Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(21)

“It’s autumn, you know. Not summer,” I said. “You need a new poem.”

He offered up a lopsided grin in response. One of Bob’s eyes was a wee bit lazy. You didn’t notice it right away; it was only after chatting with him for a couple of minutes that you realized something just didn’t quite focus on you. Even so, it was his bulbous, red drunkard’s nose that stole all the attention.

He wasn’t the easiest guy to look at, and he was mildly irritating to talk to. But he seemed to know just about every Earthbound in Morella, and I trusted him. After two years of hearing about the minutiae of his daily life, it was kinda hard not to.

“Bobby boy,” I drawled affectionately, laying it on thick as I poured his drink from the shaker into a hurricane glass. “I’ve got a weird, yet extremely important favor to ask.”

His grin faded as he glanced from side to side, making sure I wasn’t talking to some other Bob. “Really?”

“It’s on the down low,” I said, putting a silent finger to my lips.

He leaned low over the bar and spoke in a soft, conspiratorial voice. “Anything, Cady. Name it.”

“I need to employ the services of a death dowser. Ever heard of one?”

A couple of seconds ticked by until he finally answered. “Umm . . . yeah, I know a guy.”

Good old Bob. For a moment there, I’d wondered if he was going to hold out on me. “Is he reliable? He can really find dead bodies?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Better sweeten the pot, I thought. He was a sucker for freebies, so I quickly constructed a fruit extravaganza on an extralong umbrella skewer—lime wedges, cherries, orange segments, and four pineapple slices—and settled it horizontally across the rim of the glass.

“O-o-oh,” he said appreciatively, holding out both hands to cradle the ridiculously top-heavy concoction.

“Tell me more about this guy.”

“The death dowser hasn’t done any work for me personally.” He pulled fruit off the umbrella and popped it in his mouth as he reached for the right words. “He’s a little, well, out there. Not exactly someone you’d want to take home to Mom, you know?”

I washed my sticky hands at the bar sink. “I don’t care about that. Is he good?”

“People say he has skills. He brags that the Morella police have paid him under the table a couple of times to find bodies. I can’t verify that, but I did hook him up with someone a few months ago, and they said he completed the job.”

“Awesome. Can you set up a meeting? It needs to be fast.”

“How fast?”

“Every day counts.”

He slurped his drink. Pale pink foam stuck to his lips. “How ’bout later tonight?” he finally asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Really? Yeah, absolutely.”

“I’ll make a phone call. He’s a night owl. Has a couple of side businesses. . . .” Bob’s mouth puckered slightly. I probably should’ve taken note of this at the time and asked more questions, but I didn’t. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m sure he’ll agree to meet. He doesn’t live far from here. Maybe ten minutes? He’s skittish about visitors, but he trusts me. I can take you there when your shift is over.”

The last thing I wanted to do was tool around the city with Bob in the wee hours of the morning, but I put my feelings aside and merely said, “I’m counting on you.”

That’s all he needed. His good eye fixed on me with saintlike devotion. “I won’t let you down, Cady.”

I finished up all my closing duties and locked up the bar around 2:30. Bob offered to drive, but I declined, knowing exactly how much alcohol he’d consumed the past couple of hours. He wasn’t drunk—I’d never seen him cross the line into sloppy—but no need to chance it.

He gave me directions along the way. The drive was a lot longer than he’d promised, nearly a half hour, and Bob fidgeted in the passenger seat the entire way. Turned out the dowser lived on the outskirts of Waxtown, a former industrial neighborhood in southeast Morella that was in the middle of a painful gentrification. Converted lofts, upscale bakeries, and trendy restaurants had driven up property taxes—and driven out most of the original residents from the center. On the outskirts of the neighborhood, however, blocks of small apartments, once home to factory workers, were now occupied by a motley mixture of art-school idealists and some of the displaced residents who could no longer afford the skyrocketing rents further in.

I parallel-parked outside one of these old brick apartment buildings, which Bob said was a few blocks away from the dowser’s place. Headlights from the occasional car whizzed past as we navigated around prostitutes and late-night clubbers stinking of beer. Instead of heading to the entrance of the building where the dowser lived, Bob led me to a rusting chain-link fence on the side. As I looked on in bewilderment, he quickly foraged around the crumbling sidewalk for a small pebble, then reared back into a pitcher’s stance and lobbed it in a high arc to ding against a second-floor window.

“What the hell, Bob?” I whispered.

“Sorry. He’s weird about too many phone calls.”

“Great. That sounds on the up-and-up,” I muttered as I folded my hands around my middle and shivered. A few seconds passed before a girl with a dark green halo leaned out the window. Bob announced himself in a loud whisper. Without a response, she left for several seconds, then returned and tossed down a single key on a large silver ring, which turned out to unlock the front entrance. We headed up a couple of flights in a depressing stairwell straight out of Soviet-era Russia, with concrete steps lined by flaking metal handrails. Every surface of the stairwell was smothered in a thick coat of cheerless, glossy gray paint—even the dust on the exposed pipes.