Kitchen or car, one way or the other we’ll sort it out.

In my bathrobe, hair still damp, I knock on Kelly’s door. Part of my job, playing rooster.

The unlocked door swings open.

“Kel? Rise and shine.”

At first I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing. Her bed is already made, throw pillows in place. Not possible, not at this hour.

“Kelly?”

That’s when I see the note. A note prominently displayed on her desk, held down by her South Park pencil holder. A note written in her usual florid felt tip, abbreviated as if it were e-mail.

Don’t worry, Mom, it’s not what u think. Something came up. Will call u 2morrow at high noon. Luv u tigers and tons(really!),

K.

She’s gone. Run away.

5. Somebody Special

The way Roy Whittle figures, there’s white man crazy and there’s Indian crazy. Both are bad, but Indian crazy is worse ‘cause in his opinion Indians are all crazy to begin with. Your average swamp injun is a few shy of a load for starters. Add liquor and syphilis and crazy ain’t far behind.

“You figure Ricky’s lost it?” Roy asks his brother.

Dug is driving, bumping their brand-new Dodge Ram over the rutted road that leads to the old airfield. He shoots a puzzled look at his brother. “Huh?” Dug not being one to jump into conversation without prodding.

“Acting weird,” Roy says. “The big chief. Ricky Lang.”

Dug shrugs. “Can’t say.”

They’re fraternal twins, but it’s always seemed to Roy that he got all the words, the conversational ability and most of the brains. You can’t say Dug is simple, exactly, not if you don’t want him pounding you, but he’s not a man given to speaking much, or expressing opinions. Or other normal stuff like reading a little and planning ahead—Roy does that for the both of them.

“Ricky pays us,” Dug points out, nodding to himself in satisfaction, having solved the question.

“Yep, he does.” Roy sighs. Might as well be talking to himself. But he can’t let go of the idea that Ricky has been acting peculiar. For instance his recent Superman talk. Staring at Roy with his hard little eyes and saying he can see into his head, he’s got X-ray vision. Like he can read Roy’s mind. A scary thought indeed.

When the big man first approached them, Roy thought it was strange, a Nakosha sachem wanting to hire a couple of local white boys. But when he’d explained the situation with his tribe, and what he intended to do about it, it sort of made sense that he needed outside help. Any reservations Roy had got erased by the offer of a new truck with a legal title, insurance paid for, the whole bit. Plus cash money in the very near future. But the last few days he had occasion to wonder if maybe Ricky wasn’t, when you got right down to it, bat-shit crazy. At the very least he was totally unpredictable, and that made him dangerous.

Roy vows to be extra damn careful with Ricky Lang, truck or no truck, money or no money.

They come around the last snaky turn in the old logging road. Ahead is the airfield, wide and clear. Not paved, because paving would draw too much attention, but scraped and leveled and hard-rolled, and suitable for everything but the very largest aircraft. Five thousand feet from end to end, straight as a string. A much improved version of the old, rutted clearing where, once upon a time, smugglers limped in, flying wheezy old DC-3 Dakotas loaded with bales of whatever, no runway lights to guide them other than a few pools of smoky kerosene set afire. Wild times that more or less ended before Roy and Dug were old enough to participate.

Unlike their poor pappy, who died in Raiford Correctional, basting in his own bitter juices.

Don’t trust nobody, boys, least of all yur so-called frens.

That was Pappy’s only song, for years before he died. How he was ratted by friends and associates and blood relatives. A long story, partly true, mostly bull. The sad fact was, the old man was the last in a long line of willing rats, with nobody left to rat out. Boys who started out jacking gators ended up rich, wrecking fifty-thousand-dollar Jaguars on backcountry roads for the sheer stupid fun of it, until they were spent out, broke, back in the cracker swamplands where they started.

Roy, twenty-four years old and barely out of the same neck of the Everglades, has no intention of going back, not without a wad of cash in his pocket. Enough for him and Dug to live decent. And near as he can figure, Ricky Lang is the man to back, moneywise. That is, if he don’t go totally squirrel.

“What we do?” Dug wants to know, gazing at the empty airfield.

“Ricky wants us to wait,” Roy explains, patient as always. He’d started out life five minutes ahead, is still waiting for his brother to catch up.

“Huh? Wait for what?”

“Somebody’s coming,” Roy says. He opens the glove compartment, takes out his brand-new ten mil Auto Glock 20 with the fifteen-round magazine. “Somebody special.”

6. Worse Than Sex

Fern has been my best friend since the first day of first grade. She sealed the deal by finding my shoes. Brand-new shoes strapped onto my pudgy little feet by my mother barely an hour before a group of marauding third-graders—big as invading Huns to me—knocked me down on the playground, pulled up my dress and threw my brand-new shoes into the woods behind the school.

There must have been adults overseeing us, but I have no recollection of that. All I remember is being devastated. Destroyed. These were the shoes I’d insisted on when shopping for my new school outfits. Expensive, from the way my mom pursed her lips and looked worried, but I’d made a fuss and she’d given in. Now the precious shoes were gone. I couldn’t go into the school barefoot—mortal shame—and I couldn’t go home. I was lost. The new world of first grade had ended before it even began.

I cried so hard I couldn’t see. And then this big girl came out of the fog of tears, a lovely girl three years older than me, with bright, beautiful, almond-shaped green eyes and wonderfully curly hair. She put her arm around my shoulders and helped me smooth down my dress and promised to find my shoes. She did find them, and helped me strap them on, and twenty-five years later whenever I get irritated with Fern, or find her wearisome, I think of the shoes, and that seals the deal all over again.

So it’s Fern who gets the first distress call.

“Kelly ran away,” I say, my voice breaking. “With a boy.”

“Oh, Jane! No way! I have to sit down.”

Fern has the wireless, carries it to her favorite chair, the soft leather recliner that belonged to her ex-husband. Poor Edgar. A sweet guy but no match for Fern, not in marriage, not in divorce, not in life. I know she’s using Edgar’s old chair because I recognize the sound of the squeaking springs as she settles in, pushes back, lifting her size-ten feet. “There,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

I try, but naturally, Fern being Fern, she interrupts long before everything gets told. “So you’re telling me Kelly stayed out all night and skipped out on her summer job? Welcome to the club, Jane.”

“But she’s never—”

“That you know of. Please. She’s sixteen. Everything but their name is a lie. Sometimes the name, too. I got these calls for Cheyenne? Frat boys looking for Cheyenne. Is that like a stripper name? Jessica was calling herself Cheyenne at some club, gave out her home number. Unbelievable. Jess has a tested IQ of one thirty-five, but at clubs it apparently drops to about sixty-five.”

“So you’re telling me not to worry.”

“No, no, no. Be very worried. Just don’t think you’re alone.”

“But what if she’s having sex?” I ask plaintively.

That gets a laugh out of Fern. Laughter so hearty it seems to warm the receiver on my phone. “If, Jane? Did you say if? Of course she’s having sex! Why else would she stay out all night with Smike?”