Bone Key (14 page)

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.’ ”

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“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-whatevercan-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 booksmart 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. 138 SUPERNATURAL

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
!”

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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 140 SUPERNATURAL

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.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Not much else here. Whatever the spirit did to those two, that did it for now, but it might be back later.”

“We should salt and burn the bones.”

Dean shot him a look. “And lemme say again, Bone

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Sammy, look at the bones.” He said it in his own voice this time, for which Sam was grateful. “Just what’s poking out there is at least five different people, and I can’t tell how far down it goes—or how far across. Unless we set the whole site on fire, and even if we do, we don’t have
that
much salt.”

Sam had to agree with his brother; for one thing, there were at least four right hands just in what he could see, as well as five skulls. The usual method was going to be a bit too overt in this case. “And it’s not like this place gets a lot of snow, so we’re not gonna be able to get the stuff in bulk all that easily.”

“Yeah. Let’s head back to the B&B, get some sleep, then we’ll do the research thing in the a.m.”

By the following afternoon, Dean had had enough of the Monroe County Public Library. He and Sam had spent all their time since waking up (close to noon after the long night they had) sitting there, going through various and sundry records while hyped up on Nicki and Bodge’s excellent coffee. The library was conveniently located near the Naylor House: three blocks over and one block down on Fleming Street. Dean was handling the construction site and going through the newspapers to see if there were other hauntings—or murders—that might give them a clue as to what was going on. That left Sam to check out the lost tribe. 142 SUPERNATURAL

They broke for lunch, only for Dean to realize, to his great chagrin, that the Hooters on Duval Street was no longer there.

“My heart bleeds for you,” Sam said in that snotty tone of his. “C’mon, Bodge recommended a place to me this morning.”

“When did that happen?”

“You were sitting right next to me, Dean.” Then Sam smiled. “Of course, that was before you had your coffee . . .”

“That explains it, then.” They went to a place that was on the second floor. The cute maitre d’

showed them out to the balcony, which had a waisthigh brick wall and several small metal tables with glass tops, and wrought-iron chairs that dug into your back but managed to be comfortable anyhow. Dean had never figured that one out, but chalked it up to life’s little mysteries.

They had a nice view of Duval. While it was much quieter—and sunnier—in midafternoon, there were still plenty of people walking up and down, as the street was full of shops, as well as restaurants, museums, and other stuff. Dean wondered if he’d have an opportunity to get to the beach—though it was a bit chilly for that. While it was a lot warmer than South Dakota, it wasn’t quite bathing-suit weather, either.

After ordering a couple of beers and a basket of fried shrimp and fries for the two of them to share, Bone

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Dean asked, “So what do you know about our lost tribe?”

“Not much,” Sam said with a sigh. “They were called the Calusa, and most of what we know about them is that we don’t know much about them. They had a reputation as fierce warriors, which was helped by their tendency to pile up the bones of their enemies.”

“Hence, Cayo Hueso,” Dean said just as the waitress—who wasn’t quite as cute as the maitre d’, but was still pretty hot, and was named Paula—

brought two bottles. “Thanks.”

Sam also said, “Thanks.”

Paula gave Dean a big smile—she had
great
teeth—and said, “No problem.
Anything
else you need, let me know.”

She walked back toward the kitchen, giving Dean a nice opportunity to see how well her ass moved in her shorts.
Hooters, schmooters,
he thought with a smile.

“What
is
it with you?” Sam asked. Dean smirked and took a pull on his beer. “Jealous?”

“Please. Anyhow, the Calusa occupied the island for centuries, fighting off the other tribes and the European settlers, but disease wiped them out in the eighteenth century.”

Shaking his head, Dean said, “The old malariain-the-blankets routine?”

144 SUPERNATURAL

“Nothing
quite
that cold-blooded, but all it’d take is one of them to catch something from a European that they hadn’t built any kind of immunity to, and . . .”

“Excellent diagnosis, Dr. House.”

Making his little pouty face, Sam asked, “Fine, what’d
you
dig up?”

Taking another sip of beer first, Dean said,

“We were right about Katrina. A lot of the places on South Street got pummeled back in ’05. The owners sold the lot, the new people decided to build something new. Construction crew’s also one short now—one of our two corpses was one of the workers. Other one was a woman from Miami, down here for a getaway.”

Paula came by with a big basket filled with breaded shrimp and French fries, as well as a plastic cup filled with tartar sauce. “Thanks again.”

“Anything else? Anything at all?”

Under other circumstances, Dean would have several suggestions, but they were on the clock, as it were. “If we think of somethin’, we’ll let you know.”

There were already bottles of various condiments on the table, and Dean immediately grabbed the ketchup bottle and squeezed out the lovely redness onto the fries. Sam watched him with that stupid little-brother Bone

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145

expression of his. “Want some fries to go with your ketchup?”

“So anyhow,” Dean said, popping a ketchupsoaked fry into his mouth, “they only were able to ID the bodies based on their wallets. The bodies were ‘unrecognizable.’ ”

“Well, the library had a wireless network, so I was able to get online,” Sam said, indicating his laptop with his head while he speared a shrimp with his fork and dipped it into the tartar sauce.

“And they weren’t kidding about them being unrecognizable. Their skin was wrinkled and almost mummified. But their hair was still the same as it was in their ID photos.”

“That’s weird.”

“Not really.” Sam bit into another shrimp and swallowed it before going on, in full boring-lecture mode. “Despite what TV would have you believe, if you age someone rapidly, their hair
won’t
go gray automatically. That’s something that can only happen over the course of times as new hair grows.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wizard.” Dean popped another fry and forked a shrimp of his own. “We need to find the demon that started this. Any word from Bobby?”

Sam shook his head while he chewed. “Left a message, though.”

Dean thought a minute while he ate some more, 146 SUPERNATURAL

then washed it down with more beer. “All right, let’s go to where that girl was killed. That’s where the sulfur was, and I’m willing to bet real money that her blood was used for the ritual that amped up the spirits.”

“No bet. But how do we trace the demon?”

Dean scratched his ear. “Most of the demons who got out of the gate have been taking advantage of the whole having-a-body thing. He probably came down here as much for the vacation value as the spiritual energy.”

“Not a ‘he.’ I think we’ve got a couple,” Sam said.

“What?”

“All the witness statements for the killing had the girl leaving the bar with an older couple. The police want ’em for questioning, but they haven’t been found yet.”

Angrily spearing another shrimp, Dean asked,

“What is it with all this share-and-share-alike crap? First the seven deadly sins, then that couple in Ohio, now this. Since when do demons trust each other?”

Shrugging, Sam said, “Maybe they spent so long in hell they formed relationships? I don’t know—

but I think we have to assume that we’ve got a pair. And if you’re right about them wanting to take advantage of all the pleasures of the flesh, they’re probably staying in a luxury hotel.”

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“The fanciest hotel on the island is the Hyatt on Front.” Dean grinned. “Which is, like, a block from where our girl’s throat was cut.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Susannah Hallas had never considered herself a lightweight before tonight.

She’d been having a great time in the Schooner’s Wharf, listening to a local act, an older man with white hair and matching beard, who sounded a bit like Hank Williams, only more relaxed. He did a great song called “Tourist Town Bar” about his job, basically, and an equally hilarious one called