Page 6 of Deader than Dead

One person left, the suited businessman’s interest apparently as lukewarm as my own. Person two, a man in his early to mid twenties, followed him through the door less than a minute later, which only left the woman Dice was conversing with at the counter.

Dice. I’d often wondered where he’d gotten that name, but I’d never asked.

Gambling habit, maybe? I considered other options as I moved on from the albums and picked up a clock, turning it over to examine its workings. When the conversation at the counter came to a close, I followed the woman to the door, close enough to see the dark roots that gave away her blonde hair as being out of a bottle.

Instead of leaving, I locked the door and turned the sign over to say it was closed, Dice emitting a sigh so loud that I had no problem in hearing it despite the meters that separated us. “This better be quick,” he said, irritation bleeding into his words. “Some of us have a living to make.”

I snorted as I made my way to the counter. “Which one? The cover story, or what you actually do?”

Dice rolled his eyes, but refused to rise to the provocation. “What do you want, Bellamy?”

I reached inside my jacket and extracted the cloth-wrapped bundle and lay it on the counter. After returning home the previous night, I’d spent a lot of time studying the mask and trying to work out what made it so valuable. Something about it bothered me, enough that I wanted to get Dice’s take on it before I handed it over to O’Reilly. By day, Dice might do his best to come across as a mild-mannered and friendly pawn store owner, but behind his smiles was something rather more cold and calculating. What he didn’t know about the word on the street usually wasn’t worth knowing. I dipped my chin toward the counter to bring his attention to what I’d left there. “I need to know if you recognize this?” Along with Dice’s street knowledge, came an impressive encyclopedic knowledge of artifacts and antiques.

His gaze held mine for a few seconds. If you didn’t mind the air of danger that emanated from him once he dropped the phony shopkeeper persona, he was a handsome man. As I preferred to share a bed without risk of getting stabbed during the night, I’d never gone there. Well, that and him never having given the slightest indication he was interested despite our association going back years. “What is it?” he asked.

Waving a hand in an instruction for him to take a look earned me another sigh for my refusal to do it for him. His movements were cautious as he peeled the sides of the cloth back to leave the mask staring up at him. I expected a pithy comment about why I was wasting his time by bringing him children’s toys. What I didn’t expect was for him to physically recoil from it, Dice even taking a step back from the counter like he was keen to put as much distance between himself and the mask as he could.

“You recognize it?” I asked, the question mostly rhetoric. He’d hardly have had such a reaction to it if he hadn’t, would he?

When his gaze lifted to mine, there was an accusation in it. “Where’d you get this?”

“Part of a job.” The tension in Dice’s jaw said he didn’t like my answer very much. “Someone hired me to take it from a house. Sentimental value, apparently.” Dice’s sneer said that I’d been an idiot to believe that, confirming what I already suspected. “What is it? Where does it come from?”

Dice shook his head, his movements jerky as he flicked the cloth back over it in a way that said he didn’t want to look at it any longer than he had to. “You’ve been had.”

“In what way?” More headshaking followed as he shoved the cloth-wrapped bundle at me so violently that it forced me to catch it before it tumbled to the floor. Having retrieved it safely, I tucked it back into my jacket. “Tell me what it is.”

“Get it the fuck out of here!”

The amount of vitriol in Dice’s voice had me taking a step back. “Not till you tell me what’s got your knickers in such a twist?” He rounded the counter, and I backed away from his furious expression. “Listen, Dice…”

“Get it the fuck out of here! I won’t ask you again. And if you want my advice, you’ll take it back to wherever you found it, or you’ll get rid of it. Whoever these people are who’ve hired you to take it, trust me when I say that they’re not what they seem.”

I didn’t realize how far I’d gone until the door was at my back and there was nowhere else to go. “Sentimental value!” Dice laughed, but there was very little humor in it. “Yeah, we all want to get our hands on the Bontifi mask for sentimental reasons.”

“The Bontifi mask?”

“It’s a powerful occult artifact, if you really must know.”

Powerful! Occult! The words rebounded in my skull as Dice grabbed my jacket to jerk me away from the door. Once he’d cleared the way, he unlocked it and pushed me out onto the street, the action so violent that I stumbled and nearly fell. “Don’t come here again, .”

I might have argued, but the door was already closed, Dice apparently having reconsidered reopening to the point of dragging the blind down so I couldn’t see in. I stood there in stunned silence, the mask burning a hole in my chest even through its cloth covering. I might have stood there longer if it wasn’t for the familiar strains of Debussy starting up in my pocket.

The number wasn’t a familiar one as I pressed the button to take the call. “Mr. Farrell,” a smooth male voice said before I could say a word. “You have something of ours. We need to arrange a meeting to take it off your hands.”

“Yours?” I queried, nausea starting up in my gut. “You weren’t the one I spoke to before. Where’s O’Reilly?”

“Busy,” the voice said. “You’ll be dealing with me now. Do you have a problem with that?”

I veered off the street and into an alley where it was much quieter, the wall at my back proving a useful aid in overcoming the sudden weakness in my legs to hold me up. There was no mistaking the veiled threat in the words. What had I gotten myself into? “No. No problem,” I lied. “It doesn’t matter to me who I deal with as long as I get my money.”

“As soon as we have our… parcel, you’ll get your money.”

Would I? Did I even want it? My moral code was being severely tested. I didn’t do weapons and although the mask wasn’t what you’d traditionally consider a weapon, Dice’s reaction told me that’s exactly what it was. I wiped a hand across my brow, unsurprised to find I’d broken out in a cold sweat.

“Mr. Farrell? When and where shall we meet?”

I lay my head back against the wall and tried to think. The man on the phone was nothing like the first person I’d spoken to. Now that cold clarity was coming to the fore, something told me the man had been an actor, and I’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I should have realized from how different that conversation had been to how Baker had talked about them, it couldn’t have been authentic. I slid my hand into my jacket and curled my fingers around the edge of the mask. The easiest thing would be to hand it over, collect my money, and walk away. How bad could whatever they’d planned be? It was just a mask.

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