Bones and Bagger (Waldlust Series Book 1) (15 page)

Chapter 21

The text asked me—ordered me—to be at the Marriott the next evening at 9 PM.  The first thing that came to mind: I’m finally dead.  The second thing: evasion.  The third thing: Better enjoy the rest of Soyla’s photos while my eyes still float on the inside of my skull.  The fourth thing: Nothing.  I mean, I’m no chess grandmaster who can think four moves ahead.

The Seven.  The little uninvited bugger in my flat last night must have finked on me to his buddies.  But what could he have said?  That I was lukewarm when it came to housekeeping?  I still had no clue what I had involved myself in.  Check that. No clue what trouble Sparky had found.  So why was I sitting in a wooden desk chair while I let my old buddy drool all over my pillow?  I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but you get the idea.

I sensed someone looking over my shoulder and turned to see Helmet standing there holding a sleeping Karl.

“What is happening?” I said to Helmet.

Helmet just stared back, but I thought I detected concern on his face. Just as likely it was ghost gas or something. 

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

Helmet looked over to the computer monitor and then back at me.  He rolled his eyes and walked away.

“I’m putting the phone in my pocket.” 

He waved without stopping the annoying gliding thing he did. 

“Did I mention Soyla sent a few dozen new texts?” I said.  “Oh, but you wouldn’t know, would you.  Because the phone is hard to see when it’s sitting in my pocket.”

Helmet’s response left me trying to remember if giving the finger was in vogue as far back as World War II.  I decided to leave that mystery for later because Sparky had slept long enough.

Never having mastered the concept of throwing open a door, I opened it with as much noise as opening a bedroom door could generate.  Keep in mind I didn’t want to wake any of my other guests.  I’d decided it was time for a one-on-one conversation with my old buddy Sparcius.

The door thing didn’t wake him up.  That told me he wasn’t asleep to begin with.  Remember how a vampire doesn’t need much sleep? Well, we’re also light sleepers.  I can hear a mosquito landing on a cotton ball.  I knew Sparky heard me walk in.

You’d think I’m used to Sparky’s constant baloney and cow-pie situations, but I’m not.  And if I ever get used to it then I’ll cut my own heart out and feed it to one of The Seven. The Seven.  Somehow Sparky brought them into my life.  Would it be redundant to say that it made me mad?

Best to keep my cool when dealing with Sparky, though.  He did everything for a reason and he knew I knew he was wide awake.  If I picked him up by the neck and put his face through the wall, then the conversation would turn away from substance and toward poor, misunderstood Sparky.

He’d spend whatever time we had in his fake righteous indignation and I’d eventually find myself feeling guilty enough to apologize.  Sparky would then depart and I’d remain blind of whatever glaring buffoonery he’d gotten me into.  So I looped the “Keep cool” mantra track in my mind.  I would not give in to Sparky’s manipulation.

I walked over to Sleeping Beauty and I saw Sparky tense.  Just an iota, but I saw it. Sufficient confirmation of what I suspected about him not being asleep.  He wanted me to do something disruptive.  “Keep cool” my brain said.  Only someone must have turned down the volume.

I coolly reached down, grabbed the back of Sparky’s neck.  I lifted him out of the bed.  Sparky went limp…in a mildly tense way.  He
wanted
me to rough him up.  “Keep cool.”  Don’t give in to Sparky. “Keep cool.” I wasn’t falling for it.

I smashed his face into the floor.  That felt good.  For me, not him, that is.  I congratulated myself on keeping cool.  I mean, I avoided the temptation of throwing him through the wall.  Sparky didn’t move.  I knew he wasn’t hurt too badly.  I mean the guy had an arm ripped off and regrown within the last twelve hours.  How bad could a face plant be in comparison?

“You broke my nose,” he said.  A pause.  And then, “I swallowed three teeth.

“Grow it all back,” I said.  “And keep it down, Sparky.  We need to talk and I don’t want anyone else to interrupt.”

