Bone Key (4 page)

Sam winced. “Since the Devil’s Gate opened?”

28 SUPERNATURAL

Dean nodded. “Mostly it’s been more hauntings—

Key West has more ghost stories than anyplace this side of New Orleans—plus a weird death. Girl got her throat slit, and there was sulfur on the wound, according to Yaphet.”

“Do me a favor, all right?” Bobby said. “Let’s check on this ‘weird death’ from here before you go on down to Florida?”

“Yeah,” Dean said, “

’cause the absolute
last

thing I want to do is leave the twenty-degree temps here and drive to a place that’s famous for sun, warm weather, live music, and partying.”

Sam looked at Bobby. “He’s got a point.”

“I do?” Dean looked at Sam with mock-confusion. “Wait a sec, if you’re agreeing with me, something’s gotta be wrong.”

“Very funny. Look, if it’s a real job, we should go. If it isn’t, it’ll probably be fun.”

“No ‘probably’ about it,” Dean said with his biggest this-will-be-
great
smile. “Key West is
always
fun. And this time, we’re gonna appreciate it properly.”

Bobby threw up his hands. “Fine, do what you want—but I assume you ain’t gonna go till morning anyhow, right?”

Dean started to say something, but Sam said,

“Right.”

“Say what? Sam, if we leave now, we’ll make better time.”

Bone

Key

29

“We’ve both been drinking—”

“A glass of champagne and a couple beers. I’ve driven just fine with more booze in my system. I’ll be fine.”

Undeterred, Sam went on, even as he admitted to himself that Dean had an enviably high alcohol tolerance. “—plus it’s New Year’s Eve, so there’s bound to be lots of crazy people driving. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and hit the road in the morning.”

“Fine, whatever.” Dean got up. “I’m gonna get started on that sleep.”

Sam looked up at Bobby, who spoke before Sam could even ask the question. “Go ahead and use the computer.”

“Thanks.” Bobby’s computer was more up-to-date than Sam’s laptop, and had a faster processing speed. Sam would dearly have loved to upgrade his machine, but that required funds he just didn’t have. They barely survived on credit-card fraud—which, with federal warrants out on both Dean and Sam, was getting increasingly risky—and Dean’s ability to hustle pool and win at poker. In fact, just last night, he’d gotten into a high-stakes game. Bobby had lent him the stake money, after a great deal of cajoling, and Dean had won it all back and then some, to the tune of five figures. That would keep them going for a while. Heck, they’d even be able to stay in motels more often, instead of squatting in abandoned houses, as they’d been forced into more than once. 30 SUPERNATURAL

Bobby, of course, had the money because he actually made a living—which enabled him to upgrade his computer every once in a while, too. The Singer Salvage Yard was a thriving business. As Sam sat down at the keyboard, he was reminded of another reason why he had to find a way to save his brother: Dean was their breadwinner. It was far from the most important reason, and didn’t even register ninety-nine percent of the time, but it was there nonetheless. Sam didn’t actually have any marketable skills—at least, not any legal ones. He had been less than halfway to a law degree when Dean had come for him at Stanford with the news that Dad had disappeared. The only things he knew how to do were either useless for making money, way outside the law, or in professions (the military, law enforcement) that were likely cut off to him forever. Of course, illegal behavior wasn’t totally out of the question. He was a wanted man in any case, for several felonies, so a few misdemeanors would hardly make a difference. Back at Stanford, he knew a guy who made a good chunk of change writing papers and selling them, and that was certainly an option he could pursue. But that was a thought for another time. Forcing himself to focus, he made a few online searches and found what he was looking for. A young woman vacationing in Key West named Megan Ward was found with her throat cut on a back street. Bone

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Bobby being Bobby, he had several bookmarks to coroners’ offices from around the country. Normally, these were highly secure intranets, but Bobby had managed to get through that. Apparently Ash, the now-deceased computer genius who hung out at Harvelle’s Roadhouse before it was torched, had performed that feat for him. Scrolling down, Sam found the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office site, and was able to track down the M.E. report on the girl’s death. Sure enough, her throat was cut—but there was very little blood at the scene, even though her carotid artery had been sliced open, and there was no indication that the body had been moved. The M.E. also noted, as this Yaphet character had, that there was sulfur on the wound, which was odd, as there was no evidence of sulfur anywhere else. It wasn’t odd to Sam, though. Lots of demonic rituals required blood, and demons tended to leave sulfur behind.

