The Spider Thief

by Laurence MacNaughton

  Cleo chuckled, on and off, the rest of the way to her mom’s house.

  Nobody was home. Her mom was in Atlanta, she said, on a consulting job. Ash was just thankful that the driveway was paved, not dirt, because he didn’t want to try to push the Galaxie through mud.

  Lightning flashed, illuminating the pine-covered mountainside. The house hadn’t changed much. With the giant apple tree out front and the white-painted wood porch, it really looked like someone’s parents’ house. Out front, the wagon wheel was still set in the ground, full of overgrown rose bushes. Ash parked beside it.

  Cleo got out of the car and gasped, her breath steaming. Pulling her jacket up over her head, she ran for the front door.

  Ash got out to follow her. The ice-water rain drenched him instantly, plastering his hair down over his eyes, weighing down his clothes. Moolah bolted ahead of him, leaving him to slog alone through the ankle-deep runoff. Hard rain stung his bare arms.

  Cleo stood under the shelter of the front awning, teeth chattering as she sorted through her keys. She got the door open and urged Moolah inside. Ash came in last, just in time for the dog to shake off a cold spray of water. Cleo shut the door, cutting off the noise of the rain and trapping them in lukewarm darkness. She flicked the light switch. Nothing happened.

  “Damn it,” she whispered. Her teeth chattered.

  “Here.” Ash pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her. She clung to him, shivering.

  Then she shrieked and jumped back, making Ash’s heart leap into his throat. Lightning flashed again, revealing Moolah slunk down on his haunches, looking miserable.

  “Your dog has a very cold nose,” she whispered.

  “Well.” He shrugged. “At least you know he’s healthy.”

  *

  Hours later, they sat by the wood stove in the corner of the living room. It looked like a museum piece on a pedestal, a sculpture in hot black iron. The scent of wood smoke calmed Ash’s nerves, as did the steaming mugs of coffee and the soft glow of candles. “Honestly, you didn’t have to make coffee on the wood stove,” Ash said. “Your mom’s Taster’s Choice would’ve been fine.”

  “I only serve that to my enemies.” Cleo leaned back into the couch across from him, wrapped in a heavy quilt, sipping her coffee.

  “So does that mean you’re not mad at me anymore?”

  She didn’t answer at first. “You could’ve sent a postcard. At any point in the last few years. Even an email. ‘Hey, Cleo, remember me? We used to be totally in love, until I ran off one night without saying goodbye. Just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, well.” She stared into her coffee. “I did spend a lot of time hating you.”

  “But if you still hated me, you wouldn’t have saved my life on the highway back there.”

  Cleo shrugged. “Don’t read too much into it. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Oh, I think it does. And you know it.”

  Her eyes revealed nothing. “I would’ve done it for anyone.”

  “Even cold, heartless me, apparently.”

  “Even you.” She set her mug down. “So what kind of name is Moolah, anyway? African or something?”

  “No. Moolah.” Ash rubbed his fingers together. “You know, dinero, cashola, greenbacks.”

  She lifted one eyebrow. “You named your dog after money?”

  “Sure. Watch this.” Ash shrugged his blanket aside and stood up. The wad of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket was still damp, but he had no doubt the dog could sniff them out. “Moolah!” He patted his hand on his leg.

  The dog, dozing in front of the wood stove, perked his head up, then came trotting over.

  Ash rubbed his head. “Good boy. Moolah, show me the money!”

  The dog sniffed around the room, his nose working furiously. He put his forepaws up on the arm of the couch and nosed Cleo’s limp jacket. He let out a clipped bark.

  Ash grinned. “Got any cash in that pocket?”

  She reached into her damp jacket and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. She held it up.

  He called Moolah over and fed him a treat. “Good boy!” He gave the dog a brisk rub. “Works every time. This mutt’s a genius.”

  She looked skeptical. “I imagine he might know to look in jacket pockets.”

  “Sure. But this pooch can sniff out cash anywhere. He’s found it in nightclubs, back seats of cars, so many places, I don’t even know. The day I taught him that trick, he found a fifty in a gutter outside a Laundromat. I spent it on a bone-in rib eye and split it with him.”

