Catacomb (23 page)

Flashes of the morning returned to him. Images in reverse. He felt the heat of the needle pricking his neck, then the cold shiver of his father’s ghost walking through him. A Finnoway’s name on those funeral documents. Documents, he was now certain, that were gone.

Not a bad find. But not enough to wipe away the debt.

“I don’t understand. You saved me,” Dan murmured, curling up on himself in the bed.

“I wish that was true.” But it clearly wasn’t. Dan recoiled, no longer trusting the safety that Oliver had mentioned. Had he tumbled from one fire and into another? “But I didn’t realize how stupid I’d been until you turned up unconscious on my stoop. I was grateful that you were alive. No, that’s a lie. I was afraid. But now I’m grateful.”

It was still like Oliver was speaking in another language altogether, and Dan’s head was too stuffed with cotton to make sense of the words. “Wait—I ‘turned up’?”

“Yeah, some good Samaritan was kind enough to dump your ass on my doorstep, out cold and bandaged. Not exactly a delivery I was expecting.” Oliver smoothed both hands over his face, scrubbing at his forehead.

“Who, though?” Dan murmured. “Who would come for me and then just leave?”

“I don’t know who did it, but you owe them a debt of gratitude for damn sure,” Oliver said. “Most people, they tangle with Finnoway and they don’t make it out alive.”

“How do you know that?” Dan replied gruffly. He was still trying to wrap his head around the phrase “out cold and bandaged,” but he was getting the clear impression that his friends had been right about Oliver after all. “Bandaged,” he whispered, unsteady against the pillows.

“Yeah,” Oliver said softly, carefully picking up Dan’s hand and lifting it so Dan could see it. His hand was wrapped tightly in a bulky bandage, clean and white, secured over the palm with a tiny metal clip. His bright pink fingers poked out of the bandage, except for one.

Where his little finger should have been was just a blank. He gaped at the empty spot, feeling that throb from before return and spread, searing down toward his elbow.

They have my bones.

“H
e
took
it.”

Oliver didn’t respond, and if Dan had been any stronger in that moment, he would’ve lurched out of bed to shake him.

The room above the shop in which Oliver apparently lived was cramped and low ceilinged, with only one grimy window that faced out into the alley. The walls in here were crammed with bookcases, each shelf overflowing more than the last. Outside, it had begun to rain, the droplets pattering on the window in a soothing crescendo as the wind picked up and carried them harder against the building. A few naked lightbulbs swung from the ceiling, and black-and-white pictures of people Dan didn’t recognize hung on the walls. Oliver’s family, maybe. Some of the shots looked old enough to be from the start of the store.

“Listen, Dan. I’m gonna say some things right now that you’re not gonna like. I just need you to listen and then hate me afterward, all right?”

Dan shook under the blankets. He didn’t want to listen. He had to, but he didn’t want to. There was no processing what he was looking at on his hand, and Oliver’s words at least distracted him from the fact that he would really have to confront it eventually.

“Here’s the box you wanted,” Oliver said, moving to sit on a rickety wooden chair next to the bed. “But it’s not entirely what I said it was.”

Oliver cleared his throat and swung into a more upright sitting position. At his feet, a cardboard storage box waited, tattered, stained, and empty.

When Oliver tried to offer him a mug of tea from the side table, Dan refused to take it. He didn’t want anything from Oliver now. He had wanted the box, sure, but now it was clear that the box had been some kind of trick.

“There’s nothing in it,” Dan said, dragging his eyes from the box to Oliver. “Is this a joke?”

“There
was
a box, Dan, but you need to let me explain.”

“Do I?” He laughed, dry and sarcastic, and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I guess I do, since I’m not sure my legs even work at this point. They’re still there though, right?”

“He just took the finger.”

“Why? Why only that?”

Oliver stared back evenly, moistening his lips before saying, “Because that’s all he needs. It depends. . . . Sometimes we take a lot more than a finger, but there’s always a reason. We don’t usually know the reason, but Finnoway does.”

“We?”

“Yes, we, Dan. That’s part of what I’m trying to tell you. I got chumped into working for the Bone Artists, just like I said. But I never stopped working for them, not really. The story I told you . . . There were a few inventions in there.”

Dan pulled his knees up toward his chest, using his left arm to try to help them along. He’d have to get used to avoiding his
right hand for a while. Just looking at it now made his stomach somersault, and as the feeling in his limbs started to come back, the pain was already immense. “I’m too sedated at the moment to smack you, so please, keep taking advantage of that.”

“No smacking necessary,” Oliver said, putting up his hands in surrender. “You can’t make me feel worse than I already do. Not that it’s much help to you now.”

“Jordan told me not to trust you. Man, he had your number from day one.”

“You still don’t understand. This isn’t about me. Or not just me. This started with our families. My granddad, your parents. They were all wanted for messing with the Bone Artists, and the Bone Artists never let a grudge go unless the debt is repaid. I tried to get out of the debt by doing the petty work with Micah, and when they wanted me to start stealing bones, I really did try to quit. But Finnoway wouldn’t let me.”

