The trees were thin, with no discernable trail through them. Minerva had a pistol. Micah went unarmed. A gun felt trivial in his hand now. A useless toy.
They stumbled upon a path of sorts. A band of desolate gray stripping through the woods. Not a thing was living along it. Not a tree, a shrub, a weed. It was as if a scouring fire had burned across the ground, leaving only powdery ash behind.
The path wound toward the black rock, which Minerva could glimpse through gaps in the trees. An unsettling sight: a sheer cliff of blackness so dark it swallowed the sunlight. The woods were silent. They were not being trailed.
They kept their own counsel. Minerva could tell that Micah was exhausted. His encounter with the things that had left Otis and Charlie and the red-bearded man dead had sapped his energy. His stride was labored, but his pace was remorseless. Minerva felt weary, too. It was like living in the shadow of a dormant volcano: you never knew when it was going to erupt and spew molten lava all over you.
Clouds rolled in. Rain pattered down. A steady trickle soon grew to a sheeting downpour. They found shelter under the firs. Minerva became aware of the powerful funk of her body. How long had she gone without bathing? She thought back to her last shower in a motel bathroom a few hours’ drive from Grinder’s Switch. The yellowy water spraying from a calcified nozzle. The mildewed shower curtain with a pattern of bow-tied ducks. How much would she pay to take a shower right now? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand?
The downpour lasted fifteen minutes. The rain turned the ash into a slurry that clung to their boots. They walked until the sun began to fade.
They rounded a bend, and it came into view. The black rock.
The trees petered out, becoming more stunted and palsied. The surrounding landscape was as sandy as a desert. It was monolithic. A giant rotted tooth pushing up from the red sand. It was a mile distant, but Minerva could feel its forbidding magnetism gripping her already—she was a lead filing dragged toward its brooding shadow.
“You do not have to come,” Micah said.
“Like hell I don’t.”
5
YOU’RE ONE DUMB BUNNY, Virgil Swicker.
Virgil’s mother used to say that. His own mother, who was so damn smart she got knocked up eight times by five different daddies. So damn smart she couldn’t wring a shaved nickel out of any of them in child support, so she and her brood lived in a saltbox shack on the edge of the Mojave Desert, sucking on sand. A real smarty-pants, his ma!
But she had him dead to rights. Virgil was dumb. He was just smart enough to know it. Which was a pretty sad place to pin the tail on that particular donkey. If he’d been juuuuust a little dumber—if he could have killed off a few measly IQ points—he probably wouldn’t have been able to grasp how witless he was. And then it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. What a kick in the teeth, huh?
One thing about knowing your limits is you learn how to operate within them. Virgil Swicker had learned early on that his lot in life was being a follower. He felt safest behind someone else, looking down at that man’s heels. A leader needed smarts and fire and drive. All a follower ever needed to know was where to line up.
Virgil had left home at fifteen to little fanfare; his mother could barely care enough to wave good-bye from the stoop. He hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on the streets, eating out of dumpsters behind Chinky restaurants. He was a big kid and nobody had raised him right; he started rolling drunks, and that went well for a while before this one rummy wheeled on him with a switchblade. The guy was nimble with that blade, too, even three sheets to the wind—“I’m over from Stockton, motherfucker!” he kept screaming, as if that should mean something to Virgil, as if laying your hands on a wino over from Stockton was a capital crime. That Stockton trash maniac opened a big slash under Virgil’s armpit, then chased him down the street, laughing like a schoolboy, tee-hee-hee—if the nutzoid hadn’t tripped into a gutter, he would have caught Virgil and stabbed his eyes out.
After that, Virgil mooned around the Tenderloin like a kicked dog. There were times he thought about buying a knife or maybe a gun—that bastard with the switchblade wouldn’t have been so high-and-mighty if Virgil had stuck a pistol in his face, bet your ass on that—but he couldn’t afford either of those items. It was in the depths of despair that a single ray of sunlight brightened Virgil’s world. That ray had a name: Cyril Neeps.
They met on a bench in Union Square. Virgil was puffy and scabbed, his teeth loose in his gums from eating dumpster fruit. Cyril was tanned and fit and had this way about him that said, Hey, world, get a load of me! He seemed the kind of man who could do anything he wanted with his life, and Virgil was instantaneously awed by him.
“What’s your story, fella?” Cy had asked without much interest, investigating the cracks of his teeth with a cinnamon-flavored toothpick.
Virgil had hemmed and hawed for about fifteen seconds before Cyril laughed great big, sucked a shred of meat off the tip of the toothpick, and said: “You’re as dumb as a box of rocks, ain’t ya?”
“…I guess so.”
Cyril clapped him on the back. “Hey, no big whoop. You probably didn’t spend enough time in your mama’s belly. You came out like a cake that’s still mushy in the middle.”
“I guess.”
“Here, have a toothpick,” Cy said, unwrapping a fresh one. Virgil was overcome by this small charity.
“That’s right, dummy,” Cyril said cheerily. “Use the pointy end.”
There was nothing cruel in the way he said dummy—just stating a fact, which Virgil guessed was true. Cyril would call him dumb in many flavorful ways as their relationship went along. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Three bricks short of a load. Squirrel-headed. Pudding-brained. Not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. Drooling fuckin’ mongoloid when he was running hot. Sometimes Virgil would go red in the face when Cyril said these things, but he never argued. He just wished Cy had the good manners not to mention his dumbness, the way you shouldn’t call attention to the fact that a kid was missing his hand or was blind or something like that. It was mean, pointing out defects. But then, Cyril wasn’t really a nice guy.
But he was smart. A whole lot smarter than Virgil—granted, that was a low bar to clear. But Cyril had command. Presence. When he walked into a room, people looked up. If they looked long enough, they would see Virgil trailing in on his heels. Virgil helped Cyril stick up a few gas stations and a Chinatown grocer. It was dead easy. Cyril laid his hands on a gun. They wore panty hose over their faces. They made good money, too. Fifty bucks here, thirty-seven bucks there. All in cash! Untraceable was the word Cyril used.
Still, they got pinched. Bad luck, was all. They both did a hitch. Two years, sentences reduced due to prison overcrowding. After they got out, they returned to the Tenderloin. Virgil tried to sell his body to the waify mincers and nine-to-five types who trolled the park for rough trade. But Virgil looking how he did, there weren’t many takers. Cyril was tired of him by then, Virgil could tell. He wanted a real partner, someone to help him become the criminal big shot he knew he could be. Someone a damn sight better than shit-a-brick Virgil Swicker. But Cyril never did find that running mate—maybe because he wasn’t such hot shit, Virgil secretly thought.