The Skinwalker Conspiracies - 02

by Jim Bernheimer

  “You’re not getting anywhere near that ring!” Oswald snarled.

  “Easy there,” I tried to reassure him. “Getting it would take way too much time. I’m going to go to a pawn shop and get a cheap wedding ring and pretend that I have your anchor. I act like I’m a big tough Skinwalker who has you by the balls and I want to barter you for the location of Eckels and De Soto.”

  Oswald calmed down and thought it over. “What if it doesn’t work?”

  Sadly, it was a valid question. My professional acting resume was mighty thin. Jimmy Wilkes once told me that the only thing I could “act” was “guilty.” The plan we had concocted hinged on me being able to pull off the role of a Skinwalker.

  My answer was, “We start ambushing his ghosts and disrupting his operation. Frontal assaults only work when you have numbers. Two isn’t a very big number. So, we take out his troops and force him to deal with us before his little empire is down to nothing.”

  “I suppose,” Oswald said. “I’m not the only thorn in his side. There’s a whole group of Mexican ghosts who still want to take back everything the United States pretty much stole from them.”

  Cringing, I was sorely tempted to remind him how the Soviet Union pretty much imploded with a whimper and the “dirty, stinking capitalist pigs” won – sort of. It was getting harder to tell every day. Either way, I wasn’t there to have an ideological debate with an avowed Marxist.

  “That’s good. If he’s feeling pressure from the south and we happen to start weeding out some of his forces, he’ll be more likely to give us what we want.”

  “Hey buddy, just what are you looking for? I ain’t got all day!” The guy at the pawnshop was giving me a look – torn between a paying customer and the baseball game on his television.

  This was the fifth pawn shop I’d been in trying to find a used wedding band.

  I’d been in enough pawn shops in my life to know that they always had this feeling of desperation hovering about. It didn’t matter whether the place was well lit and the people wearing shirts with logos on them, or some shady place with bars on the few windows and a guy behind the counter with sweat stains in his armpits.

  Of course anytime I’d been in one, it was to sell something from my life at a discount.

  No, I wasn’t too picky about what the ring looked like, but for my little plan to work, it had to have a touch of the supernatural to it. Our fallback plan was to get one plain ring and glue a few iron filings to it, so I can “charge” it and make a suitable forgery. A real one anchor would be better, of course there would probably be a ghost attached. That was another fun obstacle in my way.

  There’s that phrase the NCOs in the Army used all the time, “Work smarter, not harder.” I’d long since given up on that. Now, it was only a matter of how hard did I have to work. Right now that consisted of touching ring after ring and seeing if anything had some kind of spark accompanying it.

  “Gimme a break,” I said preparing yet another lie. “I spent all my money on my girl’s ring, but still have to get something for me. I’ll know it when I touch it.”

  The man grunted and pulled out another little felt box filled with rings somebody had exchanged for a few dollars.

  A few rings down was this rather unspectacular looking gold band. My index finger tingled a little when I touched it.

  “Let me see this one.”

  It was dinged up and too large for my ring finger, but there was definitely something there.

  “How much?” I asked

  “Really? That one?” He sounded puzzled.

  “Yeah.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, and his expression turned calculating. “One forty.”

  “How about ninety?”

  “Shit, I could melt it down and get that much for the metal. I can do one twenty, but that’s it.”

  “Fine. I’ll take it.” I watched as more money left my “vacation” fund. If this kept up, I’d have to switch to staying at campgrounds instead of cheap hotels.

  I hated spending money. I always had. There are different kinds of poor. Some just don’t know how to stop spending. I wasn’t one of those. I was the “never had it to begin with and never gonna have it” type.

  Even though I tried many times to put it behind me, money – more specifically the lack of money – was always a problem for me.

  Making matters worse, buying a secondhand ring got me thinking about the sad state of my love life. Girls like Jenny Goodman or even Candy wouldn’t want an engagement ring bought from a pawn shop. Considering all I got from my injuries in the Army was a mediocre disability check, two months worth of my salary wouldn’t get much else.

  So there I was, walking out of the shop and into the blistering afternoon heat. My thoughts weren’t on how I was going to trick William Travis into thinking I was a Skinwalker. No, I was thinking about how any girl, who wanted to become a fixture in my life, wasn’t going to be doing it for the money. Danger and fear of the unknown were about all I had to offer at that moment and I had that by the boatload.

  Episode 19: Trying to Forget The Alamo

  Other than the whole Ferryman thing, I was like most people. I ate, I drank, and I slept. Usually, I could only remember a tiny bit of what I was dreaming about and that typically faded before I’ve finished breakfast.

  Miscalculating the traffic, it took close to seven hours to travel from Dallas to San Antonio. Once there, Silas, Lee Harvey Oswald, and I bunked in one of the budget, chain hotels near the airport. Oswald wanted to get right out there and start sniffing around downtown San Antonio. I wanted to get the most “bang for my buck” out of the hotel and be rested for my foray into acting.

