“But the witch doesn’t have the tattoo,” I said. “I do.”
“The surrogate has to be male because the Dyaks are a patrilineal society.”
“So, the old woman can be a messenger, but not a surrogate.”
“In the simplest terms, yes.”
“So why would this demon pick me?”
I stood up, full of restless energy, and wandered out to the SUV, drawing a path in the dust on it as I circled the vehicle.
“Well, that’s where we leave anthropological hypotheses and enter pure guess work.”
“So guess, already.”
“The demon got pissed off with the machete man, and you happened to be available.”
“Why was it angry with the machete man?”
“Betrayal.”
“How could he betray the spider?”
“It took some doing, but we found out from the head man at that new village that he works for an outfit of illegal loggers. Machete man had agreed to act as a guide.”
“So, the new village people were in on this from the start?” I said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“We all trusted him… without question.”
“Johnnie should have known better…” Jimmy trailed off.
“So now I’m possessed by a killer spirit who is unhappy with me. Could it get any worse?”
“Yes, Sebastian, I think it can,” Jimmy said. “If he’s willing to let you die, or kill you himself, it means he has already identified a replacement.”
“Who?”
“Why, your Indian friend, mate. Who else?”
Chapter 29
Distraction
Chief William frowned when I walked into the reservation office but said nothing.
“I wonder if you could help me,” I said.
“You want an AA meeting?” he asked.
I chuckled at his joke, but he still wasn’t smiling.
“Um, no. I’m looking for the old man. We drank together last night and sweated, but now he’s gone.”
“I told you, there is no old man.”
“All right, but, just in case someone else might know him, would you be all right if I drove around the reservation…”
The chief gave me a long, silent look.
“You don’t bother people. If they ask you to leave, you go,” he said. “And no booze.”
He turned and walked away.
For ten days, I drove every inch of that reservation that my four-wheel-drive would go. Several old people admitted knowing of the medicine man, but no one had seen him in years, or so they said.
I learned that he belonged to a different clan of the Ute tribe, one that had simply disappeared. The few who knew him agreed he had powerful medicine, whatever that meant.
Every evening I bounced over the rutted road to the cabin, made myself a drink, took a cold-water bath from the pump and had another drink. I walked in the desert when the sun was high and let the alcohol leach from my pores. Then I sat on the steps at night, pouring more gin right back into myself until I thought I could sleep without visions or nightmares.
I didn’t try to contact Amanda or her lawyer, Mr. Smith. I doubted that she wanted to see me, despite Mike Owens’s claim. I suspected he was trying to get me to take the first step. After all, Amanda had my cell number; she could call or text anytime.
Perhaps doubt is the wrong word. I feared it. I was afraid she wanted to tell me face to face that she was through with me. I figured as long as I didn’t contact her, we weren’t totally through.
So I searched for the Indian and waited some more. He never showed up, and I decided to move on and tie up a loose end—three days and seventeen hundred miles away.
*
Cecilia Brant answered the doorbell in Arlington, Virginia, on the sixth ring. She was bare-footed and wore a calf-length terrycloth robe and a towel wrapped around her head.
I gaped at her.
“Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there drooling?” she said.
“Thank you. It takes a few seconds for things to register lately,” I said. “Did Mike Owens call you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ask you to see me?”
“No.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then why answer the door?”
“Unlike some people, I need to be near the person I’m going to kill,” she said.
That startled me.
“Are you planning to kill me?” I asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“Well, let’s see how that goes,” I said. “I haven’t had much luck killing me. Before I die, let me tell you I had nothing to do with your husband’s death. I hadn’t given him a thought since I left the Middle East until Mike told me that he had died.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“My expectations are pretty muddled right now. For what it’s worth, it’s the truth.”
I don’t know if she believed me, but she turned out not to be the grieving widow I’d imagined. As we sat over coffee in a living room covered with tapestries she’d collected from her trips abroad, I learned the general was apparently an overbearing jerk in his personal life as well as in his profession.
She made no effort to get dressed and crossed and reclosed her tanned legs. Her robe showed slender ankles, then rounded calves and dimpled knees. I lost track of the conversation, and we ended up doing the things naked people who are attracted to one another do.
It happened once on the sofa, then again on her king-sized bed before we calmed down.
Lying beside me, without sheets covering us, she touched the fading bruises on my throat.
“You’ve got bruises. Did someone else try to kill you?”
“Something like that. I’m not sure. As I said, it’s taking longer than usual for things to compute,” I said. We lay facing one another, her leg draped over me. She was looking into my eyes; I was looking at her left breast. It was an uneven staring match.
“Shouldn’t we be smoking a cigarette or something?” I said.
“You need that after sex, do you?”
“Ah, I forgot you’re a shrink.”
“And a new widow. If I told my husband’s colleagues about what you just did, they would kill you in a heartbeat. They loved him far more than I did,” she said.
“So, what do you make of this?”
“Our having sex?”
“Well, maybe, but that’s not what I had in mind.”
She hesitated.
“Nothing in my training would lead me to believe that a demon can possess a human being. It’s outside the realm of documented experience,” she said.
