Dead to Rites (22 page)

(No, they hadn’t dug a basement into the soil beneath the trailers. The entrance tunnel sloped up, so the “ground floor” was actually raised, leavin’ room for… Y’know what? Skip it.)

Then, of course, we hadda deal with the light—or lack of it. I could manage well enough, since it wasn’t
entirely
pitch black; I couldn’t sprint around without tripping on things, but I could pick my way carefully without pickin’ up any bruises. Tsura was another matter, though. Eventually, with a whole lotta fast-talkin’ and cajolin’, she let me into her noggin enough to jazz up her eyesight.

Honestly, I hadn’t been sure I could do that, but I figured if I can manipulate mortal minds enough to make ’em see something that ain’t there, or temporarily blind ‘’em, it couldn’t be
too
hard to go the other way with it, right? And hey, whaddaya know? It worked.

Though she got a tad flustered again with me starin’ into her peepers for a minute and a half while I fiddled with things in her brain. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess this was a chick who didn’t have a whole lotta recent experience with the hombres, though of course I wasn’t about to ask her.

It was kinda cute in an awkward sorta way. Maybe I
would
ask her, later. Wasn’t a polite topic, or any of my business, but it might be fun to see her face or hear her try to answer.

Yeah, I’m a bastard sometimes.

Anyway, that neat trick got us through the intervening halls, full of more “Egyptian” décor so tacky I couldn’t help but joke to Tsura that maybe the mummy just got offended and walked out on its own. Unfortunately, when we actually got to the “central chamber” where the ancient stiff’d actually been displayed, that amount of vision wasn’t gonna cut it. We hadda be able to give the place a solid up’n down, dig for clues, anything the cops mighta missed or not understood.

So
then
we hadda stumble around, peering at and under and around the grotesque and/or stupid adornments, hunting for a light switch that we knew was gonna be well hidden from the payin’ customers. We weren’t
complete
bunnies, me’n Tsura; we’d known we were gonna need real light when we got this far, so I’d thrown the generator switch outside when we got here, makin’ sure we’d have power when we needed it. (Carnival had enough machinery running, even at night, that I had
some
hope it wouldn’t be noticed.) We just hadn’t wanted to use it until there was no other choice. Even deep in the building as we were, there was always the risk someone might tumble to us once we brightened the place up.

But as I said, there was no choice anymore. It was Tsura who finally found the dingus, tucked away behind a “canopic jar” that I’m pretty sure was a Thermos with a layer of slapdash papier-mâché. Dull yellow lights sputtered on with an irritating hum, and I was finally able to take the place in.

I wasn’t impressed.

At least Rounser’d kept this part of the funhouse closed, even though it hadda be costing him business. Dunno if that’d been his call or if the cops had basically ordered it, but either way it made my job easier.

Only a little, though. Maybe it’d been the bulls themselves, who hadn’t considered bits of the broken display useful evidence, or maybe it was carnival staff, but a whole mess of ginks had tromped back and forth through the hall, slammin’ their plates down on whatever got in their way. Bits of bandages and other wrappings—whether genuine or decorative I couldn’t immediately say—had been kicked all around the chamber, many of ’em showin’ clear shoe prints in grime and dirt. Some shards of glass from the case around the sarcophagus had been crushed so tiny they were nothin’ but pinprick constellations glittering in the dull glow. The sarcophagus itself—which was wood and plaster—was covered in dust and powders from the investigation. It was intact, though, except for the lid, which had split in half like a stale loaf of bread.

Basically, now I could see it, I almost wished I couldn’t. Hadn’t the foggiest where to begin, or what I could possibly find in this mess once I did.

All right. Don’t rush into it, Mick. Just think it through.

“Good God, where do we even start?”

Or maybe
talk
it through, long as Tsura was here anyway.

“Okay, kid. Who do we guess snatched the stupid thing?”

“Um… Well, you said it wasn’t Ramona and Baskin, so we can rule them out…”

“Nope. I said they
said
it wasn’t them and I believed ’em. But I been wrong before. They ain’t top of the suspect list anymore, by a long shot, but we don’t rule anyone out, savvy?”

