The Spider Thief

by Laurence MacNaughton

  Mauricio leaned forward, eyes wide, hands clasped between his knees. “Hey, Prez. You weren’t trying to . . . I mean, you okay?”

  “I am fantastic.” He settled into his creaking leather chair and immediately started to feel better, more in control. He found a forgotten glass of water sitting on his desk and chugged it down.

  “I mean . . .” Mauricio pointed in the direction of the Torino.

  Ash dropped into the chair next to Mauricio. “Sorry to interrupt you there, Huggy Bear. With whatever it was you were doing.”

  Prez set the glass down. “I was enjoying my day. Until now.” He wiped his mouth. “Mauricio, where is my money?”

  Mauricio shot a look at Ash.

  “That was your money?” Ash said, acting surprised. “Funny, I thought it was Andres with the money. He was going to pay me, what was it?”

  “A million dollars,” Mauricio said.

  “A million dollars,” Ash repeated, nodding. “Sounds about right.”

  Prez pulled open his desk drawer and found the medication he’d forgotten to take earlier. So that was what the water was for. He popped the pill and dry-swallowed it, then leaned back and fixed Ash with a calculating stare.

  Ash’s hip attitude started to crumble in the cold silence that followed. The brothers traded worried glances.

  “We had a deal,” Prez spat out. “You suppose to bring me back my cash.”

  “Yeah,” Ash said slowly, “about that . . .”

  “You don’t have it,” Prez said.

  Ash cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”

  “That’s the wrong answer.” Prez touched the intercom on his phone. “D. In here. Now.”

  Not two seconds later, DMT barreled in through the door, making everything in the room look smaller. His shirt and tie were immaculate, every inch of him looking healthy and strong, except for the big white bandage taped to the side of his head.

  Mauricio lunged out of his chair and threw an arm across DMT’s back, clapping him on the shoulder. “D! Hey, man. You all right? You look good.”

  DMT broke into a soft smile. “Back among the living.”

  Mauricio tapped his forehead. “They put a steel plate in there or what?”

  “Naw. Just aches a little. It’s cool.”

  Prez rose to his feet, leaning across the desk on his knuckles. “Jermain and his brother are dead,” he shouted.

  Instantly, the room fell silent. DMT squared his shoulders, his game face back on. Prez looked hard at each of them, Ash last.

  “I wasn’t talking,” Ash said, making a zipping motion across his lips.

  “You get any my boys hurt again, I will bury you.”

  Ash swallowed. “Listen, Prez—”

  “In a dirt hole. Do you understand me? A dirt. Hole. By the time I get done with you, nobody even going to find your white bones.”

  Ash looked away for a second, then back, biting down on whatever he wanted to say.

  “You find my money and you burn it,” Prez said. “You soak it in gasoline and set a match to it. Next time I see you, you bring me a briefcase full of ashes. I make myself clear?”

  Ash’s eyes ticked around the room like they were trying to access information that wasn’t there. Finally, he nodded. “What about Andres?”

  “Let him come down here.” Prez sat down again and leaned back. His chair creaked. “Maybe I’ll bury him right next to you.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Mummy

  The steering wheel shook in Cleo’s hands as her Jeep climbed the washed-out dirt road. Years of mountain wind, flash floods, and neglect had eroded the dirt track to little more than a continuous dead spot in the grass. Cleo tried to imagine Ash driving the Galaxie through here at high speed, pursued by Andres’s gunmen.

  She had trouble picturing it. This area seemed too remote, too still and silent, swathed in waves of tall grass and aspen groves.

  Up ahead, the preacher’s house crept into view. Obviously, nobody had lived there for years. Angled black patches showed where siding had rotted off. Bits of the house were scattered across the tan grass of the mountainside. The porch was completely collapsed.

  She drove past a shed, its doors wide open, sunlight streaming through the bullet holes in its walls. Graves stepped out from behind the shed, his suit sharp but his tie unstrung, picking his way carefully through the tall grass. The dark brown skin of his shaved head shone in the sun.

