The Curious Case of the Cursed Dice (Curiosity Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 2)

by Constance Barker

  My mind raced as I watched the uniformed thugs cluster outside our door courtesy of Clarence’s phone. "There sure are a lot of them out there," I said.

  "I think it just looks that way," Lila said. “It’s a narrow hallway. That makes it look crowded and exaggerates their numbers.”

  "Well, where does that leave us?"

  Lila pointed to the objects I was holding. "We got what we came for, I guess."

  "And we are stuck in here with our booty," I pointed out. "That isn't exactly the outcome that I was looking for. I guess my luck is kind of spotty."

  "That's probably because you use it constantly," Clarence said. "You get a hunch and take a gamble. So you use yours regularly and it probably ebbs and flows. We had some incredible luck earlier… maybe the dice were using yours and Lila's both."

  It dawned on me that he might be exactly right. "Which should mean that you, Clarence, would have more potential luck than anyone. Even if I hadn't been using up some of mine, you are a positive hoarder of luck."

  "And at this point, I'm negative luck," Lila said.

  I watched Clarence as he considered the situation.

  "Hey," a voice called through the door, "you are trapped in there." It was Ulrich.

  Lila put her hand on the door. "Thanks for that, sweetie, but we kind of noticed it all on our own. Unless you have something new to contribute, please stop interrupting us."

  "I've got more men coming. When they get here I can unlock the door and you’ll be captured. Again. Why bother pretending you have a chance to escape?"

  “Because it makes us feel a lot better about the situation,” Clarence said. “Oh, and by the way, catching us will be more difficult than you think.”

  "Why?" Ulrich sounded honestly curious.

  "Because I changed the combination," Clarence told him. "Go ahead and unlock it if you can. I’m afraid you’ll need the guy with the torch. Last I saw of him he was taking the door off the security room so your guys could find out I wasn’t inside."

  Clarence smiled as he turned his cell phone so we could see the scowl on Ulrich's face.

  "Then I'll resort to plan B," he said.

  "That doesn't sound like an improvement," I said. "What's plan B, Ulrich?"

  "I can have my men stay out here until you have to leave for food and water."

  Clarence looked at me. "That is a serious drawback to our position in this standoff alright."

  "Maybe we will find another way out," Lila said.

  "Good luck with that," Ulrich said. "Look around all you like, but there isn't another exit. Not even a cooling and heating duct, Clarence. We know that's how you got out of the security control room."

  "Good boy, Clarence," Lila said.

  We stepped back from the door to talk.

  "So we haven't got any options?" I made it a question, hoping I was wrong.

  "Just trusting to luck," Clarence said.

  “Oh that old scam,” Lila said.

  Clarence held out his hand. "Give me the dice."

  "Clarence, you know you can't plan how this will go, don't you? Luck just happens."

  "I don't have to like it," he said far too calmly. "As a clever woman once said, we are out of options."

  I could sense his resolve. Taking this gamble would go against everything Clarence believed in. I held out the dice and dropped them into his hand.

  "What can I say but 'good luck'.?"

  "That seems incredibly appropriate and trite at the same time," Lila said. “Now can we get out of here?"

  "What's the rush?" Clarence said. "You were complaining about the heat outside."

  He was stalling, getting up his nerve.

  "We’ll do it whenever you are ready," I said.

  "As long as it's soon," Lila said and gave us an embarrassed smile. "I don't do well in enclosed places for long."

  Chapter 29

  Clarence put his palms together and rubbed the dice between them as if he was warming his hands.

  "What are you doing?" Lila asked.

  "I have a theory that I’ll be luckier if I get the luck in the dice used to me. I've seen gamblers do this."

  “Another thing gamblers do is name a pair of dice if they find they are especially lucky.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  She held up a hand. “Honest.”

  “I’ll call them Clarence,” he said. He was serious.

  I touched his arm. "You do know that most of the people who do that with dice lose, right?"

