The Tell-Tale Con

by Aimee Gilchrist

  For a second, I found myself wishing that I could kill time like this every day. Maybe he would let me keep one of the phones. Then I would know what happened to the horse women.

  Then I hated myself a little just for thinking that.

  Now that I realized the direction my brain was going, I wanted to turn the phone off, but that would be ridiculously stupid.

  I would just ignore anything he said. It was already ten. How much longer could it take before the demon started telling him to rage against the man and we could bag this whole thing up?

  My determination to ignore him lasted for about thirty seconds after Harrison clicked on again. “Hey,” he whispered, “My Sharona just told me I need to go to math camp. Then all the girls will love me. Tell me the truth, Talia, do you find math camp hot?”

  I laughed, though the rational part of my brain was screaming obscenities at me for ruining all its hard work. “Compared to chess camp? Because that’s a tough one.”

  It occurred to me that maybe it was rude to make fun of his love of chess. It was the second time I’d done that without any regard to his feelings. But, like the first time, he seemed unperturbed. “Talia, Talia, Talia. Everybody knows that there’s nothing hotter than a guy who’s good to his queen. Chess players are always sexy.”

  There was something absurdly adorable about that kind of self-effacing acknowledgement of his geekness and yet unapologetic confidence.

  “Tallulah!” There was a hard bang against my door. “Did you eat all the cheese?”

  My fingers slid off the walkie-talkie making a loud, horrible screeching noise. Then I dropped it by accident. It bounced against the hard floor and landed finally with a resounding thud. I stared at the door, unsure what to do. Even if she came right in and saw me hanging out and talking to someone she didn’t know on a phone she hadn’t given me, she wouldn’t care. Mom’s parenting style involved ignoring me until she needed something. So perversely, I felt like I’d been caught doing something horrible, though I wasn’t doing anything wrong at all.

  I scooped up the walkie-talkie and shoved it under my pillow, still unsure why I was reacting guiltily. I cracked open the door. “No, I used the cheese for dinner. Why do you need some?”

  “I’m still hungry.”

  “There’s chicken left over from yesterday. Put it in the microwave.”

  She looked, for a moment, like she might complain, as though I had the magic ability to produce cheese at will. Then she shrugged.

  She pulled the door closed, and I slumped back against the dresser. My heart was thumping hard, like she’d caught me doing something terrifyingly inappropriate instead of talking to a guy from my science class.

  I pulled the walkie-talkie out and pressed the button. “Go to bed. I’ll be waiting.”

  There was a long pause. “I haven’t been told to go to bed in a long time.” It was easy to hear the amusement in his voice, even over the tinny speakers.

  “Don’t you want to get to this?” I’d lost my amusement and patience with this whole thing after the nerve-wracking appearance of my mother.

  I could practically hear him shrugging on the other end of line. Maybe if I was him, I wouldn’t want to get down to the demon stuff either. “I’ll let you know.”

  I was met with radio silence, and that bothered me. But Harrison was almost nothing to me. Nothing except my boss, anyway. I wasn’t going to feel guilty for essentially telling him to shut up and get to it.

  Not that ordering myself not to feel bad helped. Eventually I did fall asleep sitting up in bed, slumped over the walkie-talkie. But the explosive scratching noise of the walkie-talkie turning on came through loud and clear. I almost fell out of the bed before I was able to get myself together enough to press the button and hiss, “Go ahead.”

  I squinted at the clock. Just after 2:00 a.m.

  “I hear it,” he hissed back.

  “Hold out the walkie-talkie.”

  I heard something. A strange, low, guttural whisper. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could definitely hear someone talking.

  “Do you hear it?” he demanded.

  “Yeah. I’m coming over.” I scrambled out of bed, tripping over my backpack that I’d tossed on the floor. I fumbled for the light.

  “You can’t do that. The doorman won’t let you in.”

  “Then you better let him know I’m coming. Because I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  I ignored his further protests. Without being in his room, there was no way I could tell. Hearing the voices wasn’t enough. I needed to know everything to really know what was happening.

