Finneas drew the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Diamonds for his two face-up cards. Samuel drew the Ace of Spades and the Eight of Clubs. Finneas started the bet at five dollars. Samuel matched it, raising ten. Finneas called, and then Lou dealt each of them the remaining cards.
Finneas glanced at his hand, pleased to see three Queens and a Jack of Diamonds. Samuel checked his cards and visibly blanched. Finneas raised the bet by fifty. Sweating, Samuel matched and bet an additional five hundred. It was all of his chips. Finneas barely had enough to match it. It was a risky move, but it wasn’t his money and he had to try to win at all costs. “Call.”
Samuel sighed. He flipped over his hand; Ace of Spades, Ace of Clubs, Eight of Spades, Eight of Clubs and six of Clubs. The crowd gasped; it was the Dead Man’s Hand.
Finneas glanced at Borri. He had the cards to win, but wasn’t sure that Borri would still want it. The alchemist nodded sadly. The room was as silent as death. Finneas showed his hand.
Samuel clutched his chest as the black mist rose from the cards, burning his fingers. Finneas dropped the cards, trying to see Samuel through the haze. He imagined Samuel’s heart beating, struggling to burst through the chest. His own heart burned, his chest barely able to contain the fear. A hand formed in the mist and reached for Samuel. “Father! Help me!”
Finneas drew his pistol, aimed at Samuel’s heart, and fired twice. Samuel slumped into his seat. Black blood seeped from the wound. A heinous howl erupted from the mist as it began to fade. “Tell my father, I understand.”
Borri stood behind his son. He leaned over, and whispered, “I am very proud of you, son.”
Samuel struggled to make his last few raspy breaths. He tried to reach for his father. Borri grabbed his son’s hand and watched him die. “I’m very sorry, Doctor Borri,” Finneas whispered. “I couldn’t stand to let the Black Man take him.”
Borri reached into his pocket and produced a small vial. “Drink this within the hour and all I promised shall come true.”
Finneas accepted the vial gratefully and turned to scoop up the remaining cards in Tituba’s Deck. “Thank you, Doctor Borri.”
“I would run now, if I were you.” Borri cradled his dead son in his arms. “It has already started.”
Finneas sniffed the air. There was smoke somewhere near by. He had not noticed it previously. “We should leave the building.”
Borri scoffed. “I will remain here. I suggest you leave now, Mr. Bagley.”
Finneas slipped Tituba’s Deck into his pocket, grabbed Lou by the arm, and made his way to the door. The black smoke was thick on the city streets. “Do you have a fire department?”
“Only a bunch of drunken volunteers!” Lou yelled.
As the fire swept up the street consuming building after building, they treaded up the steep slope hoping to escape the city limits. An explosion rocked the area as the liquor store caught fire. Exhausted, they stood on the hill, watching the city burn. Finneas thought of Tituba’s Deck and wondered if it had caused this as punishment for denying the Black Man his rightful prey. He pulled out the small vial and flipped the stopper off with his thumb. Finneas gulped the foul smelling liquid and fell back upon his rear.
“I’m ruined!” Lou cried.
“So are we all, Miss Lou. So are we all.”
A Little Job in Arkham
by John Sunseri
Milton Trent cautiously — ever so cautiously — pulled the handle of the suction cup. The glass circle whispered almost inaudibly and came free, and Trent placed it atop the handkerchief he’d laid down for that purpose. He raised his empty hand, reached through the hole in the case and paused for a second. If there were any alarms he’d missed, this would be when they went off.
Nothing. Silence.
A bead of sweat rolled down the back of his neck into his shirt, but he ignored it. He focused again on the cameo in the case, his black- gloved hand hovering motionless an inch above it, his eyes locked like lasers on the prize while his ears strained to hear anything unusual. The tick of the grandfather clock (a splendid William Hasler of Chatham, worth maybe ten thousand bucks) plunked quietly in the corner, a creak of a floorboard from the kitchen as the house cooled, and from outside the mournful chorus of frogs in the water garden. Nothing to worry about.
