The Spider Thief (17 page)

“No, I’ll just make my own.” He bent down over his next shot, but DMT didn’t leave. Slowly, Prez straightened up again and leaned on the cue stick, waiting.

Clasping his giant hands in front of him, DMT said, “I was thinkin’ . . .” He pursed his lips.

Prez nodded. “Go on.”

DMT glanced over at the cage in the corner that held the printing press and all of the equipment. “I was thinkin’ maybe it’s time we should get rid of all that. Just to be safe?”

Prez looked him over, noticing his tense shoulders, the nervous shake in his hands. The boy just needed some reassurance. Hell, he’d just been shot in the head. That was enough to make anybody jump at shadows. Prez bent down and lined up his shot again. “You go on home, D. Take some time off.”

DMT cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go back there, Boss.”

The shot went off nice and easy, with a click that sunk the eleven ball. Of course DMT didn’t want to go back there, all the blood stains on the floor, probably yellow crime scene tape on the door. The boy had never been through anything like this.

“I rather hang here,” DMT said. “Make sure you a’ight.”

Pretending to study the table, Prez nodded. “Get somebody to find you a hotel room for the rest the week. Then we find you a new pad.” He circled the table, feeling a heavy weight in his chest. “Jermain and Sweet, you got their services all set up? Flowers and all that?”

“Yes, Boss. I put it on your calendar. Even called the newspaper, told them put it in the obituaries.”

“Good.” Jermain and his brother had been fools, but they were still his responsibility. “Now go on, get me a ice green tea.”

“Yes, Boss.”

Prez waited until he was absolutely sure DMT was gone before he put away his pool cue. He crossed over to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a long number from memory.

The phone didn’t make a ringing sound, just a series of clicks, and then a whisper like an old radio. Prez listened to the almost-silence. “You there?” he said finally.

“Yes,” the Sweeper said crisply.

Prez fought off a shiver. The Sweeper gave him a chill, and for that reason alone he hated to use him. But there were certain things only the Sweeper could do, and some of those things had gotten Prez where he was today. Even if it was like dealing with the Devil, it always worked out in the end.

“You got my message?” Prez said. “I got two of my crew dead, now I got their families to take care of. I can’t let this go on.”

“I understand.”

Hot anger rose up inside Prez as he waited for more. “You suppose to take care of this already.”

“I have not been able to locate him.”

“Locate him?” Prez slammed his hand down on the desk. “Where the hell you at? This Colombian prick shot three of my boys!”

“You need to calm down.”

“Oh, so you giving
me
orders now. That it?”

“You do not want to say anything critical over the phone.”

“Your phone suppose to be secure!”

“Mine is,” the Sweeper said. “Yours is not.”

Prez peered into the shadows in the corners, past the kitchenette, behind the Torino. “You sayin’ they tappin’ my phone line? You know that for a fact?”

“I am saying that I cannot guarantee the sanctity of systems that are outside my control. Besides, you must listen to your doctor. Keep your stress level low.”

“Fuck my stress level. I want Andres buried in a hole. Today. You understand?”

“I have not yet found a way. This person is very connected, very powerful. Financially, and spiritually as well.”

“What’s that suppose to mean? The man is a stone-cold freak. Ain’t no messiah.”

“The truth is the truth, regardless of your belief.”

“I
believe
you gonna have to find a way to take care of business.”

“Yes.”

“
Today
.”

“Yes.”

Prez fumed at the phone, trying to think of something else to say, but yelling at the Sweeper was a waste of time. He hung up.

With a grunt, he lunged out of his chair, marched across the room, and yanked his pool cue out of the rack.

“My stress level,” he muttered to himself, and nailed the cue ball.

Preacher

Graves led Cleo down the hall, his shoes silent on the moss-green shag carpet. Heavy drapes, turned gray with age, blocked out most of the sunlight. The unmistakable stench of death choked the already thick air.

“In here, we had one Hispanic male, single shot at close range from the front, small-caliber pistol. Best guess, it happened two days ago.” Graves took a tiny bottle of menthol gel out of his pocket and put a wet stripe across his upper lip.

