“No one sent us,” Kaz pleaded. “And we’ll give you all our money. Just please don’t touch Calista.”
Wyatt’s mouth twisted into a sour frown. “Wait, what do you think is going on here?”
“You want Calista naked, so I assumed …”
“You assumed what?” he sneered. “I’m a recluse, not a pervert. I would never do … that. And besides, I’m not even into girls.”
Kaz stepped back again.
“Don’t flatter yourself, big guy.” The Cobbler waved them forward. “I just need to see if either of you are wearing a wire.”
If a deranged shut-in seeing my bra and panties is the worst thing that happens tonight, Calista thought, I’ll be getting off light. She dropped her jacket and peeled off her sweater, revealing a square of gauze adhered to her lower back.
Wyatt motioned to the bandage with the barrel of his gun. “What’s this all about?”
She tossed her sweater aside and folded her arms over her chest. “It’s a rash. A nasty one, too.” Now several months old, she still kept her sigil under wraps in case someone caught a glimpse; much easier to convince Uncle Frank that she’d injured herself than trying to justify body art that could lead to a lifetime of groundings. “You’d better stay back,” she added. “It’s contagious.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Wyatt picked a corner and tore. He adjusted his glasses and bent forward, scrutinizing the design. “Interesting. I’ve seen something like this.”
“You’ve seen my tattoo?”
“No,” he was quick to clarify, “I said I’ve seen a tattoo like it. Police blotter back in October. Cops were instructed to keep an eye out for these symbols in North Valley.”
“Cops are looking for tattoos? You’ve got to be joking.”
“They’re stripping down suspects and looking for these designs. Anything that looks like a rune, or some type of a—” He stood upright, eyes locked on Calista’s. “Why would you let Jackson Carter tattoo this onto you? Weren’t you worried you’d get expelled from Hawthorne?”
She blinked. “How did you—”
“Know you went to Hawthorne?” He scrunched his pudgy face, eyeing her from head to toe. “I hack all my clients, so I know who I’m dealing with. When I hacked Jackson, I discovered that during the last twelve months he’d received communications from two different females who weren’t his mom: Whitney Covington and Calista Scott. Whitney would send him a dozen ridiculous selfies with every text, and you’re not her. Since you’re around his age and you’re wearing a kilt and knee socks, that makes you Calista, the seventeen-year-old senior at The Hawthorne Academy. The one he tattooed. He referenced it a week before his house went up in flames.”
“Jackson was still getting texts from Whitney?”
“I’m the guy with the gun.” The Cobbler lifted his weapon to eye level and tapped the barrel, as if the fact they were hostages had somehow slipped their minds. “I’m conducting the interview. Why the tattoo?”
“I don’t know,” Calista said. She didn’t know why she’d chosen the sigil, but its effects were becoming apparent. Like a poorly prescribed psychotropic, it was destabilizing her mood, making her more reckless—but maybe it was more than a GPS suggesting turns and lane changes. Sometimes she felt like she was on autopilot. Staring into the barrel of The Cobbler’s gun, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d chosen the design, or if the design had chosen her.
“But she’s not a criminal,” Kaz put in. “Neither of us are! And we don’t know any cops, or have any wires.”
“The truth will set you free,” The Cobbler pressed the barrel into her chin, tilting her head towards the ceiling. The oil smelled like black licorice and rubbing alcohol. “You’d better get real truthful, real fast.”
Honesty wasn’t always the best policy—especially when murderous tattoos were involved—but there was no point in lying about how they’d arrived at Wyatt’s front door. “We came across Jackson’s gun and ID. This address was with it.”
Wyatt flicked the safety latch on his pistol and tucked it into the waistband of his track pants. “And you think he was murdered. You’re following the trail, looking for leads.”
“H-how did you know?” Kaz stammered.
“Because I’m smart,” Wyatt sighed. “And you’re not.”
Kaz reached down and grasped the hem of his sweater, lifting it past his navel. “So, you don’t want me to—?”
