by J. R. Rain
Inside the heart were chiseled the letters: “Mr. R.”
I looked over at the spirit drifting a few stores down. I waggled my finger at him. “Graffiti, Mr. Rose. Tsk, tsk.”
The partially-manifested spirit continued rising and falling, giving no indication that he’d heard me. But he was listening and watching.
I stood and pulled out the map, making sure I was remembering the final riddle correctly:
Twenty to one, run run run.
Twenty to one sounded like horse racing odds to me. Or the time. Twenty to one would be 12:40.
Or another number...221.
I took in a lot of air. And I meant a lot.
Because I was suddenly certain I had solved the final riddle.
At least, I hoped I had.
* * *
Although details of the actual map were vague, if I faced the ocean proper, as the map seemed to indicate, I saw something interesting: joggers running along Casino Avenue.
And so I jogged, too.
Or, rather, ran, as the riddle suggested I should. Counting off 221 steps as I did so. Except the closer I got to 221, the more I began to doubt myself.
Keep going, Sam.
And so I did, jogging in my Asics, jogging easily, ticking off the steps as I went, feeling the ocean breeze on my face, and knowing that a spirit was trailing behind me in the far distance. Apparently, ghosts weren’t much for running.
210 steps...
I scanned the area, suddenly certain I had made a grave error in my calculations.
216...
I was on a lonely stretch of beach.
218, 219, 220...
I slowed down, taking it all in.
221...
I stopped, hands on hips and scanned my surroundings. I was, of course, standing at Avalon Pier.
“Son of a bitch.”
* * *
I looked again at the laminated map.
Eighteen dashes, followed by two dashes to the left. Eighteen steps, plus two steps to the left?
At the head of the pier, I considered counting off 18 steps, but that didn’t seem right. What sort of treasure would be on a pier?
Certainly not a pirate treasure. And where were pirate treasures? Buried in the sand, of course.
I leaped off the pier and, starting at the retaining wall, counted off eighteen big steps. I was alone on the beach, so I didn’t care how crazy I looked. No, scratch that. Two people were doing something under a towel about two hundred yards away. My super-sensitive ears picked up on some low moaning and groaning.
Great.
I did my best to ignore the lovemaking and focused instead on my steps. The beach sloped down. The pier rose above me. At 18 steps I paused and examined the closest wooden pylon. It was covered in barnacles and seaweed. Most important, carved deeply in it, were the letters: “Mr. R.”
I turned left and walked two more steps and found myself under the pier. I also found myself filled with excitement, because I could veritably sense the treasure underneath me. A small fortune in gold. Mama could use some gold.
I felt him before I saw him.
First, the hair at the back of my neck stood on end, followed by a tingly sensation that coursed through me.
I turned slowly and was not very surprised to see Cleo Rose behind me. Or Mr. R. Except now, of course, Cleo wasn’t a vaguely-shaped human. No. Cleo had made a glorious, full appearance, complete with exact detail. He was also drawing energy from me, which was fine. As a spirit, he needed to get his energy from somewhere.
Mr. Rose didn’t look crazy. He was stooped and thin. His face was narrow and pleasant. He wore a thick beard, which, upon second thought, looked sort of pirate-like.
Mostly, though, he looked mournful.
No, heartbroken.
He reached out with a surprisingly real-looking arm. That is, if an arm glowing with super-bright filaments of light could look real. Either way, he placed his glowing hand on my upper arm and I could actually feel him...feel his warmth. A single word appeared in my thoughts.
Please.
I felt his anguish, his sadness. I was confused at first, until his pain was obvious.
Although we were alone under the pier, I suspected that Cleo Rose had made such a complete appearance that anyone would have been able to see him. A true ghost. Except we were alone.
“You want your kids to find it.”
The spirit before me, who looked so very much like a man, a real man, nodded slowly. He even blinked. Perhaps it was just a memory of blinking. Surely he didn’t need to blink, right? But I had an image of not just the one son. He had three sons and a daughter. And many grandkids.
“Or perhaps one of your kids or grandkids?”
He nodded again, and we stood together, vampire and spirit, under the pier with the ocean crashing nearby. Not too far away, two lovers were in the throes of passion. Now that I was so close, so frustratingly close, I reached out with my inner sight, reached out...and down...down through the sand where I saw a wooden chest buried perhaps five feet below. A big chest...and it was filled with actual gold coins and jewels. Mr. Rose had buried quite a fortune down there. A pirate treasure to be sure. How and where he’d come across the money to do so, I didn’t know or care. Wasn’t my business. But it was more than a small fortune beneath my feet. It was a very big fortune.
And I had been promised a percentage of it.
Except it was never intended for me. It had been intended for his kids. Yes, I could take it. I could ignore the wishes of the spirit standing behind me as I uncovered his life’s work. After all, he was a dead man. Who cared what he thought, right?
Except I cared. His life’s work had been intended for his family. A legacy of love and fun and, yes, insanity.
The good kind of insanity.
I had, of course, already been paid for my work. That was how retainers worked in my business. A client paid you in advance for your work.