Sparky didn’t move.  Maybe he needed help.  I grabbed a handful of blonde hair and pulled him up.  That got him moving.  I’m not good at being the bully, it’s a role I save mostly for Sparky and the occasional demon.  Not being good at bullying comes with advantages.  I’m not so arrogant as to think my victim will continue in cow-like compliance.

I was ready to fend off the hand.  It came at me quick, alright.  But not quick enough.

“Come on, Sparky,” I said.  I could hear the weariness in my own voice.  “In the neck?”

Stupid move.  He would have stood a better chance at gutting me with the knife.  Less distance for the hand to travel and more awkward to defend.  My neck?  I could have taken a moment to fix coffee and read the headlines and still defeated that move.

Sparky didn’t struggle against my grip and I let his hand go.  He kept the knife.  I didn’t care.  We both knew he didn’t stand much of chance against me when I expected an attack.  He sat down on the bed.

“Do you let the dog sleep on your pillow?” he said.  “I swear I smelled dog odor all night.”

And just like that I’d mined the first bit of useful information from the encounter.  I now knew what Karl did all day while I rolled groceries in Wiesbaden.  And it wouldn’t do any good to close the door when I left for work.  The little idiot could bound right through without interrupting the squirt stream as he peed his excited way to my bed.  And onto my bed.

“Don’t worry about the dog,” I said.

That would be my job.

“We need to chat, Sparky.”

“Kind of early,” Sparky said.  “I need a coffee.”

Sparky touched his nose and spit a mouthful of blood on the bed.  Perfect.  That would force me to wash the sheets.  My penance for smashing his face.  I’d change my mind about how good bouncing Sparky felt once I started working with those hospital corners.  But I’d climb the bed-making mountain when I came to it. 

“You don’t need anything,” I said.  “You’re stalling.”

No dispute from Sparky.  Not verbally, anyway.  He stood and walked out the bedroom door and I ended up following him to my kitchen. That was how quickly I lost control of the conversation. Most guys own a minimum of two working devices in their kitchens.  The first, and most important, manages the beer.  The second item goes hand-in-hand with the first.  A coffeemaker.  Sparky found mine and did the necessary machinations to get the coffee flowing.

More stalling as he fussed with cups and sugar.  You can forget fresh milk in a bachelor pad.  One wall of my kitchen consisted of windows, and I could see the morning coming to life out there.  A shade of gray that you only see in Germany crossed the sky as Sparky and I sat down at the kitchen table.

“So what’s happening, Sparky?”

“What…”

“Stop the crap,” I said. “You know what.”

Sparky didn’t look offended and that told me he had expected it to come to this.  Probably spent the whole night mapping out this conversation. 

“Thanks for sanctuary, bro.”

He got interested in his coffee while he spoke.  No problem.  It would have disappointed me if he’d shown the audacity to look me in the eye while he cooked up his baloney.  And after he’d hosed me so royally by getting me involved in something—whatever it was—so sure to be deadly.

“Save your thanks, Sparcius,” I said, “and tell me what’s going on.”

“Soyla,” he said.  And he still wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Soyla?” What about her?”

“She’s after me.”

No kidding
. 

I figured that one out on my own.  Right about the time she ripped his right arm off at the shoulder.  Huge clue.  I sensed that pulling information from Sparky was going to be like pulling teeth while the person kicked you in the nuts.  And after two thousand years, I should have been used to it.

Not wanting to wake up the crowd, I tried to keep my voice calm when I said, “Why is Soyla after you?”

“Gambling,” Sparky said.

And there it was.  Everything made sense.  I mean, it fit so well I could have had the conversation without Sparky.  I kicked myself for being so blind.  Maybe it was the knife in the back and the demons.  The demons?

“Gambling,” I said.

“Yes.”

A bird landed on my deck—the one over Herr Doktor’s breakfast room.  He hopped for a moment in search of morsels, and finding nothing, flew away.  Karl must have wandered in sometime during the coffee making because he threw himself at the glass door and barked an exuberantly-silent turf warning to the little bird outside.  I put down my cup of coffee and thought for a second.

