Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (3 page)

The head slowly went from one side to another. A single flake of crimson-dotted tissue paper floated towards the floor.

“Are any of your friends pranksters?” Jonathan asked, looking for a nice, normal reason for this man to be in possession of such a card.

Once more, the ponderous turning of the head one way and then the other.

“All right, Wendell, I think you had better start at the beginning. Take your time and let’s see what there is to make of this.”

When his client didn’t speak, seeming once more to have forgotten how to form words, Jonathan began to despair of having any patience left.

He wished he had thought earlier to call for an order of Singapore noodles from The Lucky Monkey restaurant across the street. Accepting it would be a while before he got to eat, Jonathan pulled out the bottle of bourbon from his desk drawer.

He filled his glass, took a coffee cup that didn’t appear to be dirty, and sloshed some of the bourbon into it as well. The mug he slid towards Wendell.

The gaunt man didn’t hesitate over the liquor. He took the cup, gulped back a slug, and did a damn fine impression of a consumptive cat ridding itself of an aggressive fur-ball. However, he took another drink and, eyes watering, began to speak.

“The card—I got it at an antiques shop. A machine, see? That’s what unnerved me at first. I’ve always found the things quaint, a memento of a different era. But now . . .”

Wendell took another drink, but before Jonathan had a chance to interject one of the questions already swimming in his not yet sufficiently bourbon-soaked mind, the man went on.

“I ran out of the shop, and when I got to my car, I found the card still clutched in my hand. I tossed it onto the passenger seat and drove home quickly. I’d calmed down a fair amount by the time I’d driven back to my house.”

Wendell turned the mug ceaselessly in his hands.

“I still thought then that I was being silly, see? I mean, I told myself, who knows when the machine had been filled, or by whom, or even what for? I was foolish enough to tell myself it probably wasn’t even a
real
antique but a movie prop that the bastard in the store hoped to pass off as an original.”

Wendell gave a weak, deprecating laugh and then drained the last of the bourbon. Jonathan thought about refilling the mug, but at the rate his client seemed prepared to suck it back, he’d never get a coherent story if he obliged every time it emptied.

“It wasn’t until a few hours later that I read the morning paper.”

Jonathan flicked his eyes to the folded paper on the far corner of his desk.

“And then I began to really freak out.”

Jonathan had grabbed the paper from off of the bus stop bench outside his building. It had already been well-read before he had gotten it and now it had a felted look.

He had skimmed through most of it as he did every morning. He liked to make sure it contained no news that actually impacted his life, such as new by-laws, price hikes in the cost of gas or tobacco, graves that had been displaced or bodies disinterred over the night—the standard stuff.

Jonathan couldn’t bring anything to mind from what he had read, that would, in any way, connect to the card before him and his client’s ramblings.

“I was born on the fourteenth of September.” Wendell informed Jonathan as though understanding his thoughts.

With the same reluctance he once had for putting his hand into his grandmother’s purse, knowing she stored her not-yet-ready-to-be-discarded tissues and her hard candies made sticky by spilt perfume, Jonathan picked up the paper and found the horoscopes.

He quickly scanned until he came to Virgo and read what it had to say.

This week will be good for most Virgo’s. Mercury is in the ascension. Use this week to forge a new friendship. Be wary of lending money to family during the month. If you were born on the fourteenth of September, this will be your last week in this life cycle
.

He laid the paper aside.

Wendell’s eyes, devoid of emotion, looked past him. Jonathan felt he should say something. He had no idea what though. ‘Do you like long walks on the beach?’ didn’t seem appropriate.

Wendell spared him.

“I got quite unnerved. I confess I drank a bit, then.” Wendell glanced to the mug he’d placed on the corner of the desk.

With a sigh, Jonathan leaned out and poured a measured amount of the bourbon into it. He topped off his own glass and then pointedly put the bottle away in the desk drawer.

Wendell took the mug, wrapping around its sides fingers long enough to verge on being tentacles.

Jonathan knew this could all still be a set-up. A well-placed bribe gets the paper to print a certain line in the horoscopes. Cue the actor carrying a printed card with hopes of playing the assigned role well enough to earn a few hundred bucks. A half decent actor could manage the body language and facial deadpan.

Jonathan had no problem thinking of people who would actually bother.

Apatedyne was obviously the first to leap to his mind. It seemed a little out of their style, however. His second guess came quick on the heels of the first.

There resided in the city a certain Welshman named Owen Braith Davies, who had long been a thorn in his side—and to be fair, vice versa. Davies hadn’t made a move in their on-going chess game for several weeks now.

If it was a con, Jonathan had no problem playing it out a bit longer. He had no pressing cases. He could do so long enough to spot the reason for the diversion and turn it around on the perpetrator.

It was always good to know one’s enemies and how they thought.

However, if this guy was being straight with him, then Jonathan had to admit his interest was piqued. In truth, Jonathan thought if it was a con, it was being played on Mr. Wendell Courtney.

Still, he was a private investigator—somewhere he even had a license to prove it—and a job was a job. He could use the money. It would be nice to earn on a job not involving cleaning up after Apatedyne, especially if his last secretary did find her way back to the office. He owed her a few days’ pay.

O
kay, Mr. Courtney,” Jonathan said. “I’m willing to take on your case and look into who’s doing this to you.” He opened up his cigarette case.

“No, you don’t
understand
,” Wendell nearly wailed. “Damn! He said you’d take me seriously.”

“I am,” Jonathan replied calmly, fishing out another smoke. “Wait. Who said?” He straightened up. The cigarette broke half way out of the case. “Shit,” he mumbled.

