The Eye of the Moon (37 page)

Dino picked a glass from behind the bar and began to pour Hunter a beer. He had a chunk of white plaster on the shoulder of his suit jacket. He could see that Hunter was clearly rattled, and as the Filthy Pig had already pulled his pistol out and used it once it was in the bar owner’s best interests to keep him happy. Hunter was a ‘made’ man, after all, despite the fact that his geeky appearance might suggest otherwise. His hair was as neatly combed as ever and looked as though it had recently been blow-dried. With the thick brown sweater he wore beneath his tweed jacket, he looked like a reject from
The Cosby Show.
But he was undeniably dangerous.

Since a hush had now fallen on the bar, and everyone’s conversation had stopped, Hunter realized he had the perfect
opportunity to call the ‘Big Bro’ number. He picked the cell phone out of his pocket again and flicked through the menus to find the number. Once he’d found it he barked out a last reminder to the rest of the customers in the bar.

‘Now listen up! Everybody just sit tight for one more minute, will ya? I’ve got an important call to make. So can you all keep your fuckin’ mouths shut for just a little longer while I call someone that you may all have heard of, huh?’ He looked around at his audience, who were at best feigning interest in what he had to say. ‘Yes, folks, I have the phone number for the Bourbon Kid. An’ I’m gonna call him right now, so keep it buttoned.’ He put his left index finger to his lips for emphasis, then used his right thumb to press ‘Call’ on the cell phone.

Amused to see that everyone in the bar was now paying him full attention, he put the phone to his ear and waited for it to ring. The dialling tone kicked in after about three seconds. Half a second after that, the silence in the bar was broken by the sound of someone’s cell phone ringing.

Someone standing no more than three feet from Hunter.

Josh had only been working at the Santa Mondega City Library for a month, and it had been hell. The head librarian, Ulrika Price, was a severe taskmaster, and she made him nervous. And when Josh was nervous he had a tendency to lose control of his bodily functions. This could happen in many different ways, such as a sudden burst of snot shooting out of his nose, a mouthful of spit flying over the person he was talking to or, in extreme cases, pissing his pants just a little.

From day one Ulrika had taken great pleasure in making him feel uncomfortable and in wielding such power as she had over him. Intimidating a fifteen-year-old boy like Josh gave her a real buzz, of a kind that was all too absent from her otherwise sad and lonely existence.

Today had been one of those days when she was more uptight than ever, and it had pushed Josh to the brink of quitting. He had a second job anyway, so he could just about afford to lose his job as a trainee librarian. The only responsibility with which he was entrusted was placing the returned books back on the shelves where they belonged, and by Miss Price’s reckoning he was shit at doing even that. Already that day she had berated him for placing a Dan Brown novel in the Non-Fiction section and, even worse, a Barbra Streisand biography in with the Humour titles. It seemed he could do little right, certainly in Ulrika’s eyes. Of course, it was her own fault for putting him under intense pressure to replace books the minute she logged them back in. One thing she wouldn’t stand for was a pile of returned books mounting up on her reception desk.

The black school trousers Josh was rapidly growing out of were starting to creep up his ass due to all the sweat he was working up on his jaunts back and forth to the shelves, and his plain white shirt was close to becoming transparent. After placing a book entitled
Dieting for Midgets
on the top shelf of the Cookery section he returned to the reception desk to find out what Ol’ Misery Guts had for him next.

When he got there she was on the phone, and knowing how she valued her privacy he stood and waited patiently for her to finish her conversation. She was sitting in the padded plastic seat right behind the reception desk, facing the entrance so she could see everyone who came in and went out. She was always checking to make sure no one tried to creep away with a book without signing it out first.

Josh knew better than to get caught listening in to her phone call. Ulrika Price took some highly dubious calls from some very unsavoury characters sometimes. Josh knew this because, on one occasion when she had been away from reception, he had impersonated her when answering the phone. A man with a deeply unpleasant voice had spoken on the other end and given him a list of four names and a date, then slammed the phone down. The junior librarian had thought nothing of it, but when, a few days later, Ulrika had found out what he had done she had gone ballistic and pinned him up against a wall with a hand at his throat. After that, he had made a point of never impersonating her again.

