Read Gathering Prey for Free Online

found Letty checking out with a Yoga tome and a book on compact concealed-carry firearms.
    “You’re
not
going to start carrying a gun,” Lucas said.
    “Of course not, but I want to stay informed,” Letty said. “We oughta go out to the range this weekend, if it doesn’t rain.”
    “Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “It’s been a while.”
    •   •   •
    SKYE WAS THE LAST PERSON off the bus. She was wearing the same outfit as in San Francisco, but smelled like soap. She and Letty shared a perfunctory hug, Letty introduced Lucas, and they waited until Skye’s bag was unloaded. Lucas said, “We got you a hotel room in St. Paul. We’ll drop your stuff there and grab something to eat, and figure out what we’re doing.”
    “That’s great, but I really don’t think I can afford—”
    “We got it,” Lucas said. “For two or three days, anyway.”
    “Appreciate it,” Skye said. She’d learned not to decline kindnesses; they might not be offered a second time.
    A half an hour later, they’d checked her into a Holiday Inn on the edge of St. Paul’s downtown area, and from there went to a quiet Bruegger’s Bagels bakery on Grand Avenue to talk. They all got baskets of bagels and Lucas and Letty got Diet Cokes and Skye a regular Coke—the calories thing again—and as they settled down at a corner table, Lucas said, “You’re worried about your friend.”
    “One of Pilot’s disciples—one of the women he sleeps with—told me they cut out Henry’s heart and put it in a Mason jar and they take it out at night and worship it.”
    Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Do you believe that?”
    She held up her hands, palms toward Lucas, like a stop sign. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s all road bullshit. But I’m telling you, Mr. Davenport, this is not like that. We go back a way with Pilot, all the way back to Los Angeles, and there are stories about him. That he kills people, that they all join in, killing people. Not like some black Masses or something, that weird shit. They do it because they like it, and because it makes them feel important. I call him the devil because that’s what he wants people to think about him. He loves that. He loves that whole idea of being evil to people, and have people talking about him.”
    Lucas leaned back and smiled, and offered, “He does sound pretty unlikable. You know his real name?”
    “No. Everybody calls him Pilot. He has this tie-dyed sleeveless T-shirt that he wears all the time, it’s yellow with a big red
P
on it. The
P
is made to look like blood, and he tells people it
is
blood.”
    “You think it is?” Letty asked.
    “Looks like regular tie-dye to me, kind of faded out.” She turned back to Lucas: “Mr. Davenport, Pilot
is
full of shit. He’s a liar and he’s lazy and he’s crazy and he sells dope, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do some of the stuff he says he does. I know for sure that they have all these food-stamp cards, and they sell them for money at these crooked stores in L.A. They’ve been running that scam for a couple of years. He talks about how the Fall is coming, and how the only way to survive will be to join up with the outlaws . . . and you gotta be willing to kill in cold blood. They’ve got guns, and everything.”
    “The Fall?”
    “Yeah, you know, when everything blows up and all the survivors wear camo and drive around in Jeeps.”
    •   •   •
    LUCAS AND LETTY threw questions at her for fifteen minutes, and when they were done, they had character sketches of Pilot and four of his disciples, named Kristen, Linda, Bell, and Raleigh, no last names. “Raleigh plays a guitar and Pilot calls him Sledge, like a combination of Slash and Edge, and Kristen used a steel file to sharpen her teeth into points, and she’s like inked from head to toe,” Skye said, but she had few hard facts.
    She knew that Pilot’s group traveled in a caravan of old cars, including at least one