Napier's Bones (4 page)

They had left
the canyon behind some time ago, although the mountains still surrounded them,
although at more of a distance. Now they were coming out of trees after having
crested the top of the pass. Jenna signalled and pulled into a viewpoint
overlooking a big lake, a gorgeous blue that reminded Dom of pictures he’d seen
of the Mediterranean. Dozens of sailboats dotted the lake, and cabins were
spread across the brown, desiccated hills that led down to the water. “Judging
by what happened back in Logan, she was a little too much for you.”

Dom climbed out
of the car and pushed hard against its roof, stretched his back and legs. “I
was sitting in your hometown without any of my own mojo,” he said to Jenna as
she also got out of the car. “I took a bad hit when I was hunting for my
quarry, but that’s because I got backlash from a fight between two experienced
and powerful numerates, both of whom were hosting pretty powerful shadows.
That’s a lot to fend off when you’re caught by surprise.”

Jenna pointed
down to the water. “That’s Bear Lake down there. The left side is north. About
one-third of it is in Idaho, the rest still in Utah. If we go south around the
lake and then over those hills,” she pointed to brown hills on the other side
of the water, “we’ll end up in Wyoming. You need to tell me now where we’re
going.”

Dom scratched
his head, thinking. In the meantime, Billy asked, “Is there anyone you need to
tell that you’ve left home?”

“I’ll phone my
roommate and tell her she can keep all my stuff. My Dad died a couple of years
ago, and I gave up on the church when I was a teen, so I tend not to have
contact with any other relatives.” She shook her head. “So the short answer is
no, there’s no one out there that really cares.”

“Can we get
lunch down the hill?” asked Dom. When Jenna nodded, he said, “Great. We’ll do
that first, and then on to Bozeman.” They got back in the car. “The university
there has a mathematical sciences department, and when I last visited a couple
years ago I found something in the library that no one had cottoned onto yet.
As long as the protections I laid out are fine, it should still be where I left
it. Plus, I have a little stash there, some mojo safe for pickup in case of
emergency.”

Jenna steered
them back onto the highway and started down the long twisty path that led to
the lake. Dozens of cabins peppered the dry scrub and grass that covered the
hills; she slowed down to take a good curve on a steep portion, and six Harleys
thundered by from behind, the last one leaning back into their lane just ahead
of an approaching SUV.

Dom
pulled the baseball from his pocket and looked at it, worried that the backlash
may have even travelled as far as Bozeman, maybe further, wiping out any hope
he had of protecting himself. Staring out the window, he started to flip the
ball in the air, giving it a backhand spin and then catching it with a small
downward swipe of his hand.

Anyone with the
slightest awareness of the provenance of the ball would have a conniption,
seeing him do this with it. It was Mark McGwire’s sixty-first home run ball,
hit on the day McGwire’s father had turned sixty-one. Mojo enough, but the fact
that Roger Maris had hit his own sixty-one in 1961 added that much more to its
power. He hadn’t known for sure that the ball was going to be hit that day, but
the numbers available made the time spent well worth it. Harder still was
getting it in contact with McGwire and his father that day, while their
numerate mojo still raged from the fantastic series of coincidences, but he had
managed, fighting through crowds of fans and reporters and security and lawyers
and agents, fending them off with previously prepared formulae, holing out a
path through everyone and then calling forth their mutual mojos, tied together
by virtue of family and proximity, only a few hours shy of their peak.

The ball had
been one of his strongest artefacts, a confluence of dates and times and
numerical events that so rarely happened. And he had been the one to get it
done, had beaten four other numerates that he’d known of, perhaps even
frightened off others, smaller players in a big game of numbers.

He’d gone
through much the same with number 62, which had the advantage of being hit on
9/8/98. That one, not quite as powerful, was stored in a safe deposit box in
Edmonton. But it was better than what he was holding in his hand right now, the
backlash having made it completely worthless, just so much seared leather and
rubber, all of its mojo lost doing its job. Which was good, he knew, but it
still hurt to lose something this powerful.

He leaned out
and tossed the ball into the scrub on the side of the road. Maybe some kid from
one of these cabins would find it and use it as intended, to toss and catch and
hit.