  Shoving a sweatshirt over my tank top, I skidded down the hall in sock covered feet and headed for the stairs. I hit Mr. Wong’s with so much inertia that I almost couldn’t stop when I discovered Mr. Wong himself standing in the middle of the Laundromat, right in my way. I scrambled to get control and ended up slammed against a dryer, one leg in each direction.

  “Oh good, you are here.” He didn’t seem remotely curious as to why I was running around in boxer shorts at two in the morning with my hair sticking straight up. Nor did he seem alarmed by our near collision. “I need to make noodles. You watch the machines.”

  Mr. Wong’s was a 24-hour establishment run by Mr. Wong and his wife, June. Their son, Roger, owned the grocery two doors up, and sometimes he, or his wife, a girl from Texas that I had to listen to complaints about pretty much daily, would fill in too. But there were times that someone needed to step away. Mr. Wong and I had an understanding. I would take over in a crunch, and in return he let us use the washer in the corner that was broken, and if you hit it just the right way it would wash for free. The integrity of my jeans and personal hygiene demanded that I hang around so that Mr. Wong could make some freaking noodles. But the noodles and jeans would have to wait.

  I held up my hand, all my fingers raised. “Five minutes Mr. Wong. I’ll be right back, I swear.”

  He had this face, I have never seen it on another person used with such perfection, that made me feel about two feet tall. But now wasn’t the time to fall prey to his displeasure. “Right back,” I repeated, edging for the door.

  Harrison continued carrying on over the walkie-talkie about how he couldn’t have me over.

  As soon as I hit the street I realized how underdressed I was for this little excursion. Freezing, I ran across the road, watching for drunks. The last thing I wanted to do was get hit.

  “What apartment do you live in?” I asked into the microphone.

  “I’m coming down. Just stay in the lobby,” Harrison hissed.

  Well, at the least the lobby was inside. My teeth were chattering. The desert at night is no place to be in shorts. I bounded up the massive staircase to the pretentious Library lobby, and, as promised, Harrison was already there. Dressed in ridiculous plaid pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt with a lopsidedly stretched collar, he looked about five years old. And pissed. Though whether at the voices or at my insistence on coming over, I couldn’t say.

  The marble lobby floor was almost as cold as the cement outside had been. I should have at least worn shoes. The guy sitting behind the counter, the security guard maybe, ogled me from his chair in a way that was utterly gross. Harrison’s expression, on the other hand, did not improve.

  “What’s the deal with King Leer?” I indicated to Captain Lascivious with my thumb.

  “I told him you were my girlfriend, and my parents didn’t like you so I had to sneak you in during the night for a booty call. I should have told him you were a prostitute,” he growled.

  I saw the guy pocket a bill with his smarmy smile still intact. “Did you pay him?”

  I guess it wasn’t my business, but it bothered me a little that Harrison had to pay the guy to get me in. “Just a hundred bucks. It’s supposed to get you in four times. You might as well come and listen to the voices before they stop. It never lasts longer than a few minutes.”

  I was apparently worth a maximum of twe
nty-five bucks a booty call. I didn’t know what the going rate was, so I didn’t know whether to be offended or not. I followed him to the elevator, electing to ignore the guard. If I didn’t someone was going to get punched.

  I checked my watch as the wooden-paneled elevator glided up fourteen floors in a fraction of a second, treating us to something classical played on a panpipe. It had been just over two minutes since I’d received his call. Harrison stood next to me in the elevator, silent, rumpled, and angry.

  Well, if he didn’t want my help he shouldn’t have asked for it. Okay, he kind of didn’t ask for it. But he shouldn’t have come to my house. Not that he’d known he was doing that. It didn’t matter. Because then he had hired me, and I was in the problem now, and I was going to solve it right. I knew how to get answers, and I knew when someone was playing someone else. Harrison needed me, whether he liked it or not.

