The Spider Thief

by Laurence MacNaughton

  Which meant there was a chance, a small chance, that he could save Mauricio.

  Ash patted his pockets. No cell phone. They’d taken it when they arrested him.

  Up ahead, the tow truck lurched back into view, engine straining. Behind it, trussed up with blinking lights, hung the Galaxie. Its wet paint shone with rain.

  The sight of it ignited something inside him. The need to fight.

  He would not give up. Not give in. He would hang onto what he had left of his life, and build it into something new. Something better, that fixed everything around him that he’d broken.

  The tow truck slowed at the stop sign, brakes squealing, then rolled through.

  “Hey!” Ash yelled. He launched himself after the truck and chased it down the road, yelling. He slipped on the wet sidewalk and stumbled. The truck pulled away into the distance.

  He ran for all he was worth. Lungs burning. Legs pounding until they threatened to give out.

  Far ahead, the tow truck slowed at a red light and put on its right turn signal. The magnetic light stuck to the Galaxie’s fender blinked.

  Ash cut into a dark alley. The streetlights didn’t reach here. He charged ahead into the blackness on faith alone, his feet slapping on unseen asphalt, the dank air burning in his lungs. He could trip on anything here, he knew. Run headfirst into a fence, or a concrete wall. He didn’t care.

  He wasn’t going to lose the car. He wasn’t going to lose Moolah, or Mauricio or Cleo. Even if it killed him.

  He shot out of the alley into the street just as the tow truck approached. He charged directly into its path.

  A quick moment of terror seized him as the truck’s headlights pinned him. Its horn blasted through him like a force of nature. Every instinct told him to jump out of the way.

  He stood his ground. Raised his hands.

  The thing’s huge front bumper came at him, fast. Its brakes shrieked.

  Ash stared at his distorted reflection in the chrome grille as it shuddered to a halt, inches from his face. His eyes stared back at him, made huge by the curved metal.

  The truck’s air brakes blasted out an explosive hiss. The driver, a shriveled guy with a voluminous white beard, leaned out the window. “Hey! What’s the matter with you?”

  “Put down the car,” Ash said, coming around the truck’s nose. “Now.”

  The driver shook his head. “This your car? Too late, man. Get out of the road!” He started to say more, but Ash dug a wad of Kung Fu Noodle Man’s cash out of his pocket and slammed it down on the truck’s hood.

  The guy took a long look at the cash and then at Ash. He jerked a thumb back at the Galaxie. “Right here in the street okay with you?”

  *

  Prez hadn’t craved a cigarette in years, but he wanted one now. He leaned against the wall of his office, next to the interior overhead door that was currently rolled open, and watched his crew use dollies and a forklift to move out his printing equipment.

  He knew every nut and bolt on these machines, having run ones just like them for years. Even though he’d bought these particular ones just a couple of weeks ago, and only because that S.O.B. Andres had forced him to, he still felt a bitter pang of loss. Like he’d failed, somehow.

  But Prez didn’t have time to stew about it. He had his crew to watch over. Every one of them was in the warehouse at that moment, less than twenty of them left after Andres got through. He made sure they were packing heat. Had them check the doors every ten minutes. At the loading dock, where the truck idled as they loaded the printing equipment, he had three boys with AK-47s. If Andres made the mistake of coming back, Prez wanted him full of holes before he hit the floor.

  DMT lumbered up to him, breathing hard, stripping off a pair of work gloves. “Boss, that thing sure heavy.”

  “That’s ‘cause it’s old school. Way they suppose to build things. Who’s drivin’ the truck again? You check in with him?”

  DMT nodded. “All under control, Boss. I got it.”

  “Don’t want no mistakes. Feds come back in here, I want this place so clean it make your shoes squeak.”

  Gospel music soared out of DMT’s phone. He answered and frowned, then put one hand over the phone. “They caught somebody outside.”

  “Who?” Prez’s blood heated up. “Andres?”

