Running Scared Read online

  Cherelle was already swinging the wheel to miss the ragged rock. She had been up old man O’Conner’s “driveway” often enough in the last six months that she had every stone and rut memorized.

  Even so, the Bronco lurched and swayed hard enough to snap Tim’s teeth together.

  “Chrissake,” Tim complained. “Slow down.”

  “He said four hundred if we got there before dawn.”

  “We’ll be dead before then,” Tim muttered, thinking his voice was too low for Cherelle to hear.

  She heard it anyway. “Look, get it through that beautiful thick head of yours that we need money. The printer is yelling at us to pay for the pamphlets and business cards he ran off for us. Our credit cards are maxed, and no one is mailing us any new ones. The tires on this piece of shit are bald. The rent is overdue. We have a quarter tank of gas.”

  Tim made yada-yada-yada sounds.

  “Virgil has money,” Cherelle continued. “Cash in hand. If he wants us before dawn, we get there before dawn.”

  Tim yawned widely. “Y’know, lately you’re sure pissy when you get into your channel role. Lighten up.”

  She wished she could. But she couldn’t. It had gotten so that every time she pulled on her white channeling outfit with its long filmy shirt and skirt, her palms got cold and her heart started to beat too fast, like when she used to boost stuff from the convenience store back home as a kid. An adrenaline roller-coaster ride, fear and exhilaration combined.

  She didn’t mind that part. What she minded was the dead-cold scaries, the way her nightmares made her feel. Channeling was getting to her. Seeing too much. Hearing too much. Feeling too much.

  It was one thing to run a con on the dumbs. It was a whole other thing to feel like the con was real.

  Not all-the-time real. Just some of it.

  And with Virgil, most of it.

  Voices whispering. Chanting. Screaming. Fires burning and knives dripping blood.

  Christ Jesus, it was enough to send her whimpering back to the nuns who had done their best to terrorize her into being a good little girl all those years ago.

  Unhappily Cherelle decided that she was getting to be as crazy as Virgil. Maybe it was catching, like herpes.

  The Bronco hit a pothole so hard that Tim whacked his head against the passenger window. “What in hell do you—” he began.

  “Shut up,” Cherelle cut in savagely. “You’re not the one who has to do it. You just stand around and look smart and pretty and make nice with the females. I’m the one sleeping with the devil and hearing all the screams of the damned.”

  Tim gave her a startled, sideways look. “Uh, you feeling all right, Cher?”

  “Fucking fantastic, why?” she asked through her teeth.

  “You’ve been acting weird.”

  “Well, ding-dong, we have a big ol’ winner. I’m a channel, remember? I’m supposed to act weird.”

  “You’re doing a hell of a job of it.”

  She had started to tell him just what she thought of his half-wit, shit-for-brains comments when she spotted the glow of light from the old man’s house. Fiercely she clenched her fingers around the steering wheel and gunned down the bumpy driveway.

  There was barely the smallest hint of color along the eastern horizon when she got out, slammed the car door, and gulped air. Without waiting for Tim, she started up the dirt path lined with colorful river cobbles that looked black in the darkness. There was one light on in the old house. The position told her it was the living room, which often as not served as the old man’s bedroom. He spent as much time pacing as sleeping.

  The front door opened before Cherelle was halfway to the house. Golden light licked out toward her like a rectangular tongue. With the determination of an actress stepping into the spotlight, she pulled her role more tightly around her.

  Showtime.

  A gaunt, angular man who was barely taller than Cherelle’s five and a half feet stalked stiffly toward her. As usual, Virgil was wearing several old shirts, one over the other. On top of that he had on his customary flapping black jacket, army-surplus pants from the days when uniforms were still made of wool, and boots that were as hard and gritty as the ground itself. The only thing unexpected about him was the cheap wooden box he carried under one arm.

  Before she could open her mouth to offer a bland, peaceful greeting, he shoved a wad of cash into her hand.

  “Four hundred,” he said.

