So off they went. And never came back.

  Traydon’s mother had one of those stinky diseases where she required constant diaper changing, so Mom and Dad couldn’t go look for him, and calls to local authorities had been met with abject apathy. I’d been in Chicago doing some rich and famous publicity stuff and was alerted to this case by my helpful court-appointed community corrections officer, Mrs. Drambuiequist, who was the type of person that no one would try to save if she was in a restaurant choking on a lentil.

  So up north went I, in my pimped-out recreational vehicle-slash-crime lab known as the Crimebago Drei (pronounced crim-ee-bay-go dry), with my helpful and ever-so-cute pet companions, Waddlebutt the chinstrap penguin and Big Dick the capybara.

  Are you feeling why they made a TV series about me? I’m fascinating. Or as the kids these days say, this main character got bougie rizz, finna spit bars, popping off with the juice, based no cap, gas, getting the bag, I hits different, slaps out of pocket, facts, vibe.

  The kids these days are illiterate.

  And lazy.

  And they need to get off my lawn. Periodt.

  Yeah, I spelled that last word right. Ask some damn kids.

  After a six-hour drive, stopping only to illegally dump my black water in a Cracker Barrel parking lot, I arrived in whatever town I arrived in and had to figure out where to go next. The local cops? The local newspaper? The local bar to listen to the locals spread local gossip?

  I decided, before I made any moves, to call Traydorn’s parents and ask them a probing question I’d forgotten during my first interrogation. Namely, why the hell did they name him Traydorn? Did they lose a bet? Were they mentally unfit? Did they expect him to one day grow up and save the Barbarian Viking Planet from fire-breathing dragons?

  The Barbarian Viking Planet is cool.

  Also I have ADHD and get distracted a lot.

  I wonder if it’s gonna rain later. Kinda smells like rain.

  Rain mixed with something sinister.

  Was it my keen premonition detecting some sort of looming, foreboding danger?

  Or… maybe some black water splashed on my tires at the Cracker Barrel.

  For those not versed in RV slang, black water is poo-poo. I’d recently had a Gigantico Double Mean Bean Burrito Magnifico—the tortilla was made from bean flour for the double punch of beanness—and it had torn through my digestive tract like a greased fat kid on a waterslide.

  My black water was stinky.

  I should send a bag of it to Mrs. Drambuiequist. She’d get it in the mail and be all, “I wonder what this unexpected package is. Perhaps a bag of delicious vanilla frosting?”

  Surprise! It’s human feces!

  I should totally do that.

  Really, that woman was the worst.

  Anyway, I called Traydorn’s parents, and they didn’t pick up. Which was a complete waste of my time, and yours.

  So I decided to use my private eye skills and triangulate the exact spot where Traydorn’s cell phone signal stopped signaling. That involved logging into the cell network database using my password—bought via a generous bribe to one of my countless fans who worked at the carrier—and finding his last known location. After punching the coordinates into my GPS, I took a winding rural road to another road that was little more than a gravel path, and traversed deep into the woodsy woods, trees so thick they blotted out the starry night and orange moon.

  When X marked the spot I parked in the middle of the road and talked to the troops.

  “Waddlebutt, Big Dick, I’m going to go investigate. You guys wait in the vehicle.”

  They didn’t respond. Because they were a bird and a giant rodent.

  I gave them each a pat on the head with my real hand—they tended to try and bite my prosthetic fake hand—and climbed out of the RV, stretched and scratched and pulled at the front of my uncomfortable pants to give the sweaty jumble twins some air, and then called Traydorn’s number, listening to the woods for the dulcet sounds of Ja Rule.

  Traydorn had Ja Rule as a ringtone. Yes your cell provider knows your ringtone. They also know how many times you visit www.hotsororitygirlslive.com. You filthy thing. What were you doing when you were an innocent soul in heaven and God was passing out the shame?

  We both know what you were doing. Nasty. Do you bake pie with those hands?