Lunch was a
burger and fries and an excellent raspberry milkshake at a little joint on the
side of the road, sitting on picnic tables in the shade of trees that seemed
barely capable of defying the heat. Dom paid for the food as well as gas for
the car from his thick roll of bills. Then, after stocking up on junk food and
drinks for the long drive, Jenna grabbed some change and ran over to the pay
phone.

“Time for lesson
two,” said Dom, jogging up behind her. “First off, I’m glad to see you’re not
using a mobile phone. Those things are easy for everyone to track, numerates
and analogs alike. Second, for the pay phone, something with numbers like this,
you should never have to pay. That, plus we don’t want any trail showing where
we’ve been, just in case we’re still being hunted. Any change you use will
light up like fireworks at night to the right kind of eye.”

She put her
hands on her hips. “So what do I do?”

Dom frowned,
sticking his tongue slightly out of his mouth while he thought. It was an
outside phone, which meant that numbers didn’t stick around long enough for
lifting. Not that pay phones were that easy for it these days, with everyone
using mobiles instead. Eventually these things were probably bound to go extinct.

“Look here. See
this number?” He tapped the phone number on the little label sitting above the
keypad.

Jenna leaned
forward, squinting. Obviously her glasses weren’t just cosmetic. “946-8668.”

“Right on. So
what you need to do now is concentrate real hard, see if a pattern emerges from
that.”

“W-e-ll,” she
said, drawing out the word, “8668 is a pattern, right?”

Dom nodded. “And
one a child could see. Instead, you need to look for the numbers you’ve been
seeing since you were a kid, look for how those relate to the entire number
that’s on here.”

Frowning, Jenna
crossed her arms and stared hard at the numbers. Then her face lit up. “Oh! I
see something!”

“And?”

She frowned
again. “No, I don’t. I thought I saw a cube root in there, but I was wrong.”

“You’re still
thinking along elementary lines,” said Dom. “Don’t look so hard for
conventional formulae; rather, just see what the numbers can do for you. Watch
them, stroke them, make them come out. Hell, do you think I went to university
and studied math and even learned how to write and read a formula of
any
type?” He shook his head. “And I may be talking out of school here, but it’s a
good possibility that Billy here was anything
but
a mathematician.”

“You’re probably
right,” responded Billy.

Jenna looked up,
watched a passenger jet cutting across the sky high overhead. “I see circles,”
she said. “Triangles, other shapes. Some numbers are squeezing their way in,
filling gaps between them.”

“Good,”
said Dom. “From what I’ve heard, it works, or at least looks, different for
everybody who does it. Does it seem complete?”

She looked back
at the phone, waved a finger in the air and whispered to herself. “They don’t
want to cooperate,” she said, frowning. She reached out a hand, and Dom watched
as a small cloud of numbers tried to break away from her, but with an effort
she managed to get them under control. “Okay. Got them. I’ve just added my home
phone number. Wow!” She broke into a huge smile. “Everything just fell into
place!”

Dom frowned. The
numbers were still bouncing in the air around Jenna, but seemed to be doing
their level best to keep away from her. But he nodded his head and said, “One
more thing to add, then. Pick up the phone and punch in whatever numbers work
with the pattern you just made. Then add a series of eleven primes, starting
with . . .”

“Seventeen,”
said Billy.

“Seventeen. And
jump two when you get to the fifth and the seventh.”

Jenna screwed up
her face, concentrating. Then she punched in a bunch of numbers, finishing off
with the set of primes, the last one seventy-three. This last number Dom seemed
to see from her eyes, one blink there and one blink back in his own body. “It’s
ringing!” she said.

Dom shook off
the momentary shift and smiled at Jenna. “You did good,” he said. “Elegant, actually,
for someone who’s just starting.”

She pointed at
the phone and whispered, “There’s no one home.” After pausing a few seconds,
she started to speak. “Cindy, it’s Jenna. No time to explain, honey, but I’m
leaving town. I don’t know how long. You can keep my stuff if you want, or give
it to Deseret Industries, or sell it to help with the rent. Sorry to leave you
in a lurch like this. I’ll call when I can. Love you. Bye.” She hung up.
“Answering machine.”

