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death the toll, with this hex I curse your soul. So mote it be.”
lenses of the John Lennon specs his eyes were terrified. He licked his pale lips.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I sounded like Jake.
him beyond the fact that he was finishing up an undisclosed undergrad program at UCLA
kind of way, as though I still didn’t get it.
your problems, but this particular problem rang a few bells for me. Or so I thought at the
Boulevard. My ten-year-old Bronco was on its last legs, and Jake seemed to believe that I was
“Gave him eight hundred bucks. Told him to take Wanda Witch away for the
tequila sunset. Palm trees rustled overhead. Tinny Christmas carols issued from the
I watched Jake’s blond and buff reflection materialize behind me in the windshield.
year of life. We’re looking at twenty minutes of terror. Tops.”
part in a class on demonology or witchcraft about a year ago. I guess somebody inhaled too
Red and green Christmas lights strung across the lot flashed on. They reminded me of
across the street. I remembered I hadn’t stopped for lunch. My stomach growled. I wondered
“You shop around, you compare prices, you get the vehicle right for you,” he observed,
was right, too. Climate controlled. What did that mean? Air conditioning?
was the victim of a ritual killing.”
that’s all. You hired him through a temp agency. You think they ran a serious security
lot of kids are attracted to it.”
Forester.
coerced.
planter bristling with plastic bougainvillea.
“I don’t know. You seem preoccupied.”
because he was a cop – that the job was tough enough without having to go to war with the
complicated. Jake despised himself for being sexually attracted to men. Though he had been a
certain tension between us that I sometimes feared could never completely be resolved.
he was less active in the clubs these days.
Crime, the weekly writing group I hosted at the bookstore.