The Book With No Name (40 page)

Jessica rewarded him with a cheeky grin and a wink of her own. ‘Sure thing, honey,’ she said. ‘Hey Sanchez, can we have a bottle of vodka to go, please?’

It would be an understatement to say that Sanchez was more than a little jealous of the attention Jessica was giving Jefe. They were starting to look and act like a proper couple.
If only he had made a move first,
he mused. Fuckin’ Jefe. Bastard. But he handed Jessica a bottle of vodka on the house, and continued to put a brave face on things. He didn’t want Jefe to know that he had a thing for his woman. That wouldn’t be wise. He watched them enviously as they left the bar. Jessica was kindly providing a shoulder for a rather drunk Jefe to lean on. His adrenalin rush had obviously worn off and he was staggering all over the place. Without Jessica for support he would certainly have fallen.

Just as they reached the doors Sanchez called out after them, ‘See you two tomorrow. Don’t forget it’s fancy dress!’

Jessica turned back and winked at him.

‘Don’t worry, Sanchez, I’ll be dressing up. I kinda think you’ll like my outfit.’

Miles Jensen had been sitting in almost total darkness ever since Carlito and Miguel had left the barn. They had closed the large wooden doors behind them when they went, shutting out what little light had been provided by the moon. He could just about make out the outline of the scarecrow in the wheelbarrow in front of him. It was very nearly one o’clock and time for the alarm on his phone to go off.

The scarecrow hadn’t moved, which came as no surprise to Jensen, but he was keen for the witching hour to come to an end anyway. The ridiculous story Carlito had told him about the scarecrow coming to life had been laughable, but with every passing minute Jensen had found himself becoming a little more nervous. It was too dark to see the time on his phone still nestling in his lap, and he was now beginning to have doubts about whether or not the alarm had actually been set. Suggesting that he had set the alarm for one o’clock, when in actual fact he had done no such thing, might have been Carlito’s way of prolonging Jensen’s agony.

Jensen’s head still hurt from the blow he had received earlier in the evening, and this was making it difficult to stay alert. He wanted nothing more than to rest his eyes and go to sleep for a few hours. In fact, he was actually quite close to nodding off when he heard a creaking sound coming from the front of the barn. Instinctively he took a deep breath of air in through his nostrils and held it, so as not to make any noise. Looking ahead of him, he desperately strained his eyes to see if he could make out what was making the noise.

It was the barn door, and it was opening very, very slowly.
He could tell this because of the slim shaft of moonlight that suddenly appeared and lit up one side of the scarecrow’s head. The straw face now looked as though it had eyes, where before it had no facial features at all. But the scarecrow was not Jensen’s main concern. He needed to know who the man standing at the doorway shrouded in mist and outlined by the glow of the moonlight was. It was a tall man who appeared to be wearing a suit and a panama hat that tilted slightly to one side of his head. He also held a gun in his right hand, pointing down at the ground.

‘Somers? That you?’ Jensen called out.

The man did not respond. Instead, he stepped inside the barn and pushed the door almost shut behind him. There was still just a slight shimmer of moonlight coming in through a small gap where the door was not fully closed. It provided just enough light for Jensen to see that the man was walking slowly towards him. He was also raising the gun from his side and pointing it at the wheelbarrow in which the scarecrow was slumped. When he was about three yards away from Jensen he stopped and appeared to take aim, pointing the pistol at the scarecrow’s head.

At that moment something happened that might have cost Jensen his life. The alarm on his cellphone went off. The tune it played was the theme from
Superman: The Movie,
and it was horribly loud. It was hard to tell whether or not Carlito had turned the volume on Jensen’s phone all the way up or whether the sound was so shocking because the silence preceding it had been so unnerving.

The sudden noise startled the man in the panama hat and he swung round, pointing his gun at Jensen. His trigger finger was trembling. This man was seriously spooked.

‘Jensen, are you alone?’ he whispered, hoarsely.

‘Christ almighty. Is that you, Scraggs?’

‘Yeah. You alone or what?’

‘Yeah, I think so, apart from this fuckin’ scarecrow.’ He found himself overcome with relief at the sound of the familiar voice of Lieutenant Paolo Scraggs.

‘A scarecrow? Is that what it is?’ Scraggs asked, baffled.

‘Yeah. The Straw Man himself. Can you untie me, please?’

‘Sure.’ Scraggs stepped forward and jumped up onto the stack of bales that Jensen was sitting on. He positioned himself directly behind the bound man and felt around until he had his hands on the tape that was binding Jensen’s hands together. He made no attempt to unwind or cut the tape immediately, however, obviously seeing this as an opportunity to quiz the captive investigator about what he had discovered.

‘So why did those two guys bring you in here, Jensen? And why didn’t they kill you?’ he asked.

‘Can you just untie me, please?’ Jensen groaned. He was too tired for an interrogation from a fellow officer. He had been through quite enough already.

‘Come on, Jensen. I just saved your ass so I reckon you can tell me what’s going on. In fact, I think it’s the least you can do in the circumstances. I could always leave you here, you know.’ Scraggs was a tiresome individual at the best of times, and Jensen was now beginning to see why Somers showed so little tolerance for the man.

‘Listen, Scraggs, they left me here to die. Said something about the scarecrow over there coming to life to kill me. They never told me what they wanted with me or anything like that.’