  It would have broken the mood to stop and count the cash. Besides, Virgil had never stiffed them with a payment. So Cherelle murmured something that could have meant anything and passed the wad off to Tim, who had just caught up with her.

  “I see the need is very strong in you tonight,” she said to Virgil. Then she bit the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. When you got right down to it, there wasn’t much difference between hooking and channeling. In both jobs the whole point was to make the mark feel good no matter how pathetic he actually was. “Would you be more comfortable inside?” she asked without real hope.

  “No good inside,” he said impatiently. “Let’s move on. Dawn’s coming sure as hell.”

  Even before he finished talking, Virgil set off up the rise behind his cabin. The steeply sloping, rugged trail led to the base of a bluff that was a wide swath of black against the stars and moon. His steps were short but not hesitant. He didn’t bother with the pencil flashlight in his jacket pocket. He knew the way to the vortex spot Lady Faulkner had discovered on his property. At least, he let her think she had discovered it. He had led her there and then waited, seeing if she would pass the test. None of the others had.

  Lady Faulkner did.

  She knew right off he had himself a vortex place. A whacking good one, too. She told him she felt it like electricity the first time she touched the three big red rocks on the ridgetop. Like three men standing—leaning drunkenly, if you want the truth—the stones huddled at the base of a much bigger, much taller sandstone cliff that ran for several miles along a tiny creek.

  Back when he had first moved here, he had poked around the ragged cliff face. He found old broken pottery, fallen-down walls, and mounds of stones that had once been houses. But he didn’t go prowling anymore. It was hard getting around, and the ghosts in those places had nothing to tell him that he didn’t already know.

  People died. No one cared.

  Chapter 8

  Sedona

  November 1

  Very early

  Grateful for the bright moon, Cherelle followed the old man’s footsteps. Her white clothes shimmered in the moonlight. The skirt and loose blouse lifted and swirled and billowed at the least hint of movement. Nice and atmospheric for the dumbs, but the clothes didn’t give her nearly enough warmth for predawn in the high cedar scrub forest around Sedona.

  She had been going for angelic with her costume but had landed closer to winding sheets and goblins. God knew she felt cold enough to be a corpse. Her skin had roughened like the hair along a junkyard dog’s spine at the sight of a thief. Cursing silently, she rubbed her palms over her arms and wondered if Tim had remembered to bring a jacket. She doubted it. He was worse than a kid. If she didn’t think of it, it didn’t get done.

  She was fed up with being mama-chick to every pretty baby-chick she stumbled over.

  Silently she reminded herself that being poor wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later she would make the big ol’ score that was waiting for her. She didn’t know what it would be, she just knew that it had to be. She wasn’t going to spend her whole life one bad break away from turning tricks again. She had too many brains for that.

  She was the one who had figured out that there was money in the channeling gig after Tim came back from an all-expenses-paid sex holiday in Sedona with a fistfull of cash and a lot of lame one-liners about talking to ghosts. It had taken a year and more work than either of them liked, but she and her pretty boy-chick had put together a channeling business. Not a great one. Not a lousy on
e. Just a business.

  Everything had been going okay until Tim’s old jailhouse buddy had showed up. Socks was a real pain in the ass. He kept wanting Tim to play when there was work to be done.

  Not that she blamed Tim. This working all the time was for the dumbs. What kept her at it was the belief that someday soon one of the morons who came to Sedona looking for a vortex thrill would be a man rich enough to take care of her and young enough to still get it up. When that happened, Tim and the stupid channeling con were history. Or maybe Tim would get lucky first and find himself a nice rich old lady who believed in talking to Thunderballs or whoever the flavor of the day was. Then Cherelle could live off Tim while she looked over the old lady’s rich male friends.

  Thinking of that day was almost as good as doing crack cocaine. Both made her feel like she could fly. One day she would. She’d just step off the edge and fly and fly and fly.

