makes me worry about you. You don’t want this girl to break your heart, do you? Take advantage?”
“Like you’re not?”
Belle snorts. “Okay. Funny. That’s not what I’m doing at all.”
Looking straight ahead, my eyes narrowed down to nothing, I say, “Belle, I love Vauxhall. Nothing, not a single thing, will change that.”
I turn off Wadsworth and take many turns onto many side streets before we wind up in a residential area where there are twigs for trees and the grass is yellow having only just been planted.
Belle says, “In Polynesia there’s this ritual where a young kid, a teenager, as part of his becoming a man, has to keep his hand on the first woman he sees. Has to keep it there for as long as possible. And then, when either the woman is just too sick of the guy standing there or the guy just gives up, he needs to go back to the village shaman and describe exactly how the woman’s skin felt. Describe it in detail. Later, after a few more rituals, he’s blindfolded and taken to a hut where there’s like five women. He’s supposed to touch just the shoulder of each of the women and tell the shaman which one was the one he has his hand on for two days or whatever. If he can do it, he’s passed the test. If not, he’s still a boy. Most teenage guys don’t pass. Takes them years.”
I say, “Interesting.”
Belle smiles and says, “It’s not true but it should be.”
She directs me to a sketchy neighborhood where the houses are all on top of the factories and the train tracks and the empty looking warehouses. It’s this no man’s land where the lawns have rotting cars on them and the streets are all dinged and dented like meteors fall here all the time. We pass one house after another. She directs me left and then right and then right again.
And that’s when I see it.
Right there, on the rusted-iron garage door of some gnarly looking concrete bunker building is the spray-painted hand symbol I saw on the door to the LoDo Diviners’ lair. Same symbol on Janice’s T-shirt. Right there. I hit the brakes and I hit them hard. Belle almost gets her front teeth lodged in the dash.
“What the hell, Ade?!” she shouts at me.
I just point over at the weird bunker building. At the hand.
“So?” Belle plays cool.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Nice try. Who lives there?”
“What?”
“Who lives there?”
“I don’t know,” Belle says, shaking her head too hard.
“Well, we’re going to find out.”
NINE
What it’s called is breaking and entering.
I don’t knock on the door.
I don’t yell out hello when I walk in, Belle in tow.
What this is called is getting some answers the only way I can.
Good thing kicking down the front door actually works.
We walk into this place and the first thing I’m struck by is the fact that it’s like totally festooned with wires. So festooned we have to duck under cables and cords and wires like the place was a tech jungle.
There are so many computer monitors on that everything in the room flickers like it’s underwater. Fans whir. Something not a cricket beeps. Something not a bird chirps.
And there’s this dude sitting in the middle of this mess.
He’s in a reclining leather office chair surrounded by computers. On his lap, two laptops side by side. One for each skinny thigh. He’s gaunt, his head shaved clean, and he has his bare feet in a tray of what looks like dirt. There are empty cans of demolished energy drinks catching the green light under his chair.
Belle, in my ear, she whispers, “Slow Bob.”
And I see why they call him Slow Bob almost immediately.
This guy, he’d lose a race against my coma dad.
We’re standing there long enough, in full view, that you’d worry the guy was dead. The way he turns to look at us, it’s like he’s moving backward. And when he speaks, he stops and starts like a busted-up cassette tape. His voice, it’s the blandest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Gilberto told me you might stop by,” Slow Bob says. “Funny, that.”
“So you know me already too, huh?” I ask.
All slow, Slow Bob says, “I’ve heard a fair deal.”
“Who doesn’t know about me?” Mostly I ask Belle that.
Belle says, “You weren’t ready, Ade. I’ve told you.”
I just let that go. “So, what’s this guy do?”
Slow Bob motions to the computers around him, says, “With these I can get everything I need. So long as I’ve got an inch of skin in some earth, I can read anywhere. And that means that I can see what goes down in the ground. Geomancy, I can read a place like you read the future.”
I look down at the tray of dirt his feet are buried in; it’s clear plastic but cracking and there’s dirt spilling out. I’m pretty sure that through the yellowed plastic I can see worms, but they might be roots.
“Where you want to go?” Slow Bob asks.
“Cherry Creek Reservoir, the north end, east side. Beach area,” I say.
“Big beach.” Slow Bob yawns. “Can you narrow it down more?”
“Right across from the tennis courts.”
“Cool.”
He types away at one of the laptops, fingers like bird beaks, and then leans back in his chair and says, “Okay, this look like the place?”
I walk over, lean in, and look at the screen. It’s an aerial shot of the beach. “Looks like the place,” I say. “Right there in the water is where it goes down.”
Slow Bob says, “Someone needs to grab me a drink from the fridge over there.” He points behind us. Belle volunteers to get the drink but has a hell of a time finding the refrigerator. Slow Bob shouts directions, only he does it so slowly Belle looks at me and gives a silent scream of frustration. When she does find the fridge, she slams the door shut hard. Computers rumble and belch. Slow Bob yells about that too. Belle comes back shaking the can vigorously.
He puts it on the floor by his feet and then tells me to give me his hand.
I do, his skin is cold, and he bites me.
Hard enough to draw blood. I pull my hand back fast, look down at the wound. Belle, she’s looking around for something to drop on Slow Bob’s head. I tell her I’m okay and Slow Bob says, “Part of the process. Just need a teensy bit.”
He spits into the dirt at his feet and then leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He says, “This will probably take a few minutes. Just sit back and relax.”
A full sitcom later we’re still standing there.
I’ve been watching the bite mark on my hand, looking for swelling, redness, pus, or any signs that it’s as horribly infected as I’m afraid it is.
Belle says, “It looks fine, stop stressing.”
I dream about hand-sanitizing gels.
I whisper to Belle that I’m ready to jet, that this isn’t working.
That’s when Slow Bob comes alive again.
Even though the approach of his voice is distant, sluggish, it still spooks us.
“Geomancy’s totally different these days,” Slow Bob says. “I don’t know a geomancer who’s had to go to an actual location in the past five years. What with the GPS and the mapping software, most of us are doing just fine like this. Sure, there are some show-offs like Stanley Pulse who feel the need to go trucking around with a rod, but
