Once Gil had handed over Doc to me and I’d placed him on the arm of my chair, he surprised me by thrusting out his left foot and yelling, “Drumstick!” He then set that one down and stuck out his right foot, looking down at it he repeated “Drumstick!” Then he went back and forth from right foot to left in a little birdie cancan, calling out “Drumstick, drumstick!” While I sat there both stunned and horrified, my sweet, sweet birdie finished his chorus by ruffling his wings, singing, “And buffalo wings!”
For the next several minutes Gilley and Heath were lost in a fit of laughter. Doc felt encouraged by this, and began a long litany of fart noises, interspersed with the occasional repetition of the birdie cancan.
Meanwhile I concentrated a stern glare at Gilley, but he didn’t notice for several rounds of drumstick. “What?” he asked innocently when he finally saw my furious face.
“Why?” I roared.
Gil gave a half shrug. “You leave me alone with your bird all day, darlin’, and you know I’m gonna think up something new to teach him.”
I sighed and offered Doc a peanut. He stopped with the farty noises and cancan almost immediately and dug into the shell.
“Can we please focus here?” I grumbled when Gil and Heath continued to rib each other and chuckle. Only to a couple of guys would that disturbing feathered comedy routine be funny.
They both cleared their throats and mumbled apologies. “So!” Gil said, setting his iPad on its kickstand and getting out his keyboard. “Heath tells me you walked right into another imprint today.”
“I did,” I confirmed. “We found a small vortex in a cave up in the foothills, and that amplified the energy enough to toss me right into one. I was able to see Daryl on the day he found the vessel which held the black hawk spirit, and I also caught a glimpse of what the sacred pot looks like.”
“I hear Daryl wasn’t alone,” Gil added as his fingers began to fly over the keys.
“He had a partner. Some guy named Wyatt.”
“Did you get a last name?”
“Nope.”
Gil frowned. “That’s going to make it a little trickier,” he said.
“I can describe him,” I told him.
Gil looked up from his tablet screen. “Shoot.”
“Tall,” I said. “About Heath’s height with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.”
“How old?”
“Uh . . .” I had to think about it for a second. “I think around our age, maybe a little older. Early-to-mid thirties.”
Gil typed away and I wondered if he was hacking into law enforcement records as we spoke. “There’s nothing about a guy named Wyatt in Cruz’s e-mails,” Gilley said, which let me know exactly where he was getting his info.
“Yeah, but aren’t you only looking in the e-mails you sent from Cruz’s computer to yours?” I asked. “I mean, there could be mention of him in one of the older e-mails.”
Gil gave me the patronizing look that someone who considers himself a mental giant might reserve for someone exiting the short school bus. “I’m in Cruz’s e-mail, M. J.”
I felt a small burst of alarm. “How did you get into his e-mail from here?”
“I reset his password, and put a tracer on his e-mail so that when he reset it again, I’d get a text and voilà! I can root around in here at will.”
“Gil!” I snapped. “Don’t you think he’s gonna notice that?”
Gilley remained unfazed. “Oh, relax!” he told me. “He’s never going to notice unless we’re both in his e-mail at the same . . . uh-oh.”
Gilley sat forward and his typing took on some urgency. “What’s happening?” Heath asked into the prolonged silence that followed.
“Gilley just tipped his hand,” I said, crossing my arms and shaking my head at him.
“It’s fine,” Gil said, and a few keystrokes later he sat back and wiped his brow. “Phew!”
Gil smiled winningly at us then and found us looking expectantly back at him. “Right,” he said, hunching over the keyboard again. “Wyatt something . . .”
“Why don’t you start with Daryl and see if that leads us to Wyatt?” I suggested.
“I’m already on it,” Gil said, like he didn’t need me to remind him.
And then I remembered that the two grave robbers had mentioned something about a professor. “Hey, Gil?”
“Busy,” he said, his fingers still flying over his keyboard.
