Bad Bones (8 page)

Gabe brought the bike to a slow halt. It was a kind of ‘What’s-wrong-with-this-picture?’ moment. Like what were two LAPD cruisers, lights flashing, doing parked right outside LeBarron Antiques? Had there been a robbery? The thought made his stomach cramp. It’d be just his luck that that was what had happened and the bracelet would be among the stolen items. His chances of getting Cecil LeBarron to sell it back to him – for the money he’d paid out yesterday – had been slim to nothing at best. But if the bracelet was gone, then – there was that voice again – he was dead in the water.

He got off the bike and, completely on autopilot, chained it to a nearby bench. A large crowd had gathered either side of the shop, held back by the yellow and black crime-scene tape that was already in place. More people were turning up by the minute, which meant the cops couldn’t have been there very
long, their arrival signalling it was rubbernecking time.

Gabe hung back, staying where he was for a moment. He wanted to find out what had occurred, but then again, maybe not knowing was better. Some part of his brain kept dragging up clichés like ‘Ignorance is bliss’ and ‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you’. He took a deep breath and walked towards the store alongside two older women who were chatting to each other.

“What’s going on here?” one woman said as she checked her watch.

“
I
don’t know, Charlene just called.”

“She down here already?”

“In the salon across the street.” Gabe saw the second woman nod to her left. “She can’t come out, she’s in the middle of having highlights.”

“So, what, you’re her on-the-spot reporter, Alice?”

“You don’t got to come, Sadie, I ain’t draggin’ you.”

“It’s kinda on my way.” Sadie checked her watch again. “I got time. You think it’s a burglary, or what?”

“I think I’m gonna ask that cop, see what he says…”

Gabe tagged along, walking in the same general direction as the women, over towards a beat cop who was standing with his back to them where the tape was tied to a tree.

“Officer?” Alice leant over and tapped the cop’s arm.

The man, standing a good two metres, wearing mirrored sunglasses and carrying some extra weight, looked like his uniform had been sprayed on. He glanced down at Alice. “Yes, ma’am?”

“What’s the scoop?”

“Ma’am?”

“In there.” Alice peered round towards the shop. “It a big deal, in there?”

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am. As you can see, I am out here.”

“You didn’t hear about anything?”

“Look, you want to find out what’s going on in there, you have a couple of options.” The cop, his name tag said ‘Bernado’, smiled. “Cross the line and go on inside, which I would not advise, or wait till the detectives come out and ask them. And good luck with that too. Or wait for the six o’clock news. Best I can do.”

Officer Bernardo smiled again and walked away. Gabe was thinking he should get closer to the shop front, keeping his ears open in case anyone had actually heard anything, when he saw, over by one of the cruisers, a plain-clothes cop talking to a small Hispanic woman. She looked distressed and the plain-clothes cop was patting her arm, trying to calm her. A witness?

That train of thought came to an abrupt halt, cut off by the whooping of an ambulance siren. The crowd buzzed with chatter, moving forward as far as it could. Officer Bernardo and three of his colleagues squared their shoulders and made sure the lines held.

The ambulance pulled up, rocking on its suspension and Gabe watched as a couple of EMT paramedics got out, already pulling on latex gloves. They went round to the rear of the vehicle and hauled out a gurney, locking its legs and wheeling it towards the open front door of the shop.

“Someone ain’t gonna walk outta
that
place, you ask me,” said a man next to Gabe.

“No shit, Sherlock,” the guy next to him laughed.

“You heard what happened?” Gabe threw the question out, to no one in particular.

“Likely a burglary gone bad,” the laughing guy said. “Looking at the amount of heat there is here.”

“Opening-up time,” the first man nodded to himself. “It’s when they like to do it, burglars.”

“Say what?” the second man snorted. “So’s they get the rest of the day off?”

Right then there was a flurry of activity, another push from the crowd and Gabe saw the gurney being rolled back out on to the sidewalk. He was expecting to see Cecil LeBarron, covered in one of those foil survival blankets, looking maybe a bit beaten up and washed out, despite his fake tan, being taken off to the Emergency Room. Instead he saw a zipped-up black body bag.

“You hear me, right?” said the man, turning to the guy who’d laughed at him, a told-you-so look on his face.

“You mentioned walking, man, you never said nothing about
dead
.”

