John Sandford - Field of Prey

Kent peered at him again, then said, “What, you want to give me twenty so I’ll go away?”

“I know there’s no good fix,” Lucas said. “If it were up to me, there’d be a window in the government center where you could go for your weed, or whatever else you needed to help you get through the day. But that’s not happening. Not yet, anyway. So I’m asking you, what can I do?”

Kent pondered that for a moment, then asked, “You’re serious?”

“I am. I thought, I don’t know-how’d your brother get the money to you? You’re not always so easy to find.”

“Got a box at Downtown Copy, Number 171,” Kent said. “He sent the money there.”

“How about if I send you a Starbucks gift card, or a McDonald’s gift card, every once in a while?”

“You trying to cheapskate me, Davenport? Buying me off with a latte?”

“I’m trying to figure out how I can help, so my karmic thread doesn’t get twanged,” Lucas said.

More thought, then “Money is the most fungible commodity, man. It’s not that I’m greedy, but money gets you everything else.”

“Yeah, but if I send you money once a month, you’ll spend it all on weed, and you’ll still go hungry, and I’ll still get twanged,” Lucas said.

Kent scratched one of his scraggly sideburns, then said, “What if you wrapped like a fifty around a loaded McDonald’s card, and sent that to me?”

“I can do that,” Lucas said.

“Still won’t make up for my brother,” Kent said.

Lucas said, “Manny, I’m not worried about your brother. Your brother was an asshole. I’m worried about you.”

“Well, fuck you then,” Kent said. But he sat down next to his backpack and dug out a blank business card and a pencil, and laboriously wrote his name and address on it, and handed it to Lucas.

“I’ll send you something when I think about it,” Lucas said.

“How about something now?” Kent asked. “I got mouths to feed.”

After their successful carnal adventure at the farm, which led to the discovery of the Black Hole, Layton and Ginger continued to get it on that summer, but not at abandoned farmsteads. A friend worked in a motel and would give them a room for an under-the-counter twenty dollars, which the counterman split with the maid, 75–25. Layton also got the shirt off Ginger’s best friend, Lauren, but that was as far as he’d gotten on that project, before they all went off to different colleges. They would continue to write letters to each other until October, and then Ginger didn’t make it home at Thanksgiving, and Layton didn’t make it home at Christmas. . and, you know how that all works, and it’s okay. Life moves on.

Horn’s body wasn’t found until the following spring. His skull grinned up at the bleak Minnesota sky all that winter, as the snowstorms came and went, the snowflakes drifting into his empty eye sockets.

When the body and skull were found, by a man cutting ditch weeds, the cops weren’t certain what they had, although a few suspected. A DNA check confirmed those suspicions.

The discovery was a three-day wonder that eventually Twittered away into digital irrelevance, lost amid the noise of the computer age and a universal media that could always find a worse crime.

Then nothing was left, except memories clutched to the hearts of the parents of the young women lost to the Black Hole; and the nightmares of Catrin Mattsson, which she feared would live forever.