I hand G back the jay and proceed first, shotgun up and ready. On the patio is a table and chairs with a white, apparently blood-spattered Chicago White Sox hat in the middle of the table, that fucking Indian with the mouthful of giant teeth. No, wait, that’s the Cleveland Indians. And what was his name?

“Chief Wahoo,” G says. “Which Henry pointed out while he was on fire, you will recall.”

“So Hank can control material objects,” I mutter, deeply spooked.

“We don’t know that the hat wasn’t here all this time,” G points out. “It’s Troy’s team, right, he died with this hat on? I mean, one like this? You cut his hat in half with the Husq, right, while he was wearing it?”

“Yeah. Did I tell you that or did you grok it?”

“Don’t really know. Doesn’t matter, right?”

“Yeah, but this is a different hat, obviously. You’re right, it coulda been here all the time. We don’t know how it got blood on it, though. And there’s the fact that Hank mentioned Chief Wahoo while he was on fire, as you noted. That would seem to make Chief Wahoo pretty fucking significant, wouldn’t it?”

G sorta nods and shrugs at the same time, so I really have no idea how significant she thinks the toothy Injun is. That’s wasn’t racist, just colloquial! I peer through the patio doors, don’t see anything. I pull on a door and it opens. I look at G, who’s putting the roach on the table next to the hat. She nods, which means shotgun first, I can almost hear her in my mind.

I enter, and the similarity here to when Tiff ran into Fatso is weighing on me like a ton of shitbricks.