  "They don't have this particular pair of dice now, do they?"

  He had a point. "And do you have any ideas about how to use them for our escape?"

  He wrinkled his forehead. "I have some crazy impulses. I wouldn't call them ideas. But then I don’t have any ideas at all, so I guess we go with the impulses."

  "I guess we do."

  Clarence put the dice in his pocket, pulled back his shoulders and walked to the door. "I think you two better stay close to me," he said. "Things are about to get weird."

  "As opposed to our normal tranquil world of cursed object hunting?" I nodded at Edgar. "Or living with ghosts?"

  “That’s good fortune for you indeed,” Edgar said.

  Clarence nodded. "Yes. Based on the nature of my impulses, I think they are going to get far weirder before we start to approach any sort of normalcy again. We have to go through the armed contingent outside the door, and then get to the ground floor from the twenty-fourth floor with the objects."

  “Sounds good to me,” Lila said. “I did sign up for weird.”

  With that Clarence opened the door wide and stepped out of the vault, startling the armed men who had been watching the door.

  Edgar took advantage of the situation to slink through them. "I'll root for you from over here," he said.

  The men at the front of the pack were still frozen in place. I think the fact that Clarence was smiling as if he was glad to see them had them puzzled. Finally, he let go of the door.

  "Excuse me," he said. He took my hands and Lila’s. "Coming through." He winked at us, said, "Here we go," and stepped right between two of them. I was a bit in front and Lila brought up the rear. As we walked through them I was certain that something interesting was about to happen.

  The reality of what had just happened seemed to dawn on Steele and his men all at once. And that was the moment that our peaceful egress from his vault room turned into a melee. I couldn't track everything that happened in the next moment, but I watched as a guard right at the door spun around to face us. He was raising a baton—one of those nasty hardwood clubs cops have. As his arm came up, the sleeve of his shirt caught on the edge of the door, and his own momentum spun him around. His sudden change of direction was perfect for putting his head right in the downward path of another guard's baton.

  Ulrich had his gun and leveled it at us, but in that crowded space, with armed men packed in with little space between them, the guard who'd been hit in the head slammed into Ulrich. His body covered the gun.

  In the chaos, while the men were tripping, slipping, and generally assaulting each other, they also opened a pathway. Our little trio carefully and calmly picked our way past them and emerged on the other side unscathed.

  “Welcome,” Edgar said.

  Clarence stopped and pushed Lila and I down the hallway. "One sec," he said. “I’ll be along in a moment.” Ulrich had pushed the guard aside (he fell down on the floor). Clarence turned and gave Ulrich a casual shove toward the door. Ulrich lost his balance and fell back, his arms flailing in the air. Two guards ducked inside the room to get out of his way. Another grabbed at Ulrich and the two of them tumbled back into the vault. Two more followed, trying to help.

  "Why don't you let these gentlemen see our reserve team, Edgar?" I said. “Make a dramatic entrance.”

  “Like a real ghost,” Edgar said, smiling. He looked in the direction of the door and shouted, "Boo!"

  Suddenly the guards that were still struggling to get back
on their feet jumped back.

  "I've wanted to use that word ever since we decided I was a ghost," he said as we watched Clarence shut the door, locking them in. "The lock," he said.

  I held out the lock and Clarence hooked it on the door handle.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "The lock on that door only locks people out, not in. This will keep them inside while we get away."

  "But we came for the lock…"

  "And now we have to leave it," he said. "We've got the dice you wanted so badly and we have the pen. Let's call it a win and cut our losses. We need to improvise."

  "Right." I looked at Lila. "We want to avoid getting greedy."

  She grinned at me as Clarence glanced at his cell phone and made a face. "We better get cracking. There a lot more ugly and angry looking guys coming up the stairs. I don’t imagine they are coming to reinforce our team.”

  "Which way do we go?"

  He shook his head. "All the exits are blocked." He turned and opened a door to a room. "This way," he said stepping inside as if he knew what he was doing.