  She shook her head. “Only you, Ash. Seriously.”

  “Weird, though.” He pulled the wad of hundreds out of his pocket. “I reckoned he’d home in on this first.” He held the money down in front of Moolah’s nose, but the dog turned away. Not interested.

  Mauricio’s words popped into his head. There’s something wrong with the money.

  “So tell me about your curse,” Cleo said, interrupting his thoughts. She stared off into the shadows across the room, where her dad’s bird-watching books were stacked up next to a glass case of hawk feathers. “You said the curse was on you. What did you mean by that?”

  Ash pocketed the cash and sank back into his seat, feeling a dark mood settling on him. “Not a lot to say. I found this gold spider statue when I was a kid.”

  “The one that you said Andres was after.”

  “Turns out that way, yeah. It was a gold spider statue with emerald eyes. And I swear to you, that thing’s eyes lit up like they were on fire. It was evil.” Ash hated the way his voice trembled when he said it, but he pushed on. “It was cursed. And I knew right then that I’d woken it up, and I’d pay for that. And I have. Ever since that night, when people get too close to me, they tend to die.”

  She stared at him, not saying a word. He couldn’t tell if she believed him or not.

  “Makes long-term relationships a little dicey,” he added.

  “This same gold spider Andres is looking for? You found it when?”

  “Fifth grade.” Ash debated how much to tell her at once. “There’s a lot more to that story, but the short and sweet is that my parents sort of got rid of it. Then after that, things were calm for a while, aside from the usual teen angst and all that high school nonsense.”

  “It wasn’t all nonsense.”

  In his mind’s eye, he had a glimpse of her on prom night, beautiful, looking up at him with such earnest intensity, one gloved hand on his arm. He pushed that thought aside, with all its attached bittersweet angst. There was too much pain attached to it. Because that was the night of the fire.

  He hadn’t seen his home burn, he’d only seen the aftermath. The smoking ruins. The funeral for his parents, and then another one for Cleo’s dad. Being the sheriff and the first one at the scene of the fire, he’d run inside to try to save them.

  But he never made it back out.

  “I know I’m cursed. I can’t prove it, but I know it.” He drank the remains of his cold coffee, wishing he had something a little stronger. “So if I’m a bit of a wanderer these days, it’s not because I don’t care, let’s just put it that way. Mostly I don’t want anybody else dying in my proximity.”

  “What about Mauricio? By that rationale, aren’t you worried he’ll die, too, if he hangs around you?”

  “I’ve warned him. But he doesn’t believe in the curse. Not any more than you do.”

  She gave him a sharp look. “Ash, you really think some kind of curse is the only possible explanation?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t we ask my parents?” He regretted saying it the moment it came out of his mouth. Her father had died in that fire, too. It wasn’t just his pain alone. But if he’d hurt her, she didn’t show it.

  “Andres set that fire,” she said quietly.

  “The same Andres? No. That’s impossible.”

  “He was here. That night. Years ago.”

  Her words were pl
ain enough, but Ash struggled to sift the meaning out of them. “Wait. Are you honestly trying to tell me that Andres was behind all that, that he set the fire that killed them?”

  “No. The bullets killed them. Andres just set the fire to cover his tracks.”

  Ash couldn’t find a way to make sense of that. How could Andres have been here, all those years ago? How could Andres have even known about the spider back then?

  You are so much like your father, Andres had said. You have no respect for what does not belong to you.

  Ash gripped the sides of his head, fingers tangled in his damp hair, trying to put the pieces together. If Cleo was right, then Andres was there looking for the spider, even back then. Had he homed in on it after Ash had woken it up? Had the preacher, in his attempt to break the curse, somehow made it even more powerful? What kind of spiritual connection did the spider have to those who touched it?

  What kind of connection was there between his parents, the spider, and Andres?

  “Oh, God,” Cleo breathed, “you didn’t know.” She slid off the couch and came over to sit next to him on the arm of the chair. Tentatively, she put her arms around his shoulders. “I didn’t mean to drop that on you. I thought you knew. There was an investigation.”

