by Alex Archer
“What did I see? What did Oliver see?” she whispered. She paced in a tight circle, putting her hands under her armpits. It was chillier in the lobby than it had been when she came in. “What? Who? Who did I see? Who?” She stopped and stared at the poster of a man dressed like Marilyn Monroe. “Who, indeed?” One of the men who’d attacked her, the tall one who’d been called Sute, was familiar somehow. She’d seen him before and only now realized it. “He was at the dig,” she exclaimed.
Annja bolted from the Purple Pussycat and stopped in her tracks on a rain-slick sidewalk bathed in night and neon lights.
Quite a few hours had passed since she’d stepped in for the late-morning show. In her trance, she’d fallen asleep.
8
“Brrr,” Annja said. Indeed it was chilly. The sun going down, and the fall evening made her wish she’d bought a sweater in the boutique—which a glance down the street confirmed was closed now. She’d picked the blouse because it was pretty without being flashy and it would serve as a fine Australian souvenir. But at the moment, it certainly wasn’t functional. The rain added to her shivers and sent her back inside the Purple Pussycat and to the concession stand. She’d noticed something earlier, hanging on the wall next to the cat timepiece.
“Miss, the eight-o’clock show started awhile ago. There’s another one at ten, and—”
“That jacket,” Annja said. “I’ll have one of those. A medium, please.” She was thankful they accepted American credit cards, because the price tag—sixty bucks or thereabout in American dollars—would have practically emptied her wallet.
She shrugged into it, finding the shoulders a perfect fit and the sleeves just a tad long. But there were elastic bands around the wrists, and so she pronounced the fit, “Good and warm, thanks.” It was purple, of course, satin, and the shiny metallic threads and seed beads on the back spelled out Pussycat. A smaller logo was embroidered over the breast pocket. It was lined more heavily than a windbreaker, and reasonably well-made for a wearable advertisement. Still, it just looked—tacky—and was something she intended to leave behind when all of this was done.
“Oliver,” she mused. “Someone needs to call your fiancée. But what to tell the woman? That I’m convinced the love of your life and my best cameraman has been murdered?” Annja still didn’t want to be the someone delivering the bad news. “And someone needs to find your body, Oliver, find out just what happened. Someone needs to pay.”
She zipped up the jacket and turned, just in time to see the woman on the pay phone finish her call to. Annja darted over and grabbed the receiver before it hit the cradle, even though there was no one else in the lobby to contest her for it.
Staring at the numbers, she realized she didn’t have enough coins to call Oliver’s cell phone—it was a New York area code and would count as an international call. Instead, she got the operator and placed a collect call to Oliver’s cell phone. It didn’t even ring this time. Next came a collect call to her producer. Once again she got Doug’s voice mail. Then she dug out her coins and pulled Wes Michaels’s card from her wallet. She stabbed in the numbers for his cell phone and growled from deep in her throat when a message played that the subscriber was out of range.
Should have realized that, she thought. No cell towers near the place. There was a satellite phone at the dig site; she’d seen one of the archaeologists with it. But she didn’t have the number for it, and she was certain she couldn’t get it through directory information.
“A fool I’ve been.” Annja was still angry at herself for falling asleep in the auditorium. She’d needed the rest, had slept so very little the night before, and the fight in the hotel had been taxing. Still, she knew she shouldn’t have allowed herself any respite, should have called the police, as she was doing now.
“Hello? I’m calling about the—” she searched for the correct words “—the bodies that were found at the Sheraton on the Park hotel this morning. Yes, the Sheraton on Elizabeth Street. I was—”
The desk officer stopped her from continuing. Annja tapped her foot and politely listened to him.
“Miss, I can put you through to media relations and—”
“No, you don’t understand, sir. I’m not a news reporter looking for a quote. I was there…. Yes, that’s right. I was there at the hotel.”
