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  The coffee woman dug in her messenger bag, tossing a three-ring binder and papers to the side. “Like hell he will.”

  Axel reached Stephanie and stood over her. “Get up, Priscilla. You’re going to get what’s coming to you.”

  “Nobody’s getting a dick-beating today, pervo,” the coffee woman said, pepper-spraying Axel’s eyes from three feet away.

  Axel screamed, grabbed his face, and stumbled backward. He slipped on the spilled coffee and landed in a sitting position.

  The coffee woman gave Axel a couple of good kicks in the stomach. He went fetal. She turned to Stephanie. “Grab my stuff. We have to get you out of here.”

  Stephanie nodded and grabbed the binder, papers, and messenger bag and cradled them in her arms.

  The coffee woman kept the defenseless Axel at bay by hitting him with another stream of pepper spray. He screamed.

  Stephanie pulled her away, pointing toward a huge security guard stomping over. “We should go.”

  “What’s going on here?” the guard asked.

  “That man attacked her,” the coffee woman said. “With his dong.”

  “Not on my watch.” The guard picked up Axel with one hand. “You’re coming with me, buster.”

  The coffee woman walked toward the women’s bathroom. Stephanie glanced to the front door and considered leaving, then looked down at the bag and papers in her arms. She caught up to the woman in the bathroom.

  “Your stuff is right here,” Stephanie said, setting it on the sink counter.

  “Thanks,” the coffee woman said.

  “I should be thanking you. I had no interest in getting hit with a dick. Even if it probably wouldn’t have hurt, now that I think about it.”

  The coffee woman looked at herself in the mirror. “I’m covered in coffee.” She took off her shirt and put it under the water in the sink. Stephanie found herself staring at the woman’s nude torso. She was young, pretty, and in shape. She was also covered in ink. A dragon, some quotes that were too far away to read, a dollar sign, a dozen more.

  When the woman turned and smiled, Stephanie looked down at the cover of the binder on the counter. The title read, “San Diego–Poway Highway Proposal, Routes, Maps, Proposed Land Buys.”

  The woman wrung out her shirt, put it on, and looked in the mirror. “Great. A wet T-shirt contest.”

  Stephanie took off her jacket. “Try this. It should work until you can get something else.”

  “Thanks.” The woman smiled, took the jacket, and put it on. “Are you doing the symposium, too?”

  “I am.”

  “Perfect. That puts us on the same schedule. I have gym clothes in my car. I can return your jacket.” She buttoned the front of the jacket and reached for the binder and her stuff. “Thanks for grabbing my stuff. I’d be in hot water if I lost it. Top secret.” She smiled and winked.

  Stephanie handed the woman the notebook that she definitely wanted to read. There had been talk about that highway expansion for years. That kind of inside information was potentially the $1 million find that could get her out of her current $300,000 racket.

  “I’m Patricia,” Stephanie said. “It’s really nice to meet you.”

  “Gretchen. Nice to meet you, too.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Did Gretch have to spray my face twice?” Axel shouted, pouring milk into his eyes to stop the burning.

  “You’re getting milk all over the back of the van,” Kurt said.

  “Isn’t there something they use in the movies instead of real pepper spray?”

  “Authenticity,” Kurt said, stripping out of the security guard uniform in the cramped space. “The more truth in the lie, the less lie there is to defend.”

  “Did you get that pearl of wisdom from Mother?” Axel asked. “You’re spending a lot of time with her.”

  “She’s full of wisdoms,” Kurt said. “You could learn lots. She’s a good teacher.”

  Kurt hopped in the driver’s seat and started the van. He peeled out of the parking lot, fishtailing onto the street.

  Axel slid around the back of the van, the milk flying from his hand and splashing against the wall. “What the hell, Kurt? Inconspicuous. We made a scene in there. There’s a monster on the side of the van. Slow down.”

  “Bloodface is not a monster,” Kurt said. “He’s a fallen seraph.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Uncle Fritzy taught me some driving stuff. Uncle Fritzy says that driving slow is for old women and Latinos.”

