This is kidnapping. You know that right?

I woke around noon to find a strange man standing over me.

I shrieked and fell backward to the floor between the bed and the wall, claws up, ready to scratch the fucker’s eyes out.

But he just stood there, hands at the sides of his black suit, while his companion, a tall, thin black man with narrow sideburns, checked the closet and bathroom and under the bed.

“Not here,” he said. “But the window in the bathroom is wide open.”

The man in the suit looked to me like he was waiting for an explanation.

“It was hot last night,” I said.

“Check outside,” he ordered.

The man with the narrow sideburns left and my silent interrogator glanced to the functioning AC unit under the window at the front, then bent to pick up one of the boxes of cordials from the floor. There was a sticky cluster of empty chocolate shells inside. He counted the number of boxes around the room.

“I got hungry,” I said.

He tossed the box in the trash. The skin of his cheeks was pockmarked and his hair was pomaded. He looked like door security for a pay-by-the-bottle club in midtown. He even had the requisite merino turtleneck in place of a shirt and tie.

“Put some clothes on,” he said flatly. “Mr. Raimi would like to see you.”

I looked down. I was in nothing but a Care Bear T-shirt and grandma panties. “Who?” I feigned.

Bouncer-man was not amused.

“What happens if I tell him to go fuck himself?” I asked. “This is breaking and entering, you know. Just because this is a motel — ”

“Trust me.” He picked up my jeans from the floor and tossed them to me. “It’s in your best interest to come.”

“Is that a threat?”

I slipped them on and went to pee. Bouncer-man just stood square-legged and watched as I walked to the bathroom. I leaned against the wall for a moment and let my heart calm down.

“Fuck, Kell . . .”

I shut the window across from the toilet. I expect she was in there when she heard them at the door and bailed. I figured the best thing I could do for her was to lure them away as quickly as possible. I peed and put my hair back and skipped my face and teeth. When I stepped out, my chaperons were waiting by the door, both of them. I swiped my aviators off the table by the door where she’d left them.

“Don’t you need that?” Bouncer-man nodded to the front corner of the room, near the door.

Kell’s purse.

“Duh.” I pretended like I meant to fix my hair one more time in the mirror before poking the sunglasses into it and slinging the purse over my shoulder. It was heavy.

Damn, girl.

Bouncer-man and his friend took me uptown via high-tech limo. They sat up front. There was a large touchscreen panel in the back that controlled the temperature and the music and the wifi and the privacy window and everything. Four of the seats had their own foldout screen, like on an airplane. I spent the whole ride rolling the windows up and down and streaming parts of various TV shows I’d never seen, one on each screen.

We stopped in a private parking spot in front an old stone block mansion, more tall than wide and wedged carefully between two old school brick condo towers. The mansion’s first three levels were obviously part of the original structure. The block stone had dark runoff stains at the edges of the gutters and frames that spoke to old age. A huge bay window jutted from the second and third floors, suggesting there was a single tall space behind, like a ballroom or long dining hall. The top floor was a later addition, although the architect had done a good job of blending the styles. The front of it was all windows, but they were tinted and impenetrable.

Bouncer-man and I went right in while the other guy did something with the car.

I stopped in the middle of the foyer. “Never been in a house with its own elevator.”

“Mr. Raimi is waiting,” he said, urging me to the grand staircase that curved around both sides of the elevator shaft.

I followed him up. The steps were shallow and wide and covered in soft carpet, like something out of a really nice hotel. The two sides of the staircase wound like DNA strands around the elevator, whose door alternated direction. On the second floor, it opened toward the front, but since that’s where the stairs met on the third floor, there it opened at the back. It was so cool, a really nice design.

The fancy stairs stopped at the third floor and I was led down a hall to the steps to the fourth floor addition. I stopped halfway. The first door on the left of a long carpeted hall was cracked open, as if someone had just been inside, and I caught sight of a canopy bed, unmade, and a mess of clothes and crap.

