The Curious Case of the Cursed Dice (Curiosity Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 2)

by Constance Barker

  “I need to keep some information for leverage.”

  “You have no leverage and you know it. No, the only possibilities, the only reasons for you to not be telling me everything I want to know are that you don't actually know anything, or that you have no intention of being actually helpful. A fairy tale about an artifact, even if it is true, is a distraction. I think that the cost of getting information from you, information that I can't actually rely on until I've vetted it, is far too high to be worth the time and trouble of extracting it. My operation works because I keep things simple and uncomplicated. Even my men are like that. I don’t choose them because they are the best at what they do, but because they are reliable, loyal, and predictable. I can trust them."

  "Now there's a pitch for mediocrity that I've never heard before. As a human resources practice, it’s a principle that I find fascinating, if somewhat depressing."

  "Depressing?"

  "Equating any kind of success with mediocrity. I'm surprised at you, Ulrich. That’s disappointing. I thought you were all about quality. You put so much attention on the details of your building and your collection… But now, instead of seeing the potential of someone who doesn’t sit squarely in the template, you only see me as a difficulty? What about the option of having talented associates who can get you the moon?"

  “I have no interest in the moon,” he said.

  “That was a figure of speech.”

  “Which complicates communications and, at the end of the day, makes my point. I’d have to have you tell me everything three times because of your colorful language.”

  “What can we do then?”

  Ulrich looked at her for a moment. “I have a thought about that,” he said. He walked to a side table, opened a drawer, and took out an automatic. Lila wasn't a gun buff, but she watched enough television to know a Glock 9mm automatic when she saw one. The cops on television seemed to enjoy announcing that their guns were Glocks. Her brain toyed with the thought that Glock probably paid for those little announcements.

  But now she had a more pressing matter to deal with. Ulrich Steele was pressing the barrel of the gun to her head. "What did I say? I didn’t mean to offend you, if that’s what I did."

  Ulrich shook his head. "It's what you didn't say that counts here. And no you didn’t offend me. As far as reaching for the moon, I have to say that I'm quite happy with my current slow and steady path to world domination. A colleague of mine named Walter once tried going for the big-ticket item, believing it was a brass ring, a prize that it would catapult him to glory. He was wrong."

  "Unless the big-ticket item was a Roman weapon or he was riding a carousel, you are totally trashing your metaphor."

  "I’m sorry if my way of speaking offends your sensibilities, Lila Twill. My point is that I don't believe in shortcuts, or relying on superstars to get the job done."

  "Well, that's your choice, of course, but I can help you with that."

  "If you could, you'd be a different person. As it is, you are unreliable, devious, double crossing, and completely untrustworthy."

  "I suppose you think that makes me a bad person? If you don’t like those qualities I could come up with others."

  "I don't care about whether you are good or bad. What matters is that those qualities mean you are the kind of person who wouldn’t and shouldn’t fit into my organization… or my universe, for that matter."

  Ulrich had made up his mind, and given the direction his thoughts were taking, the barrel of the gun touching her head felt cold. She was pretty sure the barrel was made of high-tech plastic but a loaded gun touching your forehead feels a lot more sinister than the idea of plastic can summon up. This felt like cold steel. "This is the thanks I get for helping?"

  "I suppose that if you actually believe that you've been any help to me, then that's exactly what it is."

  In the next few moments, Lila found herself imagining a raft of possibilities. She saw herself moving suddenly and ripping the gun from Ulrich's clammy hands and taking him prisoner. She imagined staying calm and moving aside the last second, letting the bullet whizz by her… and then ripping the gun from Ulrich's clammy hands and taking him prisoner. She could also… she stopped. She'd run completely out of ideas and now she saw nothing but the tensing of his finger on the trigger and an increase in the pressure from the cold barrel of the gun pressing harder against her forehead. She was sure it would leave a mark. Of course, when he pulled the trigger, the bullet hole would make a complete mess of her head. The mark wouldn’t matter then.

