by Zoe Chant
She stopped short. “You’re kidding! Already?”
“Serious. In fact, serious enough that Lance Jackson left Chicago and his big corporate case, and powered down the freeway at five a.m. The text I got just now was to report that he is here, and they’re all waiting for us.”
She eyed him. “Rigo, have you been up all night?”
A quick smile. “Not all of it.”
Her lips parted, but she closed her mouth again, and finished braiding her hair as she thought about the father-son bond. She was still feeling her way into this whole family thing, after so long believing she would forever be alone.
Clearly there was plenty going on. And yet Rigo had chosen to stay by her side instead of rushing off to help Alejo with whatever was going on at the other end.
“Sounds like there’s a lot to hear. Well, I can wait till we’re all together.”
His smile deepened, then it was his turn for a quick shower.
Godiva sat on the bed, pondering the word ‘mates’ again. She still really didn’t know if it was mostly poetic, or something truly magical. This euphoria she felt, this sensitivity to Rigo, was too new. Mates . . . and then she remembered the rest of the Gang of Four. Who she’d last communicated with that day on the terrace.
She knew they had to be thinking about her. She heard the shower turn off in the bathroom, so she quickly texted Bird, Doris, and Jen: Mates. It seems to be a thing. News at eleven.
Ten minutes later, she and Rigo were on their way back to the post office, where apparently Alejo had never left. “At least there’s that Starbucks,” Godiva said, reveling in Rigo’s arm around her. “Let’s fortify ourselves with the elixir of life before we face whatever it is Alejo found out.”
She had come all this way to solve a mystery. And it seemed it was about to be solved. But as they walked together toward the coffee shop, she realized she could have waited a day or even three. Right now the only thing on her mind was Rigo—and about ten thousand questions, more sprouting in her head by the minute.
Too bad nobody had asked for her opinion on timing.
So they got coffee, then crossed the street to the enormous parking lot they’d entered their first night. It served not only the post office, but several adjacent businesses, most of which were not yet open this early, so it was largely empty except for a cluster of cars at one end.
One of these was Alejo’s rented van, which Rigo steered them toward. On the other side, away from the already intense morning sun, stood two men and two women. Alejo was one of the men, tall and rangy in build. But he was nearly dwarfed by an enormous, extremely handsome man, his hair and skin as dark as his eyes.
Godiva would not have recognized Lance Jackson Junior, who she recollected as a weedy kid with glasses and a gigantic Afro, except for his build. That was Lance Jackson Senior’s build—Mr. Jackson the firefighter and Boy Scout Master.
Lance no longer wore glasses, and he kept his hair short, but he was every bit as big as his father had been, if not bigger. At Rigo’s and Godiva’s approach, the group split up, Lance giving her a huge grin. “Ms. Cordova?”
“It’s Hidalgo now,” she said, “but you’re no longer in high school. Call me Godiva. Oh Lance, it’s great to see you again. So . . . what happened here?”
Lance’s smile vanished, and his dark eyes turned cold as he gestured toward the open back of the van. On the floor, trussed up tight, lay a man. His blond combover was messed up, his battered face a study in petulant fury.
“Mom,” Alejo said. She noticed distractedly that a bruise marked the side of his face. “I think you might remember Doug Barth.”
Godiva stared, then whispered behind her hand, “Is that Barf the Bully?”
Alejo gave a nod, suppressing an inadvertent grin. Then he said, “Waltzed into the post office lobby just after midnight. Straight to the box. Then right into my waiting arms.”
Godiva glanced at those bruised faces, and interpreted the words correctly: Barth had put up a fight. But he’d lost bigtime.
“Apparently he has a pal on the inside of the office who saves up the mail for a week at a time, then puts it into the slot at the end of the designated day. Which happened to fall yesterday. Isn’t that your test letter there?” Alejo was holding what looked like a much-used dayplanner or ledger. He used this to point the floor of the van near the tied man, where a bunch of mail had been neatly laid out.