Cecil LeBarron was dead? Gabe couldn’t quite take the information in. Then it occurred to him that he didn’t know for sure it was Cecil in the body bag. Could be the burglar, right? Cecil could come walking out of the store any minute now. Except
Mr LeBarron hadn’t really come across as the fightback type. The next person to exit the antique store was a second plain-clothes guy, Gabe assumed he was another detective, on his phone.

“The owner? He’s on his way to the morgue now… LeBarron.” The man checked a notepad as he spelt the surname out. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll stay here, wait for the crime-scene guys to finish, see if they come up with anything that could…”

Whatever else the man had to say was lost as he walked over to where his colleague was still interviewing the Hispanic woman. No doubt about it now. Cecil was dead. Gabe felt a little lightheaded, spaced out by what he’d just seen and heard and what it meant. Or
could
mean. He
could
be jumping to conclusions, thinking this had anything at all to do with the gold bracelet he’d sold yesterday. The bracelet he’d come to try and buy back because of some crazed person with weird eyes who had beat the crap out of him. And threatened him with, what had he said? Bad trouble? Ending up dead was about as bad as trouble got, and he had no difficulty believing the crazy man was a killer, even if his only proof was a dream.

But why would he have killed Mr LeBarron? He’d seen Gabe coming out of the store, which is how he’d known about the place, but
how
did he know the bracelet was there? Why kill the man, why not simply take the gold and go?

Gabe knew he wasn’t thinking straight, hadn’t been since he tumbled into the arroyo and found the gold, and he wondered if he might be suffering from some kind of concussion. What did he know?

It took a moment for Gabe to realize that he’d smelled something, something pungent and musty. He glanced left and right, then looked over his shoulder. The peak of a faded red baseball cap, close up behind him.

“
Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit,”
the whispered croak of the man’s voice rasped,
“but righteousness delivers from death…
”

Wheeling round, his heart thundering, Gabe found the man looking straight at him. It was just like yesterday – all he could hear was the echo of the man’s words in his head. He closed his eyes, waiting for the punch he assumed was coming. When it didn’t and he blinked them open again, the man had gone and there was just some woman trying to get a
better view of what was going on.

Gabe, his breath coming in short pants, thought he saw a red cap somewhere in the crowd. And then he became aware there was something in his right hand. Looking down he saw a small square of yellowing paper, neatly folded twice. The paper looked old and felt stiff as he opened it out. There was some writing in what appeared to be dark brown ink. Writing in the kind of style you associated with quill pens, ancient documents and wax seals.

Six words.
Quod meum est mei, noli prohibere.

Gabe walked away from the antique store in a daze. Everything else around him had faded away, all airbrushed out. He hadn’t been imagining it, every move he made was being watched, and the man watching could get to him wherever he was, awake or asleep. He started to wonder whether it was stupid or not to think his dreams and his reality were beginning to merge, then he remembered another line he’d read in one of his dad’s old comics, some character saying, ‘Just cos yer paranoid don’t mean they ain’t after you’.

Well, they – the killer priest person, the owl and the coyotes – were definitely after him, and too right he was paranoid. With that weird musty smell still clinging to his nostrils, why wouldn’t he be?

Walking back to where he’d left his bike, Gabe kept returning to the fact that Cecil LeBarron was dead. As in definitely not alive. True fact. And what
he also knew to be true was that he wasn’t suffering from a concussion and had not been hallucinating. This was real. He glanced at the piece of paper again, then refolded it and stuffed it in his jeans pocket. What did the words mean – hell, what
language
were they even written in? And what had the guy meant by righteousness delivering from death?

He stood by his bike, staring blankly into space. How was he going to find out what had happened to the bracelet? Going to the police was not an option, as what would he say if they asked where he’d got an antique gold bracelet in the first place? And how could he ever tell the cops about this crazy person being the one who had killed Cecil? He couldn’t, it wasn’t going to happen.

But there was a harder question to deal with. Was there some kind of deadline he didn’t know about attached to returning the rest of the gold? If there was it had to mean he was in … ‘dead trouble’ came to mind and wouldn’t go away.

The rest of the gold pieces were at school, in his locker, and it was Saturday. No way he could get in to fetch it till Monday morning at the earliest. He unlocked the bike and put the chain in his
backpack, on top of the envelope with the money in it. The two thousand dollars. Was it blood money? Tainted? That thought sent his mind spinning into turmoil again as he tried to figure out what he should do next.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he badly needed to talk to someone. And the only person he could think of was Stella. Who else was there? Anton? He didn’t think so. Ant was a good friend – no, he was his
best
friend – but the chances he might act like Gabe was making all this up, like it was some huge practical joke he was playing, were too big to take. And the rest of his friends would be worse. It had to be Stella. Firstly, she’d asked him to call her today. Secondly, she already suspected his story about being knocked over by a car was a load of bull and, finally, she had been so honest with him about her brother. So he should be as honest with her.
Quid pro quo.
The phrase stopped Gabe in his tracks, midway through shouldering his backpack.