  Reality rushed in on her then. While her scenarios had been lovely fantasies, she knew that even if she somehow managed to get the gun out of his hands, the problem of Ulrich Steele remained. He was a big, powerful guy who probably could break her neck in a heartbeat—thereby ending all her future heartbeats. Of course, if she did nothing at all he was going to splatter her brains all over the polished mahogany floors.

  A metallic click echoed in the room. She'd considered her options for too long. He'd pulled the trigger. Time had slowed. In a moment she’d hear the gunshot, feel the beginning of the end.

  She tensed and waited. Nothing happened and nothing continued to happen. The room was, as the poets say, deathly still. The poetic thought wasn’t reassuring, given that it was her own death that was in question.

  For a moment she wondered if she’d died and somehow missed it. Was that possible? Did time simply stop at the moment of your death?

  Somehow she didn't think so. No, she was pretty sure that getting shot would be a stupid, messy, painful experience.

  Opening her eyes (she hadn't realized she'd closed them) and saw Ulrich staring at the gun stupidly. Then he used both hands on it, trying to move the slide. "My gun jammed," he said.

  "Don't you ever clean it?"

  "It was brand new."

  Without waiting to see if Ulrich could find a way to fix his toy, Lila shot out of her chair and bolted for the door. She didn't expect to get away – not really, but after dithering around about taking a bullet to the head she was upset with herself. She had a second chance that was marginally better than the last one (probabilistically speaking, calculating the odds once you factored out the gun and factored in the guards outside) and she was determined not to just let this geek end her life without trying to save herself. She owed herself that much. If he shot her in the back, fine. At least she’d be trying to save herself.

  She ran through the room and into the hall, noting that there were two armed guards between her and the nearest door marked EXIT. They looked big. Even if they only looked that way because she was running in fear, that didn’t take away the fact that they were still armed guards.

  Game over, she thought. But she didn’t stop. She ran headlong at them. The only thing in her mind was an attempt to dash right past them, heading for the welcoming, beckoning exit door that led away from Ulrich Steele.

  Her luck held. Both guards were caught off guard. They had both been leaning back against the wall in a most un-guard-like posture, with their hands behind their backs. As she tore by them, one lurched forward in an attempt to grab her. Moving so quickly from his off balanced position, with his legs crossed, as his hand touched her arm her forward motion pulled him over and his lurch became a fall. She sensed him going face down in the antiseptic hall behind her as she ran. Glancing behind her, she saw the second guard reach for the gun in the holster at his belt. As his hand touched it, it went off with a deafening roar. Then came a high, shrill scream of the guard who was lying on the ground. He'd been shot.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” the guard who’d shot him was saying. Lila was forgotten for the moment. Never one to miss an opportunity, she took off.

  As she scampered through into the stairwell, the closing fire door cut off the screams and chaos, muffled the sounds. Lila scampered down the stairs, taking them two at a time, with no real idea of where she was going. "You might say I'm trusting in luck," she said out loud as if someone had asked.r />
  When it came to deciding how many floors to go down before stopping… that part was easy. After two flights, she was out of breath. She hadn't heard any sounds of pursuit, but it didn't make sense to stand around in the stairwell where she was so visible. There was a door from the landing that led… somewhere. So somewhere was where she was going. She took a breath grabbed the handle and pushed hard. The heavy door swung open and immediately hit something.

  "Ouch," a voice said. It was a familiar voice. This had to be a weird coincidence, or luck by another name.

  “Clarence?” she asked. “Is that you? Are you okay?”

  Chapter 27

  Clarence and I were walking down the hallway, heading for the stairs when the door swung open. Clarence had just put a hand out and was leaning forward to grab the handle when it suddenly met him more than halfway and the edge of the door caught him in the jaw.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “Clarence? Is that you? Are you okay?”

  "Lila?" I was sure it was her. Who else would it be? A moment later she poked her face through.