“Bobby?” When he came over, Sam pointed at the screen.

“Yeah. All right, I guess the sun shines on a dog’s ass every once in a while.”

Sam set all the pages he’d called up to print on Bobby’s laser jet, then stretched his long arms. “All right, I’m gonna hit the hay. Thanks, Bobby.”

“No problem. I just hope this isn’t a wild-goose chase.”

32 SUPERNATURAL

Shrugging, Sam got to his feet. “Worst-case scenario, Dean’s cut loose on Key West.” He grinned.

“Key West may never be the same.”

Bobby did not grin back. “Yeah, well, be careful. There’s a reason why the place has so many ghost stories. Lotta spiritual energy on that island. If there is a demon that got out of the gate workin’

down there, it could be real bad.”

Sam nodded. “I know. But we’ve got the Colt—

we’ll be all right. Hey, we’ve already faced down two gods and the seven deadly sins. We should be able to handle this.”

Bobby wasn’t buying Sam’s bravado. Sam had never been very good at it anyhow—that was more Dean’s bag. He’d been trying to be more like Dean in preparation for Dean’s being gone, but some things just didn’t take. Hell, he still was having trouble figuring out what went where under the Impala’s hood . . .

Putting a comforting hand on Sam’s shoulder, Bobby said, “Keep workin’ on it, Sam.”

Sam wasn’t sure if Bobby was referring to Sam’s piss-poor attempt at being cocky or his ongoing attempts to find a way to save Dean.
Maybe
it’s both,
he thought. He nodded to Bobby, who nodded back. Then he went off to bed.

THREE

Angela O’Shea hadn’t always wanted to kill the tourists.

For one thing, she had been one herself. She had come down to Key West for spring break during her sophomore year of college. While her friends were mostly getting drunk and listening to crappy cover bands on Duval Street, she learned how to scuba dive and went parasailing and checked out the museums. She came back the summer after sophomore year, intending to spend just a week. She had yet to leave.

During her first trip, she’d heard a singer/songwriter do a tune, the refrain of which ran: “Just came down for the weekend, but that was twenty-five years ago.” The singer had said that the island was full of people that applied to, and Angela had laughed and thought that to be amusing but ridiculous. And now she was one of those people. 34 SUPERNATURAL

Having dropped out of college, she had to support herself (her parents were more than happy to pay for college, but that was as far as their generosity went). She had taken on a couple of parttime jobs, including waitressing at one of the bars during the day (when the places were much less crowded and easier to deal with) and being a tour guide for one of the many companies that gave ghost tours at night. Key West was silly with ghost stories, and her job was to take groups of twenty or fewer to allegedly haunted houses and tell exaggerated tales about them. Angela had figured it to be easy, just working from a script, but it turned out that Cayo Hueso Ghost Tours Inc. liked their tour guides to embellish and perform. Angela had actually done some improv—she’d been a theater major before dropping out—so she started adding her own spins to the stories of Native Americans, wrecker captains, treasure seekers, and artists of various stripes whose shades allegedly haunted the island. The job started out fine. It seemed like there were always one or two idiots in every tour group, and always one or two rude assholes who complained about everything and didn’t tip. At first, she was willing to put up with that, but five months later, it hadn’t gotten any better. Not to mention the self-proclaimed skeptics who tried to “disprove” what she was saying, thus ruining the fun for everyone else. Bone

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35

It wasn’t like anybody
really
believed this stuff. Well, okay, that wasn’t true, lots of people did, so why ruin their fun? It wasn’t like some grad student dork was gonna change their minds . . . Today she had the worst of all worlds. They started out at the old Lipinski place on Eaton Street, which had been purchased by CHGT after old Mr. Lipinski went into the sanitarium. The house had been in his family since the nineteenth century, but they had to sell the place to pay for the old guy to go to the nuthouse. And it was the center of one of the stories anyhow, so the company bought it and put a gift shop in what used to be the sitting room, but otherwise left the house intact—including the room in the turret for the doll.

