Sam was in a pickle. A juicy, deep-fried, bacon-covered, forearm-sized pickle. Under any other circumstances, he’d have been over the moon to have an excuse to end this whole boondoggle. He still wasn’t sure what was real and what was the result of some kind of mass-hysteria, head-trauma-induced hallucination, but he had had more than enough of this kind of madness. This ought to have been a no-fault, easy win for him. He ought to have been able to break his commitment to Hillary guilt-free since the van itself had very much been broken.

And yet...

“I’m sure you’re happy,” Hillary went on, all but reading Sam’s mind,” now you get to go back to the Gentleman Giant ranch early. No more being my chauffeur. No more being my bodyguard, either.”

It’s true -- in fact, it was an understatement. He wasn’t just happy, he was exhilarated. But something was eating at him and that’s what made it hard, or at least harder than he had expected. How rotten that his sole source of joy at the moment was her sorrow. He had never placed much import on the notion of chivalry, but it felt like an ignoble path to happiness. It made him feel like a vulture, that’s what it did. A vulture who was closer than he’d been in a long time to being safe at home, but a bottom-feeding, carcass-scavenging vulture all the same.

He knew it was about more than the van. The van was this ill-conceived trip and this ill-conceived trip was the last thing to connect her to her dad. He had raised her, alone, with little more than tomato soup and stories he heard via a pirate radio station pillorying the airwaves from a little outpost near Nuevo Laredo. From XEYF Cliff Kresge learned of Project Bluebook and its pandora’s box of unsolved mysteries. He listened to plenty of illicit shows from that black market radio station but none caught his fancy quite like the Full Muse, hosted bi-weekly by the ever-guileless Rosie Disposition.

It was Hillary who first asked Cliff about the radio shows he listened to and why. Only after years of pestering did he relent and explain it to her --and only then because he had run out of excuses not to. The fact was, that whole thing was a bit of a guilty pleasure for him. He never could decide how much he believed in any of it, flying saucers and their diminutive pilots, though he was obsessed with it all the same. Never did miss a show of Rosie’s and taped them frequently, too.

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Once he did finally tell Hillary, he had to pretend that it was a joke he was in on, had always been in on. It didn’t make much difference to Hillary what he thought of Rosie Disposition, the Full Muse, or Project Bluebook. She was his father: how much of his motivations would she ever understand? What mattered to her was that she had finally been let in on what had otherwise been his little secret.

From then on, it was one they could both share.

“Look, Hillary. I’m sure we can get this back on the road in, I don’t know a few months, and then maybe next year --”

“I don’t think either of you gets it. You can’t go back to the ranch, whatever that means. And Hillary, you can’t just go home and wait it out until next year”

Hillary sighed.

“I know that, I know this whole silly gambit is over --”

“It’s not just that. The van? I know it has some sentimental value to you, so this is going to sound harsh. Forget about it. I knew where to find you and they, the people who did this to your van, knew where to find you because you were being tracked. Since Shadow Hills. We’ve been following you. They’ve been following you. As for why they did this? All I can think is that they were trying to send a message. Maybe they were mad that they found the van without you in it, but I think they were just as content to show you their affinity for brutality.”

She considered everything Dat Vinh had said plus all they had been through. No doubt, she also let her eyes wander back to the van and the condition it was in. Forgetting it was easier said than done. It took her a long while to reply at last, much to Dat Vinh’s chagrin.

“You never told us who you are, and who they are.”

Dat Vinh had to stop himself from explaining that, were it not for their post-marital tete-a-tete, he might have explained that a long time ago. He had half a mind to say something he’d regret, especially concerning the danger that the three of them were in thanks to all the belly aching they had done.

Instead, he kept his answer short, using as few words as he could.

“We’re the Milieu. They’re A.S.P.”

“Which one of you,” Sam asked, hoping he already knew the answer,” are the good guys and which are the bad guys?

It was a simple question. It was an insulting question. It should have been a question that Dat Vinh answered quickly, absolutely, and unwaveringly.

And yet, he chose not to answer it at all.