There was her own handwriting on one, but to her absolute astonishment, the addressee on all five of the other letters—in a variety of hands—was ‘Alejandro Cordova.’
“I don’t understand,” Godiva said.
“I think it’s my fault,” Lance spoke up, his voice a basso rumble. “Alejo says he told you how he asked me to check the box after he took off to find his dad. Which I did, the first time late that summer, then after school pretty much every day I didn’t have football practice, all through senior year of high school. And every couple of months after that, right up until a few weeks ago. What I didn’t know was, Barth followed me, my guess is that very first summer. Saw me work the combination. Stole the letters out of spite—”
Here Barth started cussing them both out.
Lance just raised his voice, drowning out the noise. “—and what we’re beginning to piece together right now, is that he apparently decided that this would be the perfect front for running scams. He seems to have thought it foolproof. If he ever got caught, the authorities would go after Alejandro Cordova.”
“Only there isn’t any Alejandro Cordova,” Alejo spoke up, addressing the sweaty, crimson-faced man lying on the floor of the van. “I changed my last name when I turned twenty-one.”
Barth stopped cussing, and snarled, “You never said anything in that crap you wrote.”
“Because changing my name was the sort of news to discuss in person. So you read the letters before destroying them?” Alejo asked, without a hint of embarrassment.
“They were a laugh riot,” Barth sneered. “Until they got too boring even for that. I just tossed them.”
Shock numbed Godiva, then fury swept through her as she thought of all those letters Alejo had written that she never saw, and would never see. “That’s mail fraud!” she cried.
“Oooh, cry me a river,” Barth jeered. “I’m terrified.”
“You should be.” One of the women, silent until now, pulled a book from her shoulder bag and held it where Barth could see it. “But not about the feds.”
The book’s binding looked like it had been stitched centuries ago. When Barth saw it, his bloodshot eyes widened and his face betrayed real fear before the smirk was back. But it looked forced. “How did you . . .”
“Get past your so-called security? Easily. Took me about a minute and a half. Didn’t anyone ever tell you in Criminal 101 that whatever else you do, you don’t cheap out on your security? Anyway, one look at this thing, and I recommend we don’t even bother with the feds, or the local police,” the woman stated with a grim-reaper smile. “This is going straight to the Midwest Guardian.”
At that, the younger woman, who looked a lot like Lance, especially through the eyes and cheekbones, uttered a deep laugh and cracked her knuckles.
Rigo leaned down to whisper to Godiva, “Alejo says that Kaydi Jackson is a knight. Same as her dad and granddad.”
Lance tipped his head toward his daughter and the older woman as he said to Godiva and Rigo, “Alejo reported in last night. These two spent the night searching Barth’s house.”
The first woman said, “Our orders are to take it from here.”
Kaydi Jackson then proved herself to be every bit as much of a badass as Godiva’s friend Jen when she hauled Barth out of the back of his van, and though he writhed in her grip, she slung him ungently into the back of another van, then slammed the door and locked it with the heavy thunk of serious security.
Alejo said to Godiva, “Barth clearly didn’t expect any trouble, so everything was right out in plain sight, both here in his car and at hi
s place. After I called in his address and other info, I searched the car and found this ledger. I spent the night looking at it while they tossed his house.” Alejo turned the woman with the ancient book. “I know you have to turn over the evidence. But can you wait while I take a look? I want to compare the two.” He held up the ledger and nodded at the book she held.
The woman looked from the ledger to Alejo, frowning. “My orders are clear, but considering the fact that this ass-clown duped you for years, I think you’re owed. Why don’t you hold this for me while I go talk to the management here. There’s a worker who has some explaining to do. And that person, we can report to the feds.”
She handed Alejo the ancient book and walked away.
Ordinarily Godiva would be fascinated by something so obviously old, but her mind was trying to grapple with too many things at once, her overriding emotion fury. This was behind the long silence, the hurt, the wondering—a scammer?
