Free Until the Beginning by Amy Plum Page B

know who he’s paying off to look the other way, but he’s got all sorts of wild animals over there. Fancy-pants businessmen fly in and pay top dollar just to shoot themselves some antelope or some such bullshit.”
    Miles lifts an eyebrow and peers at me out the side of his eye.
    “You say he’s south of Vaughn?” I confirm, my heart racing.
    The man pulls an area map out of a rack next to the cash register, and unfolds it on the counter. He picks up a pen, then hesitates. “You gonna buy this?” he asks, looking up from the map.
    I nod.
    “Okay, then,” he says. “Here’s us.” He draws a star on the east-west road we’re on and, then moving the pen southwest to an area that looks completely bare besides a patch of green in one corner, he outlines a large rectangle.
    “He’s got himself this huge tract of land stretching from the desert south of Vaughn up into the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains here,” he explains, pointing to the green part. It’s in the same general area that I had guessed at in our atlas.
    He shoves the map toward me. “That’ll be five bucks,” he says,and I add another bill to the money on the counter.
    “Says he’s able to reproduce the animals’ ‘natural habitat,’” the man continues, wiggling his fingers in the air like quotation marks. “Natural habitat, my ass,” he mutters to himself, handing me my change and slamming the cash register drawer closed with a jingle of coins.
    “Thanks so much,” I say, slipping the change into my pocket.
    “If you’re not on one of his safaris, you won’t be able to get anywhere near enough to see the animals, though,” the man says, as Miles and I make our way to the door. “Crazy bastard’s got the whole place electrified. Even has his own security guys guarding the place. Thinks he’s running his own private army. Bunch of thugs, all of them. Not the type you want to get mixed up with, that’s for damn sure.”
    Miles hesitates at the door. “What’s the name of the guy who owns the place?”
    “Avery. ‘Hunt’ Avery,” he says, using his fingers again to punctuate. “Craziest bastard I ever did meet. Comes through here once in a blue moon. Richer than God. Thinks he is God.” The man shakes his head, and turns to organize the cigarette packs.
    Miles holds the door for me, and once we’re outside I drop my bag and fling my arms around him, squeezing him with everything I’ve got. He stands there holding the grocery bags and looking amazed. “This could be it, Juneau. A man like that—filthy rich, own private army, huge tracts of land—that’s the kind of guy who could kidnap a whole group of people.”
    I let go of him, scoop up my bag, and almost skip to the truck. “This is it, I can feel it,” I say excitedly, as I climb into the cab. “We’ve found my clan.”
    The only thing to see on the two-hour drive to Vaughn is a flat expanse of dry grass stretching all the way to the horizon. In the distance to the south, a mountain range is barely visible, just a smudge of purple against the powder-blue sky.
    The road is bordered by wood or metal fences, and a couple of times we pass vast herds of cattle. Miles plays with the radio dials, listening to one song until the reception turns static, and then pressing buttons until he finds another that works. We switch between country-and-western, Spanish-language stations, and what Miles calls “oldies.” I find it all fascinating. The only music we had in the clan was the kind we made ourselves.
    “You’ve never heard of the Beatles?” he says at one point when I ask about the song he knows all the words to.
    “Of course I’ve heard of the Beatles,” I say. “Marge, Kenai’s mom and head cook, knew their songs by heart—and she sang on baking days. Plus, the Beatles had a whole paragraph in the EB.”
    “Ah yes, the 1983 Encyclopaedia Britannica , font of all knowledge,” Miles jokes.
    I cross my arms in challenge. “Do you know what a pangolin