“Hey, that sounds good.” I tried to keep my voice casual. “My wife’s pregnant and we’re just looking for a nice, quiet neighborhood. We live closer to Chicago now and it’s getting a little rough for our taste.”
I must have passed another test, because he touched the socket wrench to his forehead. “Well, good luck finding a place. Lots of families here, you could do worse. I’m Tim, by the way.”
“Paxton,” I supplied automatically. I tried to hold back my wince. Way to give him your real name, slick. “And thanks, I appreciate it.”
He waved a hand and turned back to his car. I must have eased his initial suspicion with our conversation because he no longer seemed to care that I was on his street. That would change quickly if I didn’t get a move on, even though I hadn’t accomplished much other than creating more questions for myself. I headed down to the end of the street and made a turn to circle the block. A strip mall off of the main road offered me the best opportunity. I parked the bike and hung my helmet off of the handlebars. On my feet and off the Kawasaki with my hands tucked into the pockets of my jacket, I was just another pedestrian. Paralleling the Gennaro’s street, I turned the corner — and vanished from sight.
The invisibility is an illusion, of course. Without a solid surface at the rear of the eye for light to reflect off of, a hypothetical invisible man would be blind. And even if he weren’t, for some reason, he’d be constantly barking his shins on obstructions or tripping due to lack of perspective given that he’d be unable to see the position of his own limbs. It would be like stumbling through a pitch black, unknown room all the time. Hardly a recipe for conducting clandestine investigations. I’m clumsy enough without adding invisible feet to the equation. Thankfully, when ‘cloaked’ I can see myself just fine.
I set up my cell phone camera to record once since I can’t see myself when I use the trick. There’s a slight shimmer as I move, but other than that I’m almost entirely unnoticeable. The effect is not unlike the movie Predator — a fact I find both creepy and cool. I don’t know if it’s enough to see with the naked eye, but so long as I move quietly and avoid stepping in mud or snow, I can move about with no concern for drawing attention.
That doesn’t mean that I can just walk up and open Bobby’s front door, of course. Tom or another neighbor would have to notice that particular oddity. In that case, he’d doubtless remember the stranger who was looking at houses.
Despite the ringer that Mother’s court case ran me through, I’ve made it through most of my adult life without being in any serious legal trouble. I’d like to keep it that way. So as the alley behind the Gennaro house opened up to my left, I turned inside and took careful steps to avoid branches, glass, or other debris. Oddly enough, there was no activity in the backyards of the houses on either side of the alley. The people of the neighborhood were evidently spending all their time out front. Presumably, once the school day is over they’ll retire to the rear, where rambunctious little ones can be more easily contained inside fenced-in perimeters.
The fence behind Bobby’s house was — thankfully — chain-link and low enough that climbing it is a simple matter of stabbing the toe of my shoe into an open square and swinging my opposite leg over. The chain rattled slightly as I made the move, but it’s a quiet enough noise that it could have been nothing more than the wind. I heard neither outcry nor questioning expression.
I knelt inside the perimeter and shucked out of my backpack. I tend to keep a spare jacket inside in case I need to make a quick change of appearance. Wrapped up inside the jacket is something more than a little illegal that would land me in quite a bit of trouble.
“You didn’t get this from me,” Esteban muttered when he handed over the lock-release gun. The devices are a restricted for purchase by law-enforcement agencies only and are essentially an automated lock pick. Insert the business end into any lock, pull the trigger a time or two, and you’re inside. My fingers are deft enough that I could probably learn to pick a lock the old-fashioned way, but that’s time-consuming.
There was probably a suitable spell I could have used from the grimoire, but I had to go and reduce it to a sack of ashes. Hindsight.
The Gennaro’s back door opened into the kitchen. I made a quick study through the decorative glass. The inside seemed deserted if a bit tidier than the outside. Satisfied that the house was empty, I unlocked the door.
