Chasing Shadows

by Jamel Cato

  He could have saved his breath, because I wasn’t going anywhere.

  When the gunfire returned a few moments later, I noticed it was trailing from the opposite direction and precisely hitting many of the same locations on Xavier’s house.

  The cacophony abruptly ceased about ten seconds after that. It took another two minutes before I felt brave enough to peek my head up. I didn’t spot any immediate danger.

  “It’s over,” a feminine voice said to my left. I turned that way to find a slender and stunningly beautiful Indian woman dressed in a skintight leather bodysuit. In the flesh, Sajala’s supernatural alter ego was orders of magnitude more ravishing than the wispy image I had glimpsed earlier.

  “Wow,” I said reflexively. “You look better than a double scoop of ice cream in the Mojave Desert.”

  “Tell that to him,” she said, looking over my shoulder.

  Xavier walked up and said, “Whoever it was is long gone, if they were ever here.”

  I noticed that both wounds on his face had completely healed.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I found a remote-controlled sniper’s nest on the hill over there.”

  That explained several things. “Was there a transmitter?”

  “No, but there’s a melted black wafer that I’m guessing was one before it self-destructed.”

  “Damn,” I said. “If they thought of that, I’m pretty sure there won’t be any DNA around.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Riva said, holding up a small piece of cloth.

  Chapter 12

  A bell chimed when I walked through the door of a palm reading shop in South Philly called Lady Seville’s House of Mystical Divination.

  Lady Seville was a fortysomething Romanian conwoman whose real name was Esmerelda Faw. Everything about her and her business was a scam except for one thing: She was in possession of one of six known copies of The Book of The Dead.

  The Book of the Dead is an ancient tome whose pages can reveal the future and divine truth from falsehood. According to the legend, the Devil pilfered it from the entry gate of Heaven, where Saint Paul had been using it to review the deeds of every soul seeking entry. Satan allegedly made six copies of the book before God sent angels to recover it.

  I was not sure what I thought about the legend, but the pages of the book, or whatever it really was, could indeed perform the feats claimed of it. I had been the beneficiary of its knowledge several times. The real mystery was why a charlatan like Esmerelda could read it. The pages of each copy appeared completely blank to everyone except for a select few individuals, who were known as Readers. Every Reader I had ever met or heard of besides this one was someone of extraordinary character or faith.

  “I accept credit cards and Bitcoin now,” Esmerelda snapped at me as she emerged from a beaded doorway in the back of her parlor. “So, I don’t want to hear any excuses about you not having cash.”

  “Hello, Relda,” I said with a smile.

  “You owe me two hundred dollars from your last reading.”

  “That’s one hundred fifty more than I remember. And I had Eve send you a check last year.”

  “The knowledge I imparted to you drained my divination abilities for two weeks. I had to temporarily close my doors. I almost starved to death.”

  I twisted my lips and waited.

  “Seventy-five,” she said. “Not a penny less.”

  I slapped a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “Take it or divine the back of my ass as I walk out of here.”

  She picked up the bill and made it disappear into a pocket of her skirt. “That was for your past due balance. You must prepay for today’s session.”

  I sighed and placed a credit card on her reading table.

  She regarded my immediate surrender with disappointment. “This must be serious.”

  “Someone just tried to kill me.”

  “Someone is always trying to kill you.”

  “But this time I don’t know why.”

  “You think it’s someone you came in contact with recently?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “The Book is not like some search engine you pull out of your pocket when you feel lazy.”

  “I know that. That’s why I’ve only asked you to consult it on my behalf four times in all the years you’ve known me.”

  “What do you think of my new decorations?”

  I removed my special eyeglasses and looked around, focusing my attention on a framed canvas painting hanging on the wall behind me. It depicted a field of wildflowers blooming under a clear azure sky. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be, but it has a lot of aural energy not native to this plane, especially around the sky.”

  She seemed pleased with this assessment. “I paid twenty K for it. The sky is supposed to turn dark and cloudy if an undercover cop or someone else looking to do me harm is present.”

  “I could use one of those. Where did you get it?”

  “Wait here,” she said, getting up and leaving the room.

  She came back a few minutes later carrying a large book with an ornate green and gold cover. She placed it on a pedestal between us and opened it to its first page.

  I glanced over at the page, but it was empty.

  “You look different with your glasses off,” Esmerelda remarked, letting me know she was on to me.

  I put them back on.

  “Give me your hand,” she said.

  I complied.

  She ran her index finger along the palmar ridge of my open palm in a manner I found mildly sensual.

  “If you’re in danger, you’re welcome to stay here for a day or two,” she said. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  I turned to look at the painting. A roiling thunderstorm was forming in the sky. I wondered if my host knew that her magical early warning system worked both ways. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll just take a reading for now.”

  She placed my hand gently on the table, then turned to consult the Book.

  When I got back to my office, Eve asked, “Did you get your palms read?”

  “Sure did.”

  “How was it?”

  “Expensive.”

  “Did it come with a happy ending?”

