Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation

by M. R. Sellars

  “Again, sounds interesting.”

  “You never know,” she answered with an amused giggle. “By the way, they also offered me a nice discount at their stores.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Uh-huh, so if you do a good job maybe I’ll let you take me shopping after we wrap it up.”

  “That could be fun,” I said.

  There was a period of silence following my comment and soon there was a palpable sense of seriousness creeping into the void between us. Our momentary lightheartedness disappeared in the wake of the recent verbal distraction.

  “You’re certain you don’t want me to come home, then?” Felicity finally asked, the concern edging her voice once again.

  “Positive sweetheart,” I told her. “We’ll talk when you get home.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure,” she said.

  “Go make some sexy pictures of carburetors,” I told her. “Gear heads need pinups too.”

  I heard her laugh at the other end of the line, once again breaking through the mantle of seriousness that originally cloaked her.

  “And, honey?” I added.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what? Inviting you to a lingerie shoot?”

  “No,” I returned. “For everything else.”

  I could almost feel her smiling when I hung up the phone.

  * * * * *

  I absently took a sip from the coffee mug and screwed up my face in disgust. Willow bark tea was not the most pleasant drink one could ingest to begin with and being an hour cold didn’t help it at all. I suppose that would teach me to look first and then drink. I glared at the cup as if it were at fault, then set it aside and hooked my finger into the handle of the cup I’d been reaching for to begin with— the fresh cup of coffee I had just put on the corner of my desk a few minutes ago.

  I took a sip from the new mug and found it to be only slightly less cold. I cocked an eyebrow and shot a glance at the clock in the corner of my computer screen. 10:47 A.M. was staring back at me. The few minutes had somehow expanded into forty-five. I guess I had been a little more preoccupied with my work than I’d originally thought.

  I leaned back in my chair. The springs underneath the piece of furniture creaked as it tilted, then I was almost certain that I heard my joints creak as I stretched. I drew in a deep breath then pushed my eyeglasses back up onto the bridge of my nose. As of late, I’d been finding myself allowing them to slip down so I could look at the monitor over the top of the rim.

  I knew that meant it was time for a trip to the optometrist. Actually, I’d known it for a while, but I’d been avoiding it. I fully suspected I was going to need bi-focals, and that just meant I was getting old. No one ever wants to admit to aging, and I suppose I was no different.

  I looked at the coffee cup in my hand then back at the clock. I mulled it over for a minute and then decided I would go ahead and get one more fresh cup—if there was any left. I was just pushing my chair back from the desk when the phone rang. This time it was my business line, so I didn’t bother with caller ID. I simply rolled the chair back in and took the receiver in hand, cutting the device off mid-peal.

  “Gant Consulting,” I answered.

  “Yeah, kin you fix my com-pooter? It’s broke.” A poorly disguised and all too familiar voice grated from the earpiece.

  “No, Ben,” I returned without missing a beat. “How many times do I have to tell you? I do custom software and networks, not computer repair.”

  My cop friend guffawed at what he perceived to be an amusing prank call, and I had no choice but to break into a grin myself. His good humor had a tendency to be contagious, as did his sullen moods; and I’d been on the receiving end of enough of that type of phone call from him to know, so this was a pleasant change.

  To be honest, considering what I’d experienced earlier I was surprised to find his tone so jovial. I had been expecting that I would hear from him but figured it would be something I didn’t want to hear. That was what always seemed to happen whenever I had one of my episodes.

  “So what’re you doin’?” he asked.

  “Working,” I replied. “And for some reason, feeling very old.”

  “Yeah, funny how it creeps up on ya’,” he said. “I remember goin’ to bed one night feelin’ like a twenty year old. When I got up I had all kinds of old man pains, and I had no freakin’ idea where they came from.”

  “Same here.”

  “Come on, though,” he jibed. “I thought you Witches were immortal.”

  “Have you been watching sixties sitcom re-runs again?”

  “It’s the only thing on TV worth lookin’ at anymore. Besides, the Montgomery gal is pretty hot.”

  “Ever wonder why they changed Dicks mid series?” I made an obscure reference to the change of actors from the old show.

  “Not really,” he replied. “But I have been wondering when you’re gonna wiggle your nose and make shit show up outta thin air.”

  “Not going to happen, Ben.”

  “Crap. I hate when you tell me that.”

  As entertaining as the conversation had been, I was still wondering if another shoe was about to drop. “So, what about you? Shouldn’t you be out catching bad guys or protecting us from evil doers?”

  “Day off,” he told me.

  “Lucky you,” I said, still slightly suspicious. “So what are YOU doing?”

  “Talking to you.”

  “You’re in rare form today.”

  “So sue me. So you wanna do lunch? I’m buyin’.”

  “You’re buying? What’s up, you win big at the riverboat?” I chuckled.

  “Hell no,” he answered. “Lost fifty bucks last time I did that.”

  “It’s a little early for lunch yet isn’t it?” I asked.

  He came back with a question of his own. “Depends. When’d you get up this morning?”

  “Point taken,” I replied. “Yeah. Lunch sounds good. I could use a break anyway. What did you have in mind?”

