“Is that what’s on these noodles?”
“When the ocean becomes sick, everything within becomes sick. Some of the men grew very ill. Some even suffered brain damage, memory loss.”
“Lot of that going around these days,” Ash said. After an awkward moment, he added, “And? Everyone survived, I take it?”
The man shook his head.
Ash held up one finger. “Just a sec. So today you’re still eating shellfish because why?”
“It reminds me.” The man’s gaze was ferociously intense. “Life is precious. It must be lived deliberately.”
“Hmm.” Ash thought about that. “I’ll stick to burgers, thanks.”
“Ah. But what of mad cow disease?” The Asian man went back to his shellfish and chewed thoroughly. “You may call me the Sweeper.”
“The Sweeper?” Ash struggled to keep a straight face. “Let me guess. You have your own action figure. Comes with kung-fu action shellfish.”
The Sweeper gave him a questioning look.
Ash shook his head. “Forget it. You want to tell me why you faked my death?”
“Cleaner that way. Nobody will be looking for you. Not alive, anyway.”
“Will they be looking for me dead?” He felt his eyebrows go up. “You think anybody will really believe that I got assassinated by some kind of ninja hit squad?”
“In my experience, FBI agents make fairly compelling witnesses. They will see what they want to see.”
“And the point of all this is . . .?”
“You will disappear. Vanish in the night. Once you get out of town, trust me, nobody will miss you.”
“Hey. I’ve got friends. I’ve got a girl.”
“Not anymore. The man you were, I am sorry to inform you, is officially dead.” He unbuttoned a bulky pocket on the leg of his fatigues and pulled out a thick manila envelope. “Look these over very carefully.” He tossed the envelope to Ash.
Inside was a rubber-banded stack of cash. “This cash is kosher, right?”
The man didn’t answer.
Ash kept digging, finding a very convincing birth certificate, Social Security card, driver’s license, and passport. The picture was his, but the information was different. “Mitch Turner. That’s a terrible name.”
“You will get used to it.” The Sweeper set his bowl aside and wiped his mouth. “Ash had many enemies. Enemies with a great deal of power. That creates problems. Luckily for you, I solve problems.”
“I’m thinking maybe that was just a teensy bit of overkill.”
“Sometimes that is necessary,” the man said. “If they refuse to cooperate, I unfortunately have to make their deaths permanent.” He held up a wax paper bag. “Egg roll?”
Ash pursed his lips and shook his head no.
The man shrugged and pulled a very thick egg roll from the bag. He bit down and chewed noisily. “When we let you go, you must get on a bus, a taxi, it makes no difference to me. Stay off of airplanes. That would start a trail. Get on ground transportation. Head out of town. I have no interest in where. Another state. Another country. Do you understand?”
“Sure. Soon as I find my brother.”
“Half-brother.” The man took another bite. “Maybe he does not want to be found. Maybe he has already found a new life, with his uncle.”
“Hmm. I’m thinking no.”
The man’s expression gave away nothing.
Ash cleared his throat. “Well, as tempting as your offer is—and I mean this in the most sincerely heartfelt way—you can forget it.” He stuffed the papers back into the envelope and tossed it at the man’s feet. “I’m not just walking away from my life.”
“What life?” The man didn’t move to pick up the envelope. “Let me see. Total assets to your name, zero. No job. No property. You have never filed taxes.”
“Taxes, seriously?”
“You do not even own the car you drive, because you stole it from a dead woman. Your entire career could best be summed up as a string of minor-league confidence scams. The ‘girl’ you’re after is none other than an FBI agent who is obligated to arrest you on sight. And if you care about her so much, how exactly did she end up in the hospital?”
“She’s a little banged up, but she’s fine.” Ash felt like he was shrinking down inside himself. He couldn’t meet the man’s gaze. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” The man finished his egg roll and crumpled the bag. “Bad luck just seems to follow you around, hmm? You have excuses. You have justifications. Mistakes were made, yes, but not by you. Of course not. You are simply, in your mind, a victim of circumstance.”