  I’d still eat it. I like pie.

  Anyway, I walked a twenty-meter grid but didn’t hear “Down Ass Bitch” coming from anywhere. Back in the Crimebago Drei I fired up my IMSI catcher, aka my dirtbox.

  Heh heh. Dirtbox. It just sounds so nasty.

  I’d bought the dirtbox used at a police auction for the cool price of eighty grand. It simulated a cell tower and could sniff out nearby phones and force a handshake connection. The hacked cell would then give up its information, including current location.

  Yes, cops can do this to you. No, they probably aren’t getting a warrant first. The tech companies who spy on you and sell your private info aren’t getting permission either. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

  So my dirtbox did its sniffing thing, while I wondered if I should change my porn name to dirtbox, and then it pinged a location, and with the help of a big ass flashlight I found Traydorn’s cell phone alongside the road, battery nearly dead, a crack on the screen.

  I quickly checked his SMS text messages and saw some back and forths with Mia from days earlier, prior to them heading to Wisconsin. Nothing jumped out as a clue. No sexting, either.

  Boring.

  I then checked his email, which I hadn’t been able to do at his parent’s house because they didn’t have his password and he’d brought his laptop with him up north. I quickly found the address of the rental property, which was less than a mile away.

  So did he lose his phone while hiking, and perhaps he and Mia were at their vacation rental at that very moment?

  Possible. But neither had checked in with their families. That could have been the lack of cell service in the area, but I had a sinking feeling it was something else.

  On a hunch I checked his photos, bringing up his last selfie.

  My hunch paid off.

  I stared at a pic of Traydorn and Mia, nighttime in the woods. They were both smiling wide. He had his arm around her, and she held out her left hand, showing off her new engagement ring.

  Cute. But I didn’t smile, because that wasn’t all the picture revealed.

  Standing right behind the happy couple was a tall lone figure with an out-of-focus grey face, holding up a syringe while lunging for Traydorn’s neck.

  JACK

  Instinct made me reach for a sidearm that I wasn’t wearing, and my hand instead slapped at the folding knife clipped inside my front jeans pocket.

  I didn’t pull it. I didn’t need to. We were staring at something—either a dead body or some sort of statue—and neither posed an immediate danger even though it gave both of us an unpleasant surprise.

  The object, jutting out of a ditch and half-buried by weeds, dead leaves, and pine needles, had a large head and a rudimentary, anguished face. Bright, wide, bulbous greenish-blue eyes that reflected our flashlight beams, and a gaping circle of a mouth that seemed to be crying out in pain while also shouting a warning for us to back off.

  The thing had an outstretched arm, thick and ragged, as if someone had dunked their hand in concrete and allowed it to dry.

  “It’s a sculpture,” Chandler said.

  I glanced at her, saw she also had her hand over her folding knife.

  We crept closer, Chandler keeping her beam on the statue, me keeping mine on the slanted ground ahead so we didn’t lose our footing. When we stood next to the object we got more detail. This stone figure was festooned with bits of broken liquor bottles and rusty beer caps, which formed rudimentary clothing.

  “Reminds me of a gingerbread man,” Chandler said.

  I winced. Not a pleasant memory for me.

  “The eyes seem familiar.”

  “You know someone with monster eyes like that?” Chandler asked.

  “Not familiar like that. They’re made of something familiar.”

  “Look like wine bottles.”

  I shook my head. “They’re rounded off. What kind of glass is rounded?”

  “Lightbulbs? Maybe a traffic light? That’s green.”

  “These have too much curve. And some blue in them.”

  What’s green and blue and round and made of glass?

  And why does it make me feel like I’m having déjà vu?

  Chandler leaned over to brush off some of the leaves and detritus, uncovering two legs jutting out at odd angles. The figure was posed like a rag doll, dropped and discarded and very displeased that it was being ignored.

  “Outsider art?” I suggested.

  It wasn’t good enough or detailed enough to suggest a professional artist, but some obvious time and care had gone into its construction.