  Nobody had told him anything. He’d left town the night after the funerals, swearing he’d never come back, thinking he was a curse to everyone around him. “The fire was an accident,” he heard himself saying, distantly. “A freak accident. They said it might’ve been an electrical short.”

  “No,” she whispered. “No, Ash. They were murdered.”

  “How?”

  “I have a copy of the coroner’s report.” After a moment, she added, “The rounds were nine-millimeter subsonic. A silenced pistol.”

  Like the one Andres had used to kill his own man. Ash’s eyes stung, and he blinked back tears. In Cleo’s efforts to break his belief in the curse, she’d only convinced him more. He’d found the spider as a kid and woken it up, setting this all in motion. And eventually Andres had come looking for it.

  Everyone had died because of Ash.

  “I was the only one who saw Andres that night,” Cleo whispered. “I saw him driving through town. I didn’t find out who he was until much later. I can’t prove it was him. But I saw him.”

  Ash closed his burning eyes.

  “We’ll catch him, Ash, you and me. We will.”

  Chapter Ten

  Lens

  Mauricio had never liked guns. So it felt like a Dante-ish sort of purgatory, having to sit there in DMT’s dingy apartment in the early hours of the morning, choking on cigarette smoke and watching complete idiots play with loaded weapons.

  The music thumped so loud between the cracked plaster walls that it felt like a living creature beating on his skull. Crammed into one corner of a smelly blue couch with split seams and a wobbly arm, Mauricio watched DMT’s friends Sweet and Jermain get louder and more stupid with each new six-pack.

  Both of them were black, armed, and worked for Prez, just like DMT. The difference was, whatever quality it was in DMT that clicked with Mauricio, these two didn’t have it.

  Sweet was the skinny nervous one. His brother Jermain was bigger and louder. The two wore matching shirts and ties. And pistols, giant stainless steel Desert Eagles with calibers big enough to kill elephants. They seemed to find endless fascination in the act of taking the guns apart and putting them back together.

  “Check this,” Sweet said, holding up a rubber band he found somewhere in the mess of beer bottles and pizza boxes that covered the floor. Squinting in the smoke from the cigarette clenched in his teeth, he looped the rubber band on the front of his disassembled pistol’s empty frame, stretched it back over the cocked hammer and aimed it at Mauricio. “Look-a-here. World’s baddest-ass rubber band gun.”

  Mauricio pushed his blue plastic-rimmed glasses back up his nose. “Very impressive.”

  “Bet yo ass.” Sweet pulled the trigger, and the rubber band stung Mauricio in the forehead. Jermain laughed so hard he fell down onto the arm of the couch and broke it off.

  Mauricio carefully set down his warm bottle of beer and stood up.

  “Where you goin’?” Sweet said. “Prez says you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “I’ll be outside.” Mauricio picked his way across the trash-littered floor to the front door and the clean night air. DMT’s apartment was on the third floor of an open L-shaped building that faced the street corner. Streams of traffic whizzed by on the main road, lines of white headlights and red tail lights.

  He leaned on the rusted railing and seriously considered running for his life. He took a deep breath and let it out. The chipped paint of the railing was rough in his grasp. He forced his hands to unclench.

  The door opened behind him, spilling hip-hop music onto the balcony.

  “Mauricio,” DMT said in his soft voice, lumbering up next to him. “What’s good wit’ it?”

  “Nothing is good.” Mauricio stepped back to the door and pulled it shut, trapping some of the noise inside. He went back to his spot by the railing. “Nothing at all. You can’t hold me here against my will. That’s a federal offense.”

  DMT looked hurt. “I ain’t trying to hold you nowhere. Prez just told me, keep a eye on you. You want to go someplace, well, let’s go then. I don’t want them trashin’ up my place neither.”

  The thought of being crammed into a car with those two made Mauricio’s skin crawl. “Just tell them, hey, enough with the rubber bands.”

  “Yeah. They be cool.” DMT straightened the lapels of his jacket. Like Prez, DMT dressed sharp twenty-four hours a day: Ralph Lauren suit, herringbone shirt, pinstripe tie. The anti-gangsta. That’s how Mauricio was starting to think of him.

