Torrent

by Lindsay Buroker

  Artemis looked at Simon, eyebrows arching in polite inquiry.

  “This is my friend Simon Jimmicum,” I said. “He’s from Washington but came down here for school and stuck around. Simon, this is Artemis Sideris.” I glanced at him to see if he’d recognize the name. He hadn’t shown any interest in sports in the years I’d known him, but she’d been a big deal for a while. His eyes didn’t widen in recognition though. “We were neighbors when we were kids.”

  “You’re Greek?” Simon gawked.

  Not his smoothest opening line, but at least he hadn’t stuttered.

  “I was adopted,” Artemis explained. “And you can call me Temi.”

  She gave me a curious look as if to ask why I hadn’t used the nickname. I didn’t give her anything back. I’d gotten over the abrupt end of our friendship a long time ago, but seeing her here made me feel like an awkward kid all over again.

  “I went home for a while,” Temi said. “After... things. It was uncomfortable. Did you go home? After you finished school?”

  “Not for long.” I couldn’t believe she’d come all the way out here to chat about our childhood homes. What could she possibly want? “Mom and Yaiyai started inviting appropriate bachelors over to dinner and making pointed comments about how adorable my sister’s new baby is.”

  “I experienced... something of the sort,” she said. “I couldn’t stay there. But I’m not sure what else I can do. I never got my diploma, or even a G.E.D. I’m looking for a job though. Somewhere far from home. I thought perhaps...” She cleared her throat and gazed toward a squirrel cavorting through the branches of a tree a few campsites away. “Your mother mentioned your business. I thought you might hire me.”

  “What?” I blurted at the same time as Simon said, “Yes.”

  I glared at him, then told Temi, “I don’t know what my father said, but we’re not that profitable yet. We aren’t able to pay ourselves salaries and we’re just getting by.”

  “But you have freedom.” Temi sounded wistful. “You go wherever you want, when you want, and it sounds... romantic.”

  “Geez, Temi, you’ve been all over the world for tennis, haven’t you? I can’t imagine what seems appealing about driving around the Southwest in a clunky thirty-year-old van with AC that only works intermittently and when it does, you wish it didn’t, because there’s a burned meat smell that comes out of the vents.”

  “Hey,” Simon said, “don’t talk about Zelda like that.”

  I shushed him. He crossed his arms over his chest and gave me a glare that would have been a lot noisier if he weren’t inhibited by Temi’s presence.

  “I’ve seen much of the world, yes,” Temi said, “but I was always so busy training that I didn’t have time to enjoy it. I always thought there’d be time later, but...” She finished with a shrug.

  “Well, uhm, I’m sorry you came all the way out here,” I said, “but we can’t afford to hire anyone. This isn’t the best time either. We’ve run into some...” Trouble? I wasn’t sure if we were in trouble exactly, but the punctured motorcycle tires and the fact that the deputies had promised to “be in touch soon” left me wondering if we should abandon Prescott before—

  A hand clasped onto my arm. Simon lifted a give-us-a-moment-please finger toward Temi, then hauled me to the far side of the picnic table. The brush didn’t quite hide the view of cars cruising down the road toward town, their noise insuring our conversation would be private.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “We’re not hiring her, Simon. We barely covered the fee for the campground. Full-time employees are slightly more expensive.”

  “We can find a way.”

  “Says the man who stole the pepper shaker from Denny’s last night.”

  Simon pointed at my nose. “That was a revenge theft, and you know it. They charged me for the onion ring upgrade, but I didn’t get onion rings.”

  “A normal person would have simply pointed this out to the server.”

  “If you don’t know I’m not normal by now, you haven’t been paying much attention over the last four years.”

  I conceded this with a wriggle of my fingers, but said, “We can’t hire her, and this wouldn’t be a good time to expand the business anyway, what with the possibility of vengeful motorcycle riders coming after us.”

  “What if we didn’t hire her? What if we made her a business partner? She could share profits.”