Demons.  If I believed what Sparky was saying, and I’d be foolish to believe all that he ever said, this was about a gambling debt.  Sensible.  Soyla would be the kind of person a highly-connected underworld gambler would hire as an enforcer.  It had to be illegal.  Sure, sufficient regulated casinos existed—one of the more famous in Bad Homburg itself—but I suspected Sparky would find no welcome in any of them.

And Soyla’s arm-ripping stunt lent a certain air of verisimilitude to the story.  That rather personal violence would send the kind of message a hard-nosed, illegal gambling boss would want to send.  But demons?  That didn’t fit. Demons are all about misery, nothing else.  They don’t gamble, and I’ve never heard of them establishing businesses—illegal or otherwise.  I know I’m throwing out a lot of absolutes here, but the path seemed reasonable. Only reasonable though, and nothing more.  I wasn’t ready to swallow it just yet. What about Sarah Arias?  And The Seven?

I was just about to go down that line of question when I was interrupted by something I said.  Sounds weird, I know, but that’s me.  Thinking one way, talking another. 

“You’re lying.”

This time Sparky
did
look offended.  Us guys from the old school dance around that whole lying thing.  Used to be you called a man a liar and one of you two ended up dead.

“What are you accusing me of?” said Sparky, and I could see a red tint appear on his cheeks. 

“I think it’s clear what I’m saying.”

The bit about not being a bully and staying alert…I redoubled my effort in that direction.  A calm Sparky knew I’d take him down under just about any fight condition, the lost-temper version of Sparky would also know the same thing.  But he wouldn’t care.  That would make him dangerous.

I needn’t have worried because Sparky backed down.  Immediately. That made me even more suspicious.  Oh, I’d seen him back down before.  Never this quickly and not without at least a smattering of snide ripostes.

“OK,” he said.  “You caught me.”

Sparky did a good job of looking ashamed, a sure sign he still lied.  He could have sex with your wife and your mother—at the same time—and not feel an ounce of remorse.  I gazed out the glass wall, across the small parking area, and into the second story window of the building next door.  I couldn’t see much because the Turkish family that rented the place put up bed sheets for curtains.  Just a façade with everything behind covered as quickly and cheaply as possible.  A perfect metaphor for what I expected out of Sparky.

I looked back at my friend. I must have caught him by surprise because a cunning look had replaced the carefully crafted chagrined thing he’d worn when I gazed out of the window. He spoke.

“There was this girl,” he said, and I perked up at that. 

If I couldn’t get the truth from Sparky then getting close to it would end up better than nothing.  I already thought I knew who the girl would be.  Wouldn’t you?  Who spoke to me for the first time within minutes of Sparky showing up?  Who called me by what I was?  “Vampire,” she had said.   “We are watching you,” she had said.  Any idea? How about some more clues.

Who showed interest in the gang on the night Sparky joined us?  Who hung around to discuss things with The Seven dude?  Who—in addition to Sparky—disappeared moments before the demons attacked?

“Sarah Arias.”

Oops.  I thought out loud that time.  I looked hard in to Sparky’s eyes as I spoke the name of that gorgeous female hide. Blank.  Nothing.  No apparent recognition. No airs.  In sum, no artificial ingredients.  Either I’d just struck the mother lode or I’d been picked off at first base while scratching myself and spitting.

“What?” Sparky said.

His face still looked as empty as I imagined his bank account must have been after the Jag purchase.

“You said a girl, right?”

And I had Sparky off balance. 
Off balance
.  Finally the time had arrived for my knockout blow.

“What girl?”

Fake Latino voice.  J-Rod.  The children had awakened and the adults wouldn’t get to speak about big people things for the rest of the morning.  I didn’t know whether the feeling I had regarding who Sparky’s girl might be invoked jealousy or awe.  Most likely a mixture.

Sarah Arias.

Chapter 22

“Who mention Sarah, man,” said J-Rod.  “She here?”

“No,” I said.

“I wish, man.  She hotter dan a habanero tamale, homey.”

