In the Shadows of Fate

by Rick Jurewicz

  "I think I like her already," said Jake. "Once we get on the road, you can call her. We should be able to get to South Central in under two hours, and it's on the way to the Indiana border. I imagine that should give her enough time, and we can meet her in a public place." Jake tapped his thumb on the steering wheel for a moment, hesitating to say what was now on his mind.

  "Miranda, I don't want to make you worry more, but if these people know where you go to school, you have to remember that they could possibly be watching your apartment already. That doesn't mean they are after Lydia, though. They could just be waiting to see if you try and show up there for anything."

  Miranda had been so caught up in thinking about everything else that had been going on that the thought these people could already be watching the apartment or Lydia hadn't crossed her mind. She felt another wave of fear rush over her, but she knew that the choices she and Jake had were limited. If they were watching Lydia, there was nothing she could do at that point anyhow. She was far more afraid for Lydia's safety than her own. Now, she felt she needed to see her and be sure for herself that Lydia was alright.

  "Okay. Let's get going then. Ten minutes on the road, I will call her and tell her what we need. I am going to ask her for $2,000. If we are only buying gas and food, it should be enough for the time being.”

  Jake nodded his head and reached down to turn the ignition key. The car was turning over, but it was not starting right up as it had been. There were no signs of any trouble before, and Jake tried again and again before hitting the steering wheel with his fist in frustration.

  "Son of a bitch!" he exclaimed, then popped the hood latch and got out of the car to see what might be going on with the engine. Miranda sat in the car, contemplating what else might go wrong. Jake fiddled with a few different things that Miranda could not see, and had Miranda try the key a few more times before finally slamming the hood back down. He got back into the car with a look of annoyance on his face.

  "Do you know what it is?" asked Miranda.

  "No. These goddamn newer engines! It's not like working on my bike. I used to fix old cars with my dad all the time. There was fuel and fire. If the car wouldn't start, chances are it was one or the other. Now they pack so much shit under the hoods, and everything has electronic sensors attached to it. Nothing in this world is made simple anymore!" Jake exclaimed.

  "So, now what?" she asked.

  "We are going to have to get it towed. We might have to try and rent a car to meet Lydia, and once we get the cash we can pay for the repair, whatever it is."

  Jake walked into a nearby convenience store and used the phone inside to call for a tow truck, which arrived within 20 minutes. The truck gave them a ride to the service station about two miles down the road. The place was called Billy K's Auto Service Central, and Miranda and Jake sat in the lobby for about an hour before one of the mechanics, a tall, thin African-American man, came out to talk to them. He approached Jake, which was just as well as far as Miranda was concerned. She knew almost nothing about car talk, with the exception of how to drive in all weather conditions, and where to put the gas and oil.

  The name on the man's shirt said "Huey", and he walked up with a clipboard in his hands.

  "Well, what you've got going on here is a bad sensor. The engine computer told us which one it is from a code, but your dashboard engine light was burned out, so you all probably never saw it come on," said Huey. "We replaced the bulb in the dash, but we can't get the sensor until tomorrow, early morning."

  "Isn't there any way you can rush it or something?" asked Jake. "Maybe send someone to get one?"

  "We have to special order it, and it won't get here until our truck delivery late tonight. Besides, we have a whole lot of customers ahead of you today that made their appointments far in advance. You're lucky we can get you in at all this week," said Huey.

  "How much is it going to cost?" asked Jake, trying to compose himself better. He didn't want to come across too urgent to this man and draw too much attention.

  Huey looked down at his clipboard and did a few quick calculations.

  "Parts and labor...about $235," Huey told him. "If you've got a credit card, you can charge the amount now, but if not, I'll need at least half down for the part."

  "How much is the part?" asked Jake.

  “The part is $185, the rest is labor. It's an easy fix. Most of the money is in the sensor."

  Jake walked with Huey several feet away from Miranda, who watched as they walked away. She wondered what Jake might be up to, but decided it was best to let the men do their talking.

  "Huey," he said, with his hand on Huey’s shoulder. "Is there any way that I can give you a credit card, but have you charge it after the repair is finished?”

  "Uh, you'll have to make arrangements with Billy if you wanna do something like that. I can't authorize that myself."

  "Can you get Billy for me?" asked Jake.

  Huey went into a back office behind a two-way mirror, and stepped out with an older, somewhat heavier African-American man. Huey pointed to Jake, and the man walked over to him.

  "Is there a problem with something, son?" asked the man, whose name was clearly printed on his blue work shirt as well, which read "Billy K."

  "No, there's no problem. It's just that...my credit card is good, but we just don't want it run until after the repair is done and we are on our way. That's all."

  "And how do I know your card is good if I don't run it? How would I know it's not stolen? Listen, I've been playing this game for a long time. If you don't like the way I do business, you can find another tow service and take your car somewhere else," said Billy K. firmly, and he turned to start walking back to his office. Jake reached out his hand and placed it on Billy K's shoulder.

  "Wait. Please. Just give me one minute," he said, and looked at Huey for a moment. "Privately."