  “Crazy outsider art,” she countered. “I swear this thing was pulled from one of my childhood nightmares. Does it look like it’s screaming to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Maybe it was because we were viewing it in the woods, at night. Maybe in daylight it wouldn’t exude the same creepy aura.

  It didn’t improve the creepy factor that something howled in the distance.

  Chandler turned around and pulled out her cell phone, and I stepped beside her for the selfie. When the camera flashed, I noted neither of us were smiling in the pic. We also made it to the gnome and snapped another, but after the Pole Barn of Blocks and the Concrete Zombie Statue I’d honestly had enough of this scavenger hunt.

  After climbing back out of the ditch Chandler paused to flip through the ring of laminated clues. I watched her frown.

  “The statue’s not on here.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s not on the list.”

  “So this giant scary screaming nightmare isn’t part of the scavenger hunt?”

  “Nope. They got birdhouses and old water coolers and carousel horses and wind chimes but no creepy cement outsider art. Weird.”

  Very weird.

  I had a bad feeling, and wasn’t sure if it was instinct or paranoia. I’d been to so many crime scenes that I numbed myself to the sight of death.

  That’s what it felt like. I was girding myself, as if we’d just seen a corpse.

  “You hungry?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

  “Starving.”

  “We can do salads and sandwiches. Or we can go into town and see what culinary delights Lake Flathead offers.”

  “When in Rome. Remind me what the local cuisine is like.”

  “Wisconsin is the fattest state in the country. Up north it means cheap beer and fried food served in local shitkicker bars. I had a burger when I was in Lake Loyal topped with bratwurst, a pickled egg, sauerkraut, deep fried cheese curds, deep fried butter, frozen custard, and a Wisconsin State Fair cream puff that was to die for.”

  “Did it come with an angioplasty?”

  “The bartender had a defibrillator.”

  “No shit. Deep fried butter. Might as well inject fat directly into your arteries.”

  “That doesn’t taste as good,” I said.

  I heard a noise to my right and immediately swung the beam around, catching the lower limbs of a poplar swaying as if they’d been jostled. Holding my breath I heard the sounds of an animal moving through the woods.

  Deer? Elk?

  Something else?

  “How big do bear get up here?” I asked Ms. Know-It-All.

  Chandler tensed. “Did you see one?”

  “No. Just the tree shaking.”

  “There are black bear. Males can get over nine hundred pounds.”

  “But there aren’t many, right?”

  “Thriving population. Over twenty thousand. Nocturnal feeders.”

  “Great. Good call, doing this scavenger hunt at night.”

  “Bear isn’t a big deal. You can scare off a bear. Make yourself look big, start making noise. The really scary shit out there are the wolves. Can’t scare off a pack of hunting wolves. They surround you and take you down.”

  “I should have brought my gun.”

  Chandler shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Handgun rounds would just piss off a wolf pack.”

  Just as her words were hitting home, another howl echoed out of the darkness. I couldn’t judge this distance, but it wasn’t far.

  “Tell me that’s a coyote,” I said, cautiously optimistic.

  “I wish.”

  Shit. “How about we go back to the house and find a local shitkicker bar.”

  “Done.”

  We walked slowly, deliberately, through the darkness and the autumn chill, checking our backs, our sides, above us and below us.

  We didn’t see anything.

  But I still had that skin-prickly feeling that I only got when I felt someone’s eyes on me.

  THE ARTIST

  The Artist Watches Them Walk Back To The House.

  Watches Them, And Smiles.

  Their Words Carry On The Night Air.

  The Artist Is Not A Bear. Or A Wolf.

  The Artist Is Something Much, Much Worse.

  But The Women Are For Later.

  Right Now, The Artist Has Work To Do.

  Art To Do.

  Art Art Art.

  Art Does Not Create Itself.

  It Needs The Artist To Capture It. To Pose It. To Immortalize It.

  Death And Beauty Are Both Eternal.