He took the cameo.
He could feel the fine carving through the thin fabric of the glove, could sense the bumps of the diamonds, nine total, could almost imagine the cool feel of the gold setting, but he wasted no time fondling the thing. In a quick motion the cameo was through the glass hole and into Trent’s pouch, and he picked up the plunger and the round piece of glass, secreted them as well. He stood, not sparing a backward glance, and moved quickly and surely through the dark room toward the window.
“Very nicely done,” came a voice from the easy-chair by the fireplace.
This is not to say that Trent stood there and listened to the sentence for the whole second and a half it took the invisible speaker to say it. No, at the first vibration of the ‘V’ in ‘very‘, he had gone from a quick walk to a bound toward the window that would have shamed a jack- rabbit. By the time the word ‘nicely’ started, he had skidded to a halt, his rubber soles squelching on the hardwood as he noticed a bulky, bodyguard-shaped silhouette outside the glass. He’d spun toward the kitchen by the time the ‘ly’ came, and had taken a fast step toward the back of the house, and was well on his way to sprinting when the lights came on, just in time for the final thud of ‘done.’
The study was a lot nicer in the light — he could see the magnificent oriental rugs, the breathtaking tapestries and glassed-in shelves with the huge antique tomes and folios, the ornately-framed Whistler, the less-ornately-framed Gainsborough, a Pickman sketch in its own corner. And a man sitting comfortably in the chair, remote control in his hand, looking amusedly on as Trent turned his head this way and that.
“The kitchen blocked as well?” Trent asked, stopping and casually turning toward him.
“Indeed,” said the man. “Your reflexes are very good.”
“They’ve had to be,” said Trent. “But apparently I’m slowing down.” “Nonsense,” said the man. “You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for. I am Cornelius Bowen, the owner of this house — and, I might add, of that antique cameo in your pocket.”
“They say possession is nine-tenths of the law,” said Trent.
“If we go by that logic,” smiled Bowen, “we could argue that since you’re in my home, I own you.”
Trent took the cameo out of his pouch, reached over, set it down on the table next to him. He then crossed his arms, let himself relax, and looked at his host.
“So,” he said, “what next? The cops?”
“An offer,” said Bowen. He stood, put down the control for the lights and moved over to the sideboard. “Brandy?”
“An offer,” repeated Trent.
“Yes,” said Bowen, reaching for a bottle. “I have need of a thief. A great thief. I need you to do a job for me. Would you like a glass? It’s ‘Old Havana’, from Germain-Robin in California.”
“Not France?” Trent asked.
“I dislike the French,” replied Bowen. “A Frenchman once double- crossed me.”
“What happened to him?” Trent asked, taking a few steps toward the old man.
“He died,” said Bowen simply, extending a glass. “Here.”
“I don’t drink on the job,” said Trent. “And when I do drink, it’s usually beer. Cheap beer.”
“What do you spend your money on, then?” asked Bowen, taking a sip from the snifter and smiling in appreciation of the taste. “You live simply, drive old cars, you don’t have a drug habit. You reside in one of the seedier parts of Boston. You don’t frequent whores...”
“Whoa, whoa,” said Trent, his eyes widening. “How do you ...?” “I’ve been doing my research, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen, setting down the goblet. “I needed the best thief on the East Coast, and it turned out he lived in
my very own city. I could have saved some money had I known that in the first place.”
“Good people have been looking for me for ten years,” said Trent. “Entire police departments. Interpol. And you just found me? Just like that?”
“I have certain advantages that most lack,” replied the old man. “But once I obtained your name, I monitored you on two of your jobs. Again, you have my compliments — the theft of the kylix from the design museum in Providence was brilliant.”
Trent looked steadily at the man, but inside he quailed. How the hell had the guy known that he was involved in the theft of the ancient drinking cup? He’d used his usual string, of course, but he was a hundred percent sure that none of his partners would have ratted him out.
If they had, he’d be in the deepest cell at 200 Nashua Street right now instead of here watching Cornelius Bowen drink expensive brandy. “May I ask,” said Bowen, “what you did with the kylix?”
