Plum Spooky

FIFTEEN

DIESEL WAS ON the phone when I walked into my apartment. His hair was damp, and he was freshly shaved, which meant he’d used my razor. Diesel traveled light. He hung up and wrapped an arm around me.

“You smell like doughnuts,” he said.

“I bought Lula breakfast.”

“I have a guy flying in to a small airport just north of Hammonton. He’s going to take us over the Barrens. I’m hoping we can spot the rocket-launch site from the air.”

“How small is this plane?”

“It’s not a plane. It’s a he li cop ter.”

“Oh boy.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“I’ve never been in a he li cop ter. I’ve never wanted to be in a he li cop ter. They don’t look safe.”

“Sweetie, nothing that flies looks safe, including birds.”

He lifted my bag off the hook on the wall and draped it over my shoulder. “Time to roll.”

We took the Subaru with the trailered ATVs. If we found the launch site, we’d use the ATVs to get back to it. If we didn’t find the launch site, we’d ride around and hope we got lucky. I had mixed feelings about getting lucky. I wanted to snag Munch, but I didn’t especially want to see Diesel in action, shutting Wulf down.

At the best of times, Trenton isn’t especially pretty. And this wasn’t the best of times. The sky was the color and texture of wet cement, and everything under it felt like doom. I looked up at the sky, and I prayed for rain. I was pretty sure he li cop ters didn’t fly in the rain.

By the time we found Hammonton Airport, the sky had lightened a little, and I knew I wasn’t going to be saved by rain. The he li cop ter was sitting on a stretch of blacktop, waiting for us. It was blue and white, had a clear bubble nose, and looked like a big dragonfly. It seated four.

“Oh God,” I said on a moan.

“Think of this as an adventure,” Diesel said.

“I’m from Jersey. I get my adventure on the Turnpike. I only fly if there’s a beach or a casino involved. And then it’s in a big plane serving alcohol.”

We parked and crossed the blacktop to the pi lot. He was average height, average weight, and covered head to toe with tattoos. His graying blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

“This is Boon,” Diesel said. “I’ve known Boon for about a hundred years.”

I nodded a numb ac know ledg ment and stood in a catatonic stupor.

“She thinks he li cop ters aren’t safe,” Diesel said to Boon.

“Hah. If everything we did was safe, we’d never do anything, would we?” Boon said.

I inadvertently whimpered, and Diesel scooped me up and set me in the backseat of the helicopter. He took the seat next to Boon and passed me a headset with a microphone.

“Buckle up and put the headset on so we can talk to each other,” Diesel said.

Boon fired the bird, we lifted off the ground, and my heart rate went to stroke level. I closed my eyes and chanted the rosary. This from a woman who hadn’t been to church in three years, and then it was just for Christmas Mass because my mother had made me.

“Open your eyes,” Diesel said over the headset. “Help me look for a clearing where someone could launch a rocket.”

We’d been in the air for five minutes and hadn’t plummeted to the ground in a smoking fireball, so I dredged up some courage, held my breath, and peeked out the window.

Diesel’s voice was in my ear again. “You have to breathe. And stop thinking about flaming, twisted debris and body parts spread over the Barrens.”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“Yeah, and it’s creepy.”

Boon was flying grids, high enough for us to see a large area, low enough to pick out details. We passed over Gail Scanlon’s house and the monkey habitat. It looked untouched. The door to the habitat was still open. No vehicles in the yard. No monkeys. No Carl. The thought made my heart constrict. It was much easier to understand the Barrens from our bird’s-eye view. We could get a better picture of how the paths connected and led to campsites and abandoned homesteads. There were plenty of clearings, but none that held any real interest. We didn’t see any rocket launchpads. We saw a number of cabins and double-wides that looked occupied. A car in the driveway of one. Smoke curling from the chimney of another. Not a lot of activity. A truck bounced along a rutted road leading to a little house with chickens scratching around in the front yard.

“Fly over this area again,” Diesel said to Boon. “I know it’s here, and somehow we’re missing it.”

“Maybe it’s not in this area,” Boon said. “Maybe the rockets get trucked in. Remember when we were in Columbia?”

“I hate that idea,” Diesel said. “That makes my life much more complicated. They could truck them in from anywhere.”

“I don’t think they’re that far away,” I said. “Munch was in Gail Scanlon’s neighborhood on his ATV.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Boon asked Diesel.

“Wulf is hanging with a guy named Martin Munch, a genius working with electromagnetic waves. All of a sudden Munch’s project manager is dead…”

“Twisted neck?” Boon asked.

“Yeah. And now Wulf’s got the manager’s sister. I’m guessing Munch made some sort of discovery, and Wulf is intrigued by it.”

“Had to be some badass discovery to get Wulf into the Pine Barrens. Wulf is more Vienna, Paris, Dubai,” Boon said.

“I think they must be using the Barrens for research,” Diesel said. “There’s lots of space here, and it’s close to areas where Munch has sources for materials.”

“How much space does Munch need to do research?”

