Bone Key

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Still, Sammy was gonna try to save him. Dean wouldn't be Dean if he didn't do everything he could to keep his little brother safe, and Sam wouldn't be Sam if he didn't try to do whatever he could to beat the odds and get that happy ending that they never seemed to get.

  "So, win any games?" Dean asked as Sam came over, a quarter-full cup of beer in his hand.

  Sam snorted. "Right. You know I suck at that game."

  "Yeah, but I like hearing you admit it out loud."

  "Nah, I was just watching." Sam gulped down the last of his beer.

  Grinning, Dean said, "You pool voyeur, you."

  "Get anywhere with the girl in the hot pink shorts?"

  The grin widened. "Yup. We're meeting back here Saturday. I figure we'll have this taken care of by then."

  "Hope so." Sam set down his cup. "Ready to make with the mad lockpicking skillz?"

  "Let's do it," Dean said, gulping down his own beer.

  This late on a Wednesday night after a holiday weekend, Duval Street wasn't terribly crowded. That didn't mean it was empty—drunken revelers were still wandering about in groups of two or more, plus the occasional solo pedestrian. Most of the bars had closed up, and Dean had to admit, it was weird seeing the open-air places with their gates and windows shut. Open, they looked like inviting places to come sit. Closed, they actually looked like buildings.

  When they passed the Bull and Whistle, Dean was surprised to see that Yaphet was still there.

  "Hey, dudes!" he said. "I was hopin' you two'd show up. There's been, like, a disturbance in the Force."

  "What do you mean?" Sam asked.

  "Construction site down on South Street. Some seriously bad shit happenin' down there, if you'll pardon my French. Two people went in, didn't nobody come out. Cops're there now, but they won't be there forever, y'know?"

  "Hey," Sam said, "you know a cop named Van Montrose?"

  "Yeah. Seminole dude. He's a cool cat, for a pig."

  "You trust him?"

  Yaphet shivered. "Well, y'know, he's a pig, man. Can't trust the fuzz. But for fuzz, he ain't bad."

  Dean figured that was as good an endorsement as they'd get. He looked at his brother. "You wanna check that out instead of the tour company?"

  "We should do both," Sam said. "Maybe split up, take one each?"

  "Nah, that never works. Every time we split up, things get bad."

  Sam shrugged. "When we stick together, things get bad, too. What difference does it make? It's not like this is a horror movie, where splitting up leads to instant death."

  "Dude, our lives are horror movies." Dean held up a hand, cutting off another protest. "Fine, whatever, we stay together. Let's do it." Looking down at Yaphet, he said, "Keep it cool, Yaphet."

  "Right on, brother," Yaphet said, holding up a fist. "Hey, Sammy, you check out my poem yet?"

  Suddenly nervous, Sam said, "Uh, no, not yet."

  "Well, lemme know what you think when you do, 'kay?"

  "Sure thing," Sam said in his best bullshit voice. As they walked off, Dean said, "Poem's that bad, huh?"

  Sam winced. "Worse."

  They walked up to Eaton, which was even more deserted than Duval. After a quick trip to their rooms to retrieve the EMF, picklocks, flashlights, and their weapons, they crossed the street to the house with the turret. The occasional person wandering by was enough to make Dean suggest they try the back entrance first, but that notion was quickly kiboshed as that entryway had been sealed.

  The front door, though, was just locked and alarmed. Which was good as far as it went, but the front entrance was completely exposed to the street.

  As Dean knelt to pick it, he said, "Do me a favor and stand in front of me and make yourself tall."

  "I don't need to make myself tall, Dean, I am tall," Sam said in that tone he always used when he gloatingly reminded Dean that, for all that Sam was the "little" brother, he had a good three inches on Dean. Sammy'd been using that tone since hitting his growth spurt at age fourteen and shooting past Dean on the height chart. Back then, of course, Sam provided those reminders approximately once every five minutes. "Hey," teenaged Sam would say, "can I borrow your jacket? Oh, wait—it's too small for me!"

  Now, though, he needed his brother to be the Incredible Hulk. "Just widen your shoulders or something."

