Saturday, July 5th
Pancake (slang, origin probably American, circa 1920s) - hardboiled dame, a tough woman
There was an instant of time when Penelope honestly thought something was on fire, and it was touching her. In a lethargic state of wakefulness, she frantically fumbled for her pocket, shoving her fingers inside, and yanked the contents out. Gloves, both leather and latex, tumbled out, stuck to each other because of dried blood and sweat. Her Leatherman Tool plummeted out and onto the floor with a dull clank as it hit carpet. Finally the gemstone fell out.
It settled itself on the leather couch as if it placed itself there, and Penelope stared at it, even while she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. As soon as her fingers made contact with it, it didn’t seem to be hot at all. As a matter of fact, it was icy cold.
Penelope blinked again and studied the gemstone lying so serenely on the couch beside her. It was a jewel, like a thousand others that she had seen before. Certainly, it was bigger than some, the size of a large hen’s egg, but where it was different was its intense color. It was the sleek, unfathomable black lines of its multifaceted surface that made her lean in closer.
Outwardly, it looked like a huge diamond, but Penelope hadn’t ever heard of a black diamond before. The graying light of the room reflected off its impenetrable surface and showed a rainbow of colors, like an iridescent pool of oil on water. Pure darkness fell away under the surface revealing none of its innermost secrets. She slowly realized that she was having a hard time looking away. Gradually she remembered the foul nightmare that woke her up.
She wasn’t in the Durfrene Row house any more than there was a huge man with a kachina mask towering over her. The fact that she was thinking more and more of this man as an “it” because she wasn’t sure if she was dealing with something from this plane of existence, was more than unsettling.
It made her briefly consider her own background and the scheme of convictions upon which she had been raised. Jacob and Jessica Quick had never been particularly religious individuals. As a consequence, Penelope pretty much followed a similar line of values. God probably existed, but she needed proof. However, she believed in good friends. She believed in family. Stealing was okay as long as the stealee wasn’t going to miss the loot. She believed in her own ability to control the universe, although she was a little shaky on that count at the present moment. So thinking about the giant in the mask as something rather than someone was jarring to her belief system.
The basics were these. Penelope had creeped a house that she believed belonged to a shady character, someone who was fair game to thieves. Penelope had emptied his safe. Penelope had run into Mr. Tall Lumpy and Very Frightening. Penelope had been shot at with a big gun with powerful bullets. Penelope had run into Ms. Beautiful but Equally Frightening. Then Penelope had been chased by several other things slash questionable human beings with strange red eyes. They had followed Penelope unerringly and cornered her on the DART train on the Houston Street Viaduct, probably killing a Dallas police officer in the process. In a manner that seemed very improbable, Penelope had encountered the two above named individuals and heard what also seemed impossible. Jeremy, Penelope’s very good friend and fellow thief, had spoken to her from out of the darkness. Then Penelope had done what any normal thief would have done in the same situation. Penelope had taken a header off the bridge into the Trinity River, where a group of inebriated psychiatrists had rescued her.
Penelope abruptly covered the gemstone up with a leather glove. She no longer wanted to look at it. Then she glanced around her. From the way the light was spilling into Jeremy’s living room, she could tell she had slept most of the day away. God alone knew what Mrs. Johnson thought she was doing up here.
Furthermore, there wasn’t a sign that Jeremy was planning on returning soon. Typically he would have called Penelope or Mrs. Johnson up a few days before he came back. Penelope had left messages on his cell phone, and there wasn’t a phone in the apartment. Jeremy had a phone line, but it was used exclusively for his DSL connection. All human communication was accomplished through cellular.
It made her think of checking his email. But Penelope knew that it would be encoded or encrypted or would have some kind of fancy security system that would foil 99% of thieves, to include computer savvy ones, of which she was not. Jeremy didn’t trust anyone with the codes to his computer, not even her.
But her train of thought led her to something else. She checked her other pockets, systematically emptying out what she had brought with her to the creep. Most of the items were not traceable. Clothing, gloves, the wig, and other materials. Every last piece. All purchased from secondhand stores on Thursday, July the 3rd, or with cash from big anonymous department stores where she wouldn’t be remembered, and no one cared anyway.
There were only two exceptions. The cell phone was a cloned one, purchased from a kid on Third Street who made his living off stealing cell phones and reprogramming them. The other exception was the Leatherman. It belonged to her, but it was ten years old and couldn’t be traced to any one sale because there were no specific marks on it. She had bought it at a garage sale when she was fifteen years old.
The cell phone fell beside the lump that the gemstone made under the glove. In a moment Penelope would take a trash bag and put everything she had used from the creep in it. Then she would throw it in the dumpster of some unlikely recipient. And that included the Leatherman and the Slim Jim tool. She didn’t know what the people in that house had seen, but she wasn’t going to take the gamble. That was a mistake that got stupid thieves caught.
