The Spider Thief (8 page)

“No. The bullets killed them. Andres just set the fire to cover his tracks.”

Ash couldn’t find a way to make sense of that. How could Andres have been here, all those years ago? How could Andres have even known about the spider back then?

You are so much like your father
, Andres had said.
You have no respect for what does not belong to you.

Ash gripped the sides of his head, fingers tangled in his damp hair, trying to put the pieces together. If Cleo was right, then Andres was there looking for the spider, even back then. Had he homed in on it after Ash had woken it up? Had the preacher, in his attempt to break the curse, somehow made it even more powerful? What kind of spiritual connection did the spider have to those who touched it?

What kind of connection was there between his parents, the spider, and Andres?

“Oh, God,” Cleo breathed, “you didn’t know.” She slid off the couch and came over to sit next to him on the arm of the chair. Tentatively, she put her arms around his shoulders. “I didn’t mean to drop that on you. I thought you knew. There was an investigation.”

Nobody had told him anything. He’d left town the night after the funerals, swearing he’d never come back, thinking he was a curse to everyone around him. “The fire was an accident,” he heard himself saying, distantly. “A freak accident. They said it might’ve been an electrical short.”

“No,” she whispered. “No, Ash. They were murdered.”

“How?”

“I have a copy of the coroner’s report.” After a moment, she added, “The rounds were nine-millimeter subsonic. A silenced pistol.”

Like the one Andres had used to kill his own man. Ash’s eyes stung, and he blinked back tears. In Cleo’s efforts to break his belief in the curse, she’d only convinced him more. He’d found the spider as a kid and woken it up, setting this all in motion. And eventually Andres had come looking for it.

Everyone had died because of Ash.

“I was the only one who saw Andres that night,” Cleo whispered. “I saw him driving through town. I didn’t find out who he was until much later. I can’t prove it was him. But I saw him.”

Ash closed his burning eyes.

“We’ll catch him, Ash, you and me. We will.”

Lens

Mauricio had never liked guns. So it felt like a Dante-ish sort of purgatory, having to sit there in DMT’s dingy apartment in the early hours of the morning, choking on cigarette smoke and watching complete idiots play with loaded weapons.

The music thumped so loud between the cracked plaster walls that it felt like a living creature beating on his skull. Crammed into one corner of a smelly blue couch with split seams and a wobbly arm, Mauricio watched DMT’s friends Sweet and Jermain get louder and more stupid with each new six-pack.

Both of them were black, armed, and worked for Prez, just like DMT. The difference was, whatever quality it was in DMT that clicked with Mauricio, these two didn’t have it.

Sweet was the skinny nervous one. His brother Jermain was bigger and louder. The two wore matching shirts and ties. And pistols, giant stainless steel Desert Eagles with calibers big enough to kill elephants. They seemed to find endless fascination in the act of taking the guns apart and putting them back together.

“Check this,” Sweet said, holding up a rubber band he found somewhere in the mess of beer bottles and pizza boxes that covered the floor. Squinting in the smoke from the cigarette clenched in his teeth, he looped the rubber band on the front of his disassembled pistol’s empty frame, stretched it back over the cocked hammer and aimed it at Mauricio. “Look-a-here. World’s baddest-ass rubber band gun.”

Mauricio pushed his blue plastic-rimmed glasses back up his nose. “Very impressive.”

“Bet yo ass.” Sweet pulled the trigger, and the rubber band stung Mauricio in the forehead. Jermain laughed so hard he fell down onto the arm of the couch and broke it off.

Mauricio carefully set down his warm bottle of beer and stood up.

“Where you goin’?” Sweet said. “Prez says you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“I’ll be outside.” Mauricio picked his way across the trash-littered floor to the front door and the clean night air. DMT’s apartment was on the third floor of an open L-shaped building that faced the street corner. Streams of traffic whizzed by on the main road, lines of white headlights and red tail lights.

He leaned on the rusted railing and seriously considered running for his life. He took a deep breath and let it out. The chipped paint of the railing was rough in his grasp. He forced his hands to unclench.

The door opened behind him, spilling hip-hop music onto the balcony.

“Mauricio,” DMT said in his soft voice, lumbering up next to him. “What’s good wit’ it?”

“Nothing is good.” Mauricio stepped back to the door and pulled it shut, trapping some of the noise inside. He went back to his spot by the railing. “Nothing at all. You can’t hold me here against my will. That’s a federal offense.”