I took in a lot of useless air and realized that I had been paid to treasure hunt. Life could be worse. I smiled at the spirit who, even now, was fading from view.
“You do know that we’re both crazy, right?”
He smiled again...and disappeared.
The End
Return to the Table of Contents
Blue Moon
“It is rare to catch a glimpse of us. But when you do, be afraid. Or not. For we are not evil. Just hungry.”
—Diary of the Undead
I didn’t go into Starbucks very often, but when I did, I saw him.
He sat in the far corner, his back to the wall, cowboy-like, as in, no one can sneak up on him. He’s your typical Starbucks geek. Laptop, headphones, wires everywhere. A too-big phone sitting next to him. Like most Starbuckians, he appeared to be hard at work on something, tapping away furiously, only sometimes pausing to look off into the near distance. Or the far distance. Or perhaps he was checking out an ass or two. How the hell would I know?
Either way, he seemed to work as hard or harder than most of the other Starbucks geeks. Typing, typing, typing. Fingers flying, keys being hit with vigor, energy and confidence.
He was also a big guy. Not as big as Kingsley—few are—but certainly big enough. He might have been handsome if not for his slightly-too-big head. Also, I didn’t like his half-ass beard, somewhere between a real beard and something Don Johnson might have worn in the 80s. Pick a beard or not, big guy. At least, that’s what I said.
Anyway, the only reason we’d been hitting this Starbucks was that Tammy had developed a penchant for coffee. Go figure. The madness all started when a relative had given her a Starbucks card last Christmas. Who gives an eleven-year-old a Starbucks card? At any rate, her new favorite drink was a caramel macchiato, and so, these days, when I was in a particularly good mood (or if I’d recently cashed a client’s check, which was just as rare) she and I would hit up the local Starbucks.
A vampire at Starbucks. Why not?
Not often, granted. A nin
e-dollar coffee filled with enough sugar to fuel a Smart Car wasn’t something I was very keen on. But...my daughter liked them. I suspected sitting in a Starbucks, drinking her flavored coffee, also made her feel like an adult.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but she seemed happy, and I liked when my kids were happy. So sue me.
Anyway, business must have been good this month because we’d been in nearly every week—and each time, there he was:
The blond guy with the pseudo-beard and big head, his back to the wall, was pounding away at his keyboard again. Who he was, I didn’t know. But I found myself drawn to him. I supposed he wasn’t hideous to look at, but he certainly wasn’t my type. I didn’t generally go for blondes, and I most certainly didn’t go for half-assed beards.
Still, there was something about him. I’d noticed it before, but had mostly ignored it. After all, I had enough men in my life. Too many, some would say.
I was certain my interest in him wasn’t romantic. No, there was something else about him. Something intriguing...and familiar. I generally kept a low profile, and I was certainly not one for catching up with old friends. Old friends asked a lot of questions.
Was he an old friend? I didn’t know, but I was sure I knew him from somewhere. And, as we ordered our drinks today—a caramel foo-foo drink for Tammy and a bottled water for me—I found myself glancing over at him again and again.
And, yes, today I had cashed another client check. Wahoo! A nice-sized one, too, although my client, I suspected, had seriously considered not paying me.
Bad idea.
You see, I had been promised a bonus if I found something—a hidden treasure of all things—and I had. Except a crazy ghost had had other plans. Yes, a ghost...who very much didn’t want me to reveal the location of his treasure. So, instead of disclosing the location of the buried fortune, I had shown my client evidence of its existence. I had, after all, been hired to find the treasure, not reveal the location.
Yes, a loophole in my agreement. My client had not been pleased. That might cost me a bad review on Angie’s List, but that was a price I was willing to pay. In the end, a dead man got his wish, I got my bonus, and now here we were at Starbucks. Life goes on.
As Tammy placed her complicated order, sounding like a true Starbuckian, I glanced over at the blond guy writing in the corner. He wore one of those 1920s paperboy caps. Sometimes called duck-billed caps. Nerdy, but kind of cute, too. He wore his at a slight angle. Jaunty.
As we waited for our drinks, Tammy launched into a rather elaborate and disturbingly well-thought-out plan to have Anthony, her younger brother, move in with their dad so that we girls could have the house alone. When she was done, I told her that a) that wasn’t going to happen and b) she would miss Anthony, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
“I won’t miss his farting.”
“No one would miss his farting, Tammy.”
“Maybe he can live with Dad half the time.”
“Or not.”
“But—”
“No buts. Not even Anthony’s stinky butt.”
Tammy giggled, and when our drinks were ready, I led Tammy over to a table and told her to sit and wait for me.
“You’re going to talk to that man,” she said. My daughter, you should know, is a world class mind reader.
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s not polite to read other people’s minds.”
“Well, you keep looking at him.”
“I know.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”
* * *
“Hi,” I said, except I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me. So I leaned down and waved just over his laptop.
That got his attention. He gasped a little and looked up. He was wearing pink—yes, pink—headphones with the words “Virgin Airlines” written on them. He pulled them off, slipping them down around his neck. As he did so, I caught what might have been some New Agey music. I didn’t take the big guy as an Enya type, but go figure.
