“Besides,” he said, making his voice lighter, “I have a game tonight. My captain couldn’t find a sub goalie as of a couple of hours ago. I can’t let my team go without a net minder.” He paused. “You could come.”
I doubted my stalker would show up at the rink, and I liked watching Dee play, so—yeah.
Dee and I had met at a hockey rink. Not the one we were in now, but still I couldn’t help but think of Brad Keel whose death had brought Dee and I together. Weird how something so horrible can lead to something good.
And now there was death again—Sudie’s and John Broadhurst’s. And the missing Aunt Mich, who I wanted to find before she became body number three.
A woman I knew by sight—her boyfriend? Husband?—was on the team with Dee, waved as she sidled by me in the stands. I’d been to a few of his games. There were never more than a handful of people who come to watch and cheer on the guys. We’d gotten to know each other’s faces. I waved back, said hi, and hoped she wouldn’t sit beside me and talk through the whole thing. Why people came to a game and didn’t watch because they were gabbing was a mystery to me. I liked to sit alone in the stands, but then I liked being alone in general. And maybe because I played too, I watched more closely than some others, always looking to pick up a tip or move to improve my own skills.
Another reason I didn’t want her to sit with me was that I wanted time to think about Sudie, Aunt Mich, and Broadhurst—how they might all fit together. There had to be a common denominator somewhere.
The woman walked past me and sat with another woman whose boyfriend, I knew, was this huge guy who played defense. Judging by their greetings, they counted the other as a friend. I was glad for that. I’d have the next hour to myself to think.
It was Sudie’s murder that threw me. I knew from Petra that Mich and Broadhurst knew each other and that he might have been a bit obsessed with her. He couldn’t be the kidnapper, though, since he’d died months ago. Which could mean—probably did mean—there was an unknown player in this game.
And why Sudie? If I didn’t feel so strongly that the three things were tied together, I’d believe that Sudie’s murder was completely unrelated. She’d been killed by someone in the community, someone who knew the spell to enter her shop. But the names Petra Folger, Michelle Dinsmore, and John Broadhurst had meant nothing to The Gate, or Bridget, or Jack. Except for John Broadhurst, none of the names had meant anything to Dee either. If any of those people were in the community, it seemed at least one of them would have known the name even if they didn’t know the person.
How did Sudie figure into this mess?
The sudden crash of a body against the boards and gasps from people in the stands pulled me out of my thoughts. I shot my gaze immediately toward the goal to make sure Dee was all right. I gave a small sigh of relief to see him standing calmly in the goal crease, leaning against the net post, his eyes focused on his players’ bench. My gaze followed to where he was looking.
A skater on his team had a skater from the other team bent over the meter-high wooden wall that separated the player’s bench from the ice. The guys sitting on the bench were busy taking punches at the guy from the other team where his upper body leaned over the wall. The refs were busy trying to separate everyone—without much success.
I shook my head. It was recreational ice hockey and these guys acted like the fate of the free world was dependent on their winning the game. Stupid.
As I watched, the skaters on the ice for the other team rushed over to Dee’s team’s bench and started yapping at the guys. A few of Dee’s teammates came off the bench onto the ice and started fighting with the other team. Which only drew more of the opposition’s players from their bench over to Dee’s.
The refs were blowing their whistles and trying to break up what were now multiple fights. I shook my head again. This was beyond stupid.
My personal theory is that because hockey is such a contact sport, tempers flare more than in, say, softball. But I could be wrong. Maybe recreational softball had just as many knockdown, drag-out fights as hockey. Maybe it was a matter of the pros setting bad examples. What’s the old joke? I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.
The scorekeeper turned on the buzzer that usually meant the end of a period or of the game. End of the game it meant now, even though there was still half a period left to play. That was it. The refs had called it. Game over.
Very slowly, the fights broke up and the two teams retreated to their respective locker rooms. Dee glanced up at me in the stands and shrugged as he, too, skated toward the locker room.
Minutes later, my cell rang. I glanced at the screen and saw it was Dee calling.
“The captain wants us to stay for a bit of post-game dissection.”
I could practically hear his eyes rolling, though, to his credit his voice sounded normal. He hated post-game talks by the team’s captain—especially when they included lectures on good sportsmanship.
“I shouldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s cold in the stands. I’ll meet you at the Corn.”
There was a pause before he spoke. “Could you wait for me? Get yourself a cup of hot chocolate if you’re cold.”
I knew what he was getting at. My irrational, stubborn side perked up. I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself and didn’t need some wizard bodyguard.
“I’ll be fine.” I dropped my volume low. “I have on the protection spell I got from Sudie. No one is going to get me between here and the Corn. I’ll see you there.”
I hung up before he could protest more.
The place wasn’t very crowded when I came in, but there were enough people that I didn’t feel alone and exposed. I walked straight up to the bar, settled on a stool with a red Naugahyde padded seat and gave Nina the bartender a big toothy smile.
Nina put a napkin and glass of water down in front of me. “Where are the rest of your stinky friends?”
