Torrent

CHAPTER 6

By the time the Jaguar pulled into the campground, my skin felt like it’d been burned by acid where the fire extinguisher propellant had struck it. I was glad none of it had landed in my eyes-and that we had a first aid kit in the van.

Temi parked behind Zelda. Darkness gathered in the trees, and the traffic had dwindled on the highway. Crickets chirped and some small animal scuffed about in the brown leaves carpeting the ground. I eyed the deepening gloom without favor and wished there were more miles between us and the Vendome.

Temi turned off the car and faced us, her elbow on the backrest. “So, am I hired yet?”

“Yes,” Simon said.

His hair and shirt were crusted with fire extinguisher propellant, and he already had visible burns on one cheek where the goo had spattered him. If the riders had taken the brunt of the attack, they’d be even more irked at us than they had been before. Clearing out of Prescott might be a smart move, though I had a hard time entertaining it, not with the memory of that golden disk at the forefront of my mind. I wished there’d been time to examine it. If Simon and I were the ones to break the story of some one-of-a-kind relic on our website, this time someone else couldn’t get credit for bringing awareness of it to the community, not like with the Anasazi find. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me, but I wanted my old professors and classmates to see that I hadn’t become some sleazy grave robber just because we were selling some of what we found, items that most people would consider junk anyway.

Temi was looking at me, waiting for a response.

I nodded. “If you want it, you’ve certainly earned it at this point.”

She inclined her head once. “I apologize for not getting a warning to you earlier, but you didn’t give me your phone number.”

“I know. I was thinking about that up in the room.”

“I had to call your mother. Your parents’ number has been the same for decades.”

“Erg, what’d you tell her? Not the part about us being caught in some strange guys’ room, I hope.”

“No, but I did need to relay a sense of urgency, so she’d know I couldn’t chat. In the twenty seconds we were on the phone, she managed to ask if you’re eating regularly, staying away from the booze, and how your rash is doing.” Temi smiled faintly, one of her eyebrows twitching.

“Rash?” Simon grinned. “What rash?”

“None of your business.” I glowered at him, then gave Temi a plaintive look. “What did you tell her?”

“That you’d gone for take-out and had forgotten your wallet at the hotel. I needed to call you before you tried to pay and found out you were missing your money.”

I sank into the backrest. “Oh, good. That shouldn’t alarm her.”

“No, it’ll make her happy,” Simon said. “She’ll think we’re doing well enough to afford hotels and take-out. Your grandma seemed really concerned when she saw all the ramen bags in Zelda’s cupboards when we visited this summer.”

“She was more concerned that I showed up with some scrawny Indian boy.” I said the last in my best impersonation of her accent, though Yaiyai’s words had been even more derogatory than mine. “She keeps hoping I’ll take a trip to Greece to find an appropriate Prince Charming.”

“I’m not scrawny,” Simon said, throwing a glance at Temi, who was smiling and nodding in recognition at my Yaiyai tone. Adopted or not, she had a similar mother and grandmother and knew exactly where I was coming from. “There’s a lean mean beast hiding under this innocuous packaging,” Simon added, gesturing at his clothing.

“Is it hard to be lean and mean when you’re smothered in white goo?” I asked.

“No.”

“Uh huh.” I climbed out of the car. “Temi, do you want to stay for dinner? We have peanut butter and jelly, and some carrots and apples. We can tell you all about what we do, so you can decide if you truly want to join us before committing yourself.”

“We should probably tell her about the body too.” Simon climbed out of the car as well, eschewing the door. He seemed to dig the convertible concept.

“Body?” Temi blinked.

“Yeah, we stumbled across a recently deceased fellow in the mountains.” I kept the explanation simple, not wanting to sound like a crazy person for implying unnatural predators were stalking the hills. “The sheriffs may be by eventually. If not to question us about that, then to inquire about our new habit of sneaking into people’s hotel rooms to snoop around…”

Simon clasped his hands behind his back and studied the trees, as if he were the epitome of innocence. I didn’t know who he thought he was fooling.

“I have some food back at the Motel 6, so I’ll pass on dinner.” Temi’s nose had crinkled at the mention of PB and J. She was probably used to organic this-and-that and grass-fed such-and-such. “But thank you for offering. Can I meet you here tomorrow? You mentioned something about estate sales? I’m not that knowledgeable about antiquing, but anything would be better than standing all day at some fast food place. I’ll work hard. I’ve traveled quite a bit, so maybe that can be useful.”