“Hi,” I said again.
He smiled and sat forward and promptly knocked his iced coffee off the table. As it went flying, I reached down almost casually and caught it before it got very far. I returned it to its wet ring on the table next to his keyboard.
“You better be careful,” I said. “I hear iced coffee is hell on keyboards.”
He stared at the coffee that, just a few seconds earlier had been flipping through the air. He looked up at me, his mouth hanging open a little. I got that a lot these days.
“Er, right. Thank you...” his voice trailed off. “That was incredible.”
I shrugged. “Lucky catch.”
“No, I mean...that might have been the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Then you need to get out more,” I said. “This seat taken?”
He blinked some more, then shook his head. He had been prepared to work today. He had been prepared to lose himself in whatever it was that he was writing. He hadn’t been prepared to have a nosy woman with superhuman reflexes sit across from him.
I set his leather saddle bag on the floor beneath the table. Cool bag. I sat opposite him.
“I’ve seen you here before,” I said.
“I’ve seen you, too,” he said.
This actually surprised me. Never once had I seen him look up from his keyboard.
“Are you a writer?” I asked.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Either that or you really, really hate your laptop.”
He grinned. I grinned. We studied each other some more. My inner alarm remained silent. Always a good sign. We did this for another twenty seconds. The silence was not uncomfortable or unpleasant.
I continued studying him. Full lips, short beard, hint of gray in his beard. Lots of laugh lines. Could probably use some lotion on his skin. Strong hands. Nails chewed. Bad habit. He wore a v-neck tee-shirt. Chest hair poking out. A ring on his right hand. A thick squarish watch on his left. North Face jacket hanging on the chair behind him. Nice jacket. Nothing about him suggested that I knew him.
And yet...I did know him. I was sure of it. “You’re probably wondering why I’m sitting here,” I said.
He reached for the recently-saved coffee. As he drank, he continued to take me in, his eyes going from my hair to my face to my body, scanning. They might have lingered on my boobs a little. I’d give him a pass. This time.
“I think I know why you’re here,” he said. I waited for it, expecting the worst. And by worst, I meant some cheesy come-on line. Instead, he surprised me by saying, “You think you know me, and it’s killing you.”
I nodded, impressed. “Something like that.”
“Or maybe you're here because you like my beard.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He sighed. “Well, I like it.”
“Someone has to.”
“Ouch,” he said, but smiled anyway.
He set down his drink and glanced at his laptop when a ping sounded. I would know that ping from anywhere. It was an instant message, or an IM. Fang and I had used IMs often in the past. The big blond writer ignored the IM. On impulse, I reached out with my mind to see if I could get a read on him and was surprised that he was completely closed off to me. Another immortal? Interesting, as only immortals were closed off to me.
He nodded after a moment and said, “Yeah, you seem familiar. Actually, you seem really, really familiar.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“No,” he said. “Just the ones who sit across from me at Starbucks and who look so damn familiar that it’s driving me crazy.” He paused and pretended to think about it. “So, I guess maybe once a day.”
I laughed. No, I snorted, which made him laugh. I heard Tammy giggling behind us. My telepathic daughter would be picking all of this up. Yes, my kids were weird. And, no, I wouldn’t trade them f
or the world.
“Did I used to date you?” I suddenly asked.
He laughed some more and looked me over again. To the betterment of his health, he didn’t linger on my boobs this time. Good boy. Someone raised him well. He said, “Oh, I would remember if I used to date you.”
“Is that a compliment?” I asked
“Very much so.”
“Good, then I won’t have to give you a public noogie.”
“A public noogie?”
“Yeah, you want one after all?”
He raised his hand and laughed hard. Easy to get along with. Effortless familiarity. God, I knew him from somewhere. I tried again to penetrate his thoughts. No luck. An immortal? Geez, he didn’t seem immortal. He seemed very normal. Too normal.
When he was done laughing, he said, “You sound kind of badass.”
“I have to be.”
“And why’s that?”
“I’ve got two kids.”
He nodded. “Mad mom in minivan and all that?”
“Close,” I said, thinking of my minivan parked just outside the doors here, a minivan with a fresh dent along the passenger side fender, a dent that was the result of me backing into a shopping cart. Lord knows my inner warning system goes haywire when someone has ill intentions for me, but far be it to alert me when I’m about to put a $700 dent in my van.
Stupid warning system.
I studied him some more. The beard. The blue eyes. The chipped front teeth. The overbite. Jesus, this was driving me crazy.
“It’s driving you crazy, isn’t it?” he asked, grinning. He seemed to be enjoying this a hell of a lot more than I was. The bastard.
“Bonkers,” I said. I chewed my lip. Tapped my nails on the circular, slightly scarred table. I asked him where he went to high school. He told me. No dice. But his high school hadn’t been very far, just a city away.
“What year did you graduate?” he asked.
I told him. He shook his head, reached for his iced coffee. When he was done sipping from it, he set it back into the wet ring. Bull’s eye.
