“Yeah, but at least you walked off your sausage-?and-?egg sandwich. It would have gone straight to your ass.”
“I’m going back to Gail’s house, and then I’m going home. I don’t care about Munch. I don’t care about Wulf. I don’t care about their wicked weather machine. I don’t care if it rains rhinoceroses.”
“What about Gail Scanlon?”
“She’s on her own.” I looked around. “Which way do I go?”
“Wait,” Diesel said. “Do you hear something rumbling?”
I stopped and listened. “It sounds like Elmer’s truck with the broken muffler.”
We walked through the woods, following the sound. Carl tagged along, but the scarf monkey stayed in the tree. The truck cut out, but we kept walking in the general direction. The trees thinned, and we came to a large patch of scorched earth. A small, egg-?shaped Airstream travel trailer sat on the edge of the clearing. Elmer’s truck was parked next to the trailer.
Diesel knocked on the trailer door, and Elmer answered.
“Holy cow,” Elmer said. “What a surprise. Nobody ever visits me. Do you want to come in?”
I gnawed on my lip. I didn’t want to be rude, but there was only one door. If Elmer farted and the trailer went up in flames, I’d die a horrible death.
“No thanks,” I said. “We were just out for a walk.”
“We’re looking for Gail Scanlon,” Diesel said.
“That’s the monkey lady,” Elmer said. “I met her once. She was real nice. I heard she was missing, and all her monkeys got loose.”
Elmer looked past me at Carl.
“Is that one of her monkeys?”
Carl gave Elmer the finger.
“Yep,” I said. “That’s her monkey.”
“Do you have any neighbors?” Diesel asked.
“The Easter Bunny is a couple miles through the woods. And one of the Sasquatch boys lives down the road a ways. Used to be a young couple living in a little house at the end of Ju nior Sasquatch’s road, but they moved out, and then the house burned down. I swear, it wasn’t my fault.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not in this little patch of the Barrens,” Elmer said. “There’s some businesses on Marbury Road. A couple antique shops, the Flying Donkey Mine, a bed-?and-?breakfast that don’t serve breakfast.”
“Is it a real mine?” I asked him.
“I suppose years ago it might have been. I don’t know what kind of mine, though. Then it was a tourist attraction. Only thing, there was hardly any tourists. It closed almost as soon as it opened, and it’s been closed since. And, of course, there’s the Dev il, except he isn’t much of a neighbor.”
“Do you know the Dev il?” I asked him.
“Not personal. I hear him flying over the trailer at night sometimes. Lately, he’s been flyin’ a lot. I tell you, the Barrens are strange and getting stranger.”
“Have you ever been in the mine?” Diesel asked Elmer.
“Nope. I thought about it, but it got closed before I got around to visiting. I thought it might have been interesting.”
“I think we should take a look at it,” Diesel said.
“You can’t go in. It’s all boarded up.”
“Then we’ll look at it from the outside,” Diesel said to Elmer. “You feel like driving us over there?”