  It took almost a minute to pick the lock, then another ten seconds to switch off the alarm. Once that happened, the two brothers moved almost as a unit, training that was drilled into them by their ex-Marine father from the time that both boys were old enough to be trusted with firearms, one covering the other while the latter moved in a bit, then the former moving while being covered.

  Within a minute, both brothers were sure the ground floor was clear, and Dean closed the door. "We should try to find where each of them was killed."

  "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say one of 'em was right there." Sam was pointing his finger at the gift shop that was in the back of the ground floor, where a display unit had been shattered from the top, as if something had fallen on it. Most of the top shelf and some of the second shelf were broken, too. It was, Dean thought, consistent with someone falling onto the thing. Looking closely, he saw that some of the glass fragments had blood on them, as did the shelves. He also noticed that there was a slot for a third shelf, but it was missing—probably at the local crime lab.

  Sam was looking at the Florida license plates with people's names on them and other junk. "People really buy this crap?"

  Dean shrugged. "Tourists." Pulling the EMF out of his pocket, he closed his eyes, winced, then turned it on. When he didn't feel it spark or hear it explode, he opened one eye.

  It was working fine. He'd recalibrated it to handle the higher levels Key West ghosts were giving off these days, and it looked like he'd done so properly. Opening the other eye, he told Sam, "Same thing we got at Hemingway—EMF's off the freakin' scale."

  "The other body was upstairs," Sam said.

  Looking around, Dean saw the winding staircase that led up to the turret. "Let's go."

  Again, John Winchester's training kicked in, and the pair of them moved up the stairs the same way they'd entered the building. The wooden stairs creaked as they progressed, but there was nothing to be done about it. Hell, this is the HQ for a haunted-house tour. Of course the stairs creak.

  Dean moved up around one bend, then covered Sam as he went around the next one, eventually making their way to the top of the spiral, where a big wooden door greeted them. Dean noted that the EMF readings were spiking. "I think our little dolly of doom is definitely up here."

  Pocketing the EMF, Dean raised his shotgun, standing at the left of the big wooden door. Sam took the other side, his own sawed-off at the ready.

  Dean held up three fingers, then two, then one—then they burst in.

  The room was quiet—and kind of weird. It was filled with tiny furniture—too small to be used by anyone fully grown but not small enough for the average toy. "It's like a dollhouse for Paul Bunyan's action figures," Sam said as he hunched over in order to enter.

  "Yeah, or Billy Barty's place." Dean didn't have to hunch over nearly so much as Sam. With a grin, he added, "If you wanna wait outside while us normal-heighted people look around... "

  "Hardy har har."

  Chuckling, Dean looked around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, beyond the weirdness of the room itself. Unlike the mess downstairs, all the furniture was neat and orderly. "You sure the girl was killed up here?"

  Sam nodded, moving to the right. "That's what the report said." He looked behind him, and said, "Uh, Dean?"

  Looking up, Dean saw his brother swing the door partly shut. It was covered in now-dried blood.

  "The M.E. report said the woman died of blunt force trauma to the head causing a subdural hematoma."

  Dean blew out a breath. "And the door probably caused the trauma." He shined his flashlight around the room. "So where's the blunt force?"

  "What do you mean?"
>
  "Look around—lotsa furnishings, no occupant. Where's the doll?"

  "His name's Raymond."

  Dean shot a look at his crouching brother. "The doll has a name?"

  "Most dolls do."

  "And you would know this, how, exactly?"

  Sam just gave Dean a bite me entirely look.

  "The doll was a mischievous spirit, according to the legend. It would cause all kinds of problems, and the kid who had the doll would be blamed for it. When the kid grew up, he redid the turret so it would be Raymond's room. The doll's lived up here ever since, but the lore has it that it causes trouble every once in a while."

  "Murder's a little more intense than 'mischievous.'"

  Sam shrugged as he knelt by the door to peer more closely at the blood. "Yeah, well, Hemingway's spirit didn't used to have a mad-on for cats, either." He squinted at the door. "Geez—there's, like, four different indentations on the door here. And the blood spatter's consistent with that. This wasn't just murder, it was overkill."