The desk officer interrupted her again. “Miss, the media-relations spokesman will be able to—”
“No, I’m really not a reporter. Honest. I’m a witness, almost a victim, actually. More than just a witness to the whole thing. I was shot at, and I—”
Once more the desk officer cut her off, and Annja realized he must be getting a lot of phone calls about the incident and was skeptical about her involvement. Perhaps they got a lot of crank calls.
“No, sir. I did not speak with the police at the scene. Listen to me. Please.” Annja blew a breath out between her teeth. “Can you transfer me, please, to one of the officers working on the case?” She knew they would either be at the station or still at the hotel. Police in any country didn’t quit easily. “Sergeant Griffith, yes, that will be fine. I’d like to speak with Sergeant Griffith. Thank you.”
Music she’d expect to hear in an elevator came on the line, and she tapped her foot faster. One minute passed. Two minutes. She looked at the pussycat clock. Three minutes, and the god-awful hold music changed to a tune equally bad. She turned back to stare at the number pad on the phone.
Then someone tapped on her shoulder.
“I need to make a call. How much longer are you going to be?”
Annja turned, seeing the woman who had been on the phone earlier.
“It’s important,” the woman persisted.
“So’s this,” Annja quietly retorted. Patience. Be polite, no need to cause a scene.
“This is very important!” the woman shouted.
Annja sucked in a breath and slammed the receiver down, deciding a trip to the police station was a better alternative than listening to hold music for who knew how long. A trip to the station was in order…right after she returned to the dig. If the men had indeed tried to kill her because of something she’d seen, it was possible Dr. Michaels and his team were also in danger.
She raised the collar on her jacket and returned to the sidewalk, dozens of thoughts swirling through her head—Oliver, the police, Dr. Michaels, the jade ankh, the tall man she recognized from the dig site.
“Sute,” she said, remembering the name one of her other attackers had called him. She’d spotted him shortly before they left the site, when she’d walked up the ridge to get Oliver. He was getting a distance shot of the student dig, and Annja looked through the camera to see it closer. Sute was there, with three more men who might have been her attackers. She only recognized Sute because of his height and lankiness. There were others at the dig, students and an older gentleman, small, who might have been a teacher. Another fellow who stood apart from the rest.
Remember, Annja told herself. What…who…did you see?
And there were tents, indicating that, like Dr. Michaels and his archaeologists, the students stayed at the site overnight.
“Who are you, Sute? Who were you?” She corrected herself. Annja glanced down at the bricks. The neon lights reflected on the water held in the mortar, looking like colorful electric snakes slithering away in all directions from her blue shoes.
Despite the rain, the Cross was crowded. Friday night, no wonder, she thought. Friday nights in most big cities bustled. It was hard to tell the tourists from the locals now, most of them wearing a raincoat or carrying an umbrella, heads down as they walked or turned toward companions they talked to. The night masked nationalities and ages, blending everything together like a watercolor painting that had smeared.
Across the street two lovers huddled under the overhang of a youth hostel. They were locked in a kiss and ignored the passersby who paused to watch or taunt. One shouted, “Get a room!” before guffawing and moving on.
Someone paus
ed under the awning near them, and appeared to look across the street directly at Annja. There were too many shadows to see more than his outline or to be really sure if he was looking at her. Maybe he was simply standing out of the rain and waiting for a cab. But she had the sensation that she was being watched, an unpleasant tingling that she’d come to recognize as a precursor to trouble.
She took a step forward, considering crossing the street and getting a good look at the man. But a car splashed by, and when it had passed, the man was gone. The two lovers continued kissing.
Maybe she could find a policeman walking a beat here. Maybe he could put her through right away to this Sergeant Griffith. Maybe Griffith would call Oliver’s fiancée and deliver the unfortunate news. Maybe he already had.
“They’re looking for me,” she mused, thinking of both the police and the men who’d tried to kill her. Perhaps the man she’d just spotted across the street had been shooting at her at the hotel. More likely he was just an innocuous visitor to the Cross.