I ignored him and continued with, “While you’re looking into Daryl, see if he was enrolled in any of the local colleges or universities.”
Gil stopped typing and looked up at me. “Why?”
“In the imprint, they mentioned taking the vessel to someone they called ‘the professor.’ I’m thinking that maybe they were enrolled in some sort of class with someone who might’ve been an expert on Native American artifacts.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Gilley’s fingers actually typed faster. After several minutes he finally said, “Aha!”
“You found Wyatt?” I asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Did you find the professor?” Heath offered.
“Er . . . no to that too.”
“Then what did you find?” I said impatiently.
“An address for Daryl,” Gil said.
I stared at him. “How does that help us?”
“Maybe you can ask some of his neighbors if they know this guy Wyatt,” Gil suggested.
I leaned back in my seat and Doc fluttered on the arm of the chair, sensing my irritation. “A lot of legwork was something I was hoping to avoid, Gil. I mean, isn’t there anything else out there in cyberspace on Daryl or his buddy Wyatt?”
“Not according to public records,” Gil replied. “I mean, I’ve got some charges levied against Daryl for grave robbing and a DUI a few years ago, but nothing traceable to any other involved party.”
“Crap,” I said, realizing this was going to be harder than I thought. “Okay,” I conceded. “Heath and I will go root around Daryl’s place tomorrow and see if we can’t come up with a little more information.”
Gilley stretched lazily in his chair. “While you two are off doing that, I’m gonna call Gopher and see if I can’t bum some equipment from him.”
“I thought we were buying it with the two grand Pena was giving us?” Heath said.
Gilley did the short-school-bus look again and said, “Why pay for what we can borrow?”
“Take a temperature check with him too, will you, Gil?” I asked. I was worried that our producer was going to start getting impatient with the amount of time we were taking off. “Make sure we still have jobs to come back to once we finish up here.”
Gil tapped his lip. “Good thinking. Make sure we’re all still employed before we ask to borrow expensive equipment.”
After that, we all turned in.
Chapter 12
“What a dump!” I whispered when Heath pulled to a stop in front of a run-down mobile home at the very back of a trailer park in a rather seedy section of Los Alamos.
The trailer was weatherworn and in a bit of a shambles, with paint peeling off battered siding and decaying wood. The windows had paper taped over them and the door looked ready to fall off its hinges.
The yard was littered with beer cans and trash all in various stages of decay. An old milk box held up one side of a set of wooden steps leading to the door, and I wondered who’d be brave enough to step onto those going either in or out.
“I don’t want to get out of the car,” I admitted.
The door to the trailer suddenly popped open, and an elderly woman with curlers in her hair and a cigarette hanging from her wrinkled lips eyed us with suspicion.
“Looks like we’ll have to get out and talk to her,” Heath said.
“Yippee,” I said woodenly.
We hopped out and approached the trailer, being careful where we walked. The whole place smelled of smoke and mold, and the combo caused my stomach to bunch. Still, Heath and I bot
h pressed forward on our mission to find out more about Daryl West and hopefully his buddy Wyatt. “Hi there!” Heath said, all friendly-like.
“What you want?” the woman snapped.
I held back the urge to correct her English.
“We’re here about Daryl,” Heath told her, getting right to the point.
The woman’s suspicious eyes turned downright hostile. “He ain’t here.”
Her answer surprised me somewhat, as, by the looks of her, she’d be the type to tell us he was dead and to go away and leave her alone. I wondered suddenly if she’d been told about Daryl’s fate. I also wondered if she was related to him. Either way, she didn’t seem like someone willing to tolerate a lot of questions. Whatever we asked about Daryl, we’d have to ask carefully. “Actually,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, “we’re really trying to find Daryl’s friend Wyatt.”
The old lady continued to scrutinize us, and puff on her cigarette, which was in serious need of having its ashes knocked off, lest they dribble onto her housecoat. . . . Oops. Too late. “What you want with Wyatt?” the old lady asked, swiping at the ashes now dirtying her clothing.
