Chapter Nine

Levi

I was sunk in misery as I sat there, cold and alone and waiting for Rolf to come find me again. And then I heard a tap on my window and saw Willie standing there outside the car. He smiled at me, held up a key fob and clicked it. The car made a little chirping sound, and the door locks popped up.

He pulled open the door and grinned down at me. “Hey! Wanna get out of there?”

“Wille! What are you doing here? How did you get Rolf’s keys?”

“Don’t worry about him. I have my ways.”

“Rolf, tell me! You better not have hurt him!”

“Oh, calm down and stop making so much noise,” he said. He held up the keys again. “Don’t you want out of those cuffs?”

“Tell me you didn’t hurt Rolf!”

“Hell no, he’s okay. He might have a little headache when he wakes up, but he’s all right.” He bent over me and pulled me forward so he could unlock my handcuffs. “He’s got you trussed up, all right. Keep still so I can get these cuffs off you.”

“Where is he?”

“Who? Your cop? He’s right where I left him, I suppose. I was waiting over there behind those bushes when he came around the corner and I jumped out behind him. He never even knew what hit him. But we better hurry and get out of here before he wakes up.”

He twisted the key in the lock and the cuffs opened and fell off on the seat beside me. He reached for my arm and pulled me out of the car.

“Is he hurt?” I asked, feeling frantic. “I need to go to him.”

“Hell no, you don’t. You’re coming with me.” He yanked on my arm and then pulled me along behind him to the road, breaking into a little jog that I struggled to keep up with. His legs were longer, and I was worn out by all that had happened so far. I managed, though, and soon we’d made it to the crossroads I remembered nearby. It was maybe a half mile away from the old church.

“I called Benjie to come pick us up. You remember Benjie.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh. Well, he can get his mom’s car. All we have to do is wait here. He should be here soon.”

“Willie, they’re going to catch us. We should just go back to Rolf’s car and throw ourselves on his mercy.”

“Fuck that. He ain’t got any mercy. So fuck him. I have the money now and I’m not letting go of it. I worked hard for that money.”

“How do you figure?”

“Don’t worry about it, smartass. It’s mine. And now all I have to do is get this damn curse off it. That’s where you come in.”

Some headlights were coming down the road toward us, so we jumped back out of sight. As they got closer though, Willie smiled with relief. “It’s Benjie. Let’s go.”

Willie pulled me behind him again to the road and we piled in the front seat next to Benjie, the guy who’d come to get us. I sat over by the window and thought about Rolf, hoping he was all right and wondering if he really would have taken me to jail, or if he’d just been trying to scare me. I figured that was a toss-up. But either way, I was dying to see him again and check on him. I guessed this was how the mating thing I’d heard so much about actually worked. It seemed like I wanted to be with him all the time, no matter what. I sent up a quick prayer to the gods that he was all right.

Sagging against the window, I half-dozed as we drove. I guess it was the adrenalin dump. I was expecting to hear sirens behind us at any time, but we soon arrived back in Valleywood without incident. I realized we were heading straight toward my apartment building. On the one hand, that was good, because I was worried about Nugget. But on the other hand, wasn’t that the first place Rolf would come looking? And was that good or bad for me?

I must have made some slight noise, because Willie glanced over at me. “We’re going to pick up your book and then we’ll find a safe place to go so we can do this thing.

“But the book said we need to do it under a full moon. The moon isn’t full.”

He shrugged. “Oh, well.”

“You can’t just say, ‘Oh, well,’ and forget it. There’s a reason for every part. And that includes the personal stuff from Ben Bolagi.”

“What’s the reason for every part?”

“I don’t know, but if my mother went to the trouble of writing it down, then we should do it.”

“Is there a full moon soon?”

“How should I know?”

“Can you check?”

I sighed and pulled out my cell phone to Google it. I sighed as I put it back. “No full moon for four more days.”

“Then we’ll have to do without. And I’m not going back to that graveyard. The cops will be watching it.”

“But…”

“No buts. We could all be dead in four days. The curse is already after me. Imagine how bad it will be now that I have the money. We can’t afford to wait.”

I sighed heavily, though I knew he was probably right about the need for urgency. I wondered for the hundredth time why I’d ever let him talk me into this.

Willie gave me the elbow. “What else did you say we needed?”

The potion said peppery herbs…what do you think those might be?”

“Beats the hell out of me. You can ask at the supermarket.”

“Oh, okay, I guess.”

“What else?”

“My mother’s book. Some red cloth and a red candle. Oh, and once again—something personal of that person, like some of Bolagi’s hair or nail cuttings.”

“Whatever. We’ll just have to make do.”

Leroy stopped in front of my apartment to let us out and then went to park somewhere, “just in case,” as Willie told him.

