Dreams and Shadows - By C. Robert Cargill Page 0,75
said Harold.
“You know how much this would bring at auction? The sale of this would run the shop for months.”
“And I’m giving it to you. It wouldn’t be much of a gift if it were easy to part with, now would it?”
Colby nodded, smiling weakly, something of an achievement for Harold to have gotten out of him. “Thank you,” he said. “This means a lot to me.”
“You’re welcome. Now get out of here. I’m closing up. Go home.” Harold smiled.
THOUGH HE OWNED a car, on days like this Colby biked to work. Austin is a city swimming in trees. In the spring, every neighborhood is swollen with oak and pecan, branches arching over cracked suburban side streets; bushes bursting from the grass, threatening to swallow sidewalks whole. It is a green oasis surrounding a dammed-up river the locals prefer to call a lake. From the air it looks like a city devoured by a creeping green, its buildings like a series of tall, thin, Incan temples, destined to be overrun by jungle, left forgotten, to puzzle future civilizations. Of course, come summer, that shade is the only thing protecting residents from the harsh, bitter scalding of an unforgiving sun and its hundred-degree afternoons, when the green full beard of spring gives way to the brown withered stubble of drought.
It was spring once again: with its early-morning mistings, evening thundershowers, and temperate afternoons; a beautiful patch of green between the depressing yellow-brown of winter and the intolerable yellow-brown of August. This was the time of year Colby loved most. It was still early in the season, when the days could get well into the high seventies, but the nights were a brisk, wintery forty-five. Austin weather was like that this time of year: dysfunctionally bipolar. It was a time of year trapped perfectly between two very different worlds. And Colby Stevens felt a certain kinship with that.
Colby owned a small house on the east side of the city, squarely in the section of town teetering between hipster chic and too poor to live anywhere else. There was nothing special about it, a rather plain, unremarkable house on an ordinary, unexceptional street. He kept it in good repair, paying a neighborhood kid to keep the lawn up so as to not attract unwanted attention. It was a bar code of a property, generic, ordinary, and anonymous. Just as Colby wanted.
Colby opened his front door, breathing in deeply through his nose. There was nothing peculiar. He laid his keys down in the bowl sitting on an entry table just past the foyer, giving a good look around in all the nooks and crannies of the room. Closing his eyes, he concentrated deeply. There was nothing out of place and nothing present that shouldn’t be. Finally, he could relax.
He walked over to his bookcase, looked carefully at the shelf third from the top, and ran his fingers along four other copies of The Everything You Cannot See. The shelf was comprised almost entirely of books by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, filled in with a few other obscure reference manuals on the occult. Colby parted the four, splitting them right down the middle, sticking this new copy, his fifth, in between them. Then he sighed deeply, his only consolation being that Harold meant well.
“You have plans?” asked a voice from behind. Colby sniffed the air and immediately recognized the familiar scent of brimstone and gazelle musk. Yashar. He didn’t bother to turn around.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Drinks,” said Yashar. “Lots of them.”
Colby nodded. “I think I can squeeze you in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SECOND STREET PREDATORS
Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit. Well-dressed and impeccably coifed, he was like cheap scotch—just refined enough to seem classy to anyone who didn’t know better. Mid-thirties, condo, job in finance, a sleek car that could be started by remote, a band of pale flesh around his left ring finger, and a gold ring tucked neatly into his front-right pocket.
Simon had a theory about women, and if you knew him well enough that he both trusted and wanted to impress you, he would lay it all out. “They’re all broken,” he would say. “Every last one of them. Oh, it’s not their fault. It’s not biological either. I’m no sexist. It’s societal. We do it to them; we break them down, bit by bit, year by year. With magazines and commercials and movies starring big-breasted bimbos who can barely get a line