  The Artist Knows Both Very Well.

  The Artist Knows. The Artist Knows.

  Time To Give Life To The Dead.

  CAPTIVE #80

  Tray had fallen asleep, the nightmares not as bad as the real-time agony of his reality, and then a sound woke him up.

  A mechanical, loud, rumbling machine sound. Close by. He put his hand on the concrete above him, feeling it vibrate.

  A rescue!

  Tray tried to yell for help, his dry voice straining like a wrung-out towel. Unable to hear his own voice, he began to pound on the blocks, slapping at them with his palms.

  He slapped until he had no feeling in his hands, and then, abruptly, the machine stopped.

  Tray continued to slap. Continued to yell.

  He also heard Mia yelling.

  Help seemed to be so close.

  But help did not come.

  Something else came instead.

  CHANDLER

  Everyone in Wisconsin seemed nice, which made Chandler suspicious. One couldn’t drive down the street without people giving a wave. One couldn’t go to the grocery store without a chat about the weather with perfect strangers. And due to freely flowing social lubricant, taverns were the friendliest places of all.

  The Fall Down Inn in Lake Flathead must have missed the memo.

  The moment Jack and Chandler entered the bar, rock salt crunching under their footwear, the only three patrons and the bartender abandoned their heated conversation to stare.

  No one smiled.

  Chandler used a sidelong glance to size them up. People’s demeanors could be quickly determined with a combination of body language, facial expression, and wardrobe. Chandler read the forty-something guy at the end of the bar as disagreeable and a possible threat based on his suggestive leer, his unshaven face, his lewd open-leg slouch on the barstool, his ripped and stained denim overalls, and most obviously his FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT baseball cap.

  The second patron, also male, had a wrinkled, hangdog expression of exasperation or maybe disappointment. In his fifties he wore a tidy but faded flannel shirt, buttoned up to the collar, worn but polished boots. There was an empty shot glass on the bar in front of him next to his can of Miller High Life. When he met Chandler’s stare his eyes were far away, practically dead.

  First guy looks like a predator. Second guy looks like a ghost. And the third guy…

  Big man, big arms and broad chest, crouched over his beer, hands on either side of the can, hunched shoulders, eyes darting and suspicious. He wore heavy work boots and had scabs on hairy knuckles.

  Classic prison posture of a guy in the prison mess hall, guarding his food. He recently did time, and hadn’t readjusted into society yet.

  They all shared a vague resemblance.

  Related? Or did all small-town locals look alike?

  “They don’t seem friendly.” Jack, under her breath.

  “Win them over with your grace and wit.”

  They headed for the bar, the glares from the townies hot as spotlights.

  “What’s with all the salt on the floor?” Jack asked as she perched herself on a stool.

  “I’d guess getting ready for six months of snow. Or they haven’t swept since last season.”

  Chandler grabbed a barstool and bellied up. She focused on the bartender, a wizened old guy cultivating a garden of nose hair and a beard even bigger than his gut.

  Jack leaned toward him. “Beautiful night, huh? We need a couple burgers, cheese curds, and beers.”

  He didn’t move.

  “You have burgers?” Jack asked.

  He nodded.

  “You have cheese curds?”

  Another nod.

  “And beer?”

  He reached into a cooler, pulled out a couple of Rhinelander shorties, popped the caps off, and set them on the bar in front of Jack and Chandler. Then he walked away without another word, heading through the door into the kitchen.

  The three men at the bar commenced their conversation, but kept it low so Chandler couldn’t hear their words over the country music droning through the shitty ceiling speakers, and the ball game on the TV turned up to eleven.

  “I got instincts on the three barflies, but I’m not sure on the barkeep,” Chandler said to Jack. “Suspicious of strangers?”

  “Not sure yet. Maybe he’s just cautious. Maybe lost in thought. Maybe surprised. I think we interrupted something.”

  Chandler checked the game. Tie. Nothing happening but color commentary about some retired player.