  Billy K. looked at the hand on his shoulder, and then looked to Huey. He gave Huey a nod indicating everything was alright. Huey returned to the garage, periodically looking over to check up on his boss.

  "Okay then. Talk. You have one minute," said Billy K., and looked at his watch. Jake hadn't known what he was going to say to try and convince Billy K. of anything - until Billy K. looked at his watch.

  "Listen. I don't want any trouble any more that you do. We are in a...situation. We haven't broken any laws. We're not wanted by the police. We don't have a lot of cash," said Jake, and looked over to make sure Miranda was not paying attention to him at that moment. She was looking down at a magazine, and Jake turned back to Billy K. He slid a gold and silver colored wristwatch off from his wrist and handed it out towards Billy. The shop owner looked down at the watch, and Jake nodded to him. He took it in his hand to examine it closer.

  "Just look at it. It's the real deal. Real gold with silver accents. It's a Rolex. My grandfather won this in a poker game in the early 1970s. He gave it to me for a high school graduation present. It was insured at more than $2,000. If you want it for payment, it's yours. No questions asked."

  Billy K. looked at the watch with great scrutiny, and then looked back to Jake with the same scrutiny.

  "You sure you wanna do this?" Billy asked.

  "Yes. I'm sure. It'll more than cover everything."

  Billy placed it in his pocket. "I have a guy that knows about this stuff. He'll check it out within the hour. If it looks good, you've got yourself a deal."

  "Do you have a rental car available?" asked Jake.

  "That," said Billy, "Would require the credit card, and no $2,000 wristwatch is gonna cover that."

  "Then do you have a place nearby that we will be able to stay for the night? Someplace cheap, and can we get a ride there and back in the morning?"

  "Don't want much, do you?" asked Billy K. "Once I get this checked out, Huey can give you a ride up to my cousin's motel a half-mile up the road. It's not much, but it's cheap and close, and it'll give you a bed for the night."

  Jake nodded to Bil
ly K., who returned to his office to make a phone call to his 'guy'.

  Miranda stood up, and Jake walked over to her.

  "Everything all right?" she asked.

  "Yeah. Everything is covered. They'll run the credit card in the morning, and the owner is setting us up with a ride to a place to stay for the night. No rental cars available."

  "He's doing all that?" she asked, curiously.

  "I guess they felt sorry for us. Anyway, it's covered. Don't worry. First thing in the morning we can be on the road to Lydia.

  Within an hour’s time, Billy K. had Huey taking Miranda and Jake to the Grand Avenue Motor Court, a half-mile from the garage. Jake walked to the main office and met Billy K's cousin Matt, who on Billy's word set them up in a room. The two of them then walked down to a small family style restaurant about a block west of the motel. They chose their orders from the restaurant’s 'value selections', still watching what little cash they had very closely.

  The neighborhood was not the worst around, still being in the vicinity of the university, but the motel itself was kind of a dive. It was right across the street from a club called "The Westside Warehouse", which by day looked like just that - a plain, unremarkable warehouse building. But to the local college crowd, it was one of the hottest nightspots around, with dancing, live music or DJ's seven nights a week.

  The marquee out near the road just across from the motel read 'Annual Halloween Bash TONIGHT - closing for renovations for one month starting tomorrow!' Halloween was still more than a week away, but the owners and management knew that it would be a travesty if they didn't have their highlight party of the year, with costume contests and cash prizes, and even a surprise trip this year. The girls always got in for free; the sexier the costume, the better. Guys paid, mostly without argument or hesitation, the $25 cover fee for the event, and the place was usually packed to capacity by 9 p.m.

  The staff of the Westside Warehouse had a Mardi Gras costume theme this year, with flashy costumes of all sorts related to the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade theme, along with strings of colored beads and feathers galore. The stage area was decorated to look like one of the popular classic festive parade floats, with jesters and heads of lions with golden crowns draped in purple and green vestments.

  Jake and Miranda mostly stayed in the motel room after their early dinner. Jake found a paperback novel left under the bed, which for him passed the time and helped to pull his mind away from the things that have been going on, at least for a short while. On the other hand, it concerned him how clean the rest of the room was if something as large as a book could be missed under the bed by the cleaning personnel.

  He'd been in worse, though, recalling a trip he had made to Florida during one spring break two years before with a couple of other guys. After the split with Miranda, and before he decided to clean up his act and do something with his life, he had a few binges of crazy drunkenness and excessive partying. Not that he hadn't delved into this kind of behavior before, but his state of mind wasn't in the best of places after Miranda had left.

  The trip to Florida was set up by Jake's cousin Randy and a couple of Randy's friends from Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. Jake had chipped in his portion of the money for the trip, paying for one-fourth of a condo for the week near the Orlando area, and so had Randy. But just two weeks before they were to leave on the trip, Randy broke his leg in a skiing accident at a resort in Harbor Springs, and decided not to go on the trip. Instead of calling off the trip entirely and losing out on their money, Jake and the two other guys decided to chip in together to pay for Randy's quarter of the condo.

  Jake did not know either of the other two guys before the trip, meeting them for the first time in Mount Pleasant when they were leaving on the road to head south for the week-long stay. Jake left his car at the apartment complex that the two other guys, Keith and Coomba (which was not his real name, rather a nickname that Jake never learned the origin of) were living in at the time.