  Smiling, dreaming, Cherelle bumped into Virgil. She would have fallen against him if one of his thin, surprisingly strong hands hadn’t clamped around her arm to steady her. Even with that help she had to brace herself on one palm against the cold surface of a man-high stone. Instantly she snatched back her hand as though she had touched a live rattlesnake. She hated those stones with a passion that came straight from fear.

  “Thank you,” she said in a low voice. “The energy is so strong here that I forget about the normal world.” Goddamn path could use a few lights, too. But she kept that nonvortex insight to herself.

  Tim came up behind her. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything is perfect,” she said, shivering and lying through her locked teeth.

  She couldn’t dream away the clenching of her stomach any longer, or ignore the cold slide of sweat down her spine. She had nearly peed her pants in raw kindergarten terror the first time Virgil had led her to this place. She didn’t know what waited in the shadows between the three stones, but she knew to the bottom of her feet that she didn’t want any part of it.

  She watched Tim go over and lean against one of the big stones, waiting for her to get on with the act. He no more felt anything than the rock did. Less, probably.

  The boy was beautiful and could fuck her blind, but he had the IQ of hominy grits.

  Virgil gave her a little shake. “Dawn’s coming, Lady Faulkner.”

  “Of course.” Belatedly she realized that Virgil was no longer holding the wooden box. She looked around, then jerked. The box was in the center of the ragged circle made by the stones. Some trick of moonlight was making the cracks between the slats glow. “What—” she began, then cut off her own words. Scammers didn’t ask the dumbs any questions. “I presume you wish to speak with Merlin.”

  “You got that right.”

  Mother Mary, not again. Cherelle bit back her irritation at doing the same old same old one more time. She wondered if that was how Broadway stars felt when they repeated the same performance night after night after night and twice on Wednesday and Sunday.

  “Many people wish to communicate with Merlin,” she forced herself to say calmly. “As we have discovered, he rarely wishes to communicate with them.”

  “Hell, I know that. Had more than one so-called channel claim he had a direct pipeline. It was crap. Not a one of them could tell me what was in the boxes under my bed.”

  When Cherelle understood what Virgil meant, she wanted to scream. He was after a mind-reading act, not a chat with a mythical magician.

  And she was no mind reader.

  “Someone else in Arthur’s court would be eas—” she began.

  “Merlin,” Virgil cut in. “He’s the only one with the power. Let’s go. We’re wasting time. It has to be before dawn, when they’re all shooed back to hell.”

  For a moment Cherelle didn’t know what he was talking about. Then she remembered it was Halloween, when spirits supposedly were let out after dark and then harried back into their dank holes at daybreak. She wondered if he also believed in flying broomsticks and dancing toadstools.

  She bit the inside of her mouth again, forcing herself not to laugh in the old man’s face.

  “Mr. O’Conner has a point,” Tim said, smiling.

  Only Cherelle saw malice in the beautiful curve of her lover’s lips.

  That was one of the problems with being smart in a world full of dumbs. You saw too much and most of the time couldn’t do squat about it.

  Tim barely smothered his yawn.

  She wanted to kick him in his ever-ready balls. He always left it all up to her. She had to carry off the whole channeling act with him yawning in her face.

  “Of course.” Cherelle’s voice was smooth despite her anger and the constant prickling of gooseflesh on her body.

  She really hated this place. Somehow she had to figure out what was in the boxes under Virgil’s bed, and then she could “channel” it to him straight from Merlin and get the hell out of here.

  She shuddered. She couldn’t wait to see this creepy place in her rearview mirror for the last time.

  With a toss of her head that sent her pale, elbow-length hair flying, Cherelle stepped around the wooden box until she stood in the small area at the center of the three rocks. And she damned her overactive imagination for making it feel darker and colder between the stones, empty, bottomless, like she was falling down a well.

  She had done that once as a kid. It wasn’t one of her favorite memories. Lately channeling always reminded her of it. It was making her sick to her stomach.

