The Diablo Horror (The River Book 7) (9 page)

“I don’t think it’s funny at all. I’m as serious as a heart
attack. I have my reasons.”

“What are they?”

“They’re just… reasons.” Roy’s conversation with Thomas was
foremost in his mind. Now it seemed that there was no path forward, and that
was exactly the time that Thomas had advised him to press on. He was determined
to do it.

Steven sighed. “I thought Judith was the expert.”

“According to Dixon. He knows a lot of people, but not
everybody. Most of his contacts are old timers. We just have to search for
someone else who knows more. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Think of it as getting a
second opinion.”

Steven paused and thought. Maybe Roy was right; a second
opinion wouldn’t be a bad thing. He felt tired, wrung out, and he didn’t have
the internal drive to keep the engine going, but Roy did. Maybe he should just
trust him and let Roy do the driving for a while.

“Alright,” Steven said. “If we can find someone else, I’m
game.”

“That’s my boy,” Roy said, smiling. Steven thought it was the
first time he’d seen a smile on Roy’s face in several days, and it warmed him a
little.

◊

Back at Steven’s house, Roy explained his intention to keep
searching for answers to Eliza. She was on board with all of his suggestions.

“So, we just need to do some digging,” she said. “Find
someone who is more of an expert than Judith.”

“I’ll try Dixon again,” Roy said. “He did say she was the
best, but he might know others.”

“When I look for specialists,” Eliza said, “I usually ask
Joe. He knows people. I can give him a call.”

“That makes me as useful as a football bat,” Steven said. “I
know no one.”

“You just relax,” Eliza said. “Leave it to us. We’ll find
someone.”

Steven sat down on the couch. He heard Roy in the kitchen,
talking to Dixon on the phone. Eliza had wandered into a hallway, talking to
Joe on her cell phone.

If one of them comes back with a lead,
he thought,
you need to be
supportive. Shake off the dazed and confused air and start thinking again.
They’re doing this for your benefit, too.

He looked around the room. Across from him was where Aka
Manah sat, the last time he saw him.
Got the location of the pit from me, and
was gone. Jason’s death was just normal collateral damage.

Both Roy and Eliza walked back into the room at the same
time.

“Dixon says there are others who are experts,” Roy said,
“maybe even more so than Judith, but they’re all recluses and not well known.
Judith was the most famous of the lot. He doesn’t know any others by name.”

“Same from Joe,” Eliza said. “Demon experts tend to stay
disconnected from the rest of us. But he did have a suggestion. He has a niece
who uses a guy, right here in Seattle. He has a database. She gets the names of
experts from him.”

They looked at each other. “Worth a shot!” Roy said. “Do we
know his name?”

“He’s calling me back with that,” Eliza said, “and a phone
number.”

“Good!” Roy said enthusiastically. “We might find a way to
take down this fucker! Pardon my French, Eliza. I’m swearing worse than Deem.”

“You don’t have to keep saying that, Roy. I’ve heard worse.”

Roy walked back into the kitchen to get some coffee. “My
mother raised me to not swear around women.”

“Well, you’re doing a very poor job of that!” Eliza said.
“Seriously, it doesn’t bother me. I’m not some delicate flower who wilts when
she hears a bad word.”

“So what, we wait for the number?” Steven asked, trying to
generate some enthusiasm for the impending task. “Then call the guy, make an
appointment?”

“Yeah,” Eliza said. “I guess so. Roy?”

“That’s exactly what we do,” Roy said, walking back into the
room holding a fresh mug. “We go see this guy, and see if he can give us a
better expert to talk to than that bitch in Gig Harbor. Pardon…” He stopped
himself.

“Yes,” Eliza said, turning to Steven, and smiling while she
shook her head. “That bitch in Gig Harbor!”

◊

They fought their way through rush hour traffic to Magnolia,
a neighborhood only a few miles away as the crow flies.

“How long have we been driving?” Roy asked. “An hour? We’re
only going across town.”

“About an hour,” Eliza said from the back seat. “This traffic
is terrible.”

“It’s the east-west thing,” Steven said. “Plenty of major
roads running north and south, but if you want to go from the east side of town
to the west side, god help you.”

They inched their way up 15
^th
Avenue, finally reaching
the Nickerson Street bridge, and crossed over into the northern section of
Magnolia. Traffic eased considerably once they entered the residential
neighborhoods.

Eliza’s phone map led them to a large condo building that
looked modern. They found a visitor parking stall and walked into the building
entry. Eliza pressed the button for 801, and a high-pitched male voice came
over the speaker.

“Yes?”

“It’s Eliza.”

“Who’s with you?”

“My friends, Steven and Roy.”

They heard a buzzing sound, and Roy reached for the inner
door. Then they rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.

The door to 801 was opened by a thin man, about six feet tall.
He wore black framed glasses and looked like he was in his late twenties.

“Hi,” he said, and turned, letting them walk in behind him.
Steven came in last and shut the door.

The condo was tiny. They walked past a miniature kitchen and
into a very small living room, the majority of which was occupied by a bicycle.
There was no place to sit. The only window faced the side of another building.

Eliza made the introductions. Everyone shook hands.
Looks
like every other young hipster who works for Amazon or Microsoft,
Steven
thought.
Glasses, short haircut.
Let’s see if his social skills match.

“You must be Elliott?” Eliza asked as she shook his hand.

“So, you know Frida?” Elliott asked.

“Well, she’s the niece of a good friend of mine,” Eliza said.

“Are all of you gifted?” Elliott asked, looking at each of
them.

“Yes,” Eliza said. “We all are.”

“Good,” Elliott said, “would you all please jump into the
River for me?”

