The Book With No Name (20 page)

‘And possibly a vampire …’

‘He kills Elvis, but then he says “
Shit!
”?’

‘Really? He actually stops and says “
Shit!
”?’

‘Yeah, he stops and says “Shit!” because he realizes the King doesn’t have what he’s looking for.’ Jensen paused for a minute, because at this point even he was unsure where his theory was heading. He continued with less certainty, ‘But why would he think these two kids Dante and Kacy have it?’

Somers held up a hand to suggest that Jensen might like to shut up and pay attention.

‘Wanna hear my theory?’

‘Sure.’

‘My theory is this: we know that Marcus the Weasel was an expert thief, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So, let’s suppose Marcus had the Eye of the Moon in his possession. He then gets a taste of his own medicine and is robbed by these two kids, Dante and Kacy. They take the Eye and make tracks. Now – and this is the bit I’m not sure about – maybe these kids can identify Elvis as Marcus’s killer, so
Elvis decides to bump them off, just in case. He goes to their apartment, but so too does the Bourbon Kid, who’s looking for the Eye of the Moon. The two of them cross paths. BAM! The King is toast.’

‘You’ve given this a lot of thought, haven’t you?’ Jensen remarked, picking up on the excitement in Somers’s voice.

‘Well, let’s face it, whoever killed Elvis is the same person that murdered our other victims, ’cept Marcus. We know that because of the eyes and tongue thing.’

Jensen pondered the theory for a few moments, then said, ‘It’s pretty thin, but I actually kinda like it. You might be on to something there. One thing you haven’t mentioned, though.’

‘What’s that?’ His partner raised an inquiring eyebrow.

‘Now, I know you think the Bourbon Kid is behind this, and you’re probably right, but what if it was the guy Dante who killed Elvis and all the others?’

Somers shook his head vigorously, then leaned back in his chair and let out a deep sigh.

‘Are you determined not to believe me when I tell you it’s the Bourbon Kid doing almost all these killings? How many times are we going to have to go over this? I mean, will you just
trust
me?’

‘You’re missing my point,’ said Jensen, this time holding
his
hand up to signal that Somers should let him finish. ‘I do believe the Bourbon Kid is behind virtually all these murders – leastways, the ones you got Polaroids of.’

‘So what’s your goddam point, then?’

‘My
point
,’ said Jensen, looking hard at the other man, ‘is that this kid Dante might actually
be
the Bourbon Kid.’

Dante wasn’t keen on fortune tellers. They had a habit of bringing bad news. It seemed like they gave everyone else good news, but when it came to him, he’d always get some sort of warning that bad things were on the horizon. He hadn’t actually visited many fortune tellers in his time, but Kacy felt some sort of affinity with them, so every once in a while he would accompany her on one of her many visits.

The last time they had visited a Tarot-card reader she had told Kacy all kinds of good news, but when Kacy asked her to look into Dante’s future as well, nastiness of various kinds was predicted. The woman foretold the death of Dante’s dog, Hector, which then actually did die no less than three weeks later. He knew that Kacy realized that he was a touch sensitive about being asked to accompany her on a visit to the latest fortune teller she’d found, but after her heroic antics in the Santa Mondega International Hotel when she had robbed the drunken lowlife he figured it was the least he could do. Besides, he wanted to prove that he still didn’t believe in any of this fortune-telling crap. His beloved hound had died, sure, but that was just coincidence.

The House of the Mystic Lady had a kind of familiar look to it, as though Dante had seen it before in a dream. Yet he felt sure he’d never been there before – or not in this life, anyway. It was situated on the promenade down by the harbour. From the outside it looked very like an old gypsy trailer that had been converted into a small house. The roof was low and arched, and the outside was painted red, with yellow borders around the poky little windows. There were steps leading up
to the front door that looked as if they could be folded up and packed inside the house if the Mystic Lady ever decided she wanted it towed away.

Kacy led the way up the steps, with Dante straggling along behind her. The front door was already open, but it wasn’t easy to see in because there was a curtain made of strings of multicoloured beads hanging from the top of the doorway right to the floor.

‘Come on in,’ called out a croaky voice from inside. ‘It’s Kacy and Dante, isn’t it?’

Dante raised an eyebrow and whispered in his girlfriend’s ear, ‘
How the fuck did she know that?
’ Kacy looked at him to see whether he was serious, and shook her head when she realized he was.

‘I phoned and made an appointment, you dummy.’

‘Oh, yeah. Of course.’

The room they entered was very dark, and so narrow that Dante could almost have touched both sides at the same time if he’d stretched his arms out fully. There were candles intermittently spaced at eye level on shelves along the walls on either side. Their light came from an enchanting pink-coloured flame that barely flickered. As their eyes adjusted to the gloom they could see, sitting directly in front of them behind a dark wooden table at the far end of the room, the cloaked figure of the Mystic Lady. Her cloak was a dark purple colour and (as was so often the case with people in Santa Mondega) the hood was pulled up over her head, concealing her face.

‘Please be seated, my young friends,’ she croaked.

‘Thank you,’ said Kacy, sitting down on one of the two wooden chairs situated on their side of the table. Dante took the other, making an effort not to look too interested, in the hope that the old lady would be able to tell he wasn’t going to swallow any of the crap she was about to feed them.

‘You don’t really believe I’m going to be able to tell you anything, do you?’ the rasping voice asked him from somewhere beneath the hood.

‘I’m keeping an open mind.’

‘Good. You do that, son, and – who knows? – you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself, or about Kacy maybe.’

‘Yeah, that’d be nice.’

The woman slowly pulled back her hood to reveal an old, wrinkled face covered liberally in warts and boils. She focused her gaze upon Kacy and smiled, but it was only for a brief moment. The smile was instantly wiped from her face when her eyes fell upon the necklace the girl was wearing.