  Axel blinked, his vision returning. “Did he use the word ‘Latinos’?”

  “He used a racister word,” Kurt said. “I corrected him, but old people have a hard time with new nomenclature. They like the old words they know for things. Like possessions they don’t need but still aren’t willing to part with.”

  “Like comic books and action figures.”

  “No, not like those. Collectibles are for collecting. It’s in the name.” Kurt took the next turn quickly, sending Axel flying from one end of the van to the other. “Sorry about that.” Kurt did not sound sorry.

  Axel looked out the back of the van in the direction of the convention center. A black Town Car slid through traffic and got right behind them. His vision wasn’t one hundred percent, but he was pretty sure he recognized the man in the driver’s seat—or rather his poor choices in fake hair. Driving the Town Car was the bald man that had been at their mother’s funeral. It’s hard to forget someone with crooked eyebrows.

  Axel moved closer to get a better look. “Do you know anyone with alopecia?”

  “Which one’s that? Is that when a person has a third nipple?”

  “No body hair.”

  “Nope. Why?”

  “We’re being followed by one.”

  Kurt looked in the side mirror. “The Lincoln?”

  “It swerved like it was in a hurry, then settled in behind us.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Kurt said. “Hold on.”

  “To what?” Axel yelled, pushing his hands against the roof of the van for support.

  The streetlight in front of them turned from yellow to red. Cars on the cross street moved into the intersection. Kurt floored it toward the thinning gap between the cars.

  Axel’s vision had cleared enough for him to see his imminent death through the front windshield. “Cars. Bus. Crash. Splode.”

  “I’ve been practicing.” Kurt smiled, calm.

  When he reached the intersection, Kurt pulled the parking brake. The van slid sideways, took a sharp right turn, and miraculously entered the flow of traffic without hitting another vehicle.

  “Half Drift!” Kurt yelled.

  Axel flew against the side of the van for the billionth time. He stayed down, wondering why he had kept trying to stand.

  “It’s better to let your body go slack than to tense up,” Kurt said. “I read that somewhere. Calm, blue ocean, Ax.”

  “Calm, blue up yours.”

  “Is the Lincoln still back there?” Kurt said. “I got some evasive maneuvers I’d love to try out.”

  Axel looked out the back. The Town Car made the turn and accelerated in their direction. “You pulled ahead. He’s not pretending like he’s not following anymore. What do you think happens if he catches up?”

  “We aren’t going to find out.” Kurt hit the gas.

  Axel lost his balance and slammed against the back door of the old van. It opened. He grasped the interior handle as he fell out, just missing hitting the asphalt. Half in the van, Axel watched the road fly inches from his face, small pieces of gravel peppering his cheek.

  The van threaded the traffic, changing lanes erratically. Axel got his other hand on the handle and hooked his ankle on the edge of the back door. All he needed to do was one sit-up. He prayed that the muscle memory from that one Pilates class he took with Priscilla was still in there.

  With a loud “haawwgruffla,” he pulled himself into the van and slammed the door shut.

 
Kurt turned. “Be careful. The lock on the back door is broken.” He flipped a U-turn and headed in the direction of the Town Car, then took a sharp right down an alley. Kurt found a side street and pulled the van into an apartment parking lot.

  Axel made his way to the front seat. His heart raced like an out-of-shape baby bird’s heart after said baby bird had just run a marathon for baby birds. They sat in silence. Kurt smiled from ear to ear.

  “We lost him,” Axel said.

  Kurt picked up the milk carton. “Was that my milk you poured in your eyes?”

  “It was in the ice chest.”

  “It’s empty. Where’s the rest of it?”

  “All over the back of the van.”

  “What am I supposed to drink with my Oreos?”

  “You got a real thing about cookies,” Axel said. “There’s bottled water.”

  “Stop. Just stop.” Kurt held up a hand. “You can’t be suggesting I dip cookies in water. That’s insanity. And how do you dip something into a bottle? Sometimes you’re so oblivious.”