Up in my apartment, Nugget was happy to see me, though incensed about Willie being there. I had to lock him in the bedroom while I found my mother’s book. I told Willie I needed to walk my dog, but he shook his head.

“No way. We have to get out of here. Hurry up and let’s go.”

“Not before I leave him some food and water,” I said, and went to fill his bowls, while Willie growled and paced behind me. I didn’t care—I didn’t want to leave Nugget here by himself again anyway. Plus, I guess I was stalling a little. I was hoping Rolf would show up and rescue me, but it didn’t happen. I wondered again just how hard Willie had hit him.

“Come on, Levi!”

“Stop shouting. I don’t want my grandma to hear and come out here.”

“Aw, hell no. She’d talk us to death before she let us go.”

“Lay off my grandma.”

“Okay, don’t get touchy. Come on, let’s get this done.”

When we finally left the apartment, we headed straight to the nearest big grocery store, which was a few blocks away. It was called the V&T, and it was the largest grocery retail store in the city. There were probably twenty or more of them inside the city limits, and their official name was the Valleywood Tea Company—hence the V&T, though no one ever called them anything to do with Tea. They had started out as a tea business, I think, before opening the first grocery store way back near the turn of the century.

It was there that I got the “peppery herbs,” which consisted of some basil, some oregano, some marjoram and chives. I even found a red candle in the household goods aisle. I already had my mom’s book and a small Bible she had among her things. All we needed was the red cloth, and the personal stuff from the one who laid the curse. Willie said he had a red shirt at home that he could use, so we headed toward his house.

“What about the personal stuff? You said you’d figure it out? How’s that?”

He shrugged. “Okay, look. It was Ben Bolagi, like I told you. He was originally from a foreign country, and really superstitious, according to my friend. He knew all about curses and stuff like that. It was in his religion.”

“But you said that the curse killed him. You said he got hit by a truck as he left the funeral home.”

“That’s right. I don’t know why the curse struck him. Maybe it was just an accident. They do happen, you know. Or maybe he did something wrong with his curse. Anyway, he stole that money from the bank.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Think of it as a Cash Redistribution System. He stole it from that bank and now I’ve stolen it back. But really, if he’s dead, what does it matter?”

“It’s the bank’s money!”

He just laughed. “You worry too much. Let’s go do the spell.”

“But what about his personal items?”

“We have his bag and his money now. That’s pretty personal, right? And we’ll have to do without the rest. It’ll be fine.”

Groaning again, I let my head fall back against the seat. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. We need to follow exactly what the spell says.”

“You worry too much, Levi. You always have.”

****

As it turned out, Willie couldn’t find his red shirt, so we went by Leroy’s house to get his. Willie took me out in Leroy’s back yard to do the spell, not willing to wait any longer. It was as good a place as any, I guess, and Rolf was unlikely to come looking for us there.

Standing around Leroy’s trash burning pile in the backyard, I pulled out the faded piece of paper from my mother’s book, took a deep breath and decided to get started.

Leroy seemed the most nervous of the three of us. I heard him murmuring to Willie.

“Do you really think Levi knows anything about this?”

I looked up and addressed Leroy directly, before Willie could answer. “I’m standing right here, you know. And I’m not as good as my mother. She knew things and saw spirits. Her mother did too. And her mother before her and so on, back all the way before anybody could remember. I do too, a little, though I’m not as good as they were. I know you don’t want to believe it, but some things are just true, whether you believe in them or not. Now shut up and let me concentrate.”

I laid out the red shirt, which didn’t smell too good, but I doubted if that mattered. Then from the bag from the grocery store, I took out the basil, the oregano, and the marjoram and chives. All of it was in little tins like they sold there—we didn’t have anything fresh, but maybe it didn’t matter. We’d see. I sprinkled some of each on the cloth.

“Now I need the personal items from the one who laid the curse, Willie. You really don’t have anything except for the bag?”

“No, but that should be enough.”

I rolled my eyes at his overconfidence. “Okay, if you want to bet your life on it.”

He bristled and gave me a long glaring look. “Yours too, Levi. After all, you were there for all of it. And you’re the one doing this spell.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

Of course, I’d thought about that, but it didn’t help one bit. I gave him a dirty look, tore off a piece of the cloth and walked right up to him with my hands on my hips. “This part is all yours, Willie. Take a pen and write the man’s name down on the cloth. Then go back and cross it out with little X’s over each letter.”

“So what are we doing?”

“Sending the curse back to Bolagi.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Yeah, so that means it won’t hurt him. Now, while you do it, imagine how he looked in your mind’s eye. His hair and his eyes, and all that. Think of him and say these words, ‘I reverse the curse and send it back to you,’ as you do it.”