  The room he'd led us inside was empty. And hot. "It's being renovated," Lila said.

  She was right. The office had been stripped bare to the concrete and it had no windows. Clarence went to the open window frame and looked out. I could feel the hot air blowing in and hear the noise of the city below.

  Clarence turned to us and clucked. "Looks like we'll have to jump."

  "Jump? Do you know how high up we are?"

  “Twenty-four floors,” Lila said. “Maybe really only twenty-three. A lot of these buildings skip the thirteenth.”

  "It doesn't matter," Clarence said.

  "No, because as I recall, falling from this kind of height, anything over five stories or so, is usually fatal."

  "But you can see our luck is still working for us."

  "It was real lucky that the reinforcements blocked all the exits," Lila said. "I liked that part."

  Clarence tipped his head and looked straight down. "Well it was luck brought us into the one office where the windows were missing. This building doesn't have opening windows. Luck is telling us to take the chance."

  "But Clarence…" I said.

  "We don't have time to waste. Trust me... for once."

  The look on his face was a revelation and it told me what I needed to know.

  "You are nuts, sweetie," Lila said. “Totally bonkers.”

  Lila couldn't get it, but I could see what was going on. Clarence wasn't focused on us escaping – not directly. If he had been, the dice would have arranged an easy, if illogical, escape. What Clarence wanted, more than anything, was to be the hero. He wanted to save the day—dramatically. So the dice were arranging things to make that happen in a spectacular fashion.

  "We need to do this," I told Lila.

  She shrugged and smiled. She looked down. "Sure, why not? My social calendar is pretty empty, so I can afford the time to die this week."

  "You need to trust Clarence," I said.

  "Oh, I do." She winked. "Time to take a leap of faith, so to speak, it seems."

  So, despite a knot in my stomach, I joined the other two and we climbed up on the window ledge.

  "It's a long way down," I said.

  "That's good," Lila said. I gave her a quizzical look. "If it's a long fall that gives us more time for lucky things to happen and save us from an otherwise certain death."

  That I agreed showed that, once again, my life was showing me a side of logic that I'm sure would have given Aristotle nightmares. "Then it's time to get lucky," I said, and we held hands… and then we jumped.

  Falling is a strange experience. Terrifying, heady… I guess that's the rush skydivers love so much. Maybe even high divers get it. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that without the possibility of a parachute breaking your fall or the sight of a limpid and welcoming blue of the water in a pool underneath… let’s say it's got more of an edge. We had no safety equipment, no special gear of any kind, and a personal view of a section of Las Vegas' shocking white, blisteringly hot, hard, sidewalks coming up at us far too quickly for comfort.

  Thirty-two feet per second. The equation, probably learned in a college physics course, popped into my head. If you didn't take into account wind resistance, that was how fast we were accelerating toward the ground.

  I wondered if my death was going to include a close encounter with trivia—minutia from your past that dances before your eyes and inside your head, delighting in suddenly having some relevance to your soon to be terminated existence.

  I hope that doesn't sound dreary and all negative, or morbid, because it was more like… what a relief. I didn't want to spend my last moments reliving my life, especially the really dumb parts, like when I'd convinced myself that Walter Temple loved me, or the time I'd… well, let's leave the rotten parts of the past well buried.

  In the meantime, in real time, Clarence held my left hand tight and I clutched Lila's in my right. It must've made a fascinating picture. Three people falling abreast can't be that common a sight even in Las Vegas. One or two, sure. But a falling threesome? What are the odds?

  Suddenly there was a sharp tug from Clarence's side and we were jerked in a direction parallel to our plummeting motion. I saw that Clarence had grabbed (or hit, or been snagged by) the top of some scaffolding that window washers use. Luckily (yes) no one was on the scaffolding because we hit the boards hard. We hadn't actually fallen very far yet (time distortion occurs during stressful times, doncha know?) but we still broke the scaffolding and careened off it, headed downward again.

