“It’s the Jefferson Lines, I can get a ticket now. Wait a minute, let me ask this guy.” She was gone for a minute, and Letty could hear some talk in the background. Skye came back to the phone and said, “The bus leaves here at midnight and arrives in Minneapolis at noon tomorrow.”

“All right. All right, I’ll meet you at the bus station. Stay away from Pilot and stay away from that blonde.”

“I will. Oh, Jesus, what about Henry?”

“We’ll work that out. I’ll get my dad, and we’ll work that out.”

•   •   •

HER DAD WAS Lucas Davenport.

Lucas was a tall man, dark-haired except for a streak of white threading across his temples and over his ears, dark-complected, heavy at the shoulders. He had blue eyes, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and a scar that reached from his hairline down over one eye, not from some back-alley fight, but from a simple fishing accident. He had another scar high on his throat, where a young girl had once shot him with a piece-of-crap street gun. So his body was well lived in, and he’d just turned fifty, and didn’t like it. Some days, too many days lately, he felt old—too much bullshit, not enough progress in saving the world.

For his birthday, his wife, Weather, a surgeon, had bought him an elliptical machine: “You’ve been pounding the pavement for too long. Give your knees a break.”

He used it from time to time, but he really liked running on the street, especially after a rain. He liked running through the odors of the night, through the air off the Mississippi, through the neon flickering off the leftover puddles of rainwater. He needed to run when he was dealing with people like Ben Merion.

By the time he reached the last corner toward home, he’d worked through his grouchiness. He turned the corner and picked up the pace, not quite to a full-out sprint, but close enough for a fifty-year-old.

And through the sweat in his eyes, saw Letty standing under the porch light, hands in her jeans pockets: looking for him.

Letty had gotten herself laid: he and Weather agreed on that, although Weather called it “becoming sexually active.” Lucas was ninety percent sure that she hadn’t been sexually active in high school, aside from some squeezing and rubbing, though she’d been a popular girl. Once at Stanford, she’d apparently decided to let go.

Lucas deeply hoped that the sex had been decent and that the guy had been good for her, and kind. When he was college-aged, he hadn’t always been good for the women in his life, or kind, and he regretted it. He also knew that there was not much he could do about Letty’s sex life, for either good or bad. Keep his mouth shut and pray, that was about it. Trust her good instincts.

He turned up the driveway and called out, “Whatcha doing?”

“Waiting for you. Something’s come up,” Letty said.

He stopped short of the porch, bent over, his hands on his knees, gulping air. When he’d caught his breath, he stood up: “Tell me.”

•   •   •

WHEN SHE’D TOLD HIM, he said, “Have you thought about the possibility that she’s nuts? Or that she’s working you?”

“Of course. I don’t think she’s crazy—I mean, I don’t think she’s delusional,” Letty said. “I have to admit that she talks about a guy being the devil, which doesn’t sound good, but when she does it . . . you almost have to hear it. She’s not talking literally: not a guy with horns and a tail. She’s talking about, what? A Charlie Manson type. A Manson family guy. He calls himself Pilot.”

“Pilot.”

“Yeah. Pilot. She flat out says he’s a killer,” Letty said. “She didn’t come up with that today, she said it weeks ago, when we first met in San Francisco, when there was no money in it. As far as working me goes, she tried to work me a little in San Francisco, because they weren’t making any money with their singing. Then she realized she didn’t have to work me, because I was going to buy them a McDonald’s anyway. She’s not dumb.”

Lucas sat on the porch next to her and said, “Okay. First of all, you know, she is crazy. Somehow, someway, because all street people are. Not necessarily schizophrenic, or clinically paranoid, but almost certainly sociopathic to some extent, because they can’t survive otherwise. If they’re too sane, their whole worldview breaks down, and they wind up in treatment or in a hospital or dead: dope or booze.”

“She’s not exactly street,” Letty said. “She’s a traveler. They’re kind of street, but they’re different. A lot of street people are . . . bums. Beggars. Travelers are different. For one thing, they travel. They’re usually pretty put together—they buy good outdoor gear, they stay neat, they try to stay clean. Lots of them have dogs that they take care of. They have objectives. They make plans. They know each other, they meet up.”

“More like hobos,” Lucas suggested.

“I don’t exactly know what a hobo is. Aren’t they on trains?”

“Yeah, but these travelers sound like hobos,” Lucas said. “They have a certain status.”

“Exactly,” Letty said. “Will you come with me, when I meet her? She’ll be in around noon.”

“Yeah, sure. I might have to push a meeting around, nothing important,” Lucas said.

“She said they had Henry’s heart in a Mason jar,” Letty said.

“Ah, the old heart-in-the-jar story,” Lucas said.

“That Pilot made a guy eat Henry’s penis . . . roast it and eat it.”

“Ah, the old roasted penis story . . .”

“What if it’s true?”

“It’s not,” Lucas said.

Lucas stood up and dusted off the seat of his running shorts. “There are certain kinds of stories that pop up around crazy people, especially street people. Apocryphal stories, urban legends. Slander: cannibals are the big crowd favorite. I’ve run into all kinds of stories like that—the most extreme ones you can think of, people eating babies or feeding babies to dogs, and so on. Exactly none of them have been true.”

“But . . .”

Lucas held up a finger: “There are cannibals out there, but there aren’t any true stories about them. Cannibals are quiet about what they do. When you hear cannibal stories, it’s always about somebody trying to get somebody else in trouble. And usually about roasting and eating somebody’s dick. Or somebody’s breasts. Sexual fantasies, made up to get somebody else in trouble.”

“All right. But—come with me tomorrow.”

•   •   •

LUCAS MOVED HIS MEETINGS around and at noon the next day, he and Letty were in Minneapolis. The Jefferson Lines shared a terminal with Greyhound off Tenth Street, a relatively cheerful place compared to most bus stations, built under a parking garage.

They could see the green-glass top of the IDS tower peeking over the surrounding buildings as Lucas parked his Mercedes SUV on the street. He and Letty walked over to the station, where they were told that the bus was running forty-five minutes late. “Hasn’t even gotten to Burnsville yet. There was a big accident out on I-90. The driver’s trying to make up time, though, so they won’t be in Burnsville for more’n a couple minutes,” said the guy behind the Jefferson Lines desk.

They decided to kill the time by walking over to the downtown shopping strip, so Letty could check out new arrivals at the Barnes & Noble and Lucas could look at suits at Harry White’s.

The Harry White salesman was happy to see him, as always: “You’re running late in the season this year, but I snuck a suit off the rack, put it in the back, until I could show it to you. Italian, of course. It’s not quite as dark as charcoal, you couldn’t call it charcoal, but it’s a touch deeper than a medium gray, with a very fine almost yellow pinstripe, more beige, I’d say.”

Lucas was a clotheshorse, and always had been. He spent a half hour looking at suits, had a couple of them put back for further examination on the following Saturday, spent five minutes looking at ties, another five with shoes, checked out a black leather jacket—$2,450 and soft as pudding. He spent nothing, and walked across the street to Barnes & Noble, where he found Letty checking out with a Yoga tome and a book on compact concealed-carry firearms.