  “There’s a great little Indian place on Olive, downtown.”

  “Yeah, been there. I can go for that,” I told him. “So you want me to meet you?”

  “Nah,” he returned. “I’ll pick ya’ up.”

  “Okay, so I need to change into something Felicity wouldn’t be ashamed of me to be seen wearing in public.”

  “Well light a fire under it, Kemosabe. It’s hot out here.”

  I wondered for a moment at the comment then said, “Where are you, Ben?”

  “Right now? Standin’ at your freakin’ front door waitin’ for you ta’ get your happy ass down here and let me in.”

  His comment was followed by a click as he hung up, and then the doorbell began ringing in a vicious staccato brought about by him leaning on the button. Our two dogs joined in with a chorus of barks and howls as they squared off with the door downstairs in order to protect the house from invaders.

  Yeah, I definitely needed a break. I dropped the phone back in the cradle and pushed back, gathering up the used coffee cups before tugging open the office door.As I started down the stairs, I wondered if I should fill my friend in on what had happened to me earlier this morning.

  Before I reached the bottom, I had decided it could wait. There was already a niggling feeling in the back of my head that told me Ben and I would be spending a lot of time together in the very near future. Whether he knew it yet or not.

  We might as well start off on a happy note; because I already knew what was looming before us would be far from pleasant.

  CHAPTER 3:

  I wasn’t someone you could describe as a big fan of heights. Standing here at this particular moment, looking down through the railing from the top level of the old Peerless-Cross department store parking garage, smack in the middle of downtown Saint Louis, I was reminded of that fact in no uncertain terms.

  The honest truth is that for the majority of my life heights had never been much of an issue. I hadn’t
spared as much as a moment’s consideration to the idea of fearing them; at least not any that I remembered. But, of course, that was all before the night when a deranged serial killer had tossed me over the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge somewhere near the middle of its span across the Mississippi river. Now to that, I had given more than just a passing thought. I had dwelled on it. And, to say the least, it was definitely something I wasn’t going to forget. Not in this lifetime and probably not even the next.

  Fortunately for me, the rope he had been trying to hang me with had held fast. The other bonus was that it had been wrapped around my arm instead of my neck. It was only due to this stroke of blind luck that I had the luxury of being able to recall that night in all of its Technicolor detail.

  But that’s another story, sort of.

  Now, to clarify, I have to point out that I’m not one to panic or go into an immobile stupor due to a fear of heights— not at all. Whenever confronted by the vertical demon, I simply feel an involuntary catch in my throat and then experience that sinking flutter in the pit of my stomach that always precedes the ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin dump of fear. Of course, it is just about then that said adrenalin does exactly that— dump.

  With a sudden flood into my circulatory system, the hormone embarks on an emotionally driven attempt to rescue me from the perceived danger. A few seconds later I, mutter some form of exclamation, the cleanliness of which is directly proportional to the height multiplied by the amount of adrenalin then divided by my heart rate. That accomplished, I remove myself from the situation.

  For the most part, all it ever really does is make me tense muscles I don’t even remember having and then battle a lingering headache for an hour or two.

  “Sudden stop.” My friend’s deep voice uttered the two simple words from behind and above my left shoulder.

  I glanced back without fully turning and questioned him. “Do what?”

  “The sudden stop at the bottom,” Detective Benjamin Storm returned with an almost jovial undertone. “Ya’know… It ain’t the fall that kills ya’, it’s the sudden stop at the bottom.”

  It was comments like this one that had long ago convinced me that my best friend, a homicide detective with the Saint Louis City Police, would make the perfect wisecracking cop for a weekly television crime drama. He was loyal, honest, and good at his job. And, as evidenced by his most recent verbal observation, he was inextricably tied to clichés. There were even times when they would season his speech the same way some people salt their French fries— too much. Still, while not always an especially endearing quality, it was a part of his makeup, and I accepted it for the personality trait it was. Of course, accepting it didn’t keep me from retaliating against it at times.

  Like right now for instance.

  “Not actually,” I said as I turned, unsure as to whether or not he would take the bait I was about to toss before him.

  I put my hand up to shield my eyes against the late morning sun. The sky was clear and the yellow-white globe had already driven the air temperature past ninety, with the relative humidity making it feel as if we were in a Jacuzzi. Worse yet, the hottest part of the day was still to come. Of course, that was just ‘Mother Nature’s Tourism Bureau’s’ way of saying welcome to June in Saint Louis, Missouri.

  The only thing that made it bearable standing up here on the open concrete deck of the parking structure was the slight breeze rising and falling around us, and more importantly, the fact that a table in an air-conditioned restaurant was waiting for us down at street level.

  I tilted my head up to look at my friend’s face. While I wasn’t the tallest person around, I was still of average height. Ben, on the other hand, took average and built upon it with reckless abandon. He stood a full six-foot-six and carried himself on an enviable broad-shouldered, muscular frame.

