Disembodied Bones (51 page)

“Tick-tock,” said that chilly voice, thinly
amused and from a far-off spot, watching her as he would watch an
entertaining sports game. “Time’s running out. Better hurry,
Leonie.”

Leonie didn’t say anything. Instead she
focused on reasoning. A maze would be constructed so that the
person would have to take the longest route in order to make it
through. Most people are right handed, and she was no exception,
and she had taken the right hand turn first.
Rookie mistake
.
Straight ahead would not be the way to go either.

She turned left and despite the threat of
more traps to come, Leonie hurried. Ten feet down there was a
corridor that went right. She ignored it and continued left. The
tunnel turned left and then right. Leonie stopped as she realized
she was breathless. It seemed too similar to the other sides.
Many turns and wham, another trap
. She gingerly prodded with
her foot and the cement floor seemed as firm as what she was
standing on.

Another chasm to suck me down? Another
glass-filled trench to cut my flesh to shreds?

Better hurry, Leonie
. The words
ricocheted in her head. She honestly didn’t know if they were real
or Elan had repeated them again.
Tick-tock
.

“What’s next, Elan?” she asked aloud.
“Alligators in a pit?”

Elan laughed an electronic noise that made a
shiver run down Leonie’s back. “Alligators wouldn’t live long in
the darkness.” She couldn’t tell from which direction his voice had
come. If it hadn’t possessed that metallic tenor she would have
thought he was standing close by in the dim blue light of the
passages, watching her. “How does your…hand feel, Leonie,
sweetheart?”

“It feels peachy,” Leonie said, inching
forward. Actually her hand felt like a lead balloon and throbbed
like a vice had been closed on it and still remained. But she was
thinking about Elan. It seemed odd that he wanted to talk all of a
sudden. It was as if he was trying to distract her from something.
Was she headed in the right direction or the right direction for a
trap?

Her hand went up to touch the wall and she
yanked it back with another stifled cry. More razor blades in the
walls in the exact spot she would stand to peer around the corner.
This time her palm was cut in addition to her fingers. Some of the
new cuts crisscrossed the old ones, like a sick game of
tic-tac-toe. She ripped a strip off the bottom of her black T-shirt
and bound her right hand, fumbling as she tried to tuck in the
edges with the already bound left hand.

When she was done she peered around the
corner without touching the wall and found another deep pit. No
surprise there.
Elan has a…affinity for pits.
This one was
deep as well. It was also half filled with water and no way to get
out. After floating in it for some time, a person would get tired
and eventually drown. Leonie stared into the darkness and could
barely see the scum covered water below. She cringed and instantly
hated herself for feeling the way she did.

Instead she spun around and repeated her
steps. Leonie took a left at the passage she’d earlier ignored. Ten
feet down that it turned left and then took another right. Despite
her agonizingly slow progress, she found no more traps waiting for
her and began to hurry her pace. There was a choice of going left
or straight and Leonie hesitated as she tried to decide.

There was a brief moment of silence and then
something crawled over her foot. Leonie leapt backwards like a
shot. She looked down and saw a slithering shape meandering down
the hallway. It wasn’t large, but twisted and glided on the
concrete floor, disappearing around the corner. Not alligators, but
something else. She peered down the leftward passage and knew what
waited for her there. There was the faint sound of hissing that
sounded like the water coming out of the pipe, but that wasn’t it
at all. She shuddered soundlessly.
A pit full of snakes
.

“I hope you got bad poison ivy when you had
to hunt them down, Elan,” Leonie said.

“Did one get out?” Elan’s voice was amused.
“Too bad. There were some rattlers in there. A cottonmouth or two.
I haven’t looked in on them for a day or two. I expected there
wouldn’t be many left as they have only each other to eat. But
there were a bunch of garden snakes too. So the big ones are bound
to last for a few months.”

Leonie ignored the left turn and went
straight. The passage took a right, then a left, and then another
immediate right. It was followed by another left that became a
T-split. She could go left or right. But she could see a cool green
glow coming from the left, perhaps the glow of a screen saver on
another laptop. She almost smiled when a spring loaded set of
stakes was set off by a wire she tripped. The pressure on her leg
was fleeting but she felt it through her pants and that inner alarm
went off like a firecracker, screaming at her to be wary. There was
a rush of air across her face and she jumped backwards like a
frightened cat.