  Mauricio took off his glasses, squinted at the lenses, and put them back on. “I don’t know how I ended up here. I should be back at school.”

  DMT leaned on the railing, making it creak. “What kind of school you go to?”

  “Film school.”

  DMT did a double take. “You know how to make movies? Like real ones?”

  Mauricio shrugged.

  A silence fell between them. Below, the traffic lights changed, and a motorcycle roared out onto the street.

  DMT nodded. “I’d like to do that.”

  “Ride a motorcycle?”

  “Make a movie.”

  The old familiar frustration rose up inside Mauricio. “That’s what everybody thinks. Make a movie, sure, you get a camcorder, you can shoot some crap and put it on YouTube. But a real film, something with heart? Something that moves people, makes them think, makes them laugh and cry? That’s art, man. Film can be art. But you have to transcend to it.”

  “Huh. I want to do the action thing. Right?” DMT put up his fists and jabbed at the air. “Run around, get all physical-like.”

  Mauricio sagged against the railing, fighting off a wave of anguish. “Sure. Fine. Move to LA, look into stunt work, you could probably find something.”

  “Naw, I don’t want to do stunts. I want to be up in the camera, doin’ my lines. Have my own stunt double, know I’m sayin’?”

  “Oh.” Mauricio caught himself before he rolled his eyes. “So you want to be a star. That’s original.”

  “Just want to be in a movie, that’s all. You know when you watch a movie, and it’s the kind, it’s about this stone cold dawg, his life’s all messed up, on the wrong path, doin’ the wrong thing. But for the right reasons. Feel me?”

  Mauricio thought about it. “No. Not really.”

  “Yeah, you do. Like he’s a hit man, right. And he finds out the dawgs he works for are all evil-like. Turns out he been killin’ the wrong people. So he goes and like saves a bunch of innocent people. And then at the end they’s all safe, but while he’s killing off his enemies, he gets shot. I mean, he still walks out of there, it’s all dramatic with the music an’ everything. Everybody likes a happy ending. But the thing is, you watchin’ it, you know
he gonna die.”

  “Hmm.” Mauricio pretended to agree. “You mean like, say, Shane.”

  “I don’t know no Shane.” DMT leaned out over the railing, his thumbs and forefingers making a box over the Denver skyline. “Look at that view, dawg.”

  Mauricio stepped over next to him and raised his own fingers and thumbs, mimicking the box DMT was making. The two of them stood side by side, squinting at the Denver skyline.

  As much as Mauricio hated to admit it, it would make a good establishing shot. Had a natural composition to it, light and dark that would direct the eye, asymmetrical but balanced. The more he looked at it, the more he liked it.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You see it now.” DMT clapped him on the back with his giant hand. “You goin’ to make that movie, I know it.”

  Mauricio lowered his fingers. He should shoot it now, he told himself. While he had the inspiration. “I have to get my camera.”

  “A’ight. Where it at?”

  Mauricio pointed straight down, over the railing, to the shadowed shape of his car parked three stories below. Together, they went down the concrete steps, the whole time Mauricio thinking about how he could escape, run off into the night. Except that DMT had his keys.

  He didn’t know this neighborhood at all. He wasn’t sure how far he could get on foot, or whether he could find a taxi. And the strangest part of it was that he didn’t want to leave. He actually felt a connection to DMT. The big guy just didn’t have a dangerous aura. And Mauricio’s instincts about dangerous people had been honed to a fine edge lately, thanks to Ash and his brilliant schemes.

  DMT, by comparison, felt safe.

  Besides, Mauricio really wanted to take that shot of the skyline. He decided to go with it, embrace that creative spark and capture it before it went out. It made him feel alive, more than he had felt in months.

  They got the bulky case out of the trunk and headed back upstairs, DMT panting as he climbed. “That’s a big camera, yo.”

  “When we get money, Ash gets boots.” Mauricio bounded up to the top step. “I get cameras.” He set the case down outside the front door, unlatched it and pulled the camera from its foam rubber cradle.