I walked to it and pushed the door wider.

Had to be Kell’s room. She had her own bathroom with a separate tub and a glass-walled shower with built-in tile seat and TWO shower heads, one on each side. The tub had jets, of course, and sat next to a window with a view of a courtyard below, like a little garden.

Bouncer-man reached past me and shut the door. Then he took my arm, gently but insistently, and led me back to the stairs. He made me go first this time, and as I climbed to the top, I wondered what it was like to live in that house every day. The butler guy was also a pretty good chef, from what I understood, and she could just call down and say “Make me some sandwiches!” and he’d bring up a platter with a selection: one open-faced with seared Ahi tuna, one with imported Black Forest ham and aioli on lightly toasted brioche, and one PB&J.

Okay, I made that up, but that’s what it seemed like.

The top level definitely had a mid-century, Frank-Lloyd-Wright-y feel. The stairs were a single set of simple planks that jutted from the wall with open air between. The railing was solid glass. There was a waterfall in a nook at the top, near where the elevator exited, and a library-office straight ahead, which is where I was directed.

I stepped into the room, which was empty.

“Wait here,” bouncer-man said.

The formal desk was on the right side of the room so that the occupant had a clear view of the windows, the door, and the boardroom table at the other end. Interestingly, the desk was missing a chair. Over it hung a five-foot portrait of Lyman Raimi standing before a wall of chiseled rock. In the middle of the space was a fancy couch and matching armchairs. Everything smelled like new carpet.

The view out the windows was killer but not nearly as interesting as the individually framed book pages that lined the oak-paneled walls of the room. They were all from very old manuscripts. I browsed as I waited, moving around the occasional furniture.

I was studying a very large page, almost like a poster, when Lyman rolled in. He was a very large man, which I’d been told, but he was confined to a wheelchair, which I had not, which made me wonder if that as a recent development. He wore a loose padded house vest over a collared shirt. There were leather slippers on his feet.

I beat him to the punch. “I told your guys like twenty times on the way over that I don’t know where she is, so if that’s why I’m here, it’s a gigantic waste of everyone’s time.”

“How do you like it?” He was just a smidge out of breath. He nodded to the page in front of me.

Most of it was handwritten text. The scratch was so old that the once-black ink had faded to pale brown. Some of the letters were all but invisible, to the naked eye anyway. I knew from school that you could resurrect stuff like that with infrared imaging, and that they often found older texts underneath the visible ones. Parchment and vellum were very expensive back in the day, so books deemed useless — or dangerous — were sometimes erased, by soaking in lye or something like that, so the pages could be reused for more “uplifting” works, like a treatise on the Gospels.

“It’s from the eleventh century,” he explained with a little bluster. “Nearly a thousand years old.”

“Is that when the eleventh century was?” I asked sarcastically. “Huh. I didn’t know that.”

Most of the framed pages were walls of indecipherable text with little hand drawn diagrams, but the sheet in front of me was a full-page illustration. A naked man, crudely drawn and out of proportion, stood under a gallows. The rope that had held him had snapped and part of it dangled from the wood. He held a flaming staff and there were symbols all over his body that matched those in the circle on ground around him. Three long knives, each different than the other, poked up from the foreground.

He pointed to the symbols. “Remind you of anything?”

I squinted. The UV-protective glass preserved the document inside but made it a little difficult to see with the glare form the big windows behind me. “Sort of looks like a circuit diagram.”

There were zigzags and T-junctions, all of which ended in a small circle, just like you’d see on an electrician’s layout.

“People forget that modern science grew directly out of alchemy,” he explained. “Back in the day, there wasn’t a difference.” He motioned to the pair of chairs in front of the desk. “Please have a seat.”

I knew he wasn’t very old, in his mid 50s, but he looked older than I expected. Illness will do that I guess.

I stood in place. “This is kidnapping. You know that right?”

