Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(22)

We made our way to the last apartment at the end of the hall. The same girl who’d thrown us the key answered the door. With sugary-red dyed hair, she looked like a Latina Raggedy Ann doll. Dark circles hung beneath dull eyes that wanted us out of her sight. She held out an impatient open palm to Bob. He set the key in her hand and mumbled a timid hello as we entered.

The apartment was filthy. A cramped kitchen overflowing with trash and dirty dishes funneled into a narrow dining room. As we passed into a larger living space, the smell of damp hamster cage transitioned into a vinegary, burning-soil aroma: sømna, an opiate derived from the dried gills of a mildly toxic Pacific Northwest fungus. Like valrivia, it was smoked mostly by Earthbounds. Unlike valrivia, it wasn’t a mild, legalized smoke you enjoyed on your afternoon coffee break, but rather, a highly addictive and highly illegal narcotic.

“Bob, you *,” I mumbled.

He shot me a nervous sidelong glance. A thin sheen of sweat covered his forehead.

An Earthbound with a large, bright blue halo sat on a striped couch at the far end of the living room, near a curtainless window. Two humans were hunched over a coffee table in front of him, their backs to us. One of them bent to inspect something on the table. The Earthbound on the couch glanced over his head and caught my eye. “Take it or leave it,” he said to the men. “Makes no difference to me.”

“It’s not what I expected,” one of them said.

“Not my problem. You paid, I provided. Get out. I’ve got company.”

Both men turned to look at us, fear pulsing in their eyes. One grabbed the mystery item off the table, stuck it in his jacket pocket, then slapped his mate on the shoulder. Both kept their eyes on the floor as they marched out of the room, parting like a wave around Bob and me. The apartment door slammed behind them.

“Robert,” the blue-haloed Earthbound said, “introduce me to your friend.”

“Cady Bell, one of the Tambuku owners. Cady, this is Hajo.”

“A pleasure.” The Earthbound stood up, unfolding a frame well over six feet. He was dressed in jeans and a slim, black leather racing jacket with a mandarin collar and three silver stripes on one sleeve, zipped all the way up to his throat. He was about my age, I guessed, mid- to late twenties. Short dark hair and darker eyes. Long, thin sideburns styled into diagonal points. Smoldering good looks.

“Bob failed to mention that the death dowser he knew was a sømna addict,” I said.

He emitted a rough chuckle as he looked me over a little slower than I liked. “No worries. My willpower is rock solid.”

If you had self-control, you could supposedly use the drug in small amounts for years without much backlash to your health. Problem was, once you crossed the line and upped your intake, you hit a no-return point, referred to as tribulation. Past this, you were pretty much screwed. Dead man walking. Medical rehab success was slim, and if you couldn’t stop, toxicity levels stacked up exponentially. A state law passed five years ago was one of the harshest in the country: possession of any amount was a felony that got you an automatic ten years in prison and a $20,000 fine. But half of those imprisoned died within a week of being denied the drug.

“I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time,” I said. “I just don’t want to be in your home when the cops catch up to you.”

“Oh, I don’t live here.” He unzipped his jacket to reveal the suggestion of a well-defined chest beneath a shirt that clung to his skin. “This is Cristina’s place. I don’t shit where I eat.”

So very classy. You know how people get better-looking the more you know and like them? That applies in reverse too. The smolder was dying.

“I’ve seen you at your bar a couple of times.” He sat down and spread his arms over the back of the couch. An upturned Ducati motorcycle helmet teetered near his thigh. His voice was low and hard to hear over the volume of the flat-screen TV across the room.

I perched on the edge of a stained La-Z-Boy recliner. Bob stood next to me, cracking his knuckles nervously. “Don’t remember you,” I said, “but I serve a lot of people.”

Hajo shrugged. “Too crowded for my tastes. So, Bob tells me you need to find something in La Sirena.”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. Please don’t let this be a mistake. “What do you need for tracking?”

“Bare minimum? The name of the dead person, a photo, some facts about them. But to save time, I need to get on the same path they were on before they died.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I could drive around all day randomly trying to pick up on a thread, or I can cut corners and line myself up to a marker that will lead me to the thread. There are a few ways to do this. If you know the exact place they died, that’s best. I can track a body from place of death really fast.”

I shook my head. “No clue where the actual death occurred.”

“Okay, then what about the last person to see them alive?”

That would be Bishop, I supposed; however, if we knew where Bishop was, we wouldn’t be tracking down dead bodies. “No again. What else?”

“Last place they were seen sometimes works, but it’s tough. Depends on what the person did before they died. Grandpa Joe might’ve been last spotted at the local diner, but he could’ve tooled around town before driving off a cliff.”