Napier's Bones by Derryl Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

back to the car. Before climbing back in he brushed the
numbers from the hood, then drove off.
    “Couldn’t trust
me?” asked Jenna.
    “What?”
    “The numbers on
the hood. Were you afraid I was going to drive off and leave you standing in
the middle of nowhere?”
    Dom grinned, a
little sheepishly. “Too late for you to get cold feet now, Jenna. I need your
wheels, and you’re in deep enough that you need to stick with me. So to
preclude rash decisions, I did it for both of us.”
    “All three of
us,” interjected Billy.
    “Right. All
three of us. Let’s find us a Denny’s.”

6
     
    Both had a large
breakfast, although where Dom consumed several cups of black coffee, Jenna got
by with only orange juice. “I don’t belong to the church anymore,” she said,
when he asked her about this, “but sometimes I think parts of it still belong
to me.”
    When they were
finished, and after two trips to the toilet for each of them, Dom settled the
bill and they walked out into the day, thin high clouds beginning to slide in
and blank out the blue sky and sun. “Where to now?” asked Jenna, as they
climbed back into the car.
    Dom checked his
watch. “A mailbox about five blocks away from here, and then the bank. Here’s
hoping that my trail there had better cover than the one to the library.”
    At the mailbox
he told Jenna to wait in the car and ran across the street, waving his fingers
in the air and watching where the numbers fell. It had been a long time since
he’d been here, and he was hoping to hell that things were still in place.
Happily, the numbers eventually and casually drifted in a small cloud over to
the box, which shook violently for several seconds after they covered it. Dom
opened the little door, pulled out an envelope and ran back to the car, the
numbers behind him falling to the sidewalk and slipping in between the cracks
or drifting down the gutter towards the sewer.
    “What’s that?”
    Dom ripped open
the envelope and shook out a small key, which he pocketed, a passport, and a
Montana driver’s license with his picture and the name
Eric Wood
on
it. “ID.”
    Jenna made a
face. “Now how did you do
that
?”
    He tucked the
license into his wallet and the passport into a pocket and then shrugged. “Not
hard, really. I have stuff like this seeded all around the continent, in places
I’ve already been or else in places where I have a friend willing to do the
mail drop.” He held out the envelope and let Jenna take it. “See how it only
has a one-cent stamp? I pilfered a few hundred of those from the home of a
mildly numerate fat guy.”
    “A what?”
    “A fat guy.
Shoulda seen him, he was fucking huge. When he died he weighed 733 pounds, and
they had to cut a hole in the wall of his apartment building to get his body
out and into a truck, since a hearse wasn’t big enough. Had to use a crane to
get him down, too.”
    Jenna shook her
head. “What does him being so large have to do with anything?”
    “I find myself
rather curious as well,” said Billy.
    Dom grinned. He
realized he rather liked telling tales like this, after so many years of
keeping to himself. “His name was Randall Morgenstern, and he lived in upstate
New York. The best I could figure out, when whatever part of his mind that does
the job realized his numeracy, he’d been gaining so much weight already that it
just kept pushing him up until it found a nice prime number where his weight
could hover. He was actually pretty happy with that, the last couple of years
he was alive; he couldn’t lose any weight, but he could eat as much as he
wanted and not gain any, also.”
    “The stamps,
Dom,” pleaded Jenna. “Please tell us what this has to do with the stamps.”
    “Oh. Yeah.
Randall, I met him when I was in New York for the 9/11 attacks, and I decided
even I couldn’t stomach picking through the detritus like a ghoul, looking for
all the mojo that rained down out of the sky that day.” Jenna looked