Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation (4 page)

“So what’re you doin’?” he asked.

“Working,” I replied. “And for some reason,
feeling very old.”

“Yeah, funny how it creeps up on ya’,” he
said. “I remember goin’ to bed one night feelin’ like a twenty year
old. When I got up I had all kinds of old man pains, and I had no
freakin’ idea where they came from.”

“Same here.”

“Come on, though,” he jibed. “I thought you
Witches were immortal.”

“Have you been watching sixties sitcom
re-runs again?”

“It’s the only thing on TV worth lookin’ at
anymore. Besides, the Montgomery gal is pretty hot.”

“Ever wonder why they changed Dicks mid
series?” I made an obscure reference to the change of actors from
the old show.

“Not really,” he replied. “But I have been
wondering when you’re gonna wiggle your nose and make shit show up
outta thin air.”

“Not going to happen, Ben.”

“Crap. I hate when you tell me that.”

As entertaining as the conversation had been,
I was still wondering if another shoe was about to drop. “So, what
about you? Shouldn’t you be out catching bad guys or protecting us
from evil doers?”

“Day off,” he told me.

“Lucky you,” I said, still slightly
suspicious. “So what are YOU doing?”

“Talking to you.”

“You’re in rare form today.”

“So sue me. So you wanna do lunch? I’m
buyin’.”

“You’re buying? What’s up, you win big at the
riverboat?” I chuckled.

“Hell no,” he answered. “Lost fifty bucks
last time I did that.”

“It’s a little early for lunch yet isn’t it?”
I asked.

He came back with a question of his own.
“Depends. When’d you get up this morning?”

“Point taken,” I replied. “Yeah. Lunch sounds
good. I could use a break anyway. What did you have in mind?”

“There’s a great little Indian place on
Olive, downtown.”

“Yeah, been there. I can go for that,” I told
him. “So you want me to meet you?”

“Nah,” he returned. “I’ll pick ya’ up.”

“Okay, so I need to change into something
Felicity wouldn’t be ashamed of me to be seen wearing in
public.”

“Well light a fire under it, Kemosabe. It’s
hot out here.”

I wondered for a moment at the comment then
said, “Where are you, Ben?”

“Right now? Standin’ at your freakin’ front
door waitin’ for you ta’ get your happy ass down here and let me
in.”

His comment was followed by a click as he
hung up, and then the doorbell began ringing in a vicious staccato
brought about by him leaning on the button. Our two dogs joined in
with a chorus of barks and howls as they squared off with the door
downstairs in order to protect the house from invaders.

Yeah, I definitely needed a break. I dropped
the phone back in the cradle and pushed back, gathering up the used
coffee cups before tugging open the office door.As I started down
the stairs, I wondered if I should fill my friend in on what had
happened to me earlier this morning.

Before I reached the bottom, I had decided it
could wait. There was already a niggling feeling in the back of my
head that told me Ben and I would be spending a lot of time
together in the very near future. Whether he knew it yet or
not.

We might as well start off on a happy note;
because I already knew what was looming before us would be far from
pleasant.

I
wasn’t someone you could
describe as a big fan of heights. Standing here at this particular
moment, looking down through the railing from the top level of the
old Peerless-Cross department store parking garage, smack in the
middle of downtown Saint Louis, I was reminded of that fact in no
uncertain terms.

The honest truth is that for the majority of
my life heights had never been much of an issue. I hadn’t spared as
much as a moment’s consideration to the idea of fearing them; at
least not any that I remembered. But, of course, that was all
before the night when a deranged serial killer had tossed me over
the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge somewhere near the middle
of its span across the Mississippi river. Now to that, I had given
more than just a passing thought. I had dwelled on it. And, to say
the least, it was definitely something I wasn’t going to forget.
Not in this lifetime and probably not even the next.

Fortunately for me, the rope he had been
trying to hang me with had held fast. The other bonus was that it
had been wrapped around my arm instead of my neck. It was only due
to this stroke of blind luck that I had the luxury of being able to
recall that night in all of its Technicolor detail.

