Twice Dying by Neil McMahon Page B

decided you were bad luck, and she was afraid it would rub off.”
    He said, “Chances are she was right.”
    Abruptly, Monks braked hard. A small burly shape was ambling down the road’s center toward them, making no effort to budge. As he skirted it, the headlights picked out a badger’s white mask: beasts that would fight to the death before giving ground.
    He said, “How hard have they tried to find Caymas?”
    “He was scheduled to report to the outpatient clinic in Ukiah for decanoate injections twice a month. Stopped showing up more than a yearago. His family said he’d disappeared. He’s a registered child molester, not allowed to leave the area. There’s a bench warrant out for him.”
    “But nobody’s looking?”
    “They never do. Everybody’s glad those men are someone else’s problem.” She took out a cigarette and held it. With the scarf and dress, it gave her the look of an actress in a Western movie, taking a break. Monks reached to push in the lighter, but she shook her head.
    “I don’t want it on my breath,” she said. “He was attractive to kids—Caymas. Isn’t that strange? The perfect older playmate. Always knew the right thing to say, to coax a child into playing a game. Keeping a secret. Most of the NGIs are scary. But I’ve only met a couple like him.”
    “If we did happen to run into him, you’d recognize him?”
    “He’s not somebody you forget.”
    Monks’s right hand moved to his coat pocket, touching the Beretta. In a worst-case scenario, it lust might provide the leverage to get them out of there.
    He corrected himself. Worst case was that Caymas would have to dig a hole big enough for two bodies, not one, back in the dank redwood forests.
    “Dennis O’Dwyer heard a rumor that when Robby Vandenard was a kid, they couldn’t keep pets around,” Monks said. “They’d end up dead.”
    “It all fits with what’s been creeping up on me, about Robby. Men like him almost never commit suicide.”
    Monks drove a distance further before the implication hit him. When he turned, she was watching him patiently.
    “Robby had a lot of nasty stuff on Jephson,” she said. “I’m not saying Jephson had him killed, but I bet he didn’t weep at the news.”
    Two miles later the headlights found the number, hand-painted in red on a battered mailbox shaped like a small Quonset hut. A dirt road led into the woods. They followed it two hundred yards before it curved to reveal a sprawling, wood-sided house with lit windows and smoking chimney.
    Several vehicles were parked in no apparent order: pickup trucks, a dark customized van on its way to being trashed, a newish mini-station wagon, a fifties-era ton-and-a-half with wooden slat side racks and a flattened tire that made it list to one side. The shapes of other buildings, sheds and shacks and a looming hulk that might have been a barn, merged into the darkness beyond, with a few lights visible in the distance. The overwhelming sense was of a compound of hostiles.
    The bark of a large dog boomed out, instantly picked up by others. Several low shapes appeared on the run, big black and yellow mutts with bared teeth and bristled spines, lunging through the light cast by the headlamps.
    The front door of the house opened. There was no porch light: only a shadowed shape just visible, waiting inside. They got out, Alison fending off the growling dogs swarming her legs and thrusting noses in her crotch. She walked ahead of Monks to the porch, a hand purse clasped in front of her.
    The woman waiting for them was in her fifties, buxom, well-preserved, wearing a multicolored peasant skirt. This would be the brood mare, Monks thought: Haven Schulte. One hand was on her hip, the other out of sight, as if gripping the barrel of a shotgun. Behind her came the sound of a television, voices and laugh track suggesting a sitcom. Another shape appeared behind her: a man, younger, watching them intently. He turned and spoke to someone unseen in the