Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
“Fuck off.”
“For real.”
I know Fenn’s full of shit. Still, the darkness plays tricks on the mind. Suddenly I’m imagining movement out of the corner of my eye, the sound of my own breathing like a stranger over my shoulder.
“There was one guy. He was sitting in a shelter when this female camper left her tent and walked to the firepit outside. A few hours later he knocks on the door of some nice old lady in town and tells her to please call the police. He’s just chopped the poor girl to pieces with his hatchet.”
“You couldn’t have told me this—”
“Oh, shit!”
I reach out and grab Fenn by the back of his shirt when he nearly does a header.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“Yeah.” He turns on his phone’s flashlight to see what tripped him. Growing out of the ground like a tree stump, there’s the crumbled remains of a brick wall. “What the…?”
We both turn on our flashlights and scan the area. Everywhere we look, derelict ruins loom as tombstones to once-standing structures. A chimney stack reaching out of the dirt. A wall with an empty doorway. The bare slab of a foundation to nothing.
“What is this?” I mumble to myself, not expecting an answer.
“These mountains used to be covered in logging mills,” Fenn whispers, as if signs of a long-dead human presence now means someone’s listening.
The buildings are gone, but the traces are there. I study the outline of several perfectly situated houses in a row on either side of what was once a horse road. “This doesn’t look like a mill.”
“What makes more sense? Going up and down this mountain to work every day, or walking right outside your door and picking up a saw?”
“A ghost town.”
“If ol’ Rog is dumping hikers and drifters, this would be a good place.”
Except I’m not the superstitious type, and I don’t get caught up in fantasy and scary stories. Roger’s an oddball, but I doubt he’s got the stomach for gore. Whatever he’s doing out here, it’s more of an intellectual pursuit, of that I’m certain.
We press forward until the tree line abruptly gives way to tall grass.
“Dude.” Fenn stops me, throwing his arm out to halt my steps. He shines his flashlight at the palm of his hand. “Swinney’s growing pot.”
His humor soon turns to alarm when we hear voices and a bright searchlight streaks through the grove of marijuana plants. We hit the dirt and creep backward on our hands and knees into the relative safety of the trees.
“I hear maybe four, five guys?” I hiss.
He nods. “That’s definitely a generator, too.”
“They’ve got to have a trailer back there or something.”
“How’d they get it in there?”
The more important question is, what do we do now?
“Let’s go back.” I tug Fenn as I retrace our steps.
“What, really? Why? We just got here.”
“And we found what we came for. So now we’ll wait for Swinney by his car and confront him there. Assuming he’s alone.”
Fenn grins, his white teeth shining in the darkness. “You don’t want to get a picture of him coming out of the pot forest like the Field of Dreams?”
“Not a chance. You ever hear of Humboldt County?”
“Huh? No.”
We double-time it back down the path, through the ghost town and its leering statues, while I quickly fill Fenn in.
“Years back, Mom and I lived in Northern California. Humboldt was, still is, the pot farm capital of the US. Part of what’s called the Emerald Triangle. There are more illegal grow-ops there per acre than anywhere else in the country. And the second-highest murder rate in the state. Guys up there, they don’t play. They’ll shoot you dead and turn your body to compost for wandering onto their property.”
“Isn’t pot legal in California?”
“Yep. And that only pissed them off. We’re not talking granola hippies. These guys are hardcore gangsters with fucking AK-47s and dogs that’ll eat your brain right out of your skull. So, no. We’re not sticking around to run into some of Roger’s business partners. As long as we don’t see any other cars down by the road, we’ll confront him there. I’m not trying to die tonight.”
From Mr. Swinney’s phone data that I scraped last week, we know we’ve got quite a wait ahead of us. So we pull up a log with a view of the car and the trail, and settle into the dense shrubs for a long night.
“I spy with my little—”
I throw an elbow into Fenn’s ribs. “Don’t even start.”
“Then what are we gonna do all night? I need to be constantly entertained, otherwise I’ll self-destruct.”
“You sound like Lawson,” I say with a grin.
Fenn shrugs. “He and I aren’t that different.”
“Nah, you are. You have a conscience.”
My stepbrother’s gaze briefly flicks toward me. “You sure about that?”
Before I can answer, my phone lights up with a text.