Daria Ravenclaw The Year of the Owl. Nosey: Part II
Marshal Dillon grumpily backed down and decided that Ms. Bowden's idea might work better. He still wanted Stearne questioned to see if he was from an old Scourer family that had been laying low and he still wanted blood samples.
Ellen decided to use her contacts with the Obliviators. She called her friend Joan Putnam. Joan was one of those witches who carried cell phones. She picked up on the third ring.
"Joan!" said Ellen Bowden. "Thanks for calling me back!" Joan Putnam was on the local Obliviation squad and Ellen had worked with her before.
"Make it fast, Ellie, I'm trying to enjoy some beach time!"
"I'll do what I can," said Ellen. "There's this guy in Highland, a school social worker, who's been hassling a couple of our kids who go to the public schools. We don't think he's an old Scourer or a Grindelwald hold-out, but the Marshals would like to question him and then gently nudge him into dropping his investigation."
"Sounds like something I could do, but I was long overdue for a vacation and I really want to relax for a few days," said Joan.
"I hear you," said Ellen. "Maybe there's someone else you could recommend?"
"Let me think," said Joan.
There was silence as both witches waited for Joan to gather her thoughts.
"OK, I've got someone you could contact. There's a gal who works out of Houston with the Obliviation squad over there. She might be someone you can use."
"What's her name?"
"Jennifer Pullman. I'll give you her cell number. It's 555-867-5309."
-((O-O)))-
The Bagpiper Apartments
Highland, Texas
Darryl Hansen was a dirtbag. That was not uncommon: Highland, Texas was blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of dirtbags. And Darryl fit into the Highland pattern quite well: petty theft, rolling drunks, breaking and entering (although he preferred automobiles to and storage houses and trailers) and scamming, either current girlfriends or straights.
He had other vices: he liked to party and get high, preferable in settings where he could hit on and score on some cute thing who was looking for some excitement. Gambling, either with cards or sometimes on sports was another one of his hobbies, howbeit an expensive one. He knew he needed to cut back on that, but he told himself he'd do it after he made a big score.
Darryl had what more virtuous types would call a cash-flow problem. Partying was expensive, especially with the good stuff that the cops hated. So was gambling. He needed money, and a lot of it. He owed Jimmy big money for those pills, and Jimmy wasn't patient. If he could get some, no questions asked, the better.
He was cooking dinner (canned chili and rice) when someone knocked on his door. The knock put him on alert, but he relaxed when he realized that it wasn't hard enough to announce Jimmy or one of his buddies. He owed Jimmy money and he'd heard that Jimmy was getting PO'd because he hadn't started paying him back yet.
He opened the door.
It was a girl: taller than most, about five foot seven, maybe five foot eight. She had dyed blond hair and looked pretty buff.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," he said back. "Who are you looking for?"
"Are you Darryl Hansen?" she said.
"Who wants to know?" said Darryl.
"Like I do," said the girl. "Like I heard he has a cash-flow problem. I can help if he does me some little favors."
"Like what sort of favors?" asked Darryl.
"Like there's this dude I'm checking up," she said. "While I'm checking up on him, I need a place to stay."
"Are you a cop?" asked Darryl.
"Sort of," said Jenny. "Except that I make problems disappear." Darryl saw the look on her face and shivered.
"You do just what I tell you and we'll get along fine."
Darryl gave her a resentful look, which she returned with the sort of indulgent smile he'd gotten from hard-cases that give little weenies they could crush like bugs without working up a sweat.
He wondered who she could be, then had a horrid realization. She was one of those. A hoodoo.
The hoodoos. Darryl thought that he was pretty smart, at least smarter than the average slug working his tail off for nickles and dimes. Sometimes he screwed up, sometimes the cops showed him different, but he liked to think that he learned from his experience, something a lot of Highland's underworld never did.