DMT looked hurt. “I ain’t trying to hold you nowhere. Prez just told me, keep a eye on you. You want to go someplace, well, let’s go then. I don’t want them trashin’ up my place neither.”

The thought of being crammed into a car with those two made Mauricio’s skin crawl. “Just tell them, hey, enough with the rubber bands.”

“Yeah. They be cool.” DMT straightened the lapels of his jacket. Like Prez, DMT dressed sharp twenty-four hours a day: Ralph Lauren suit, herringbone shirt, pinstripe tie. The anti-gangsta. That’s how Mauricio was starting to think of him.

Mauricio took off his glasses, squinted at the lenses, and put them back on. “I don’t know how I ended up here. I should be back at school.”

DMT leaned on the railing, making it creak. “What kind of school you go to?”

“Film school.”

DMT did a double take. “You know how to make movies? Like real ones?”

Mauricio shrugged.

A silence fell between them. Below, the traffic lights changed, and a motorcycle roared out onto the street.

DMT nodded. “I’d like to do that.”

“Ride a motorcycle?”

“Make a movie.”

The old familiar frustration rose up inside Mauricio. “That’s what everybody thinks. Make a movie, sure, you get a camcorder, you can shoot some crap and put it on YouTube. But a real film, something with heart? Something that moves people, makes them think, makes them laugh and cry? That’s art, man. Film
can
be art. But you have to transcend to it.”

“Huh. I want to do the action thing. Right?” DMT put up his fists and jabbed at the air. “Run around, get all physical-like.”

Mauricio sagged against the railing, fighting off a wave of anguish. “Sure. Fine. Move to LA, look into stunt work, you could probably find something.”

“Naw, I don’t want to do stunts. I want to be up in the camera, doin’ my lines. Have my own stunt double, know I’m sayin’?”

“Oh.” Mauricio caught himself before he rolled his eyes. “So you want to be a star. That’s original.”

“Just want to be in a movie, that’s all. You know when you watch a movie, and it’s the kind, it’s about this stone cold dawg, his life’s all messed up, on the wrong path, doin’ the wrong thing. But for the right reasons. Feel me?”

Mauricio thought about it. “No. Not really.”

“Yeah, you do. Like he’s a hit man, right. And he finds out the dawgs he works for are all evil-like. Turns out he been killin’ the wrong people. So he goes and like saves a bunch of innocent people. And then at the end they’s all safe, but while he’s killing off his enemies, he gets shot. I mean, he still walks out of there, it’s all dramatic with the music an’ everything. Everybody likes a happy ending. But the thing is, you watchin’ it, you know he gonna die.”

“Hmm.” Mauricio pretended to agree. “You mean like, say, Shane.”

“I don’t know no Shane.” DMT leaned out over the railing, his thumbs and forefingers making a box over the Denver skyline. “Look at that view, dawg.”

Mauricio stepped over next to him and raised his own fingers and thumbs, mimicking the box DMT was making. The two of them stood side by side, squinting at the Denver skyline.

As much as Mauricio hated to admit it, it would make a good establishing shot. Had a natural composition to it, light and dark that would direct the eye, asymmetrical but balanced. The more he looked at it, the more he liked it.

“Yeah, that’s right. You see it now.” DMT clapped him on the back with his giant hand. “You goin’ to make that movie, I know it.”

Mauricio lowered his fingers. He should shoot it now, he told himself. While he had the inspiration. “I have to get my camera.”

“A’ight. Where it at?”

Mauricio pointed straight down, over the railing, to the shadowed shape of his car parked three stories below. Together, they went down the concrete steps, the whole time Mauricio thinking about how he could escape, run off into the night. Except that DMT had his keys.

He didn’t know this neighborhood at all. He wasn’t sure how far he could get on foot, or whether he could find a taxi. And the strangest part of it was that he didn’t want to leave. He actually felt a connection to DMT. The big guy just didn’t have a dangerous aura. And Mauricio’s instincts about dangerous people had been honed to a fine edge lately, thanks to Ash and his brilliant schemes.

DMT, by comparison, felt safe.

Besides, Mauricio really wanted to take that shot of the skyline. He decided to go with it, embrace that creative spark and capture it before it went out. It made him feel alive, more than he had felt in months.

They got the bulky case out of the trunk and headed back upstairs, DMT panting as he climbed. “That’s a big camera, yo.”