Elan was laughing again. Leonie watched the
stakes streak around the right corner and although the corner
stopped the trap from coming all the way around into the wall, she
wasn’t quite fast enough. It was a set of stakes set about a foot
apart, some as much as three feet long and sharpened to a fine tip.
The longest one pierced her thigh and she screamed with the pain of
it. She took a shaking step backwards and pulled her leg off the
stake. A spurt of blood followed and dribbled down her pants. She
looked down and put her right hand over the wound.
At this rate,
I’ll bleed to death before he has a chance to kill me.

The puncture wound was deep, but it hadn’t
ripped the flesh. She’d missed most of the stakes by jumping
backwards. Leonie clumsily tore some more T-shirt and stuffed the
injury with a wad of cloth, hoping it would staunch the
bleeding.

Ignoring the pain, Leonie determinedly went
around the stake trap. She ignored the left and went toward the
glow. At the end of the passage was a laptop on the floor, a skull
and crossbones screensaver bouncing around a greenish background.
Beyond the laptop was a metal door. It was locked and the hinges
were on the outside.

She tapped a key and the riddle appeared:

-

What has six eyes,

Six arms,

Six legs,

Three heads,

And a very short life?

“I know this one, Elan,” Leonie said with a
note of triumph, finding the camera in an upper corner above the
door with the pitiless red light on. “It wasn’t as hard as you
said.”

“What’s the answer, Leonie?” Elan’s voice was
still tacitly amused.

“Three men about to be killed by a monster.
Three men about to die.” She immediately recognized the connotation
but ignored it.

“Very good. And just under the wire. You had
twenty-two seconds to go. There are thirteen variations on that
riddle, any would have been acceptable.”

“You’ll let the boy go?” Leonie didn’t want
to hear the hopeless pleading note in her voice, but it came out
anyway.

“If you get to him before I do, Leonie,” Elan
said.

“If I…get to him before you do?” she repeated
helplessly. “That’s not what you said.”

She could hear the vicious smile in his tinny
voice. “Rules change, Leonie. Run along, little girl. Let’s see how
well you remember the maze.”

Leonie heard the implicit threat and turned
away from the laptop. It was a shuffling gate that revealed all the
pain she was in and the looming fear that could engulf her at any
time, but she was running.

-

What has six eyes,

Six arms,

Six legs,

Three heads,

And a very short life?

Three men about to be eaten by a dragon.

Monday, July 29th

Who makes it, has no need of it.

Who buys it, has no use of it.

Who uses it, can neither see nor feel it.

What is it?

Roosevelt Hemstreet said incredulously, “You
want me to do what?”

Gideon sighed. “I know what it sounds like, a
really bad Abbott and Costello movie. But George Ogden told me to
go take a gander at Monroe Whitechapel’s crypt. He didn’t say it,
but he’s still afraid. I could hear it in his voice. I don’t think
he’d talk to a federal judge with a protective order for custody.
He wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

“His crypt,” Roosevelt repeated doubtfully.
“Do you know that he’s buried in that fancy cemetery on the hill
with his family? After they interred him, they didn’t put his name
on the crypt because they were afraid that the families of his
victims would do the same thing they did to his house, except
worse. Tear his body to little bits like the Ayatollah
Khomeini.”

“Ogden said something funny before he hung
up,” Gideon added broodingly. “He said, just remember, if you have
money, you can even make a cat dance.”

Roosevelt thought about it. “Just confirming
what you’ve already thought.”

“Yeah, but I need you to go look at the
crypt,” Gideon insisted.

“Jesus, if Rowena finds out what I’m up to,
I’m going to be toast. Black man on toast, with my ass fried to a
crisp. You don’t want me to look at the corpse, do you?” He sighed
deeply. “Ogden didn’t strike me as the type to play a joke, but
what did you think?”