Hockey players smelled pretty foul after a game. There was a sort of running competition over who smelled worse post-game—hockey or football players. My personal joke was that there were no bugs in my garage because the fumes coming off my gear killed them the moment they ventured inside.
“Not a game night,” I said. “At least, not my team.”
Her eyebrows raised a little; I’d never come to the Corn by myself before.
“I’m waiting on Diego and his stinky friends.”
“Ahsanti?” she asked, naming my usual bar beer.
I nodded.
“There’s a table open in the back, a nice dark corner,” she said, putting the cold bottle in front of me on a small napkin. “No one will bother you there.”
“Thanks.” I slipped off the stool and took my beer and me to the table in the nice dark corner to wait.
I can make a beer or a shot of whiskey with a glass of water last a long time when I’m with friends. I get restless alone in a bar, though. Not that I’m often alone in bars, but it has happened, usually cases just like this when I’m waiting for someone to arrive.
From time to time in these situations I listen in on strangers’ thoughts, sense their feelings. I hadn’t done much of it since Brad Keel’s death, but since I’d promised Petra I’d do my best to find Aunt Mich it was sort of my job and I was clearly out of practice, judging by how much I’d misread or missed outright lately. The way the knowledge had slammed me to the ground at John Broadhurst’s condo and missing the connection between Broadhurst and Aunt Mich was proof enough of that. I needed some nice, safe exercise in the fine art of mind snooping.
I homed in on a couple sitting at a nearby table, not one in the deep shadows like where I was, but in the dim yellowish light of the overhead fluorescent tube lighting. Just a pair of lovebirds cooing at each other. She’d recently told him she was pregnant. They were both delighted. He was celebrating with a beer. She had water with lemon, no ice.
I tried a quartet of row
dy frat-type guys clustered around the pool table but every one of them had the same thoughts—was he going to get laid anytime soon?
I turned my thoughts to Aunt Mich, took a pen out of my purse, closed my eyes, and sketched on a napkin. I opened my eyes to see what I’d drawn. Scribble scrabble. Just a bunch of dark lines running all over themselves. Sort of the way my brain felt lately.
I glanced up at the clock. Forty minutes had passed. Dee should have been here by now. I waved at Nina to let her know I’d be right back and stepped outside to see if he was coming up the road.
Two steps from the door, a hand tightened around my arm.
14
I yanked my arm free and spun around to see who had put his hand on me. An elderly Hispanic man blinked at me in surprise, I supposed at the violence of my motion.
“Donde, uh, where es Center Street?” the man said in such heavily accented English it took a moment for my brain to figured out what he was asking.
I ran a psychic scan on him even though he looked harmless. He felt harmless.
“Come on. I’ll show you.” I added, “Venga,” from my very limited, non-curse-word Spanish vocabulary as I walked toward the corner.
We were coming up on an alley that made me think of my dream of the trashcan over flowing with beating hearts when the old man, or someone, grabbed me from behind.
He, I was sure it was a man, grabbed my arms and pinned them behind me, shoved me into the alley and frog-marched me toward the back. The man seemed taller now, the angle of his arms wrong for the no-taller-than-me elderly gentleman outside the Corn, and a lot stronger than I’d have credited that old man. I squirmed and struggled in his hold but couldn’t shake lose. I kicked out backwards, hoping to connect with a shin, or better, his groin. I hit nothing but air.
I screamed for help, wondering why the protection spell wasn’t working—had I not done it right?—but no lights came on around us. There was no sound of rescuers’ running feet.
The brute must have had a friend waiting in the dark shadows—or maybe it was the old man. The brute was still holding my arms with both hands when a black cloth hood was tugged over my head. It smelled of dust and completely blocked my sight. I kept screaming my lungs out, squirming and kicking—all of which were doing me precisely zero good. Which is about as much good as my “psychic” abilities had provided. I hadn’t felt in danger from the old man on the street, just as I’d missed the connection between John Broadhurst and Aunt Mich. I might as well be an ordin for all the good my psychic and spell casting abilities were doing.
Maybe I was becoming one. Maybe my powers were weakening as I aged. Maybe my new telekinesis abilities had wiped out my psychic ones. The thought upset me more than I would have expected.
Telekinesis. Yes.
I’d seen a steel trashcan, the kind that might be used in a school cafeteria, with a lid. I wished the lid would fly toward the man holding me and bash him in the head. I just needed him to let loose for a moment. I was fast. I’d be out of there in less than two heartbeats. I wished hard.
The man kept hustling me down the alley. The sounds of the main street grew fainter. No trashcan lid hit him.
I sent my wish out again—for a heavy rock to hit his head or even some gravel to fly into his face. I might as well have wished for the moon to come down and growl.
The man jerked me to a stop. The distinctive click of a car trunk opening seemed loud in this empty alley. I braced against what I knew was coming, going limp and thinking myself heavy. The man lifted me off my feet and threw me into the trunk as if I were no more than a bag of groceries. I landed with a hard thump. He grabbed my hands, forced my wrists together, and bound them with what felt like a plastic tie. At least my hands were in front of me. Small favors.