  “A bald guy with crooked eyebrows?” Mother Ucker said. “Yeah, that’s no big deal. He’s FBI.”

  “Say again?” Axel said.

  Axel and Kurt sat across the table from Mother Ucker in the abandoned beer hall, which acted as the unofficial Ucker HQ. Axel had only met a handful of times with Mother since their initial meeting. Kurt, on the other hand, spent time with Mother and Fritzy at least once a week.

  “The Federal Bureau of Incompetence,” Mother said. “They’ve been trying to get something on me for years. They couldn’t find an ass at an orgy.”

  “I totally ditched a Fed,” Kurt said, holding up a hand for Axel to high-five.

  Axel left him hanging.

  “Can we all get back to the part where the FBI was chasing us?” Axel asked.

  Fritzy walked into the hall from the back. He had a small safe on a hand truck.

  “Hey, Uncle Fritzy!” Kurt yelled. “You won’t believe it. I ditched a Fed. You should’ve seen me. At one point, I threw a Dipsy Doodle and then put some French Pastry on it. Like you showed me.”

  “Get out of town!” Fritzy yelled back.

  “Ran a reverse Wile E. Coyote on his butt.”

  “Impressive,” Fritzy said, leaving the hand truck and joining them. “You’re ready for my advanced class. Meet me here tomorrow morning. I’ll find you a helmet.”

  Axel stood up, sat back down, and stood up again. He thought steam might come out of his ears. “That means we—me and Kurt—are now on the Feds’ radar, too. Which I don’t consider to be great.”

  “Was it Harry?” Fritzy asked Mother.

  “Who else?” Mother said. “He’s a determined bastard.”

  “A bald man named Harry?” Axel asked.

  “I never thought of that,” Mother laughed.

  “Harry Cronin,” Fritzy said. “He’s had a bug up his ass for us for a while.”

  “We’re going to end up going to jail forever,” Axel said.

  “You won’t go to jail forever,” Mother said. “Jail is where you’re held before trial. It’s temporary holding. Prison, on the other hand, I can’t make any promises about. Most Uckers do some time.”

  “If Mother and Uncle Fritzy aren’t worried,” Kurt said, “I don’t see why we should be. They’re more experienced.”

  “We set a confidence game in motion, and there’s a Fed on our ass,” Axel said.

  “I won’t let anything happen to either of you,” Mother said.

  “See,” Kurt said. “It’s fine.”

  While Kurt got getaway driver lessons from Uncle Fritzy, Axel had started the process of creating an official dossier for Brother Tobin Floom and his ministry. Background information, historical biography, business associates, anything he could dig up on the faux padre.

  Axel loved a good mystery—falling into an internet wormhole and seeing where it led, digging deeper and deeper into the web and sifting through the facts and fictions. The biggest problem was that ninety-nine percent of internet content was opinion. Not raw data, but some nonexpert’s interpretation that may or may not be based on any truth. The only way to wade through the clutter and find actual data was to start with the boring. Dates and locations and numbers and names. Public records, newspaper announcements, statements of fact.

  Along with the internet mining, he was reading Brother Tobin Floom’s autobiography, God’s Humble Servant: My Great and Humble Journey. Fifty pages into the book, Axel was positive that Brother Floom (and/or his ghostwriter) didn’t know what the word humble meant.

  From the introduction: “I asked myself a question. While the Lord can choose to speak to anyone—He is the Lord, after all—why does He speak directly to so few people? Why does He speak to me? I prayed on this. And you know what the Lord said? He told me that, like in the Bible, He speaks only to prophets. Does that make me a prophet? Am I enlightened? Chosen? Special in some way? It’s not for me to say, but would the Lord speak to me if I wasn’t? Not my words. His words. God’s word.”

  Brother Floom’s other books were not what Axel would describe as theological texts. No dense monographs on the moral implications of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son. While the book God Is Not Poor cited scripture, it was eighty percent The Power of Positive Thinking—not coincidentally also written by a Protestant minister—with a new set of vocabulary words, a healthy amount of illustrations and graphs, and a personal spin on the relationship between faith and prosperity.