  Plus, I still needed to warm up to the idea of Oswald as a partner in crime. He didn’t exactly have a sterling track record, to say the least.

  Realizing that I couldn’t chain him up or anything, I told Oswald to scout the area around the motel and stay out of trouble … something his history showed he wasn’t able to do. After a tiring drive, with nothing but garbled static on the radio and malfunctioning cruise control (thanks to the presence of a very powerful ghost in the backseat), I desperately needed some rest. After making certain Silas was comfortably situated, I climbed in – not bothering to take off my clothes because I was too tired to unpack.

  My eyes opened and I could smell the sea air.

  “Have a good nap, Paul?” A female voice asked. “I told you to put on some suntan lotion. You know how you burn!”

  I opened my mouth to ask who the hell Paul was. What came out, though, surprised even a guy who could talk to ghosts.

  “We haven’t been married for two days and you’re already nagging me.”

  The curly redhead put her book down, adjusted her white hat, and smiled at me. She wasn’t a stunner, but the woman had a “girl next door quality” to her. Somehow, I knew her name was Tabitha. She said, “Should’ve run when you had the chance, sucker!”

  Standing up, I felt the hot sand between my toes and could hear the shouts of children along the beach. My companion wore a green one piece that looked like something out of those old surfer movies from the sixties. Gazing around, I noted that everyone else was wearing similar attire. At any moment, I expected the music would start and everyone would start dancing like all those cheesy beach movies.

  “Why run when I can do this?” I replied reaching down and hoisting her into the air. I threw her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and marched toward the water. The strange thing - I could really feel her weight on me. Everything was so vivid.

  “Don’t you do it! Don’t you dare do it!” Her shrieks were punctuated by laughter while she kicked and beat her hands on my back.

  “Let’s go for a swim and cool off.”

  “Paul? Paul? Put me down! I told you I didn’t want to go swimming today.”

  “Then what’s the point of coming to the beach for a honeymoon?”

  Waist high in the waves, I unceremoniously dumped her
. She came up looking like a drowned rat covered in freckles. The nasty glare on her face was a sight to behold.

  “What’s the matter, Tabbycat doesn’t like water?” I playfully asked.

  “My hair is ruined!” She pursed her lips in a sexy pout.

  “Good thing I love you and not the hairdo.”

  Her expression softened. She smiled and wrapped her arms around me. “You are impossible to stay mad at. You know that?”

  Not saying a word, I leaned down and kissed her. The taste of the saltwater covered her lips.

  “Mike, you okay?” The scene fades and I feel a hand on my shoulder shaking me.

  “What?” I said sitting up in the hotel bed. Wiping my hand across my face, I could still taste saltwater and my toes twitched like when they had muddy sand in between them. Even in my bizarre new life, this kind of stood out as being odd.

  “You were mumbling something,” Silas said. “You were also glowing way more than usual.”

  “There was a beach. I was there with a girl.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Her name was Tabitha and she called me Paul. They’d just gotten married. What the heck was that about? It was like I was just there.”

  “Interesting,” he commented.

  “Interesting, how?”

  Silas was thoughtful for a moment. “Mike do you still have that wedding ring on you?”

  “Huh?” I was still trying to wake up. It took me a moment to figure out what he was asking. “Yeah, it’s in my pocket. Why?”

  “Take it out. Yes, it looks brighter now.”

  I examined it. It did feel like there was more to it than before. “What do you think it means?”

  “I’ve heard about things like this before. It’s called psycho … psycho … shoot! I can’t remember. You can probably turn on that computer of yours and find out, but it’s some kind of thing that you can touch something and see things from the object’s history.”

  “Great. More proof that I’m a psycho,” I deadpanned, while imagining myself on some show you’d see on at three in the morning. “You really think I pulled that vision from the ring?”

  “Mike, after all we’ve been through together, you still sound like a doubter.”

  Okay, I was a little slow, but hey, I just woke up from a pretty nice dream and got told that I’m a little more psycho than I originally thought.

  “Guess I shouldn’t keep it with me anymore,” I said. “Damn shame though, Tabitha was a good kisser.”

  “What are you worried about, Mike?”

  “That it’ll possess me.” Donnie’s dog tags and Cassandra’s little jade trinkets came to mind.

  “Are you tired? Do you feel drained?” Silas asked.

  “Not really. How long was I out?” I was refreshed and felt good.

  “Only a couple of hours. I’d say be careful with it, but if it’s just a memory stuck in a ring, you might be alright.”

  I set the ring down on the nightstand and broke out the laptop. The idea of using this thing like a shot of one of those energy drinks appealed to me, but I’d learned to be suspicious of things that seemed too good to be true – the hard way.

  Psychometry or psychoscopy was the term Brother Silas was trying to remember. Now all I needed to do was learn how to read tarot cards and I could be employed at carnivals across the country!

  I gave Silas the car keys.

  “And just what am I supposed to do with these?”

