jaw. She said something to the driver,
who did a Daytona and split in an instant. I wondered if she would
call the police on her cell phone.

But if the shooter could see us clearly, he
didn't take advantage of it. After clearing my head of muddled fear
and my face of stiff roadside grass, it dawned on me that the cross
had indeed been the target. I swiveled around on my hip and sat up.
When I saw some ants making a beeline for my crotch I surrendered
myself to my destiny and stood.

"Mute!" Barbara wailed.

"If this guy was serious I'd be toast
already," I said.

Jeremy peeked up from the ditch, waiting for
the next whizz-bang to take off my head.

"They can't kill us," I reasoned. "We're the
ones getting the clues."

Neither Barbara nor Jeremy were convinced, so
I did a little jig. I knew I risked annoying the shooter, if he was
still watching. He might decide to pop me for my insulting
behavior. After all, there were two family members to spare.

"See?" I gestured to my brother and sister,
urging them to join me. "They're just letting us know they want
their cut."

"
They
?" Barbara said, rising slowly.

"They. Him. Her. Whoever. The police aren't
the only ones who know what we're up to." As I spoke, I watched
Jeremy slinking through the ditch on his hands and knees. "Think
over the last year or so. Haven't you noticed strangers watching
your movements? Not every day, not every night. Just often enough
to keep tabs."

"I haven't seen anyone." Barbara brushed off
her jeans. "I mean, I've got perverts google-eying me all the time.
Day and night. Some of them would follow me home after work. How
would I know them from these guys?"

"I guess you wouldn't," I admitted. "But
let's face it, we're sitting on a lot of change. It's only normal
for certain parties to be interested."

"Idiots," said Jeremy, still prone in his
trench. "Someone shoots at you like that, you don't stand in the
open and yack-yack."

"I think Mute is right." Since Barbara could
not see past her bosom, she had to hand-check her abdomen for
bullet holes. This drew a honk from a passing motorist. Barbara
daintily flipped him off, then frowned down at Jeremy cowering in
the ditch. "You're all muddy."

"Jesus!" Jeremy wept. "You're both lunatics!
Look here, I got hit by a splinter from that cross!"

"I think we all got a few nicks," said
Barbara, enjoying the spectacle.

I, on the other hand, was appalled by my
brother's antics. He was supposed to provide muscle, and at the
first sign of danger we got tears.

"Go get the car," Jeremy told Barbara.

"You want us to leave you here?"

"No!" Jeremy cried frantically. "Just pull
over to the side of the road here and I'll hop in."

"That's not very gentlemanly," Barbara
critiqued. "If you really thought we could get shot, you'd be the
one to get the car."

You got that right, Sister. My craven brother
was getting on my nerves. He acted (and, at the moment, looked)
like those wimpy gookenspiels rednecks love to torment. I
personally was on the verge of kicking sand in his face, and I'm
the last person on earth to do such a thing—at least when it's
beyond the bounds of prudence.

"There's no place to park," Barbara reasoned,
visually estimating the narrow space between the road and
ditch.

"Stop in the road!" Jeremy shouted.

"I will not." Barbara planted her hands on
her hips. "That would create a dangerous hazard."

"Just long enough for me to get in."

"You suck," I complained. "I thought you
would be tougher than this."

I stopped short of suggesting he had been
tenderized and feminized in prison, so to speak.

"Come on, Sweet Tooth," I continued. "Let's
leave him in the ditch."

"Sure," she said tersely, setting out across
the road. She gave me a look that said she was only joshing. She
wouldn't leave her brother behind. Not because he was her brother.
She wouldn't leave a stray poodle behind. When we were kids, she
tried to rescue cicadas that had been mauled by our cats.

Jeremy must have forgotten this bit of family
folklore. Mistaking Barbara's bluff for grim determination, he
jumped up and dashed past her, beating her to the Sentra and
flinging himself prone on the back seat.

"Hey, you're all muddy!" Barbara reminded
him.

Unlike the dimwits ahead of me, I checked the
traffic before crossing.

Enjoying the front seat, I twisted around and
looked down on my brother, who had packed himself in the rear seat
as securely as cargo headed for China.

"I never thought I'd see the day," I
said.

"Never mind," Jeremy shot back. "I plan to
see plenty more days. Sweet Tooth, don't go toward the woods. Make
a U-turn. We can find a side road to take back to Richmond."

"Which way is Old Petersburg Road?" Barbara
asked me.

"I don't know, but it's got to be on the
other side of the city." I nodded straight ahead.

"Oh no you don't," said Jeremy.

"Oh yes I do," said Barbara, starting the car
and pulling onto the road.

Jeremy cowered, whimpered and in general made
a spectacle of himself until we had made it safely past the woods
we thought the shots had come from. Then he began snarling like a
banshee Chihuahua.

"That's right, ignore me. We could have
gotten killed and who do you thank for the warning? No one, because
we all would be dead! No thanks to me! Thanks to you!"

"You're ranting," I said.

"What do you expect!" Jeremy wiped some
mud off the side of his face. "That was a high-powered rifle they
used against us. We could be laid out next to Skunk, and who would
care? Not you! What have
you
got to live for?"

"Is he making sense?" Barbara asked me with a
sidelook.

"I understand him, but it doesn't make
sense." I stared firmly at the glove compartment, unwilling to
grace my brother with eye contact. "I've got plenty to live for.
Well, I've got my own skin, and I wouldn't risk it for being
stupid. No one's going to hurt us while we're still broke."

"That's right," Barbara agreed. "We're the
gooses. We don't have the egg yet."

I found explaining my actions brutally
difficult, like learning a new language. Barbara had stomped on my
tongue with her ungrammatical footnote. My thoughts veered and
crashed. I fell silent.

"Drop me off at my car," said Jeremy.

"Have you gone lame in the brain?" Barbara
protested. "We got a real address, now. Maybe the money's sitting
there waiting for us."

"Don't you have to go to work around this
time?" Jeremy, finally convinced we were in the clear, sat up and
looked around, focusing most of his attention on the rear
window.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Barbara asked
warily.

"The sun's going down," said Jeremy.

"Oh, I only work when the sun goes down?"
Barbara fumed. "Is that it? Like I'm some kind of vampire or
something? For your information, I happen to have a few days
off."

A few days off without pay, I thought. Just
like me, a P-14 without vacation or sick benefits. People like us
take monetary risks going out for a coffee break or a breath of
fresh air. What we wanted had been left begging by our hardscrabble
upbringing and twelve years of indifferent public schooling.
Barbara and I were looking for sweet repose away from the working
poor, that soft gray bed between grinding honesty and dangerous
venality. In short, an extended breathing space. Jeremy seemed to
have everything in excess already, but that could be deceptive. Any
envy Barbara and I might feel would be modified if it turned out an
army of loansharks was on his trail. Maybe my brother had a better
idea of what we were dealing with than we did. Maybe I really was a
jackass for standing up to the sniper that way.