It was two seconds of silence, then a click. Given Gus’s paranoid nature and his refusal to speak to answering machines because some shadowy shadow government within a shadowy shadow government would compile voice profiles, I took that as a message to call him back. The phone rang once, then clicked, then rang again with a completely different tone, then clicked, repeat, click, repeat. Finally, Gus answered.
“Jonah?” he said by way of greeting.
“Gus.”
“So, I have some very good news,” he said.
“Oh, thank god,” I muttered.
“I managed to sell your books.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Well, we could go to Vegas and have a hell of a time.”
“That would involve you leaving the house for more than thirty seconds, which you haven’t done since—”
“Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell was right, you know?”
“Right, how much?”
“Minus my fee, we’re looking at around ninety-five hundred.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep, someone wanted that old diary pretty bad. Fetched a nice chunk of change.”
“Well, that’s a plus,” I said, starting the truck. That, coupled with whatever I could hustle Lysone for, would leave me out of the Carvers’ debt and, quite possibly, carrying a few extra bucks in my pocket.
“You alright? You sound rough,” Gus asked.
“Bad night. Listen, Gus, do you have enough money on you that you can float me until everything clears?”
“I have it in gold. I don’t trust paper money.”
“Wait. What?” I asked.
“I don’t trust paper money. Those strips they put in it? They’re data recorders,” he said. “They take samples of touch DNA, record fingerprints.”
“Right. Gold’s fine,” I said. “Mind if I swing by tonight?”
“I don’t have any plans. I may stream a Tori Spelling documentary, if that interests you?”
“I, no, no it doesn’t. Not at all.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Positive.”
“Ah well. Thought I’d offer,” he said.
“Much obliged,” I said. “See you in a few hours?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Gus said.
I hung up the phone and started the truck, backing out of the small lot that sat behind Sam’s gym. The phone rang again when I pulled out into traffic. I didn’t bother reading the name. I just answered it.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mister Heywood.”
“Miss Lysone.”
“I take it there is a good reason why you never arrived to our meeting?”
I cut a quick glance to myself in the mirror. My bandages were clean, but my face underneath was a myriad of bruises, scrapes, and cuts.
“You could say that,” I said.
“I see. Is the fragment still safe?” she asked, and once again her voice was colored with the slightest bit of desperation.
“As houses.”
She sighed with relief. All in all, Lysone still threw me off. There was something about the way she’d been so cool and detached, so in control in the beginning. Yet now, the closer she got to that damned rock, the more she seemed to need it. She sounded like an addict getting closer to a fix. It freaked me out, just a little. It also told me I had a damned good chance of managing to pull more money out of her if I played my cards right.
“Do you think you can work me into your schedule now?” she asked, a slight edge coming back to her voice, that control in tone reasserting itself.
“Well, that depends.”
“Pardon?”
“I said that depends.”
“On?” she asked.
“On how the next few minutes of this conversation proceed,” I said.
“I take it you have some sort of proposal,” she said, making no effort to hide the fact that she was patronizing me.
“Actually, yes. See, I did a little research on this rock. It’s a bona fide hunk of the Ledberg Runestone, you’ll be happy to know. It’s also got some juice to it, and I’m pretty sure you follow my meaning.”
“It is and I do, yet I fail to see how this is relevant to our previously held arrangement.”
“Because the terms of our previous arrangement are in need of a little alteration,” I said. I’d been letting the tide carry me for too long. It was time I started taking a little bit of control and start swimming. To be honest, it felt good to be playing the game, to be the one doing the hustling and not the one getting hustled.
“Is that so?”
“It is. See, the way I figure it, this rock is worth easily fifty, sixty thousand to the right person. Initially, you were going to offer me twenty thousand, then it dropped down to five. I’m feeling generous, so how about ten thousand and we call it a day?”
There was a long stretch of silence. I drove mostly up and down side streets, circling back on myself, wasting time while I waited for her to talk.
“And if I refuse?”
“Well, at the moment I’m going roughly eighty miles an hour down Interstate forty,” I lied. “Think maybe this rock would hold up if I drop it out a window? Hell, I could probably find another buyer if need be.”
“I think you couldn’t possibly be that stupid,” she said.
“You’d be amazed how stupid I can be,” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“Perhaps not.”
“So, what’s it going to be? Do I drop it out the window? Find another buyer? Or do we come to an agreement?”
“Do you know how quickly I could kill you, if I so chose?” Lysone asked. She delivered that news the same way Cash would: emotionless, flat, like it was just an item on a to-do list. The thought of Cash set my stomach to rolling. I didn’t answer for a second, opting to take a deep breath and compose myself.
The fact that she was willing to kill for it, assuming she was telling the truth, told me that I’d gotten to her. That she believed I had what she was after. I didn’t doubt she could kill me if she wanted to, but for now, I had the advantage.
“Supposing you could, that seems a bit like overkill,” I said. “There’s also no guarantee that if you did that, I’d have it on me when you did. Seems an awful lot of work on a guess. Ten grand, that’s it. Less than you offered the first time, more than the second. I think it’s perfectly reasonable. Besides, the offer is time limited. You either take it or I start looking at other options. I can meet you now, and we can both walk away happy.”
