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“Oh. How does that—ok, I guess.”
“And he was on a toilet.”
“Wait, but—”
“In his backyard.”
Jem scratched his beard. His voice sounded off when he said, “In his backyard?”
Tean nodded.
“Damn,” Jem said.
“You want to know the worst part?” Tean asked.
Jem nodded, still scratching his beard.
“I didn’t source it. It might not even be true. But he was such a—such an ass, and I let myself get annoyed.”
Jem cleared his throat, but his voice still sounded strange when he said, “You didn’t source it, huh?”
Tean shook his head.
“Oh my God,” Jem whispered.
“Do you have something stuck in your throat? Because you don’t sound normal.”
In answer, Jem kissed the side of his head.
“That doesn’t really address my question,” Tean said.
Jem opened his mouth to say something and then pointed. A moment later, Tean saw it through the brush: the gleam of chrome.
They found the car behind a thick, tangled brake of honeysuckle. It was a Ford Escort that had to be twenty years old, and the bluish-green paint was peeling like a sunburn. Tean turned on his phone’s flashlight and directed it through the windows. Dirty clothes and plastic shopping bags covered the back seat, along with travel-sized toiletries, a box of Cheez-Its, a twenty-four pack of Lifewater (down to seven bottles), and what was unmistakably a five-gallon safety can, the blue-steel kind meant for gasoline or kerosene. When Jem tried the passenger door, it was unlocked, which answered one question but raised several more, and inside, it smelled like stale body odor and vinyl that had baked in a summer day.
“Ok,” Jem said. “She’s staying at a motel but more or less living out of her car, and she drives out to a chicken ranch in the middle of the night for…what?”
“Poultry farm.”
Jem made a questioning noise as he crawled into the car.
“It’s not called a chicken ranch. It’s called a poultry farm. You could call it a chicken farm if they only raised chickens, I suppose.”
“She left her purse,” Jem said, a note of triumph in his voice. “Shit, hold on.” Plastic rustled as Jem emptied some of the Walmart bags on the back seat. Then, after donning them as improvised gloves, he dumped her purse out on the driver’s seat. Tean made his way around the car, trampling the knee-high prairie grass, and tried the driver’s door. It opened easily, and he crouched next to the Ford to see what Jem had turned up.
Most of the list was what Tean would have expected: a partially crushed tampon, a pack of tissues that had clearly seen better days, receipts and scraps of paper, half a bag of M&M’s. The credit cards and a driver’s license were under the name Una Marchesi.
The only item that didn’t belong was an envelope. Tean remembered that envelope. He’d seen Una with it as she escaped from Yesenia’s bedroom.
Jem flicked a questioning look at Tean, and Tean nodded.
“Well,” Jem said in an underbreath, “what’d you get, Una?”
He opened the envelope and shook it out on the seat. Photos, glossy four-by-sixes, slid across the upholstery. His phone began to buzz, and he made an annoyed noise, considered the bags on his hands, and then seemed to decide to ignore it. Tean leaned closer, angling the light of his phone to mitigate the glare on the glossy paper.
They were animals. A crocodile. An African gray parrot. A tamarin. A bat-eared fox. A macaque. A scarlet macaw. A capuchin monkey. A tiger.
“Hey,” Jem said. “That’s my bird.”