He did it, but only with a lot of muttering under his breath and long, menacing looks, which I mostly ignored. While he worked, I scratched the man’s name—BOLAGI—on the side of the red candle. I lit it and began letting it burn all the way down to a nub, like the paper said.

Over and over, I chanted the words, “I send back any curse you send to me. I cross you with it so that none of your deeds will prosper.”

When it finally burned down, I took the bag from Willie, along with the paper he’d written on and tied it all up with string inside the red shirt. (Or as close as I could get it. Leroy wasn’t a large man, and that shirt didn’t stretch all the way around it. But it would have to do.)

“Now what?” he asked me.

“Now we need to bury this bag at a crossroads,” I told Willie.

“What? Any crossroad?”

“Yeah, that’s what it says.”

He picked up the bundle and headed toward the front yard, as Leroy and I both struggled to keep up with his long legs.

“Wait—where are you going?”

“This house is on a corner. That’s a crossroads, right? I’ll bury it in the yard by the street. Leroy, you still got my shovel in your shed?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Leroy replied.

“Then grab it. We got to bury this thing.”

Leroy found the shovel and Willie dug a hole in the yard beside the nearest side street—which I supposed would work as a crossroads. I stood beside him as he dropped the bundle inside the hole and I said the words I needed to say to return the curse.

Willie filled in the hole and turned back to me. “Is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Okay then. You can leave now.”

“What? Just like that?”

“Yeah. You did what I asked, so you can go. Get the bus back home. Just keep your mouth shut about me if the cops come calling.”

It seemed awfully anticlimactic after the way he’d been chasing me around all over town, but he didn’t have to tell me twice. I left right away, walking quickly toward the bus stop we’d passed a couple of blocks back before he changed his mind. Willie never even so much as waved goodbye.

I was hoping to catch a bus to take me back to my apartment, which wasn’t too far. I could have walked, but I was feeling totally worn out from all my adventures. I’d been waiting for about a half an hour or a little more, beginning to think I should have just walked it, when I saw Rolf’s truck come barreling down the road toward me. I saw the exact time he spotted me, because he slammed on the brakes, making the tires squeal.

He left the truck right in the middle of the road as he jumped out and charged over toward me. I backed away, holding my hands out in front of me.

“Now, Rolf, slow down. I can explain everything.”

I never got a chance, because he put his head down and hit me hard in the stomach, knocking the breath out of me as he slung me over his shoulder and hauled me over to throw me in the front seat of his truck. I bounced off, hit the console and, as mad as he was by that time, I began yelling at him. I was getting sick of these Alpha type assholes throwing me around.

“What are you doing? Are you arresting me again? I haven’t done a damn thing!”

He stood beside the truck, staring in at me. “Oh, really? You call breaking into two different graves doing nothing? Lying to me about Watusi and about being in his gang? Damn it, I believed you, and you made a fool out of me!”

“It wasn’t hard! I didn’t break a sweat.”

“You little bastard.”

“If that’s how you feel, then take me to jail!”

“I don’t need your damn permission.”

“Good—then do it! Go on—put the cuffs on me like the stormtrooper you are.”

He glared at me like he wanted to hit me. “Go ahead—hit me.” I tapped my chin. “Hit me right here. I dare you.”

“I ought to do it and let you suffer the consequences.”

“I said to do it! Didn’t you hear me? Should I yell a little louder?”

He glared in at me and I could see that he was fuming. Well, good, because so was I.

To treat me like this, after all I’d been through? He had to know I’d been kidnapped, and I did what I could to survive the experience. Maybe it was wrong, but what choice did I have? And this was all the thanks I got?

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth. I’m taking you home and then I never want to see you again.”

“Fine by me. No problem whatsoever.”

“Stay away from me from now on, and don’t you get involved in my investigations again.”

“Don’t worry. I never wanted to in the first damn place. But you came after me, remember?”

“I mean it, Levi. I’m not running around after you to check on you constantly anymore!”

“Oh, whatever.”

“I’m serious.”

“So?”

“Don’t keep answering me back!”

“Why not?”

“I said to be quiet!”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

“Damn it,” he cried, throwing up his hands and stomping around to get inside the truck. He had just started up the motor when there was a huge flash of light behind us and the sound of a big explosion nearby—a blast so loud that the sound waves literally rocked the truck and made my ears ring. Rolf dived for me and pushed me down in the seat, covering my body with his.

It was over in just seconds and whatever had blown up, must have been totally obliterated. The explosion was that loud. I was still shaking as I struggled to sit up once Rolf had moved off me. He was staring out the back window, looking shocked, so I looked in that direction, too, and saw big, black plume of smoke spiraling up into the sky.

It seemed to be coming from the area I just left—from the direction of Leroy’s house.