Page 24 of Making His Bones

“Yeah. I think it’ll come down to him wanting to dump off the kids, or is it more important to get rid of us? Putting us down will only bring them onto the cops’ radar.”

Galileo fell into another trance. “I’m Galileo, I’m Galileo, I’m Sam . . . “

“Sam? What the fuck?” Knoxie yelled.

“Keep following, keep following Sam . . . “

I turned around. “Galileo? Are you all right?” I was certain he was having some kind of PTSD flashback to his youth. That had happened to me on occasion. I was still angry that no one had been able to find out how our dad had really died. “Four-wheeling in the desert” was as vague as, well, “following a truckload of Mexican kids in the desert.” I was never certain if Hank Whaley hadn’t had his face converted into a dart board, too. He’d obviously gotten on the bad side of Tony Tormenta.

Galileo had a distant, panic-stricken look to his eyes. “Oh, Galileo, I’ve come undone! Exult O shores and ring O bells!”

“He’s come undone,” said Knoxie. “I’m trying to stay distant from this guy, but it’s still gonna be pretty fucking obvious we’re in the middle of nowhere following them.”

“Go even slower,” I suggested. “It’s not like we won’t see them, or someone will get in between us and ruin it.”

Just as Knoxie was slowing from fifty down to thirty, the back roll-up door of the truck opened. Their truck slowed too, so we were maybe forty yards behind. An adult Mexican stood there holding a cardboard box. Galileo was quick with the binoculars.

“Hagfish from Oregon,” he recited. His tone changed as the Mexican withdrew a Bowie knife and slashed the plastic on the box lid. “Chąą'!”

“Shit what?” asked Knoxie, foot on brake. “He’s going to terrorize us with some fish?”

I had a bad feeling about this as another Mexican came up behind this one with another box. The kidnaped boys were vague silhouettes in the back of the truck. I clutched Knoxie’s shoulder. “Slow down, bro. I’ve got a bad fee—“

The last thing I remember was Galileo shrieking in a high falsetto. “Hagfish slime!”

I had no time to wonder if the cheese had finally slid off Galileo’s cracker because these guys started flinging actual eels at our windshield. The first dozen squirmed off and landed in the gravel, no problem. But more and more boxes materialized in the truckers’ hands. And by the time the second dozen hagfish splashed the windshield, I couldn’t even see the truck anymore.

An iridescent sort of mucus began to line the glass. The weird, eyeless, ropey creatures slithered off but left behind a kind of snot, thick and glassy. Knoxie frantically turned on his windshield wipers, but they were no match for the foot-long creatures who piled up now on the windshield and hood, oozing plastic goo from somewhere in their gills.

My window was open about three inches since the Dart didn’t have air conditioning. The mucus crawled up on the roof and down the door, and by then, inside my window and onto my bare forearm.

“Gah!” I shouted. “Knoxie, stop!”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” he shouted. “I’m fucking in neutral, but I think I’m driving over some of those fucking eels!”

“Hagfish!” shrieked Galileo. “This stuff is deadly!”

“Deadly?” yelled Knoxie.

“Well, not deadly. I mean, it causes extreme consternation!”

And consternated I was, trying to roll up the window while Knoxie swerved over the gravel as though on a bed of air. I lifted the sheets of mucus from my arm. I quickly learned I had to scoop the scum off, and it left my arm clean. But I couldn’t lower the window to dump it or I’d be covered in more waves of ooze, so I dumped it on the floor between my boots.

Knoxie was in a tailspin with his foot on the brake and the back wheels whirling like the hands of a clock. Who the fuck knew where the box truck was by now? They certainly had come up with a devious way to impede us. We were floating and spinning like Dorothy’s house in a complete tornado of that shit. The wipers had smashed some of the eels, whose spiked heads looked like clumsily-costumed Martians from a 50s movie.

How could these things be real?

“Is this crap poisonous?” I yelled at Galileo. A guy from southeast Arizona knew about eels! But Galileo seemed to know it all.

“Not poisonous,” he yelled back, “but completely insidious.”

“You mean it soaks into my skin? I pulled it off okay.” When I looked back at the dog groomer, I saw eels slithering down the back window, encasing it in a sort of condom-like sheath before they swam off. I bent to pick up the blob of goo from the floor and show it to him, and Knoxie screamed.

“Put that shit away! We don’t know what it does!”

Galileo reached for the slime. “No, no! It’s completely nontoxic! See? It’s like a science project we did in school.”

Horrified, Knoxie recoiled. “What sort of school did you go to?” The car had come pretty much to a stop, hovering in a lake of ooze while the eels did glissades down the sides like a Summer Olympics event. Once the windshield was clear of fish, Knoxie wiped them away so we could see, although one of them was smushed like roadkill and gave us the sideways evil eye with every swipe. The desert was endless, and there wasn’t even a cloud of dust where the box truck had been.