“I think he’s really afraid, but I told him
who I really was, and I convinced him.” Gideon paused. “So if I
could go look at the crypt I would, but as you’re aware, I’m a
little tied up.”

There was a pensive silence. Roosevelt said,
“You haven’t killed anyone escaping?”

“I’m still at the Sheriff’s Department,”
Gideon protested, about three seconds too late.

“Right,” Roosevelt said. “I’ll call you
back.”

Gideon listened to the dial tone for a second
and then hung up the phone. He checked his email and found two
responses. One was from Brainsneeze. Gideon didn’t know the person.
The email was garbage. Brainsneeze was a civilian trying to pretend
that he was a wizard. He was also trying to break his way into the
hacker’s League of Nations by bragging.

Erasing the message, Gideon saw the other
message was anonymous. Now that’s interesting. He opened it up and
read the contents.
We have a winner.

Abruptly he stopped and looked at his right
hand. The palm of his hand hurt as did the tips of his fingers. The
left hand had an intermittent ache and a slight swelling that
started at the base of the thumb. Gideon frowned and ignored both.
He couldn’t do anything about it and the only thing that he sensed
from Leonie was like a fuzzy wall of pain and fear that kept going
up as far as the eye could see. He deliberately looked at the email
again.

The anonymous message confirmed previous
intense “phishing” for Gideon Lily. The dates started about two
years before with periodic reviews. The author stated that several
wizards had been offered financial incentives to get Gideon into
the right location, to discover what he was looking for, and to
generally get him into a position of vulnerability. The unknown
author also stated that it was assumed that Gideon had busted one
too many hackers.

I don’t bust. I prevent
. Gideon
studied the message diligently. Email could be traced. If the
operator was clever it would be routed through other servers all
over the world. If the operator were really clever, or arrogant, he
or she could use their own computer and never get caught.
Unless, of course, you run into me
. His fingers began to
manipulate the keys.

The anonymity meant one thing to Gideon. The
unknown hacker had taken some money and now felt guilt over
Gideon’s situation. His arrest would be all over the midnight
internet and the wizards would be discussing it at length amongst
themselves. Some of them had limited consciences and would feel
that Gideon had been asking for trouble. Whatever he got, was
probably what he deserved. Another one hadn’t felt that, but not so
much as to leave a name.

By the time Gideon figured out who it was,
the sun was making bars of light on the wall through the slats of
the blinds. Her name was Caffeine Queen and she was a mid-level
player. Gideon had a file on her because she dabbled in illegality,
but she had morals. She messed only with companies with bad
reputations, the kind of companies who hired mercenaries to do
their dirty computer work. She had pet projects. Hypocrites,
backstabbers, and liars were all legitimate targets for her. She
didn’t steal money or equipment for herself, but left statements on
their websites, condemning their lack of virtues concerning
treatment of animals, people, and environment in varying degrees of
severity.

Gideon liked her. She was a cowboy who had
fun. He had idly figured she was a teenage genius with an agenda,
living on the Gold Coast in the guest house of her parents’ estate.
However, he wasn’t surprised when he discovered she was a
forty-four year old housewife living in rural Washington State. She
had two daughters, fourteen and eighteen, and a husband who worked
in the lumber industry. The lady was active on the net and liked
her causes.

More and more activity was going on in the
outside hallway, and Gideon presumed that he had limited time to
work. He didn’t waste time with another email to Caffeine Queen. He
called her on the telephone. There was a two hour time difference
and a sleepy teenager picked up the phone. The teenager didn’t
argue when Gideon politely asked for her mother.

“Oh, jeez,” the teenager said irritably. “Is
it seven o’clock already? MOM! Phone for you!” There was a pause.
“No, it’s not Dad. I didn’t ask who it is. Shut up, Kiki. Your
breath smells like a sewer, rat face.”

A minute later, a woman came on the phone.
Gideon had revised his mental image. She was short with graying
hair and bright blue eyes that glittered with moralistic fervor.
When this was all over, and he wasn’t dead or in jail, he was going
to suggest to her that she would be great doing what he did. She
had the ‘nads for it. “Hello?” she said with an agreeable motherly
voice.