“Sure.” I waved my phone. “I’ve got your number now, so I’ll text you when we get rolling.”

As Simon and I washed up, I kept an eye toward the woods and an ear toward the highway, listening for the roar of motorcycles. After all that had happened that afternoon, I was flinching at shadows. What had seemed a friendly campground the day before had taken on an eerie feel, and I wished it were fuller, with families chattering in the cool evening air. It was October, though, and the beginning of the workweek, so there were only a handful of campers spread out over the site. Once again, I wondered if we were making a mistake in staying.

Nothing jumped out of the shadows, and Simon and I made it through dinner without incident. We ate inside instead of at the picnic table. Neither of us seemed to be in the mood for the great outdoors that evening, a thought that Simon confirmed when he asked, “You mind if I sleep in here tonight?”

“Not at all.”

“In case you’re wondering, I’m not worried about crazies wandering around out there ripping people’s heads off-I just think it might be chilly tonight.”

“I wasn’t going to say a thing.”

You wouldn’t have caught me sleeping out there in a tent after the day we’d had either. Tents didn’t have locks, whereas the van did. Most of them worked too. Zelda also housed weapons of a sort. In addition to my bullwhip, a wooden Navajo bow hung over one of the side windows. Incongruously, a set of fiberglass arrows in a vinyl quiver hung below it. The bow had been one of my more educational finds-educational because I fell for the story from the old man who sold it to me. He’d claimed it was a hundred years old. An expert had later told me it’d been made in the 70s and that I was lucky it wasn’t plastic. Since it was worth less than I’d paid for it, I’d kept it and took it out and shot it every now and then.

“Good,” Simon said. “Thanks.”

I shrugged the words away. Zelda was his baby, bought and paid for back when we were still in school, and he could crash in it whenever he wanted. I often volunteered to take the tent, but he had a thing about snoozing in a bed while a girl slept on the dirt outside. Two could easily bunk in the van, but after working together all day, we seemed to get along better when we had our own space at night. Besides, we always joked that one of us might bring a girl or guy home and need some privacy. The idea of Simon successfully asking a girl out was almost as funny as the idea of him showing her to his tent for a good time. He’d sworn on any number of graves that he wasn’t a virgin, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. Of course, I hadn’t dated anyone since Christmas the year before, so I guess I couldn’t judge. Making the business work had been the focus for months, and with all the traveling we did, it was hard to take the time to meet people and get to know them. Tempe was supposedly our home base, but we didn’t have an office or store yet-our storage locker with the roll-up garage door wasn’t the sort of home base that drew one to visit often.

Simon had his laptop out, so I shook away the thoughts and dug mine out too. The campground lacked electrical hookups, but we had solar panels that we set up when we were staying for a couple of days, and in Arizona they were enough to run the DC fridge, a couple of LED lights, and-most importantly-our laptops. Someday we planned to get a dish for Internet, but for now, we used our cell phone’s wireless hot spots. We had to watch our bandwidth, especially when it came to gaming, but we could dink around for a little while in the evenings.

I flipped open my laptop and fired up RealmSaga. I selected my character, and the opening words of “This way lies adventure…” scrolled across the screen. I’d never played computer games in college-my grades thanked me-but Simon had gotten me hooked after we started traveling together. I now had a level-43 gnome engineer with a knack for blowing things up, and I spent too much time running around the virtual countryside practicing that skill. Simon had wanted me to play a healer, so I could toddle after his warrior, putting Band-Aids on his injured butt, but I’d known this would be more fun.

“I’m thinking about signing up for martial arts again once we get a store opened in Phoenix and are able to spend more time there,” I said randomly. Or at least I thought it was random.

Simon was sitting at the opposite side of the table, his face highlighted by the glow of the screen. He smirked knowingly. “Upset that you got your ass kicked by those pretty boys?”

“Hey, you got your ass kicked too.”

“Yeah, but that’s par for the course for me.”

“Did you just use a sports metaphor?”

“Completely accidental, I assure you.” Simon squinted at something on his screen. “I don’t even know what it means. It’s a golf thing, right?”

“Bowling,” I said, because it was fun to mess with him.