  The sun silhouetted him so I had to squint in order to make out his angular face. Framing his countenance was coal black hair, worn as long as departmental regulations allowed. His dark eyes gazed out over high cheekbones, revealing little and missing nothing. It was impossible to look at him and not immediately know that he was full-blooded Native American.

  “Whaddaya mean, ‘not actually’?” he huffed.

  And with that, we officially had the ‘hook.’

  On the fly, I dredged up an old childhood myth and applied my own twist to it. “What I mean is that you’re dead before you ever hit the ground.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Seriously. The fear of falling is so intense that your system overdoses itself on adrenalin. It pretty much shorts out your nervous system and causes you to suffer a heart attack as you fall, end of story. You’re a corpse before you ever hit the ground.”

  I watched his rugged features as his right eyebrow furrowed. I could literally see him rolling what I had said over and over inside his head, trying to get a handle on it.

  “Bullshit,” he retorted.

  The one word comment wasn’t exactly what you would call swallowing the ‘line,’ but I’d known he would be a hard sell.

  “Oh yeah.” I nodded vigorously as I spoke and offered up a bogus factoid to lend credence to my lie. “It’s a known fact. Now, of course, the fall has to be greater than twenty feet for the fear to reach that level and cause your system to dump that much adrenalin.”

  He cocked his head to the side and gave me an unsure look.

  I pressed on. “You know how when you fall you get that bizarre feeling in your gut like you just lost your stomach?”

  “Like when ya’ top a hill on a roller coaster, you mean?”

  “Exactly. Well it’s like that, but since you don’t fall far enough you don’t have the heart attack.”

  “No way. Hills on roller coasters are way higher than twenty feet.” He shook his head as he argued.

  “Sure, but that’s different. Your subconscious knows you are in a roller coaster.”

  “You’re just yankin’ my chain.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So what about skydivers?”

  “Parachute. Again, the subconscious knows.”

  The look on Ben’s face told me that he was struggling with this sudden contradiction of perceptions. He wasn’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination, so I was actually surprised I’d managed to take it this far.

  My friend slipped his hand up to smooth his hair and then allowed it to slide down and began to massage the back of his neck. He always performed this gesture when he was thinking hard on a subject.

  “Really?” he eventually asked, giving his head a slight nod as he squinted at me.

  Now, there was the ‘line.’ I thought about going for the ‘sinker’ as well, but I wasn’t feeling particularly ornery today, and I doubted my luck would hold out. Besides, it had only been one cliché, not to mention that he was bigger than me and he had a gun.

  I gave it a long moment before finally answering him with a simple, “No.”

  He shook his head and screwed his face into a frown. “Jeezus, Rowan, don’t fuck with me like that.”

  “Hey,” I splayed my hands out in a ‘don’t blame me’ gesture. “You’re the cop here. Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell when someone is lying? Besides, I’ve never known you to be gullible. How was I supposed to know you’d fall for a line of BS like that?”

  “Because it came outta your mouth,” he replied with a grunt as he stabbed a finger in the air toward me. “I EXPECT everyone else to be lying but not you. And, you got so damn much trivia runnin’ around in your head, I just figured maybe you knew somethin’ I didn’t.”

  “Well…” I shrugged. “Maybe I do on some stuff. Sudden stops at the bottom, though, not really my area of expertise.”

  “Yeah, mine either, but I’ve seen a couple of meat sacks sprawled out on sidewalks. The friggin’ stop at the bottom’s what did ‘em in. Trust me.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I replied, consciously chasing away the visual his words
had conjured, and then I paused for a moment before changing the subject. “So, I may be wrong, but I didn’t think we came here to discuss the physics of falling from tall buildings. Or did we?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “But you were the one starin’ off into space over here.”

  “I wasn’t staring off into space.”

  “Yeah, Kemosabe.” He nodded. “Yeah, you were.”

  I didn’t issue another rebuttal. It occurred to me that perhaps my earlier self-assessment was in error. Maybe these days heights did make me seize up after all.

  “So, speaking of lying, are we at least here to go to lunch like you said when you showed up at my door?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Why would I lie about that?”

  “You tell me? It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve used a free meal as a carrot to get me somewhere.”

  “C’mon, man, I told ya’ already. This is my day off.”

  “I seem to recall you once telling me that you are never really off duty,” I reminded him.

  “Jeez, what are you, a freakin’ tape recorder?”

  I merely chuckled in reply.

  “Yeah,” he continued. “Maybe so, but even when I’ve done that to ya’, I didn’t screw ya’ over on the deal.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Hell yes.” He waved his index finger in the air to punctuate his comment. “I know for a fact that I still bought chow.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the meal,” I said as we began walking along the inclined parking lot toward the glassed-in elevator enclosure.

  He ignored the comment. “Well, to be honest, I do have somethin’ else I wanna do while we’re here, now that ya’ mention it. I need to hit The Third Place after we eat.” He offered the name of the tobacco shop we both frequented with what could have easily passed for reverence. “You good with that?”

  “Yeah.” I gave him a nod. “I need to have Patrick order me some more CAO MX Two’s anyway. It’ll save me a call.”

  “You and those damn double maduros,” my friend muttered.