He offered the bottle to Cleo, but she waved it off. She breathed through her mouth, coping with the smell as best she could. It had to have been a lot worse when Graves found the body the day before. But it was gone now, taken to the coroner.

Graves paused in a doorway, and she peered over his shoulder. Inside the room, faded wallpaper hung down in sheets. A fresh-faced deputy in his twenties stood just inside the doorway, snapping photos. “You need to come in here, Agent Graves?”

Graves waved him off and led Cleo upstairs.

Each stair creaked quietly under their feet. Faded pictures hung in the stairwell. The preacher and his wife, both wearing heavy glasses, neither of them smiling in any of the photos. Upstairs, pinpricks of sunlight penetrated the curtains, as if the full heat of day was trying to blast its way into the gloom. But it wasn’t enough to light the hallway to more than a dusty twilight. Graves took a small metal flashlight out of his pocket and clicked it on. He led her to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

He paused outside the door, his eyes surprisingly bright in the half-light. “Conditions in the bedroom must have been just right. Low humidity. Lack of ventilation.” The doorknob clicked, and Graves pushed the door open silently. “I’m working on the assumption that these two are the owners of the house.”

Two bodies lay in the center of the floor, near the foot of the bed. A man in dark slacks and argyle socks, a woman in a faded dress, her legs crossed at the ankles as if napping. The skin was drawn tight around the bones of their faces. He was bald. Her curly white hair lay like a halo on the long embroidered pillow they shared. Two pairs of heavy eyeglasses sat perched on the edge of a nightstand.

Cleo drew in a breath and held it. In the dry, sealed room, their bodies had naturally mummified. But how long ago? And what had killed them?

A sharp animal instinct kicked up inside her, urging her to run, fearing some hidden danger still lurked in the room. With effort, she stood her ground.

“Sheriff’s department is looking through the records right now, trying to find a next of kin,” Graves said. “So far, we know the electricity to the house was disconnected ten years ago. Looks like nobody asked any questions when they stopped paying the bills.”

Cleo clicked on her own flashlight and studied the corpses. They had an odd sense of finality about them. There were no signs of violence, no accompanying feelings of injustice. Cleo felt more like an intruder than an investigator.

But the fact that the bodies were on the floor, instead of in the bed—that part didn’t fit. And the carpet around them was recently disturbed, scuffed in seemingly random directions.

“What do you make of this?” Cleo pointed at the woman’s hands. They rested on her stomach, but they were open, the shriveled gray fingers slightly bent.

“Best guess? She was holding onto something when she died. Something heavy. Stayed there a long time, until somebody came along and took it.”

Something. Maybe a gold spider.

Cleo turned around in place, taking in the rest of the room. Both dressers were covered in a sheet of dust. Same with an end table with a fringed lamp. The brightest thing in the room was a reading chair upholstered in bold blues and yellows.

The back of the chair had noticeably deeper colors, a more saturated pattern in the fabric. Cleo bent closer. It was missing the haze of dust that covered everything else.

She stepped back, looked at the chair and then the mummified body of the preacher’s wife, with her frozen fingers.

She closed her eyes and visualized the gold spider in the trunk of the Galaxie. There was a crumpled-up sweater laying next to the spider, on the checkered cloth of the car’s trunk.

She thought hard, imagining Ash placing the spider in the trunk, wrapped in the sweater so he wouldn’t touch it. In her mind, she parked the Galaxie in the creaky shed, with Ash standing at the rear bumper, frozen like a photograph.

He stood behind the open trunk, sweater-wrapped bundle in his hands, trying to hide the spider. Why? Andres was after him. It made sense. In a hurry, he dropped the spider. His hand accidentally grazed it. Ash stared at his palm, the skin already reddening. He slammed the trunk, staggered, and fell to the floor.

She froze the film there for a moment in her mind, then rewound it. Ash moved backward in jerky motions, the trunk opening, the bundle jumping back up into his hands. He ran backward out of the shed, up the driveway and into the house.

She paused. What had happened in the house? She wasn’t sure.

She cut to Ash upstairs in this room, alone, looking at the body of the preacher’s wife on the floor. She was still holding the spider, even in death. Why, Cleo didn’t know. She’d work on that later.

