Prather had judged his old associate well… Zeke really was not about to give up the chance to earn several thousand dollars. No sooner had the call ended then he started dialing with one claw-like hand and reaching for his rolodex with the other.
Zeke was an old-fashioned kind of crustacean. His stubby fingers weren’t well-suited for a cellphone’s tiny buttons, and he liked having things written down. Names and numbers on index cards could survive the loss of a phone, and they were less susceptible to electronic trickery.
Of course, as someone in Zeke’s line of work knew, there were ways that anything… even an encoded book sealed up in a safe… could be “hacked” by someone with the right knowledge and tools. He’d been taking countermeasures against such things since the days of rotary phones. That was part of why he was suspicious of cyberspace… he didn’t need to worry about defending his information from attacks coming from a whole new notional plane of existence.
He did have a website for the store, but it was just a static page with some pictures of his more typical offerings. It bore a copyright date of 1997 and a phone number he hadn’t had since 1998. The email address on it had never been correct, and it would hardly have mattered if it was.
He called up a few of his closer connections and left somewhat vague messages while he flipped through the cards to find one he’d hardly ever used: Dr. Sebastian Everett, better known to the world as Doctor Shadow. Among those mystics who could loosely be construed as “good guys”, the Doc was the one who seemed most inclined to study such dark and primal matters as unmaking.
“You have reached the private line of Dr. Sebastian Everett, D.D.S. Please leave your name and telephone number and the specific matter this is in reference to and I will get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Hey, Doc… it’s Zeke.” He normally wouldn’t have gone into this much detail over the phone, much less to a recording, but he knew from experience that the man’s request for specificity wasn’t casual. He wouldn’t return a call if he didn’t know what it was about. “I’m looking into something for a colleague… a bit of that old black magic, with an emphasis on old and an emphasis on black: not the hocus-pocus, but the other kind. I need to know what all’s involved with setting up…”
There was a quiet click and the background static changed. He heard an intake of breath, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hello, Ezekiel.”
“Who’s this?” he said. “I was calling for…”
“The doctor’s not available,” she said, and he realized he was hearing an echo. He slowly swung his stool around to find himself looking at a pale-skinned woman with dark hair, talking on a cell phone. “Hang up the phone, Ezekiel… and then explain very quickly and very concisely why you’re asking about this.”
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