  When the elevator reached the top floor, the door slid open with an almost silent snick, leaving us in a long dark hall, lit only with a couple of expensive, stylish and practically useless antique brass lamps. Harrison held a finger to his lips and opened the front door to his house, slowly and quietly.

  If I’d had it in my head that Harrison lived in an apartment, I was very much mistaken. At least he didn’t live in an apartment as I’d always known them to be. I now understood what Sam had been blathering about when it came to The Library. Harrison’s home wasn’t all marble and white as Sam’s boyfriend’s had been, but it was certainly awe-inspiring. With the lights of Albuquerque shining in through the massive bank of windows along one wall, I could see the living area was enormous. It was all dark wood, intricate carvings, soaring ceilings and tall bookcases. Everything suggested a library where the lobby had not.

  “Wow.” I tried to keep my voice quiet, but it seemed to echo.

  “This whole floor used to be the law section back when it was a library,” Harrison provided grudgingly, steering me towards another hall with a tight grip on my elbow. I knew which room was his before we opened the door, since I could hear the low grumbling sounds from beyond his slightly open door.

  We slid inside, and Harrison shut and locked the door behind us. I knew that it couldn’t be real, but I had to admit there was something very creepy about the growling disembodied voice floating in the air repeating, “Destruction, destruction, destruction, Harrison.”

  I refused to be wigged out by something I knew was a con, even if the hairs on my arms were raising in protest. I stood for a second and listened for the source of the noise. It was hard. The voice was low and soft and gave the impression of coming from both everywhere and nowhere.

  “It should stop any second,” he whispered.

  I had the idea the sound was coming from below me, so I dropped to my knees on the floor. The sound was definitely closer down there, though I still couldn’t locate it. Looking like a fool, no doubt, I crawled along the floor on my hands and knees, playing a demented game of hot and cold. I finally found what sounded like the source to me, right as the voice finally commanded Harrison to wreak some havoc and then petered off. I pressed my ear to the floor directly in front of Harrison’s bed, the wood incredibly cold against my face. I heard a soft whirring noise and then the deafening sound of silence.

  I patted my hand against the floor boards, determining they were real wood, single panes, not the fake huge panels that Mr. Wong’s had. “Do you have a screwdriver?”

  “A…screwdriver?”

  “A flathead, if you’ve got one.”

  “A flathead. Screwdriver.”

  “Could you just stop repeating everything I say and find me something to pry up this floorboard?”

  He didn’t respond, but he did leave the room, closing the door again behind him. By feeling around, I was able to figure out where it would be best to start prying by the time he came back with a silver cheese knife. I held it up to the light of his bedside lamp. “Really?”

  “I don’t think we have a screwdriver.” He sounded offended. By me. Because he didn’t have a screwdriver.

  “Whatever.”

  I hunkered down and worked the board until it popped off with a tremendous groan. Harrison pulled in a breath, but the rest of the house remained silent. As suspected, underneath the board was an empty cavity rather than a sub floor. It was about six inches wide and a couple of feet long. It was too dark in the room to see how deep it went. And heaven only knew what was down that hole. Could have been spiders, mice, centipedes. Anything but a demon.

  Harrison had better appreciate me for this. I took a deep breath of my own and slammed my hand down into the darkness. Regrettably, the hole was no where near as deep as I might have anticipated. I struggled to keep my cursing down to a whisper while I worked on trying to bend my fingers again. When most of the function in my hand had returned, I reached down again and felt carefully, still cringing at what else might be down there.

  My fingers closed around something about the size of a business card but much thicker. I pulled it out and held it under the light while Harrison looked on, expressionless. It was some kind of recorder, nothing I’d ever seen before. A small LCD screen let me know that it was cued up to play at around two in the morning. I handed it to him. “Here’s your demon.”

  Harrison took it and stared at it for a long time without saying anything. I folded my arms over my chest, wishing again that I had shoes and a coat. It was too cold for this crap. The recorder was proof positive that I’d been right all along. I wished I felt better about it.