  "It's me." She smiled, happy to see us. “Wow, what luck!” Just then I saw a blur of motion from above us. I grabbed Lila's arm and yanked her through it. Right as she cleared the doorway, a ceiling vent cover crashed to the ground behind her.

  “That was close,” she said, looking at the thing.

  "It's a heavy sucker," Clarence said, poking his toe at the metal. "With sharp edges too. That could’ve hurt."

  "That was a…"

  "Freak accident?" I asked.

  She moaned. "Well, I guess I don’t need a luck-o-meter to know that I’m running on empty all of a sudden. Big old hunks of steel falling out of the ceiling right over my head seems a fairly good indicator of that."

  Clarence shook his head. "On the other hand, I'd ask you to consider that it did miss you. You weren’t even grazed. If Cecilia was an agent of your luck, and I'm not saying you aren't acting totally independently, Cecilia, well if she is, then you were pretty darn lucky. In which case…"

  "I can’t take it. This is all far too complicated," I said. "And we don't have time for a detailed analysis, so let's admit that we have no idea if Lila is out of luck yet or not. We need to simply assume she is, for pragmatic purposes, and act accordingly."

  "Far enough," Clarence said. "As long as, for scientific purposes, we agree that it is uncertain."

  "We can examine the philosophical implications at a later date."

  "Over a drink," Lila said.

  "A drink would be great," I agreed. “In a bar far away from this building.” I watched her brush herself off as if she'd gotten something on her. "So why are you here anyway, Lila? Why aren't you off double-crossing us with Ulrich?"

  "That didn't work out so well," she said. "Not for me, anyway. His idea of cooperating and the rewards for doing so didn't fit with mine at all."

  "So you walked out on the negotiations?" I asked.

  “Something like that. We came to a parting of the ways and I thought reuniting with you two would be fun. Get together and talk over old times.”

  “Over drinks.”

  “Right.”

  Clarence was rubbing his jaw and generally being dramatic about being walloped with it. "Do you always fling doors open like that, Lila?"

  "Just when I'm being chased by trained thugs, even if they are mediocre, which Ulrich admits they are. He likes it that way. Can you imagine?"

  I looked through the door, past her. "Were they following you?"

  "Not that I saw. I guess they must be tending to their own problems. As I took my hasty leave, one of the guards managed to shoot the other one. I can imagine that won't go over big with the boss. I don’t think he’s in any rush to catch me. He's sure he is back in control, with his boys running the show."

  "Not entirely," Clarence said. He held up his cell phone. "We control the vertical; we control the horizontal…"

  "That's the opening to an old tv show called OUTER LIMITS," Lila said. "How does that help? Is Ulrich a fan?"

  He handed her the phone. "When you went into the stairwell the door must've jammed shut behind you." We looked and saw the hallway upstairs. A group of men gathered around the door were hitting it with batons.

  "They'll break through the door soon enough," Lila said. "That's how stupid but loyal works. If we just wanted to tick Ulrich off, we could let them chase us around the building and let them destroy it a floor at a time.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s not. As much fun as that sounds, I prefer a version of our plan where we just run away."

  "Coward," Clarence said.

  "Hey, dude, pain hurts and if that gun hadn't jammed… for whatever reason… well, these guys are playing serious hardball."

  "There is that," Clarence agreed.

  I stood my ground. "We have the dice...” I looked at Lila and she nodded, patting her back pocket. “We still need to get the lock and my pen. After all we've gone through, I'm not leaving until I get them."

  "Without any other resources, we will have to be very lucky to do that," Clarence said, looking at Lila pointedly.

  She caught his meaning. "You want the dice?” Then she shrugged. “Okay, with one of you taking a turn, maybe I'll be back to regular luck soon. That's better than bad, fatal type luck, which I've always tried to avoid."

  She was still clutching them so I held out my hand, palm up. "Give, Lila."

  She stared at my outstretched hand making me think she might bite me. Finally, she took them out of her jeans pocket and put them into my hand. "It's risky," she said, slowly moving her hand back.