As she took the group up the winding stairs to the turret, one overweight man wearing a thick sweatshirt and jeans said, “Nobody told me there’d be
stairs.
I can’t take a lot of
stairs.
”

Five months’ practice was the only thing that kept Angela from saying, “If you ate a salad once in a while, you’d be in better shape.” Instead, she asked a question that the man’s wardrobe had already answered: “Your first day in Key West, sir?”

“Why—yes. How’d you know?”

The only people stupid enough to wear a sweat-
shirt and jeans are the ones who just got here.

“You’ll find that many people walk on the island. Everything’s pretty close together, for the most 36 SUPERNATURAL

part. You might want to consider one of the pedicabs.” They were always told to mention the pedicabs, since the brother of CHGT’s owner ran one of the pedicab companies. Technically, she was supposed to give the company name, but she never did that, as it struck her as unethical. When they got to the top of the wooden stairs, which had creaked and groaned under the weight of so many people, everyone bunched in the doorway at the top of the steps. Angela removed the top hat that was part of her work clothes. Normally, Angela was strictly T-shirt and shorts, but for work, she put on the big black top hat, the black taffeta skirt, the black stockings, the white button-down shirt and black vest, the multiple black bracelets, and the big stompy boots. She also overdid the eyeliner and put on black lipstick. She had resisted Goth-ifying herself at first, but the boss insisted, and she did notice that the tourists responded to her better when she looked like a Marilyn Manson fan.

Angela stepped inside the small room, hunched over so she wouldn’t hit her head on the ceiling. The room at the top of the turret really could only accommodate a small child. She indicated the undersized furniture—the man in the sweatshirt probably couldn’t fit his fat ass in the sofa—and said, “This is where Raymond lives. Raymond is a doll.” Angela moved aside so everyone could get a better view. Besides the small couch in the center Bone

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of the room, there was an end table that looked like a coffee-cup saucer with four legs attached to it (on top of which was a dinky desk lamp that could only accommodate a Christmas-tree light, providing the only illumination and making the room spookier), a rocking chair that looked like it belonged to a three-year-old, and an easy chair. It was on that chair that Raymond sat. Sweatshirt man wiped sweat from his large brow, and said, “That’s the
ugliest
thing I ever saw! God, Marcia, isn’t that the ugliest thing you ever saw?”

The almost-as-overweight woman with him just nodded sagely, carrying the look of a woman who’d long since learned to just stay quiet and under the radar. Angela’s mother had that look; being married to Angela’s father did that to a person. Her dad belonged in the same insane asylum as old Mr. Lipinski . . .

And fat man wasn’t wrong in any event—Raymond was a very ugly doll, looking more like a monkey than the small child it was supposed to represent. It wore a striped shirt under its round head and fat face and oversized jaw.

“Raymond was a gift from a Bahamian housekeeper in 1904 to a young boy who lived here. It was his favorite toy—but it got him into trouble. The boy was always a good child, until he received Raymond, at which point he became a
terrible
prankster.” She 38 SUPERNATURAL

hesitated, having long since learned the value of the dramatic pause. “Or so everyone
thought.
You see, the young man insisted, to the point of tears, that it was Raymond who’d knocked over the priceless vase, Raymond who fed spoiled meat to the dogs, Raymond who tracked mud into the house when it rained, Raymond who set the Christmas tree on fire.” She only added that last one around this time of year. That hadn’t been part of the story, but she remembered reading somewhere that people used to put actual candles on their Christmas trees, so it struck her that fires had to be fairly common, and it was the kind of thing a kid—or a doll possessed by a ghost, ha-ha—might do.