“There’s no such thing,” I said.

“Sure there is, man,” J-Rod said, but I was talking to his back. 

He’d already lost interest in the conversation and was foraging in the fridge.  Unless he wanted beer for breakfast he’d need to go out to the grocery store around the corner and get in the bread line. 

I locked eyes with Sparky and mouthed, “Later.”

He didn’t respond.

Sister Christian came swinging in next.  She looked fresh, and of course, that made me think about her underwear.

“I’ll walk to the store and get some bread,” she said.  “You have enough coffee?”

I did.  I handed her a fifty euro note—about 65 bucks—and she took it.  Surprised me a bit, but a little socialism goes well with sweet-looking, middle-aged hippie girls.

“Any orders?” she asked.

“Get a dozen with cheese and a dozen with ham bits,” I said.  “And you might as well pick up some eggs while you’re at it.”

She walked over and hugged J-Rod and then me.  How could she smell so fresh in used underwear?  Female trade secret?

“And I’ll get some TP,” Sister Christian said as she walked out the door.  “I had to drip dry last night.”

I would describe the arrival of Watanabe and the Bonny Prince thirty minutes later, but who’s interested in a couple of yawning, stretching, scratching dudes?  Not me, so get over it. 

We took our morning party to the den while we waited on Sister Christian to return with the rolls.  Bread is one thing my people still do right.  Germans bake a million different kinds of breads with textures ranging from melt-in-your-mouth to rocky-path-through-the-leaves. Each could sustain you for life.  If you’re not a vampire, that is.

And speaking of vampire.

“Yo, you two creatures of the night,” said J-Rod. “Do you go hunting and bite some hot bambinas in their nightgowns while we sleep?”

That one went over like a loud brap in a wooden pew during the wedding prayer.  Everyone stopped what they were doing.  Even Karl interrupted his morning crotch-polishing and put up his ears when the conversation halted. Idiot.  Helmet, too.  He looked interested in my response and he knew where I’d been all night.

“Not last night,” I said.

For some reason, my response perked up the Bonny Prince.  “Does that mean you are hungry for blood?”

He obviously wanted it sound like a joke, but I’ve lived long enough to see humor as mostly a conduit for fears, for uncertainties, and for anger.  That goes double for bad humor and the Prince’s attempt fell flat. People talk about stress lines on a face, I tend to see the opposite when people are frightened.  Lines disappear into a doughy-looking puffiness.  That’s what I saw on the Prince’s face, and the same to varying degrees with Watanabe and J-Rod.

“Not hungry,” I said.  I heard the boys exhale.  “But I wouldn’t say no to a pick-me-up.”  I took a sip of my coffee.

Simultaneous intake of air from the guys and I fought to keep my nostrils from becoming a shower head spewing coffee.  Watanabe, Vince the Bonny Prince, and Jesus Rodriquez.  The perfect Greek chorus. I decided to ham it.  Served them right for thinking those things about me.  Of course, just a few hours before they’d absorbed the nasty jolt of truth regarding my condition.  But I was still the same Garrett and I would have expected a bit more from my friends.

“Pick me up?” said Watanabe.

Of all the gang, he’d shown the greatest skepticism regarding my vampire thing.  It’s often the geniuses of the world who most readily overlook the truth.  That makes them smarter than they are wise.  But who could blame a guy for wanting to put a Harvard education to use?  Watanabe must have replayed the demon fight from dozens of angles and points of view. 

“Yes,” I said. “A little pick-me-up to start my weekend.”

“Where would you find a pick-me-up,” said non-Latino J-Rod.

The door opened behind me and I knew Sister Christian had returned with the assortment of German rolls.  The boys ignored that noise. 

“Where?” I said.  “Most likely I’d find it among houseguests that overstay their welcome.”

Complete silence.  I could feel the three pairs of eyes boring into me like one of those augers fishermen use to drill down to the water.  I didn’t change my expression and that gave it away.  The boys all began laughing at the same time. 
Still the Greek Chorus.
Sister Christian placed bags of bread on the little table in front of the couch. 

