The Cursed

It took them a few minutes and a big mug of tea laced with whiskey to get Valeriya calmed down. “Thank you,” she said, then winced. “Someone is watching. Someone is always watching. If they see me crying, it will be even worse.”

 

 

Kelsey was seated across from Valeriya. “You have to tell us what happened. Who’s threatening you and why?”

 

“Last night,” Valeriya said, huge tears welling in her eyes again, “I went to take the trash out. Suddenly he was there. He could have killed me then. He is a big man. Strong—powerful.”

 

“What did he look like?” Hannah asked, then looked at Kelsey, pretty sure she already knew the answer.

 

“I don’t know!” Valeriya wailed. “He grabbed me from behind. He—he was strangling me, but then he told me what to do and let me go. He said I had to get back here, back in the house, to find something. He thinks there’s something here. Something valuable. I told him you wouldn’t let me back in, but he said I had to make you. He said if I didn’t get in and look for this...this thing, he’d kill my baby and my mother. He said if I try, even if I die, then at least my baby would still live.”

 

“What is ‘it’?” Kelsey asked.

 

Valeriya shook her head. “I don’t know. And I don’t think he believed me when I asked what he was talking about. I am so frightened! I don’t know what to do. We don’t have money. I can’t just go away.” She laid her head down, sobbing again.

 

Hannah and Kelsey exchanged a look, and then Hannah said, “There, there. We’re going to make sure you’re safe.”

 

“We just need to know everything that you can tell us about this man,” Kelsey said. “Have you been threatened before? Did anyone ever ask you to look for something in this house before?”

 

Valeriya looked up, wiping her cheeks, a frown creasing her face. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

 

“What?” Kelsey asked.

 

“He knows me,” Valeriya said. She turned to look at Hannah. “And he knows you. He knows this house.”

 

“How do you know that?” Hannah asked. She felt rivulets of ice creep along her spine.

 

“Because he left me money once—here. In a room in this house.”

 

*

 

Billie Garcia’s boat was an old fishing rig refitted with a diving platform. It was a twenty-two-footer with a small tower and smaller cabin. There were slots, four on each side, to hold dive tanks.

 

Her name was Original Sin.

 

Logan headed off to find out if anyone had seen who had taken the boat out and brought it back in, and when.

 

Dallas stepped from the dock to the deck and took a look around. There were no tanks in the slots now. The boat had been hosed down. There wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on the deck.

 

He headed up to the helm. There was no radio, no GPS, nothing that would allow them to trace the boat’s movements. He headed down into the small cabin. It held a table that converted into a bed, a small head—complete with a shower hose positioned right over the toilet—and a small galley. There were cabinets above the sink; opening them, he found some basic supplies: canned goods, mac ’n’ cheese, and cereal and other nonperishables.

 

He didn’t think the cabinets would yield anything useful, but he moved cereal boxes around anyway, looking behind everything.

 

He gasped when he moved the corn flakes and found the treasure he’d been seeking.

 

There was a knife. His heart quickened. Of course, it could be any knife.

 

But it wasn’t. It was a bowie knife.

 

It had a nine-inch blade, the handle was polished wood, and it was about fifteen inches total in length. It had been washed clean.

 

But...

 

That didn’t mean that it wouldn’t yield something. If Jose had cut his attacker deeply enough, blood could be soaked into the wood or lurking in the slot where the blade was attached. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

 

“You down there?”

 

He heard Logan shouting to him from the deck, and a moment later, Logan appeared on the steps that led down to the cabin. “Anything?” he asked.

 

Dallas produced the knife.

 

Logan whistled softly. “We need to get that to a lab quickly.”

 

Dallas nodded. “Agreed. What about you?”

 

“Big guy brought the boat in yesterday. Wearing, of course—”

 

“A hoodie,” Dallas finished for him.

 

“A dark hoodie. And he kept his head down. They noticed because they know the boat belongs to Billie Garcia.”

 

“And this knife,” Dallas said, “could—with any luck—be another piece of evidence tying Machete to this boat and Jose’s murder.”

 

*

 

Machete was still watching. And waiting.

 

And watching a house—even Hannah O’Brien’s house—was, frankly, boring.

 

At least he had different hiding places from which to watch. Buildings, the alley, sometimes under trees. And he was the one person who could get away with being where he was. He was perfect. Maybe the Wolf had known that from the beginning. But in the beginning it had been fun. It had been thwarting the police and riding the waves and finding treasure, tricking people, tricking governments.

 

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