VI

The pool of light cast by the last lamp post in the row was suddenly deformed by a twisted shadow that flickered erratically across it. I tried to put on even more speed. By my reckoning, the damned thing couldn’t be further than ten feet behind me and it was gaining fast. I angled across the drive that fronted in hotel, vaulted low hedge, and dropped into that familiar pose from my football days.

This had better work, Lee, I recall thinking as I tucked the swathed toboda under one arm and strong armed my way through the front door.

Fortunately, the door to the lobby door wasn’t locked, so the arm remained intact if a little numbed by the impact. There was no one inside beyond a drowsy clerk who perked up considerably at the unexpected clamor of the door being shoved aside with considerably more force than his usual elite clientele would exert. I skidded to a stop in the center of the lobby and tried desperately to look as if there was nothing unusual about my arrival. It was a forlorn, doomed hope. I was disheveled, my hand was still bleeding and, standing slightly bent from the pain my battered ribs were kicking up, I probably looked like Quasimodo’s second cousin.

He shot me the hairy eyeball as I crossed the lobby as if I owned the place and vanished into the nearest elevator. As I turned to select my floor, I got a clear view of the lobby. There was no sign of the creature from the antique shop, just the clerk crossing to inspect the door for possible damage. It looked as if my hunch about its aversion to the glare of the overhead light or the presence of a potential witnesses had paid off. I should have felt reassured, but somehow I didn’t. The night had already been full of surprises ,and it was still early. The sooner I delivered the toboda and collected my pay, the better.

I got off on the ninth floor paused to orient myself. The corridor was, pardon the expression, dead quiet, and the lights had been dimmed down for the night. I followed the heavily patterned strip of carpet to room nine eighteen and knocked on the door. It was a safe bet that the client was in and expecting me, since she’d stressed that she’d like the statue tonight is at all humanly possible.

No answer. The feeling of uneasiness increased. I checked out the hallway in both directions, half expecting it discover a hunched horror creeping stealthily in my direction. I briefly wondered if it would even need an elevator to reach me, or if it might just pop up unannounced the way Masaka did. Then I ditched that line of thought as too disturbing and knocked again.

In a cheap movie, this was where the door would hinge open with no visible cause. The lights would be on, but it would be deadly quiet inside. I’d walk in on to find a desiccated corpse and either a hired assassin or my shaggy friend from the antique shop waiting for me. I comforted myself that this was the real world. In and out with the rest of my fee. Right now, given other matters, it was faint comfort.

I knocked a third time, louder. By now I was getting extremely edgy. Shifting the swathed statue slightly, I tried the knob. It turned effortlessly and the door gave an inch. Okay, I mentally reassured myself, she’s probably an out-of-towner from some burg where they don’t lock their doors at night. Yeah, sure. That tied in perfectly with the expensive big city outfit she’d worn in my office. Taking a deep breath, I pushed entered the room.

Someone had been packing, or maybe they’d been interrupted while unpacking, though that seemed less likely. There were two open suitcases on a bed, which I noticed was made up maid-perfect. Three dresses were neatly lined up along the edge, each sporting a satin covered hanger. None of them had that rumpled ‘worn’ look, so I decided that she’d arrived that morning, started to unpack, then had abruptly gone shopping for some gullible idiot to liberate the toboda.

Then again, that scenario seemed kind of odd. I’d have pegged her for the fastidious type who would have hung everything up first thing. I made a quick round of the room, looking for anything else that might give me a clue as to what had gone on, and how it might affect me. There were absolutely no personal items set out in the bathroom. I decided they were probably in the other suitcase. If she’d checked in and headed right out again, her toiletries were probably still packed in the suitcases.

Only they weren’t. I found that out when I put the toboda down on the bed and twitched aside a patterned blue flowered silk blouse that had been carelessly tossed across the nearer open case. Something else was there. A lot of somethings. My suspicions that I had been played for a sucker and that a lot had been deliberately held back when she’d poured out her tale of woe, had evidently been very well-founded.

