The Spider Thief (16 page)

He wadded up the cover and tossed it onto a nearby chair. The Torino’s paint was dull in the light. Scratched. Chipped. But priceless.

Prez walked the length of the car, picking out the holes where they’d bolted cameras to film the detectives’ faces during the chase scenes. The rearview mirror was missing, of course. One of those things they did in TV shows back in the day.

On the passenger side, the metal at the front edge of the door was banged up from all the times David Soul threw the door open a little too hard, chasing all those crooks with Afros and bell bottoms. Prez ran his fingers along the scrapes in the paint, feeling where little chips were missing, feeling the history.

When he opened the driver’s door, the indirect opera lighting came on inside. The seat yielded easily when he sat down, wrapping him in its familiar scent, not all that different from an old book. The police radio hung near the 8-track, though of course the radio never worked, not even when they were filming the show back in the day.

Prez settled the Schlitz in his lap and turned the key one click. The 8-track rattled to life and the Temptations sang to him, telling him that Papa was a rolling stone. Singing it over the wocka-wocka guitar and that deep soul beat that grooved just a little bit into the wonderland of disco.

Prez drained the Schlitz, crumpled the can, and tossed it out the car window. He turned up the 8-track and felt the beat course its way through his body, taking him back all those years. Back when the world was wide open, things were
happening
. Back before computers and bar codes and databases.

Back when a brother with a good hustle could make it big, roll from place to place without nobody the wiser. Back when the word on the street was the only word you needed.

Back when he was free. The real Prez. A cool black dude with a fat stack of fresh Benjamins in his pocket, taking him anywhere he wanted to go, one hundred-dollar bill at a time.

He turned the key and started the Torino. It rumbled to life, the vibration thrumming through the big sofa-like seat. The Temptations sang on, well, well, Papa was a rolling stone.

He tapped out the rhythm with his hands. Let his eyelids drift down low. He leaned back in the seat, his arm hanging out the window. He could just drive away, leave all this behind him. It was the best feeling in the world.

And then a white kid’s face popped up next to the window and Prez just about jumped out of his skin.

“Hey!” Ash shouted, over the music and the engine noise. He waved his hand through the smoke in the air, coughing.

Prez shut off the engine and the silence rang in his ears. His sense of direction whirled, as if he’d just woken from a dream. The warehouse solidified around him, becoming real again, and suddenly he felt the weight of age pressing down. How long had he been there? He wasn’t sure.

“You okay in there?” Ash said, louder than he needed to.

Prez scowled. “How the hell you get in here, man. Where’s DMT at?”

“Haven’t seen anybody but you.”

Prez swung the Torino’s long door open and fought his way out of the seat. The floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet. Ash reached out to steady him and Prez waved him back with a grunt. He leaned on the Torino’s roof until he got his balance back.

Ash opened a door, letting in a warm glow of sunlight. A fresh breeze blew in and Prez’s head started to clear up.

Ash shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall, appraising the car with a lopsided smile. “Now, I swear that car looks
exactly
like the one from that old TV show.”

“That’s because it is,” Prez snapped. He made his way back toward his desk, working hard to keep upright and steady.

“That is the car we bought for you, right? Like five years ago, with all those hundred-dollar bills?” Ash followed close behind him. “You pay for everything with C-notes?”

“Ash?” Prez said.

“Yeah?”

“Shut it.” Prez got to his desk and found Mauricio sitting on the edge of a guest chair. A thin haze of smoke still swirled in the air, making the lights glow.

Mauricio leaned forward, eyes wide, hands clasped between his knees. “Hey, Prez. You weren’t trying to . . . I mean, you okay?”

“I am fantastic.” He settled into his creaking leather chair and immediately started to feel better, more in control. He found a forgotten glass of water sitting on his desk and chugged it down.

“I mean . . .” Mauricio pointed in the direction of the Torino.

Ash dropped into the chair next to Mauricio. “Sorry to interrupt you there, Huggy Bear. With whatever it was you were doing.”

Prez set the glass down. “I was enjoying my day. Until now.” He wiped his mouth. “Mauricio, where is my money?”