  "Thank you William Petersen," Dean muttered. "So where is Raymond?"

  He shined the flashlight everywhere except the window—directly shining the light on the window might alert someone on the street that there was someone in the turret, and they couldn't count on all the island cops being as accommodating as Montrose—but there was nothing. Just itty-bitty furniture.

  Then he looked up and pointed the flashlight at the ceiling.

  A doll that looked like a monkey with a Beatles wig and a striped shirt was up in the rafters. As soon as the light hit it, it started to hurtle down toward Dean.

  Dean raised his shotgun and leapt out of the way, but Raymond changed direction somehow and landed right on Dean, hard enough to knock him to the floor.

  Where the hell did this thing get this kind of weight? Dean thought as, once again, his training kicked in and he angled his body so that his shoulder took the worst of the fall to the wood floor.

  Sam cried, "Dean!" even as Dean tried to push off Raymond. The doll wouldn't budge, though. Instead, its little hands clamped the sides of Dean's head.

  Realizing it was trying to do the same thing to Dean that it had done to that girl, Dean tried to get up, but Raymond's weight was too great. Still, he flexed his neck, pushing his head upward to resist the force of Raymond's iron grip.

  Suddenly, the grip was gone, as Sam's workboot collided with the doll hard enough to send it flying. Thinking, Can't do that wearing flip-flops, Dean clambered to his feet even as Sam—now that Dean was clear of his shot—fired a rock-salt round at the doll.

  But it ducked behind one of the chairs, and the rock-salt sprayed harmlessly against the stone wall with a clatter.

  Dean pointed to one side of the chair while he moved quickly around to the other side. All hopes of being sneaky were screwed by the damn creaky floor, so unless the doll was deaf, it was gonna know they were coming. Luckily, there weren't too many places to go in this room.

  As Sam set up on the far side of the chair, Dean leapt forward, aiming the shotgun at the floor.

  There was no sign of the doll. Where the hell is it?

  "Ooof!" Sam fell to the floor, his gangly arms flailing. Running back around the chair, Dean saw that the doll had tripped Sammy, but his little brother had kept a grip on his shotgun. Sam tried to bring the stock down on the doll's head, but he couldn't get leverage.

  Dean ran over to do the same, slamming the wood into the doll's head. That, at least, made it loosen its grip on Sam's leg. Dean quickly backed up just as the doll again launched itself at Dean. This time, he swung the shotgun like a baseball bat, and it knocked the doll right into the wall next to the window.

  As soon as it fell to the ground, Sam, still lying on the floor, shot it. The doll blew apart with a flash of black light, straw and cloth flying all over the place.

  "You okay?" Sam asked as he got to his feet.

  Dean nodded. "Yeah. Let's hope that the spirit was tied to the doll and blowing it to pieces means it won't come back the way Hemingway threatened to."

  Sam blew out a breath. "Let's check that construction site—but Dean? The more I see, the more I think this is a demon, or something worse."

  "What, another god?" Dean asked with a cheeky grin as they moved toward the door.

  "Maybe. EMF off the charts, spirits acting out of character—we need to find out who's doing this before things get worse."

  "C'mon," Dean said, grateful to be able to stand up straight in the stairwell. "Let's get outta here before someone reports that shotgun blast."

  ELEVEN

  "No points for originality," Sam muttered, as they got out of the Impala, which Dean had parked across the street from the construction site.

  "Sorry?" Dean asked as he closed the driver's side door behind him with a loud thunk.

  Sam joined Dean at the trunk. "We're at the southernmost part of the southernmost location on the continental United States. They couldn't come up with something more interesting to name this than 'South Street'?"

  Dean shrugged as he double-checked his sawed-off. "Maybe not original, but it's pretty damn descriptive." He closed the trunk. "Feel kinda silly calling it the southernmost part of the 'continental' U.S., though. I mean, it's an island."

  They started to cross the street. Sam said, "Dad used to call it 'the lower forty-eight.'"

  "Yeah, but Hawaii's south of everything, so it's 'lower' than we are now. That's why you had to qualify the whole southernmost-point crap in the first place."