“As much as it pains me, I suppose you have a point.”
“So, Jack of the Wood then? Say half an hour?”
“It would seem so,” she said.
“Good,” I said, pulling into the same lot that Waylon and his brother had seen fit to beat the bejesus out of me in, two doors down from Jack of the Wood. I sat in my truck, staring at the walls, at the traffic. My hands were shaking and I was coated in sweat when I finally got out. I grabbed my bag, complete with the rock, tossed it over my shoulder, and walked inside my favorite bar.
Chapter 27
One of the many reasons I love Jack of the Wood is the music. Tonight’s fare was a band belting out traditional Irish tunes. A decent crowd had shown up for the festivities, and there was the chatter of bar patrons, the clatter of glasses and bottles, all mixing with the fiddle and acoustic guitar of the band. The joint had a lot of history. It was the kind of place where stories were shared over glasses and a whole hell of a lot of merry got made.
I got my drink at the bar, a double of one of their better Irish whiskeys, and scanned the crowd. I knew a lot of the faces, some of them by name. A few glasses got raised in my direction. I ignored them, trying to pick Lysone out of the crowd.
When I finally spotted her, it was in a booth at the back. People seemed to avoid her, walking out and away from her table rather than going straight past her. I wrote it off as a vibe she gave off. After all, she wasn’t exactly the most friendly or inviting
woman I’d ever met. Attractive, yes. “Inviting” wasn’t a word I’d associate with her. A glass of water sat in front of her, the outside thick with condensation.
It took me more than a minute to wade through the crowd, which was heavy with college kids interspersed with the regulars. The band drifted from one upbeat drinking song to another, the patrons with them in force, slurring along to every verse. I slid into the booth across from Lysone. Her eyes snapped towards me. There was desperation in them, something that I hadn’t seen the other times we’d spoken. There was something else, too. Something dark and primal that I couldn’t really put my finger on. It wasn’t so much her body language. It was more of an aura, which I guess explained why people were choosing to avoid her. Hell, I wanted to avoid her at this particular moment, and I was about to make a decent sum of money off of her.
“You have it?” she asked, a sharp edge to her tone.
“I do.”
“Give it to me,” she said.
“No,” I said.
She blinked, a look on her face like she’d been slapped.
“No?”
“No.”
Lysone stared at me, her eyes narrowed. Finally, she settled back in the booth, arms crossing over her chest, a slight tug of a smirk at her lips.
“Ah, I see now,” she said.
I threw an arm casually across the back of the booth. For almost the span of an entire song, we sat like that, staring at each other. I broke first, wiping sweat from forehead with the back of my hand. A small smile tugged at Lysone’s lips. She was like a hungry wolf catching the scent of a very tiny, very scared bunny.
“This is, I believe you call it, the hustle, correct?”
I shrugged.
“Actually no hustle whatsoever. It’s pretty cut and dry.”
“Ah,” she said with a patronizing smile. “By all means, carry on.”
I’d be lying if I said that her reaction was doing wonders to bolster my confidence regarding this transaction. Either way, I was all in, I had to play it out to the end whichever way it went.
“The price has gone up. It’s that simple,” I said, trying to exude as much confidence as I possibly could.
“Has it?
“It has,” I said, matter of fact. “See, I did a little digging. It turns out your magic pebble is worth quite a bit to the right buyer. Matter of fact, it’s worth quite a bit more than your initial offer. So, we’re going to renegotiate,” I said. Even to my own ears, I didn’t sound entirely sure of myself. Hell, I was starting to think I sounded more like a scared middle schooler asking a girl to a first dance than I did a con artist, practitioner and channeler of primordial mystical forces, or spell-slinging master of the occult arts.
Lysone quirked a brow and nodded for me to continue.
“Ten thousand. Cash.”
“Ten thousand dollars in cash?” Lysone asked, though she sounded more amused than inquisitive. I was hoping for at least resigned, maybe insulted. This was not going as planned.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to get a read on her. There was something underneath her facade, something that I couldn’t quite put a name to. It was dark and violent. The reality of how out of my depth I was had started to creep in at the edges of my nerves and it was taking a ton of willpower to not get up and run.
“There’s another option,” Lysone said, pitching her voice to something just above a whisper.
“No, there isn’t,” I said, keeping as much bravado in my voice as I could.
“But there is.”
“Fine,” I said with a shrug, trying to appear nonchalant. “There’s other people that will pay me for this. I came to you first, since you’re the one that made the initial job offer. Call it courtesy.”
“A courtesy? You tried to shake me down.”
“Nature of the game. Don’t like it? Don’t play,” I said.
Lysone settled back in her booth and took a small sip of water. She set the glass back on the table and traced one fingertip through a small droplet of water.
