Serial Friday!
Couple of thoughts on this chapter:
1. The idea for checking the invoice came from the part in The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade checks the newspaper for ship arrivals from Hong Kong.
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| La Paloma? I hardly know her! |
3. Turns out you can schedule blog posts to drop when you're not around. I'm writing this from three days in the past! Spoooky. Note to self, story idea: blogger in past reads blog posts from future, hilarity ensues. (Note from future me: Hilarity did ensue. I did something wrong, and the post didn't publish. Oh, well. I tried!)
Enjoy the pancakes!
LLH
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
"The Demented Non-Life of Jefferson Davis"
By L.L. Heberlein
(copyright 2015, all rights reserved)
CHAPTER TEN:
“I’m Japanese, not Chinese, ya fucker!” Ken Wang glared at me over a plate of pancakes. I’d offered him breakfast in exchange for some information. We met at Beth’s Café, famously open all night. Ken ordered two pancakes, two eggs, two slices of bacon, and a huge glass of orange juice. He’d threatened to order the 12-egg omelet, but I begged him not to draw attention. I had coffee.
I glared back at him. Ken smacked my arm. “Just joshin’, ya fucker!” Ken called everyone fucker. It was like a term of endearment. He laughed as he read over the pieces of paper. “Yep, just a shipping invoice. Cargo left Hong Kong around the third of last month, just arrived here on a cargo transport. Unloaded in Tacoma.”
“Does it say what the item is?” I sipped my coffee while I waited for him to swallow down another shovel full of pancakes and syrup.
“Says here ‘unspecified,’ which means it could be anything. Drugs. People. Anything.”
“People?”
“Yeah, some people hitch rides in cargo containers. They pay a lot of money to get smuggled into the country.”
“How do they do that? Don’t they starve? Suffocate?”
“Yep,” he said. He spread his arms and did that Eddie Murphy pseudo-African voice. “Welcome to Ameer-EE-Ca!”
“Grim,” I said, taking another sip of coffee. “So no clue what this thing is?”
“Nope,” Ken said, turning the stone over in his hands. Ken is the dumbest smart guy I know. A genius idiot. He worked all day designing computers for aerospace companies, and all night playing video games. He made more money than a kid his age deserved, and spent it all on toys and candy. Ken didn’t have a girlfriend. Not that he wasn’t a good-looking guy. He dressed well, nice clothes, cool haircut. Girls just didn’t seem very high on his priority list.
Ken was probably my only friend not involved in the supernatural. He was just a guy I knew, someone I’d helped out of a jam once. We exchanged email jokes. That sort-of thing.
“You know, if you ask me, I think this thing looks like an ashtray.”
I took the stone back from him, and examined it. “It does look like an ashtray,” I said. “For all I know, it could be. I have no idea what this thing is, or what it does, but everyone seems to want it.”
Ken used a slice of white toast to sop up the last of the syrup and egg residue on his plate. “Beats me. I’ll give you twenty bucks for it!”
I smirked. “Tempting. I could use twenty bucks,” I said. “But you really don’t want this ashtray. It comes complete with a load of bullshit and a lot of problems.”
“So what are you going to do with it?” The check came, and he grabbed it. I protested. “No, let me. You’re hard up for twenty bucks and stuck reading shit in Chinese. You get it next time.”
I sighed. “People keep offering me a shit-ton of money for it,” I said. “When they’re not trying to steal it.”
He shrugged. “Why not just auction it off to the highest bidder? Put it on eBay or something?”
“Ken, you are a genius,” I said, slipping the thing back in my pocket.
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” We shook hands and exchanged some bullshit pleasantries about getting together soon and recreating that one night with the tequila and girls. He got into his car and I followed him for a few blocks to make sure he wasn’t followed. The last thing I wanted was to get anyone else killed over this ashtray.
Ashtray. Why hadn’t I seen it! The thing looked exactly like a cheap quartz ashtray you’d pick up from some stoner gift shop. Or it could be some magical item with enough power to blow a hole in the world. I still had no clue.
But I liked the auction idea. I mulled it over a bit as I made my way back to the office. I think it’d been long enough.
Yep. I got there, and the front door had been forced open, the lock broken. As if the key wasn’t just hidden under the doormat.
Someone – gee, I wonder who – had broken in and made a brand new mess of things. Shelves had been knocked over, their contents spilling across the floor. Couches overturned, torn cushions and bits of fluff all over the place. The desk had been overturned, and the little door to the locked compartment had been torn off its hinges. I told him the key was under the blotter, sheesh.