“No,” said Trent.
“Very well,” said the older man, a slight smile on his face. “Now, to business. I need a book stolen, and I need you to steal it.”
“What book?” asked Trent.
“It’s called the Necronomicon,” began Bowen, but Trent interrupted.
“Up in Arkham,” he said. “At the University.”
“Exactly,” said Bowen, his eyebrows lifting. “You’ve heard of it?”
“I make it my business to hear of everything valuable and easily portable,” said Trent, arms still crossed before him. He wanted to put them into his pockets, but he didn’t want to scare the old man. He’d seen one bodyguard already, imagined several more, and didn’t need a beating. “And that’s a doozy of a profit, that book.”
“You’ve looked into stealing it?” asked Bowen, eyes narrowing. “I’ve looked at it,” said Trent. “It’s impossible.”
“Nonsense,” said Bowen. “Anyone can steal anything.”
“All right, let me amend that,” said Trent. “It’s impossible for me. Maybe if I had three months planning, unlimited funds, and access to a whole lot of hard-to-find information and if I had a man on the inside I might be able to pull it off. But that thing is locked down tighter than the United States Constitution.”
“I can get you whatever cash you need,” said Bowen quietly. “And whatever information you need. You’ll have to find your own inside man and you’ll need to do it quick. I need the book by the end of the month.” Trent laughed. “I guess I’m going to jail, then. I told you, Mr. Bowen, that it’s impossible.”
“And at the end of the whole affair, when I have the book in my hands,” continued Bowen, ignoring the thief s protests, “I will give you a million dollars each, you and your team.”
“I ...” began Trent, then stopped. “Four million dollars?”
“Five million, Mr. Trent,” smiled Bowen. “Though it was a nice test -but, yes, I’m aware that you use four helpers on your bigger jobs. Shame you didn’t bring them along tonight, or I would have talked to you all at once.”
“It’s a good thing I didn’t,” said Trent. “I’m a peace-loving man -a thief, not a fighter- but if you cornered Buddy Bang like you did me tonight, one of you would’ve ended up dead.”
“I did research on Mr. Bangatowski as well, Mr. Trent. I assure you, he wouldn’t be allowed to be as close to me as you are right now.”
“Humph,” grunted Trent. He had been testing the old man a little bit, but he’d come through with flying colors -if he knew about Buddy, he knew about all of them. And that was scary.
“Why do you need it by the end of the month?” he hazarded, trying to buy a little time.
“That’s not your concern, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen coldly. “Suffice it to say that I’ve found myself in a position where I need to buy your services. If you decide that you will not do this thing for me, I assure you that you’ll wish you’d never broken in here to steal the Waterston Cameo.”
“Mister,” said Trent, “I was there five minutes ago.”
***
“You agreed to what?’ asked Theresa, incredulous.
“I know,” said Trent, lighting a Marlboro. They sat in Cloot’s, back in their normal corner, 20-oz pints in front of them. “But I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?”
“The book’s impossible,” she said, leaning back and picking up her beer. “We looked at it last year, remember? Drove all the way up there ...”
“Things are different now,” said Trent. Buddy Bang sat way back in the corner, sunglasses on, but Trent felt the man’s eyes on him through the cheap plastic lenses. On either side of Theresa were Mike and Willem, and they both stared at him too, wondering how things had gotten to this point — how someone had found them all, found their names and addresses.
Wondering which of them had sold them out.
“Look,” said Trent, “we’re gonna have to do this thing. Either that, or you’ll all have to go on the run. I don’t know how this guy got his information, but he’s got us all cold — from the stuff he knows, he could send us all to prison for a long, long time.”
“Makes you wonder,” said Buddy, the lights from the bar glinting on his knockoff Vuarnets.
“Yes it does,” said Trent, picking up his glass, raising it to his lips. He took a long sip, set the pint back down, wiped his lips. “I’ve been wondering some of the same things myself, Bang, and you know what I came up with?”