Like many of Highland's grubbier residents, Darryl had heard about the hoodoos. He'd once thought they were just a rumor, but after Reinhard disappeared, he decided that they might be real after all and decided to stay out of their way. He didn't know what they looked like, and he heard that they changed faces and appearances the way some girls changed their outfits, so it didn't matter much if you did think that you knew what they looked like. The hoodoos didn't rob, they didn't steal, but if you did something to hack them off, like mug the wrong citizen, break into the wrong house and steal something with bad juju, they came out of nowhere and hit you hard. If you were lucky, you'd find yourself stoned, beaten-up, and lying in front of some cop's patrol car. If you weren't so lucky, well, Highland had a lot of wide empty spaces around it that the hoodoos could use for dumping bodies.
"I'm going to move in with you, but first I want to get you squared away with your creditors," said the girl.
"My what?" said Darryl.
"The people you owe money to," said the girl. "I'm told that you owe Jimmy at least three figures. And that you owe Deke at least two."
How did she know that, Darryl wondered.
"I'm gonna go change," she said. She marched into his bedroom like she owned it and closed the door behind her.
She came out a couple of minutes later and Darryl couldn't help but look at her and think "Wow!".
"Let's go," she said.
The Sundowner was a badly-lit dive off a side-street in one of Highland's rougher parts of town.
He had to admit that the girl—her name was Jenny—was pretty hot. She wore a sexy long-sleeved black blouse with tails tied in the middle, showing a nice bust and a slim waistline. She wore shorts and Daryl had to admit that as scary as she was, she had great legs. They got out of his car and she walked over to the door. "Open it," she said. "I'll cover you."
She walked in ahead of him and both of them started looking for Jimmy. He spotted him first. Jimmy was sitting at a booth in the back, several of his guys either seated with him or at tables next to him. Jimmy and his guys gave him deadly looks.
"What are you doing here, Hansen?" said Jimmy. "Trying to weasel some more money from me? You haven't even paid me the money you owe me."
"Actually he's with me," said the girl, giving him a smile. "I found out that he owes you some money. I want to make sure that Darryl here is squared away with you while he does me some favors."
The incongruity of what the girl just said made Jimmy stop in his tracks and stare at the girl. Despite the fact that she didn't look like she was carrying, she hung loose like someone ready to deal with trouble. If he had to guess the girl's age by her look, he'd guess she was nineteen. But she didn't look like she was a nineteen-year-old-she acted a lot older.
She also looked him and his guys in the eyes and smiled at all of them. She had a lovely smile, but it stopped somewhere above her cheekbones. This girl was trouble, and even if that snitch over by the bar wasn't there, Steve decided that it wasn't worth the hassle. Besides, if the girl was dealing, he might make some money out of it.
"So how much does he owe?" she said.
"Three hundred sixty seven dollars," Steve replied.
The girl pulled out what looked like an oversized chop-stick from the sleeve of her blouse, set it on the table, then opened her handbag. Steve didn't like the way the chopstick was pointed at him. She counted out three crisp hundreds, a fifty, and a twenty.
"Will that do it?" she said.
"We're good," said Steve.
"Cool," said the girl. The girl picked up her chopstick and put it back in her sleeve. Steve glanced over to the right and watched in shock as the air shimmered and a guy appeared in one of the other booths.
Holy crap, the girl must be one of the hoodoos. He wondered who or what had stirred them up, and why. Someone was in a truckload of trouble. At least it wasn't him, he thought.
"Nice doing business with you," said the girl, "but we're on the clock. G'night!"
She rose, took Darryl in hand, then left the bar.
The now-visible man looked at him, tipped an imaginary hat at him, smiled, and said "Good ev'nin" and also left.
-(((O-O)))—
Daryl had another creditor named Fat Jack, a local bookie. Jenny found him at a discount store of all places, and paid off his debt in full view of the store's surveillance monitors. The store had other customers and Jenny had her stick out, so Fat Jack took what he'd owed him without making a scene. As a matter of fact, Fat Jack was so bemused that he made it a point to snow Jenny with a display of good manners, although the hoodoo gave no sign of being amused.
-(((O-O)))-
"So why are you at my place instead of someplace else?" asked Darryl.
"There's a guy who's being nosy about some of our kids and we want to question him and then send him on his way after we set him straight," said Jenny.