“Oh. All right. Uh.” She started to pace, stopped herself before she could trample anymore of the scene—or before I could
tell
her she was about to trample more of the scene. I jerked her an approving nod. “So, it
could
be anyone. No guarantee it’s even somebody you know is involved in all this yet. But I’d think probably, um, Fleischer? That was his name, right? You said his people were casing us—uh, the carnival, I mean. That points to him, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does. It don’t entirely make sense, though.”

Tsura blinked.

“There’s a whole heap of occult and mystical traditions,” I explained, “and they don’t all play well together. Lotta occultists these days study more’n one practice, but others focus on just one. Far as I’ve heard, Fleischer’s the latter sort. He’s a strict Kabbalist, doesn’t dabble in much of anything else. And the Book of Exodus notwithstanding, there ain’t much overlap between Kabbalah and Egyptian
heka
. I don’t see where he’d have too much use for anything he might get from the mummy’s spellwork.

“Still’n all, though, I agree, he’s the most probable suspect.”

She smiled at me, clearly proud she’d gotten the right answer.

“Now forget all that,” I told her.

“What?”

“You gotta study the evidence with an open mind. ’Sokay to have theories, but you gotta put ’em aside while you’re hip-deep in investigating. You get too set on a theory, no matter how likely, you start missin’ things that don’t mesh with it.”

“Like when you got fixated on… on what’s-his-name? The shapeshifter?”

Yeah, thanks for that embarrassing reminder. Still…

“Goswythe. And yep, like that. Maybe later, when we
know
insteada guess, we go back and look for signs that we’re right. But for now, we gotta study the evidence without preconception.”

She humphed and stuck a fist on her hip.

“So why did you ask me who I thought was behind it in the first place?”

“Can’t learn to put aside preconceptions if you don’t have ’em, can you?”

“Fine,
professor
. Is there a written report, too?”

“Check back later in the semester. Now get to looking.”

She looked. I looked. We found about equal amounts of bupkis.

“So, professor,” she asked me, stretching her back and wiping a bit of sweat from her forehead with a sleeve, “what’s lesson two?”

“Cheat.”

It woulda taken a whole squadroom of cops half a day to reassemble the display case from the bits and pieces and shards scattered throughout the rest of the detritus. (Well, most of the case; some of the pieces, as I’d mentioned, were pretty much powder now. Nobody was reassembling
those
.) It took me’n Tsura about an hour and a half. ’Course, we only accomplished it that quick because I siphoned several buckets-worth of good luck from the rest of the funhouse around us. Tsura’s coworkers were probably gonna have to fix up some of the machinery and replace some patches of rotted wood in the near future. (I did make sure to avoid too much damage to the slides or anythin’ load-bearing. Wasn’t looking to crush any children today.)

I also tried to get her to use her own gift, maybe peek into the future and see where some of the pieces were hidden, or how they fit together, but even after we were done, she couldn’t say for sure if she’d managed to make that work or not. I figure it did, if only because she was fittin’ some of those bits together faster’n I was for a little while.

Either way, though, clearin’ some space on the floor and layin’ the glass out so we could see at least a fair representation of how it’d looked before it got smashed all to hell made things a lot clearer.

“Mick?”

“I see it.”

I didn’t wanna see it, didn’t wanna come to the conclusion it was pointin’ at, but I saw it.

“What does—?”

“Hold that thought, sister.” I knelt next to half of the broken sarcophagus lid. “This thing ain’t closed all the time, is it? That’d make it hard for the rubes to actually see the mummy your boss’s been advertising all over the place.”

“No, it’ll close for a few minutes, then open slowly. Loud creaking and all that. The whole ‘mummy is about to rise from its tomb’ sort of—” she stopped and shivered “—sort of nonsense.”

“Right. Nonsense.”

See, there’d be no need for whoever stole the mummy to break the lid. During the day, they coulda waited for it to open by itself. At night? Woulda been a lot quieter to force it open than to crack it in half. I mean, the mechanism’s right there.

Then there was what Tsura and me’d both noticed with the glass. Yeah, it’d been tromped and kicked and shifted around, but puttin’ the whole pane back together’d forced us to really pay attention to where the shards had all ended up. No way they’d
all
been moved, no matter how careless the bulls or the staff’d been. No way at least some of ’em hadn’t stayed where they fell when the display first shattered.

