Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) (2 page)

“I don’t want soup. I don’t want to wash the sweet out.” Samuel kept opening and shutting his mouth experimentally.

“Uhhhmmmmn.” My mind went back to the phone number problem. There are a depressingly large number of online services and stalker apps that will track down the personal information and current location of a cell phone number. Even more depressingly, I often use them. But I was starting to think the number Cassidy had given me was an unlisted landline. An old-fashioned private landline wouldn’t broadcast GPS coordinates, and its owner and location could be hidden behind a limited liability corporation license. Not impossible for anyone who wasn’t a law officer to track, but doing it with a laptop from a restaurant booth was beyond my limited technological savvy.

In a way, a landline made sense. Magic causes energy disruptions, and most modern wireless and digital technology is too sensitive to work around it. If the sex operator who had enticed Cassidy’s husband really was using some kind of spell or magical ability over the phone—and I thought she was—it was possible that she had to use a landline because a cell phone would keep shutting down the moment she started chanting or singing. But If the spell went into one landline receiver and came out a cell phone seven hundred miles away and still had a magical effect, why wouldn’t that magic still shut down the cell phone?

I started doodling something that looked like a ward stone surrounded by ley lines on a napkin. Lots of defensive magic functions by drawing and channeling magic into the ground where it can be dispersed by the earth’s magnetic field…Did the act of physically travelling through copper filament and being grounded before going through some kind of transmitting station dilute the magic just enough that it could still function but not shut down cell phones? Some men who called phone sex numbers were probably obsessive about it. Was it possible they were getting repeated doses of a small amount of magic, the effect of which grew stronger over time? I didn’t like the idea that someone was experimenting with those kinds of thresholds. The fact that most curses can’t be conveyed through technology is one of the few things keeping the world halfway stable.

While I was mulling this over, Samuel belched fire. It was a small flame, certainly not comparable to anything that a circus performer would do to draw attention, but it was real fire. I looked around—slowly, not frantically, because sudden motion draws attention—but there were only two other customers in the restaurant, and neither of them was very alert.

“Samuel,” I didn’t have to speak loud. His hearing was as good as mine. “You can’t do things like breathe fire.”

An expression came into his eyes. Slightly guilty, somewhat chagrined, with both innocence and a sort of cunning lurking in there. “I didn’t.”

“I saw it. If you breathe fire in public, knights from my old order will find us and kill us both,” I explained.

“I just burped.” He was challenging me.

“You haven’t been burping flames your whole life or you would have been discovered by now. And if you keep breathing fire, someone will stop you no matter what your reason is. It might be me.” I let him see the part of me that would end the problem Samuel represented once and for all if I had to, just for a moment. I’m not proud of that part of me, but it’s real, and it’s there anytime I need it.

The emotion crouching behind his eyes changed to something like panic. “No,” he mumbled. “It was an accident.”

I sighed. Now I felt like a bully. There was no easy balance to strike with Samuel. I was either protecting a killer or mishandling someone with disabilities and needs I had no idea how to deal with. Would killing Samuel be the hard choice that I had to make to protect other people, or would it be a sociopath’s way out?

The next morning, Cassidy gave me the number of a PO box in Porter, Alabama. “Getting the tracking number was easier than I thought,” she explained.

I gave her an encouraging nod. “Good.”

We were having pancakes at the Main Street Café even though she was cheating and having a salad instead. In fact, Cassidy was acting like we were on a date. She was wearing a black jacket open over a green dress that was somewhere between office job and nightclub. She smelled good. I was wearing a blue shirt from the Gap that I’d gotten from a Goodwill and smelled faintly of woodsmoke and Speed Stick. She had nervously offered her hand and her full name, something we hadn’t done at the meeting. “Cassidy Chalupnik.”

I asked her a question to cover the fact that I wasn’t offering my full name back. Cassidy seemed like someone who would Google any name I gave her as soon as she had a moment with her smartphone, and I had a lot of names ready with bland histories and no pictures on the internet, but none of them matched the story I’d given at the meeting. “Chalupnik. Is that Polish?”