“I’m human and I’m experiencing it,” I said, “and it’s taking a rather nasty turn. I tried to kill it; now I think it’s trying to kill me.”
“Why do you think it failed to kill you?” she asked.
“I think…”
I hesitated and looked into her eyes.
“I think there may be limits on what it can do. And it and I are both trying to discover what those limits are.”
“So, if I had pulled a knife and stuck it in your ribs a few minutes ago, would you have died?”
“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
Cecilia rolled onto her back, distracting the hell out of me, and pulled a very sharp knife from under her pillow. Then she rolled back onto her side, placing the tip of the metal against my Adam’s apple.
“Shall we see what the million-dollar answer is?”
Chapter 30
Operational
TOP SECRET
FROM: MAJ WALKER STURGEON, 348TH GENERAL SERVICES, CHIEF OF STAFF
TO: OPERATIONS TEAM CHARLIE
RE: ORDER TO DISABLE CONTACT
IN ABSENCE OF DESIGNATED COMMANDING OFFICER, CHIEF OF STAFF CONTINUES IN COMMAND PER REG. 14-37-B, REV 09/2015.
CHIEF OF STAFF PERSONALLY ASSUMES COMMAND OF TEAM CHARLIE EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. USE I.D. TEAM CHARLIE ASSET GOL
F RPT GOLF.
TEAM CHARLIE ORDERED TO DISABLE CONTACT US CITIZEN SEBASTIAN ARNETT, PASSPORT 774872778, REF Y0071-12-14284-R CMS.
BE ADVISED SUBJECT TARGET CURRENTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE US ARMY SPECIAL WEAPONS COMMAND, USMC LTC MICHAEL OWENS, COMMANDING.
MAKE NO RPT NO CONTACT WITH LTC OWENS. INFORMATION AVAILABLE THIS SOURCE WILL BE ROUTED VIA CHIEF OF STAFF PERSONALLY.
OPERATIONS AUTHORIZED IN HOMELAND AND ABROAD. NO RPT NO AUTHORIZATION LIMITS.
FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS THIS ORDER VIA CHANNEL OMEGA RPT CHANNEL OMEGA.
ALL PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS RE: CONTACT TARGET ARNETT SHALL BE DESTROYED IMMEDIATELY.
ENDIT
TOP SECRET NODIS
Chapter 31
Murder
Amanda’s lawyer—the buttoned-down Charles Ivo Simon—reached me two days later at my cabin in West Virginia.
I was in a deep funk over my tryst with Cecilia and, quite frankly, her kinky response to it. A Band-Aid covered the nicks she had made on my throat while practically riding me to death.
I wanted to attribute her—our—behavior to grief, but I hadn’t been grieving the general’s death, and I’d enjoyed a long day and night with her. I was seriously glad none of the general’s men had knocked on the door to check on her while I was there.
“Mr. Arnett, are you there?”
“Yes, Mr. Simon, what can I do for you?”
“The Denver police want to speak with you again, and Mrs. Campion has hired me to represent you. I’d like to make arrangements for you to return to Colorado.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“No, thanks?”
“Yep. No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not going back to Denver.”
“What about a conference call with me on the line?”
“Nope. I’m done with Denver.”
“I don’t believe you’re a suspect, and your legal jeopardy would be minimal,” he said.
“You said you were hired to represent me.” I avoided mentioning Amanda’s name. “So, represent me. Tell them no. I was attacked. Period.”
“But your attackers died,” he said, as if this made a difference.
“Chalk it up to bad life choices. I have problems of my own, and I’m not taking on another. Actually, I think you’ve got a lot of balls calling me. You—and your client—booted me out of Denver.”
“Mr. Arnett, there is another thing—”
I hung up on Charles Ivo Simon and turned the cell phone off. I didn’t want my funk to get funkier, although of course it did because it added Amanda to the guilt trip I was on with Cecilia. That got me remembering Sarah, and I dug into the liquor cabinet.
As I sipped my third mid-day drink, I reasoned that I had no grounds to feel guilty about Amanda. I’d saved her life, or at least kept her from injury and armed robbery. She’d thrown me out. Or more precisely, she’d had Charles Ivo Simon do it for her.
Thinking of her brought images of her naked in bed, which made me think of Cecilia naked in bed. As wonderful as Amanda was, Cecilia was a wild woman and there’s nothing like a naked woman with a knife to get the blood flowing.
I pondered whether I needed a cold shower or another cold drink. I made the drink and took it to the shower. As I stripped, my thoughts turned to the muggers, death and demons.
*
The crunch of tires on the gravel drive and a firm knock on the cabin’s screen door interrupted my lunch the next day.
“Mr. Simon,” I said, recognizing the lawyer through the wire mesh. “What brings you to West Virginia? And in a business suit, no less.”
I held the screen door open, and my pin-striped guest craned his neck as he entered the open space that made up my kitchen, dining and living area.
“Are you a hunter, by chance, Mr. Arnett?”
“No. I pretty much shoot just pictures. Why do you ask?”