  DMT shook his head. “Ash.”

  Prez choked down a stream of obscenities. The effort made his spine twinge and lock up. “He suppose to be gone. For good.”

  DMT listened to the phone, still covering the mouthpiece. “Says he’s lookin’ for his dog.”

  “You got to be kiddin’ me.”

  “And he says he knows how to get rid of Andres.”

  “Yeah, I heard that one before.”

  “Says that you . . .” DMT frowned, listening

  Against his will, Prez found himself leaning closer, waiting. “Says I what?”

  “Says you got the gold spider Andres wants.”

  “I . . . what?” After a stunned moment, Prez pushed himself off the wall and limped toward his desk. He didn’t know which he wanted more: to believe Ash or to kill him. “Lord have mercy. Tell ‘em, bring him in.”

  It didn’t take long. Ash showed up soaking wet, his eyes gone bloodshot. He grinned so hard Prez could see all of his teeth.

  The man did not look good. Like he was coming apart at the seams.

  “Where’s Moolah?” Ash said.

  Already settled in his chair, Prez waved away the boys with guns but motioned for DMT to stay. Ash’s dog bolted through the warehouse and danced around him, wagging his tail furiously. Ash got down on his knees and hugged the dog, tight.

  “Take it my associate wasn’t too clear,” Prez said after a moment. “Since you still in town.”

  “Well, I figured it out.” Ash looked over the dog at him. “There is no curse. It’s not magic. It’s a chemical. A neurotoxin.”

  “The hell you talkin’ about?”

  “The spider. If you touch it, you absorb the toxin into your skin. It gives you a rash, but more important, it wipes out your memory. That’s what happened to me in the mountains.”

  “Tell me why I’m suppose to care.”

  Ash smiled with contentment, no longer looking like a man possessed, but one who had finally hit his groove. “Because now we can get rid of Andres forever, and break the ‘curse’ for good. Just give him a fake spider. He goes home happy, I get my brother back, your secret is safe. How about that?”

  Prez gave him a good long look. “A fake spider? Where am I goin’ to get that?”

  “We’ll make one. A counterfeit spider. You, me, working together. It’ll be beautiful.”

  “It’ll be crazy, what it is. Why don’t you just give him the real spider?”

  Ash’s manner went somber. He patted Moolah one last time, then stood up and crossed over to stand in front of Prez’s desk. DMT straightened up, ready for anything.

  Very quietly, Ash said, “Because the real spider is toxic. It kills people. Andres would use that to his advantage. Innocent people would die.”

  “So you tellin’ me, givin’ Andres the spider back goes against your moral principles.”

  Ash looked up and to the left, thinking. “I guess, yeah. I don’t want anybody else getting hurt. You?”

  “Man, I guess you some kind of saint, then. You know that?” Prez permitted himself a smile. “So where you gonna get the original spider, to make this duplicate from?”

  Ash turned and pointed to the wreck of the Torino, which DMT had covered up. “You got the keys?”

  After a moment of deliberation, Prez opened his desk drawer and got them out.

  “Thanks.” Ash took them and strode over to the Torino, lifted up the edge of the gray cloth cover, and opened the trunk. A golden glow reflected up on his face, and he drew in a sharp breath and held it. His eyes went wide as he stood there, transfixed

  Prez limped over, DMT right behind him, and gazed down at the most beautiful and dist
urbing thing he’d ever seen: a shining gold spider, the size of both of his hands. From inside the trunk, its chilling emerald eyes seemed to stare right back at him.

  Ash shook himself and looked away, blinking. “I slipped it in there the other day. While you were, uh, preoccupied.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Yeah, I thought I was, too.” Ash gave a wry smile. “Turns out it’s just a chemical.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Bulletproof

  Cleo had held things together until she got home from the hospital. But the moment she pulled into her parking space and shut off the ignition, the silence closed in around her. And at that exact moment, she realized she’d lost everything that ever meant anything to her.