Ash looked down at her body. Was he shocked? Afraid? Did he say a prayer? He knew not to touch the spider with his bare skin. So he took the sweater off the back of the chair and picked up the spider—carefully? Greedily? Reluctantly?

Wrapped up the spider and held it. But how did he escape with it, when Andres and his gunmen were in the house?

She rethought the scene. Ash wouldn’t be here alone. He’d have Andres and the gunmen breathing down his neck. She could imagine Andres raising one finger and pointing, ordering one of his men to pick up the spider. Verify that it was the real deal.

One of his men bent down and, after a moment of hesitation, maybe a quick prayer, picked it up. And a moment later he collapsed on the carpet. Maybe he lay there for a minute, twitching. That explained the marks in the carpet.

What would go through Ash’s head at that moment?

Originally, he’d come up here on a hustle. Selling the spider to Andres. But then he’d come face-to-face with the gold statue. Did he have a change of heart? Did he decide the spider was too dangerous to hand over to Andres? Or had he just gotten scared and run off?

In her mind, Ash grabbed the sweater off the chair and used it to cover his hands as he picked up the spider. Held it out to Andres:
Here, take it
.

She froze on that image, Andres reaching for the gold spider, his eyes wide with greed.

No. Andres was too smart for that. But if Ash faked dropping the spider, maybe one of the gunmen would have reached for it. Or if he’d moved fast, striking out with the exposed gold . . .

“Ash knocked them out,” Cleo said aloud.

“Hmm?” Graves said. “Who knocked who out?”

“Nothing.” Still watching the film in her head, Cleo saw the gunmen go down. Saw Ash ducking out before Andres could get a clear shot. Running down the stairs, out the door, down the driveway and into the shed. Fueled by fear, he quickly opened the Galaxie’s trunk, trying to ditch the spider before Andres found him.

It all fit, more or less.

She shook her head, coming back to the present, looking down at the bodies. The preacher’s wife wasn’t wearing gloves. She’d been holding onto the spider with bare hands when she died. That was no accident.

In her case, the scene looked premeditated. The victims were laying peacefully side by side, sharing a pillow, like a couple of addicts getting high. Had they known what the spider would do to them?

And what did it do? It seemed like even a brief touch knocked a person out and caused localized amnesia. What would happen to someone who touched the spider continuously?

Would it erase all of their memories? Would it get them high, somehow?

Would it kill them?

A chilling thought occurred to her. “Graves. Do you know anything yet about their medical history? Any evidence of terminal illness? Mental health issues?”

“I’ll look into it. Why?”

“I think this might be a suicide.” She turned to face him. “Or maybe an overdose.”

He looked surprised. “Overdose on what?” He stood in front of a bookcase, studying the spines of the books one by one with his flashlight.

“I don’t know yet.”

Past Graves, beneath the end table with its fringed lamp, a clean black leather briefcase sat in shadow. Its brass latches gleamed in the beam of her flashlight.

Pulling on latex gloves, Cleo passed him, knelt and pulled out the briefcase.

“What’s that?” he said over her shoulder.

“Something that doesn’t belong.” She set the briefcase down on the carpet and tried the latches. The brass hasps snapped up with precise little clicks. When she opened it, her breath caught in her throat.

The briefcase was packed with rubber-banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

Graves whistled. “The preacher was not a poor man.”

“This wasn’t his money. It’s only been here a few days.” She prodded the stacks, doing a quick count in her head and multiplying it. “There’s a million dollars here, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said, his voice hushed.

The money probably belonged to Andres, she realized. Payoff for the spider. Ash had left in too much of a hurry to take it. But what about Andres? Why would he leave behind a million in cash?

A strange odor wafted up from the stacks of bills. She sniffed. “That’s weird. Smells like . . . paint.” Carefully, she picked up a bundle of bills and flipped through it. They were all crisp, all new, and—she checked this twice—they all had the same serial number.

Graves shifted on his feet, plainly uncomfortable. “Why kill a man downstairs and leave behind a million dollars?”

“Because,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “It’s all counterfeit.”