  Sam shook his head. "Why are we talking about this?"

  "Dude, you started it."

  "Whatever." Sam looked at the site, which was barely lit this late at night. He could hear the flap of crime-scene tape, and his flashlight illuminated the yellow barrier. "Least nobody's guarding the scene. That's pretty laissez-faire."

  "Key West is big on the whole yeah-whatever-can-I-have-another-beer philosophy. They probably figure no one'll mess with it."

  "Yeah, Dean," Sam said with a small smile, "that's what laissez-faire means."

  Shining his light in Sam's face, which caused him to squint and hold up one hand, Dean said, "I know, dumb-ass, I was agreeing with you."

  "Fine," Sam said, and Dean lowered the flashlight. Sam blinked the spots out of his eyes and marveled at how Dean still fell into old habits. When they were kids, Sam was always the book smart one who liked studying, while Dean was more of the type to beat up the nerds, and who hated admitting to knowing anything. Smart made you an outcast, and given their hard-traveling ways, Dean had enough issues in school with that. So he adopted the jock persona of not caring about learning anything.

  That tendency still bled into his personality, to Sam's annoyance, to the point where Dean would profess ignorance on subjects Sam knew damn well he was knowledgeable about. Anything to not be the nerdy kid.

  Like any of that crap matters now, Sam thought bitterly.

  Thrusting these thoughts out of his head, Sam looked at the site. The work had only just started, with a few girders clawing upward and a tarp over them making it look like a tent.

  Pushing the tarp aside, Sam saw that the site was just a big hole in the ground.

  "Crap!" Dean cried, even as Sam heard sparking. Whirling around, he saw the EMF was having the same overload it had had in the Hemingway Home and Museum.

  "Dude, I thought you fixed that."

  "I did, " Dean said angrily, shutting it off before things got worse. "Calibrated it so that it could handle twice the EMF it could before." Looking around, Dean said, "Whatever we got here's even stronger than Hemingway and Raymond."

  Considering that those two spirits had more supernatural energy than average, that didn't bode well.

  Putting on a scratchy voice and a British-sounding accent, Dean said, "Look at the bones!"

  Sam stared at his brother, mouth agape. "What?"

  "Dude, Holy Grail?"

  Finally placing the line as being from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sam
said, "Oh yeah, right."

  Dean rolled his eyes. "Funniest movie in the history of the human race, and 'Oh yeah, right' is the best you can do? You sure you're my brother, Sammy?"

  Ignoring the dig, Sam instead did as Dean had instructed in his impersonation of Tim the Enchanter. There were indeed bones just under the surface of the hole that was probably going to be the basement of the building.

  Jumping down into the hole, Sam looked at the walls of the hole and tried to recall the geology class he'd taken at Stanford. "Dean, if I'm reading these rocks right, this is deeper than they've gone before."

  "What do you mean?" Dean asked, hopping down next to him. "And since when do you read rocks?"

  "If I'm remembering Geology 101, all of this has been underground for a long time. Which means the previous building didn't have a basement as low as this."

  "Katrina, probably," Dean said. "Louisiana got all the publicity, but the entire Gulf Coast got hammered. Whatever used to be here probably got totally wiped out, along with the first few layers of dirt."

  Sam nodded. "That follows. 'Cause those bones probably aren't all that recent."

  "Cayo Hueso," Dean said. "It means—"

  "'Bone Key,' I know," Sam said. At Dean's surprised look, he added, "I went to college in California, remember? You pick up some Spanish."

  "Uh-huh. Well, it's called that because when the Spaniards first showed up in Florida, this island was covered in bones. It was occupied by one of the tribes that got wiped out—the Anasazi, maybe?"

  Sam shook his head. "They're the Southwest. I'll check it out later."

  "Either way," Dean said as he looked around the rest of the site—which didn't take long, as there wasn't much there aside from a few unearthed bones and a whole lot of dirt, "the bones were mostly the tribe's enemies. They probably buried their own people deeper."

  "So the bones of dozens—maybe hundreds of members of a long-dead Indian tribe are down here where a demon just raised the spiritual ante."