  I laughed. "It seems to me that as deep as we’ve gotten into this adventure that it's way too late to worry about taking risks."

  Lila looked at Clarence. "I like this girl, Clarence."

  "She has good instincts."

  I felt a little lightheaded from the sudden overdose of compliments, so I filed them away to savor later. You don't get many in life.

  I let my head clear for a moment and suddenly had a desire to go in the direction that I thought was north (it was a bit confusing). "We are going this way," I said.

  "Hi ho, hi ho," Lila said far too cheerfully for my taste.

  Chapter 28

  Once I had the dice in my hand and felt them pulsing with potential, I committed myself. I figured that if we were going to pull this off I would have to use them to the fullest extent of the law—whatever law governed cursed objects that changed your luck. I had to act as if I knew how it worked, and since that seemed random, I decided that it worked the way I wanted it to work. Why not?

  So, with the goal of acquiring the lock and the pen in my mind, it was time to get moving. I didn’t really know where we were, so I selected a direction randomly, listening to the call I heard and hoping to get lucky. Our path led to the emergency elevator and we found Clarence still had control of it. We went up, to the twenty-fourth floor, where Steele’s collection was.

  When the door opened, Clarence sighed. “I wish I’d known that this elevator existed and went straight to the top. It would’ve made life easier.”

  We followed the hallways and switched directions a couple of times. Luckily (see how well this works?) as we followed my newly-enhanced instincts, we didn't run into any guards. And when I opened a door into a room and we saw a security door with a keypad lock, we knew we’d arrived.

  "I know this door," Clarence said.

  “It’s the vault,” Lila said. “I didn’t know you could get here this way.”

  “When you are lucky...” I said.

  "Then let's go in."

  Clarence tried the handle. "Locked."

  "I've got it," I said, pretending to be confident. I stepped up to the keypad, closed my eyes and picked a random number. It resonated comfortably in my head and when I entered it, I heard a satisfying click.

  "You go, girl," Lila said.

  "I go in," I said, and stepped into a room.

  "
What a lot of stuff this greedy man has," Lila said. "As long as we are here I think we owe it to him to lighten his burden somewhat. He'll come to appreciate a more minimalist lifestyle once he gets past the angry part where he starts tossing subordinates off the ramparts."

  "You mean you want us to rob him?" Clarence asked.

  "Well, the reason we came here, in this vault, is to steal the lock, right? We came to rob him. So I'm not suggesting anything different, just that we expand the scope of our work. The goal is still the same."

  "Cleverly put, Lila," I said. "The answer is no. We are going to have enough trouble getting out of here with the things we came for."

  She shrugged. "Sorry, it's a reflex."

  We found the items we came for rather easily. We got lucky, you might say if you didn't realize how double-edged that entire word was becoming for us. As I grabbed the pen box, opening it to make sure the pen was inside, Edgar joined us, swirling around and getting his bearings.

  “Oh thank goodness! I thought I was forever stuck in this vault.” Edgar looked around. "This is a fascinating place. Lots of cursed things have passed through here, not counting the stuff you have."

  "That makes sense," Clarence said. "Ulrich seems to be a collector for the Cabal."

  “Oh, my,” Edgar said, suddenly not quite so pleased.

  I picked up the lock, noting it had a fascinating feel to it ― heft that I didn’t expect. The wood was different than any I knew. Of course, the curse would make it feel different from other wooden objects.

  Clarence looked at his cell phone and groaned. "The posse is coming," he said, showing the video feed of armed men heading down the hallway toward the door we'd come in through. “They are hot on our heels.”

  "That's okay," Lila said.

  "It is?"

  She smiled. "The door's locked. They can’t get in."

  That news didn't please Clarence. "But we are trapped. That’s the only way in or out."

  "The only way we know of at the moment," Lila said. "I prefer to keep an optimistic perspective when it comes to our chances. Let’s assume there are options we haven't discovered yet. It's a good way to keep from panicking."