Heath and I exchanged a look and he nodded to me to take the lead. “We need the expertise of a friend of his,” I said.
“Expertise?” she said, mocking my word choice.
I was careful to hold my distaste for her and her mocking tone in check. “Yes, ma’am. Wyatt told us that if we ever found anything that needed to be . . . uh . . . appraised, then we should go see this guy he knows. A guy he calls the professor.”
The old lady cocked her head, pulled the cigarette butt out of her mouth to tap it on the side of the trailer before flicking it with two fingers onto the dirt a few feet from where we were standing. I refused to flinch. “Why don’t you just go to Wyatt’s?” she asked next.
“We couldn’t find it,” I said quickly. “I mean, I’ve only been there once, and I’m having a hell of a time finding it again.”
“Why don’t you call him?”
I held up my phone and wiggled it. “My old phone got stolen last week, and I never backed up the contact list. I had to start from scratch all over again.”
“So how’d you find us?” she asked, and I assumed that the “us” included Daryl.
“Information,” I said. “He’s listed at this address.”
I had no idea if that was true or not, but I hoped that she wouldn’t check before she helped us. If she helped us, that is.
The old lady rolled her tongue around for a few moments—and I wondered if she was playing with some ill-fitting dentures. Finally, she said, “I ain’t seen either Wyatt or Daryl in a week.”
I nodded like that didn’t surprise me.
“They go off sometimes together when they come into a little money, and then Daryl don’t come home for a few days and when he does, he’s usually drunk off his ass and not a penny to help me pay the bills.”
I nodded again, encouraging her to keep talking.
With a sigh, she finally gave us what we came to find out. “Wyatt lives in the apartments behind the Wal-Mart. I don’t know what unit, but maybe someone over there’ll know. If you see Daryl, you tell him to get his ass home before I throw his stuff into the street. And he better come home with some rent money!”
I pumped my head up and down enthusiastically. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “You got it. If we see him, we’ll tell him exactly what you said.”
I turned to Heath and took his hand, ready to go back to the car, but he resisted. I looked at him then and was surprised to find his eyes unfocused. I knew that expression, well. I’d seen it reflected on his face during several ghost hunts before. “You okay?” I whispered.
“She’s in trouble,” he said, motioning with his chin to the old lady, who was still eyeing us warily.
I hesitated and gave him my full attention. “Who’s talking?” I knew he was communicating with someone on the other side just by his expression and the cast to his eyes.
“I . . . I think it’s Daryl,” he whispered.
That surprised me. “Has he crossed?”
“No,” Heath said, and pointed to a withered and dying tree. “He’s over there.”
I swiveled my head and detected the faintest disturbance in the ether near the trunk.
“Is he talking?” I asked.
“What are you two whispering about?” snapped the old woman.
“That’s his grandmother,” Heath said softly, still unwilling to have the woman overhear. “She’s his only living relative and he’s convinced someone’s out to kill her.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know,” he said, closing his eyes so he could concentrate.
I turned my attention back to Daryl’s grandmother. I’d so wanted to leave without being the one to tell her Daryl was dead. “You say you haven’t seen Daryl for a week?”
“Yeah. Maybe a little longer.”
I swallowed hard. “Should we tell her what we know?” I whispered to Heath.
He frowned and opened his eyes. “No. She won’t believe us and she might think we had something to do with it. We should send her to Sheriff Pena, though. I don’t know what’s taking them so long to notify next of kin.”
“Has anyone from the Zanto Pueblo been out here to see you?” Heath suddenly asked her.
The elderly woman—clearly not Native American—actually laughed. “Why would anyone from a Pueblo come to see me?”
Heath didn’t answer; instead he pressed his point. “Has anyone from the sheriff’s department come to see you . . . Trudy?”
Her eyes narrowed again suspiciously. “Why don’t you cut the crap and let me know what this is about?”
