“What did you do, kill somebody?”

He shakes his head no.

“Ha. Sure. Then where you headed?”

His hands reply. Peace. Love.

“Oh, Lordy.” Special Agent Cobb laughs high and squealy. “Son, you were trying to hop a train to Duluth. That where they’re hiding all the peace and the love these days, Duluth?”

As they drive on, the rubber hand inches closer. They cross the tracks into a small old city where every other building is either boarded up or a tavern. Soon the city trails away and Special Agent Cobb accelerates from stoplight to stoplight through a depressed industrial zone, rusty warehouses and tilting fences pinched against the tracks by rocky bluffs.

“You hear about the train that went through a forest fire in Idaho, and when it got to the next yard they found three of you assholes in a hopper car, barbecued to death?”

Sammy Squirrel aims his locked grin off his right shoulder toward the river. He doesn’t feel much anymore except sudden stirrings of deeply buried sadness and rage, and these moments belong to the voice. Now expecting it, he keeps his gaze cast far away and spies amid the shoreline scramble of trees an approaching mass of blue poly tarps, sheets of black plastic, tents of many colors, a homeless camp. His eyes stay on the camp as the truck passes.

Red light. The truck stops. That rubber hand bumps him on his bare thigh.

“Burnt bums. Ha! Guess what. Smelled just like chicken.”

Green light. Another leg bump. Off they go. Sammy Squirrel twists to watch the homeless camp until he loses it in the dense riverbank forest. The truck speeds up.

Stop this tool. Stop him.

“You heard about Hobo Heaven? In Washington State? It’s a tunnel in the mountains, eight miles of smoke and fumes. When the train comes out the other side, all you scumbags are dead as smoked fish, every time, gone to meet your maker. Hobo Heaven.”

Are you chickenshit? Take his gun and stop him.

Already the homeless camp has faded a quarter mile back. Ahead hangs one last stoplight. Then the road becomes a two-lane highway, heading steeply up away from the river.

Use your bare hands.

Loser.

At the last red light, Agent Cobb prods again with the rubber hand and makes a nervous wheezy giggle. “I’ll bet you’d like a little cash. Huh? Bus money? So you can go find your peace and love?”

This last stoplight turns green. Agent Cobb isn’t looking at the light, so the truck doesn’t move yet.

“I’ll bet you’ll take thirty bucks for the bus to Duluth, am I right?”

Break his neck. Cassie wants you to.