  Cleo stopped and rolled down her window. “Hey. I was in the neighborhood.”

  His sunglasses hid his eyes. “Cleo.” He turned his head and stared off across the mountains. “You are trying to make my life difficult, correct?”

  She gave him a sweet smile. “I’m just here to keep you company.”

  He let out a long sigh. “And I’m just trying to follow the rules.”

  “So how’s that working out for you? You find this crime scene all on your own? Oh, wait, no. That would be because of me.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that Snyder still suspended you.”

  “I don’t remember actually hearing the word ‘suspended.’” Cleo made quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

  Graves stared at her, his face a perfect mask, until the corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. It made him look irresistible.

  “Meanwhile, I did hear there was a mummy,” Cleo said. “Maybe two.”

  He shook his head, slowly, and turned away. “How did you find out about that?”

  “You find a homicide involving a mummy, people tend to talk.”

  He sighed and trudged up toward the house. Cleo crept the Jeep alongside him, keeping pace.

  “I can’t let you inside the house,” he said.

  “Gee, that’s too bad. But look on the bright side. At least it’s me showing up here, not some news van with a satellite feed. This whole story could go viral in about ten minutes.”

  Graves stopped and faced her. “Please tell me you are not trying to blackmail me. Me, of all people.”

  “Oh, I would never do that to you. You know that.” She pretended to look wounded. “Come on, Graves, we need to stick together. So you can show me what’s in that house up there.”

  “You can’t just . . .” Graves hung his head for a long moment, grunted, and then waved her on ahead. “Might as well park up there.”

  Three vehicles sat in front of the house. Graves’s gray sedan was parked off to the side, under the shade of a few thin aspen trees. In front of the house sat two trucks marked with sheriff’s department decals. The sight of the gold star on their doors brought up an old ache in her heart. It was the same gold star she’d seen as a kid, and it would forever remind her of her dad in uniform. She swallowed the lump in her throat and got out of her Jeep.

  Graves caught up. “We had to go in around back. The front porch fell in.”

  She looked up at the broken timbers jutting out from the side of the house, over a pile of shingles and rubble. The tips of the timbers gleamed with fresh wood. “Happened recently, too.”

  He followed her gaze and nodded. She couldn’t tell if he’d already come to the same conclusion or not. He pointed to a coppery glitter in the grass, where a deputy was picking up spent shell casings and bagging them. “Nine millimeter,” Graves said. “My guess, an automatic weapon, same one they used on your car.” As he said that, he edged a little closer to her, as if he was trying to protect her.

  “So somebody was firing from the front porch.”

  “Correct.” He raised his finger like a gun and pointed it downhill at the shed. “Pop-pop-pop. Somebody gets that Galaxie started and takes off, but it wasn’t easy. Car sat in the shed at least five years, could have been longer if it had a gel battery. Some long-term tire marks on the concrete floor, matching flat spots in the tire tracks on the road.”

  She contemplated the bullet-riddled shed. Ash must have been running for his life. One false move on his part, and it would’ve been his death they’d be investigating he
re, instead.

  Graves led her around the house to the back door. She’d never been inside the preacher’s house before, even though it was only a few miles from her parents’ home. She knew her dad had been called here once, when she was in high school.

  A tingling sensation ran up and down her arms. She stopped cold, remembering.

  On the rare occasions her dad was able to come home for dinner, he always had the strangest stories to tell, some of them funny. Actual crimes were relatively rare in this small mountain town. Most of his calls were about drunk and disorderlies or livestock running loose on the roads. But on one particular occasion, he’d gone to the preacher’s house after the office got a frantic phone call that the preacher’s wife was dying, and the preacher had gone insane. The caller had been Ash.

  When her dad got to the house, he said, everything had seemed okay. The wife was sleeping. The preacher said that he and Ash had had a “misunderstanding.”