She laughed self-consciously. “It’s Czechoslovakian. I hate it. I wish I could keep Steve’s name, but, well, you know. It’s a shame though. I really liked being Cassidy Jameson.”

“I like Chalupnik,” I said. “It has character. Like a good chunky soup.” I had no idea what I was talking about.

“It means
peasant
,” she said a little dourly. “I have no idea why my family kept it.”

“So, why are you?” I asked.

She considered this. “Hmmm. I don’t know.”

“Maybe that’s their reason too,” I said.

She got around to the thing I was trying to avoid. Women are good at that. “So, what’s your name?”

“O’ Toole.” I improvised. Between the huge number of Irish cops in Chicago, New York, and Boston, the chances of there being a lot of cops named Tom O’Toole seemed pretty good. “So, see? Your name’s not so bad. You could be a tool.”

She laughed, mostly to be polite, and then our food got there and the conversation died for a while. I didn’t try to resurrect it. I don’t mind silence.

“What do you do for sex?” she asked abruptly.

It was an unusually frank question, but maybe it was because we’d met in a meeting where people were baring intimate details about their lives. I answered. “That’s not the real reason I wanted the phone number, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

She laughed a little self-consciously. “No. I mean…how do you get it?”

“Usually, I run my eyes and hands and lips over the body of a woman who’s willing to have sex with me,” I explained. “This helps the woman lubricate and speeds up my heart rate, which sends blood rushing into my groin and causes a certain part of that area to expand…”

She crumpled up her napkin and threw it at me. It bounced off my chest and landed on the floor. “Shut up.”

“Honestly? There are women who aren’t looking for a serious relationship,” I said. It was true. Some of them were divorced and wanted to jumpstart their sex life again, or career-oriented, or widowed, or independent, or felt like they wanted to have fun and see what was out there before they settled down. “Every now and then, we bump into each other.”

“So to speak,” she said.

“So to speak,” I said. “What are you really asking me, Cassidy?”

“You’re some kind of gypsy right now, right?” She said.

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” I agreed. “Although it might piss off some gypsies.”

“And, well…everybody needs sex,” she forged on.

“Well, not like oxygen,” I said. “But yeah. One way or the other.”

“I’m not ready for anything serious either,” she said. “But I’m…well…It’s been a while. And I’m in a small town. I can’t just put on a sexy dress and go to a bar and wait for some hot stranger to come along or whatever they do in big cities. There’s only one bar that isn’t a dive around here, and even if I went there, most of the men are too dumb or too young or too mean or too married. And none of them would be strangers.”

“Sounds like you need a trank gun and a black van,” I observed.

“The next thing I throw is going to be my knife,” she warned.

I held up a palm in a gesture of apology. “Sorry.”

“I’ve thought about Match.com or eHarmony or some other dating site, but that just seems like a lot of BS that I’m not ready for,” she said. “I’ve thought about Craigslist or something like it too. I hear there are websites that have links for people who just want to skip all the hoo-hah and get to the…”

“Yee-hah?” I suggested.

She smiled a little self-consciously. “But then I think about Steve and I just can’t do it. I don’t want to be like him.”

“Ummhmmn,” I grunted for lack of anything better to say.

“Do you think I’m messed up?” she asked.

“Yes,” I responded.

“Thanks!” she shot back angrily.

“Come on,” I said mildly. “Everybody is.”

“Steve’s barely been gone for half a year. I guess he was gone before that, really, but….” She stuttered to a halt.

“We all have different ways of trying to deal with our crap.” I paused while a waitress came over and refilled my coffee. It was true enough. Some people suffer a loss and their libido goes up. Some people’s libido goes down. Some people want to find a cave to huddle in, and some people want company.

“So, you don’t think I’m a freak?” she said.

I didn’t explain how broad my definition of freakiness could get, up to and including tails, scales, stingers, fangs, claws, cannibalism, extra limbs, possession, and human sacrifice. Instead, I said, “I don’t care what anyone else does with their body as long as they’re not raping somebody or having sex with a minor. It’s none of my business.”

Cassidy wasn’t giving up that easily. “What if someone wants to make it your business?”