Taking out another cigarette and lighting it, Jonathan asked. “Who, Wendell? Who told you I would be able to help?”

Here we go
, Jonathan thought,
now we come to it.

“The policeman,” Wendell explained.

Jonathan took a drink. He dragged deeply on his smoke, and then dove in. “A policeman?”

“Yes. I went to the police before coming to you. See, I thought—like you seem to be thinking, though you’re wrong, I assure you—some
one
was messing with me, maybe actually threatening me.”

Wendell grew progressively more animated the longer he talked.

“I went to the police and they basically laughed me out of the station. It was humiliating and scary. I didn’t know what to do next. Then, one of them from inside came out and stood near me.

“While he lit his cigarette, he said into his cupped hand that I should seek you out. When I asked him what he meant, the officer took out his cell phone, and though he acted as if he spoke to someone on the other end, what he said was directed at me, see?”

Wendell took a drink and Jonathan held his tongue waiting for his client to finish the whole tale.

“He said that you, Mr. Alvey, were the only person in New Hades who could or would help me. He said where I could find you and that you would believe me.”

“Yeah, I think I know who you’re talking about.”

Jonathan remembered his father’s body on the ground, the blood pooling into the carpet around it, the knife handle sticky in his grip. He remembered the looks on the cops’ faces and how the cuffs had dug into his wrists. The trial, the questions, the sentencing—he remembered every second of it.

He also remembered the one cop who had shown the slightest sympathy towards his plight: a man by the name of Lamont Bonham.

As time went by, Jonathan had sent certain clients to Bonham, knowing he was an honest and open-minded cop. And over time, if Bonham came across people whose trouble couldn’t be handled by mundane means, he would direct them towards Jonathan.

“So . . .” Jonathan began, but before he could assemble a conceivable response to all he’d been told, Wendell jumped up.

“Wait! There’s also this. I found it in my closet after being at the police station. I had tried to convince myself that everything happening to me indicated I
did
need the help of a professional when remembered I had it.”

Jonathan bit back the remark that Wendell should have chosen the professionals with the white coats and padded rooms. There remained a possibility these occurrences
were
paranormal in nature. A well-phrased curse could mess with a person in such a way.

The curse would carry no actual potential for harm, but it could mess things up. If someone would go through the effort of hexing a person in an attempt to kill them, they wouldn’t bother tacking on a warning spell first.
Unless
, Jonathan told himself,
they were truly twisted.

Wendell had gained his feet and loomed over Jonathan’s desk, a cross between Quasimodo and an NBA player. He pulled a large black orb from his coat pocket. Instinctively, Jonathan brought his ring and index fingers together and began an incantation.

Then he saw, on the side of the globe, a white circle with the number eight on it. Jonathan forced down the energy he had summoned. What Wendell had produced from his coat pocket was a ‘Magic 8-Ball.’

Dry-mouthed and sweating, Jonathan fought back the desire to finish the incantation.

The need to perform the magic consumed him. His body vibrated and every particle within called out with the necessity to use.

Jonathan downed a mouthful of bourbon in an attempt to gain control of his addiction. If Wendell noticed any of Jonathan’s struggles, he made no show of it.

“You try it first,” Wendell insisted, setting the novelty item down on the desktop.

Jonathan thought he could predict the outcome of the exercise but wanted to play it out anyway.

Picking up the 8-Ball, Jonathan turned his hand and looked at the little, circular plastic viewing window at the bottom. ’Answer uncertain’ floated in the window.

He turned it away and shook it hard before turning to look at it again. This time Jonathan read, ‘Signs point to yes.’ Turning the orb a third time, he looked to Wendell and read the dour acceptance on his face.

Jonathan concentrated. He cleared his head and thought of a question. Only one question came to his mind. Thinking only of it, he turned the Magic 8-Ball over and looked at the answer.

In context, the result could be considered a bit unsettling, but Jonathan already believed Wendell’s answers would be worse. The answer to the question, ‘When will Wendell Courtney die?’—the only question he really could ask—floated up.

‘Outlook not so good.’

Jonathan set the oversized pool ball on his desktop.

“All right, Wendell. Show me.”

The man nodded and reached out for the thing as though it was a severed head. He shook it and turned it so Jonathan could see it.

Jonathan would have liked to say he was surprised by what he read, but he’d be lying.

‘You will die soon’ was the message printed on the tiny card floating in front of the plastic window.

Wendell didn’t bother checking what the outcome had been. Jonathan guessed he’d already spent a few horrible hours turning the ball over, and over, and over.

Wendell shook the ball and held it for Jonathan to read once more. Jonathan had to admit, he had just become more intrigued. The message had changed. It remained just as grim and definite, but the words were different.

If this was a hex, curse, or spell, it was a complex one.

Now, instead of ‘You will die soon,’ the small clear circle revealed the words, ‘Outlook is death.’

To make the novelty item display one dreadful message over and over when Wendell touched it would require a tricky, but attainable, curse for a proficient practitioner. Different messages on the same theme changed the game significantly.

“I kept at this for over an hour. It was like watching my own train wreck. I couldn’t stop even though I felt nauseated with each turn. I was gripping the thing so hard my fingers turned white. Every time I turned it over, it predicted my death. The words changed sometimes but never the message.”

“All right, Wendell, I believe something’s going on. I’m going to look into this. I want to check out this thing,” he said, pointing to the orb, “and I want to go to that antiques store.”

Wendell looked relieved for the first time since he’d entered Jonathan’s office. He placed the ball on the desk and sank back into the chair, not looking at the cursed object again. “Could I impose on you for another cigarette?”