Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

“You didn’t?” Childers asked, hiding his disappointment.

“No!” Schimmel’s face pulled back into a grimace as the thought settled in on him again. “Something is seriously wrong with that dude.”

Says the guy who tossed a baby into the drink to save his own ass, Childers thought.

They reached a relatively flat spot on the mountainside. The undergrowth had thinned. A misty breeze was blowing away the fog, and Gastineau Channel was visible through a gap in the trees. Paris Creek waterfall chattered and hissed as it fell over the sheer drop just a few feet away.

Childers raised his open hand. “Hold up a minute. Catch your breath. You sure it was Dollarhyde?”

“Who else?” Schimmel said. “I mean, an old girlfriend maybe, but I haven’t had a girlfriend in over a year.” He gulped, started to breathe harder, even though they’d stopped. “Listen… I gotta tell you something.” His lips pursed like he was about to pop with important news.

Childers’s mood darkened. He didn’t like surprises, and this sounded like a big one. “What is it?”

“You remember when we hit that Indian grave?”

Childers groaned. This was so painful.

“I remember it like it was two days ago.” He snapped his fingers. “Spit it out. Just say what you’re trying to say.”

“Well… you didn’t see it, but there was a rattle down there in the rocks.”

“A what?”

“Like an Indian witch doctor’s rattle. Spooky as hell. A raven or something carved on it.” Schimmel sniffed, his chest heaving like he was on the verge of breaking into tears. “You were busy talking to Dollarhyde. I woulda tossed it back, but that kid, Merculief, said rattles like this one could go for half a million bucks.”

Half a million. So, that’s why he’d gone into town.

“How much did you get for it?”

“I’m sure this one is cursed,” Schimmel said. “Everything in my life just turned to shit as soon as I picked it up.”

That didn’t start with some Indian rattle, Childers thought. He resisted the urge to throat-punch the pathetic turd. “How much?”

“I didn’t sell it yet.”

Schimmel reached under his rain jacket and pulled out a bundle wrapped in a flimsy plastic grocery store bag. He pushed it to Childers like it was on fire.

The rattle did look old. The bent horn body was chipped and still flecked with bits of dried mud from the dig. A long, white bone was fixed to the horn to form a handle. Something was carved on the horn, a face maybe, or a bird, but Childers didn’t care. He didn’t know a damned thing about archeology or Indian treasures, but he knew that this bone rattle would be worth some serious coin.

Schimmel winced, dabbing at one of the wounds on his chest where blood seeped through his shirt.

Childers stifled a grin. Got him good there.

Schimmel gulped back another sob. His rheumy eyes flicked from tree to tree in the shadows above, the clearing below. He stopped his whimpering long enough to orient himself. “Hey, are… are we above the Glory Hole?”

Childers looked toward the sea, as if that location hadn’t occurred to him. “It’s down there somewhere.”

In truth, the mountain fell away over a near-vertical rock wall – just a few yards through the trees. The open pit entry into the Treadwell Mine – flooded to form an eerie, crystalline lake when the mine collapsed in 1917, lay some two hundred feet below.

“Thought that’s where we were.” Schimmel licked cracked lips, consoling himself. His eyes continued to flit herky-jerky through the trees. “I mean, I just want to get rid of the thing. I guess I don’t know for sure if it’s cursed, but I don’t want to take any chances either. Half a million is way too much to expect. I know that. But that bitch at the gallery would only do a couple of thousand…” He brightened. “Hey, maybe you know somebody. We’ll split the money. Hell, I only want a cut. Sixty-forty’s fine by me.”

“Sixty-forty?” Childers shook the rattle as if he was testing it. It seemed awfully sturdy for something that had been in the ground for a couple hundred years. The dirt or seeds or whatever it was inside made an earie whooshing sound.

“Sixty-forty,” Schimmel said again. Hugging himself, he leaned against a rotting log, rocking back and forth like a junkie who needed a fix. “I mean, seventy-thirty is good too, if you know a place to sell it. I just don’t want to be the one to hold on to it anymore. I mean, I think it might be why Dollarhyde put razor blades in my soap.”

“I’ll hold on to it.” Childers gave the rattle another shake, if only to watch the shudder run up Schimmel’s broken body each time he did it. The chilly mist was making him hungry. Time to speed things along. “Wanna know a little secret?”

Schimmel leaned closer, ready to hear it.

“Dollarhyde didn’t put the blades in your soap.”

Schimmel blinked and gave a nervous laugh. “What do you mean? Then who?”

Childers took a threatening step toward him, crowding his wounds, forcing him to backpedal or be run over. Schimmel fell, scrambled to his feet. Tears of betrayal and pain ran down his face.

“But… why?”

Everyone Childers had ever killed up close asked something like that. Why? He continued to advance, chasing Schimmel around a tree. Arching his neck, he loomed above the terrified man, making sure to put Schimmel’s back to the drop. Childers shook the rattle again, terrorizing the sobbing little pussy. Forcing him backward without ever laying a hand on him.

“Why?” Schimmel begged again, falling over his own feet as much as the deadfall. Fresh blood soaked the front of his shirt.

“I mean, I thought… I thought we were friends.”

“Not even close,” Childers said, swooshing the rattle.

Schimmel began to hyperventilate, mewling like a baby. He stopped when his heels reached the lip of the cliff, teetering there. Jagged rocks and the flooded pit waited below. His head fell sideways, bewildered, like a puppy after you kicked