“Oh, right.” He leaned closer, his eyes intent. Alas, it wasn’t fun to mess with him when he wasn’t paying attention. He must have logged out in a monster-infested field or somewhere that required concentration.

We tapped at our respective keyboards in silence for a few moments. I’d logged out in town, so nothing dastardly was waiting to waylay my avatar. I trotted to the auction house to see if any of my goodies had sold. If only making money were so easy in real life. Kill a monster, remove its pelt in 0.5 seconds, repeat twenty times, then sell the pelts to a tailor who would turn them into a Monster Cloak of Hiding that he could auction for a small fortune.

Thinking of monsters made my mind drift back to the mine shaft again. I shook my head and shoved the image of the mauled man out of my mind. I was playing the game for a distraction, not a reminder. Besides, a “monster” hadn’t killed that fellow, no matter what it had looked like. The only monsters in the world were human beings, and they could come up with evils aplenty without the help of mythical creatures.

“Where are you?” I asked after answering greetings from guild mates, collecting my earnings from the auction house, and checking to see which of my buddies were online. Simon, AKA Makk Twuk, the mighty dwarf warrior, was missing. “You’re not in the game.”

The pale glow of the screen shone on his face. He was intent on something, just not RealmSaga.

“Not yet,” Simon murmured.

I leaned across the table and peered at his screen. “What are you looking up?” I asked, recognizing search engine results. Then I leaned closer and caught a name. “Ah.”

“Artemis Sideris.” He stared up at me. “She won Wimbledon?”

“Yeah, do you know what sport that is?”

His incredulous stare turned into a dirty glare. “I’m not that clueless. Besides-” he tapped the screen, “-it says right here. Wimbledon is the biggest tennis tournament in the world.”

“Technically, it’s not any bigger than the three other slams, but it’s the oldest and most prestigious.” I nodded toward his laptop. “You read what happened after that, yet?”

“I’ve got it open now.” His focus returned to the screen, his eyes tracking the words as he read. “…only twenty-one when she won her first slam… was the year her game truly came together, her grace on court and sheer agility a pleasure to watch in an era where bigger rackets and advanced string technology have made tennis a game of power and heavy hitting… expected her to win many more slams, but tragedy struck on the evening after her greatest victory. She, her coach, and her physical trainer were returning from a celebratory dinner when their car failed to get out of the way of a swerving truck quickly enough.” Simon lapsed into silence, though his eyes kept skimming down the screen. “She and the trainer were critically injured,” he finally said, summarizing. “The coach didn’t make it. She was the one driving. Later allegations claimed she was under the influence of alcohol, though she denied it.”

“Her coach was only in his thirties and recently retired himself,” I said. “He’d been well liked and considered one of the greatest players of all time. I never followed the sport either, but from the articles, it sounded like the whole tennis world blamed her for his death.” I had read a lot of those articles at the time, the summer before last. Even though I hadn’t heard from Temi in years, I’d checked in on her career now and then, and my whole family had gotten up early to watch that Wimbledon final. It wasn’t every day the kid from down the street hit it big in professional sports. “The last I heard, she’d had a whole bunch of surgery done on her leg and was in rehab. Her knee cap had been shattered into a few bazillion pieces, and I think a bunch of her other bones and joints were smashed up too. She spent months in recovery, but I’m guessing from the limp-and the fact that she’s not playing again-that it never got back to 100 percent.”

“Wow.” Simon closed the lid on his laptop. “Is that why you don’t like her? Because of the accident? Do you think she was lying about drinking?”

“I don’t not like her,” I said, not quite the same as claiming I did like her, I admitted to myself. “But anyway it’s not about that. When we were kids, we were best friends. We were both homeschooled since we lived out there in the boonies, so we didn’t have a lot of other opportunities to meet children outside of our community. We ran all over the countryside together, having adventures and getting in trouble, being like sisters, I guess. Our fathers both decided we should get involved with sports to keep us from finding more trouble, so after school, our parents would take turns driving us into town and dropping us off, her for tennis practice and me for swim team. It was just fun and exercise for me, but she was really good. Obviously.” I waved to his laptop. “When we were fourteen, she went off to Florida to some tennis academy, and I never heard from her again. I wrote a couple of letters, but she didn’t write back, so…” I shrugged. “Whatever. High school started, and I made other friends.”

