We were barreling down I-95 in a puke green AMC Gremlin, with a talking goat riding shotgun and the word golem in the rear with the hatchback open and his legs dangling out over the back bumper. We were on a rescue mission-some asshat named Caedan Fox had kidnapped my brother, Adrian.

I'm Izzie. I'm good with Names. And shotguns. Ramesses III-that's the talking goat-had a busted horn and the personality of a riled-up hornet's nest. His ears were flopping in the wind and his head was bobbing in time to the radio-Ian Bavitz laying down some sick rhymes.

Gutenberg is the bruiser in back, the word golem. Imagine a huge stack of fat dictionaries, then take away the paper and just leave the words. Vowels and consonants were fluttering off him and being pulled away in the breeze like smoke up a chimney, but then quickly replaced from some place deep inside him. His head was also keeping beat to the tunes blaring out from the thump box in back even though he preferred Bob Dylan and John Prine.

So it turned out this jackass Caedan Fox was the head bean counter at Wintle, Vornholt and Hellman, some unsavory legal firm in downtown Ironport. He was a number and facts man, and didn't have the stomach for the splendor of words, of poetry, for the rise and fall of an elegantly shaped syllable. Or in this case didn't like the words in the overly honest, hard-hitting, investigative article that my brother had published in the Iron Bugle newspaper about WV&H.

The rumor mill suggested that Fox had disappeared people before and I kept telling myself over and over that that wouldn't happen to my brother. We pulled off the highway at the Thrace rest stop. Probably the only reason anyone knew this flyspeck town at all was because of this stop. A trusted friend had set up this meeting to get some intel from a disgruntled WV&H peon. One of his roles was shredding documents late into the night, but he liked to take photos and peruse the docs before he shredded them.

A lone figure sat at one of the wooden picnic tables, silhouetted in the early morning sun. The three of us piled out of the Gremlin, the autumn leaves crunching under our feet as we walked towards the table.

Gutenberg gave voice to my thoughts as we walked. "He doesn't look like I imagined he would."