  All through the dinner, her dad had seemed preoccupied about it. When prodded, he’d smiled and said everything was just fine, but she could still remember one thing he did say:

  “That boy kept telling me there was a treasure inside the house. And it was cursed.” He’d shaken his head. “Damnedest thing I heard in a while.”

  At school, Ash wouldn’t talk about it, and eventually she stopped asking. When she thought back, though, she couldn’t remember ever seeing the preacher in town again after that.

  She stared up at the back of the house, its cloudy windows and decayed wood, swollen clumps of empty hornet nests under the eaves, paint flaking from the trim. Nobody had lived here in a long time.

  Graves put a gentle hand on her arm. “Cleo. You okay?”

  She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway. “Let’s go inside.”

  *

  Prez bent down over the pool table, lining up a long shot off the back rail. He shot smoothly, the cue putting just enough English on the ball to curve it around where he wanted it. The seven ball dropped into the corner pocket.

  DMT walked in, jangling his car keys. “You want anything, Boss? Some green tea, a smoothie, something?”

  “No, I’ll just make my own.” He bent down over his next shot, but DMT didn’t leave. Slowly, Prez straightened up again and leaned on the cue stick, waiting.

  Clasping his giant hands in front of him, DMT said, “I was thinkin’ . . .” He pursed his lips.

  Prez nodded. “Go on.”

  DMT glanced over at the cage in the corner that held the printing press and all of the equipment. “I was thinkin’ maybe it’s time we should get rid of all that. Just to be safe?”

  Prez looked him over, noticing his tense shoulders, the nervous shake in his hands. The boy just needed some reassurance. Hell, he’d just been shot in the head. That was enough to make anybody jump at shadows. Prez bent down and lined up his shot again. “You go on home, D. Take some time off.”

  DMT cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go back there, Boss.”

  The shot went off nice and easy, with a click that sunk the eleven ball. Of course DMT didn’t want to go back there, all the blood stains on the floor, probably yellow crime scene tape on the door. The boy had never been through anything like this.

  “I rather hang here,” DMT said. “Make sure you a’ight.”

  Pretending to study the table, Prez nodded. “Get somebody to find you a hotel room for the rest the week. Then we find you a new pad.” He circled the table, feeling a heavy weight in his chest. “Jermain and Sweet, you got their services all set up? Flowers and all that?”

  “Yes, Boss. I put it on your calendar. Even called the newspaper, told them put it in the obituaries.”

  “Good.” Jermain and his brother had been fools, but they were still his responsibility. “Now go on, get me a ice green tea.”

  “Yes, Boss.”

  Prez waited until he was absolutely sure DMT was gone before he put away his pool cue. He crossed over to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a long number from memory.

  The phone didn’t make a ringing sound, just a series of clicks, and then a whisper like an old radio. Prez listened to the almost-silence. “You there?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” the Sweeper said crisply.

  Prez fought off a shiver. The Sweeper gave him a chill, and for that reason alone he hated to use him. But there were certain things only the Sweeper could do, and some of those things had gotten Prez where he was today. Even if it was like dealing with the Devil, it always worked out in the end.

  “You got my message?” Prez said. “I got two of my crew dead, now I got their families to take care of. I can’t let this go on.”

  “I understand.”

  Hot anger rose up inside Prez as he waited for more. “You suppose to take care of this already.”

  “I have not been able to locate him.”

  “Locate him?” Prez slammed his hand down on the desk. “Where the hell you at? This Colombian prick shot three of my boys!”

  “You need to calm down.”

  “Oh, so you giving me orders now. That it?”

  “You do not want to say anything critical over the phone.”

  “Your phone suppose to be secure!”

  “Mine is,” the Sweeper said. “Yours is not.”

  Prez peered into the shadows in the corners, past the kitchenette, behind the Torino. “You sayin’ they tappin’ my phone line? You know that for a fact?”

  “I am saying that I cannot guarantee the sanctity of systems that are outside my control. Besides, you must listen to your doctor. Keep your stress level low.”