The door eased open on silent hinges. I stepped inside.
Chapter 7
I’d suspected before, but I knew for a fact that the house was empty and abandoned as soon as I stepped inside and eased the door shut behind me. The coating of dust was enough to verify that I was, indeed, the first person inside in weeks. The mystical radar in the back of my head told me that nothing intangible lurked in the house’s dark rooms.
I was alone. The darkness at the front of the house told me the homeowners had closed the drapes and blinds before leaving, so I dropped the cloak. It doesn’t hit me as hard as the push, but if I kept it up long enough I’d end up with a whale of a migraine.
I stood there for a moment and just soaked up the atmosphere. As I waited, I tucked the lock-release gun back into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. I didn’t expect anything bad to happen, but if I needed to run, I didn’t want to have to leave any evidence behind. I wasn’t here for any nefarious purposes, but the police didn’t always see things the same way when it came to breaking and entering. Kent and Esteban would vouch for me, but the reference checks would take up time that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know what was driving my newfound sense of urgency. If anything untoward had happened here, I certainly didn’t feel it. My gut told me that whatever had happened to Bobby hadn’t gone down in his house.
But this was his home and it was all I had to go on. I studied the kitchen. It was neat and well-appointed; clean but lived in. Drawings and photos decorated the front of the refrigerator. I recognized Bobby right off of the bat. He looked like a typical, happy suburban kid. Dad was older, distinguished with graying temples. He looked like the kind of father you’d play catch with while the mom looked like someone who’d never force you to eat kale or organic sprouts. She looked like a cookie baker; beaming with dimpled cheeks.
Other pictures revealed that the family had a daughter, which made me wince. That just added more to the possible disaster. The age gap between the siblings was obvious. Bobby must have been an ‘oops.’ His sister wore a UW Badgers sweatshirt in several of the pictures and looked to be around college age.
The kitchen was a freeze-frame of happier, more contented times. It left me feeling sick to my stomach. Even if by some miracle his parents and sister were still alive, Bobby was not. I clenched my fists and tried to calm myself.
Tens of thousands of people die every day, but this was different. I don’t know who or what was responsible, but it had more obvious malice than a car accident or cancer. The anger I’d pushed down after meeting with Mother was starting to bubble back up to the surface. I restrained the urge to punch something.
Enough dithering.
I moved out of the kitchen and through the house. Much like the kitchen, the house was tidy but comfortable. In the larger rooms, it was hard to find a wall without a bookshelf. In many places, the family had shelved books two deep.
Snooping through the bedrooms seemed a bit much, so I settled for glancing inside of each and seeing if anything looked out of the ordinary. Nothing indicated that the family went anywhere in a hurry. Dresser drawers and closets sat closed and the beds were still made. To put it simply, nothing my tickled my Spidey senses. Bobby was apparently a Cubs fan. His sister had Ariana Grande and Zac Efron posters on the wall alongside the volleyball trophies.
There were a couple of doors at the end of the hall in addition to the three bedrooms. I checked the first. It was a small laundry room. Before I turned to put my hand on the door knob to the room on the opposite side, the tickle at the base of my neck told me that I’d found
what I was looking for.
The door opened inward into a moderate-sized office. For a moment, I felt as though I had stepped backward in time. The cluttered bookshelves overflowed with books and pieces of art. I was half-convinced that I stood in the entrance to mother’s office. Panic began to rise in me until I recognized the different positioning of the desk and the windows in the room.
It wasn’t mother’s office, but it was a reasonable facsimile. As I took a hesitant step inside, something crunched underfoot. I stepped back and knelt down. Pieces of brown pottery littered the carpet. My step had further ground one of them into dust. That tickling feeling at the base of my neck crawls down into my chest. Suddenly I was ten years old again.
“Mother, can I water your flowers?”