But for now, Penelope focused on the cell phone. She stroked it with tentative fingers and found that it was still a little moist from her precipitous dip the evening before. Idly she wondered if it worked and pressed the power button with a firm touch. A little beeping noise and a cheery set of musical notes announced its readiness. How about that? Just like a Timex. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Penelope picked it up and dialed Jeremy’s number. It rang once. She perked up and waited with bated breath. It rang again. And then she heard it again. But it wasn’t through the little cell phone that she heard it. It was ringing somewhere in the apartment. Jeremy’s cell phone was in the apartment. He hadn’t taken it with him.
Letting the phone drop to the couch, Penelope stood up and followed the sound with a growing sense of dread. Jeremy never took a phone with him on creeps. He thought that when Penelope bought cloned phones from the kid on Third Street she was setting herself up for an eventual fall. He thought that the kid would roll over on her one of these days when the FCC or whoever did the regulation on illegal cell phones, came knocking on his door. Specifically, the only time Jeremy didn’t have his cell with him was when he was on a job.
On the fifth ring the phone stopped chiming as the voicemail automatically picked up, but Penelope knew where it was. She slowly made her way into the kitchen and opened a drawer under the microwave oven. Jeremy’s phone sat on top of a local phone book next to an old switchblade and a set of lock picks. The phone was a different model from the one she was using, but she knew it belonged to him. The little menu on the front announced that it had twenty-three missed calls. Three of them, she knew very well, are from me.
Penelope also knew what the presence of the phone meant. Jeremy had gone to creep the very same house. But he had never come back. He hadn’t wanted to bother Penelope, lost in a crisis with her mother, so he hadn’t told her. What did they do to him? she thought with mounting horror. What could they have done to make Jeremy say those things to me, in that tone of voice that indicates his complete capitulation? God, who are those people, and what will they do to me if they find me?
Making people angry went along with the job of creeping. Penelope had known that from day one. It was why they chose particular people to steal from; it simply made things easier for them. However, the circle of truly professional thieves in the metroplex was a very small one, and if someone she had stolen from was truly determined and even in the least little way “connected,” he might find a way to discover her identity. It hadn’t happened before. There had been tidbits of information that had trickled back to Jeremy and Penelope about people who had been creeped. Furious at their victimization they had vowed revenge and even offered rewards but met with a dead-end.
Penelope was sick to her stomach, both out of fear of what had happened to Jeremy and what would happen to her. She had never had to worry about such a thing before, and it was a sensation that made her supremely uneasy. After a moment of indecision, she picked up Jeremy’s phone and set her jaw in place. Finding a box of kitchen-sized garbage bags under his sink, she set about her given tasks. She knew what she had to do, and she had to do them quickly.
*
Penelope stripped and took a shower in Jeremy’s bathroom. While she soaped off the remnants of sweaty fear and river mud, she tried not to think about whose shower she was using. When she was finished, she dried her hair with a blow-dryer he kept under the sink for various guests.
Wiping the fog off his medicine cabinet mirror, she looked at herself, checking for anything that she might have missed. Soft brown eyes stared back at her. She barely noticed her angular face with a distinct lack of fat that was reflected everywhere on her body except in the area of her breasts. Her lips were full and the shade of freshly plucked berries, but they weren’t bruised by anyone’s hand, so they were ignored as well.
Wordlessly, Penelope continued to look at herself and do a mental inventory of her ailments. The wrist was slashed just above the bone. It probably needed a few stitches, but she wouldn’t be going to the hospital. She taped several Band-Aids across it like a butterfly bandage in order to hold it together until it healed. There was a large scrape across her back and a scratch across her forehead that spoke of a battle with a vicious cat or a ferocious tree. Her thigh ached as if she had won a horse track race, and she supposed in a way she had. Her shoulder felt like it had been wrenched and there was a dull throb that indicated a bruised lump on the back of her head. All of which she didn’t particularly recall receiving.
“Looks like I’m going to walk away…again,” she murmured to herself and was a little ashamed when she flinched from the noise of her own voice.
Penelope borrowed a T-shirt and a pair of jeans from Jeremy’s closet. Her friend was close to the same size, even if he was a few inches taller. Her hip bones narrowly prevented the jeans from falling to her knees. She even borrowed some oversized shoes.
The truth was that the Jeremy she knew, the man who was her friend, would have never minded her using his clothing. He would have laughed at her predicament, and he would have teased her endlessly about her great escape, certainly one of their top ten supreme flights of noteworthy success. Noteworthy didn’t even cover what had occurred. Amazingly lucky was more like it and Jeremy would have been rolling on the ground in jocular mirth.