But that’s another story, sort of.

Now, to clarify, I have to point out that I’m
not one to panic or go into an immobile stupor due to a fear of
heights— not at all. Whenever confronted by the vertical demon, I
simply feel an involuntary catch in my throat and then experience
that sinking flutter in the pit of my stomach that always precedes
the ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin dump of fear. Of course, it is just
about then that said adrenalin does exactly that— dump.

With a sudden flood into my circulatory
system, the hormone embarks on an emotionally driven attempt to
rescue me from the perceived danger. A few seconds later I, mutter
some form of exclamation, the cleanliness of which is directly
proportional to the height multiplied by the amount of adrenalin
then divided by my heart rate. That accomplished, I remove myself
from the situation.

For the most part, all it ever really does is
make me tense muscles I don’t even remember having and then battle
a lingering headache for an hour or two.

“Sudden stop.” My friend’s deep voice uttered
the two simple words from behind and above my left shoulder.

I glanced back without fully turning and
questioned him. “Do what?”

“The sudden stop at the bottom,” Detective
Benjamin Storm returned with an almost jovial undertone. “Ya’know…
It ain’t the fall that kills ya’, it’s the sudden stop at the
bottom.”

It was comments like this one that had long
ago convinced me that my best friend, a homicide detective with the
Saint Louis City Police, would make the perfect wisecracking cop
for a weekly television crime drama. He was loyal, honest, and good
at his job. And, as evidenced by his most recent verbal
observation, he was inextricably tied to clichés. There were even
times when they would season his speech the same way some people
salt their French fries— too much. Still, while not always an
especially endearing quality, it was a part of his makeup, and I
accepted it for the personality trait it was. Of course, accepting
it didn’t keep me from retaliating against it at times.

Like right now for instance.

“Not actually,” I said as I turned, unsure as
to whether or not he would take the bait I was about to toss before
him.

I put my hand up to shield my eyes against
the late morning sun. The sky was clear and the yellow-white globe
had already driven the air temperature past ninety, with the
relative humidity making it feel as if we were in a Jacuzzi. Worse
yet, the hottest part of the day was still to come. Of course, that
was just ‘Mother Nature’s Tourism Bureau’s’ way of saying welcome
to June in Saint Louis, Missouri.

The only thing that made it bearable standing
up here on the open concrete deck of the parking structure was the
slight breeze rising and falling around us, and more importantly,
the fact that a table in an air-conditioned restaurant was waiting
for us down at street level.

I tilted my head up to look at my friend’s
face. While I wasn’t the tallest person around, I was still of
average height. Ben, on the other hand, took average and built upon
it with reckless abandon. He stood a full six-foot-six and carried
himself on an enviable broad-shouldered, muscular frame.

The sun silhouetted him so I had to squint in
order to make out his angular face. Framing his countenance was
coal black hair, worn as long as departmental regulations allowed.
His dark eyes gazed out over high cheekbones, revealing little and
missing nothing. It was impossible to look at him and not
immediately know that he was full-blooded Native American.

“Whaddaya mean, ‘not actually’?” he
huffed.

And with that, we officially had the
‘hook.’

On the fly, I dredged up an old childhood
myth and applied my own twist to it. “What I mean is that you’re
dead before you ever hit the ground.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Seriously. The fear of falling is so intense
that your system overdoses itself on adrenalin. It pretty much
shorts out your nervous system and causes you to suffer a heart
attack as you fall, end of story. You’re a corpse before you ever
hit the ground.”

I watched his rugged features as his right
eyebrow furrowed. I could literally see him rolling what I had said
over and over inside his head, trying to get a handle on it.

“Bullshit,” he retorted.

The one word comment wasn’t exactly what you
would call swallowing the ‘line,’ but I’d known he would be a hard
sell.

“Oh yeah.” I nodded vigorously as I spoke and
offered up a bogus factoid to lend credence to my lie. “It’s a
known fact. Now, of course, the fall has to be greater than twenty
feet for the fear to reach that level and cause your system to dump
that much adrenalin.”