Heath turned back to his Durango and rooted around inside his glove compartment. Finally, he came up with a pen and a piece of paper and he scribbled down something on it before walking up to her. Handing the paper to her, he said, “That’s the number to the sheriff’s department on the Zanto Pueblo. Ask to speak to Sheriff Pena. You need to call him, Trudy. Tell him you’re Daryl’s next of kin. Then, if there’s anyone you can stay with for a couple of days, you’ll need to do that too, okay?”
Trudy looked at the paper in her hands and then back at Heath as if he were talking crazy. “Are you high?” she asked him, quite seriously.
Heath didn’t answer her. Instead he turned and walked purposefully back to me. “Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand.
Before he got into the car, I noticed that he gave the tree one more long look while Daryl’s grandmother remained on the top step of her crappy trailer, still moodily eyeing us.
When we’d cleared the exit of the trailer park, I said, “Feel like talking?”
“She wasn’t going to listen,” he said—a bit defensively, I thought.
“You’re probably right.”
“And Daryl wasn’t giving me much to go on,” Heath added, as if I hadn’t already agreed with him. “I mean, you could see how suspicious she was. I start talking about her grandson who’s speaking to me from beyond the grave and she doesn’t even know he’s dead yet? She would’ve laughed us off the property.”
“Hey,” I said, laying a hand on his arm. “You’re preaching to the choir here, darlin’. I would’ve done the same thing.”
Heath sighed and leaned back from the hunched-over position he’d assumed when he started driving. “Daryl’s in a really bad state,” he said. “He thinks he got away from whatever attacked him, but he was insisting that it was right behind him. I’m thinking that the deathblow came from behind while he was trying to run.”
“The black hawk demon spirit,” I said knowingly.
“Had to be,” Heath said. “Daryl wouldn’t tell me much about what happened. He was too busy trying to convince me to help get his grandma out of the house. He kept saying that they knew where he lived.”
“They?”
“Yeah, weird, huh?”
“Did he say anything about Wyatt?”
&n
bsp; “I asked and that’s when Daryl disappeared. It was like he’d just remembered he was with Wyatt when he was attacked. He said something about needing to warn him too, and poof! He was gone.”
“So, Wyatt’s still alive?”
Heath shrugged. “If he is, then we have to assume either he or this professor guy has been taken over by the demon. It just depends on who opened the urn.”
I thought about where we were heading. “Do you think Wyatt’s at his place?”
“Only one way to find out,” Heath said, then pointed to his backpack, which was tucked next to my messenger bag by my left foot. “We’d better be ready for anything. Make sure you’ve got a few spikes handy, okay?”
I considered the attack that Gilley and I had sustained while we’d been locked in the jail cell. The magnetic spikes had finally proved to be too much for the demon, but it’d taken a whole lot of stabs on Gil’s part to get it to back off.
“I think we should’ve brought a few more,” I told him.
We cruised into the parking lot of a low-budget apartment complex, which had three floors and a catwalk that spanned the perimeter of each level. It looked like an old hotel that’d been converted to cheap apartments and likely had paper-thin walls and residents who paid their rent in cash . . . when they paid.
“Homey,” I said after Heath cut the engine.
“Can’t be any worse than Trudy’s trailer,” he reasoned.
“True dat,” I told him, and dug into my messenger bag to get out as many spikes as I could carry. Still, it wasn’t a lot, only five apiece for me and Heath.
He looked at the spikes with disappointment. “Man, I feel so unprepared for this, you know, Em?”
I stuffed all my spikes into the inside pockets of my jacket. “I do.”
We got out and surveyed the front of the apartments. It wasn’t a very big complex, only eighteen units in total by my count. “How do we find Wyatt?” I asked when we began walking toward the front.
“We can check the mailboxes,” Heath proposed. I thought that a very good idea.
When we approached the mailboxes, a woman with a bag of groceries hanging on her arm was just sticking her key into the keyhole. “Hi,” Heath said to her, offering a smile too.