“You are not to step foot into my office, Paxton. And this is a very special plant that mother takes care of. But I appreciate that you are thinking of me.” Mother stroked the delicate, twisted branches of the miniature tree. I know I’m not supposed to step into her office, even when she’s inside, but there’s something hypnotic about the tortured dwarf tree that demands further study. “The Japanese call this tree bonsai, but the plant is nothing special. The real treasure is in the vessel.”
I remember giggling at her choice of words back then — ‘vessel’ — and turning away to pay attention to something else. Now, though, as I knelt down and rubbed crumbled pieces of pottery between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that her description was more fitting than I knew at the time and most probably intentional.
All that time, I marveled. Right under our noses.
The gritty clay disintegrated between my fingers and trickled to the carpet. At first glance, there’s nothing extraordinary about it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about it that I was missing. The quarter-sized lump between my fingers felt solid, heavier than you’d expect from a typical ceramic. Ancient pottery should feel fragile, dainty. This felt almost like a piece of gravel or concrete.
In the movies, I’d whip out my handy dandy forensics kit, immediately determine the extra ingredient to be some rare metal only found in one particular place in the state and rush the building in a storm of bravery and bullets.
Lacking both a forensics kit and a source at any local police department, I had to shrug the difference off as immaterial. If Mother had it, it’s more liable than not to be some ancient artifact. I can’t see where it would be more help than it’s already been, in linking Bobby’s parents to Mother. Something about this office screams ‘male’, so presumably, Bobby’s dad was a contemporary of Mother’s. I don’t know if they knew each other, but it doesn’t really matter. One way or another, one of the items that should have been secure back at the university made it out into the wild. The most important aspect is not the how of how the pot got here — vessel, part of me thinks, but I tried to ignore it — but the fact that yet again, coincidence is stacking on top of coincidence.
“So, walk away,” I muttered. “Let’s hit the beach.”
Saying the words is just spitting into the wind. I know that my conscience would never let me do such a thing. I brushed my fingers against the carpet to wipe off any of the residual dust and stood back up. And that’s when I saw the message.
A low, plush sofa sat against the wall behind the office door. The wall behind the sofa was bare, which made it ideal for the message slashed across the paint in blocky, luminescent letters. The letters themselves seemed to pulse, as though the writer had imbued the words with some sort of otherworldly rage as they squeezed the ink from the nether regions of enormous lightning bugs.
PAXTON COME HOME
WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU
I licked my lips and blinked a couple of times to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. When the words didn’t fade from view, I pulled out my cell phone and switched over to the camera function. On the phone’s small screen, the wall was perfectly normal wood paneling. Away from the screen, the message persisted.
Unless I missed my guess, what I was seeing was similar to how I saw ghosts. They didn’t show up on cameras, either. What was this, then? Ghost . . . goo? ‘Blood’?
What scares a ghost?
“Something that can make it bleed,” I answered myself, shuddering at the morbid tone of my own voice. Given the fact that ghosts couldn’t break pottery or kill someone, I was dealing with something above and beyond anything I’d ever encountered.
I turned to leave. As I did so, the toe of my shoe bumped into one of the larger fragments of the pot and flipped it over. I had discounted the pot as being of any further use, but my misstep testified to that incorrect assumption. There was a neat row of scratch marks on the inside curve of the fragment. One side of it is missing, crumbled to dust, but it looked like I had a good chunk of the mystery writing inscribed on Mother’s special little ‘vessel’.
I snapped a picture of the fragment with my cell phone. I needed to compare it to some reference materials, but it certainly looked like the pictures of cuneiform that decorated my Mother’s office — and definitely not something that would be period or regionally appropriate for a bonsai tree. Camouflage, perhaps, to disguise the pot’s true identity?
Of course, as with the pot’s presence in my Mother’s office, something as ordinary as a houseplant seemed out of place here in Mr. Gennaro’s workspace. I considered the strange pull the vessel had exhibited on me as a child and wondered.
Had Mr. Gennaro been subject to that same pull? Had Mother?
