Page 130 of Blue Moon

“Fuck,” Ryder muttered.

Spider peered into the trash can in the kitchen—she was the Choir’s breaking and entering expert, apparently, and she’d gotten through the balcony door in less than ten seconds. And she’d done it silently. The first hummingbird had returned to base to recharge, but a second had replaced it. Blackwood’s jet was making its descent.

“Unless Hebert’s into colouring, the kid was here.”

“There’s a colouring book?” Emmy asked.

“Plus a box of crayons, Where’s Waldo? Las Vegas edition, and a half-empty bag of potato chips.”

“Who throws away perfectly good potato chips?”

“Someone who isn’t coming back.”

“He left a lot of stuff here.”

“But he took his pets,” Dice said. Ryder was getting better at recognising the Choir’s voices. She’d been poking around the tanks in the living room, a job that he didn’t envy. He also noticed that Tulsa kept her distance from them. “There’s a shed skin that might have belonged to a pit viper.”

“How do you know that?” Emmy asked.

“There’s a single row of scales under its tail rather than a double row.”

“Isn’t it illegal to keep venomous snakes in Nevada?”

“The man kidnapped two people.”

“Fair point. How many snakes do you have in the Cathouse?”

“Seven, but only five of them are venomous, and my pit viper is a real sweetheart.”

“Guess we know who put the king cobra in Julius Whitlow’s house now.”

“Right. What an asshole. I mean, who abandons a pet like that? I hear it was a nice one.”

“Are there any reptile-related leads that might tell us where he’s gone? If he took a bunch of snakes, then he must have another place set up for them. Unless he released them into the wild. Would they survive?”

“Possibly. I guess they might find a pet cat to snack on.”

Tulsa shuddered in the background.

“I think he kept them. The cobra at Whitlow’s place was a means to an end. Killing off a man he saw as a rival. Julius-not-quite-Caesar. In his own weird way, I think Hebert cares. All those meals he sent to Luna, the jewellery. The damn crayons. He’s fucked in the head, but he’s not your common-or-garden monster.” Emmy nudged Ryder. “That’s a good thing.”

“He thinks she’s his wife.”

And for Luna, with her hang-ups about sex, that might be worse than a quick death.

“In some ways, she is like Cleopatra. Luna’s no pushover.”

Tulsa spoke up. “If she can survive the Miss American Splendor pageant, then trust me, she can survive anything. You know what? This place is oddly clean. Hebert ate here and he slept here, but I’m not sure he lived here.”

“Maybe he cleared all the personal stuff out?” Emmy suggested. “He must have known we’d find the place.”

“That’s the weirder part—there are no gaps where missing stuff would have been, and there’s still food in the refrigerator, clothes in the closet, a shaver and an electric toothbrush in the bathroom. If he planned to leave for good, why wouldn’t he have taken everything?”

A bump, and the jet was on the tarmac.

Thank fuck for that.

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