Witch, Please
up seriously injured. This spooks Gany and she attempts to escape, where the rest of the coven chases after her or
something. I’m cannon fodder for whatever the Maguffin happens to be.
I mean, I could be wrong, but now I’m on the road to finding out. Literally.
She drives to a playground and parks. I drive past, double-back and observe her reaching under the bottom of a
post office box. The night must have been getting cool, because she was having a hard time getting whatever it was
she had put there. Probably she’d used packing tape instead of duct tape. Probably she hadn’t considered getting
something as simple as a box cutter to help her. Witches never thing of stuff like that.
But eventually she stands up and shoves a big tape-covered something into a recycled canvas bag. She’s not looking
around to see if she’s being followed, which could mean she’s ignored the possibility, or it could mean she’s already
decided the wolves are after her, so why stress over it. I could admire that level of poise, even as she confirmed that
she’d lie to me. I could hardly take so personally something I’d expected.
She returned to her car and I let her drive by me and then I turned my engine back on and then I made a quiet turn
around and followed at a distance. She wasn’t the only car on the street at this hour, but I kept up with her,
blending into the traffic. She turned off past an abandoned railroad house and passed through a tunnel of sycamore
trees. I followed at a safe distance, and was lucky to catch her turning onto a dirt driveway. I kept going, found a
clearing, parked, and doubled back on foot. When I got to the driveway I could see a number of cars parked in it,
but no one in the driveway or outside the house. That told me a few things, and after a cursory visual examination
of the dumpy A-frame brown house, I decided to go a roundabout path and reconnoiter before making my move.
I can see through the windows along the roof that the lights are on upstairs, but when I get around to the slider I
see they aren’t on downstairs. That gives me an idea. I examine the slider and discover that it has a plain single lock,
of the kind that has a key. This would be easy. I bent down to figure out how many pins I’d need to pick it when a
hard lump crashed into my back just above my left shoulder blade and I fell thick and dark and dead all the way
down.
Because I am nowhere near as smart as I think I am.
*
*
*
I wasn’t out long. In real life, if you’re out long, you go into a coma. You’ll probably die. I was out maybe thirty
seconds, but that blow took the fight out of me. I looked up and a guy with a old wooden club like police used to
carry was standing over me. He had a pinched face and a whispy mustache and he was small and lean but looked
like he enjoyed beating men bigger than him. Witches tend to keep guys like that in their orbit - little asteroids that
have no purpose but to smash into other things hard.
“Get up, you asshole,” he said, and I did. He put his club in my face like he was planning where to crack my skull
with it and then he reached past me and opened the slider. Then he lifted his dirty green t-shirt to reveal the butt of
a snub-nose revolver in his pants. Then he put it back down, and with his chin, told me to go inside, and I did.
The basement was still dark but there was an embedded light in the ceiling at the landing of a carpeted staircase
that went up. So when I felt a hand in my back I decided that he wanted me to go there. He didn’t object and we
ascended the stairs making muffled stomps with our feet. I couldn’t hear any other sound, so I knew I was in for it
now. The whole thing had been an elaborate ruse, a meta-lie that I didn’t pick up on because I was too enamored of