“That depends on what you have to tell me.”
“There isn’t much to tell yet.” Leaning sideways in the chair, I swung my legs up onto the night stand, resting my feet beside an ugly porcelain lamp. “I got a good look at the pit early this morning. Had a few words with your foreman. He seems nice enough, for a human.”
“I suppose.” From the background came the incessant clicking of a ballpoint pen—a sure sign that Devich was bored with my niceties. Which made two of us. “Where are you now?”
There were at least a dozen ways I could have phrased my response to make myself sound busy and dedicated, but I just didn’t have the energy to waste. “I’m in my motel room, about to take a nap.” I swirled circles on battered chair arm with my fingertip, desperately wishing I had time for a full night’s sleep. Or a pot of coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be out looking for my box?”
Gritting my teeth, I breathed deeply through my nose and prepared to make nice. “I’m flying from Halifax to Bar Harbor this afternoon, and I’ll be poking around the crash site tonight to see what I can find. If the crate went down with the aircraft, there should be some sign of it. And if it was taken from the plane after the fact, there will be a trail to follow.” I just wasn’t buying the disappeared-in-mid-flight theory. “But quite frankly, Mr. Devich, after the morning I’ve had, I should either be asleep or drunk, and the local bars don’t open for several more hours. So I’m going to take a nap, then get on a plane.”
I had to board my flight at three p.m., and the airport was sixty miles away. Devich’s phone call was eating into my limited rest time.
“Your morning didn’t go well?”
I glanced over at Orthus, whose chest rose and fell in the deep, steady rhythm of recuperative sleep. Verynoisyrecuperative sleep. “Only if you count the fact that I’m still alive. Well, as alive as I was yesterday, anyway,” I amended with a shrug he couldn’t see. “Which is more than I can say for the band of goblins dumb enough to follow me to Nova Scotia.”
Over the line, Devich made a wet coughing sound, and I pictured gourmet coffee spewing from his famously perfect nose. That probably didn’t really happen, but the mental image made me smile. He coughed again, then cleared his throat. “A band of goblins followed you to Nova Scotia?”
“Yeah, they showed up at the pit, all trigger-happy and out for revenge over a few punches I threw on a job a couple of nights ago. Like it’smyfault they’re cocky and easily distracted.”
“They fired at you first?”
Hmmm. That was a good question.Hadthey fired at me first? I couldn’t exactly remember… “If they didn’t, they were about to. It was either me or them, and if I hadn’t taken them down, I’d still be bleeding out in the woods somewhere, with one of them gnawing on my raw kidney. Fortunately for you, I came out on top. Unless you’dratherhire a bunch of over-armed, under-prepared goblins to find your box.”
Speaking of which, Devich had some explaining to do about his definition of the term “box.” But he posed another question before I could address that issue.
“What’d you do with the bodies?”
Turning my foot to one side, I used my big toe to flip up the lever on the base of the table lamp. Dim yellow light flooded one half of the hotel room, chasing shadows into the far corner. “Bowman helped me toss them into the pit. I figured a few more corpses wouldn’t make any difference in there anyway.”
“A fewmorecorpses?” Devich’s voice was a mixture of dread and confusion.
“Yeah. To keep the other one company. You do know your pit’s haunted, don’t you?”
“Pardon?” Hinges squeaked over the line, and I imagined him sitting straighter in an expensive chair in some posh office at the top of a Memphis high-rise. He probably had a fancy desk—ebony, or frosted glass—scattered with ornate pencil holders and paperweights. Hell, his stupid clicky pen had probably cost more than my entire arsenal.
I smiled at the realization that I was one up on him. “Haunted. By a wraith. You know, the wandering spirit of a murder victim?”
“I know what a wraith is, Ms. Walker,” Devich snapped, sounding more openly hostile than I’d ever heard him. “What I don’t understand is why you think there’s one in my pit.”
I let my feet slid to the floor as my focus settled on an arrangement of tiny bottles on top of the TV. How had I not noticed the mini bar? “Because I saw him. Interviewed him, in fact.”
The pause that followed went on long enough that I started to wonder if Devich was still on the line. Then he took a deep breath, and I realized he was thinking. Probably trying to decide what to ask first. “Ms. Walker, wraiths can’t speak.”
I crossed the room, the soles of my feet scraping rough, commercial-grade carpet. “Thisone sure as hell could, and he had some interesting things to say.”
Another, shorter pause, while his ballpoint pen clicked rapidly. “Such as…?”
“Such as the fact that the box buried in your pit isn’t exactly a corrugated cardboard cube. It’s a sarcophagus.” This timeIpaused, to let him absorb what I’d said. “Is there any particular reason you failed to tell me that in the first place? Knowing that little detail might have saved me considerable time and effort.”
It probably wouldn’t have, but Devich didn’t need to know that.
“Is there any particular reason you failed to tell me you can see—and evidently speak to—wraiths?”
Ihateit when people use my own words against me. “You first.”
Background stillness accompanied Devich’s voice, as if no other sound could compete with it. “Your job is to find the box and bring it to me. Unopened.”