“Why?” Godiva asked, appalled. “What did he get out it? What’s the meaning of all these letters from unknown people addressed to your birth name?”
Alejo said, “I think the letters are customers. I spent the last couple hours studying this ledger. It’s mostly abbreviations, but this much I sussed out.” He flipped it open to a page. “Date, initials—my guess that’s the customer—address, amounts of money, and each entry has a number off to the right here, in the last column.”
He pointed to a column down the right-hand edge of the page, then tucked the ledger under his arm and carefully opened the old book. “I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why the column of numbers was so random. But now I wonder if those numbers correspond to pages in this book.” He peered down at it. “Which is hand-written. In . . . I think this is Latin. Which I don’t know. Mom?”
He looked hopefully at Godiva, who had to shake her head.
Lance held out a hand, and Alejo surrendered the ancient book to him.
Lance frowned at those age-darkened pages, then pulled an expensive fountain pen from a pocket, and used it to carefully turn the leaves. “This is not classical Latin. It’s been a while since I studied it, and most of my study pertained to law, but I think this is late-medieval Latin.”
Godiva said, “What’s the difference?”
“Mostly a lot of added vocabulary from what they called Vulgar Latin. The Vulgate. Greek. Other influences as various tribes blew through Rome. Anyway, I can decipher enough to see that what’s written here are recipes for charms.” He frowned. “The Propagation of Internal Warts. Unappeasable Itch. Dissolution of the Joints . . . And those are under the category of Simple Torments. The back of the book seems to be the heavy artillery. Damn.”
“Let’s test my theory about the numbers.” Alejo flipped open the ledger again and glanced from it to the old book. “This entry has the number 72. Is there a page 72?”
This time, Lance’s expression was one of distaste as he used the fountain pen to leaf through the book. He stopped at 72, read briefly, then looked up. “It’s a charm to . . . I’d have to look up some of these words, but it has something to do with molting. And one of the ingredients is the venom of an adder. So my guess is, whatever is being molted is probably something you don’t want to have fall off. Yeah, definitely bad.”
“That book needs to be destroyed,” Rigo said.
“I don’t disagree,” Lance murmured as he ran his eyes down another page. “Wait a minute . . . This word here, remedium. The root of ‘remedy’ or ‘antidote’—if the antidotes are also there for the charms, the Guardian—the entire council is going to want their hands on this book yesterday.”
Alejo took the fountain pen as Lance held the book. Alejo began looking from the ledger to the book, then paging back and forth, as Lance said to Godiva, “As for why . . .” He shook his head. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m at fault here. I don’t think I ever glanced behind me once in all the years I came here.”
Alejo briefly looked up. “Who would? I certainly didn’t. But Mom’s right. Why’d he pick us? I get the grudge thing, but as I recall, he was in trouble with half the town.”
“Is this really about teenage squabbles?” Godiva burst out. “That box was in my name. Whatever is going on here is aimed at me as much as it is Alejo.”
Lance glanced at Barth’s brand-new Mercedes van, which Kaydi was now methodically going through. “My guess, pre-questioning, is that what started as a grudge became a convenience. I think at first he just destroyed the letters as petty revenge.”
Godiva let a sigh hiss between her teeth. “Meanwhile, he knew the combo, and he knew that the box was only used by two people, is that it?”
“Correct. I suspect what we’re seeing here is that he ran his scam through your post office box, selling charms out of this book to any who would pay. And meanwhile kept on destroying the letters, probably hoping you two would give up writing.”
Godiva shook her head. “He must know little about family bonds.”
It was just a mutter, but to her surprise, Lance gave a short nod. “I think you’re right.” And at Godiva’s look of surprise, he went on, “I hated Barth’s guts when I was a kid, but once I reached adulthood, I began to understand at least a little about where he was coming from.”
Alejo said, “If you mean coming from what they used to call a broken home, hell, half the kids in school were familiar with that situation.”