I recalled the heavy display table back at Jovanovic’s shop. The one that had been literally overflowing with little grotesque figurines. While the contents of the suitcase weren’t identical to those now scattered around the showroom floor, a number of these seemed passably similar. I did a quick inventory and came up with a count of thirty.

There was a layer of cardboard beneath the array, so I figured there was probably at least a second tier lurking underneath. Maybe a third. I did some quick mental gymnastics and came up with a minimum profit of three thousand on the open market. Significantly more if there were indeed additional layers in the case.

My mind skewed toward finding a rational explanation. I’d had as much of the supernatural as I could handle, so why not momentarily place the thing outside the hotel aside and search for a saner explanation of at least part of this mess?

Okay then. I was possibly dealing with a business rival of Jovanovic’s. This was her sample case. In no way she was some sort of deranged cultist assembling a demonic army and planning to place the toboda at its head. I liked the idea, since it gave me a reasonable rationale for the whole mess. It was possible that the oily little dealer had stolen the crown jewel of my client’s collection. That would explain her looking for outside help to retrieve it. Maybe that part of the pitch had been true.

Then my thoughts began to seesaw. Then there was the thing that had pursued me. Beyond that, why would she be carrying this stone menagerie around with her? The case, loaded, must have weighed a ton. It hardly seemed logical that she’d be toting around that many samples to show to interested clients. There were catalogs for that, as well as auction houses that could see to the distribution them to the morbidly inclined. Of course, I reflected, auction houses would want a percentage of the take for their trouble. I could understand cost cutting on her part.

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Another possibility suggested itself; one that could bring me into unwanted contact with Ed Alley -- my least favorite ember of the local force -- if I wasn’t careful. The lady could just as easily be a smuggler. I knew there were people who made a trade of quietly importing stolen relics from Central America or all kinds of Tsarist whatnots. New Orleans was a port city. It had been since the 1700s.

Given that my hunch was right, she might have just taken possession of a shipment of contraband, only to have Jovanovic snag the toboda out from under her. Or maybe he’d had it brought in and she’d found out about it, wanted it, and had spun a tale of woe for my benefit, making me patsy.

As large and obscure as the toboda was, it was probably worth more than the whole ugly bunch before me combined. Good incentive. No wonder she’d been so hot to get her hands on it. For now, I wasn’t even going into my third line of thought, which said that she and/or probably Jovanovic knew the hellish thing had supernatural powers, and wanted it for just that reason. That suggested obeah or something even more unpleasant.

During all this wool gathering, I’d been standing by the bed, my back to the door. Now there was a muffled sound from the corridor. I unconsciously fell into a guilty crouch, reaching to scoop up the toboda, which I’d briefly set on the bed. If it was my client outside, the statue was my only bargaining chip. If she wanted it badly enough, maybe I could still cut a deal for an extra buck or two or, at the very least, talk my way out of a bullet.

Then it hit me. The way my night had been going, it might well be my ugly little friend from the shop. If that was the case, it wouldn’t have needed to know the room number to find me. It would have homed in on the toboda. I hastily backed into the bathroom and closed the door behind me, unconsciously still holding the toboda. Looking back, I have no idea why I’d picked it up, essentially helping the shaggy thing home in on me.

Fortunately, the muffled thump I made when I closed the bathroom door coincided with the outer door opening, so it went unnoticed. At least the knob of the bathroom door didn’t immediately start rattling frantically, as I’d half suspected it might.

What brought me around, and came pretty near to stopping my heart, was the pair of black basalt figures perched on the far side of the vanity. They were pretty obvious Polynesian in origin, I’d seen those enormous pupil-less almond-shaped eyes on the literature in the travel agent’s office.

The figures mutely regarded at me. I stared back at them, half expecting them to make some life-ending move. After all, I was still clutching the toboda, and if it did attract followers as Lucius had suggested, I was in even deeper trouble. For a moment I entertained the idea of cramming the statue down the toilet and giving it a good flush, but of course it was far too big to fit down the drain.