I attached the picture to a text and sent it to Karen’s work cell. I kept the accompanying message short and simple.
Akkadian, maybe? Can you translate?
Never underestimate the value of a crack research staff. I took another look at the message on the wall. I knew where I had to go now. Yeah, it was a trap. But that didn’t mean I was going to walk into it unprepared.
I took my time on the walk back to my bike. Steel-gray clouds had begun to roll in, bringing an abrupt bite of fall to the air. Yesterday, a few hundred miles to the south, my light jacket had been too heavy, but now I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and wished I’d worn something warmer. This time next month, there’d be frost on the windows and maybe even snow on the ground.
And I didn’t know if I’d be around to see it.
I’m not used to being afraid. I know ghosts can’t touch me, so they’re more of an annoyance than anything else — varmints to exterminate, trash to take out. Paxton Locke, paranormal garbage man. No busting involved or required.
That’s not to say I’ve never been in any squirrelly situations. One of the first times I made a house call, I learned that ghosts don’t necessarily haunt innocent people.
Let’s just say that if there are more than a few shades on your premises, someone in your household just might be a serial killer.
The drive back to the Wal-Mart parking lot was uneventful. I racked the Kawasaki and unlocked the door to the RV. It was late in the afternoon. My old house was a couple of hours away. Personal preferences or not, I was heading in that direction. Someone or something that knew me well enough to leave taunts for my eyes only wouldn’t expect me to show up after dark.
Or so I hoped.
I pulled the lock release gun out of my backpack and headed back to bed. If I needed them, I had keys to the house. This time around, I was going in loaded for bear.
I keep my more illicit gear stashed inside a lockable cubbyhole underneath my mattress and box springs. I get into it often enough that I installed some hinged prop bars to hold them up while I dig around. The lock-release gun went back into its slot. I pulled out something with a bit more authority to replace it.
Growing up, Mother would have been more accepting of hard narcotics in the house than firearms. I didn’t learn to handle them until I was on my own, courtesy of Esteban and his family. I’m still only middling with a handgun or rifle — it’s amazing how quickly cans on a fence post can dodge when you’re trying to knock them
down — but I’m more than capable with a few alternative options.
The pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun was something I’d acquired more or less legally, though I’d purchased it not long after I got an Arizona driver’s license using Kent’s house as a mailing address. The gun laws in my home state of Wisconsin aren’t bad, but they aren’t nearly as defense-friendly as those of the Grand Canyon State. A vestige of the cowboy days, I suppose, but helpful for my purposes.
I loaded seven rounds of #1 buckshot into the tubular magazine, racked the pump and loaded another. Kent suggested a side-saddle mount to carry spare shells on the receiver. After I filled that, I had sixteen rounds in and on a compact, easily managed package. If that wasn’t enough, I’d back off and call the SWAT team, or maybe wish for a tactical air strike.
The other item I fished out was a Taser X26C. Unlike most of the self-defense stun guns on the markets, this model looked like a pistol. It included a targeting laser, could work as both a contact device and fire prongs. I could personally vouch for its effectiveness, having used it to take the starch out of a serial killer who wanted to add my skull to the collection in his basement.
It goes without saying that my ‘adoptive’ dads give the best gifts.
Sufficiently — I hoped — armed, I stashed the shotgun in my backpack and lowered the mattress and box springs. I set the bag and Taser on the bed before headed up to the front. It might be apropos for the gear to ride shotgun, but I wanted it out of sight in case I got pulled over. I wasn’t planning on speeding, but you never knew. I was going through Chicago on my way home — Illinois highway cops are hell on vehicles with out of state plates.
I sat behind the wheel with my hand on the ignition, but I didn’t turn the key. You’d think, at a moment like this, that I’d be shaking like a leaf, but my hands were steady. With a sigh, I pulled out my phone and forced myself to make what could very well be the last phone calls of my life.
Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1) Page 5