  Her career. Her shot at bringing Andres to justice. And whatever she might’ve had with Graves, that was gone, too. Now that she knew he would be there for her only if she followed the rules, she knew it would never work between them. Because sooner or later, she would break a rule just to do the right thing. And now she knew Graves would be the last person to back her up.

  Unlike Ash, who lived to break the rules. Who had always encouraged her to do the same. And maybe that’s why he’d always driven her crazy, because the rebel part of herself was always the part she was never comfortable with, the part she tried to hide from the world. And Ash saw through that with a lopsided grin every time.

  She needed him, right now. Needed him to make some kind of obnoxious crack so she could blame him for everything that was going wrong. Needed him to shrug off the pain of it all and smile at her in a way that made everything seem all right.

  Except that he was gone. Forever.

  It all felt so unreal, but Graves was sure he’d seen Ash get shot.

  Graves’s MRI showed no major injury, but they were keeping him at the hospital for observation. To be honest with herself, she was glad. She couldn’t face even pretending to comfort him. Not now.

  Her conversation with Graves echoed in her head. His story had come rolling out in terse sentences and sterile professional words. Words like intercepted . . . coordinated . . . executed.

  Ash was gone. That thought wouldn’t leave her. And though she fought back the tears, they’d been coming all night, hollowing her out inside and making the world impossibly empty and cold.

  She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. The honey wheat beer sat untouched in the back of the fridge. It seemed like that night was so long ago.

  They had nothing on the attackers. No witnesses, no tire tracks, nothing except a few paint scrapes that had already led nowhere.

  Ash was gone.

  Cleo felt useless, huddled on the end of the sofa. After a while, she forced herself to get up, and wandered aimlessly through her condo. Everywhere she looked, she saw spiders. A Halloween mug on a shelf. Graves’s spider in amber on her mantle, trapped, unreachable.

  Graves was just as unreachable now, out of the orbit of her life forever. She’d felt that as she’d walked out of the hospital, leaving him there. Whatever spark had been between them was cold and dead now.

  She paced in front of her framed poster of Charlotte’s Web, staring as she had countless times before at the cuddly pink pig and the harmless little spider that dangled inches from its nose.

  Wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands, she went into the kitchen. She leaned on the edge of the sink and got herself a glass of water. As she drank, she stared down at the dirty glasses and plates. She should wash them. Dry and put them away.

  In case she never made it back.

  It hit her then, what she had to do. She’d known it all along. It had been dangling in front of her nose, just like it did in front of the poor pig. But before now, she’d always had something to lose: her career, her future, her chance to make things right for her dad.

  Now, she had nothing. Nothing but spiders and dirty dishes.

  “Fuck it,” she whispered. Andres wasn’t going to get away. She’d make sure of that, one way or another. It didn’t matter if she left a mess behind.

  All that mattered was that she got him.

  She gulped down the rest of the water and slammed the glass down on the counter, then headed back to the spare room.

  The second bedroom of her condo had a gun safe, a file cabinet and a folding table that had never been put away, covered with contour maps of her hometown and the surrounding areas. In red marker, she’d circled the locations where Andres had been seen: the preacher’s house, Ash’s house, and the side street where she’d spotted him on the night of the fire. Almost exactly in the center of those three points was a jagged rectangle that outlined the ghost town and its abandoned gold mine.

  That’s where Andres would go. She was sure of it. Right to the middle of things. Like a spider at the core of its web.

  She undid the combination lock on the gun safe and pulled out everything she needed, piling it onto the table. She opened a cardboard box of ammunition and snapped hollow points into her spare magazines, one thick brass round after another.

  She loaded three extra magazines for her Sig Sauer and strapped them into the belt with her hip holster, but it didn’t feel like enough.

  She checked the load on her miniature Springfield XD, then slid it back into her padded ankle holster and set it aside. She loaded the spare magazine for that, the same nine-millimeter as her Sig, and slipped it into a pouch on her ballistic nylon vest.

