“Don’t you dare shoot that drag queen!” I screamed.
Nate pinned one of Ralphie’s wrists while Agent Lanagan grabbed the other. With Ralphie secured, Ida Hoe popped back up, agile on six-inch heels. Nate rolled Ralphie onto his stomach, pulled his gun from his waistband, and handcuffed his arms behind his back as Agent Lanagan read him his Miranda rights. Two other agents monitored Errol, who was bleeding like an angry hemorrhoid, but very much alive. Another helped Layna to her feet.
Emmylou had vanished.
Only when Nate ran toward me and put both hands on my shoulders, leaning in to inspect the bleeding gash on my neck, did I realize I was still sitting in the trunk of Ralphie’s car. I’d never seen Nate so rattled before. “You’re bleeding, are you okay?” he asked. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said, surprised to see the cascade of blood down my front. Still, when Nate offered me his hand, I climbed out. My stomach still hurt from where I’d been punched, but it no longer felt like my spleen had burst. “I think... I think I might actually be fine. Or mostly fine?”
“Okay, okay. Let’s get you to the paramedics first. We need to get you checked out.”
But I was still shocky and marveling. “Ida Hoe,” I said. “That was—”
“Incredible,” Nate said, sounding more like himself. “Not gonna lie. I wish I’d been the one to take that guy down. But I’ve never had a drag queen sack one of our Most Wanted offenders before. Never the same day twice at this job.”
Joyful chaos erupted as Ida Hoe, Gucci, Zhang Xiu, and Layna rallied around me, jostling and cheering and shrieking about the blood and asking if I was all right.
“You saved me,” I said.
“Pole Virgins, through thick or thin,” Zhang Xiu said, slapping her ass on the wordthick.
“Pole virgins for life,” Gucci added.
“Shade, you’ve got some tackle,” Layna said.
“Ilikedbeing a college linebacker,” he said. “But Ilovebeing a drag queen.”
Fifty
Nate recused himself from my ATF interview. So after receiving butterfly stitches and a bandage for the shallow three-inch knife gash on my neck, I confessed everything to Agent Lanagan in a little interrogation room with stacks of file boxes in one corner, jagged holes picked in the soundproofing, and a recording device bolted into a wall cubby.
Well, I confessedalmosteverything.
What did I leave out?
Finding Connor’s body in my trunk.
Stashing the corpse—with Layna’s help—in my kids’ playhouse.
The trip to Burgdorf.
My discovery that Miranda had tased Connor.
Gucci’s liver-sorbet extraction was on a need-to-know basis and in my humble opinion, the ATF didn’t need to know.
In fact, it was fine with me if they never discovered why Connor disappeared.
As long as his body never turned up, I was in the clear.
So what did I tell Agent Lanagan? I stuck close to the story I’d given Nate about talking to Connor at Huckleberry’s, where Connor had drunkenly confessed his plans for Day of the Rope. He must’ve told Ralphie and Errol what I knew and they’d been after me ever since. Ralphie and Errol said they’d chopped the finger off a woman named Baylee who lived in Valley County. I said I believed she might need help.
My kidnapping and near murder—ordered by Mrs. Carson, to be carried out by her henchmen—was of great interest to the ATF. I told Agent Lanagan I’d known Mrs. Carson since I was in high school.She’d never liked me and—after seeing me at Bar Gernika—had come up with the deluded idea that I’d figured out she was an illegal arms dealer. Mrs. Carson, Unibrow, and the other bagman had been arrested for trespassing and attempted kidnapping as they came out of the underground capitol tunnels on Jefferson Street. (Agent Lanagan told me it was suspected Mrs. Carson had lifted capitol key cards from a member of her book club who was also chief of staff to a state senator.)
I tried to imagine talking to Miranda Carson about all this. But I couldn’t. Not today. It was too awful, and surreal, and sad. But Belinda Carson being so truly terrible really did explain a lot about the historical deficits in Miranda’s personality.
When Agent Lanagan asked if I’d spotted the person who’d shot Errol through the chest with a crossbow, I swore I hadn’t seen a thing.
He reported that a couple of Ralphie and Errol’s IDIOT brethren had set fire to the Kids’ Tent. They’d been arrested. Ralphie and Errol were being charged with attempted kidnapping and countless illegal arms-trafficking crimes. Ralphie was being held in the Ada County Jail, while Errol was in the ICU at St.Luke’s in critical but stable condition and flanked by armed deputies. Agent Lanagan said he didn’t know for sure, but he’d bet his ski cabin in McCall at least one of the IDIOTs would turn federal witness and Day of the Rope would be successfully quashed.