“When we get money, Ash gets boots.” Mauricio bounded up to the top step. “I get cameras.” He set the case down outside the front door, unlatched it and pulled the camera from its foam rubber cradle.

Wheezing, DMT headed inside and turned off the music. “Get up off the floor, fools. Mauricio here gonna shoot some footage.”

Sweet looked eager. “Shoot some what?”

“And we all goin’ to be in it,” DMT said.

Mauricio paused with the camera in one hand and a wide-angle lens in the other. “Uh, no. I’m just going to shoot the skyline, that’s all.”

A chorus of disapproval erupted from the three of them. They waved him inside.

“Come on,” DMT said. “All we been doin’s sittin’ here. Let’s shake it up. Put us in the movie.”

“That’s right.” Sweet grinned. “Put us in the movie.”

“Get all three us in it,” DMT said.

Mauricio sighed and went inside. Jermain reached for the camera and Mauricio yanked it away.

“Don’t touch. Zeiss lens. This is not some RCA junk from eBay.” Mauricio took up a position against the far wall, facing them. “No rubber bands.”

Sweet folded his arms. “You goin’ to turn that on or what?”

Mauricio fired up the camera without another word. The lighting in here was all shadows and glare. But the thing he loved about this camera was how well it accommodated rough conditions.

He got a clear frame around Sweet’s pocked face. DMT and Jermain crowded in around him.

“Okay,” Mauricio said, “We’re rolling.”

“For real?” DMT said. “Just like that?”

Sweet’s face took on a sneer. He narrowed his eyes to glittering slits and tilted his head back, looking down into the camera. “Whassup. This is Sweet.”

Behind him, the door silently swung open, showing nothing but blackness beyond. The wide-angle lens exaggerated the motion, turning the doorway into a yawning abyss.

Strange, Mauricio thought. He’d just been out there a minute ago, and there was a porch light outside that door. He was sure of it. Now, it was pitch black.

Sweet grinned and looked at Jermain. “Say somethin’, dawg.”

An arm came up behind them, from outside. A black sleeve and leather glove, holding a pistol fitted with a silencer. It popped and Sweet collapsed on the floor, limp. Ice water ran through Mauricio’s body.

Jermain, propped up against DMT’s shoulder, started laughing.

“Gun!” Mauricio lowered the camera and pointed.
“Gun!”

DMT tilted his head back and peered over his shoulder. The figure in the doorway aimed the pistol, the sleeve of his black jacket pulling back, and shot twice more. The slide snapped back with each shot, popping a brass casing into the air. Blood burst from Jermain’s shirt, arcing across the carpet. He and DMT dropped in a sprawling mess and lay still.

Their disassembled guns sat untouched on the coffee table, between beer bottles.

Mauricio ducked low and scrambled around the corner past the tiny bathroom, no more than an alcove with a sink and a mirror and hideous wallpaper. He headed into the bedroom, tripping over dirty clothes.

He realized he was still holding onto the camera, and it was still rolling. He dropped it onto the messed-up bed and dug underneath for the shotgun DMT had bragged he kept there.

He found it, wrapped up in a towel. The barrel of the sawn-off twelve-gauge was oily and cold, barely longer than Mauricio’s forearm. The stock was cut off just behind the pistol grip and wrapped in dirty masking tape.

He took it in his hands, turned around and faced the empty bedroom doorway, breathing hard. The apartment had gone silent. His knees shook as he stood up.

He waited. Nothing.

What about DMT? Mauricio didn’t know for sure he was hit. Maybe he was playing dead. He could’ve been just grazed, nothing serious, but too scared to do anything.

He kept the shotgun aimed at the bedroom doorway. He tried to take reassurance from the weight of the gun. It shook in his hands.

Nothing else moved. One step at a time, he edged closer to the open doorway. His wide-eyed reflection stared back at him from the bathroom mirror, showing his face gone pale beneath his tan complexion. He kept his mouth open to hide the sound of his breathing, but that was all he could hear, the shaky rush of his own breath.

In the mirror, he saw a wiry arm covered in spider web tattoos. It snaked out and grabbed the shotgun, twisting it from his hands.

Before Mauricio could react, the taped-up stock of the shotgun smacked him in the chest. He stumbled back until he found himself sitting on the bed, staring up into the shotgun’s gaping muzzle. File marks glinted in the rough metal where the end of the barrel had been sawn off.