Dan remained silent, hoping that if he just waited long enough, the nightmare would end, and he’d be back at Uncle Steve’s in a warm, safe bed with a plate of beignets and all ten of his fingers.

“What debt did you owe, exactly?”

Oliver nodded to one of the photos hanging behind Dan. “You see that statue? It’s in a park not six blocks from here. It’s my grandfather, Edmund Berkley. He was a shopkeep, then a lawyer, then one of the fairest damn judges you ever seen. This town loved him, and they loved him even more when he finally cleaned up Jimmy Orsini and his smuggling, thieving, low-life friends.”

The name drew Dan further out of his grogginess. He sat up straighter.

“My grandfather was on the right side of the law on that fight. Jimmy didn’t live out his last days in jail like he was supposed to. He died after being rescued and gunned down, and that was just fine by most of the law-abiding folks around here.”

“I’ve heard that story,” Dan said, and Oliver’s eyebrows shot up. “Abby’s been researching Orsini for part of her photo project. We even found an old article about him in Shreveport that had that creepy Bone Artist poem on it.”

Oliver sighed and scratched his chin, pointing to the picture with the statue of his grandfather again. “I don’t know if he ever suspected just how deep the well ran with Jimmy. Jimmy was an old man by the time my grandfather put him away, but he was one of the originals. Hell, he might have been
the
Prince of the Body Thieves in the damn poem. Point is, he wasn’t just running gin and drugs, he was dealing in human bones, too. Thought they were magic.”

Dan nodded slowly. “That’s what Madame A told Jordan. I suspect you know more about them than she does.”

“Way more. More than I’d like.”

“So what, your granddad got Orsini put in jail, so the rest of the Bone Artists came after him?” Dan said. “What the hell does that have to do with my parents?”

“The Bone Artists are like the mob, a family business. They ran booze and drugs down here before, and they’ll run it down here forever. It ain’t just a bunch of gangsters anymore, they’re organized, and like I said, they hold a grudge.” Oliver reached under his chair, pulling out a half-empty bottle of rum. He swigged from it, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’re gonna finish wiping out my whole family for
what my grandfather did, and now they’re gonna wipe out all of yours for what your mother did.”

“What my . . .” Dan lapsed into silence.
Of course
. What had Maisie Moore called Trax Corp. in her article? A modern smuggling ring? Dan’s mother had uncovered a company that had been moving untested drugs out of the South and into New England for years. Into Brookline, back when the warden was there. But she hadn’t just pissed off a corrupt corporation. She’d pissed off a powerful, secret cult.

Dan couldn’t speak for a moment; his wires were too crossed. For a year, he’d thought his blood was poison—that the tainted Crawford legacy that had been passed down to him from the warden had doomed him for life. Now, he realized the same was true about the Ash side of the family.

“So your dad—when Sabrina said he was killed by a drunk driver . . . ?” Dan asked, studying the boy closely.

“I don’t know how a drunk man gets all the way across that causeway safely, then suddenly, bam, decides to veer into the next lane. But it was a hit-and-run. Hard to pin that on anyone, you hear what I’m saying? Same goes for a couple on the run that just takes a dive off a cliff in the family car.” He said this with a straight, dark look into Dan’s face.

My parents were murdered
. Even though part of him had suspected it earlier, internalizing that horrible fact was a different matter entirely. It was like accepting the fact that he had lost a finger.

But anger soon replaced despair. “You
knew
all of this? And what was I, the bait?” He held up his bandaged hand, shoving it in Oliver’s face. “This happened because of you!”

Gently shaking his head, Oliver pushed Dan’s hand away.
“When I first heard from Micah that you could help me, I thought maybe you had some information I could use to pay my debt. Or at least trade up, like Micah did. I found your tent right where Micah said it would be, except I had second thoughts about dragging you into all this. Then you came into my shop that first night, and you said your name was Dan Crawford. Well, it rang a bell. I’d just seen the box in the shop storage,
CRAWFORD & ASH
. That night, I got curious.”

Oliver stood and snatched up the rum bottle, turning it this way and that, studying the well-worn label peeling off the glass. “We all know what families are on the list—what debts the Bone Artists still want to collect on. Ash is one of those families. And I’m sorry, but you’d just told me Micah was dead and you didn’t have jack to help me. Once I figured out that you were the son of Evelyn Ash, and here my dad had had this box of her stuff to boot, well. You were my last hope of getting out. Now it’s over for me.”

Dan wanted to spring out of the bed. Hit him. Kill him. He could hardly move, paralyzed by the knowledge that all this—Maisie Moore’s death, Steve being attacked,
Dan’s lost finger
—was because Oliver had turned him in.

“Do you realize how selfish and
cruel
you are?”

Oliver stared at him with wide, haunted eyes. He looked at the floor and then at Dan’s bandaged hand. “I see that now. I thought one stranger was fair trade for my life back. But you’re not a stranger anymore.” Oliver’s eyes welled up with tears, but then he swallowed them down until his eyes looked vacant. “Anyway, even after you, Finnoway didn’t clear my debt, and he never will. I’m so
damn
sorry, Dan. I betrayed Micah, I betrayed
my father’s trust, and I betrayed you. There’s nothing I can do except promise to try and make this right.”