“Mister Heywood, let me spell something out for you,” Lysone said, turning her eyes back towards me. Her voice had changed. Before, it had just been icy. Now, each and every word seemed to reverberate with power. The very air around Lysone felt cold, oppressive. It reminded me of the few hours just before a blizzard, when it feels like the entire world has changed, becoming something desolate and heavy with the impending wrath of Mother Nature. I’d felt power before, but Lysone had just changed the game. Everything around us had become quiet, not because they had stopped talking, but because just sitting near Lysone had blocked out the sound.
Whatever she’d done to conceal what she was, she’d just taken that camouflage off, and I was in the presence of a power far older, far stronger, and far more callous than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. My hindbrain, that part that focuses on survival, was going into convulsions, dumping me with adrenaline and a resounding need to run. My whole body was shaking. I felt hot and cold at the same time, like my body didn’t know how to react to being near Lysone anymore.
“You are, as the saying goes, out of your league. You are a very, very small cog in a very big machine. I could kill you and everyone in this room, with nothing more than a thought,” she smiled slowly, a predator’s smile. “To be perfectly honest, I could wipe this insignificant pin prick of a hall from the face of the map and spend less energy doing it than it takes you to blink.”
I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat there, mouth open and precariously close to losing control of my bladder.
Lysone let the words hang in the air, then reached into her pocket and put an envelope on the table. She slid it towards me. Sound came rushing back in, the sound of the band, of the crowd, yet it was all sort of surreal and hard to take in. Things had changed in that moment. People, we like to think we’re at the top of the food chain, the apex predators. Myself, everyone around me, we were insignificant compared to Lysone, whoever or whatever she was.
“Now, what you owe me. I want it,” Lysone said, taking a very girlish and demure sip from her glass. “Put it on the table.”
My heart, still thudding at roughly the pace of a speed metal drumline, drowned out the words.
Lysone tapped one nail against the table, the sound so sharp in the din of noise that it hit me like a slap in the face.
“The stone. On the table,” she said. “Go on, you can do it.”
I reached into my bag, my hand trembling, and withdrew the stone. Almost instantly that feeling of its power washed over me. Only now, there was malevolence in it. It was like the stone itself wanted to be near Lysone. It practically hummed with metaphysical bad intent.
I set it on the table and immediately regretted it. I should have never even brought the damned thing to her. I should have never taken this little heist-for-hire on to begin with. But I had, and now because I had, something terrible was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but I knew it like I knew that Han shot first and that there was a special spot in hell reserved for the jackass who cancelled Firefly.
As soon as my hand left the hides wrapped around the stone, a nearly cosmic weight settled onto my shoulders. I suddenly understood what Pontius Pilate had felt like when he’d washed his hands. Worse yet, I had absolutely no idea why.
Lysone gave me a brief nod of thanks, a wink, and just like that, she vanished. The stone was gone, she was gone, and I was left sitting there still shaking, scared out of my mind, and feeling like the biggest mark on the planet.
I sat in Jack of the Wood for a long, long time. Hours at least. I didn’t drink. I didn’t even move. The last vestiges of Lysone’s power had faded only seconds after she’d vanished.
While I sat there I tried to reconnect to humanity. It sounds odd, but I needed the feeling that came with being near other living, breathing humans. After getting just the slightest taste of whatever that woman, or woman-shaped thing, was, I needed the reassurance. I was scared to leave. You hear sto
ries about monsters, about things that we can’t explain, but to be in the presence of that much sheer power was something wholly and entirely different.
When I finally left, the night had turned ominous, heavy. In the distance I could see an illuminated cross outside of a church, one of its light bulbs burnt out. The light it threw off only made the shadows seem longer and darker.
I’d left my phone in the truck, and the little screen displayed two missed calls. One from Sam and one from Gus. It was already pushing past midnight, so I figured all the trouble I’d gotten Sam in, I could wait until the next day to call him back. The last thing I needed was for Andy to start throwing a fit thinking Sam had some strange man calling him in the middle of the night.
I called Gus back, and the phone didn’t even ring. Not much of a surprise there, but with no other place I could think of to go at the moment, and the debt with the Carvers still hanging over my head, I pointed my truck in that direction and started driving.
Chapter 28
When I got to Gus’s, the gate was laying in the driveway, torn off its hinges. The security camera, usually mounted on a long metal pole, lay next to it on the ground.
I didn’t get out of my truck. Instead, I turned into the driveway and made the short half-mile trek in record speed.
The front of the house told the same story, the front door had been torn off and now lay at the bottom of the steps. A few of the yard gnomes had been relocated to the front yard, hard enough that they were in pieces. I saw wires sticking out of some of the gnomish debris.
I killed the engine and sat in my truck, listening to the motor tick. Everything was silent. This far out, there should have been the song of cicadas, an owl, bullfrog, something.
I got out of the truck, leaning on my cane for support, and stood there. Waiting, hoping to hear something. Anything.
Nothing came.
It took me a few minutes for me to muster up the nerve, but I finally made my way to the stairs. I moved slowly, not just because of the cane, or the fear of what was waiting in the wings. There was no telling what sort of traps Gus had set up. For all I knew, I’d take two steps and end up in a pungie pit, or a bear trap, or hell, both at once.
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