Frowning again, Penelope noticed that her face was wet, and irritatedly, she wiped a slow rain of tears off her face. She didn’t want to think about Jeremy anymore.
Methodically she put everything in the garbage bag. Clothing to shoes to the Leatherman Tool. She included the cloned cell phone, the various freshly rinsed gloves, and the empty cloth bag that had contained the rest of the loot from her ill-conceived haul. The booty was put into an empty Walmart bag. She looked skeptically at the still damp stacks of cash and shrugged, knowing she couldn’t do anything about it at that moment. Last to go into the plastic bag was the black gemstone. She wrapped it carefully in a hand towel and realized that her stomach was growling with hunger.
Penelope prepared to sneak out of Jeremy’s apartment because she didn’t want Mrs. Johnson to see her with the two bags. However, before she could make a break for it, she looked out the window and saw the older black woman drive off in her pristinely maintained 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Probably going to church for some reason or other, she thought thankfully but sorry that she had to surreptitiously avoid Jeremy’s landlady.
She also took Jeremy’s cell phone. Penelope was going to need one. And perhaps, just perhaps, Jeremy would return to his senses and call his own number to find out to where it had vanished. Another unwanted thought fluttered through her mind. If he’s still alive.
When Penelope finally left the apartment, locking up after herself, she took the garbage bag full of things she would never see again and the plastic Walmart bag. It didn’t even occur to her to miss the folded piece of paper that had the Durfrene house safe’s combination written on it.
*
Blearily, Will looked around him. He had discovered that sitting all day in a rented car wasn’t comfortable. Several times, he used a local Starbucks’ bathroom and purchased enough white chocolate mochas to energize a thousand yuppies. The clerk looked at him oddly on his third trip inside, and he decided to use another bathroom in the future. He fed the meter quarters, dimes, and nickels until he ran out, and since he hadn’t seen a cop all day, he let it go.
Will didn’t think the Jetta would get towed until a meter maid came by with the third or fourth ticket, when it was obvious that the car was not going to be moved. Perhaps the thief was very cautious. She could have come by and made Will before he had a chance to see her.
Will considered that and dismissed the thought. She certainly wasn’t dead. The coyote fetish still rippled with her life source, but the sun was on the decline, and he knew that she wasn’t aware what darkness could bring. The seatco and the other humans could work in the daylight; they were hardly vampires. But in the heavily populated area that was the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, Anthony would keep them from going out after dawn. He was too close to his goal to jeopardize it by thoughtless actions. However, the thief had the gemstone, and Anthony would do anything to get it back. All bets were likely off.
Something had brought Anthony to Texas. It was hell and gone from central Oregon. There, if one was close enough to the Three Sisters Mountains, one could get lost in the wilderness of towering pine trees and see the deer still running as free as the day the Great Spirit changed Indian maidens into the mountains for which they were named.
This part of Texas was full of moisture and greenery unbound. It had been a rain-filled spring, and the land had yet to dry out. The atmosphere itself seemed to be alive, pulling and tugging at Will’s body even as he sat in his car waiting for the thief to show her face. If she would. She has no reason to think that her car has been identified.
That brought another round of thoughts. Would they sniff out the thief’s car? Had the blood been overlooked? No, Anthony isn’t stupid. On the contrary, he would know almost everything that Will knew. Furthermore, he would have no compulsions about using that information in a most evil and twisted manner. The thief had thwarted Anthony. She had the Tears of the Spirit. Obviously, since she was merely a thief, she didn’t know what she had.
Will finished the last gulp of a now-cold white chocolate mocha and grimaced at the taste of it. If he were going to be without sleep as he quite rightly suspected, then he badly needed the caffeine. He put the cup aside and considered another trip outside the car to work out the strained muscles in his thighs. He was used to regular exercise and worked out, but it had no effect on sitting on his butt all night and again all day.
He was reaching for the handle of the rental car, when she appeared as if from out of nowhere. It took him a moment because she didn’t have pale blonde curls, and her clothing was fresh and clean. Her shoulder-length brown hair glistened in the last vestiges of the sun’s light as if it had been freshly washed. Her eyes were clear and sharp as she looked around.
Will only had a second to lower his eyes as if he were intently looking at something inside the car. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her trim form hesitate. Her gaze was heavy as she considered him, but he knew the moment she dismissed him. He didn’t look like a threat with long black hair that spilled over his shoulders and dark, fathomless brown eyes.
It is her. The thought speared through his brain. The thief was a pretty, young woman with a certain aura that proclaimed her innate intelligence.
When Penelope retrieved her hidden key from the magnetic box under the bumper, she glanced at him again and found him with a map in his hands. She quickly got into the car, started it without incident, and drove off. Two blocks away, she stopped again to change license plates.