McGuffin had probably gotten pretty mad when the stone wasn’t there and decided to throw a “trash the office” party. The mess was spectacular.
“What happened!” Lucy stood in the doorway right behind me, looking over my shoulder.
“Isn’t it late for you?” I asked, looking at my watch. Almost magic time for me. “Don’t you sleep?”
She shook her head. “Can’t sleep. Bad dreams.” He face was still all red, nose all puffy. “I’m trying to decide on a tie.” She held up a gray suit with a pink shirt underneath.
“What’s the suit…. Oh.” Yeah. For the funeral.
“I thought the pink shirt was appropriate,” Lucy said, with a sniff. “John always thought it made him look metro… what’s the word?”
“Metrosexual?” I raised an eyebrow. John so hadn’t been a metrosexual.
“Yeah,” she sniffed. “That’s it. Anyway, I need to pick out a manly tie to balance it all out. Here.” She held out the suit for me to hold as she tried out ties against the color of the shirt.
Which is what gave me the idea. A horrible, awful idea. The best idea I’d had in a long time.
“Hey, Lucy? Are you taking this suit over to the mortuary tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I was going to wait until tomorrow. Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” I pretended to look the suit over as I reached into my own pocket for the stone. I slipped it into the inside breast pocket of the suit when Lucy wasn’t looking. “I just thought I’d drop it off for you tonight, if you want me too. They’re open all night, right? Butterworth’s?”
The Butterworths had been in business here since the Yukon gold rush and, as vampires, they continued their mortuary work under the same owners. “Yeah,” Lucy said. “Creepy as hell, those guys. I hate the whole vampire-thing, but they’re the only ones you can call on for… you know… your world stuff.”
She said your world like it was something dirty, and probably it was. “Here, Lucy. Let me handle it. It’s the least I can do,” I said, taking the chosen tie from her. “One less thing for you to worry about.”
She nodded, and gave me a quick hug before she left. I turned back to the messy room and decided it was pointless to pick it up. Someone would just be back, tearing it apart again. I was about to leave when the phone rang.
“John Horesman’s office,” I said, choking on the words. “I’m sorry, but we’re out of business.”
“Davis, WHERE the hell are you!” It was Clara.
“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh… hi, Clara. I… uh… ran into some trouble.”
“TROUBLE!” she spat into the phone. “You’re skinny little undead ass had better…”
“I prefer non-living. And I ran into some trouble with the stone. Turns out, you’re not the owner.”
“WHAT!” She screamed. “Davis, bring me my property. NOW!”
“Okay okay, hold on. Sheesh,” I said. “You’ll have it. Just not tonight.”
“WHAT! Davis, if you do NOT bring me MY STONE right this second, I WILL KILL YOU!”
The dramatics were starting to get ridiculous. “Can’t. Non-living, remember?”
She let out an ear-piercing shriek and hissed, actually hissed, into the receiver.
“Now now,” I said. “No need to get all catty on me.”
“You’re trying to make me angry, aren’t you?”I heard her gasping on the other end. “What is it you want, Davis? You want more money, don’t you? You know what you have now, and you want more money!”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Money would be nice. I also want you to get those other two off my back.”
“What other two?”
“You know,” I said. “The lizard-guy. And McGuffin.”
“MCGUFFIN!!!” She was back to screaming. “WHEN DID YOU SEE MCGUFFIN!”
“Tonight,” I said. “Went over to his house. He mixed me a drink.”
“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!” She took a few breaths to recover herself. “That’s impossible, as Mr. McGuffin is in China at this time.”
“Nope,” I said. “Older-looking guy. Cool glasses. Tweed suit.”
She hissed into the phone again.
“I take it you know him?” God help me, but I was having fun provoking her. I guess it’s always been a problem of mine. I can never leave shit alone. Always gotta be provoking people, kicking over hornets’ nests and the like. My mother used to say something about not poking sticks at snakes, but I can’t remember now. Apparently, I never learned.
I heard growling on the other end of the phone. Honest-to-gosh growling. I’m not sure if it was Clara, some pet of hers, or something else entirely.
I had a thought. I was thinking a lot tonight. High points for me! “Listen, why don’t we all get together and straighten this out.”
“Whennnnnn,” an unearthly voice growled.
“Uh… next sundown?”
“WHERE!”
“Uh…” good question. “Purgatory. Private meeting room.”
There was a long silence. Just as I was about to say “hello?” there came an answer.
“And you’ll bring it?” The voice was again Clara’s. “You’ll bring the stone?”
“Of course!” I said.
“Fine.” The line went dead.
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