The trunk door slammed down. A few moments later the car’s engine turned over. We started moving. I slid like a log and hit the back of the trunk. It was cramped in there—a compact model car of some sort. I paid attention to where we were going. When we hit the end of the alley the car turned left, so we were heading down California Street.
I was curled like a caterpillar, my hands tucked between my chest and belly. I inched my hands up to my throat and worked at the knotted cloth that secured the sack over my head at the neck. I managed to undo the knot, but no matter how I grabbed at the cloth, shook my head, or moved it against the floor of the trunk, there wasn’t enough room to move my arms up and pull the sack off.
I gave up and swung into Plan B, feeling around for the trunk release latch. All cars made after 2002 are required to have one—but if there was one in this car, I couldn’t find it. I felt around for a toolbox as best I could, using my feet and butt as well as my hands to feel for a screwdriver, tire iron, or best of all a jack, something I could use to pry open the trunk. Nothing.
I guessed that we went three or four blocks and turned right, so now we were on Sycamore or Walnut, heading in the direction of LAX, but not on the streets most people would take to get there. We made another right and then a quick left. Every turn made me slide in the trunk. I didn’t know El Segundo well enough to figure out what street we might be on now, but from the car’s speed, I thought we must be in a residential area.
I was feeling around for the taillights with the thought of kicking them out when the car made a short turn and then stopped. A driveway, I guessed. We’d arrived at our destination.
Two car doors opened and shut. I waited for the sound of the trunk springing open. Not that I was in any position to make a daring escape when it did, but I’d try when they got me out and stood me up. A quick knee to the kidnapper’s groin.
The trunk spoinged open. Cool air rushed over me. A hand pressed something over my nose and mouth. A smell like solvent or a white-board marker pen through the sack over my head made me gag. Then things went dark.
I came to in a concrete room with no windows—and no black sack over my head. The air was cold and stale. All I could think was Cold War-era bomb shelter. I tried to move my arms, but they were bound to my body by a rope that went around me and the straight-backed, armless chair I was sitting in. At least the plastic twist ties around my wrists were gone.
Someone else was here too, behind me; I heard them breathing. I tried to look around, but the ropes wouldn’t let me. But I knew the feel of the magic in the room.
“Dee?” I whispered. When no answer came, I called his name a little louder.
“No talking,” came an obviously mechanical voice through a speaker in one corner of the room. “Talk again and you will both burn to ash here in this room and no one will ever find your remains.”
It was a bit like being yelled at by the robot from Lost in Space, but I shut my mouth.
“Here is your assignment,” the voice said. “Find Michelle Dinsmore. You have one week. If you fail, you will be destroyed, and I will begin anew.”
The voice cut off. The ropes around my body unknotted themselves and fell away. I turned to assure myself that the magic I’d felt in the room came from Dee.
He was already on his feet and swiveling toward me.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah. Fine.” Irritation was clear in my voice.
Stupid to be angry. It didn’t help anything. My voice softened. “You okay?”
“About as good as you are,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and figure out where Aunt Mich is.”
15
A hatch-like door opened in the ceiling above us and a rope ladder dropped down. It might have been a person doing it. It might have been magic. A frizz of magic that wasn’t Dee’s prickled my skin.
We looked at each other. It was a possibility that something awful waited for us at the top of the ladder. Something that thought it hilariously funny to make us believe we were out of danger, only to yell, “Surprise!” when we pulled ourselves out of the bomb shelter and hit us with some evil magic—turn us into cockroaches or something.
I shook my head to drive off the morbid thou
ghts.
Dee grabbed hold on either side of the rope ladder and started to climb. I went right behind him. If anything waited above us, we’d face it as close to together as possible.
There was no one waiting, just a large, green, fenced-in lawn behind a nondescript beige house. I spotted a gate at one edge of the fence and nudged Dee.
There was nothing dangerous on the other side of the gate either—only a dark, quiet street with cars parked along the curbs on either side. No car was in the driveway of the beige house. No lights were on inside, the occupants either asleep or away. No one was out front of a house watering, no kids at play, or folks walking their dog at this late hour. It was so still I could almost believe we were on an abandoned film set. I pulled out my phone and hit the Lyft app.
“My place or yours?” I said.
“Mine,” he said.
The driver showed up, an ordinary, normal man in an ordinary, burgundy Ford Flex. Dee and I sat close together on the seat behind the driver. Neither of us said a word for a long while, until I just couldn’t stand not asking for one more second.
I leaned close to him. “How did they catch you?”
Because even if someone snuck up on him, I would have thought his magic would have gotten him out of trouble. I’d more than thought his magic would protect him and by extension me if we were together; I trusted his magic to keep us safe. If that wasn’t the case. . . That was something to think seriously about—later.
Dee looked up at the sky—embarrassed, I thought. No. Not embarrassed—angry.
“A messenger came and said you were in trouble.”
“What messenger?”
“A rat approached me as I was walking to my car from the rink. I thought it was one of Maurice’s crew. Sometimes he gives his minions the power of speech when a message needs to be delivered.”
Barbed Wire Heart: Oona Goodlight book two Page 9