The police were looking for her because her hotel room had been ransacked and she was nowhere to be found, had missed her flight. The police would have checked the airport, the hospitals, too, probably thought she was kidnapped or dead.
The dark-clad men were looking because she’d seen something she wasn’t supposed to.
The sounds of the Cross had intensified with nightfall, all of it bouncing off the shop walls—distant horns and sirens; the patter of the rain on the awnings, against the street and against the shoulders of people who scurried from one nightclub to the next; and the music. Annja could hear the strains of an unfamiliar tune spilling out the doorway of the Purple Pussycat behind her, and she picked out a stereo playing loudly from an upper apartment nearby. There was a jazz group across the street and to the east of the lovers, a figure she could barely see through the window wailing away on a trumpet, an old Louis Armstrong number. She wished her circumstances were different and that she could go inside the jazz club, sit and listen to the group. She’d gained quite an appreciation for good jazz growing up in New Orleans.
After a moment, Annja forced the sounds and sights to the back of her mind and brought her most urgent concern to the forefront. How could she get out to the dig? Renting a car was the only option, a four-wheel drive would be best. Likely most of the rental-car places were at the airport, so Annja would have to take a cab out there. She started looking for one.
Instead, her eyes lit on a black-cherry-colored Harley-Davidson Night Train. It gleamed in the lights of a trendy bistro. Expensive in the United States, and even more expensive here because of import fees, its owner must be someone reasonably well-off, she guessed.
She couldn’t just steal it. Shouldn’t, she told herself. No matter how desperate she considered her situation. Still, she headed toward it. The bike would solve her transportation problem and would get her out to the dig. It could travel the off-road part of the trip better than an average car.
A minute later and she was standing beside it, fingers stretching out to touch the leather handgrip.
Theft? She didn’t need that heaped on top of everything else, though God knew she’d done other things she wasn’t proud of out of necessity. No doubt the police already considered her tied in with what happened at the hotel. She didn’t need this added to it.
But lives could depend on her reaching the dig. Wes Michaels, his wife, Jennifer, and the other archaeologists out there might be in danger—if they weren’t already dead. Maybe the students at the tertiary dig were in danger, too.
“I can’t call out there,” she said. “No cell tower.” Again she cursed herself for falling asleep in the Purple Pussycat. “I should have done a lot of things differently.”
Theft was a minor thing, really, she thought as her hand closed on the grip, in the grand scheme of today’s events and…
“Hey, get away from my bike!”
9
Annja released the handgrip, skittered back a step and bumped into a rangy young man in a black leather jacket, chains hanging from epaulets on the shoulders. She put him at twenty-five, maybe, his face lineless and his dark eyes wide and bright. She was tall, but he towered over her, at least six-four, she guessed. His head was shaved, and he had a tattoo of an angry-looking gargoyle on the right side of his forehead, the tail twisting down and getting lost in a bushy eyebrow that was pierced with a thin silver hoop. A small diamond stud pierced his nose, and larger diamonds glittered on his earlobes. He had on black jeans and black leather chaps. But his shirt was a pale shade of rose that added what Annja thought was an out-of-place splash of color.
“Oh, sorry,” he said after looking her up and down. “I thought you were going to steal my bike or something. Didn’t mean to bark at you. I’m a little overly protective of my precious there.”
You were right to bark at me. I was going to steal it, Annja thought.
The biker squinted and cupped his hand over his eyes, showing a gold pinkie ring set with a diamond that was at least three carats. “I recognize you,” he said cheerfully.
Annja sagged. First the odd-looking girl on the bus, and now the tall, bald biker decorated with diamonds.
“You’re from Chasing History’s Monsters. You’re Annja Creed—the archaeologist!”
He grinned broadly and thrust out his hand. “I watch your program all the time. I’m addicted to the History Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, you name it. Can I get a picture, of me and you? That’d be ace.”