  The Kevlar vest was ready to go, trauma plate in place, stiff collar threatening to choke her when she strapped it on. For a moment, she wished she had a helmet, but it would probably just slow her down anyway.

  She got the AR-15 assault rifle out of her gun safe and flipped open the lens covers on the sniper scope. When she checked the battery, ruby-red crosshairs burst to life inside the long scope atop the rifle. She brought it up to her shoulder, verified the sight was clean and shut it back up. Clipped the carrying strap on, front and back.

  She installed a black pouch onto the plastic stock with a scritch of Velcro, put an extra thirty-round magazine on each side. Debated, then stuck in two more. If she switched to full auto, she could chew up a whole magazine in a heartbeat.

  It felt like going to war, and it was. She wasn’t coming back until Andres was dead.

  It was good to be clear. She felt cold, efficient, free of any emotional clutter. This was what she was meant to do.

  She stacked up gear on top of her map. Binoculars. Flashlight. A daypack with protein bars and energy drinks.

  She was headed toward the kitchen for bottled water when her doorbell rang.

  She stood stock still, protein bars clutched in her fist, listening. The watch on her wrist said it was three in the morning.

  Softly, someone knocked on the front door.

  It wasn’t Graves. She knew that.

  Cleo went back, tossed the protein bars on the table, picked up the AR-15, and slid a magazine into place. As she marched to the front door, she pulled the charge handle back and chambered a round, clicked off the safety, and brought the rifle up to her shoulder.

  “Cleo?” a voice called softly. “Cleo, it’s me.”

  Holding the rifle in one hand, she crept to the door and checked the peephole.

  It couldn’t be.

  She unbolted the door and yanked it open. Ash stood on the landing, damp hair ruffled. Behind him, rain dripped from the edge of the gutter. His face lit up with a dazzling smile.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

  She reached through the doorway and slapped him. The sound cracked across the parking lot like a gunshot.

  He touched his cheek. “Ow. Guess I should’ve called first.”

  Fresh tears burned her eyes. “What is the matter with you? What did you do, fake your own death?”

  “As much as I’d love to take credit for that, it was not my idea.” He took a good look at her rifle and stepped back. “Hold on. Are we getting invaded?”

  She grabbed his arm and hauled him inside, then
slammed the door and hugged him so hard that she could feel his heart beating.

  “Hey,” he whispered, touching her hair. “You’re the reason I came back. You know that?”

  She kissed him then, pushing him against the door.

  He made her feel alive. More alive than ever before, and she knew with perfect clarity what that meant, though she was afraid to admit it to herself.

  She pulled back. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she breathed. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Kiss you? Or you mean the part about faking my own death?” His eyes sparkled. “Because you’ve got to admit, both of those are at least a teensy bit awesome.”

  “I’m not kidding. Graves has a concussion. Somebody could’ve gotten killed.”

  “Yeah. Like me. Why do I never get any of the sympathy around here?”

  “Because you’re a crook. You’re a smart aleck. And everywhere you go, there’s a disaster.”

  He cocked his head at her, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “And here I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”

  She looked deep into his eyes. “You’re obnoxious, Ash.”

  “Especially when I’m still alive.”

  With a groan of frustration, she let him go.

  “Seriously,” Ash said, nodding at her assault rifle. “Are we hunting elephants?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. The cold, steely feeling of reality settled down on her once more. “I think I know where Andres is headed. And I’m going to pay him a visit.”

  “We are,” Ash said, all trace of humor gone. “Together. Andres has Mauricio. I know a way to get him back, but I need your help.”

  “And you’re thinking I’ll just drop what I’m doing and trust that for once you have a real plan?”

  “Well. That was kind of the idea.” He glanced suspiciously at the assault rifle again. “You busy right now?”

  “A little.”

  “Okay. But still.” He touched his lip, and his expression softened. “That kiss has got to count for something.”