“Render unto Caesar,” I said.

“Amen.”

“Ted Bundy smiles in almost every photo. Every damned photo except that candid shot where he’s caught off guard, snarling like a carnivore.”

“That bestial face is the last thing thirty-something women saw before they died,” he said. “Everybody in America used to know him on sight. He could’ve been on a trading card in a pack of bubblegum. Bundy, Gacy, Ramirez . . .”

“Corona.”

“Corona. Anymore, you invoke those names and you get a blank stare.”

It bodes ill for a society to forget its monsters.

“In Japan, oarfish sightings augur ill,” I said. “Upstate New York, it’s rednecks and eels.”

“Seen any eels lately?”

“No, but we have a bumper crop of rednecks. And Redlicks.”

“Are you happy with the change of scenery, the new gig? Domestic bliss?”

Happy? I was too introspective to ever fall prey to that breed of complacency. Happiness tends to ricochet off me, as should be the case for people of my ilk. Best-case scenario? I’ll die the way Mifune did at the end of Throne of Blood—shouting defiant threats from a balcony while a bunch of disgruntled former comrades turn me into a pincushion. Realistically, it’ll happen on an ice floe or on the tundra in winter. Ravens will pick my bones. A fortune-teller predicted that I’d die in the cold. Nothing I could articulate to Bellow even though, as a fellow traveler, he might understand.

He saw that I wasn’t going to answer.

“Changing the subject. Are those Viking rejects planning to kill Lionel?”

“Kill? Or maim?”

A biker heaved upright. Tall, heavy, and dangerously embarrassed. He glanced at our table, having seen the three of us wander in as a posse. Calculating the odds, no doubt. I gave him an ice-water stare, held it, and waved with my fingers. He looked at Lionel and the women, back to me and Bellow, and sat.

“We’d best retrieve Lionel,” Bellow said. “He and his lady friends are on their third round of tequilas. Nothing good happens after the third shot of tequila.”

I volunteered to ruin Lionel’s evening. He was past walking under his own power by the time I reached him.

“It’s later than you think,” he said as I lifted him in a fireman’s carry and headed for the door.

The ladies pouted. The bikers uttered a muted hurrah with jazz hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Morning came along in a hurry.

I showered, dressed for trudging in the woods, trailer parks, and abandoned towns, then splurged for breakfast on my tab in the enormously expensive hotel restaurant. The plan was to head home that afternoon and table the legwork aspect of the investigation until I’d successfully withstood the holidays.

The boys awaited me at the motel. Decent weather; bright and cold. I presented Bellow a sack of donuts and hot coffee from a chain shop. His eyes were watery and owlish. Otherwise, he was tip-top and raring to charge. Lionel, conversely, looked like he’d toppled off the back of a speeding garbage truck. The motel wall kept him upright until he staggered forward and performed a Chaplin-esque face-plant into the backseat of the SUV.