20

THE BAD GUYS

Kyle, who had already started out to the garage, turned around and came back. “Wendy,” he said. “There’s something else I meant to mention to you.”

Wendy stepped over a pile of pellet-poop that Velvet had deposited in the entryway and went out on to the front porch. She expected another lecture about spending so much money on the animals. But that wasn’t what Kyle had come back to tell her.

“A call came in to the station yesterday. They picked up a couple of ex-cons in Florida who might’ve been the guys who held you up.”

“Great!” Wendy exclaimed. “How did they identify them?”

Kyle frowned. “I don’t think they did.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The captain took the call. What they told him — ‘they’ being the FBI — was that they had a big-time drug trafficker in Florida under surveillance. They were about to arrest him when two guys showed up wanting to buy his boat. Figuring the buyers might also be involved in the drug trade, they picked them up, too. When they ran a background check on this pair, they discovered that they’d recently been released from prison.”

“And these were the same two who held me up? Here I was running around paranoid of every man who glanced my way and they’ve been in jail all this time?” Wendy didn’t know whether to feel relieved or exasperated with herself for having let fear get the best of her like that.

“Maybe they’re the same guys,” Kyle said carefully. “They were arrested not long after the robbery here, charged with driving a stolen car, and having a gun like the one you described. Plus two ski masks. Not what people normally wear in Florida in the middle of summer. So they might’ve been planning a bank robbery there, but got arrested before they could pull it off. When they came to trial, the judge gave them four years on the weapons charge and stolen car. They got early release, and right after that, showed up in Miami with a lot of cash, wanting to buy this boat.”

Kyle paused, before continuing, “And some of the bills they were intending to use to buy the boat matched those stolen from your bank.”

“So they are the same guys, and they will go back to jail!” Wendy exclaimed.

“Not necessarily. Only a few bills were identifiable as among those stolen here.”

“But the bank only had the serial numbers of the bills in one packet,” Wendy protested. “Most of the money couldn’t have been identified later.”

“That’s true.” Kyle walked up and down the length of the porch, as if he wanted to go somewhere, but wasn’t sure where. “But that was three years ago. The stolen money would have been spent, and anybody might have some of those marked bills in their wallet by now. The fact that these guys had a few doesn’t prove that they were the ones who stole them.”

“But they did arrest them, right?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “But they’re not sure they can hold them. It’s not illegal to buy a boat, even if it’s one owned by a known drug trafficker. And like I said, only a little of the money they had on them could be traced to here. That’s what the FBI called our office about — to see if we had any more information. Unfortunately, we didn’t.”

“What’s going to happen now?” Wendy asked, opening the door to let Velvet out onto the front porch just so she would have a warm animal body to cling to.

“They’ll probably be released,” Kyle said, and added in his gruff cop voice, “Which is why I’m telling you. Be careful, Wendy. Keep your eyes open, especially around strangers.”

He went down the porch steps then, out to the car, and drove off.

Wendy stood there for a long time, feeling colder than she should feel on such a warm day. Then she saw Danny riding up on his bike and immediately felt better.

As he came up the front steps, she noticed a bruise on his cheek. “What happened?” she asked, touching the bruise.

“Nothing.” When he saw she wasn’t satisfied with that answer, he shrugged and said, “Just, some guys jumped me.”

“You don’t hang out much with the boys in town, do you?”

“I’m not very good at sports,” he said, as if that explained it. Then he added, “Besides, they’re all into hunting.”

Of course, Wendy thought. Practically every man and boy in this small town loved hunting, just like her own father and brother. Six-year-olds started begging for BB guns, and as soon as they got one, they’d roam around trying to shoot birds off power lines. By the time they were eleven or twelve they’d have a rifle, and the most exciting thing they could think of was to go hunting with their dad and bang away at anything that moved. She didn’t know what it was in some people that made them want to see a beautiful wild animal crumple in pain and fall over dead, but whatever it was, Danny didn’t have it.

That would make him a misfit in this hunting-crazy town, but she was glad he was the way he was. She slipped an arm around his shoulder and said, “Come on in, Danny. Velvet has been waiting for you to take her for a walk.”

• • •

When Danny returned from walking the fawn a little later, Wendy was sitting at the kitchen table, doodling.

“Whatcha doing?” Danny asked.

What Wendy had been doing was worrying about the bad guys, but she didn’t want to tell him that, so what she instead she said, “I was thinking about giving the farm a name.”

“A name?” Danny asked. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Somebody at work called it the Animal Farm, and Kyle didn’t like that because that’s the name of a book where the farm is ruled by pigs. Anyway, I like the idea of this place having a name.”

Danny stared past her and out the window for a minute. Then he said, “There are wild animal tracks all over the place. What about Wild Tracks Farm?”

“Wild Tracks?” Wendy tried the name out. “I like it.”

“Only spelled with an X,” Danny said. He took the pen from her hand and wrote, “Wildtrax.”

“That’s original,” Wendy said thoughtfully. “But what’s the X for?”

“Well, it’s like, you know, they put an X on something that marks the spot. So it’s like saying this is a place where it’s okay for wild things to make their tracks.”

“Yeah!” Wendy exclaimed. “An X is also used to designate a no-go area for anybody who doesn’t belong there. So it’ll be like saying this is the place for wild things to make their tracks, and is not the place for bad guys who want to hurt us!”