Page 34 of It Takes a Thief

“And?”

“And his was off the chart for strange things, Ford. Pomegranates. Sheep. Silk. Shoes. Lots of shoes.”

“Wait. You said sheep?”

“Yes. It isn’t so disturbing if I tell you that they judged him as something called a touch-emotion synesthete. The brain damage means he feels the sheep to be calming. Pomegranates can make him angry. The silk could cause him mortification. His brain signals are oozing across borders between parts of the brain.”

“I don’t fucking care if his fucking jizz is oozing out his ears! What does this mean for me?”

“In jail, he complained that his hamburger came out too ‘pointy.’ What it means is that he has very little in the way of stopgap measures in his brain. There is literally nothing stopping him. I saw him gathered with Doug Zelov and other Cutlasses around the burned-out house, and they were shooting off their pieces in the air. In the middle of a national forest.”

“Fuck,” I steamed. “I’ve got to go find Toby.”

“I would never shoot my piece into the air,” Slayer called as I stormed back indoors. “You know, it does come down somewhere.”

Slayer was right. I’d seen a bullet come down about a mile away from a biker rally and hit some poor fucker straight through the skull. Probably drilled down his spine too. He was dead as a doornail.

I found Tobiah chatting it up with Wolf Glaser’s girlfriend Tracy. They were sitting at one of the long tables over plates of lobster shells, giggling away like schoolkids. I practically grabbed Tobiah’s collar, but then I remembered he always wore those turtleneck dickies. I grabbed his shoulder instead.

“We need to talk.”

Sputtering, Tobiah half-stood, half-stumbled to his feet. “Sorry, Tracy. Business awaits.”

I growled in his ear as I shoved him down the crowded aisle, “What’re you doing macking on Wolf’s old lady anyway, Weingarten? You know how dangerous that can be.”

“We were just talking business! She’s developing a new strain of cannabis, and I’m the office manager. We need to talk sometime.”

That was fucking true, but I didn’t care about that right now. I needed to find a place to confront Tobiah without any city officials seeing us.

The kitchen. I shoved him past some giant pots of boiling lobsters—I could’ve sworn I heard them screaming. Or maybe it was just the steam escaping from some pressure cookers.

I felt like a pressure cooker when I poked Tobiah in the chest. “What’s the big fucking deal, Weingarten? Slayer just told me you gave me the wrong coordinates for the Cutlass clubhouse.”

His tiny berry mouth was agape underneath his hawk’s nose. “What? But that’s impossible. I got three signals from three satellites. I even got a fourth that gave me elevation! No other house was at 7,582 feet elevation! And I flew a drone over it. I saw bikers going inside.”

“Cutlasses?” I repeated Slayer’s question.

Tobiah looked askance. “Well, they wore leather—”

Now I did grab his fucking shirtfront. He should’ve been attending a Trekkies convention with that velveteen V-neck thing. That was his idea of dressing up? “I hit the wrong house, you assmuncher.”

“Oh. God!” Toby’s voice was strangled, and I could tell he was truly worked up about it. “Then…who were the bikers?”

I tossed him away so forcefully he went stumbling against a row of ceramic bowls. They didn’t mess around with paper at the policeman’s ball. The entire stack of a dozen bowls went crashing to the tiled floor. Some Mexicans saw what was happening and made valiant dives to save the bowls, but they were too late. They were smashed to smithereens.

A pig, a sergeant I knew as Brosh, came into the kitchen leading Galileo, Madison’s Prospect. “And I’ll bet you’ve never seen a lobster cooking on the Rez, have you?”

“Gosh no! This world is full of such wondrous things I never want to leave!”

Well okay then, Peter Pan. Sergeant Brosh was now frowning at Tobiah, who was trying to help the Mexicans put the shards into a trash can. His normally picture-perfect bowl haircut was askew, like one of the Beatles after a rough stage show. I knew I had to put some distance between myself and the office manager.

“Sergeant Brosh.” I shook his hand, acting like nothing had happened. “I see you’ve met Galileo, my wife’s prodigy.”

“Yes,” said Brosh heartily. “He’s a good man. Your wife knows one when she sees one.”

“Yes,” agreed Galileo, “she chose a good husband.”

All this sap was making me feel horrible about my explosion. I had to find Maddy, to bid on that fucking cruise for her. I thought it was the Yucatan Peninsula one she wanted, I wasn’t sure, so I had to find her.