“Alright,” Steven said. He closed his eyes. He saw Eliza and
Elliott in the River at about the time he entered. Roy took a few seconds
longer to join them.

Good, you can drop out,
Elliott said.

“If I say ‘jump in the River’ and people look at me funny, I
know I’m not dealing with gifteds,” Elliott explained. He removed his phone
from his back pocket, looking down at it and swiping as he talked. “You all
pass. What do you want?”

“We heard that you have a database,” Eliza said. “We’re
trying to locate an expert on a particular subject.”

“What subject?” Elliott asked, not looking up from his phone.

Yup, social skills match,
Steven thought.

“Demons,” Steven said.

This caused Elliott to look up. “Really?”

“Yes,” Steven said. “Really.”

“You’d better come through,” Elliott said, leading them down
a short hallway. There was a single bedroom and bathroom off the hallway. It
looked to Steven like the smallest apartment he’d ever seen, so he was
completely confused as to where Elliott intended them to go. Then Elliott
opened the door at the end of the hallway that Steven had assumed was a closet.
It opened into a large space with floor-to-ceiling windows facing north.

Eliza walked to the windows and looked down. “Look at the
view!” he said.

Roy joined her. “Those are the locks,” Roy said. “Saltwater
on the west, freshwater on the east.” They saw a backup of four or five large
boats waiting to be let through the locks into the Sound.

“I chose this spot because of those locks,” Elliott said.
“All that rushing water nearby tends to keep demons away.” He sat down at a
table with a laptop and began typing. The laptop was connected to three large
screens above him, all dim at the moment.

Steven looked around the rest of the room. It was loaded with
project tables and stacks of boxes. In the center of the room were two large
server racks, filled with black boxes that twinkled little lights. Cables ran
up from the racks through metal trays overhead and out the back of the room.

“Fiber,” Elliott said, catching Steven eyeing the racks and
cables. “The other reason I chose here.”

“Impressive,” Steven said, “for a home setup.”

“I can’t keep what I’m doing in the cloud,” Elliott said.
“It’s
waaay
too sensitive. Which brings me to why you’re here. Here’s
how I work. I’ll do a search for you, on whatever you want. Right now the database
is mostly contacts, but I’ve been enlarging it to include other things. In
return, you either pay me, or give me something I can add to the database.”

“Like what?” Eliza asked.

“More information,” Elliott said.

“Like what?” Steven asked.

“Anything that other gifteds might find useful,” Elliott
said. “I make enough money off this database to keep myself going and pay for
all this,” he said, waving his hand around the room. “But I see this as a
growth business. Once the database is big enough, I’ll stop taking submissions
for payment and move strictly to cash.” He rolled on his chair from the table
with the laptop to another table with a different laptop.

“How much?” Steven asked. “How much cash?”

“How big of a search are we talking about?”

“We’d like the best demon expert we can get,” Eliza said.
“Preferably close by.”

“And Judith Duke doesn’t count,” Roy piped up, the first time
he’d spoken since they entered the condo. He looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“Five thousand,” Elliott said.

“Whoa,” Roy replied. “Seems high for just a name.”

“Alright,” Elliott said. “Three thousand. Or you can pay me
with info.”

“If we paid with info,” Steven asked, “how would that work?”

“Well, you’d need to tell me up front what the info is, so I
can make sure I’m not duplicating anything. Dupes don’t have any value for me.
If I don’t already have it, I’ll weigh how much I think it’s worth. If it’s in
the neighborhood of three thousand, I’ll take it instead.”

“And how exactly do you ‘take it’?” Steven asked. “What’s the
process?”

“Well, depends on where it comes from,” Elliott said. “If
it’s from a book, like a journal, there’s a good chance you’ll have to read it
to me, since I wouldn’t have the experience to decipher it. I record you
reading, then I turn that into database entries with tags so I can find it in
future searches. If it’s some personal experience you’re sharing, I record that
too. If it’s about objects, I take pictures and have you write up descriptions
of what they do. So it really depends on what you have.”

“You have objects in your database?” Steven asked, intrigued.

“Some,” Elliott replied. “Like I said, at first I was just
focused on contacts. But recently I started expanding into other things.”

“So it’s not a big objects database, at this stage,” Steven
said.

Elliott turned his attention to his laptop and clicked at it
for a minute. Then he raised his head. “About ninety. Objects. All with
pictures and descriptions of what they do.”

“Yeah, that’s not big,” Steven said.

“You’ve got objects?” Elliott asked. Steven turned to look at
Roy, who was turned away, looking out the windows. He looked at Eliza, and she
stared back at him, pressing her lips together.

“Nah,” Steven said. “But I do have some information on a
demon you might want.”

“How did you come by this information?” Elliott asked,
returning his attention to his laptop.

“I had a deal with him,” Steven said.

“Oh, no,” Elliott said, looking up. “You have a deal with a
demon, and you came in here? Man, I don’t like to go anywhere near that shit.
That’s why I’m here, by the locks!”

“I said
had
,” Steven replied. “The deal is done, it’s
not active anymore. It’s history. And he was ancient, so I expect the
information I can give you would be valuable. Probably a lot more valuable than
three thousand dollars.”

Elliott groaned and returned to his laptop. “They’re all
ancient. Which demon? Do you have a name?”

“Do you want me to say it out loud?” Steven asked.

“Ah, good idea,” Elliott said. “Maybe write it down?”

Elliott handed Steven a sticky note pad and a pen. Steven
wrote “Aka Manah” on the pad and handed it back. The kid didn’t seem to
recognize the name. He went back to his laptop and typed it in.