  “I think it’s time to pay a visit to good old Cousin Neil,” I said.

  "You mean Nate?"

  "Whatever."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rules of the Scam #12

  Don’t get yourself into other people’s trouble…

  I managed to get out of Harrison’s place without anyone seeing me. Well, except Captain Lascivious at the counter who waggled his eyebrows at me though I’d been at Harrison’s for all of maybe five minutes before leaving again. When I got back across the street, Mr. Wong was standing in the doorway waiting for me. He looked pointedly at his watch.

  “It’s seven minutes, Talia.” His old, thin, mouth tightened until he actually seemed to have no lips at all. How did he do that?

  “I know, Mr. Wong. I’m sorry. I had to do something. It was an emergency.” I put on my most imploring face. It was a good one. I was a born con artist, part of the reason my parents were so annoyed when I’d refused to play anymore.

  Mr. Wong’s expression softened, but only slightly. “You stay here. I need noodles.”

  I knew the drill.

  Once he disappeared behind the frayed yellow curtain to his back area, I hopped onto a dryer and grabbed a magazine someone had left behind. People were always leaving things behind inside the faded orange walls of the laundry. This one was a design mag about indoor pools. As if, but it was better than nothing. No one was going to come into Mr. Wong’s at almost 2:30 a.m. I flipped through the glossy pictures of opulence, but my mind was on something else.

  The most likely suspect for Harrison’s demon was his Cousin Nestor. But why? Why try to con your own cousin into thinking he was either crazy or being hunted by a demon? It didn’t even make sense. But maybe it would once I knew Ned better. Harrison had agreed that a visit to the East Mountains was in order to visit his cousin and get some answers.

  I scrolled through possible scenarios for Ned’s perfidy: money, revenge, love, but none of them made sense in the context of all that Harrison had told me. He either didn’t know what was going on, or he wasn’t telling me the real story. At any rate, answers would be coming early, and my eyes were getting gritty.

  Mr. Wong finally came back, and I got the distinct impression he’d been taking his sweet time in an attempt to get a little payback for those two extra minutes. I was tempted to say something, but really, I like the smell of freshly laundered sweaters hanging in my closet way too much. The alternative to sucking up to Mr. Won
g is trying to get Mom to stop spending for long enough to budget our laundry money. Mr. Wong is easier.

  I ducked away from the Laundromat and bounded up the stairs. Skirting the living room wall, so as to avoid rousing Mom who had fallen asleep to the heavenly glow of Adult Swim and was passed out on the couch. I got to my room in record time.

  When I crawled back into bed, sleep came easily.

  Then morning came early.

  I was seriously not happy, when the yellow walkie-talkie came crackling to life again, slightly before seven. “Talia, are you awake?”

  I rolled over in bed and pulled the pillows over my head. It didn’t make the annoyance or the sound go away. “Talia!”

  I reached out blindly and grabbed the phone off the bedside table. “What?” I snapped.

  “Are you awake?”

  “No, I’m talking in my sleep.”

  He either didn’t find my sarcasm deterring, or he didn’t understand me with my face pressed into my bed. Either way he said, “Nate will have some kind of study group today. He always does on Sunday. Not that it seems to help him, if his grades are any indication. We have to catch him before he leaves the house.”

  Well, we didn’t have to. But now I was already awake. And, irritated or not, this did need to be taken care of, and the man had paid me. Even if our arrangement hadn’t specifically included early morning wake up calls. “Okay, I can be ready in half an hour.”

  “Great. I’ll see you in front of my place in thirty minutes. I’m in a green Prius.”

  “Of course you are,” I muttered, turning off the phone.

  It took me a few minutes to wake up, five to shower and the rest to get dressed. What did one wear to meet someone pretending to be a demon for reasons yet unknown? I decided that one wore jeans and a T-shirt. Or at least this one did. I threw on a hoodie and grabbed an orange on the way out. Mom was still passed out on the couch. Exhaustion or beer? Didn’t matter either way. She wouldn’t wonder where I was.