“Yeah, you try carrying around a curse your whole life, see how you handle it.”
“Ah. Of course. The ‘curse.’”
Ash’s jaw clenched. “Having a little trouble here taking advice from a guy who named himself after a broom.”
“The Sweeper extracted you from the FBI at gunpoint, convinced them you were dead, and solved all of your problems with a single capsule of fake blood.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Care to retort?”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“Apparently, I know you quite well.” The man gave him a penetrating stare. “But do you know yourself? No. And that puts you at a dangerous disadvantage.”
Ash looked down at the envelope. It looked thicker, somehow. A new life all crammed into one tidy package. Maybe it would be better if he walked away. Maybe the people around him would be safer without his constant interference.
Face it, he told himself. He’d banged up Cleo pretty badly on the highway. A split second either way and he could have killed her. And now Andres had Mauricio, maybe for good. He’d let down his own brother.
And what about Moolah? He’d left him sitting in the Galaxie, alone. Abandoned. He couldn’t even take care of his own dog.
Maybe he really didn’t know much about himself. What he did know, he was ashamed of. Everywhere he went, no matter what he did, he hurt those he cared about the most.
Finally, a voice rose up from deep inside him, a robotic monotone that he didn’t recognize as his own. “What do you expect me to do, move to Mexico? What?”
“You can do anything you desire. As of this moment, you are reborn. Reincarnated. Your entire past has been washed away. You have been graced with a future full of possibilities. You must embrace them. Learn from your mistakes, and do not repeat them. Live again.”
Ash tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. “I can’t.”
“You can.” The man waited. “You will.”
Ash didn’t have the willpower left to fight. Slowly, he nodded.
“Excellent.” The man took Ash’s noodles and picked over them with his chopsticks. “You must leave the city before dawn. If you are still here, you understand that I must kill you.”
Ash nodded again, feeling numb inside.
Satisfied, the man scooped up a mouthful of Ash’s noodles and chewed, letting some of them slop back into the tray.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Ritual
Thunder growled in the distance. Other than that and the sound of Andres’s humming, the ghost town was silent. Mauricio wanted to run, but he knew that Lazaro and Salvador roamed the empty streets, itching to shoot somebody.
Maybe if he managed to get Andres’s satellite phone, he could call for help. Maybe the sheriff’s department could get there before the gunmen caught up to him. Better yet, forget the phone. Get the car keys and drive, get out of there. They’d have no way to chase him.
All of these plans ran through his head, as if someone else were suggesting them. Instead, he stayed put.
“She is almost here,” Andres said abruptly.
Mauricio’s breath caught. “Who?”
“La Araña.” Andres came over and squatted down in front of Mauricio. “She is part of the earth, part of the sky. She is very close.” He got on his hands and knees. He pressed his ear to the floo
r, his black hair dragging. “Listen. She comes closer.”
Mauricio, convinced he couldn’t possibly be any more creeped out, gingerly mimicked Andres. He put his ear to the rough wood, but all he could hear was Andres humming his haunting song.
Andres opened his eyes, twin pools of black in the golden candlelight. “You hear her, yes?”
“Um.” Mauricio swallowed and played along. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Excellent.” Andres shifted into a sitting position and took hold of Mauricio’s arm, the one with the spider web tattoo. “You are one of us.”
“D-Does that mean you’re not going to kill me?”
“Kill you?” The lines around Andres’s mouth got deeper. “Only if you do not believe. And that, mi sobrino, that would break my heart.” He let go and stared off into space, humming again.
Mauricio shivered, trying not to think about how close he might have just come to getting himself shot. He had to play along with Andres. No mistakes. “So . . . what’s that song? Can you teach me?”
Andres stopped humming. “The song of La Araña de Oro. The golden spider. You should know this song. Your father never teach you?”