  “I think you’re getting my appointments mixed up.”

  “I never mix up anything. I’m just checking to make sure we can still pay rent.”

  “I am the master of my flesh, not a slave to it.”

  “And how many times have you slept with Esmerelda?”

  “Four times, maybe five.”

  “That sounds like total mastery of your flesh.”

  “Can we discuss something besides my sex life?”

  She handed me a manila folder bulging with documents.

  “What’s this?”

  “Reading material for your flight to California. That’s the workup on Robert Hollenbeck, the minutes of every HOA meeting in the last three years and the DNA results you wanted. Your flight to San Francisco leaves at seven ten tomorrow morning. Mitchell will meet you in the Admiral’s Club of Terminal C at six thirty. Oh, and I posted a listing for a new Sales Associate for the store.”

  “What’s wrong with Andrea? She just started.”

  “She’s not going to work out. I’m just getting in front of it.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “She takes four smoke breaks every shift, spends too much time looking at her phone and the cash drawer has been off by a few dollars one too many times.”

  “But I thought you said sales went up after we hired her?”

  “They went up thirteen percent after you hired her against my advice.”

  “A thirteen percent increase sounds like I made the right choice.”

  Eve floated over to the small computer desk where we kept the security recordings of the store. As a ghost, she couldn’t physically use the keyboard, but she was able to interact with photons and electromagnetic fields, which is how she an
swered the phone and managed my electronic life.

  The video feed on the screen rewound to a point from the previous day. A man in his twenties marched into the store and began a livid argument with Andrea, scaring off all the other customers.

  “That’s boyfriend No. 3,” Eve said. “He’s upset about something to do with boyfriend No.1.”

  “What about boyfriend No. 2?”

  “He stopped by last Tuesday. He’s a loser, but Andrea is totally buying into his dream of turning his personal training hobby into the next L.A. Fitness. I told her it will never happen, but all she can see is biceps.”

  “When did you tell her that?”

  “When I called her and warned her to keep her personal life out of the store. She promised she would, but you can see what her promises mean.”

  “That’s too bad. She can sell sunglasses like nobody’s business.”

  “Sales are up because Andrea looks like the perky blonde on that TV show about the people who fix scandals for the President, except with shorter skirts.”

  “Sex sells.”

  “Domestic altercations don’t. I’ll give it a month before one of her boy toys is waiting outside the store before we open.”

  I sighed. “How about I leave future hiring decisions up to you?”

  “Smart man,” she said before vanishing from sight.

  Chapter 13

  Mitchell Westerfield and I sat in the plush lobby of a California-based startup company named EnviroTech.

  “How do you want to play this?” Mitchell asked me.

  “I’ll follow your lead. I can find what I’m after mostly by looking around.”

  “Great,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have some fun with this since they’ve already made it clear there’s no deal to be had.”

  Mitchell was a partner at Philadelphia’s largest law firm and the walking epitome of the white upper class elite. We had met some years earlier when I rescued his adult son and bank accounts from a circle of Gypsy summoners.

  A receptionist came and guided us through an office filled with the hallmarks of the Silicon Valley startup scene, including a ping pong table and throngs of barefoot millennials hypnotically peering into laptops branded with glowing Apple logos.

  We were shown into a glass walled conference room where two twenty-something men sat on expensive Aeron chairs encircling an enormous tree stump. One man was Caucasian and the other was of Asian descent. The white one had an unwelcoming expression.

  “That’s quite a table,” I said, gesturing to the stump.

  “It’s the base of a tree we salvaged from a deforestation site in the Amazon,” the Asian man said with pride. Danny Lin, the company’s co-founder and CTO, had a doctorate in Materials Science from Purdue and a genuine passion for sustainability.

  “Looks like a Threaberry tree from the forest hugging the banks of the Isocula tributary,” I said. “Or what used to be forest.”

  “That’s right!” Danny exclaimed. “Are you in the Movement?”

  I smiled. He meant the environmental activism movement, but asking that question to an African American usually provoked thoughts of a different kind of movement. In either case, the answer was no.

  “I’m just a guy with too many RSS feeds for my own good.”

  “Why don’t we get started,” Danny’s co-founder, Kit Halperin, said. EnviroTech’s website claimed that Lin and Halperin had met at a Ted Talk about the environment, but the investigative report that Mitchell’s law firm had prepared in advance of our meeting presented a mountain of evidence supporting its theory that Halperin had orchestrated the encounter as part of a larger strategy to exploit Lin’s new technology. The report claimed that Halperin’s own investigators had detected and disrupted Mitchell’s investigation before details of that technology could be uncovered.

  With my long history of involvement in defamation lawsuits, I suspect a law firm out there has compiled a similar report about me. I inwardly laughed at the thought of some poor researcher giving a PowerPoint presentation about my secret life of paranormal adventure.

  “It sounds like we already have,” Mitchell said. “I can’t imagine a better introduction than the one we just heard.”

  “I can,” Kit said, glancing down at his Apple watch. “What can we do for you gentleman?”