He tossed his phone to me with a smirk, as if urging me to call the police. I caught it, but I just as easily could’ve missed. It was the latest model. Very light. Very slim. And there was no case, as if to underscore that he was rich enough not to care.

I made a face and laid it on the desk as he slid some files from the top into a drawer. When it shut, I heard a slight rattle, as if from a bottle of pills. Or three.

“Please. Sit,” he repeated.

I could see his head better then. It looked like he’d had horrible hair replacement surgery. Everything else was cut short. He coughed once and cleared his throat.

I ignored the chairs by the desk and walked to the couch. It was soft and I sunk in comfortably. I put Kell’s purse on the seat next to me and my flower-print Keds on the coffee table and made myself at home.

“Fair enough.” He rolled over to me, grabbing his phone on the way. He had hands just a tad too small for his body. “How was your trip to Coney Island?”

“Good, actually. I had never actually been. It’s one of those things you always say you’re going to do but then never do. But now I did, so I’m glad.”

“By yourself?”

“I figured you were busy.”

He chuckle-snorted. “We haven’t met before. Have we?” He extended his hand.

“Not sure,” I said, ignoring it. “I’m sure I would’ve forgotten.”

“You’re the best friend.”

“So she tells me. But I have my doubts.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m here and not her.”

“I see.” He seemed to be enjoyed my casual insults. “You’re not an easy person to find.”

“Really? Seems like your guys did alright.”

“But you’re not where the government thinks you are, are you? Do you even have a lease agreement with the Arab or is it all under the table?”

“The Arab? His name is Abdul, thank you. And since you seem to know everything, you tell me.”

He took out his phone and read the screen. “Ce-Lei-Zi Song. Hong Kong native. Granddaughter of Wai-Ling Lau, a local restaurateur of some renown, it seems. Merit scholarship out of high school to the Bruxton School.” He glanced to me. “Impressive.”

I shrugged.

“Dropped out second year, shortly after being arrested for assault?” He looked to me again, this time in surprise. I think his idea was that I’m hardly big enough to assault anyone.

I shrugged again.

“Charges were dropped. Second arrest for vandalism a few weeks ago. Charges pending.” He put the phone back in his vest pocket. He was breathing just a little too hard. “Here on student visa, too. How does that work?”

The U.S. Immigration office hadn’t quite figured out that I’d quit. I might have encouraged that misunderstanding.

Lyman nodded to bouncer-man, who was standing silently off to one side, and the man slapped a stack of cash on the coffee table hard enough to shake it. It was brand new, by the looks of it. Even the little paper band around the middle was crisp. The label had a bank logo and said $10,000.

I sat up. I’d never seen that much money. I took it and flipped through the bills instinctively. They were stiff and had the pleasant feel of fine stationary. The smell of fresh cash hit my nostrils.

“Damn,” I said with a snort. “Now I know why rappers are always making it rain.” I sniffed again. And again. “Fuck. Someone should bottle this.”

“I believe they’ve tried.” He sat back. He was smirking. “You know, I was never cool like you and Kelly Ann, even when I was younger. Of course, I’m sure that’s very clear to you.”

I set the cash back on the table.

“I was always a sickly child. My mother didn’t let me go to a party until I was in college. I felt so awkward and left as soon as I could get a ride. I hated driving, you see. Always have.”

“Is that your excuse for kidnapping? You’re too rich to know better?”

“Let’s be clear,” he said, leaning forward on his knees, “I just want what’s best for Kelly Ann. Did she tell you what happened?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Haven’t seen her.”

He smiled again in that casually amused way and leaned back. “You don’t have to lie, Cerise. We’re on the same side. I promise.”

“I’m not lying,” I said as earnestly as I could. “Until your goons showed up, I thought she was still crashing on the princess bed downstairs. So what happened? You hit her or something?”

He stiffened a little then. “Ah,” he said, as if everything were suddenly clear. “The only reason I sent William” — he motioned to bouncer-man — “to fetch you was because this meeting is urgent. I’m going out of town again this afternoon and I was sure you and I would want the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“To help Kelly Ann.”