Mauricio shot a look at Ash.

“That was your money?” Ash said, acting surprised. “Funny, I thought it was Andres with the money. He was going to pay me, what was it?”

“A million dollars,” Mauricio said.

“A million dollars,” Ash repeated, nodding. “Sounds about right.”

Prez pulled open his desk drawer and found the medication he’d forgotten to take earlier. So that was what the water was for. He popped the pill and dry-swallowed it, then leaned back and fixed Ash with a calculating stare.

Ash’s hip attitude started to crumble in the cold silence that followed. The brothers traded worried glances.

“We had a deal,” Prez spat out. “You suppose to bring me back my cash.”

“Yeah,” Ash said slowly, “about that . . .”

“You don’t have it,” Prez said.

Ash cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”

“That’s the wrong answer.” Prez touched the intercom on his phone. “D. In here. Now.”

Not two seconds later, DMT barreled in through the door, making everything in the room look smaller. His shirt and tie were immaculate, every inch of him looking healthy and strong, except for the big white bandage taped to the side of his head.

Mauricio lunged out of his chair and threw an arm across DMT’s back, clapping him on the shoulder. “D! Hey, man. You all right? You look good.”

DMT broke into a soft smile. “Back among the living.”

Mauricio tapped his forehead. “They put a steel plate in there or what?”

“Naw. Just aches a little. It’s cool.”

Prez rose to his feet, leaning across the desk on his knuckles. “Jermain and his brother are dead,” he shouted.

Instantly, the room fell silent. DMT squared his shoulders, his game face back on. Prez looked hard at each of them, Ash last.

“I wasn’t talking,” Ash said, making a zipping motion across his lips.

“You get any my boys hurt again, I will
bury
you.”

Ash swallowed. “Listen, Prez
—
”

“In a dirt hole. Do you understand me? A dirt.
Hole
. By the time I get done with you, nobody even going to find your white
bones
.”

Ash looked away for a second, then back, biting down on whatever he wanted to say.

“You find my money and you burn it,” Prez said. “You soak it in gasoline and set a match to it. Next time I see you, you bring me a briefcase full of ashes. I make myself clear?”

Ash’s eyes ticked around the room like they were trying to access information that wasn’t there. Finally, he nodded. “What about Andres?”

“Let him come down here.” Prez sat down again and leaned back. His chair creaked. “Maybe I’ll bury him right next to you.”

Mummy

The steering wheel shook in Cleo’s hands as her Jeep climbed the washed-out dirt road. Years of mountain wind, flash floods, and neglect had eroded the dirt track to little more than a continuous dead spot in the grass. Cleo tried to imagine Ash driving the Galaxie through here at high speed, pursued by Andres’s gunmen.

She had trouble picturing it. This area seemed too remote, too still and silent, swathed in waves of tall grass and aspen groves.

Up ahead, the preacher’s house crept into view. Obviously, nobody had lived there for years. Angled black patches showed where siding had rotted off. Bits of the house were scattered across the tan grass of the mountainside. The porch was completely collapsed.

She drove past a shed, its doors wide open, sunlight streaming through the bullet holes in its walls. Graves stepped out from behind the shed, his suit sharp but his tie unstrung, picking his way carefully through the tall grass. The dark brown skin of his shaved head shone in the sun.

Cleo stopped and rolled down her window. “Hey. I was in the neighborhood.”

His sunglasses hid his eyes. “Cleo.” He turned his head and stared off across the mountains. “You
are
trying to make my life difficult, correct?”

She gave him a sweet smile. “I’m just here to keep you company.”

He let out a long sigh. “And I’m just trying to follow the rules.”

“So how’s that working out for you? You find this crime scene all on your own? Oh, wait, no. That would be because of me.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that Snyder still suspended you.”

“I don’t remember actually hearing the word ‘suspended.’” Cleo made quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

Graves stared at her, his face a perfect mask, until the corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. It made him look irresistible.

“Meanwhile, I did hear there was a mummy,” Cleo said. “Maybe two.”