“No, don’t bother. If either of you were wired, you wouldn’t be saying this much stupid shit. People who know they’re being recorded make an effort to at least pretend they’re not idiots.” He sat at one of his workstations and began clacking a mechanical keyboard, filling a screen with reams of code. “Besides, if you were wired, you’d have screamed for help the second I pulled my Glock. But if you’re not here for business you have to leave. Like I said, I’m busy.”
Wyatt tapped a code into his keyboard, and his metal door unlatched.
Calista leaned over his shoulder. “What if we are here for business?”
He snorted. “You two looking to skip town?”
“No, but we could use some information.”
“Information isn’t free, Sports Bra.”
She crossed her arms back over her chest. “I can pay.”
“Sorry.” Wyatt breathed out a derisive chuckle. “I don’t divulge private information about my clients. Iron-clad policy.”
“I can pay a lot.”
Another obnoxious chortle bounced his shoulders. He was still typing. “I don’t take American Express. So unless you have cryptocurrency, and something tells me you don’t even know what that is, come back with paper.”
Calista fetched her jacket from the floor, dug into the pocket and yanked out a thick wad of bills. She dropped them on The Cobbler’s keyboard. It was enough to stop his fingers from moving.
He flipped through the bills. “Well, since Jackson is dead, I suppose I can make an exception to my iron-clad policy. Just this once.” He pivoted in his chair. “Put some clothes on and pull up a seat.”
Calista was now dressed, and had been offered a Diet Dr Pepper from Wyatt’s mini-fridge as a pre-Q&A refreshment. Kaz declined. They all gathered around the largest monitor of the Cobbler’s impressive collection.
With the tap of a button, a jagged 8-bit hourglass appeared on-screen. Chunky grains of sand tumbled into the lower chamber, and a light hiss burbled through the speakers.
The Cobbler leaned back in his chair. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
“Two thousand dollars for fifteen minutes?” Kaz shouted. “What are you, an extortionist?”
“Among other things,” Wyatt said, with no small measure of pride. “Fourteen minutes, forty-five seconds. Ask away, and I’ll spill everything I know.”
“So what do you know?” Calista asked.
“A lot more than you, Sports Bra, or you wouldn’t be here.”
She nodded reluctantly. “Good point. Okay, what did Jackson want a passport for?”
“Insurance policy. He was messing with some dark stuff and thought the feds might catch onto him. He was headed to New Zealand if things got too hot. Said he was trying to spring someone from prison.”
“Julia Scott,” Calista said.
“Right, Scott. Said she was locked up for treason, and they were holding her indefinitely. But he had something that could free her. Evidence, maybe. I don’t know what kind. Never asked, and he never offered.”
“Is that all he bought from you,” Calista asked. “The passport and the gun?”
“Nope. He wanted all sorts of occult-type stuff. He was interested in any information I could scrape off the dark web about supernatural sightings and Pagan rituals. I got the impression he was part of a Satanic cult or a coven.”
Wyatt accused Jackson of witchcraft with the tone of a casual observation, like he’d have been equally surprised if his former client were an avid stamp collector. No one could be this relaxed if they knew about the
terrifying realities of magick.
Kaz shook his head. “A cult? He was the quarterback of—”
“Yes,” Wyatt interrupted. “I know. I told you already, I hacked him.”
“So you know he would never be in a cult,” Kaz said, which only seemed to frustrate their host.
“Look, I don’t know why Jackson thought a hyena’s teeth or a vial of hundred-year-old aboriginal blood was going to free Julia Scott, and I didn’t ask. He had money, I acted as a broker.”
“You weren’t curious?” Calista asked.
“I’m curious about everything. But whatever Jackson was into, he kept it offline.” He glanced at the screen. “You’ve got eleven minutes. I’d keep the questions coming if I were you.”
Calista stood and fished into her pocket once again, pulling out a thumb drive. She slapped it on Wyatt’s desk. “This was his, too. What is it?”
He plugged the drive into the nearest USB slot, and the map winked onto his screen. It took Wyatt a few moments of humming and hawing to deduce what it was. “I’ve seen photographs like this before. More occult nonsense. Jackson was into this crap as well.”