The words on the paper. He couldn’t be totally sure, but he had a strong feeling they were Latin. A dead language…

It had taken him a lifetime to decide whether he should bring something with him or not. Having figured he should, he was then faced with the nightmare of choosing what that something should be. Flowers? Oh, puh-leeze. Box of chocolates? Ditto. In the end he plumped for an XXL-sized bag of peanut M&M’s. It was a test. If she hated them they were destined never to be anything more than acquaintances. Following the instructions Stella had given him when he’d called her, Gabe had gone round the house to the back porch.

The house looked sort of like his, except bigger, more recently painted, with a very nice pool that took up a lot of the back yard. The place wasn’t a McMansion, nothing like it, but it didn’t look as if Stella’s dad was trying to work out what his next move in the job market might be. Before he had a chance to pull back the screen door, the kitchen door opened.

“Hey! You all right, Gabriel?” Stella waved Gabe in and let the screen door slam behind him. “You look kind of, I don’t know, worried?”

“No… No, I’m fine.”

“OK.”

Stella went over to the fridge, Gabe just knowing she wasn’t buying into his ‘I’m fine’ schtick. He had no idea he was that transparent.

“Want an ice tea?”

“Yeah, thanks, that’d be great.”

“Are you sure you—”

“Look, I’ve got to…” Gabe smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, I butted in – you first.”

“I was just going to say are you sure you’re OK, cos I think you look, I don’t know… Like you’ve had a scare?”

Gabe sighed and nodded. This girl was witchy, but maybe that was the kind of person he could use on his side right now. “Yeah, well, I was going to say that I, you know, needed to talk about some stuff. If that’s OK…”

“Sure.” Stella poured two glasses of ice tea. “Like about what happened yesterday?”

“Kind of…” Gabe felt he was about to jump off a cliff. It was a now-or-never moment. “You know the canyon, the one a couple of miles down Ventura?”

It was crazy how elastic time could be. Slowing down to nothing, if you were bored, or speeding up if you had too much to do or say. Gabe had started talking in the kitchen, carried on as they went to Stella’s room and not stopped until he’d told her every last detail he could remember. By the time he’d described what had just happened outside the antique store the clock on Stella’s desk claimed he’d been talking for some forty-five minutes, but it had seemed like no time at all. And Stella hadn’t said a single word throughout, just listened intently.

Gabe, sitting cross-legged on the floor a metre away from Stella, stared at the open but untouched pack of M&M’s. Finally he looked up and shrugged in a ‘that’s it, whaddya think?’ kind of way. If he’d believed in the power of prayer he would have been in full ‘Oh, Lord!’ mode as if his life depended on it. Instead, all he could do was
hope she didn’t think he was crazy and ask him to leave and never come back.

He watched the clock tick.

Stella kind of smiled at him.

Was that it? Was that a goodbye look?

“Know what?” Gabe grabbed the moment before Stella had a chance to say anything. “Can we go outside? I could do with some fresh air after that talkathon.”

“Sure.” Stella got up.

“So you, like, don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No. No, I don’t.” Stella went to the door. “I think you need some help.”

“So you
do
think I’m nuts.”

“No, Gabriel, I don’t.”

Gabe picked up the untouched M&M’s. “Maybe these’ll help us figure out what it says on that piece of paper. You got any ideas?”

“No –” she led the way downstairs – “but I’d like another look at the pics on your phone.”

Gabe followed Stella out of the house and down to the end of the garden, beyond the pool, where there was a wooden bench and table shaded by a tall, broad dogwood tree. It didn’t take long to go
through the pictures Gabe had taken of the gold pieces, or to make major inroads into the M&M’s. Stella, it turned out, was a fellow devotee.

“I think you’re probably right about those words being written in Latin, Gabe.”

OK, so he was ‘Gabe’ now.

“And I had an idea, because of that cross you found with the other stuff? It made me think of this person I know, who’s big into history and everything; I think he might be able to help.” Stella took another handful of M&M’s. “Now I’ve seen the photos again, I’m sure he can. Really.”

“Who is this guy, some kind of genius?”

“Father Simon.”