Page 48 of It Takes a Thief

I allowed Moss to shove me aside rudely. I had to grab the feeble metal handrail to prevent going over the side of the little staircase. Moss whipped out the Tupperware. He didn’t even need to open it—the whole situation was evident to anyone with eyes in his head.

Moss’ nostrils trembled. His eyes bored right into Galileo’s as though using mind control. He knew Galileo was the weaker of us two, the one most liable to confess or bend. “All right. I came back here just now because I remembered I left a stove burner on. I no longer smell gas. This means that you’ve already been inside.” He shook the plastic container of grisly organs. “And this definitely means that you’ve been inside. I think we all know what has to happen next.”

Yanking his piece from his jeans, Moss chambered a round and pointed it at our chests. “Get moving, you two.”

He herded us not into the trailer but toward a gulley, a dry creek bed that probably turned into raging flash flood torrents in the winter. Was he going to shoot us in the creek bed so no one could see our bodies from the road? It’s strange, but I guess I’ve been in enough death-defying situations before that my heart barely speeded up thinking about this. He knew we had his eyeballs, and if they couldn’t be matched to Ashlynne, surely there were other missing women who’d been found carved up like that.

He had to kill us.

It was Galileo who lost it.

Hands clasped together white-knuckled, Galileo’s mouth was a twisted slash. “Oh, Moss, spare us! We didn’t know what we were doing!” Considering the situation, he did come up with a good cover story. “We were hungry, so I looked in your refrigerator! I swear I don’t know what’s in that Tupperware. I didn’t even look! I was so hungry I just stole it. Then I put it under my sweater because I didn’t want you knowing I stole.”

“Likely fucking story,” said Moss, waving his piece. “Get down into that riverbed.”

I attempted to help. “He’s telling the truth. He noticed you really like to make chili and he thought there might be some chili in there. Call it crazy but that’s what he does. I once found him nuking a Tupperware I had of Spam.”

“Spam is good!” cried Galileo. “We don’t get much of a variety of food here on the Rez, you know that, Moss!”

Moss wasn’t falling for it. He even shoved me by the shoulder so I stumbled a few more steps toward the trickling water. “Don’t give me any shit. You and I both know that thing is full of human eyeballs.”

I gasped. “What? Oh, gross!”

“That’s just disgusting!” cried Galileo, his hands up in a surrender.

“Get over by that van,” said Moss, gesturing toward a burgundy van that was parked crookedly right over the trickling creek. One good rainstorm and it would be swept over the road. But down here, it was hidden from sight.

And then I remembered. Maroon van.

Holy fuck. How many other dead bodies are rotting in there?

Galileo and I did the extremely slow sidestep toward the van. “Look, we know nothing!” I cried. “We don’t even have any idea why you’d have eyeballs in your fridge.”

“To prevent them from watching me!” roared Moss. Now he was a creepy, enraged clown with his fringe of white hair and his doll-like bulging eyes. “If I take them out, no one can see what I’m doing, right?”

“Right,” said Galileo uncertainly. “I, too, do not like being watched. Makes me uncomfortable.”

“You’re damned right it does!” shouted Moss. “Watching, looking, degrading me, criticizing me, stabbing me in the back! Who fucking needs that?”

Galileo shrugged. “Certainly not me.”

Was that… I strained to hear another set of motorcycle pipes heading our way. Yes! Someone was coming, at least passing by Moss’ trailer. Maybe they’d see my car and stop! Who else did I know on the Rez who rode a bike? There were several, guys who took their ramshackle bikes out to herd their sheep or cattle.

But these pipes were different. A low, resonant hum told me it was a Harley. Not just any Harley. A 95th anniversary edition Softail.

There was only one man in Arizona whose scoot was tuned exactly like that.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FORD

The Rez was a weird place for Maddy to be working. To me, it just looked like one desolate expanse. Sure, there were buttes and mesas in the distance. Those might be nice to go canyon carving in. But the desert? This wasn’t Pure and Easy territory, land of sculpted, windblown sandstone spires, steeples, and pinnacles. Every corner you turned around in P&E was a fresh vista of wonder. But this place? A boring shitstorm from hell, a ghetto of the worst sort of addiction and depravity. No wonder the government had given it to the Indians. We always got the worst areas.

The government housing was alarming. Had my mother, down in Fort Apache, lived in a piece of shit shack like this? The hogans were just slap-dash structures of mud, mud brick, and corrugated metal. It was pretty much the same thing for the shitty shitholes they gave the people. Most of the windows were boarded up for lack of glass. And, predictably, adláanis littered the landscape, staggering from house to house aimlessly, under the drooping telephone wires that festooned the landscape. I passed by a phone booth next to an ice machine where some artist had painted a two-story mural of an elder with a cane and thick glasses.

That could’ve been my grandfather. I knew nothing of my heritage, and for the thousandth time, I envied Lytton the time he’d spent on the Rez with his mother and stepfather, a tribal elder.

I’d spoken to Ogden Taliwood about this Moss Empire twit. He’d run into him a few times while checking to make sure everything was all right with the trailer which after all had belonged to their mother. He knew Empire had a prison record, running small-time operations out of Gallup, meth and heroin. But Galileo had vetted him, so it was all right with Ogden, he guessed.