  The top five or six floors of the building were smaller than the lower portion, and the impact from hitting the scaffolding slowed us enough that when we hit the combing of the building at the point where the base was wider, it was barely a bump. A disconcerting bump, but nothing as jarring as I expected.

  Unfortunately, there wasn't anything to hang onto there, and we rolled over the edge and began falling again, somehow still holding hands. It was our descent, part two.

  The next part of the building provided a sheer, short drop to a rooftop restaurant. The restaurant had a transparent, steeply sloped, hard plastic ceiling. As we slid down the sloped plastic, careening toward another edge, I looked down. It was a nice place, but my guess was that this wasn't a cheap place to eat at all. Funny how the wildest thoughts enter your mind while plummeting to certain death.

  "Whee," Lila said as we went off the next edge, heading for earth again. But now we couldn't see the sidewalk. Right below us was the stretched awning that covered the entrance of the building. We hit it, pulled it down, stretching it, then it rebounded, catapulting us up in the air again. We flew up, out, and away from the building and into the street. As we reached the top of our arc and started down again, a truck passed under us. I watched the cab pass below us, and then we dropped into the back, landing on a pile of mattresses.

  We lay there… stunned. Finally, Lila sat up. "Good thing it wasn't box springs," Lila said. "This memory foam stuff is much nicer."

  Clarence shook his head. "Wow. That was some ride."

  I held out my hand. "Give them back now," I said.

  I noticed a bit of reluctance as Clarence handed over the dice. He watched me as I took out the pen box and opened it.

  Edgar was delighted to see the box used in a way he approved of. "Where are we going?" he asked excitedly.

  "Home," Clarence said as I put the pen in my pocket and the dice in the pen box. When I closed it I noticed a shift in the way things felt. Clarence sighed. “It’s time to get to Destiny’s Point.”

  "I want a window seat," Edgar said. "You owe me. You've kept me locked in that box the whole time you guys were doing interesting things."

  "Consider yourself lucky," Clarence said. Then he smiled. "I rather enjoyed that, in a strange way. Trusting the outcome to luck and not planning anything. It’s heady stuff."

  "I have an idea," I said. He looked at me.
"I suggest that in the future you stick to your preference for plans. In fact, I think you might want to avoid making any gut decisions ever again. If you didn't have the extra luck…"

  He made a pouty face. "You do it all the time and then tease me for planning."

  "She's right, sweetie," Lila said. "We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Best to find out what they are and then go with them."

  "You agree with her?" he said, sounding hurt.

  Lila wrapped her arm around his. "I do this time. But then I adore a good plan and good planners, Clarence. And while I'll admit I did enjoy the wild ride you took us on, once was enough."

  A placated Clarence leaned back on the mattress. "These are rather nice. Can you see a label? If I can see the brand, I'd like to get one."

  Chapter 30

  Riding through the city streets, sitting on mattresses in the truck we managed to get our bearings. The now-familiar sight of some of the bigger casinos acted as references. My phone somehow hadn’t gotten crushed and I used it to call Ronny. He was free and agreed to meet us at one of the big casinos. The next time the truck stopped at a light, we hopped out and walked the short distance to the casino. No one complained about the heat, even once.

  When Ronny arrived we all piled in the taxi. "He can't see Edgar," I whispered to Lila.

  "Did you find what was behind all that strange luck?" Ronny asked. “Did you get a good story.”

  "It was a fix," I said. "That’s not my kind of story, but it seems like there was some sort of conspiracy going on. We didn’t follow it up further."

  "So those accidents weren't accidents at all?"

  "You never really know, do you?" I said. "And crime reporting is something best left to others."

  He nodded wisely. "Where to now?"

  During the walk to the casino, we had decided that going to the motel and getting our things would be a bad idea. Ulrich had the resources to find out where we were staying. We’d used our own names. We'd already paid for the nights we'd been there, and they could do what they wanted with the few things we'd left there. "We are headed home," I told Ronny.