  “You barely know her, and you want to share our meager profits? I know she’s pretty—”

  “She’s gorgeous.” Simon sighed and gazed over my shoulder. Temi had opened her car door and sat with her legs crossed as she poked around on her phone.

  “Yes, but that shouldn’t influence our business decisions.” I prodded him in the chest to reclaim his attention. “What if she were four feet tall, hunchbacked, and had breath like moose droppings?”

  “If she drove a Jag, I’d still want to take her on. She obviously has some resources at her disposal. Maybe she’d finance the purchase of a new Dirt Viper.”

  “If she’s desperate enough to want to work for us, I doubt she has funds left to finance anything, but I’m glad you don’t want to simply sleep with her—you’re planning ways to exploit her financially too.”

  Simon’s shoulders drooped. “I... it’s not like that. I thought that practicality would appeal to you.”

  “Uh huh. Listen, I have personal reasons for not taking her on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like nothing I’m going into here.”

  Skid Row’s Youth Gone Wild blasted from my pocket. It startled me, both because Simon had changed my ringtone without telling me—again—and because I’d been dreading a call. If those motorcycle riders on the hillside had written down my number and were using it...

  “Are you going to answer it?” Simon asked.

  “You think I should?”

  “It could be a client.”

  “It could be a psycho with a tool that can rip people’s heads off.” I glanced toward Temi, hoping she hadn’t heard that. She was politely ignoring our conversation, ostensibly at least.

  “Here.” Simon held out his palm.

  I dropped the phone into it without hesitation. My brave moments didn’t extend to talking to creeps on the phone.

  “Rust and Relics, this is Simon,” he answered. “Yes. Yes. That’s right.”

  “Who is it?” I mouthed.

  “Let me give you to my assistant.” Simon gave me an arch look. “She’ll get your address and payment information.”

  In other circumstances, I would have smacked him for calling me an assistant, but this time the tension flowed out of my body in a wave of release. A client. Clients were good.

  Unless... What if it was the motorcycle people pretending to be a client?

  Simon handed me the phone. I would rather have picked up a snake, but I lifted it gingerly to my ear.

  “Hello?” I listened to the request and said, “Yes, we still have the antique coffee grinder. It’s in our warehouse in Phoenix.”

  Simon rolled his eyes at the mention of a “warehouse.” What we had was a small, non-climate-controlled storage unit in South Tempe. We paid my old roommate Sarah to pack and ship items when we weren’t near town.

  I entered the man’s credit card information into my payment-processing app. He lived in Maine and wanted the big hand-crank grinder to display in his family’s coffee shop. More importantly, he didn’t sound like someone harboring a barely-contained resentment for slashed tires.

  As I ended the call and stuffed my phone back into my pocket, a roar from the highway drew my attention. Two black motorcycles came down the road. The riders wore black leather and black helmets, and one head turned in my direction as they passed. I couldn’t do anything more cogent than stare back. When they’d disappeared from sight, I glanced at Zelda, making sure the van wasn’t visible from the highway. Trees and leaves stood between it and the pavement, so I didn’t
think the riders would have been able to see it, and they shouldn’t have been able to recognize me... I didn’t think. Unless more than coincidence had brought them to the same old mine shaft as us. What if they’d been following us since we arrived in town? What if—

  A hand clamped onto my arm again. “That was them, wasn’t it?”

  Before I could answer, Simon sprinted to the Jag. “You want to work with us?” he asked Temi. “We need a ride in something fast, right now.”

  Temi shrugged and took out her keys.

  “What?” I blurted. “We’re not going after them. What are you thinking?”

  Simon had already hopped into the passenger seat. “They have my Dirt Viper!”

  “Simon,” I called, running toward them, “it’s not worth getting hurt for.” Or killed. “We can write it off on our taxes and—”

  “Go, go,” Simon barked to Temi. His urgency to get his metal detector back had made him forget his shyness.