"Why my place?" he asked.
"Because he's staying here," she answered.
Hoodoos had kids? The idea was boggling. Darryl never thought that the hoodoos had kids. He didn't have any, didn't want any, but he could see why they'd be upset.
"Who is he? If you want, I can do him," said Darryl.
"Thanks, but no thanks," said Jenny. "Too much bother."
"I'll tell you his name, but you'll have to promise to stay out of our way. And I'll get mad if you interfere. You really won't like me if I get mad." She smiled at him and he felt the energy rising in his living room.
"OK. Promise," Darryl said quickly.
"It's Matthew Stearne. He lives upstairs and over," said Jenny.
Darryl had seen Stearne. The guy was a total dweeb.
"Here's when it goes down. We want you out of the picture," said Jenny.
Darryl swallowed.
"Relax, we aren't going to waste you," she said. "We just want you out of the way."
There was a knock on the door.
"Jenny, are you in there?" said a male voice.
"Yeah, I'm here with my new landlord," Jenny relied. "Come on in."
The door opened and Darryl saw that it was the visible man from the Sundowner.
"Excuse me, Bill, but I'm still talking with Darryl here," said Jenny.
"You ever been to the Cimarron?" she said, turning her attention back to Darryl.
"Yeah," said Darryl. He'd been to the Cimarron. It was a casino resort built on the site of an old Pueblo ruin. It wasn't as nice as the fancy places on the Las Vegas Strip, but he'd never been able to afford those places either.
"There are buses that go up there out of Midland," said this Bill guy. Darryl didn't like this Bill guy. The Bill guy had cop written all over him. "You'll be on one."
They packed him off on a weekend casino bus. He had a small committee to send him off: the Bill guy, Jenny, a scary guy that looked like an old west sheriff turned real, and another woman he didn't know. He got on it. They said he was comped for the bus, his room, and free meals. He had some cash on him, although he suspected that he'd soon run out in the resort's casino.
"Bet on thirteen on the roulette wheel," the other female hoodoo called out before he boarded the bus, a woman who looked like she ought to be a checker at Kicker's Boots.
Darryl took his seat and shivered. The bus started. He was off to the Cimarron, and he didn't want to know what was going on at his place.
-(((O-O)))—
With Darryl out of the way, Jenny went to work. Darryl's apartment was a pig-pen; she set about cleaning it up. She used spells and hot water to scour dirty dishes before they went into the dishwasher, spells to scour the counter ank sink, and spells to run through Darryl's mail. Darryl had a lot of junk mail; she used a reducto spell to reduce its footprint before putting it in a trash bag to put in the apartment complex's dumpster. After a while the kitchen and dining areas started looking ship-shape. She then went to work on the living room.
The living area presented different challenges. Some people cluttered because they were intellectually curious and lost track of their various research projects. Others were easily distracted. Jenny decided that Darryl belonged to the third and most common category: they were just plain messy. Most of Darryl's living area clutter was trash, which she used her wand to shrink then flick into trash-bags.
Darryl also had crap under and behind his seat cushions. That was more worrisome. There were coins, a couple of loose dollar bills, as well as the packaging from what Jenny was certain was packaging from illegal drugs, but nothing involved needles. Some stained and rumpled sports and girlie magazines joined the food wrappers and old wrappers in another trash bag. After spellwork, the sofa and cushions were clean, and after levitating the couch and cleaning the areas behind and underneath it, that part of the living room was clean, too. She also took the glasses out of Darryl's kitchen cabinet and replaced them with some that had been hexed: the latter were essential to her plan.
Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly, she said to herself, then ruefully noted that most spiders didn't have to do nearly this much work to catch their prey.
She looked at her watch and noted how the time had flown. Magic made housework faster and easier but it still took time. It was now mid-afternoon, Stearne would be getting off work soon and she needed to freshen up.
She took another shower, touched up her make-up and put on another hot outfit.
She looked at her watched, then checked her hand mirror. William Casales' image was there looking at her.
"It's time," she said, "Come on over. Disillusionment works wonders."