  “You can let my client participate in your series C round,” Mitchell said. “His scientific background would be a valuable asset for the Board and he has already provided a five million dollar good faith advance.”

  He was referring to the money I’d borrowed from my ex-wife, who’d told me that someone from EnviroTech had called her bank to confirm the availability of funds but never deposited the check.

  Kit produced a white envelope containing the check. “Yes, about that. We’re returning the funds because we’re not seeking new investors at the current time.”

  Danny’s expression indicated he wasn’t aware of that.

  “That’s funny,” Mitchell said with a predatory grin. “Because you were seeking them two days ago.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You signed a term sheet with Redwood Ventures the day before yesterday.”

  Kip’s face flushed with anger. “How the hell would you know that?”

  “I have lots of friends on Sand Hill Road.”

  “That’s confidential business information.”

  “And it still is. It was conveyed to me under Attorney-Client privilege as part of a firm-to-firm transactional matter.”

  “Which firm?”

  “A firm with no partners or employees who look like my esteemed client here. Sort of like EnviroTech, even though the numbers you submitted to the California Innovation Commission say something different.”

  Kit stood up. “This meeting is over.”

  “Sit down, Kit.”

  “Screw you. I only accepted this meeting as a favor to Tim. I knew it was a mistake. They’re always trouble.”

  “Who is always trouble?” Danny asked, genuinely confused.

  “Sit down or I’ll keep my dinner appointment with Dina Clovin later tonight.”

  Kit sat down. “Are you threatening us?”

  “I always skip threats and go right to promises,” Mitchell said. “And I promise that you will regret treating my client like a second class citizen.”

  “No one is treating him like anything.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Kit studied Mitchell.

  Danny and I looked at Kit expectantly.

  “We can offer your client Class B non-voting shares at a valuation of two billion with a four-year vesting window.”

  “Does that include a board seat?”

  “Our bylaws limit our board to seven members, but we can offer him a seat on our Scientific Advisory Committee.”

  Mitchell stood. “We’ll get back to you.”

  “Are you still having dinner with Dina?” Kit asked.

  “It’ll be canceled in the next fifteen minutes.”

  In the parking lot, I asked Mitchell who Dina Clovin was.

  “A woman Kit never wants to hear from again, especially not in court.”

  “Were you really having dinner with her?”

  “I’ve never spoken to her in my life.”

  “Remind me not to find myself on the other side of the negotiating table from you.”

  “Did you see what you needed? I’ll be glad to arrange a follow-up meeting.”

  “I saw what I needed to see.”

  “Good.”

  “How much do I owe for today?”

  I always asked even though I knew my money was no good with the tenacious barrister.

  “Don’t mention it. I should be paying you. That was the most fun I’ve had at work since the office Christmas Party of Ninety-Two.”

  “Oh yeah? What happened then?”

  Mitchell smiled and opened the door of his rental car. “I’ll tell you after I’m dead.”

  I’m pretty sure he meant that
literally.

  After Mitchell drove off, my walk toward my own rental car was interrupted by someone yelling “Dr. Tiptree!”

  I turned to see Danny Lin jogging across the parking lot toward me.

  “You forgot your check,” he said, catching his breath and handing me an envelope.

  I hadn’t forgotten it. “I would forget my head if it wasn’t attached. Thanks so much.”

  “Are you with Viridi? Did they send you here?”

  Viridi, the Latin word for green, was also the name of a secretive network of environmental activists. There is no such thing as a Threaberry tree. It’s a partial anagram of the word Earth, which is the dog whistle Viridi operatives use to identify each other. I love the planet as much as the next ghost hunter, but I had nothing to do with them. However, I wouldn’t let a little misunderstanding like that stop me from helping Pat and Ronnie.

  “The real question is: Are you with us?”

  Danny’s face looked like I had just spit on his mother and kicked his puppy. “Are you serious? I founded the Purdue chapter.”

  “Hard to tell from all the plastic and smog around your office.”

  “Kit chose this location. I wanted to move to a green campus with goats eating o-grass, just like eBay’s HQ.”

  “Six polar bears died in the time it took you to give me that lame excuse.”

  “EnviroTech will change everything. You should see our data. Total energy inversion, zero footprint. Solar is just a band aid. I told Jeff that at the San Bernardino meetup. I can’t believe you guys are coming after us.”

  “When you say zero footprint, do you mean zero zero or oil company net zero?”

  “I can’t go into the details yet. It’s a legal thing.”

  “I just joined your Advisory Board.”

  “But you haven’t signed an NDA. Kit would hang me by my balls if I told you anything.”

  “Like how he hung Dina?”

  Danny turned away. “Dina has mental issues. She couldn’t take the pressure.”

  “What kind of mental issues?”

  “The kind our settlement agreement says I can’t discuss. Look, Dr. Tiptree, I know it sounds like a bunch of empty words right now, but tell Jeff and the others that my heart and my technology are in the right place. They don’t need to do this.”