He cocked his head to the side and gave me an
unsure look.

I pressed on. “You know how when you fall you
get that bizarre feeling in your gut like you just lost your
stomach?”

“Like when ya’ top a hill on a roller
coaster, you mean?”

“Exactly. Well it’s like that, but since you
don’t fall far enough you don’t have the heart attack.”

“No way. Hills on roller coasters are way
higher than twenty feet.” He shook his head as he argued.

“Sure, but that’s different. Your
subconscious knows you are in a roller coaster.”

“You’re just yankin’ my chain.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So what about skydivers?”

“Parachute. Again, the subconscious
knows.”

The look on Ben’s face told me that he was
struggling with this sudden contradiction of perceptions. He wasn’t
stupid by any stretch of the imagination, so I was actually
surprised I’d managed to take it this far.

My friend slipped his hand up to smooth his
hair and then allowed it to slide down and began to massage the
back of his neck. He always performed this gesture when he was
thinking hard on a subject.

“Really?” he eventually asked, giving his
head a slight nod as he squinted at me.

Now, there was the ‘line.’ I thought about
going for the ‘sinker’ as well, but I wasn’t feeling particularly
ornery today, and I doubted my luck would hold out. Besides, it had
only been one cliché, not to mention that he was bigger than me and
he had a gun.

I gave it a long moment before finally
answering him with a simple, “No.”

He shook his head and screwed his face into a
frown. “Jeezus, Rowan, don’t fuck with me like that.”

“Hey,” I splayed my hands out in a ‘don’t
blame me’ gesture. “You’re the cop here. Aren’t you supposed to be
able to tell when someone is lying? Besides, I’ve never known you
to be gullible. How was I supposed to know you’d fall for a line of
BS like that?”

“Because it came outta
your
mouth,” he replied with a grunt
as he stabbed a finger in the air toward me. “I EXPECT everyone
else to be lying but not you. And, you got so damn much trivia
runnin’ around in your head, I just figured maybe you knew
somethin’ I didn’t.”

“Well…” I shrugged. “Maybe I do on some
stuff. Sudden stops at the bottom, though, not really my area of
expertise.”

“Yeah, mine either, but I’ve seen a couple of
meat sacks sprawled out on sidewalks. The friggin’ stop at the
bottom’s what did ‘em in. Trust me.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied,
consciously chasing away the visual his words had conjured, and
then I paused for a moment before changing the subject. “So, I may
be wrong, but I didn’t think we came here to discuss the physics of
falling from tall buildings. Or did we?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “But you were the
one starin’ off into space over here.”

“I wasn’t staring off into space.”

“Yeah, Kemosabe.” He nodded. “Yeah, you
were.”

I didn’t issue another rebuttal. It occurred
to me that perhaps my earlier self-assessment was in error. Maybe
these days heights did make me seize up after all.

“So, speaking of lying, are we at least here
to go to lunch like you said when you showed up at my door?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Why would I lie about
that?”

“You tell me? It wouldn’t be the first time
you’ve used a free meal as a carrot to get me somewhere.”

“C’mon, man, I told ya’ already. This is my
day off.”

“I seem to recall you once telling me that
you are never really off duty,” I reminded him.

“Jeez, what are you, a freakin’ tape
recorder?”

I merely chuckled in reply.

“Yeah,” he continued. “Maybe so, but even
when I’ve done that to ya’, I didn’t screw ya’ over on the
deal.”

“You sure about that?”

“Hell yes.” He waved his index finger in the
air to punctuate his comment. “I know for a fact that I still
bought chow.”

“I wasn’t talking about the meal,” I said as
we began walking along the inclined parking lot toward the
glassed-in elevator enclosure.

He ignored the comment. “Well, to be
honest, I do have somethin’ else I wanna do while we’re here, now
that ya’ mention it. I need to hit
The
Third Place
after we eat.” He offered the name of the
tobacco shop we both frequented with what could have easily passed
for reverence. “You good with that?”