“What?” asked Willem, elbows on the scarred oak table, Camel hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“I figured that, if any of you had sold us out, we wouldn’t be here right now,” said Trent.
“Bullshit,” said Buddy. “We got a rat amongst us, and said rat is setting us up for something.”
“Setting us up for what?” asked Trent. “Even if one of you is a traitor, the only thing we’re being forced to do is steal the Necronomicon, and that’s not some kind of set-up. Bowen really, really wants this book, folks, and he wants us to get it for him.”
“I don’t buy it,” said Buddy. “There’s something else going on here.”
“Then we’re gonna have to be real careful, aren’t we?” asked Trent. He finished his beer, set the empty glass back on the table, then sighed.
“I’m going up there tomorrow morning to case the place,” he said finally. “Who’s in?”
“For a million bucks?” asked Mike. “Versus having that creepy old guy coming after us? What time do we leave?”
***
“It’s impossible,” said Theresa.
“I’ve been saying that,” agreed Trent gloomily. They were in a cheap room in Arkham’s Holiday Inn, the four of them uncomfortably sitting wherever they could while Willem was out getting food. “Tell me again about the security systems.”
“Two guards at the front desk — armed guards — and they’re pros, not your normal campus cops. During library hours the book is inaccessible unless by appointment — it’s in the far-back room in a sealed glass case, surrounded by infrared beams and pressure pads on the floor, and at any intrusion the steel gates slam down in front of the door and the room fills with knockout gas.”
“Any way to get around the pressure pads?” asked Mike.
“You could fly,” suggested Theresa. “Assuming, that is, that you could also avoid the beams — the projectors are actually set into the walls behind bulletproof glass.”
“How about cutting the power?” asked Buddy. “Knock out the electricity...”
“They’ve got two backup generators in the basement,” said Trent, looking over the blueprints Bowen had gotten them. “Both are self- contained and also defended. And that’s where they keep the dogs.”
“What kind of school library has freaking guard dogs?” asked Mike.
“It’s a tradition,” said Trent. “Apparently, they came in handy one time — there was some yokel tried to steal the Necronomicon a hundred years ago, and the dogs took him out.”
“Nice,” said Buddy. “They run through the place a
t night, shit everywhere?”
“I don’t know about the shitting,” said Trent. “Maybe they’re trained not to. But, yeah, they’ve got the run of the place after the library closes. And then the library‘s got all those weird defenses — the things all over the walls ...”
Two knocks came at the door and everyone tensed, Buddy reaching down and grabbing his pistol — and then two more knocks and Trent nodded. “Come,” he said.
Willem entered, three pizza boxes piled up in his hands. He kicked the door shut behind him, set the food down on the table next to the Gideon Bible and shrugged his shoulders. “Cold out there,” he said.
“You get combination?” asked Theresa, moving over to the pies.
“Two large combos and one plain cheese for Mr. I Don’t Eat Meat,” said Willem.
“Fuck you,” said Buddy, grabbing his box and returning to the bed. He opened it and steam escaped into the air. “I take care of my body, lard-ass.”
“Meat is good for you,” protested Willem, shooting a quick look down at his gut. It was pretty big.
“How about digging from underneath?” asked Mike, taking a can of Coke from the minibar.
“It’d take a month to tunnel under where we need to go,” said Trent, “and we don’t have a month. Even if we could get underneath, we’d have the problem of escape.”
“Yeah, what about escape?” asked Theresa. “You go to the cop shop today?”
“The police station’s on the other side of town, which is nice,” said Trent, moving over to the window and looking down at the parking lot. “But they patrol. If we time it right, it’ll take 'em ten minutes to respond. If we don’t, they’ll have a car there in a minute or two.”
“I’ve got routes all drawn up,” said Theresa, “and we can get a fast car from the Bruno brothers.”
“The problem is getting that damned book out of the safe room,” said Trent. “How about we just make an appointment to work with the book — say we’re doing research, do a switcheroo…”
Pyrate Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 (4.0) Page 20
