Diesel ate half his dinner roll. “You got it.”
“Was it difficult getting your monkey into the country without a quarantine period?” Nergal asked.
There was a long pause where no one spoke and everyone looked at Diesel.
“He’s a service monkey,” Diesel finally said.
Not to mention, Diesel doesn’t fly by ordinary means.
“You’ll never guess what happened tonight,” Glo said to Diesel. “Josh was giving us a tour of the Pirate Museum and one of the exhibits came crashing down at our feet, and it turned out to be a real dead guy. That’s how we got to meet Dr. Nergal. He’s a coroner, and he was awesome. He figured out that the guy had been shot, and he knew all about the gun and everything. And he figured out the guy had been shot over ninety years ago.”
“Impressive,” Diesel said.
Nergal shook his head. “Not at all. It was obvious.”
“The head fell off when the dead guy hit the floor,” Glo said. “And it was as if the instant Dr. Nergal touched the head he knew all this stuff!”
“He had a bullet hole in the back of his skull, and the round was still contained in the cavity,” Nergal said to Diesel.
The waitress brought the food, and we all dug in. Nergal was halfway through his lobster roll when his phone buzzed. He read the text message and tapped in a response.
“This has been fun,” he said, pushing back from the table, leaving his share of the bill, “but I have to be going. Duty calls.”
“He seems nice,” Diesel said to me when Nergal left. “You should consider going out with him.”
“You think?” I asked.
A half hour later we left the restaurant. Josh walked Glo to her car, and Diesel and I walked up Wharf Street to my tan Chevy clunker.
“I sense a disturbance in the Force,” Diesel said.
“Gee, I can’t imagine why. Maybe it’s because one minute we’re in bed together, and then all of a sudden you get dressed and leave, and I don’t hear from you for three weeks. And then I find out you’ve been in Sri Lanka.”
“Well, where did you think I was?”
“I don’t know…a drugstore. I thought you were going out for condoms.”
“Yeah, looking back I could see where that might have been a possibility.” He slung an arm around me and nuzzled my neck. “Maybe we should take up where we left off.”
“You’re actually willing to risk one of us losing our abilities?”
“I think I could work around it.”
“No way. I’m not taking the chance. Besides, I’m not even sure I like you.”
“Of course you like me. I’m fun.”
“I had an earlier run-in with Wulf, and now you’re here,” I said to Diesel. “What’s going on?”
“Do you know about Martin Ammon?”
“I know he’s a billionaire.”
“Martin Ammon is a publishing and media giant,” Diesel said. “He owns a bunch of newspaper and media outlets in England and the U.S. He also has a reputation as a devourer of companies, big and small. He’s an eccentric, power-hungry megalomaniac. His great-grandfather was Billy McCoy, a notorious rumrunner during Prohibition. McCoy’s partner was Peg Leg Dazzle.”
“Was Peg Leg related to the bakery Dazzles?”
“I imagine all the Salem Dazzles are related, but I don’t know where Peg Leg fits in. Anyway, McCoy and Peg Leg at some point in their illegal endeavors came across a diary and an accompanying coin. The diary belonged to a pirate name Palgrave Bellows, and it detailed a treasure he’d hidden on an island off the coast of Maine. The coin was supposed to help read Palgrave’s treasure map. Unfortunately for McCoy and Peg Leg, the map wasn’t with the diary and the coin, and they were never able to find the treasure.
“A bunch of years ago the diary fell into Ammon’s hands, and he became obsessed with finding the treasure. He bought a house on Marblehead Neck, and he buddied up with a history professor. The two of them put a lot of time and money into the project, but nothing came of it.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It wasn’t a secret. There were newspaper articles about the diary and the lost treasure of the Gunsway.”
“The Gunsway?”
“That was the name of the ship that Palgrave plundered. It originated in the Far East, and according to the diary it contained unimaginable riches both ordinary and magical.”
“Wow. Magical.”
“Yeah, that’s where Wulf and I come into the picture. The magical part of the treasure, if the diary is to be believed, is the Avaritia Stone. The Stone of Avarice. Ammon never made a big deal about the stone in all his interviews, but I suspect his real goal was to get his hands on it. He’s made joking references in the past about his drive to acquire more and more money, and says that it’s appropriate his parents named him Martin. If you combine his first initial with his last name it spells ‘Mammon,’ one of the seven princes of hell and the personification of wealth and greed.”
“That wouldn’t be my first choice for a prophetic name.”