3.

I checked my guns at the main station Downtown. I had to. They had a metal detector at the door. Not even my state Executioner’s license and the fact that I worked with the Spook Squad carried enough weight to make the steely-eyed cop at the door let me keep my protection.

Funny how we keep a building of fully trained and armed law enforcement officers more well-protected than a school full of vulnerable children.

I met Officer Jenkins at his desk. He was a stocky, medium café mocha colored man with a sort of droopy, naturally sad face. At about 5’10" he was kind of short for a cop, though he was still more than half a foot taller than me. As I had imagined, his desk was untidily stacked with papers. He almost dislodged a few when he stood up to shake my hand. There was a Band-Aid around the top joint of the index finger on his right hand.

I turned his hand over when I shook it. "How’s the papercut?"

He grimaced. "I’ve had bullet wounds that bothered me less."

I laughed. With an eye to the paperwork on his desk, Officer Jenkins hurried me over to Evidence to have a look at the book. "By the way," I said as we walked the halls of the cop shop. "I didn’t have time to stop in and get Dumare’s phone number. I’ll see if I can get it to you by tomorrow morning."

"Oh, that’s all right," Jenkins said vaguely. The wrinkles in his sad face had smoothed themselves into an absent expression. "I got in touch with him. He’s in New York."

Looking back, I’m surprised at how well I kept my cool. My voice was calm. I felt the still swirl of power in the air, and it gave me a clue that unnatural influences were at work.

"New York?" I asked calmly. The quiet thread of power in the air tightened around Jenkins as we came to a plain door with "Evidence Claims" etched onto an orange plastic tag stuck to the door at eye level. Jenkins’ eye-level, not mine.

Whatever was behind that door had its hooks in Officer Jenkins. It worked him like a puppet. His mouth opened and the words spilled out with as much emotion as the answers I get when I ask questions of zombies. "Yes, he’s there on business, but he faxed us a release to hand over the item to you.

"He said he sent it to you. It must have been stolen en route. He thought you had it."

"I bet he was upset when I didn’t send a thank-you card."

Officer Jenkins opened the door. My spine stiffened, and I wished desperately for my Browning. Not that it would stop something that could open up a man’s head and make him believe he’d had a conversation with a corpse that’d been dead and digested months ago.

The evidence claims room was the same dull beige walls and flickering fluorescent lights as most other rooms in the main station. I think the walls in the morgue are the same color. Maybe the city gets the paint on discount.

Most of the room was blocked off by a chest-high metal partition which was topped with cloudy bullet-proof glass like they have in all-nite gas stations and liquor stores. Jenkins escorted me to the window. He pushed through a paper with the item number and description on it.

"So," I said, hoping to distract him out of that vacant look he’d had since we started talking about his supposed conversation with Dominic Dumare. "Does your crook usually steal from the mail? That’s a federal offense. You could put him away for a long time with that."

"Hmm?" Jenkins mumbled. His eyes were glued to the clerk who was approaching the counter with a brown-paper wrapped parcel.

"Officer Jenkins?"

"Oh. Sorry. Gathering wool." He stood up a little straighter, seemed to collect himself and recall my question. "No, Mr. Dumare sent it through a private courier, so it’s just Grand Larceny."

"Grand Larceny?!" I almost shouted as the clerk slid the release papers through the window for me to sign. "How much is the thing worth?"

Officer Jenkins was looking vague again. He struggled a bit against it this time. "Our appraiser said that, if the fence’s records are to be trusted, it’s a hand lettered thirteenth century manuscript. Probably worth about fifty-thousand dollars."

"Shit." I muttered. The clerk passed the package through the window. I picked it up. Heavy. "I should get this home." Fifty thousand dollars.

"Don’t you want to check it first?" Jenkins asked, still straining against the lassitude of the quiet power that swirled around him. I felt it tighten like a vise on his brain, pulling his mouth shut and his mind away from the fact that he was just going to let me walk away with fifty thousand dollars worth of evidence.

Under any other circumstances, I would have said something. But this book was evidence that connected me to Dominic Dumare. If any problems arose from it, I’d prefer to deal with them myself.

I unwrapped the book. It was old, bound in cracked but well cared-for brown leather. There was no title on the cover. There was a small dark spot in the upper right hand corner of the leather cover. Blood. Fairly recent.

"What’s this," I said as I leaned over the book. Officer Jenkins leaned in and peered at the spot.

"I came in to have a look at it again this morning, after I talked to you. Damn papercut started bleeding." He held up his band-aided finger. "I’m sorry. I’ll pay to have it cleaned."

"No, don’t worry about it." I said, staring at his upraised hand. The Band-Aid was soaked with blood. The blood was beginning to drip down his hand. "Are you sure that’s only a papercut?" I asked.

"What?" he looked lost. His body gave a sudden shiver, inadvertently flinging a second drop of blood onto the cover of the book. A bright flare of power exploded around Jenkins. His eyes blanked.

"Yes," he said. "Just a papercut. It’s the little ones that hurt the most, you know."

He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the still-bleeding finger. He shoved the hand in his coat pocket like it was only a flesh wound and everything was just dandy. Ri-ight.

I looked down at the source of Jenkins’ odd behavior. The book was still closed, inert and harmless on the counter. But if I’d been in a movie, that’s when the ominous music would have started to play.

I opened the front cover. The first page was blank, but Officer Jenkins leaned over it and traced a finger along lines that only he could see.

"There’s the inscription. Dumare’s handwriting is worse than a doctor’s. It must have taken us ten minutes to figure out what it said." He cocked his head to look at me. For a moment his natural cop’s suspiciousness struggled out of the fog of the book’s influence.

"You must have made quite an impression on the man, if he only met you once and decided to give you a fifty thousand dollar book."

"Yeah," I answered him quickly, as an image of Dumare’s dead body flashed into my mind. "I made a big impression."

I turned the heavy vellum past the blank facing page. The next page had a large bold title with a block of smaller script beneath. The title was written in thick black letters that crawled like spiders across the age-browned page:

The text beneath the title looked to be Latin, but it was too sloppily written to be sure. The words were all crabbed together, written in thick, bloppy squiggles that bore only a faint resemblance to legible script. It looked as though whoever had written it had been in a rush to get it all down. The lines of text were crooked and uneven The words had been crammed onto the page, almost one on top of the other.

Lucky me. I didn’t need to be able to read the text of the book to know what it was. I remembered enough of my high school classics studies to know that "Necronomicon", translated roughly, meant "book of the dead".

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