“He, um . . . didn’t talk about it much. Never, in fact.”
“Ah, a secret.” Andres gave him a sly smile. “Let me tell you one other secret, mi sobrino. When I was a boy, the oldest man in my village, he teach me this song. It was pass to him when he was a boy, and so on from ancient time. Is a sad song, about a city of eight roads, where the people turn to stone and their spirits forever watch over a spider made of gold.”
Mauricio nodded, trying to look interested, instead of scared out of his mind.
“One day, many years later, a tall white man, he come into my village. He is looking for La Ciudad de Ocho Patas. The City of Eight Legs.”
“This white man. Was he . . .”
“You know who he was. All the other men in my village, they was afraid to go too deep into the jungle. Too many dangers, they say. Snake, fever, los revolucionarios. But the truth is, nobody ever find this lost city. Until me.” Andres gazed off into the distance. “Is a stone city, so beautiful and so quiet. No one live there. In the temple, all was dark, and in a pool of light sat La Araña, jus’ like in the song. Your father, he reach up, fingers stretch out. But the moment he touch her, he stop. His whole body shake and tremble, like he is in the presence of the divine. And he drop right to the ground. I was sure he has been kill somehow.” Andres’s voice dropped to an awed whisper. “But no. He was alive.”
Mauricio waited for more, but Andres seemed to be testing him. Suppressing a shudder, Mauricio crossed his arms in an attempt to warm up his cold hands. “The spider doesn’t kill you, does it? It takes away your memory. Gives you some kind of amnesia.”
Andres held up his fingers, barely apart, and stared between the tips into Mauricio’s eyes. “She drink a small taste of your soul. Just a bit, so small you do not miss it. And in return, she weave you into her destiny.”
Goose bumps stood up on Mauricio’s arms. “What do you mean?”
Andres gave him a beatific smile. “You will know, soon enough, once your half-breed brother bring her back to me.”
“What if he doesn’t? What if something happened?”
“No. He has el destino. This, I know. Once he touch the spider, he is wrap in her web. He will bring her back to me before he die.”
“Die?”
“I tole you. He is curse, because of your father.” Andres shrugged. “But you must know, you are part of my blood. You are not cursed. In the jungle, before you were born, we create a new order. And I, your tìo, Andres, was in charge. You see? Together, we all live in the lost city beside the river, happy. We pick fruit, we fish, we dance. In the night, beside the fire, we all join in the temple with La Araña. Together, we journey in our hearts to a place you cannot imagine. Those times, they were the most beauty I have ever seen.”
“So . . . like a commune.”
“Yes. Yes! La comunidad. Like the Garden of Eden, no? A blissful time. Until my sister, she fall in love with your father.” Andres’s mouth turned down in a deep frown. “Your father, he betray me.”
“He stole the spider.”
Andres slowly nodded. “And you know why?”
“He never talked about it.”
“Ah. But he write it down. Maybe to try to explain his self someday.” Andres reached inside his jacket and pulled out a short, wrinkled stack of yellow pages. The mass of them had been ripped out of a book, and the frayed threads of the binding still clung to the bound edge. Andres took a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket, unfolded them and carefully settled them on his long nose. He squinted down at the pages and thumbed through them, one at a time.
With a start, Maurcio realized they were the missing pages of his father’s journal. He wanted to ask Andres how he’d gotten them, but fear glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
Andres tutted quietly to himself. Even when he was doing something as simple as turning pages, he did it with a spider-like motion, smooth and silent in a way that made Mauricio’s skin crawl.
“Ah, here he is at last,” Andres said, and gazed at Mauricio with his dark luminous eyes before he started to read. “These are the words of your father, the traitor.”
Mauricio stayed silent, afraid even to breathe.
