Blood, Ash, and Bone

CHAPTER Nineteen

The cigarette hit me hard on top of the nicotine patches, but it soothed the wrenching buzz. It did nothing to tamp down my anger, however.

I called Trey. Voicemail. Then I called John. When he answered, I blasted him. “There’s another old guy involved.”

“What? Who?”

“A vendor. He’s missing. Mysterious circumstances. Plus your wife’s been blackening my name all over town. And now the Klan—”

“What?”

I sucked in another lungful of smoke. “I should’ve never let you in my shop, you and your post-dated check and big boots. I should’ve known this would be the result—being stalked, being manipulated, being set up—”

“Slow down, Tai. Start at the beginning.”

My cell phone beeped with an incoming call. Trey.

“I gotta go. But you and I will be discussing this further, John Wilde, you hear me?”

“But—”

I hung up on him and answered Trey. “You are not going to believe—”

“Tai?”

His voice was lost in a swooping chop and woosh, like a stainless steel tornado. “Trey?”

“I’m sorry, I….since this morning…. later?”

“I can’t hear you, where are you?”

“…at the latest…the helicopter…”

“Trey, do not get in a helicopter with Reynolds, there is a slight chance Audrina is trying to kill him.”

And then the line went dead. I tried calling back. More voicemail. So I sent a text instead, telling him to meet me back at the Expo as soon as possible. Then I stared at the phone. Now I had identity theft and a missing person to deal with. I sucked down another lungful of smoke.

The voice came from behind me. “Put down the phone and turn around.”

I looked over my shoulder. It was Mrs. Simmons. She looked sick, trembling and pale.

I stood. “Are you okay?”

The gun came out of nowhere, a semi-automatic, enormous and jet black and scary as hell. It shook violently in her hands.

My cigarette dropped to the ground. “Mrs. Simmons—”

“It was you! Your name’s in the receipt book! He even took your business card!”

I raised my hands slowly, palms forward. “Not mine, he didn’t.”

“You said you were Tai Randolph!”

“I am, but the person who left the card—the person who sold your husband that box of books containing that map—wanted you to think it was me. But it wasn’t.”

Her hands shook harder, and the big damn gun shook with them. So much for Earl the Biker Dude keeping her out of trouble.

I kept my voice slow and easy. “I’m the real Tai Randolph, and I have the credentials to prove it. But I don’t know how to prove that I’ve never been in your shop.”

“I’m calling the police!”

“Please do. And once you’ve figured out that I’m telling the truth, we can figure out how to find your husband.”

Mrs. Simmons considered me over the barrel of the gun, her voice as shaky as her hands. “He wouldn’t run off like this. The police keep saying I have to wait to file the missing persons report, that he’s only been gone twelve hours.”

I lowered my hands a little. The gun stayed up, but her anger wasn’t behind it anymore.

My heart panged. “I’ll do what I can, Mrs. Simmons. But first…could you put the gun down?”

She seemed suddenly ashamed of herself. When she handed over the weapon, I ejected the magazine. Empty. The gun hadn’t been cleaned in a while either.

“Where’d you find this?”

“Bob kept it under the register.”

“He didn’t take it with him on his expedition?”

She shook her head. “No. He said he didn’t need it.”

Most likely he’d been wrong about that, but I didn’t say so.

“Do you remember anything about that map?”

“It had lots of gibberish on it. Weird drawings. A moon, some stars.”

Putting down the gun, I pulled a schedule from my bag and flipped it over. Then I grabbed a pen and squiggled a crescent shape. “Like this?”

“And there was other stuff too. Wavy lines.”

I doodled in some spirals and circles. “Like this?”

“No.” She shook her head, frustrated. “None of it made any sense. But there was a list in the middle. Bob said it was a treasure tally. He said he recognized the symbol for gold. AU.”

I scribbled a list in the middle. “Like that?”

She nodded. “And there were other numbers too, strings of them. He said it was a code. But it was the paper that made him decide it was real. He said it was old, real old.”

“Did he say where he was headed with it?”

“No. But I think it was a cemetery.”

“Bonaventure? Laurel Grove?”

“He didn’t say. But I think he managed to figure out the code. I found the piece of paper next to the register with letters and numbers and the word ‘boneyard’ on it.”

Boneyard. Savannah had plenty of those. The whole city was a boneyard. Even the medians of Victory Drive were burial grounds.

“Was there anything more specific?”

She shook her head. “That’s all I can remember.”

I was staring at my makeshift map when I saw them at the edge of the parking lot. Two uniformed Savannah metro officers. They spotted us, double-checked a piece of paper, and then headed our way.

I tried to keep my voice calm. “Mrs. Simmons? Did you call the cops?”

She shook her head. And then my stomach plummeted. Because that meant there was only one reason those cops were there, looking full of duty. Mrs. Simmons followed my eyes, turning to look behind her. And then she knew too.

“No!” she said, hands to her mouth.

But the cops were headed straight for us, with stoic compassion on their faces. And they kept coming, relentlessly bearing their official burden forward.