Kaz motioned to the screen. “Wait, what do you mean photograph?”
The Cobbler huffed. “See?” He poked the monitor like he was pointing out Waldo to a befuddled toddler. “These are called thumbtacks.” With a few clacks of his keyboard the image enhanced several times, and to their amazement it was a photograph, not a digital image as they’d assumed. “This was a map pinned to a wall, and someone snapped a shot of it.”
Kaz squinted at the tiny marks. “I never noticed before.”
“Because you’re an idiot,” Wyatt stated, as if it were a peer-reviewed matter of fact.
Calista waved off the boys. “All right, can we please focus? The hourglass is emptying. Do you have any idea why Jackson had this map, and what these locations have to do with anything? One of these waypoints falls on Gravenhurst, but this map pre-dates the attack by decades.”
With some rapid-fire tapping The Cobbler searched his files, and after keying in three separate passwords, he expanded a folder with satellite images. It was Gravenhurst, in North-East Arizona. The burnt orange desert was tiled with bright rectangles; row after row of snowflake-white buildings fitted with roof-mounted solar panels. “This is where one of the dots on your map falls. On a server farm.”
“Server farm?” Kaz said.
“Yes,” Wyatt replied. “That means a bunch of servers are all in the same place, in big shiny buildings, like—”
“I know what a server farm is!” he fired back.
Wyatt grinned, creasing his eyes. “Glad you’re keeping up, Sweater Vest.”
“These are convergence points,” Calista said, “Places where ley lines intersect. Based on the age of this map, they knew what they were doing.” She saw the pieces, but couldn’t quite snap them together. “But why would—”
“The government do something this crazy?” Wyatt added. He seemed to revel in finishing others’ sentences. “If you believe the dark web, these points are mystical generators that haven’t been spooled up yet. Like conductors waiting to receive a jolt, and then bam,” Wyatt clapped his hands, eliciting a tiny yelp from Kaz. “Something sparks them to life. That is, if you’re inclined to believe that particular brand of bullshit. Jackson thought it was possible. He babbled about it constantly.”
“What do you believe?” Calista said.
“I believe people with money and power will do just about anything to get more money and power. If someone thinks building a server farm on a convergence point is going to produce something mystical? Who knows. Weirder things have happened.”
Wyatt didn’t wait to be asked for examples of the ‘weirder things’ he referenced. He started listing them off unprompted.
“Did you know Hitler hired a team of occultists and astronomers to choose his military targets?”
Kaz scoffed. “Yeah, but he was a whack-job.”
“Sure, but what about our country? The first Large Hadron Collider wasn’t in Europe—it was built in Texas back in the 90s. The feds spent billions of taxpayer dollars because they thought it could locate God on a celestial map. Turns out the men on top misunderstood the science of the Higgs-Boson ‘God particle’. They pulled the plug when the lab coats broke the news that it wasn’t a key to accessing the divine.”
Calista cocked her head. “So you’re saying that building technology on one of these points could produce something supernatural?”
“What I’m saying,” Wyatt said, “is that people are morons who will use mountains of bullshit to explain away even larger mountains of bullshit. I’ve spent a lifetime scouring the web: I’ve hacked government documents, read Emails from heads of state, even dipped my toes into NASA’s archives to see if there was a snapshot of alien autopsies. Trust me, there’s nothing there. Not a shred of evidence to suggest the supernatural exists.”
“What if all the juicy stuff is kept offline?” Calista wondered aloud. Her question caused Wyatt to pivot in his chair, eyebrow arched. She had his attention. “Maybe the government knows about ley lines, and sigils, and supernatural phenomena, and they keep everything in hard copies for safety, like this picture?” She gestured to the .jpg still open on the monitor. “You said it yourself: this wasn’t a scan, it was a photo someone snapped of a wall-mounted map. So maybe there’s a room—a whole library—filled to the brim with secrets? Someone could’ve smuggled this photo out as proof, right? And that’s why Jackson was holding onto it.”