  “Fuck my stress level. I want Andres buried in a hole. Today. You understand?”

  “I have not yet found a way. This person is very connected, very powerful. Financially, and spiritually as well.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean? The man is a stone-cold freak. Ain’t no messiah.”

  “The truth is the truth, regardless of your belief.”

  “I believe you gonna have to find a way to take care of business.”

  “Yes.”

  “Today.”

  “Yes.”

  Prez fumed at the phone, trying to think of something else to say, but yelling at the Sweeper was a waste of time. He hung up.

  With a grunt, he lunged out of his chair, marched across the room, and yanked his pool cue out of the rack.

  “My stress level,” he muttered to himself, and nailed the cue ball.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Preacher

  Graves led Cleo down the hall, his shoes silent on the moss-green shag carpet. Heavy drapes, turned gray with age, blocked out most of the sunlight. The unmistakable stench of death choked the already thick air.

  “In here, we had one Hispanic male, single shot at close range from the front, small-caliber pistol. Best guess, it happened two days ago.” Graves took a tiny bottle of menthol gel out of his pocket and put a wet stripe across his upper lip.

  He offered the bottle to Cleo, but she waved it off. She breathed through her mouth, coping with the smell as best she could. It had to have been a lot worse when Graves found the body the day before. But it was gone now, taken to the coroner.

  Graves paused in a doorway, and she peered over his shoulder. Inside the room, faded wallpaper hung down in sheets. A fresh-faced deputy in his twenties stood just inside the doorway, snapping photos. “You need to come in here, Agent Graves?”

  Graves waved him off and led Cleo upstairs.

  Each stair creaked quietly under their feet. Faded pictures hung in the stairwell. The preacher and his wife, both wearing heavy glasses, neither of them smiling in any of the photos. Upstairs, pinpricks of sunlight penetrated the curtains, as if the full heat of day was trying to blast its way into the gloom. But it wasn’t enough to light the hallway to more than a dusty twilight. Graves took a small metal flashlight out of his pocket and clicked it on. He led her to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  He paused ou
tside the door, his eyes surprisingly bright in the half-light. “Conditions in the bedroom must have been just right. Low humidity. Lack of ventilation.” The doorknob clicked, and Graves pushed the door open silently. “I’m working on the assumption that these two are the owners of the house.”

  Two bodies lay in the center of the floor, near the foot of the bed. A man in dark slacks and argyle socks, a woman in a faded dress, her legs crossed at the ankles as if napping. The skin was drawn tight around the bones of their faces. He was bald. Her curly white hair lay like a halo on the long embroidered pillow they shared. Two pairs of heavy eyeglasses sat perched on the edge of a nightstand.

  Cleo drew in a breath and held it. In the dry, sealed room, their bodies had naturally mummified. But how long ago? And what had killed them?

  A sharp animal instinct kicked up inside her, urging her to run, fearing some hidden danger still lurked in the room. With effort, she stood her ground.

  “Sheriff’s department is looking through the records right now, trying to find a next of kin,” Graves said. “So far, we know the electricity to the house was disconnected ten years ago. Looks like nobody asked any questions when they stopped paying the bills.”

  Cleo clicked on her own flashlight and studied the corpses. They had an odd sense of finality about them. There were no signs of violence, no accompanying feelings of injustice. Cleo felt more like an intruder than an investigator.

  But the fact that the bodies were on the floor, instead of in the bed—that part didn’t fit. And the carpet around them was recently disturbed, scuffed in seemingly random directions.

  “What do you make of this?” Cleo pointed at the woman’s hands. They rested on her stomach, but they were open, the shriveled gray fingers slightly bent.

  “Best guess? She was holding onto something when she died. Something heavy. Stayed there a long time, until somebody came along and took it.”

  Something. Maybe a gold spider.

  Cleo turned around in place, taking in the rest of the room. Both dressers were covered in a sheet of dust. Same with an end table with a fringed lamp. The brightest thing in the room was a reading chair upholstered in bold blues and yellows.