Without waiting for her answer, he turned to a middle-aged man behind him, also wearing a leather jacket. The fellow had a tousled mop of dishwater-blond hair and looked put off by the request. “Get a pic of us, Nate. This is Annja Creed.”
The bald biker sidled up next to Annja and hesitantly put his arm around her shoulder. He was polite, careful not to squeeze her or to seem too friendly. Nate produced a thin digital camera from his pocket and shook his head.
“Dark out here, and even with the flash, there’s no guarantee.” He took four pictures from slightly different angles and replaced the camera. “We goin’ in? Bet Max’s been waitin’ for a half hour already.” He nodded to the bar a few doors south of the bike. “It’s a soaker out here, raining hard enough to choke a frog. We goin’ in?”
Annja thought it wasn’t raining all that hard.
The bald biker didn’t answer his friend. Instead, he again stepped in front of Annja, still grinning. “Thanks for letting me get a pic. So you’re here filming something, right? I mean, not in the Cross, but here.” He gestured with his right hand. “In Oz. Filming something for TV.”
“Finished yesterday,” she said.
He touched his thumb to his chin and looked thoughtful, as if he wanted to keep engaging her in conversation but wasn’t sure what else to say. She noticed he had tattoos on the fingers of his left hand that were made to look like rings.
“Listen, sir…”
“Darioush,” he supplied. When he saw her raised eyebrow, he added, “It’s Persian. My mother traces her roots back to Persia. It means ‘ancient king.’ Friends call me Dari.” He paused. “You can call me Dari.”
Nate was frowning and looking from Dari to the bar and back again, finally folding his arms in front of his chest. Annja wondered if they were a couple. Nate’s T-shirt was pink and had five lions sprawled in the center, all of them male.
The pedestrians had stopped moving and crowded around them, some of them taking down their umbrellas so they could get a better look. Annja heard whispers.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving?”
“Some celebrity, I think. In the purple jacket.”
“Don’t know who she is. Somebody important, though. Look at her Harley. That’s a sexy bike.”
“She look familiar to you? I think I might have seen her somewhere.”
Nate leaned over to a woman in a blue rain slicker and made a face. “That sheila there, she’s on the television. National Geographic or something
historical. Dari’s smitten. And that’s Dari’s bike, not hers.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Annja saw two men at the edge of the crowd. They had dark complexions, and something was familiar about the one with the broader shoulders.
Dari slid a step to his left so he stood directly between Annja and Nate. “I think my favorite segment was the one you did on the goat suckers of Mexico. I caught it in reruns, too, and then I ordered the DVD.”
“The chupacabras?” Annja asked, as she’d made no reference to goat suckers on the segment but guessed that’s what he was talking about. She kept her eyes on the two men, who appeared perturbed that they’d been bottlenecked on the sidewalk. Still, she thought they could have gone around by going into the street.
Dari nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s it. The goat-headed vampires of Chilpancingo. And then there was the show you did on—”
Annja held her hand out like a traffic cop stopping cars. “I’m sorry. I’d love to talk, Dari, but I’m in a terrible hurry and—”
The man with the broad shoulders pushed himself into the middle of the crowd.
“Oh, sorry. No worries. I didn’t mean to tie you up here, getting drenched out in the rain and all, catching a cold. Probably got some steak dinner planned and—”
She shook her head. “The segment I finished here, I have to get back to the site.” She swallowed hard and opted for a shortened version of the truth, lowering her voice and moving so close to Dari that she could smell his aftershave. “Look, I have to get out there now. Right now. It’s important. Some of the people I interviewed yesterday could be in danger. I can’t call them. There’s no cell service there. My cameraman is missing, and some very bad people are after me. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
She lost sight of the broad-shouldered man, but his companion remained at the edge of the cluster. She felt for the sword in her mind, ready to summon it if necessary.
“Can’t explain,” she whispered. “Not here. Not in front of all these people.”