  The condo in Kissimmee, Florida, was a beautiful four bedroom place on the ground floor, less than 50 feet from the pool area. The drinking had begun as soon as they walked in the door, and later in the same day, Coomba had almost gotten them into three fights due to his flirtations with several different girls at the pool who were on vacation with their boyfriends. These were the kinds of things that sometimes happened on spring break trips to almost anywhere, but these guys liked to push the envelope as far as it could go, and Jake was still in that place where he really didn't care what happened. That was, until the third night of their stay at the condo.

  After the pool had closed for the evening at midnight, Jake, Keith and Coomba snuck back in for a quiet after hours swim. That idea took a bad turn when Coomba ran back to the room, only to return carrying the 32 inch flat panel television from the room. He had decided to find out how well the TV would work as a boogie board in the pool that night, and Keith egged him on to do it. That was the point when Jake began to think that these guys had taken things too far. As it was, so did the condo management, who had received complaints that there were people in the pool area after hours, and caught the three young men in the act of the TV boogie board incident.

  The owner of the condo they were renting was notified, and they were promptly evicted from the unit without refund. Jake was ready to go home, but the other two were not done partying. On a week in April during college spring break time, almost everywhere to stay was booked to the max. One of the front desk receptionists at a hotel on the main strip in Kissimmee suggested that it was possible they might find a room at the Carriageway Motor Court, and was nice enough to give them directions. The route they took to the motor court led them a few miles east of the downtown area through some seedy streets until they finally found the place. It was a shoddy, run down little place with piles of trash lying out on the corner of the parking lot.

  Jake and the others went in to the main office, and a man stumbled in to meet them through a doorway at the back of the office. He stood there in blue boxers and an oversized t-shirt, reeking of weed.

  Fingering through his scheduling book, he told them that he had one room available for the next three nights, and it was $75 per night. Reluctantly, Jake handed over his cash to Coomba and Keith, all the while thinking about the different ways he wanted to kill Randy for hooking him up with these two losers. They walked to their room, which was a musty little hole in the wall with two twin beds and a small bathroom. Coomba volunteered to sleep on the floor, which no one argued with, being that it was his dumb-ass antics that got them into this situation in the first place. When they awoke the next morning, all three of them were covered in little red bites that they discovered later were caused by bed bugs. They left the next day to head home, but not before demanding a refund for the time remaining that they had paid for up front. Coomba, of course, gave his money right back to the guy when he bought a bag of weed from him for the trip home, which both Keith and Coomba took turns smoking on the drive back north. They offered some to Jake, who was in no way a marijuana virgin, but after everything else that had happened, he just wanted to be able to get home in one piece.

  It was that trip that finally got Jake to open his eyes and start looking forward in life rather than living in the past. And now, here it was two years later, and he was in another run down little motel; but this time, she was here with him, and the circumstances couldn't be anything close to happy or normal by any means. At this point, the best he could hope for in the next 12 hours was no bed bugs. He continued to read his book, a horror novella called "Cabal" by Clive Barker, and tried not to think about anything at all, until he dozed off in the bed.

  Miranda sat at a small table built into the wall near the window of the motel room. There was no Wi-Fi signal from the motel itself, but she was picking up a more distant signal from one of the local businesses nearby. It was a slow connection, but she still managed to be able to use her laptop to try and find any more information that
she could about the Caducus Oraclum or about the Enochian script.

  She had found no more about the Enochian script than she already had, and had even less luck with the Oraclum. There was very little information at all online about the Oraclum, and what she did find was leading more to the belief of the existence of the Oraclum to be more of myth and legend than anything else. She was getting nowhere, and after another long and stressful day, her eyes felt heavier and heavier as she stared at the screen.

  She closed out the browser and stared out the window of the motel, watching the cars drive into the Westside Warehouse. The crowds gathered outside the doors as people lined up to get inside. She couldn't make out any of the costumes from that distance, but she did see how many of them were either glowing or lit up bright in the growing darkness outside the club.

  Halloween was Miranda's favorite holiday when she was growing up, and it stayed her favorite ever since she was a child. She loved to spook people whenever possible, and never took to any costume that was not scary. One time she was a witch, and another a vampire. And long before zombies became an everyday phenomenon in modern culture, she had dressed two years in a row as the scariest undead creature she could imagine.

  The first year was a zombie nurse, with a bloody mouth and a large fake scalpel in her chest. The year after that, she dressed up as a living dead punk rock girl with darkened eyes and black fingernail polish. In fact, the only time that she didn't dress up for Halloween as something scary was at seven years old, when her mother made her dress up like an angel. She hated it, and from that time on, it was the scarier the better.

  Thinking back about those times tempted her, just for a moment, to look at the photo albums that she had on her computer of her and her family. She quickly closed the screen of the laptop and slid the computer back into its bag alongside the folder with the parchment pages. She looked back at Jake, who had been fast asleep for some time now, and then closed the curtains to the room. Miranda changed from her t-shirt into a lightweight black tank top, pulled off her jeans and slipped into the bed.