  “Keep them for now,” I said. “I’ll give this ring another try after a workout, but if it does possess me, I won’t get too far without the Caddy.”

  “Fair enough,” the blind man said. “I think I’ll settle in for a nap while you’re doin’ your thing.”

  Being a Ferryman didn’t really come with an instruction manual. It was more like trial and error, with an emphasis on the error part. Things happened along the way and I tried to be a bit more open.

  Part of me felt like a voyeur for psychically spying on Paul and Tabitha’s honeymoon – a kid getting caught with a rented porno tape or an open bottle of booze. It was sad enough that some of my ghostly acquaintances had better love lives than I did. Now, I had an old ring that was obviously having more fun than me.

  It just didn’t seem fair. Either way, I needed to clear my head and a workout followed by some swimming seemed like the right way to deal with my newly acquired alertness. I quickly changed into my swim trunks and grabbed the plastic room key. Slipping into the corridor, I followed the signs for the gym. Not being such a tightwad had a few benefits. Besides the small but serviceable gym, the pool had water that actually looked the right color.

  I started with one of the exercise bikes. Treadmills don’t agree with all the metal in my leg; the bike provides less wear and tear. For the hundredth time that day, I wondered why I was even bothering with this madman’s quest to begin with.

  Already it was bigger than just finding the Skinwalker who was controlling my father. He was Kennedy’s real assassin and not just some run-of-the-mill bastard that I could steamroll over. One minute Oswald would sound afraid of De Soto and other times, he’d sound envious. I won’t bother lying; that scared the willies out of me.

  As for Oswald, he was a crazed animal on a flimsy leash. There was no question about if I’d have to put him down. It was only a matter of time.

  On the TV, they were still talking about that earthquake in China, from a few weeks ago. Also, it looked like Clinton was actually going to lose the nomination to that guy who - I’d recently told Silas - didn’t have a shot in hell of beating her. My psychic powers obviously didn’t extend to the future, only the past.

  I spent the next thirty minutes on the bike getting my pulse up while stopping every five minutes to do twenty-five sit-ups and fifty pushups. No one would ever confuse me for my idol Herschel Walker, but I was doing my level best to become a cheap knockoff. The guy was a tank! I’d settle for being an armored fighting vehicle.

  During that time, I tried to imagine all the other things I might be able to do, but had no idea. William Poe was able to knock me back with a wave of his hand. Oswald tried the same thing. It would be cool, not to mention damn helpful, to have some kind of telekinesis. I’ll never admit to staring at the television plug for five straight minutes and trying to pull it out with just my mind. Nope, that didn’t happen at all.

  Swimming laps helped me cool down and, by the time the pool was closing, I was more than ready to go back, clean up, relax, and give the ring a second try. Naturally, I kept it in my pocket - just in case the ring was really out to get me - and settled down for a second nap. It took some time, but I finally drifted off.

  My eyes opened and I could smell the sea air. Okay, it wasn’t telekinesis, but it definitely was interesting.

  The memory inside the ring was definitely residual. It went a little further this time – a few more minutes of making out in the waist-high water for one thing. I was a little more self-conscious this time. The first time was an accident. This time around, I had a good idea where this was headed.

  The rejuvenated feeling was still there and that wasn’t such a bad thing as we grabbed breakfast and drove into downtown San Antonio. It was time for my acting debut.

  Playing the part of disgruntled Skinwalker from St. Louis in the program today – Mike Ross.

  The funny thing was that in all the time I was stationed at Fort Hood, I never got down to San Antonio to see The Alamo. Museums weren’t really my thing back then. Wasting my time at stripper bars, partying at clubs, and playing first person shooters on gaming consoles was more my thing. My repaired eye gave me fits if I tried to play any games for more than thirty minutes and my finances simply couldn’t support my other old hobbies.

  Fortunately for me, recent events had given me a new appreciation for places of historical significance. As far as money went, it was fairly inexpensive to go visit a museum, but I had to constantly be aware of the “hidden” costs. Heck, I even had some snapshots
from Dealey Plaza of me, Silas, and a slight blur that most would say is a trick of the sun off the reflection pool, but in reality was Lee Harvey Oswald to prove it.

  The first thing I noticed about The Alamo was that it wasn’t nearly as big as I thought it would be. The chapel looked almost insignificant set against the backdrop of all the buildings surrounding the park area. Countering that was the feeling of approaching hallowed ground. Immediately, I started looking around for ghosts. There was one hanging around on top of the Chapel and a couple of others walking near where the cavalry corral would have been.

  Oswald was back at the hotel. If things got messy, Silas had the number of the hotel programmed into the cell and he’d call the number and let it ring four times and hang up. That’d be Oswald’s cue to come in ready for a fight. Silas took a seat on one of the benches across the street from The Alamo. Since toting around a pipe wrench, the work gloves, or any other assorted piece of cast iron in the Caddy’s trunk wasn’t really advisable, I was relying on my trusty bottles of iron filings once more.