  Those were the only two Floom books available as e-books. Axel had ordered used copies of Floom’s two out-of-print books. By their titles—The H.E.A.V.E.N. Method to Eternal Prosperity and the cumbersomely titled You Can Have It All: Money Isn’t the Root of All Evil, the Lack of Money Is the Root of All Evil—he guessed that they would be more of the same.

  The official Brother Tobin Floom Ministry website provided names and staff profiles for the six different physical locations that made up its operational core, including the headquarters in San Diego.

  In a recent investigative piece about televangelists, Fortune magazine listed Brother Tobin Floom as number twelve in personal wealth. But that number only represented a fraction of his portfolio. The bulk of his investments would not be in his name, but on the ministry’s books. Structurally similar to any corporation, but in the case of a church, one hundred percent tax-free income. The ministry had substantial equity, including Floom’s $4 million home in Orange County.

  According to Brother Floom’s autobiography, he grew up in rural Oklahoma. The son of a preacher himself, he was schooled in the Bible and traveled from town to town spreading the Word with his father. He began preaching at the age of eight. He took over his father’s ministry at twenty-two, fifty years earlier, and built it into the empire that it had become. He made the switch from church preaching to the television thirteen years earlier.

  Axel, of course, knew this was all bullshit. The man’s name was Dolphus Ucker. He was Axel’s grandfather. And he was a conman.

  CHAPTER 13

  Kurt maneuvered the van through a series of orange traffic cones that Fritzy had laid out in the parking lot. After a few successful turns, Kurt clipped one of them. Overadjusting, he hit a few more cones on the other side of the lane. He stopped and looked at the damage in the rearview.

  “I’m sorry, Fritzy,” Kurt said. “I knocked a bunch of them down.”

  “I set them up closer and closer as you went,” Fritzy said. “Until there wasn’t room. A kind of test. The trick is not letting it affect you. Bump another car or miss a turn, you got to stay in control.”

  “Did I pass?” Kurt asked.

  “You did okay. Let’s call it a C-plus.”

  “Should I run it again?”

  “I ain’t got the energy to set all them cones back up.”

  “Thanks a lot for teaching me this stuff.”

  “My boy never had no interest. I tried to teach him. It feels good to pass some knowledge
down.”

  “Did I meet your son at the party?”

  “Naw, he wasn’t there. He’s—” Fritzy stopped talking abruptly. “I got an idea. You want some more real world experience. I know a speed trap you could run. Try to ditch a cop. You can’t tell Mother, though.”

  “Better not,” Kurt said. “I already got a little too crazy the other day. Let’s stick to the parking lot.”

  “Okay, but we’re going to do something dangerous, or what’s the point?”

  “That a fair compromise.”

  “I want you to drive right at that light pole. Fast. When you get about thirty yards away, simultaneously crank the wheel and pull the E brake. It’s going to feel like you’re going to flip, but I don’t think you will.”

  “You don’t think I will?”

  “Probably not,” Fritzy said. “We’ll find out.”

  “This van doesn’t have airbags.”

  “You want to learn or what?”

  Kurt hit the gas, the speedometer climbing steadily if not quickly. The light pole fast approached.

  Fritzy pushed a hand against the ceiling and yelled, “Now!”

  Kurt hit the parking brake and turned the wheel. The van shook as it slid to the side. They just missed the pole but continued to skid out of control. Kurt cranked the wheel the other way, the back end fishtailing. He felt the tilt of the van. The steering wheel vibrated. Then everything stopped, and the van landed back onto four wheels.

  “A-plus, kid,” Fritzy said. “That’s a B for the day.”

  “That was awesome. Horrifyingly awesome.”

  “If I can get my hands on a ramp, I’ll teach you how to car ski, but we’ll need a different ride.” Fritzy opened a can of beer and handed it to Kurt. The foam ran over his hand. He opened one for himself.

  “It kind of feels like this is what it’s like to have a dad,” Kurt said.

  Fritzy gave him a weak smile. “I wouldn’t know.”