  Screw the past, she told herself. I got out of that trailer park, and I’m on my way to real money. No motel clerk with bad breath and dirty hands will ever look me over and ask for cash up front or a blow job behind the counter.

  All she needed was one good break and she would be set for life. She wouldn’t blow all her money like a dumb. She was way too smart for that.

  One good score.

  Just one.

  Holding on to her dream with every bit of her determination, Cherelle ignored the sickening lurch of her stomach. She forced herself to close her eyes and go into her channeling performance. Gradually she changed her breathing, deepened it, held it until she was almost dizzy, and slowly, slowly let it trickle out between her teeth. Most people did the channeling gig sitting down, but she had never liked putting her butt on bare ground. The one time she had brought a blanket to sit on, her ass had started itching like she was on a nest of fire ants.

  So she stood up and breathed in and out, in and out, until the sound of her own breathing became a kind of liquid rushing, a whispering of phrases that described a shaft of white light flooding down on her, sheathing her, surrounding her, telling her . . .

  Come on, come on, Virgil thought with an impatient glance at the eastern horizon. Get the damned channel open.

  This was the hardest part of the whole process for him. Waiting, waiting, waiting to find out if it was going to happen tonight, if he was finally going to be free of the Druid curse that had ruined everything he touched since he first found the treasure. He never should have believed his great-uncle, never should have gone to Wales, never should have dug up the damned gold. Nothing but grief. Not one damn thing.

  “. . . sense a presence,” she said in a low voice that wasn’t like her normal one. “Come closer, spirit. We wish no evil, ask nothing forbidden. We simply seek to . . .”

  Pushing back a yawn with his fist, Tim tuned out Cherelle’s patter. He never could figure out why she hated doing her act at this pile of rocks so much. Day or night, rock piles or classy condos, the gig was always the same. She put on her ghost outfit, muttered a lot, told the dumbs what they wanted to hear, and then went home with enough money to pay the rent and buy some beer. Big deal. He would do it himself, but he couldn’t stop snickering long enough. Talking to Merlin or Melchizedek or Marilyn Monroe—what bullshit.

  He clenched his teeth around another yawn. Man, this getting up in the middle of the night wasn’t for him. That was one of the reasons he had never made it as a
full-time burglar. Too much like work. At least the channeling scam was easier than prowling apartments, and it didn’t bring the cops down on your ass.

  Nobody had passed any laws against helping dumbs be as dumb as they could be.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and wished Cherelle had told him to bring a jacket. There wasn’t much wind, but it was enough to make him shiver from time to time. Glumly he eyed the wooden box, blinked, and blinked again. Then he wondered when the crazy old fart had turned on his little flashlight and stuck it in the closed box. And why. Hell of a way to waste batteries, and batteries cost damn near as much as cigarettes.

  “. . . feel you, but I can’t hear you,” Cherelle whispered. “I sense how powerful you are. Please help me.”

  Tim swallowed a snort of laughter. As soon as they got off this shitty piece of rock, he would give her something to feel and something to hear, too. He had a heavy load to get rid of.

  “. . . don’t know what Virgil wants,” she said clearly. “Do you?”

  The old man tensed and leaned forward. Merlin knew just what he wanted.

  “Ah, of course,” she murmured. “He has something of yours.” The words stopped. Her teeth snapped together. She jerked once, twice, and then shivered from her head to her heels.

  “Too dark,” she said urgently. “Can’t hear you. You’re taking the light! Please, please help us!”

  Virgil waited so tightly that he was afraid his bones would snap. She must be getting close. Never before had she sounded so . . .

  Scared.

  “Can’t—hear—you,” she said jerkily. “Please help me. Please. We mean no harm and want nothing forbidden. Help me clear the channel, Merlin. Help—me.”

  Virgil didn’t wait to hear any more. This session was going the same way as the others, right into the toilet. With a few quick movements he took worn leather work gloves out of his back pocket and yanked them on. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.

  But it had.

  She would get a clear channel now, tonight. He would make sure of it.