Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

Adam shook his head.

“Are you sure? Now’s the time to spill everything.”

“Nothing. I mean, I started to write a letter that would go out to the media if I turned up dead, but I didn’t get very far.”

I stopped walking and gaped at him. “Are you kidding me?” “Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t know what you were gonna do!”

“Unbelievable.” I resumed walking while I took out my cell phone and called my mom.

“Tyler?” she answered.

“Hey, Mom, Adam can’t find what he needs, so we’re going to keep looking. I just wanted to let you know.”

“No, you need to come home. You’ve had a traumatic experience.” “I should only be about another hour.”

“Seriously, Tyler, come home. I mean it.”

“I’ll be quick.”

“Tyler, come home. That’s an order.”

“Uh, okay. I’m on my way,” I lied, and then I hung up. Something fun to deal with later, I supposed.

We got in the car, Kelley in the front seat and Adam in the back. I held the doll out toward Kelley. “Could you hold this? Carefully?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No way.”

“If I let Adam hold it, it’ll be a pretzel.”

“I’m not taking responsibility for that thing. If you brake too fast, I could crush your head.”

“I trust you.”

“I’m glad you trust me, but I don’t want to be riding in a car with a driver who has a crushed head.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’ll hold it,” Adam offered.

“Nah.”

Kelley didn’t have her driver’s license yet, and to be completely honest, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to hold the doll even if she did.

“Give me the box,” I told Adam as I pulled the lever to pop open the trunk. He leaned forward and handed it to me, and I carefully placed the doll inside. Then I got back out of the car, set the box inside the trunk, pushed some blankets up against it for additional padding, said a silent prayer, and then shut the lid of the trunk.

I’d be totally fine. The doll would be safe until we could un-voodoo it.

As I started the engine, Kelley entered the address into the GPS. We’d get there at 6:51. Cutting it close, yeah, but I was pretty good at trimming a few minutes off the GPS’s projected arrival time.

We drove away from the park. I certainly don’t want to ruin this story for you, but I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that things were not totally fine.

CHAPTER 7

“Are we lost?” Adam asked.

“No,” I said. “The GPS says we’re going the right way.” “This isn’t the way I went.”

“Sometimes in the modern age you can reach a destination using more than one route.”

I did have to admit that I wished the GPS had an Avoid Scary Neighborhoods setting. The sun had set, and this was the kind of place where you really didn’t want your car to break down after dark. I don’t mean that in a cannibal-rednecks-with-chain-saws way, but muggers and drug dealers were worrisome enough. Most of the buildings seemed to be warehouses, and the ones that were actual businesses seemed to be closed. It was kind of strange and eerie.

“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” said Adam. “I’m making up for what I did.”

“No, you’re not. You’re sitting in the back. You didn’t even offer to pay for gas.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“I know that. So how did you get the doll?”

Adam didn’t reply.

“I’d really like to know how you got the doll,” I said.

“What does it matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess that if you robbed a convenience store to get the money to buy the doll, that’s probably something I should know.”

“It wasn’t anything like that.”

“Also, you never answered the essence question.”

“Essence?” Kelley asked.

“He needed my essence to give the doll its power.”

“Do you really want to know?” Adam asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s kind of gross.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you remember when you spent the night at my house a couple of weeks ago, and we decided to go swimming, and you asked if you could borrow some toenail clippers? Well, we’d never emptied the trash in that bathroom, and I was pretty sure that nobody else had clipped their toenails in there since then, so I dug out a few of them.”

Kelley suddenly rolled down her window, as if she were going to be sick and didn’t want to do it in my mom’s car.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

I saw Adam nod in the rearview mirror.

“So you sat there, digging through the bathroom garbage in search of my toenails, and still thought this whole thing was a good idea?”

Adam shrugged.

“Our friendship is over.”

“I figured.”

Kelley still had her window down and was breathing in fresh (actually, not so fresh) air. This was really more of a windows-up kind of environment, but I didn’t say anything.

Finally she rolled her window back up and turned around to look at Adam. “You,” she said, “are vile.”

“What is this? ‘Pick on Adam’ Day?”

“Yes. That’s a great idea. Let’s make a week out of it. You suck, Adam.”

“Okay.”

“You get negative points in every possible category of human existence.”

“I’m not sure what that means, but okay.”

“If you were lying in the desert miles from civilization and I had a bottle of water, I would—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Everybody in this car understands that Adam sucks. We can let it go now.”

We stopped at a red light. The street was empty except for a really skinny guy in baggy jeans and no shirt. He was on my side of the vehicle. His head was shaved, and his body was covered with approximately eighty billion tattoos. The centerpiece was Mickey Mouse doing something of which the Disney lawyers would almost certainly not approve.

He looked at us and smiled.

Not a “Hey, how ya doin’, welcome to the neighborhood!” friendly smile. More of a sinister smile. I didn’t like that smile at all.

He stepped off the sidewalk and approached the car.

“You should go,” said Kelley.

“It’s a red light.”

“Just go.”

“It’s got a camera!” I’d been in favor of those controversial cameras when they were announced, because I had no plans to run red lights, but now I wished I was a registered voter with a say in the issue.

The man was right there. He tapped on my window. Not knowing what else to do, I rolled it halfway down.

“We don’t want any marijuana,” I told him, feeling like an absolute dork after I said it. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never done drugs, but I could not possibly have said, “We don’t want any marijuana,” in a way that made me sound less cool.

He held out his palm. “Got a buck?”

“Oh yeah, sure.” I started to reach for my wallet and then decided that this was not the best scenario in which to do such a thing. The guy didn’t look homeless. He still looked pretty darn sinister.

I dug through the change next to the drink holder. “I’ve got, uh, twenty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three cents. Is that enough?”

“It’ll do.”

I tried to give him the change, but I was so nervous that I moved my hand too fast and I forgot that the window was halfway up and my hand smacked into the glass and coins flew everywhere.

Why was the light still red? This was the longest red light in the history of traffic.

“You gonna pick it up?” the guy asked.

The light turned green.

And then the gun came out.

I guess he had it in the back of his underwear, which is not where I would choose to keep a gun. Half of my brain shrieked, Drive! Drive! Drive! while the other half politely suggested that because the barrel of the gun was about twelve inches from my face, I should not make any sudden moves.