“But they aren’t wolves.” Lance shrugged. “Wolves run in packs. His dad was a crappy alpha, but he was an alpha. I found out a couple years after you left, that when Barth Senior was taken down by Ralph Gaines and his pack of straight-up hoodlums, the Barth pack was shattered. That’s why Doug Barth made his own pack, by threats and intimidation, the way he was raised.”
Alejo was still paging as he said, “What else did you learn about him?”
Lance said, “After high school his pack broke up. Half ended up in jail, and the rest bailed. My guess is, he’s been a lone wolf ever since.”
“What does that mean?” Godiva asked.
Lance turned her way. “In every story you’ve ever heard, has anyone ever said anything good about lone wolves?”
“No.”
“It’s not good for wolves to be packless. But like I say, pity goes only so far. He could have made a lot better decisions, starting with finding a better pack. Even if it meant beginning at the bottom and working his way into the hierarchy. And, of course, not stealing your post office box, destroying your mail, and setting up shop selling evil charms.”
“What will happen to him?” Rigo asked Lance.
“That’s up to the Guardian. Bottom line, serious trouble. A lot of trouble, depending on what kind of charms he sold—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Alejo exclaimed. He’d turned to the last pages in the ledger, and held it out for them to look at.
Next to an address, and a huge sum of money, were the initials ‘LC.’
Rigo frowned, then glanced up. “Are you thinking ‘LC’ is Long Cang? Those initials could just as easily stand for any random hombre with the initials LC.”
Godiva had completely forgotten about Long Cang, the Oracle Stone, and all the rest of it.
“Look at look at the address,” Alejo urged. “Isn’t this your town, Mom?”
Godiva leaned against Rigo, steadying herself against his arm. For a moment she was distracted by how good it felt, which helped dispel a bit of the anger gnawing at her. But it flared right up again when she recognized the address. “Yes! I even know where that house is! Well, approximately. It’s inside the only gated community in town, where the wealthy people live.”
“Look at the date,” Rigo murmured.
“Wait. That’s . . . a few days ago.”
“Yes,” Alejo said, flipping between two pages in the ledger. “If LC is actually Long Cang, he’s in this book twice. Here, and one fifteen days ago. Which would be about the time those zombies turned up, right?”
Kaydi was back from searchi
ng the car. “It’s going to be a nightmare to trace all the customers and find out how the charms were used, and on whom.” She glanced skyward, and Godiva had a strong feeling she knew who would be part of that investigation. “I wonder where the hell he found this thing.”
“Who he stole it from, is probably more likely,” Alejo said. “Dad, if the first entry was the zombie charm, then what this means is, Long Cang has a new charm.”
Everybody looked grim.
Rigo said, “Here’s my suggestion. Let’s take photos of the Long Cang pages, both charm and antidote. Get them back to the west coast pronto.”
He turned to Godiva. “Neither of us studied Latin, but it’s the root of Spanish, right? Between that and Google Translate, we should be able to suss this out by the time we get back to Joey Hu. What say?” He grinned at her, a challenge they could share.
She grinned back. There were still so many questions, and she really wanted more time alone with him, but he was including her as naturally as if she’d been a part of the shifter world all along.
“Sure,” she said, and as the mystery part of her mind started running, she said, “Let me get my phone out. We can both take pictures, but why work off our phones if we don’t have to? My phone will talk to my laptop, so much easier.”
“Excellent idea,” Alejo said.
The Guardian agent reappeared then, and for a moment they split into two groups, Lance talking to the women about Guardian matters, and Alejo saying to Godiva and his father, “So what’s the plan? I can turn the rental in and drive the Phantom back home, if you want to fly out to the west coast from Chicago. That’s fastest.”
Godiva was about to agree, then she remembered her last morning with the other three of the Gang of Four. “No . . . hang on.” She smiled as she poked at her phone. Then she looked up grinning proudly. “There’s an even faster way.”
And she held up her phone so that everyone could see Jen’s text: Of course I’ll come and get you.
Chapter 16
RIGO