The Cobbler took a moment to soak in Calista’s theory. “Huh. That’s the least idiotic thing either of you have said since you got here. The most effective way to contain sensitive intel is by keeping it analog. But if a secret conspiracy room does exist, those documents are locked in the deepest basement of the Pentagon, Sports Bra.”
“Please stop calling me that.”
“I’ll take it under advisement. But unless you have top-secret clearance at the most secure building on the planet, you aren’t getting anywhere near a room like that.” He pulled the thumb drive from the port and handed it back. “But then again, this map could also be Photoshop. Someone yanking your chain.”
She pocketed the drive.
“So,” The Cobbler said, “this has been fascinating, and we’ve learned two things: one, your friend Jackson was into some weird shit, and two, people are stupid enough to believe anything they read on the internet. Both facts that were well established long before you came knocking on the door of my control room.”
Kaz crinkled his nose. “You call your basement a control room?”
Wyatt glanced in his direction but declined to comment. “Time is running short.” He rapped a finger on the monitor where the digital hourglass had almost emptied into the lower chamber. “You have time for one last question. So unless you have a lot more cash, make it good.”
Calista stared into The Cobbler’s serious little eyes. “Who killed Jackson?”
He pivoted towards his keyboard and began typing. “I’ve been curious about that one myself.” A low-resolution video blipped into view; Wyatt swayed to the side, allowing his guests an unobstructed view of his screen. It was after dark, inside what looked like a convenience store. The security cam was mounted in the top corner of the room, angled down towards the register.
A man walked in, face partially obscured by a hoodie. He was easily six feet tall with broad shoulders and a clean-shaven jaw. A teenager, maybe, but powerful. An athlete.
The hoodie pointed at the register. The cashier—an elderly gent with a wisp of white hair and Coke-bottle glasses—refused to open it, so he lunged across the counter and grabbed the man’s throat.
The old man tried to wrench his attacker’s hand away, gouging his wrist hard enough to draw blood. It was useless, like trying to pry a hubcap loose using only his fingernails. The fact that the video was silent made it more disturbing, somehow.
The hooded teen intensified h
is grip, but something else was happening. He wasn’t just choking his victim: he was draining him. The shopkeeper’s skin began to shrivel, shrink-wrapped against atrophied muscle. He stiffened, and then his eyes sank into their sockets; two glassy orbs disappearing into quicksand.
Kaz’s gaze wandered from the screen. Calista didn’t blame him. She could barely stomach this horror film either.
The attacker released his grip, and the desiccated husk fell out of view. A dusty plume rose into frame. The killer emptied the register, snatched some bottles and vaulted the counter. As he fled, a logo was visible on the shoulder of his hoodie: an angry cartoon Kraken.
The video stopped.
“Meet the North Valley Killer,” Wyatt said. “The news reported the killings as robberies gone bad, but they were hazy on the details. This is the footage they didn’t want us to see. The crazy thing is, this isn’t being handled locally—feds stepped in to call the shots.”
Kaz was shocked into a stiffened state, back rigid, eyes glassy. Calista hoped he wasn’t going catatonic again.
Wyatt spun back to face his guests. “I don’t know what kind of tech that kid was using, but it’s hardcore. Government for sure. Maybe DARPA.”
Kaz stared vacantly at the screen. “DARPA?”
“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” Wyatt explained. “Pentagon’s weapons division. They’re always cooking up dangerous new toys. One of them probably hit the streets. Wouldn’t be the first time. Jackson is the fifth mysterious death in North Valley this year, and it’s not a town famous for its body count. If the men in black are covering it up, it’s because they want a lid on this tech.”
Calista swallowed hard. “And you think the same guy killed Jackson, too?”
“It’s a theory. Maybe Jackson owed someone money, and they burned his house to the ground. Or maybe he lit a candle and left it next to his drapes. Who the hell knows. But maybe he knew about this tech, too, which seems likely. If he was killed, whoever used his house for kindling might come after me next.”
“Why would they come after you?” Kaz asked. His voice was shaky, but he was blinking again. A good sign.
The North Valley Grimoire Page 13