I reached for the cash and flipped through it again. It was so much denser than I expected. Like it could stop a bullet. “That what this is for? To buy my ‘help?’”

“No,” he said with a half-annoyed grin. “The money is for your trouble. And any expenses you might have.”

“Expenses?”

“You’re unemployed, aren’t you? Call that a gift. From a friend of mutual interest.”

“Mutual interest?” I made a face.

I tossed the money to the couch.

“Kelly Ann trusts you. I’m certain of it. You might be the only one, actually. She dislikes her parents intensely.”

“It’s a little more than dislike.”

“Yes, she told me what happened. It’s a deep shame. Still, now she has loyal friends like you, which is more than can be said of most. It’s why I’m certain she went to you. Or will,” he added.

“Kell can take care of herself.” I stood and lifted her purse.

“What about her ex-boyfriend? The one with all the rings. Surely you don’t have any loyalty to him.”

“What about him?”

“Any idea where we can find him?”

He thought Bastien would be Kell’s second stop. He was probably right.

“You got your way, rich boy. I came. I listened. Next time, I’m pressing charges.” I started for the stairs.

He stood. “How much do you want?”

I just shook my head and kept walking. Bouncer-man stepped forward like he was going to block me, but Lyman stopped him. “No. William, please. Cerise!” he yelled. “Please, you’re not using your imagination.”

I stopped. It was a helluva insult for a monied douche like him to say that to an artist. I tried to come up with an absolutely devastating reply. It took half a second too long.

“There must be something you want,” he said. “A large donation to charity perhaps? In your name. Save the environment or something. Or how about an endowment for young artists? Be creative.”

“Dude.” I laughed. “Maybe this is news to people like you but you can’t buy a friendship. Okay? It’s not even a question of money.” My mouth hung open as I searched for a better explanation.

“I’m not asking you to betray your friendship,” he said.

“Whatever’s going on between you and Kell is her business.” I started to leave again.

“How much?” he insisted.

It was the way he said it more than anything. It was so quick and so loud — like he was just throwing words at me and hadn’t actually listened to a single thing I’d said.

“A million dollars,” I joked without breaking stride. “In non-consecutive, unmarked bills.”

Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?

“Deal,” he called.

I went to flip him off from the door, if only for making a joke of it. But then I saw his face. He wasn’t joking. He was serious. Or at least seemed to be. He was rolling around to the couch, looking down at the carpet with a scowl as if contemplating how to pull it off.

“It would take a few days,” he said. “An instrument other than cash would make it considerably easier.” He leaned with a grunt and lifted the ten grand from the cushion. “The government is very particular about large cash withdrawals. But then, something tells me bonds aren’t an option.” He chuckled to himself.

Ass.

“I’ll need assurances from you,” he said flatly. “For that much money, I need to know you can deliver.”

I stepped back into the room. “You’re gonna give me a million dollars to tell you where Kell is.”

“No,” he corrected. “I’m giving you a million dollars to find the child she’s carrying in her womb before she does it irrevocable harm by drowning her self-inflicted sorrows in methamphetamine. Or whatever the kids are doing these days. I’m not proud of my behavior, Cerise, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what she’s like. My doctor tells me the first few weeks are vital.”

I was scowling in disbelief. “A million dollars,” I repeated, incredulous.

He nodded. “In nonconsecutive unmarked bills. That was the order, correct?” He handed me the ten grand from off the couch.

I took it absentmindedly.

“Does that mean we have a deal?”

I squinted at him. “Let me sleep on it.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of time. I’ll give you five hours to decide. I’ll have landed by then. William can give you the number. After that, you’ll have 48 hours to deliver.”

“Two days? Why? What happens then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d rather not find out.” He nodded to bouncer-man, who stepped toward me as if to show me out. “Oh, and Cerise. Please keep me apprised of your progress.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Gerhard Human

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