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“What notes?”
“For my new novel.”
Gus cursed quietly at nothing in particular as they put some of what had been the contents of the fridge back in the fridge. He filled the kettle. “Come on, let’s find somewhere to eat this pizza, and you can tell me what’s been happening.”
It took them a couple of minutes to return the pile of books on the couch to the bookshelves so that they could sit down. “Start from the beginning… Don’t leave anything out.” Gus sandwiched two wedges of pizza, cheese side in.
So Theo told him: lunch with Mac, Horse’s escape, the open gate, Burt Winslow, the letter, his body, and the Ngyens of number 277. Gus asked about the police interview. Theo told him what she could remember.
Gus handed her a slice of pizza. “Eat. Clearly they’re treating Winslow’s death as suspicious. Did they tell you anything about how he died, and when exactly?”
Theo shook her head.
Gus glanced at this watch. “Worry not, Mac will have found out by now.”
“They took him in for questioning too.”
“They always do that. The police have been trying to pin something on Mac for years.”
“Mac? Why?”
Gus’s lips pulled to one side as he thought about it. “It’s to do with his family more than anything else, I suspect.”
“His family?”
“Yes, the Etheridges make the Bentons look utterly mundane.”
Theo bit into her pizza, interested, but not wanting to appear too much so.
“They’re preppers, you know,” Gus said.
“What?”
“Doomsday preppers. On the crazy end of the scale. His folks, his brothers, his uncles and aunts…all preparing for the apocalypse, or various apocalypses. The Etheridges will outlast the cockroaches. Between them, they have more guns than the Kansas PD.”
“Mac too?” Theo’s eyes were wide.
“No, not Mac.” Gus made another pizza sandwich. “He’s a regular bloke. I reckon he must have been adopted, or maybe it was being shot by his mother that did it.”
“Have you met her?” Theo found herself morbidly intrigued by the woman.
“Yes…they have an end-of-the-world fortress out past Lone Star…one hundred acres or so. She’s formidable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…when she shot Mac, for example, she had his brothers hold him down, gave him a Bible to bite on, and took out the bullet herself before she called 911.”
“Oh, my God!” Theo pulled back unconsciously. “He said that?”
“He was very drunk when he told me,” Gus said. “He knows his family’s mad, but they’re his family. And I suppose doomsday is not such an absurd concept after the pandemic.” He stopped and then shook his head. “Nope, even in a postpandemic world, they’re mad. But Mac’s fairly protective of them. In fact, he’s quite fond of them in an only-sane-child-of-lunatics way.”
“So how did Mac end up…?”
“The same way we avoided being ferals shaking tambourines and selling crystals in the pubs of Tasmania, I guess.” Gus shrugged. “He’s one of the best freelance investigators in the business, which is why the police have always suspected that he’s some kind of evil mastermind with a private army to do his bidding.”
“And he’s not, right?”
Gus looked at her, sternly. “What do you think, Theo?”