Andres began to read, inflecting the words with his own rich accent. “’Now I understand what happen to these people. They did not vanish of their own accord. They were killed. The last priests of this lost city, in their thirst for power, brought the entire nation under the sway of the spider’s narcotic curse. Fields went untended, famine and pestilence spread, and an entire civilization wasted away. Like the people in our expedition, they succumbed one by one, their addiction to this idol and its narcotizing effects ultimately consuming them.’” Andres looked up suddenly. “Why he have to use such conceited words?”
Mauricio blinked. “What?”
“Eh, is not important. He is dead anyway.” Andres thumbed through a few more pages, tilting his head back to peer down through his reading glasses. “Ah. And here we have my favorite part. ‘My conscience leave me no choice. The spider is a relic of unimaginable power, and in the wrong hands it can control the minds of thousands, perhaps more. I can already guess Andres’s intentions. Our doomed group is just the beginning. With the spider, he could lift up the revolution to conquer his nation. And he would not stop there. Unchecked, how far would he spread the curse of the spider?’”
Mauricio sat absolutely still, hearing the old building creak around them in the ghostly wind.
Andres closed the yellowed pages and sat holding them in both hands, as if praying over them. “He was wrong. What La Araña offers is so beautiful. I could have bring peace to my nation. By now, I could have bring unity to all the Americas, all under La Araña. People everywhere, in every nation, could know her peace.” His eyes shone in the candlelight. “But this is not too late. They will know her. And you, mi sobrino, you will help me bring La Araña to the entire world.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Repossessed
The van drove off, leaving Ash trudging through a cold rain, feeling empty. Everything inside him felt like it had been torn out and burned, leaving nothing behind but a smoking emptiness. The night sky was black with clouds, and the downpour soaked him as he walked.
It felt like years ago that he’d parked the Galaxie here, just down the street from Prez’s. He felt terrible about leaving Moolah alone for so long. That dog and the car were all he had left now. He couldn’t abandon them.
No matter what kind of threats he got from Kung Fu Noodle Man.
The thought warmed him. He turned his collar up against the rain, but it didn’t do any good. He was soaked through. The streetlights here were few and scattered. The long blocks were lined with old brick buildings and chain-link fences. The only traffic was a single tow truck that rumbled past him with a clank of chains.
It blasted “California Dreamin’” loud on its stereo. The song carried down the street.
As he walked, he tried to convince himself that things would work out. Maybe Mauricio would be able to run away from Andres the first chance he got. Maybe Cleo was safer without him around. Maybe he should head to California and live under a bridge somewhere.
He splashed through a puddle, not caring about the cold water soaking his feet. Up ahead, the tow truck beeped as it backed around the corner. It slid out of sight, its whirling yellow lights giving the street a surreal glowing pulse. The melody of “California Dreamin’” stuck in his head. The Mamas & the Papas.
He’d heard a story years ago about one of the singers claiming she’d been in some kind of freak construction accident, got hit on the head with a metal pipe, and lost her memory. After the amnesia, she claimed, she could miraculously sing like never before.
Ash had no idea if the story was true. But if it wasn’t, it was a hell of a scam. Might have even made the band famous.
A memory hit Ash like a physical blow, stopping him in the middle of the street. The words from his dad’s journal, scrawled in haste all those years ago, stood out in his mind’s eye:
To these people, shellfish are sacred to the gods.
An electric feeling crawled up the back of his neck. Why would people who worshiped spiders care about shellfish? His dad had already figured that out, years ago. He’d jotted the answer on the last page of his journal.
Amnesic shellfish poisoning.
Mentally, Ash kicked himself. The shellfish contained the drug. Those ancient people based their religion around it. They must have somehow laced the drug into the gold spider, so that if you touched it, you were exposed. And you lost your memory.
Do that often enough, and eventually you got hooked on it, like the preacher and his wife.
That meant the spider wasn’t cursed at all. It could be explained by science. Which meant Ash wasn’t really cursed, either, and Andres was flat-out crazy. There was no primordial spider god ruling anyone’s destiny. It was all in their heads.
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