Chapter Two

Paying Customers Only

Cassandra materialized on a busy street, by her reckoning, a few blocks away from where she and Shepard were supposed to meet. People just kept walking by, as if she hadn’t just popped up out of nowhere. She’d seen it happen countless times. Still, she marveled every single time.

Funny thing about the human mind is the way it can reject anything that defies reason. Take teleporting, for example. A body could teleport into the middle of a crowded room and go unnoticed.

To be more precise, most people would notice and freak out for maybe for a split second but then the lizard brain would kick in. Suddenly, the impossible thing they’d just witnessed had never happened at all. The presence they thought simply appeared had really been there all the time, but just hadn’t entered their awareness. That’s all. Just a silly trick of the mind.

It was sort of like playing possum, this neat little defense mechanism. Maybe it was what was keeping humans safe from things that should remain unseen.

It was the height of spring but the heat was sweltering as if it was mid-summer. Dehydrated and daunted by Florida’s oppressive humidity, Cassandra stifled the urge to make a beeline for the waters of Coquina Beach. The nearby ocean was calling. The smell of salt and the rhythmic sound of waves tugging at the shoreline made her blood leap and long for the gravid wet.

The Beach Buggy had a sagging thatch roof and weatherworn wooden walls. A real hole-in-the-wall kind of dive, it was mostly empty inside. In one corner, some drunk huddled close to the wall, head down on the counter. The bartender was a rough looking sort with beer gut, a bushy beard and a comically red nose.

He tossed Cassandra a suspicious look. “You got ID?”

“Don’t need it,” she answered. “I’m not here to drink.”

The guy’s thumb stuck out, pointing to the sign above the counter: Paying Customers Only.

Cassandra shot the irksome man a withering look, but then she acquiesced.

“Shepard, right?” She tilted her head at the third man, the one sitting at the other end of the bar nursing a single shot of something brownish. “Why don’t we just talk outside?”

All business, her contact finished his shot in a single gulp and silently obliged.

In the rank and refuse littered back alley, Shepard stood with his back to the piss stained wall. He was a stocky kind of guy. Dark. Not quite as dark as Cassandra though. He exuded a barely civilized kind of street-wise appeal. He didn’t say anything at first, just stood there staring at her expectantly.

“Oh,” she realized after a moment. “Here.”

She handed over a thick roll of twenties bound together by a rubber band. He pocketed her offering. He didn’t bother to count it, she idly noted. He handed her a piece of paper. There was a name and address scrawled there.

“Susumu Takano?” The name rolled awkwardly off her tongue.

“That’s the man you need to see.”

“And he has a copy of the book?” She pressed.

The book in question was what one might call an alternative history of the world. The book was proof that what she sought existed. Things that went bump in the night. Things that might lead to answers she was looking for.

“Dunno. Don’t care,” Shepard shook his head. “You seem to be looking for trouble. Keep going like this, you’re gonna find it.” He warned.

She laughed lightly. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

“It should,” the disagreeable man growled. “That kind of trouble, I can do without.” His voice hardened as he turned to walk away. “Don’t ever come looking for me again.”

Cassandra stuck the paper into her back pocket. She studied Shepard’s retreating back. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was stupid and reckless to keep looking for things that didn’t want to be found but at this point, she didn’t care. She hadn’t been able to retrieve the artifact. This was the only lead left.

It had to be out there somewhere, the key to fixing her broken sister. The way to make Anna whole again.

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