And now, this late in the day, she was busy peering over her spectacles and scribbling something down in a book on a shelf beneath the counter as she ‘umm-ed’ and ‘aah-ed’ on the phone. Josh, unsure whether she’d seen him waiting on the customer side of the desk, cleared his throat to let her know he was within earshot. The sound elicited an evil stare from Ms Price and she pulled her grey cardigan tighter over her shoulders, turning away from him just enough to be sure that he couldn’t see what she was writing. Eventually, after another ten seconds of nodding and ‘uh-huh-ing’, she replaced the handset on the chunky, old-fashioned white phone and
turned to her junior.

‘Are you all done now?’ she grumbled at him, frowning so much that the front of her fair hair, which was tightly scraped back into a severe bun, clawed its way forward down to her eyebrows. For a woman in her thirties, she was not ageing well.

‘Yes, miss. I’ve just put the midgets’ diet book back.’

‘Did you remember to put it on the bottom shelf?’

‘Not as such. No.’

Ulrika’s face screwed up into a contorted snarl, and she got up from her padded plastic chair.

‘I despair,’ she sighed. ‘I really do. I’ll go and move it myself.’ She walked around the desk and came through the reception counter via a hinged wooden flap by the wall. She came over to where Josh was standing.

‘Sorry,’ he shrugged as she barged past him towards the cookery section right at the back of the giant hall of bookshelves. She heard his apology and stopped in her tracks for a moment with her back to him. He could see that the awful blue veins, which ran down her calves beneath the hem of her blue knee-length skirt, were twitching. After a slight pause she turned to face him.

‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll get better at this one day … probably. In fact, you can start by putting that
Sesame Street
annual back on the shelves. Then go home. I’m sick of the sight of you.’

‘What
Sesame Street
annual?’

‘There’s one behind the counter somewhere. It’s really not at all hard to recognize.
Honestly!’
Ulrika Price was exasperated, and not bothering to hide it.

‘Okay. I’ll do that and be off, then. Thanks. G’night, miss.’

Ulrika didn’t respond and simply strode off towards the cookery section, looking for any young people on her way whom she could berate or accuse of stealing.

Josh leaned over the counter to look for the
Sesame Street
annual. The only book that caught his eye was a black volume on the lower part of the desk in front of which Ulrika had been sitting when she was on the telephone. He reached over
and grabbed it. It was a heavy hardback book and it took all his strength to lift it with the limited leverage he could apply from his position leaning over the counter. Once it was in his hands he took a look at the title.
The Book of Death,
it read.

Holy shit!
he thought to himself.
These
Sesame Street
annuals have changed a bit since I was younger.

Not wanting to upset Ulrika further, he decided to give some thought to where he should put this book. It didn’t seem right to place it in the Children’s section. That wouldn’t be appropriate. So where?

Reference –
when in doubt always put a book in the Reference section.
It was a rule that had served him well during his time in the library. Why change it now? Not wanting to be around when Ulrika returned from the Cookery section, he hurried on over to Reference. He slipped the book on to one of the shelves, then hightailed it out of the library to get something to eat before heading off to his late-night job.

When Ulrika eventually returned she was alarmed to find that
The Book of Death
had gone missing, along with Josh.
This was serious.
That book was not meant for public consumption. It was a special book that she kept locked away in a safe, only ever taking it out when she was instructed to do so. Her master, the great Rameses Gaius, had bestowed upon her the honour of being the keeper of the most powerful book in the history of mankind. And tonight had been one of those nights when he had instructed her to take it out and enter some names into its pages.

If she wanted to carry on as his mistress, and achieve the immortality and everlasting beauty he had promised her in return for her services, she had to find it before it fell into the wrong hands. And if Gaius was to ever find out how careless she had been with it, she feared that her time on earth would come to an abrupt and painful end.

Hunter turned around. After calling the number for ‘Big Bro’, he had heard a nearby cell phone ring almost immediately. He still held Casper’s phone to his ear. And standing almost directly in front of him was a member of the Shades, holding in one hand a ringing cell phone. It was the gullible one who always did as he was told, Obedience. Hunter swiftly drew his gun back out from its holster over his ribcage on the and aimed it directly at Obedience’s head. The latter held up a finger to gesture to Hunter to wait a moment as he answered his phone.

‘Hello, who’s calling please?’ he asked the caller.

‘Me, you asshole,’ Hunter replied, ending the call.

Obedience, looking confused, also hung up. The whole bar was watching, wondering what was going on.