He shook his head, slowly, and turned away. “How did you find out about that?”

“You find a homicide involving a mummy, people tend to talk.”

He sighed and trudged up toward the house. Cleo crept the Jeep alongside him, keeping pace.

“I can’t let you inside the house,” he said.

“Gee, that’s too bad. But look on the bright side. At least it’s
me
showing up here, not some news van with a satellite feed. This whole story could go viral in about ten minutes.”

Graves stopped and faced her. “Please tell me you are not trying to blackmail me. Me, of all people.”

“Oh, I would never do that to you. You know that.” She pretended to look wounded. “Come on, Graves, we need to stick together. So you can show me what’s in that house up there.”

“You can’t just . . .” Graves hung his head for a long moment, grunted, and then waved her on ahead. “Might as well park up there.”

Three vehicles sat in front of the house. Graves’s gray sedan was parked off to the side, under the shade of a few thin aspen trees. In front of the house sat two trucks marked with sheriff’s department decals. The sight of the gold star on their doors brought up an old ache in her heart. It was the same gold star she’d seen as a kid, and it would forever remind her of her dad in uniform. She swallowed the lump in her throat and got out of her Jeep.

Graves caught up. “We had to go in around back. The front porch fell in.”

She looked up at the broken timbers jutting out from the side of the house, over a pile of shingles and rubble. The tips of the timbers gleamed with fresh wood. “Happened recently, too.”

He followed her gaze and nodded. She couldn’t tell if he’d already come to the same conclusion or not. He pointed to a coppery glitter in the grass, where a deputy was picking up spent shell casings and bagging them. “Nine millimeter,” Graves said. “My guess, an automatic weapon, same one they used on your car.” As he said that, he edged a little closer to her, as if he was trying to protect her.

“So somebody was firing from the front porch.”

“Correct.” He raised his finger like a gun and pointed it downhill at the shed. “Pop-pop-pop. Somebody gets that Galaxie started and takes off, but it wasn’t easy. Car sat in the shed at least five years, could have been longer if it had a gel battery. Some long-term tire marks on the concrete floor, matching flat spots in the tire tracks on the road.”

She contemplated the bullet-riddled shed. Ash must have been running for his life. One false move on his part, and it would’ve been his death they’d be investigating here, instead.

Graves led her around the house to the back door. She’d never been inside the preacher’s house before, even though it was only a few miles from her parents’ home. She knew her dad had been called here once, when she was in high school.

A tingling sensation ran up and down her arms. She stopped cold, remembering.

On the rare occasions her dad was able to come home for dinner, he always had the strangest stories to tell, some of them funny. Actual crimes were relatively rare in this small mountain town. Most of his calls were about drunk and disorderlies or livestock running loose on the roads. But on one particular occasion, he’d gone to the preacher’s house after the office got a frantic phone call that the preacher’s wife was dying, and the preacher had gone insane. The caller had been Ash.

When her dad got to the house, he said, everything had seemed okay. The wife was sleeping. The preacher said that he and Ash had had a “misunderstanding.”

All through the dinner, her dad had seemed preoccupied about it. When prodded, he’d smiled and said everything was just fine, but she could still remember one thing he did say:

“That boy kept telling me there was a treasure inside the house. And it was cursed.” He’d shaken his head. “Damnedest thing I heard in a while.”

At school, Ash wouldn’t talk about it, and eventually she stopped asking. When she thought back, though, she couldn’t remember ever seeing the preacher in town again after that.

She stared up at the back of the house, its cloudy windows and decayed wood, swollen clumps of empty hornet nests under the eaves, paint flaking from the trim. Nobody had lived here in a long time.

Graves put a gentle hand on her arm. “Cleo. You okay?”

She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway. “Let’s go inside.”

*

Prez bent down over the pool table, lining up a long shot off the back rail. He shot smoothly, the cue putting just enough English on the ball to curve it around where he wanted it. The seven ball dropped into the corner pocket.

DMT walked in, jangling his car keys. “You want anything, Boss? Some green tea, a smoothie, something?”