  Temi had started the car, though she looked back at me before putting it into gear. “Are you coming?”

  I should have said no, but if the tech half of the business got himself killed, who would update the website? I climbed into the back seat, though not without a few choice insults for Simon’s stupid metal detector.

  Like a prize thoroughbred, the car roared into motion. It startled a dog three campsites down, which roused every other dog in White Spar. A serenade of barks accompanied us to the exit. Temi didn’t pause at the stop sign; she merely tore out onto the highway, eliciting an irritated honk from a truck. It wouldn’t have hit us anyway, not at the speed Temi was going. From the back seat, I couldn’t tell if she was grinning, but I had a feeling she’d sped in this car before.

  Simon pointed and shouted, “Pass those guys.”

  Paying no attention to the solid double yellow line in the center of the road, Temi roared around three cars before veering back into our lane. I clutched the back of her seat, my fingers like talons. We were approaching town, and the speed limit had already dropped to thirty-five, but we were going seventy.

  Was there some rule about not getting into a sports car with anyone crazier than oneself? If there wasn’t, there ought to be.

  We passed four more cars before slowing for a light. I was half surprised she didn’t run it, but Simon was pointing again. Up ahead, beyond a few other cars, the two motorcycles had come into view. Metal detector thieves or not, they were obeying the speed limit.

  I leaned forward between the seats. “What are you planning to do when we catch them?”

  “I haven’t come up with a plan yet,” Simon admitted.

  I groaned, flopped back into the seat, and pulled out my phone again.

  “Who are you calling?” Simon asked.

  “I’m texting Sarah.”

  “About what?”

  “Gonna relay that client’s shipping information to her,” I said. “If we get killed, I’d hate for some coffee shop owner in Maine to be forever wondering what happened to his order.”

  Simon gave me his Coyote smirk. “Yeah, that’d be my biggest concern related to our deaths too.”

  “Just... shut up and come up with your plan.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Our high-speed chase ended with us sitting in front of Cuppers, the Jag parked between a dented Toyota with plastic duct-taped over a missing window and a Volkswagen bug even older than our van. Lots of tourists visited Prescott, and some people from Phoenix had second homes up there, but I felt conspicuous in the fancy car anyway. Of course, that could have to do with the way we had roared around the corner and into the parking space, causing the collective eyebrow raising of numerous people sitting at outdoor tables, sipping their lattes.

  The motorcycles were parked farther up the street in front of the Hotel Vendome. We’d arrived in time to watch the owners walk inside—rather Temi had watched them walk inside while Simon and I kept our heads down so they wouldn’t spot us.

  “You didn’t see their faces?” I asked. She’d described them as tall, slender, and clad in black leather, but I’d already digested that much when they cruised by the campground. “They took off their helmets, didn’t they?”

  “They did, but they were wearing black wool caps that covered most of their hair, and they didn’t turn this way so I could see their faces.”

  “Black wool caps?” Simon crinkled his nose.

  My reaction was similar. Sure, it got nippy at night there in the fall, but the afternoon sun beating down upon us had passersby wearing T-shirts.

  “Yes,” Temi said.

  “Both of them?” Simon asked. “That’s a weird fashion statement.”

  I almost giggled when Temi gave a head-to-toe consideration of his messy hair, 80s T-shirt, torn jeans, and dust-covered socks and sandals. “Yes,” was all she said. She’d never been one for overt insults.

  Simon didn’t notice the slight anyway. He must have been mulling over something, for he soon blurted, “Maybe they’re Vulcans.”

  “Pardon?” Temi asked.

  I covered my eyes with my hand but explained. “Aliens from Star Trek.”

  “With pointed ears,” Simon added. “In the episodes where the away team traveled back in time or to a planet that wasn’t familiar with Vulcans, Mr. Spock would always wear hats or wool caps to hide his ears and eyebrows. The best episode was City on the Edge of Forever when Spock showed up on old Earth without a hat, and Kirk tried to explain his ears to the police by saying his head had been caught in a mechanical rice picker as a child.” Simon grinned in fond reverence for this memory.