“She just stopped talking to you?” Simon asked. “She doesn’t seem like someone who would do that.”

“Oh, like you know her so well after spending all of two hours with her.”

My words came out harsher than I’d intended, and Simon drew back at the sarcasm in my tone.

“Well, she did save our asses in that two hours,” he said.

I sank back into my seat and fiddled with the navigation keys, sending my avatar wandering around town, I pretended I was interested in the paladin hawking Arrows of Righteous Wrath in the chat window. I could feel Simon watching me though, like he was waiting for a more detailed explanation. The real explanation.

I sighed. He’d nag it out of me eventually. Or guess it. He wasn’t one of those obtuse guys who had the perceptive acumen of a rock. “The night before she left, we might have…”

“Fought?” he guessed.

“No.”

“Wrecked your dad’s car?”

“No,” I said, giving him an exasperated look. Did he want the story or not?

He seemed to be having fun guessing though, for he leaned forward, grinned, and tried, “Accidentally killed someone, then buried the body together, where nobody could find it?”

What a lunatic. “Yeah, that was it. And now that you know, we’ll have to kill you too. Have you filled out your will yet?”

“Nah, I don’t have anything to leave.”

“You have your thriving app business,” I said. “Sure, you only sell four apps a day right now, but I bet they’ll take off once you’re dead.”

Simon shook his head. “You’re thinking of art. Apps don’t work that way. The world forgets about you thirty-seven seconds after you stop promoting your work.”

“Ah. So, are you going to log in and play, or what?” I waved to his computer, hoping to distract him from his original inquiry. “Drizzt and Strider are asking where you are. Or shall I tell them you’re in the shower?”

Simon prodded at his crusty hair. He claimed to have used three canteens of water to wash up, but it wasn’t all that evident. At least we’d both be flame-retardant if someone’s campfire got out of hand tonight.

“We’re going to see her again tomorrow,” he said. “I guess I can ask her why she stopped communicating with you.”

I winced. So much for distracting him. “Don’t do that,” I said, turning the “don’t” into a drawn out whine.

“If you’d enlighten me, I wouldn’t have to.”

I glowered into my keyboard. “Look… I kissed her, all right?”

In the stunned silence that followed, I had ample time to admire the crickets chirping outside and the distant hoots of an owl. A Great Horned or a Spotted? My grandfather would know. I should probably get up and close that window. The temperature had dropped since sunset.

“You kissed her?” Simon finally asked. “On the lips?”

“No, on her elbow.” Funny how sarcastic I became when I was uncomfortable.

“But you like guys. I’ve seen you date lots of guys. Well, okay I’ve only seen you date two, but you mooned after at least five others while we were in school.”

Seriously? He’d been counting? I needed to clean him up and find him a girl. Not Temi though. Even with her checkered past and her uncertain future, she was out of his league. “Yes, yes, I moon after guys now.”

“Now? Does that mean you used to…” His eyebrows quirked. How had I known he’d be intrigued by this sort of thing?

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I was fourteen. I was trying to find myself. That’s all.”

His forehead scrunched up like the skin on a Shar Pei.

“Could we drop it?” I asked.

Simon lifted a hand. “Sh.”

It was only then that I realized the scrunched forehead wasn’t turned toward me but toward the window I hadn’t gotten up to close. “Do you hear that?”

A set of ghostly fingertips played the piano on my spine. “What? And you better not be screwing with me. I won’t find it very funny after the day we’ve had.”

When Simon looked at me, his usual mischievousness was absent from his eyes. “It got quiet, really quiet.”

The crickets had stopped chirping, and the owl had disappeared. A faint crack came from a campfire across the way, but nobody was talking. I leaned toward the window, but didn’t see anyone about. “Maybe people have gone to bed,” I said, though that didn’t explain the silent crickets. “Or maybe there’s a coyote or javelina out there. We are in the forest.”

Prescott had a population of forty thousand, with another sixty in the nearby towns, but it also backed up to national forest on multiple sides. Three miles out of downtown to the south or west, and you were in woods filled with all sorts of critters. Granted, we hadn’t seen anything fiercer than deer yet at the White Spar, but we hadn’t been roaming around at night either.

The image of that mauled body had popped into my head again when the first shriek came from the other side of the campground.