And where they’d fallen was in a neat, radiating pattern
outward
. The glass, same as the lid, was smashed from the inside.

Goddamn it, I’d been
joking
when I suggested the friggin’ thing got up and walked out on its own! Yes, I’ve said that the spirits of dead mortals are some of the few “supernatural” beasties out there that ain’t necessarily related to the Fae, but this wasn’t how ghosts or revenants or—or
anything
was supposed to work!

I was castin’ about, searchin’ the broken refuse and dusty corners for any other answer, any other possible interpretation, when somethin’ else finally jumped out at me. Somethin’ I’d already looked at a dozen times.

The tatters of wrapping lyin’ around? The fake stuff they’d used as part of the décor, I mean, not the real stuff the mummy’d been swathed in thousands of years ago. I was starin’ straight at an unwound length of the material, draped over a corner of the sarcophagus—the texture, the fake aging and darkening that probably had more to do with ink and tea than passing years—when I realized I’d seen it before.

“
Fuck!
”

Tsura—who, to be fair, was probably strugglin’ with the whole “millennia-old stiff may actually have gotten up and blown this joint of its own volition” angle more’n I was—just about jumped outta her toenails.

“What?
What?
”

“That damned broad put one over on me! Again!”

I’d been so careful, so friggin’ clever, and I’d caught her out on so much, and she’d
still
slipped one by me!

“Mick, what are you talking about?”

I took a long, deep breath—not real calming for me, really, but sorta to reassure
her
I was simmerin’ down some.

“When I was at Baskin’s,” I growled, “there was a pile of rags. One of ’em had been used to wrap the—to wrap a relic with some
seriously
bad mojo. Kinda thing I’d kill to keep outta the wrong hands, and in this case, the ‘wrong’ hands are just about
anyone’s
. Turned out the dingus wasn’t even there, though. Just the cloth that’d held it for a spell.”

“I see,” she said, makin’ it real clear she didn’t.

I bared my teeth in what I hoped she took for a grim smile.

“Ramona must’ve known I’d react badly to findin’ that. And she used that against me.” I bent down to pick up the scrap of faux-mummy wrap. “There was some of this in the pile, few layers down. Didn’t even register with me. Probably never would’ve if I hadn’t spent so much time in here surrounded by the stuff.”

She perched herself on a “broken obelisk,” sorta half-seated, half-leaning.

“I’m not sure I follow. Are you saying they have the mummy after all?”

“No.” I was runnin’ through it all in my head, now, tryin’ to race ahead of a dozen possible thoughts at once. “But if the piece they have is really from the mummy, not fake like this one… Or hell, maybe even if it
is
fake, the stuff’s been around the body for a while now, associated with it, that might be enough of a connection by itself, though the real thing’d certainly be a much stronger link to—”

“Mick! Make some fucking sense!”

“You tell people’s mothers their fortunes with that mouth, doll?” Then, before she could completely explode, “What I’m sayin’ is that they can maybe use the length of fabric they got to find the mummy. Almost certain if it’s the real deal, but even if it ain’t, there’s all kinda rites and rituals and spells that’ll lead them right to it.”

“Oh. Well, but… doesn’t that mean
we
can use
this
piece the same way?”

“
I
can’t.” At least, not without spending a few days it at and drawing on some truly prodigious quantities of luck, I couldn’t. “But I may know somebody. Actually, I may know two somebodies.” I tossed a rag at her.

Then, after a minute that took about an hour, “Anything?”

“No. But I told you, it—”

“It don’t work that way. Yeah.”

“Sorry. Maybe if it was an actual part of—”

“Yeah.” I reached out, took it back. “Well, like I said, I know a dame. She ain’t exactly the best in the business…” And I’d probably have to give her her grimoire back, if I wanted
any
shot of gettin’ her to agree to this. “But she may be able to pull this off. We just gotta—”

The lights died with a last, strangled buzz and a dull
thump
.

“Uh…” Tsura said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you do that?”

“Maybe. Amount of luck I was sucking up earlier? I coulda damaged the system. Might just be we busted a fuse or something.”