Almost
immediately, the phone rang. Startled, Jenna reached for it.

“Don’t pick it
up!” yelled Dom, voice sounding of panic. He reached out and grabbed her hand.

It rang again.
Jenna looked at Dom, fear in her eyes. He didn’t feel too good himself.

There was a riff
he knew from a Charlie Mingus piece. With phones like they were nowadays,
playing music on the keypad was just one note, although if you had a good beat,
and remembered where the notes used to be on earlier telephones, then the tune
could do the job. He started to play the riff before he picked up the handset,
hoping that it would be enough to keep prying eyes from finding him.

“Yeah?”
Beep-beep-a-beep-beep.

The voice was
quiet, a woman’s voice, hoarse, and the beeping of the Mingus tune did nothing
to tune it out of his head. “I don’t know who you are, boy, but believe me,
I’ll find you.”

Beep-a-beep-a-beep-beep-a-beep.

“We’ll find
you,” said another voice, a male voice—how the hell did that work? His accent
was different from Billy’s, but definitely present.

“And after
you’re dead, we’ll strip your body of all its mojo and wave an
ever-so-sorrowful goodbye as your shadow fractions away.” The woman’s voice
again, soft and deadly but still hoarse, almost strangled, raising goose bumps
on his neck and arms.

“You won’t catch
me by surprise again, bitch!” said Dom, showing more grit than he felt.
Beep-a-beep-a-beep-a-beep-beep-beep. “In the meantime, wipe away a little tear
over the fact that you couldn’t even get me when I was stripped to the bone.”
He slammed down the phone, hands shaking, then with a yell pulled the handset
from the box, threw it to the ground, where it clattered across the pavement,
metal cord and wires dragging behind.

“Fuck!” he
yelled. He ran over and kicked the handset across the pavement. “Fuck fuck fuck
fuck fuck!”

Jenna ran over
and put a hand on his shoulder. “Dom,
hush
. There are people
watching!”

Dom pushed her
hand away and marched back to the car, Jenna in pursuit. “I don’t give a rat’s
ass. Let’s get the hell out of this state; I need to be on the open road and
well away from that freak.” Before climbing in he leaned over the back and gave
the numbers on the license plate a quick swipe, glaring at the strangers
watching as he did so. Everyone turned their gazes elsewhere when he was done.

“How did she
find us?” asked Jenna, once they were back on the highway headed north.

“She didn’t,”
answered Billy. “She must have gotten the scent of you and figured out where
you lived, but the best she could do was introduce a formula to dial back;
there’s no way it could have told her where we were, though. Not that fast.” He
sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

Dom laughed, a
short, bitter sound. “So we can hope. In the meantime, we worry about just how
strong this person is.”

“But you told
her back there,” said Jenna, glancing over at him. “The only reason she almost
caught you was because you didn’t have anything with you.”

Eyes closed, Dom
leaned his head back against the seat. “It’s looking like this person is
capable of shit I can only dream of, Jenna. I’d say we were lucky to get out.
Lucky you showed up and had a car.”

“We were hunting
the same thing she was,” continued Billy, “Dom by himself and me with my
earlier host, and she was faster off the mark, seems to have found what we were
all after.” He cocked open his left eye and looked over at her. “And now she’s
hunting us.”

“You wanted to
learn.” Dom forced the eye closed again. “You’re in now, like it or not, and
school it ain’t. This is going to be a trial by fire.”

Jenna tapped the
steering wheel in a familiar pattern. “Since I’m learning, maybe it’s time for
another lesson. What was that you were doing with the phone’s keypad?”

Dom nodded. She
was tapping the same beat that he had kept when he’d faked up the Mingus tune.
“Time was,” he said, “you could play musical notes on a phone’s buttons. Not
anymore, but there’s still a residual numeracy there. I was playing a rough
estimation of a piece by Charlie Mingus.”

“Why him?”

“The same day
that Mingus died in Mexico at age 56, 56 sperm whales beached themselves nearby.”

Jenna blinked,
then glanced at Dom with her right eyebrow raised. “So?”