I gazed over at Helmet to see if he appreciated my joke.  Why does family approval still matter so much to me?  Nothing from him though and it disappointed me.  But hey, just like family.  C’est la guerre.  Helmet had his eyes on Sparky. Smart ghost.  Sparky needed watching.

It looked innocent enough, though. Sparky sat at my desk staring at the computer monitor.  Helmet turned to me with his “are you seeing this” look.  For an entity who can’t speak a word Helmet sure had a lot to say.  I took a closer look at Sparky while the Greek Chorus dispersed into a mob of bread-and-roll-devouring piranhas.

Old Sparcius showed that white doughy look on his face I just mentioned as he read what Helmet had left for me on the screen. Sparky and stress usually don’t fit well in the same sentence.  Kind of like Arkansas and newspapers. 
Interesting
. I grabbed a roll covered in baked-on cheese and ham bits and stepped over to see what had Sparky off kilter.

I didn’t know what to expect to see on the computer monitor, but I did expect to see something.  Disappointment.  The same web pages I read through the previous night remained open…the five browser windows worth of Charlemagne history.

And I didn’t see anything the previous night either.  No matter how hard Helmet tried to pass the information. I had the vague notion of tampons on their way to German customs when I said,

“He’s buried in Aachen.”

The factoid made me feel professorial.  And it made Sparky jump like I caught him drinking directly from the milk carton.

“He isn’t,” Sparky said.

I think if he could do it over again Sparky would try harder to keep his mouth shut.  I’m not sure it would have helped because his response—those two little words—jumped from his pie hole like a guilty denial.  And some folks are hard-wired to thinking they live under constant accusation—the guilty conscience—and thus the instinctual lie.  Consider Sparky the Prime Minister of that tribe.  I call them The Paranoids.

Two words fired back in defense when I intended no attack.  They ended up the sole truth I’d gotten out of Sparky, and the key to dismantling a baroque, and ultimately deadly intrigue.  Standing there holding a cold cup of coffee and half-eaten roll, with my friends talking and munching in the background, and with a grin spreading over Helmet’s face, I was unaware that the mild warning tremors I felt buzzing in my brain represented an avalanche coming down the virtual mountain at all of us.

“Yes, he is,” I said.  And then, “Get out of the way, I’ll prove it.”

Sparky exhaled in the exaggerated way people use to demonstrate boredom with a topic.  Said topics often becoming boring at a rate equal to the amount of discomfort they cause.  No way to determine whether Charlemagne bored Sparky because he knew more about Chucky than anything he would find on the web or because Chuck had Sparcius executed for what Sparky considered a minor character flaw.  Like romancing one of Charlemagne’s favorite young women of sport.

Why Sparky still held a grudge for that one I didn’t know.  I mean, hadn’t Sparky happily executed
ME
under Chuck’s orders?  And I didn’t hold it against
either
of them.  Most things about Sparky don’t make sense once you apply logic. 

The boy does have charm, though.  It’s how he landed positions in the courts of many famous rulers way back when—the kind of guys with whole web sites devoted to them.  Charlemagne ended up one of many in Sparky’s autograph book.  And Sparky never mentioned anything before, at least not in the last thousand years.  See, guys like Sparky only look back if someone’s chasing them because the rearward view usually consists of the destruction they’ve caused.

I sat down in the chair Sparky vacated.  He showed no appetite for an impromptu history session because instead of a walk down memory lane he took the path between the sofa and recliner. A few moments later I heard my bed creak.  Perhaps he decided he could live with the doggie smell on my pillow.  And the blood he’d spit on the bed.

“Buried in Aachen,” I said loud enough for everyone in the flat to hear.

“Who buried in Aachen?” asked J-Rod.

“Charlemagne,” I said.

“Too bad Homey,” J-Rod said.  “Was she hot, man?”

Helmet jumped to his feet in outrage.  If I remembered correctly the Nazi Party coopted the Charlemagne mystique to prop up the notion of the Third Reich.  But Helmet was no Nazi.