Look, I don’t go trolling around self-help groups looking for vulnerable women to sleep with, but I wasn’t sure how to put that tactfully. I tried anyhow. “I have rules. No married women. No women who are under the influence. No women in emotional crisis.”

Cassidy gave me a challenging look. “You think I’m in emotional crisis?”

“Well, I met you at a meeting for people with post-traumatic stress disorder,” I said. “That might be a clue.”

She snorted, half amused and half defensive. “You were there too.”

“I know,” I said. “Which is why you should be staying away from me. When we went there, it was with the understanding that we weren’t going to cross certain lines. That kind of thing matters to me.”

“Why?” she said.

Because a woman I loved died because she knew me, and I still kind of hate myself. But what I said was “It’s all I’ve got.”

She started to cry.

“Hey,” I protested mildly.

She shook her head, and I let her sob quietly while every person in the diner around us silently decided that I was an asshole. When Cassidy finally spoke again, she half laughed and dried her eyes. “Sorry. This just isn’t how I pictured the whole sexy drifter fantasy thing playing out.”

“I’m sorry too,” I said.

That was the wrong thing to say. Her self-esteem was in a fragile state, and when Cassidy pulled herself back together, it was as if she’d turned some kind of switch off. She spoke coldly and formally, like we were closing some kind of business deal. “If you find out anything about that number, I don’t want to know about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“This is it.” She stood up. “I’m letting it go.”

“Okay,” I repeated, and she walked out of the diner without saying good-bye. That’s the thing about people who are barely coping with grief: whatever she was going through, it had never really been about me, and it shouldn’t have been.

I picked up the check.

I still don’t know if I should have picked up the Czech.

I found a large gold pocket watch in a pawn shop in Martinsburg, and then a bench jeweler who was willing to take the watch apart and put it back together again. Tim McMillon was in his sixties and not radiating health. He had cheap fake teeth, big glasses, mottled skin, lots of soft fat, and a cough that didn’t sound temporary, but he still had standards. “What is it you want me to put in the watch, exactly?”

“A tiny tracking device made for dog collars.” I pulled one out of my pocket.

Tim took the tracker and examined it suspiciously. His business didn’t look like it was doing much better than he was—it was a grimy, cramped little store in a strip mall, and Tim was the only person in it—but I got the distinct impression that he still wasn’t going to help me if he thought I was stalking an ex-girlfriend. “Why do you want to put a GPS chip in a pocket watch?”

“Well, I keep losing track of time…” I began, but I stopped when his expression turned sour. It hadn’t been that sweet to begin with. I tried again. “I’m trying to track down a rare coin, and I think a pawn shop owner fenced it through some kind of black market. I want to use this gold watch to follow his pipeline.”

“You’re a police officer?” he asked doubtfully.

“God no, I’m a treasure hunter,” I said. “I think the coin came from a shipwreck off the coast of South Carolina.”

“Hmmm,” Tim said, and we were still working out the details when a shadow fell over us. Samuel had gotten bored in my truck and was standing directly outside the store’s front window, his face pressed too close to the pane. Samuel’s unnaturally hot breath had created a patch of fogged glass the size of a beach blanket, and his body was blurred and outlined in sunlight at the same time. Even in jeans and flannel, Samuel’s misty outline towered there like the sign of some kind of apocalypse, his features hidden.

“Jesus Christ!” Tim breathed.

“Not even close,” I assured him.

While waiting for Tim to finish working on the watch, I took Samuel to a public library with a computer area. Samuel played some kind of video game where little animated stick figures kept getting blown up while he tried to navigate them out of a maze, and he seemed to enjoy it. He laughed so loud and so often that some of the other patrons got a little uncomfortable, but nobody was going to say anything to a six foot six behemoth who seemed to have some impulse-control issues. I sat next to him and spent the time researching Porter, Alabama.

Porter got its name back in the 1800s from a prominent family of shipping magnates who made their living off the Black Warrior River. Before that, the land had existed in various degrees of contention between Choctaw and Creek Native Americans. The area was also pretty close to Tuscaloosa, which used to be known as “The Druid City.”