“I don’t know,” Diesel said. “Could be as small as a room or as large as a barn. He’d need a source of electric. Maybe a generator. If he didn’t want to be picked up by he li cop ter surveillance, he’d need a garage for his ATV. He’d need a decent road to truck stuff in.”

“We haven’t seen anything as big as a barn,” Boon said. “A generator could be hidden under tree cover. There was a ranch house with an attached garage. There was a double-wide with a couple outbuildings. Both had dirt roads connecting them to civilization.”

“Enlarge the grid,” Diesel said. “Fly us around a little more, then we’ll head back to the airport.”

WE WERE IN the Subaru, watching Boon lift off and head for Atlantic City. Lucky him, I thought. Boon was going to the land of the endless buffet, and I was still stuck in the Barrens. It was early afternoon, and I knew Diesel was itching to mount up and check out some houses.

“I’m not doing anything until you feed me,” I said.

“How elaborate does this meal have to be?”

“Just get me some food.”

Ten minutes later, Diesel pulled into a gas station and handed me a twenty. “I’ll do the gas, you do the food,” he said.

“Boy, you really know how to treat a girl right.”

“Now what? Would you rather pump the gas?”

I played the vending machines and came away with a couple granola bars, a couple snack packs of peanuts, two Little Debbie cakes, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, an assortment of gummi bears, and two bottles of water.

I got back into the SUV and put the bag between the two front seats. Diesel looked in the bag and took one of the Reese’s.

“I thought for sure you’d go for the granola bar,” I said.

“No way.”

“Ranger would take the granola bar.”

“And Morelli?”

“The peanuts.”

“And what about you?” Diesel asked.

“The cake.”

He put the SUV in gear and turned onto the road. “I knew it would be the cake.”

I ate one of the cakes, the remaining Reese’s, and the peanuts while Diesel drove. He’d picked out five houses he thought deserved a closer look, and he was searching for the best road in to the properties. We were in the heart of the Barrens, and I was bleary-eyed with the monotony. Scrub pines, sand, and some high-bush cranberries. I couldn’t imagine how Diesel was finding his way without a Taco Bell to serve as a landmark. Remembering to turn right at the large pine wasn’t going to do it for me.

“Here we go,” he said, swerving off the paved road onto hard-packed dirt.

He drove for a quarter mile on the dirt road and parked in a small clearing. We got out of the SUV and off-loaded the ATVs. The sky was growing darker by the minute, hanging just above the treetops.

I tipped my head back and studied the cloud cover. “This doesn’t look good.”

“No, but I can’t let rain stop me. I’m running out of time. I can’t see Wulf hanging in the Barrens much longer. Even with the proximity of Atlantic City, it’s not going to hold his attention. If the technology is worth something to him, he’ll move Munch to a more obscure location and lock him down. And then Wulf will find a more entertaining environment.”

“Then let’s do it. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor lack of a bathroom will stop me.”

I followed Diesel’s ATV down the dirt road. There were several forks, but Diesel knew his route. He slowed just before he came to the first house and went off-road into the pines. We parked the ATVs and moved in on foot. The house was more decrepit than it had appeared from the air. The yellow paint was faded and peeling. The small front porch sagged. Its step had been replaced by a cinder block. A tricked-out Ford pickup was parked in the yard not far from the front door to the house.

We skirted the house and looked in the garage window. The garage was wall-to-wall junk. A rusted washing machine, stacks of newspapers, a bed mattress with the innards spilling out from a huge rip in the middle. There was a mountain of big plastic bags, which I suspected from the smell leaking out of the garage contained garbage. We walked around back and looked in the kitchen window. The kitchen looked a lot like the garage.

A skinny young guy in jeans and a wifebeater shuffled into the kitchen and threw an empty beer can into the sink. The sink was already full of beer cans, and the can rolled off the pile and fell onto the floor.

Diesel rapped on the back door and opened it, and the skinny guy looked at Diesel blank-faced, too trashed to be surprised.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Diesel said.

“He ain’t here, man. I’m the only one here.”

“Yeah, but maybe you’ve seen him around. Red hair, short guy, about your age or a little older.”

“No, sorry. Haven’t seen the little dude.”

“How about a guy with shoulder-length black hair and really pale skin.”

“The vampire. Shit, he almost ran me off the road twice.”

“Where did you see him?”

“He was on the road that goes to the monkey lady. He was in a big, black, jacked-up truck. I mean, it was bad, dude.”

“Does that road connect to your road here?”

“No. I got a friend who grows some primo shit back there. I was on a shopping trip.”

A monkey with a hat ran out of the woods and stopped inches from us.

“Whoa,” the skinny guy said. “Do you see a monkey wearing a hat?”

“Yeah,” Diesel said.

“Shit, that’s a relief,” the skinny guy said.

We returned to the ATVs.

“I’m thinking he was Unmentionable,” I said to Diesel.

“Not in a good way,” Diesel said.

