Page 67 of It Takes a Thief

At last, we wound down to where an arm of the Hopi Rez stuck out. I said I wasn’t continuing on foot, and called Sock Monkey to bring his cage and give several of us a lift back to our rides. We all reconvened by some petroglyphs of horned cattle and people wearing astronaut helmets. The hippies had cobbled together a fire pit and it roared while they shared a pipe with some citizens. The atmosphere would’ve been downright Burning Man if I didn’t still have this cartoon version of my old lady teasing me into finding her.

And Maddy still hadn’t called anyone.

Even Tobiah and Wolf had been working in tandem. Tobiah handed his laptop to Wolf so he could try to find out where the Nurse Maddy character was being manipulated from. Tobiah followed the action on his watch. Right now, some little birds were gathered around Nurse Maddy, looking up her skirt, it seemed.

“You know,” I said taking a giant drag from a joint of Young Man Blue, “This whole mess wouldn’t have started if I didn’t drive Maddy away with my nonstop work hours.”

“Sing it, brotha,” said Duji, avidly waiting for the joint to come his way. “I’m semi-retired and Monique still yammers about never taking a vacation with her. Shit! We go to museum exhibits. We went to a St. Patrick’s Day parade. Shit, I took her to see Dave Chapelle live!”

Roman mourned. “I took Gudrun to a Mos Def concert.” Roman had been a fairly well-known rock god before patching in to avenge his father.

Sax added his two cents. “I took Bee to a Wes Anderson retrospective.”

Everyone looked to Knoxie. He didn’t seem to want to say what he’d done. Finally, Faux Pas nudged him with his elbow. “I bought Bellamy a Noam Chomsky book.”

Everyone groaned but me. Who the fuck was Noam Chomsky? Was I that far removed from normal, day-to-day activities that I didn’t even know who this allegedly corny author was? I was well-read. I should know things like that. I was out of the loop.

Luckily, Wolf cried out in the dimming, smoky light. “A hit!” We all crowded around where he’d propped the laptop on a flat rock. “I’ve got a ping on this asshole, and he just left Flagstaff and is heading our way.”

Duji said, “I wonder if he actually wants a confrontation?”

Faux Pas wanted to know, “Does he actually have Maddy with him?” His unspoken question was whether Noodlum would use the fact he had Maddy against us.

I said, “Either way he’s going down. He knows where we are because he’s assuming we’re following the Pokémon trail. Wild Man, Kneecap, you’re good snipers. Can each of you position yourself on either side of the road, maybe climb up a boulder a little so he doesn’t see you? There’s still enough light to see if he comes within the next hour.”

Those two patch holders started clambering like spiders. Roman went up there too, insisting he’d bested a lot of other guys at the shooting range lately. Then Fox, a former sicario, volunteered to snipe too.

The rest of us split into two groups, taking our rides on our respective sides of the road, everyone trying to cram behind boulders or otherwise remain out of sight to anyone carving it down that canyon. I took Wolf with us, Tobiah on the other side of the road.

“Ooo, closer, closer, we’re getting closer,” Nurse Maddy now taunted. Of course, it was useless to say anything back to “her.”

“You know what I wonder?” asked Duji. He had that sensitive, pondering tone he used when questioning his existence. “If I ever fully retire from this club, would Monique be happy? I think not.”

“I think not!” agreed Faux Pas more forcefully. “Women are like leeches! You give them blood and it’s never enough!”

“Women are like telephones,” mused Wolf Glaser. “They like to be held and talked to, but if you push the wrong buttons you get disconnected.”

Nurse Maddy seemed to hear this, because she squealed, “Ooo, down boys! You do know that Noodlum oversees me and everyone else in this universe!”

“He’s almost on top of us!” shouted Wolf in a stage whisper.

At last, the roar of pipes. That definitely wasn’t a Hopi-mobile, loaded with adláaniis, sloppy on Garden Deluxe wine. My mother had loved her Garden Deluxe. Couldn’t go an hour without it.

“I’ll take the driver’s side,” I informed the men. “Faux Pas, you back me up. Duji, you get the passenger side. Protect Maddy. Wolf, there probably won’t be any updates to the game so you’re tail gunner.”

We all positioned ourselves soundlessly waiting for Noodlum to arrive on his SuperGlide. But as the pipes neared us, I frowned. This was no bike. Noodlum had brought a tank to a bike ride in the form of an early seventies souped-up Camaro.

It burst through the narrow opening between canyon walls as though shot through a cannon. That fucker must’ve been going a hundred, which was okay, because we wanted to give the snipers a shot, so to speak, at nailing him. I heard a few bullets whistle through the air, at least three hitting his car, one the driver’s windshield.

I saw a head in the passenger seat.

A blonde head.

We leaped into action. None of the bullets had done any worthwhile damage to Noodlum, so we all rode with our pieces close at hand. It took us about a quarter mile of thrashing it over a hundred to catch up with the metallic green Camaro. It would be a shame to shoot up that shit, but we had no choice.

It was fucking exhilarating, I have to admit. My beloved’s life was on the line, but we were doing something about it. We weren’t just sitting like lame-asses on our hands. It was refreshing to see the likes of Faux Pas and Duji in action again. The second group came in behind us riding sweep, and you’ve never seen a better band of brothers. They were going to the wall not just for the club, and what Noodlum had done to our rep, but what we believed he’d done to Maddy. We were all working as one unit again, and we hummed like we’d just had a vital injection. My heart soared as I felt the combined strength of all of us surging through my body.

I caught up to Noodlum on the straight desert road. “All right, you fucker, where is she?” For I could see that the “head” in Noodlum’s passenger seat was just a manikin, propped there to fake us out.