‘Where did you get that blue stone?’ she demanded. Any warmth had gone from her voice.

‘What?’

‘That necklace around your neck. Tell me, where did you find it?’

‘She didn’t find it,’ Dante butted in. ‘I gave it to her as a present … a few years ago.’

‘Horseshit!’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Don’t lie to me. I’m not stupid, boy. Don’t you be. Where did you get that stone?’

The Mystic Lady’s tone of voice indicated a severe lack of tolerance for lies. This played on Kacy’s mind as she considered whether or not to keep up the pretence that Dante had given her the necklace some years before. She decided there was no point in blatantly lying, but there was also no need to confess to the fact she had stolen it from the hotel room of a drunken slimeball who was now, in all likelihood, the late Mr Slimeball, Deceased.

‘A man in a hotel gave it to me yesterday,’ she said.

The old woman sat back in her chair and looked long and hard at Kacy, studying the girl as if trying to gauge how truthful she was being.

‘It doesn’t really matter where you got it from,’ she said at last. ‘Just get rid of it. That stone will bring you nothing but bad luck.’

‘How do you know that?’ Kacy asked, intrigued to learn what it was the Mystic Lady seemed to think she knew about
the stone.

‘Well, tell me this: the man you say gave it to you, did it bring him luck?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Okay, let me put it another way, Kacy. Would you want to swap places with the previous owner of that stone?’

Kacy shook her head.

‘No.’

‘Dead, isn’t he?’

Although it sounded like a question, it also sounded as though the Mystic Lady already knew the answer to it, in the same way that a quiz-show host knows the answer to all the questions asked of contestants about themselves before the quiz gets under way.

‘Not when I last saw him,’ Kacy replied gamely.

‘Everyone who carries that stone gets killed at some time or another. Usually within a very short time of receiving it. In fact, the man from whom you acquired that stone is already dead.’

Much to his irritation, Dante found himself taking an interest in what the fortune teller was saying.

‘How do you know? Where’s your proof?’ he asked aggressively, and with a hint of a sneer.

He wasn’t happy that the Mystic Lady was frightening Kacy. She was just about the most fearless girl he’d ever known, but she believed stuff that she heard from fortune tellers, so this was liable to upset her.

‘Let’s look into my crystal ball, shall we? And I’ll tell you,’ the old woman said by way of reply. She pulled back a black silk cloth that had been covering a spherical object on the dark mahogany table. ‘Cross my palm with a twenty-dollar bill and I shall reveal your destiny.’

What happened to silver?
Dante thought, but he reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty, and threw it on to the table in the Mystic Lady’s general direction. She snapped it up immediately and concealed it somewhere about her person, much like a beggar on the street who’s been handed enough
money to buy a bottle of his favourite liquor. Then she sat back, apparently deep in thought. Eventually, when she was quite ready, she began slowly to wave her hands back and forth above the crystal ball.

To the astonishment of both Dante and Kacy, a white cloud began to form just under the surface of the ball. After a few seconds of random hand waving from the Mystic Lady, the cloudiness began to subside, to be replaced by a thin mist. Within the mist Dante could just about make out the image of a man’s face. He leaned in closer to get a better look. It looked very much like the face of the man from whom they had stolen the blue stone.

‘My God, it’s that Jefe guy,’ he mumbled quietly to Kacy, as if he hoped the old woman wouldn’t hear.

‘Are you
sure
that’s his name?’ asked the Mystic Lady.

Kacy and Dante looked at each other, both of them concerned at the way the fortune teller had asked. Did she know this man by another name? The victim of Kacy’s thieving, it had turned out, had carried two wallets with him. One suggested his name was Jefe, which was the name he had used to check into the hotel, but the other wallet contained ID for a man named Marcus.

‘Actually, his name may have been Marcus,’ said Kacy apologetically, as if she knew what was coming next.

The Mystic Lady leaned down to her right and picked up something from the floor. Dante tensed, staying alert just in case she was reaching for a weapon of some kind. In fact, what she retrieved from the floor was a newspaper. She placed it on the desk in front of them. It was the
Daily Scope,
and printed on its front page in large letters was the headline ‘MARCUS THE WEASEL SLAIN’.

Dante and Kacy both scanned the article beneath the headline. There was a photograph of the man they had stolen the blue stone from. The photo was quite old, but it was definitely of him. It showed him grinning inanely and looking more than a little bleary-eyed, so it had probably been taken on a drunken evening – which in Marcus the Weasel’s case
was every evening. There was not a great deal of information in the article about how exactly he had met his Maker, but there was enough to suggest that his end had been particularly unpleasant. Dante thought back to how he had watched the Elvis lookalike kicking the door of the hotel room in. Marcus the Weasel was dead, murdered at the hands of this Elvis guy. And this Elvis guy was a nasty piece of work who might come looking for him and Kacy.

The Mystic Lady covered the crystal ball with the black cloth once more. Then she pulled the twenty-dollar bill back out from wherever she had hidden it and placed it in Kacy’s hand.

‘Take the money back and do yourselves a favour,’ she said quietly. ‘Get rid of that necklace before anyone finds out you ever had it. It has a powerful presence, and it will draw evil towards it wherever it goes. You’re not safe as long as you have it with you. In fact, you’re not really safe if you’ve ever had contact with it. Many, many souls have searched for that stone, and many have perished by it.’

‘What’s so bad about it?’ Kacy asked. There was a note of fear in her voice that Dante had never heard before.

‘There is nothing bad about the stone itself,’ the old woman went on. She sounded very tired now, and somehow disheartened. ‘But it will draw him to it. He will come for you, and he will stop at nothing until he has it.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know who he is, and I don’t want to know. If he thought I knew who he was, he would come for me, too.’