‘You’re gonna have to do better than that, Jensen,’ said Scraggs, looking over at the scarecrow. ‘You don’t seriously expect me to believe they didn’t have a reason for dragging you here? You’ve found out something and I think it’s time you started to share the information with the rest of us. If you had died here, if those two thugs had decided to kill you, then all the information you’ve acquired about our serial killer would have been lost. Now how about telling me what you found out, before I start to lose my temper?’

Jensen was untroubled by the other man’s attempts at intimidation. He had seen something else, something that had grabbed his attention far more than the desperate probing of
the Lieutenant.

‘Scraggs …’

‘What is it, Jensen?’

‘Look out!’

‘What? AAAARGH!’

Scraggs wasn’t quick enough to react to the warning Jensen had offered. The scarecrow was upon him in a flash. It leapt up from its position slouched in the wheelbarrow and thrust its maggot-riddled straw face right into his. Its arms wrapped themselves around the back of his neck, causing him to lose his balance and footing. From where he had been crouching behind Jensen on the bales, he was sent tumbling to the ground with the scarecrow on top of him, clinging to him like a cheap suit. Scraggs continued to scream as he fought desperately to fend off the flailing limbs of his attacker. Its face was embedded in his neck, causing a horrible prickling sensation against the soft skin beneath his chin.

In his terror, Scraggs had dropped his gun. After several seconds of rolling wildly from side to side to keep the evil-looking straw man from biting or scratching him, Scraggs eventually managed to push it to one side and roll away to his right, where he succeeded only in knocking a stack of bales loose. The stack wobbled before falling on him, one heavy bale causing no small amount of pain as it banged against his forehead. This was followed by the most painful moment of all. The mad cackling. Scraggs recognized it instantly. Somers! He had one of those irritating laughs, and he was laughing it now, loud and long.

Scraggs pushed the fallen bale off his head and sat up. The scarecrow was lying flat on its front where he had thrown it during the struggle. Jensen was where he had been before, tied up and sitting on a bale of straw. Standing in front of him, outlined by the moonlight flooding in through the now open doorway, was Detective Archibald Somers.

‘Scraggs, you really are an asshole,’ Somers mocked. ‘My partner here has been tied up and left for dead, and you, you prick, you start interrogating him. You must have shit for brains.’

‘You fucking asswipe, Somers,’ Scraggs bellowed as he climbed to his feet. He was furious at the humiliation he had just suffered. Somers had obviously sneaked in after him and thrown the scarecrow at him while his guard was down. Bastard!

‘You’re the asswipe, Scraggs,’ said Somers smugly. ‘What I did to you is no worse than what you were doing to Jensen. Now untie him before I set that refugee from
The Wizard of Oz
on you again.’

The crestfallen and embarrassed Lieutenant Paolo Scraggs reluctantly did as he was told. He took his time, and gained a certain amount of pleasure from ripping the sticky tape off, knowing that it would hurt.

‘Thanks, Somers,’ said a greatly relieved Jensen. ‘How did you know I was here?’ He began to rub his wrists, then opened and closed his hands several times to try to ease the stiffness and pain in his fingers.

‘Well, I gotta tell you, partner, I was strugglin’, but then this clown …’ he pointed at Scraggs ‘… this total fuckin’ loser used the police frequency to call the Captain and tell him he was outside the barn and should he go in and get you.’

‘That so?’ said Jensen, turning to Scraggs. ‘How long were you waiting outside for before you plucked up the guts to come in and get me, you fucking moron?’

Scraggs stepped back, looking round to see if he could locate the pistol he’d dropped.

‘Hey, I was just following orders, okay?’ he said sheepishly. ‘I didn’t know you were in trouble.’

‘Some fuckin’ detective you are,’ Somers muttered. ‘Come on, Jensen, let’s get out of here. I think we both need some sleep. We got a big day ahead of us tomorrow, and word is the Bourbon Kid has been seen in a bar called the Nightjar.’

‘Yeah? Has he killed anyone else?’

‘A few. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.’

‘What about Annabel de Frugyn?’ asked Jensen standing up and rubbing his sore wrists.

‘Funny you ask. I’ve had a really crappy evening myself,
but the one bit of good news is that I got an alias for her. She’s known around town as the Mystic Lady.’

‘The Mystic Lady? What’s she, a fortune teller or somethin’?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She any good?’

‘No, fuckin’ awful. Wouldn’t see Christmas coming if she woke up in bed with Santa Claus.’

After a restless night spent alternately dozing and worrying about the day ahead, Dante had done a good deal of thinking. The first thing he had decided was that it would be best if Kacy met up with him after he’d done the deal with the monks. Although he didn’t expect them to try to double-cross him, he wasn’t taking any chances.

He had chosen his fancy-dress costume for the Lunar Festival with the meeting in mind. To make himself look a little tougher he had picked out a Terminator outfit. The guy in the fancy-dress store had done the hard sell on him and told him it was actually one of the outfits Schwarzenegger had worn in the first movie. Dante was pretty sure the guy was bullshitting him, but he wanted to believe it was true, so he chose to. And it worked. It made him feel that little bit extra cool. He actually felt something like a tough-guy, walking around in the black leather outfit and the cool shades. He also had a pistol concealed inside the jacket, just in case things went wrong. No point in taking unnecessary risks. He could easily run into some fruitcake who fancied making a name for himself by picking a fight with the Terminator.