We backtracked to a road that led to the second house on Diesel’s list. It had started to drizzle, and I was wishing I had a hat. It wasn’t bad when the dirt road narrowed and the pines gave us some cover. It was a misery when the pines parted and the rain soaked into my sweatshirt and jeans.

By the time we got to the second house, it was pouring. My hair was plastered to my face, I was squinting to see through the sheets of wind-driven rain, and I was cold clear to the bone. The dirt road was mud. The mud clung to the wheels of the ATV and splattered everything in its path, including Diesel and me.

We got off the ATVs, slogged to the house, and looked in the front window. The house was empty. No furniture. The inhabitants had moved on. Diesel went inside, did a fast pass-through, and came out.

“Zero on this one,” he said. “We can cross it off the list.”

“It looks dry in there,” I said wistfully.

“Yeah, it would be perfect, except for the dead raccoon in the kitchen and the forty rats trying to figure out what to do with it.”

The yard in front of the house was a quagmire, and on the way back to the ATV I lost my shoe in the mud. It sucked it off me. I took a step, and next thing, I was wearing only one shoe.

“Fuck!”

Diesel turned and looked at me. “I don’t hear you using that word a lot.”

“I lost my fucking shoe! The fucking mud fucking sucked it off my fucking foot.”

Diesel gave a bark of laughter and retrieved my shoe. We were both ankle-deep in mud, the difference being he was wearing his beat-up boots, and I was wearing sneakers. He swept me off my feet and carried me to the ATV. He set me on the seat, knocked most of the mud off my sneaker, and laced it back on my foot.

“Follow me,” he said. “We’re going to the Subaru.”

It was slow going in the mud and rain. If it had been warm, it might have been fun sliding around on the slick, rutted road, but it wasn’t warm, and I wasn’t having fun. We reached the car, and I dragged myself off my ATV.

“I lied about neither sleet nor snow, blah, blah, blah,” I said to Diesel.

“You gave up your shoe for the cause,” he said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.” He released the hitch on the ATV trailer and handed the car keys to me. “You’re going home, and I’m staying here. Call Flash when you get cell-phone reception and tell him to meet you somewhere and swap out the Subaru. And then send him back here to wait for me.”

“I feel like a wimp.”

“Yeah, but you’re a cute wimp. And I’m an awesome superdude. Just don’t forget to send Flash.”

He took my phone and programmed Flash’s number in. Then he reached into the SUV and took a granola bar and the gummi bears.

“See you to night,” he said.

“What about Wulf? Don’t you need me to disguise your bread crumbs?”

“I’ll manage.”

So I’m a wimp. Better a warm, dry wimp than a dead, hypothermic idiot. And when I got the chance, I’d do something nice for Diesel.

I WAS ON the Atlantic City Expressway, en route to the Turnpike, and Martin Munch blew past me. He was doing ninety in the rain, driving a mud-splattered Audi. I would never have noticed, but he cut out around me, and I caught a flash of red hair and a vision of him hunched up on the wheel. I put my foot to the floor, and the Subaru lurched forward.

After a mile, Munch pulled right, took the exit, and I followed. It was Saturday afternoon, we were in the middle of a monsoon, and Martin Munch felt compelled to drive two exits down the Expressway to a junk shop masquerading as a crafts and antiques fair. The parking lot was vast and empty. The building was a renovated, industrial-size chicken coop. The walls were cement block, and the roof was tin. Inside the chicken coop, the rain on the roof was deafening.

I’d stealthily squished across the lot and entered the building several steps behind Munch. I was wet and disgusting and not feeling at my best, but getting passed by Munch on the highway was an act of God I couldn’t ignore. He cruised the corncob dolls and miniature wooden hand-painted cranberry buckets that said PINE BARRENS, USA and, on the bottom in small letters, MADE IN CHINA. He meandered into an aisle of dented lunch boxes from the 1950s and Howdy Doody puppets. He paused to heft an antique Etch A Sketch, and I thought, Come to mama.

“Martin Munch?” I asked him.

He turned and looked at me. “Yes.”

Clink. I clapped the cuffs on him.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“I work for your bail bondsman. You missed your court appearance. And I chased you through the woods yesterday.”

“Jeez. You scared the heck out of me. I thought you were one of those crazy Pine People. There’s an old guy who thinks he’s the Easter Bunny. And the worst of all is the Jersey Dev il. You can hear him flying around at night, and his eyes glow in the dark. I saw something big and black with glittery eyes in the bush, and I started running.”

“What were you doing in the woods?”

“I was going to check on a house, and I didn’t want to take the ATV through the bog in the dark.”

“Gail Scanlon’s house?” I asked.

I never heard his answer because there was pain. It went through me like lightning. I went to my hands and knees and saw a pair of expensive black boots and black slacks with a razor-sharp crease step into my field of vision. I looked up and saw Wulf staring down at me. He was even more impressive and frightening in daylight. He was big and ghostly pale. His eyes were black, shaded by thick black lashes. He reached out to me, and when he touched me, there was more pain, and then nothing.