  I whispered, “You were closer to impressing Temi when you weren’t talking to her.”

  Simon seemed to remember he was in the presence of a pretty girl and flushed over his geeky faux pas. Temi merely appeared amused.

  “Uhm, were the Vulcans carrying anything?” Simon outlined the precise dimensions of his prized metal detector before I could tell him to stop calling the riders that.

  I hadn’t noticed anything big enough to qualify strapped to their saddlebags, and Temi confirmed my suspicion. “They weren’t carrying anything.”

  Simon sank back in the seat. “Damn, where is it?”

  “Maybe they were done using it so they left it back by that mine,” I said.

  “Mine?” Temi asked mildly, reminding me that we hadn’t filled her in on anything. She’d been a good sport to go tearing off after the motorcycles without any information.

  “We can give you the details over d—dinner,” Simon said, his deflation from seconds before fading as he smiled hopefully at her.

  “Can we figure out what we’re going to do here first? If anything? Because if not, I’m going to spend some of our client’s money on a mocha.” I waved toward the coffee shop.

  “We were at the sheriff’s department for a couple of hours,” Simon said. “Maybe our Harley guys already came back to town and dropped off their purloined goods.”

  “That’s a lot for them to have done, considering we left them with slashed tires.”

  Temi’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t think your mother gave me all the details about this business of yours.”

  “That’s a given,” I said. “This is kind of... extracurricular though.”

  “As in we’re using our free time to try and get back the $5,000 piece of equipment those people stole,” Simon said.

  “Are you sure it was them?”

  “We weren’t exactly parked at the head of some popular hiking trail,” Simon said. “There wasn’t anyone else out there.”

  Except the dead guy, I thought. “What do you want to do then, Simon? We might have been able to knock on the door and chat with them if you hadn’t stabbed their tires, but as it is, I don’t think it’s wise for us to get anywhere near them.”

  “Why don’t we get coffee and sit at the outdoor tables until those two leave again?” Simon waved at the hotel. “They didn’t have any take-out bags with them, so they probably have to go out to get
dinner. Once they’re gone, we’ll sneak up and look in their rooms.”

  “That place doesn’t have many rooms,” I said. “We’d probably get questioned if we sauntered in. Besides, how would we search their rooms without a key? My archaeology classes didn’t even cover how to break into ancient tombs, much less modern hotel rooms.”

  “Once it gets dark, we could climb up to the balcony and start looking in windows.”

  Temi was following all of this, her elbow on the back of her seat, her thumb and forefinger making an L-shape to cup her jaw.

  “This is why I don’t give my mother the details,” I told her.

  “Do you regularly do illegal things?” she asked.

  “No,” Simon said. “We’re not the villains here. We’re upright citizens.”

  “For upright citizens, we have a lot of condiments in the van that we didn’t pay for.”

  “How many times are you going to bring up that pepper shaker?” Simon asked.

  “There’s mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup too.”

  Since the conversation wasn’t going anywhere—and nobody was getting out so I could use either of the doors—I climbed over the side and headed for the coffee shop. Now that I’d been thinking of chocolate, I wanted a mocha whether we were staking out the hotel or not. A moment later, Temi and Simon followed me. We ordered our drinks, and I eyed the sandwiches and salads on the menu, but we had peanut butter and jelly and a bag of carrots back at the campsite. Why spend money eating out, when we had such a health mecca at our disposal?

  We sat at an outdoor table near the sidewalk and positioned Temi so she could watch the Vendome. I still wasn’t sure if these people would recognize Simon or me, but Temi couldn’t have been anticipated. Every now and then, though, one of the coffee shop patrons would give her a curious look, as if wondering if she might be some familiar celebrity. Temi either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice.

  “Someone in a black cap walked past a window,” she said.

  “Oh?” I didn’t turn my head, though I was tempted.