Read Online Mercury Rests by Robert Kroese - Free Book Online

stopped, Eddie had searched the area, trying to figure out where the bullet had come from. His best guess was that the shooter had been on the roof of one of the buildings across the street, but he found no clues of any kind. The assassin was long gone. Who would want Cody dead? Presumably someone who didn’t want her talking about whatever it was she had discovered. Something about Wormwood.
    There was a knock on his door. Housekeeping?
    “Go away!” yelled Eddie.
    Another knock.
    “I said, go away!”
    “It’s destiny, Eddie,” said an all-too-familiar voice. “Are you going to let destiny languish in the hall?”
    “Go away, Culain! Or Cain, or whatever your name is!” Cain was the last person Eddie wanted to see. Eddie wondered if he knew about Cody. No, of course not. How could he? She had been dead for less than an hour. Eddie had been the last person she saw.
    If I had any decency, I’d tell him his daughter is dead, thought Eddie. But I don’t. Anyway, screw Cain. He’s a murderer and a manipulative jerk. Let him find out on his own.
    “Eddie!”
    “Go away! I don’t want to talk to you!”
    “I’m not leaving, Eddie.”
    “I’ll call hotel security.”
    “Just let me in, Eddie. I need to talk to you. I’ve got some information for you.”
    “Information about what?”
    “About the story you’re writing.”
    “I’m not writing any story. I’m done with that. Go away!”
    “So you don’t want to know how it ends?”
    “No!”
    “OK. But I’m leaving something for you. In case you get curious.” He heard Cain slip something under the door. “Good-bye, Eddie,” said Cain.
    Eddie said nothing. He sat in the dark for another hour before his curiosity got the better of him. He turned on a lamp and walked to the door. On the carpet just inside the door lay ared plastic item the size and shape of a penknife. Eddie picked it up. It was a USB drive.
    He walked to his laptop, which was resting on the small hotel desk, and plugged the drive into one of the slots in the back. The laptop had been a gift from Finch Publishing, to facilitate his writing of the final Charlie Nyx book. Eddie normally wrote all of his reports longhand, but Wanda Kwan had insisted. They had even scanned his manuscript and the boxes and boxes of background information Cain had given him, because he had refused to come to Los Angeles without them. Over the past few days, he had learned how to type passably and had become enamored of the little magic box.
    The USB drive held hundreds of pages of information: everything from high-resolution scans of the Sumerian manuscript Cain had been tasked to rewrite to the six completed Charlie Nyx books to ramblings on the “secret history of Los Angeles.” Cain had evidently stolen his own daughter’s notes. Classy.
    The Sumerian manuscript was a chaotic mishmash of unintelligible symbols and pictograms, and Cody’s notes weren’t much better. Her notes were composed mostly of bizarre and probably imagined correlations between disparate people and events that resembled a demented game of word association. For example:
     
Six of seven Mercury astronauts attended the opening of Space Mountain in Anaheim. Exception: Gus Grissom—died in mysterious launchpad fire.
Gus Grissom was a MASON: Also possible relative of Karl Grissom, antichrist???
Who is Mercury???
    Poor Cody, running around trying to make sense of conspiracies far above her pay grade. Eddie couldn’t imagine there was any real connection between the Mercury astronauts, the Masons, and the Antichrist. And yet, somehow this chaotic method of paranoia-riddled word association had allowed her to piece together much of the convoluted scheming of Tiamat and Lucifer. Her obsession with the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy led her to believe that diabolical entities had manipulated the development of the Los Angeles suburbs to enable the construction of a vast system of underground tunnels—a ridiculous conclusion that was