I made a calm down gesture at Helmet.  Only Sister Christian noticed.   But Our Lady of the Day Old Underwear kept up the bagger conversation while pretending not to pay attention to me.  The old finger twirl around my ear and quick point at J-Rod mollified the ghost.  For exactly which German generation did calling someone crazy become the universal cure for hurt feelings?  Not sure, but I used it to my advantage.

Buried at Aachen or not buried at Aachen. If you believed Sparky.  And why would Sparky care anyway?  He wanted to kick himself after he opened his mouth.  But it really started moments before that…when he looked at my computer and saw I’d been surfing Charlemagne.  He hadn’t known I was watching him. Bad memories of love lost and an execution that made him move on to another life in another town?  Maybe.  But judging by his reaction, I didn’t think so.

“Did I hear you mention Aachen?” That was Sister Christian. 

She’d acted like she wasn’t listening.  Nice act.  I learned long ago—and I mean LONG ago—that women have radar dishes for ears.  They’re able to pick up 100% of the stuff you don’t want them to hear and pretend like they’ve missed everything else.

Lying was useless, so I said, “I did.”

She said, “They have a nice cathedral there.”

“Yes,” I replied, “Some famous people are buried there.”

She held up her own smartphone.

“I checked,” she said.

“Checked what?”

“The timetables.”

I raised my eyebrows in the guy version of the doggie tilted head of intense concentration.

“Deutsche Bahn,” Sister Christian said.

“We can catch the S5 out of Bad Homburg at 10:45 and we’ll be there before 1:30.”  She played with her phone and said, “We can depart Aachen before seven pm and get back to Frankfurt around nine.”  She looked up.  “You can make it back here and us to Wiesbaden before ten.”

“We?” I said.

Watanabe chimed in.  “Don’t be an ass, Gare.”

Like asking me not to breathe, but I’d give it a try.  If he were implying that the bagging team somehow had become my comrades in arms, I was going to be an ass.  Based on Sparky’s reaction, the Aachen trip did seem like a good idea, though. 

I kicked myself for not thinking of it, though the whole Charlemagne angle had just surfaced a few minutes earlier when Sparky did the evasive thing.  Well, it really started the previous night, if you counted Helmet’s prodding.  Sister Christian.  One step ahead of me and she didn’t know all that I did about Sparky.  If my brain continued to work as fast over the next few days?  I was dead.  Sister Christian.  I wondered for a moment exactly how long she thought a single pair of panties could last. I wish I had that kind of confidence.

We could have taken an hour to do the arguing thing.  I’d say it’s too dangerous and none of their business.  They’d respond with questions that went something like what could be more dangerous than what happened last night? Then they’d bang on about how whatever was happening was their business because those demons made it so.  Besides, everyone had Sunday off.  Almost everyone, that was.  My schedule had a pop-up meeting with The Seven penciled in.  I considered it a command performance.

I decided against going back and forth for an hour and simply gave in. Before I break my arm patting myself on the back for being a quivering mass of humanity, truth is I couldn’t come up with a good reason to be the party pooper.  How much trouble could the gang get into on a Deutsche Bahn train and in a cathedral?  Even the gnarliest of demons would quiver in abject terror at the thought of sitting there with no ticket with the German conductor coming down the aisle.

You need a PhD in computer science to run one of those ticket machines.  Demons can think of a million ways to make a person miserable, consider it their core competency.  On the other hand, they wouldn’t be designing rockets anytime soon.  The thought of them huddled around the ticket machine and howling in frustration brought a smile to my face.  No, the train would be safe alright.

The cathedral?  Probably.  And that’s the best I could do these days.  I’ve heard demons used to erupt in balls of fire if they got within a hundred yards of a church.  That might be one of the reasons the local folks remained so faithful. Hard to deny some connection between a church and flaming big uglies running around outside. Not so much for the last few hundred years.  At least not in Europe.  Just a theory on my part, but it all ties in with hallowed ground versus common places.