There was the sound of rummaging in the room beyond. I made out a rustling that was probably the client’s clothing being tossed to the floor, followed by a rattling of stone on stone. That would be the suitcase being shifted. From what I knew of women, it was highly unlikely that the owner of those dresses would treat them like cheap wrapping paper under normal circumstances. Something had evidently gone wrong somewhere.

“Damn!”

The voice, muted as it was through the bathroom door, was feminine. Not at all like Jovanovik’s tones, and I was pretty certain it wasn’t the thing that had been chasing me half across God’s own acre. It looked like my hunch and my employer had come home to roost. She’d probably noticed the slight disarray my brief inspection of the suitcase had caused.

If it hadn’t been for the double evil eye from the dark figures on the counter, I probably would have stayed in the bathroom a little longer. Hopefully long enough for my client to stomp back outside, probably to complain to the front desk that someone had been in her room. However, at that moment, one of the things budged.

It wasn’t an actual lunge or anything like that, but for such a small movement it carried a lot of implied menace. The thing shifted slightly to bring those oversized eyes more directly on a line with me. Or, I guessed, on the toboda.

That did it for my nerves. Frankly, given the weird events of the past six months, I was surprised they’d lasted that long. Since Masaka had drifted into my life, I’d stopped the summoning of a demon and barely managed to stop a second member of that fraternity from rebuilding his waning strength. Either of those escapades should have sent me to the happy house for a fitting for a new jacket. On particularly quiet days, when I’m sitting behind my desk with nothing better to do, I wonder why it hadn’t. They train you to handle a lot of things in the Marines, but the supernatural isn’t one of them.

There had been the suggestion in that minimal movement that something was about to happen. That did it for my already jangled nerves. I was out of the bathroom in a flash.

My client took it in stride, as if panic-stricken private investigators charging out of the privy was a daily happening. She didn’t even fall back a step as she silently regarded the toboda, which had mostly shed my concealing jacket. Make that ‘hungrily’ regarded. That stare had the same charming feel of a hungry lioness ogling a hapless gazelle that had strayed from the herd.

“Nicely done,” she positively purred. “You managed it in one day as requested,”

“Uh. Yeah,” I managed. “But there’s a slight complication. Something you didn’t tell me about.”

Her face darkened perceptibly, though her expression remained the same. I guessed she was concerned, though whether it was because I was reporting trouble or that I’d discovered something she’d felt I didn’t need to, I couldn’t tell. Her eyes had momentarily strayed to the bed.

“That covers a lot of ground,” she pointed out. “Would you care to elaborate?”

I hefted the toboda with one hand while I unwound my jacket from it with the other.

“You left out a few minor details,” I countered. “Things I’m pretty sure you knew full well, and figured I wouldn’t take the job if I knew them. Things like this toboda of yours being a head honcho in the demon world.”

She laughed. It was an unconvincing performance.

“The toboda is just a piece of crafted stone, Mr. Gammon. Valuable to collectors, yes, but that is all that there is to it.”

Like I’d buy that.

“Uh-uh.” I shot back, my thoughts returning to a quick exit. ‘I’ve seen it move. I also met a hulking thing in Jovanovik’s shop that wanted to peel me like a grape, and evidently thinks it’s this…”

I raised the toboda for emphasis

“…this thing’s protector. It followed me all the way to the hotel and, for all I know, it’s still nosing around outside.”

That hit home, and it hit hard. She went pale, half raised her hands as if to fend off some invisible menace, and backed up until the edge of the bed halted her retreat.

“It,” she asked, her slight accent heightened by her obvious fear, “came here?”

“Right up to the front door. I’m not sure why it stopped there. It couldn’t have been the one man in the lobby, so I’m operating on the theory that it doesn’t like bright light.”

She was muttering furious to herself at this point and casting frantic glances around the room. I caught the word ‘rakshasa’ or something very like that at one point, as well as something about devouring. I decided it might be a good time to hand over the toboda, make a quick pitch for a finder’s fee, and make tracks.

I didn’t want to venture outside before dawn, but if I did coax a little extra out of her, maybe it would pay for a room for the night. A room definitely on another floor. If not, maybe I could hunt up an unattended broom closet where I could wait out the rest of the night.