I looked around, trying to see the cabin as a visitor like Simon might.
“Do you own a gun?”
“Yes, why?”
“Is it available?”
“Might be,” I said. This was getting strange. Simon didn’t look armed or dangerous, but I glanced at the block of knives hidden beside the refrigerator. Caution, I had discovered recently, is not a bad thing.
Simon inspected the cabin again.
“This would be hard to defend,” he said. “Too many windows.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Simon shook himself back to my world.
“We need to talk.”
“We did that yesterday. I’m not going back to Denver. I told you—”
“It’s not about that. May we sit?”
“Sure. How about the porch?”
“That’s no worse than all these windows.”
I didn’t know what was up, but Mr. Charles Ivo Simon, Esquire, was freaking me out just a bit.
“How did you find me?”
“The local fire chief gave me directions. He seems to know you well.”
“I support the volunteer fire department, buy raffle tickets for the gun bash every year.”
“Mmm.”
I grabbed my smoking bag off the piano and followed the increasingly strange Mr. Simon onto the wide porch that stretched the length of the cabin.
He lowered himself onto an old straight-backed chair with a cushioned bottom. I slouched into a canvas sling chair, pulled a briar pipe from the pouch and started stuffing Virginia tobacco into the bowl.
“My father smoked a pipe,” he said.
“Mr. Simon, what do you want? More to the point, what does Amanda want?”
I held a stick match to the tobacco and puffed white clouds of smoke.
When the pipe was properly lighted, I dropped the pouch onto what passed for an ashtray—a pie tin weighted down by a smooth rounded stone from a nearby creek.
Simon scanned the lines of pine trees surrounding my cabin.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“I’m not here for Mrs. Campion, although I think you misjudge her.”
He turned to me.
“Some people are looking for you. Two men came to my office the day before yesterday, not long after I called you. They wanted to know how to find you. At least one of the men was on my flight out here.
“I’m being followed,” Simon said, “and you’re being hunted.”
“That’s it?”
I laughed. The lawyer looked surprised.
“I know I’m being followed. Colonel Mike Owens of the United States Marine Corps has been tasked with keeping me (a) alive and (b) out of the handsof nefarious foreigners. Some of his guys rent the house just over the hill,” I said, pointing over my shoulder.
“They’re about as close as they can get without camping out in the yard. They put some electronic devices around my property to track comings and goings around here. I suspect they have a good census of every wild critter in the area. You probably just ran into a couple of Mike’s guys. No big deal. I’m sorry you had to come all this way. I guess I shouldn’t have hung up on you.”
“If his men know where you are, why would they send someone to ask me?” Simon said.
“I don’t know. Maybe testing you to see if you’d rat me out to strangers?”
“I talked to Colonel Owens two nights ago. Mrs. Campion suggested it. They are not his people.”
“Mr. Simon, do you think the military is going to admit to a lawyer that it is following an American citizen on U.S. soil? I mean, how many kinds of illegal is that?”
“The colonel said you were in denial.”
My ears burned. I really hated people talking about me behind my back. I puffed up a red dome in the pipe. Smoke wreathed my head. Cool down, I told myself.
“So, two guys came looking for me in Denver. Why didn’t they just Google me? I’m all over, just like everybody else. They can probably find my address and phone number,” I said.
He leaned forward in his chair.
“Actual
ly, Colonel Owens has been quietly deleting you from online databases. There is no longer any connection on the Internet between you and West Virginia,” he said.
“I didn’t know that was even possible,” I said. “Well, I don’t know what to say. Mike’s paranoid, but he’s paid to be around me, I guess. So, what did you tell these guys?”
“I told them that client information is confidential, even from the U.S. government without a subpoena, and that I’d need to see a court order before I would consider divulging any information whatsoever about any of my clients.”
“That’s a little dated, isn’t it? We gave all that up after 9/11,” I said. “The government knows everything it wants to about all of us. I’m only surprised they needed to ask you.”
I puffed up another cloud of smoke. He said nothing, and I followed the tendrils of smoke toward the ceiling.
“I have some information for you about these men, their photographs, and so on. I emailed it all to myself through an email account that can’t be traced to me,” he said.
“I don’t want them to know that I have this information or that I’ve passed it on to you. I’ve also sent an audio file of our meeting and some other things. You should retrieve it as soon as you can from an anonymous Internet connection. Not here.”
He looked over both shoulders.
“Mr. Simon, I think you’re approaching the Mike Owens level of paranoia there.”
“It isn’t paranoia if you know someone is following you,” he said.
“So someone is following you,” I said.
“I told you, one of the men was on my flight out here,” he said.
“Did they follow you here?”
“I think I lost them somewhere around the Virginia-West Virginia border when I took a back road and got lost myself.”
“Well, that can happen around here,” I said.
“Nonetheless, I’m sure he’ll find you just as I did, by asking around. I’m sorry to have brought them to your door.”
For a skilled lawyer—and Amanda would only have a skilled shark representing her—Mr. Smith was both chatty and nervous.
“I wouldn’t joke about this. They appear very capable of violence.”
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 17