Page 7 of Dark Obsession

CHAPTER TWO

The attic space was dusty and as hot as Satan’s taint. Cody removed his safety glasses—lenses smeared all to shit—and wiped his face with his already wet bandana. He pressed the material into the corners of his eyes and blew out a breath.

“You stopped moving. Did it eat you?”

Jugs’s voice, still scratchy from when he’d been choked by the mummy at Dave and Ollie’s wedding, came to him from the attic’s opening. Cody put the glasses on again and glanced over his shoulder. The top quarter of Jugs’s body stuck up through the entrance, the cervical brace gleaming in the glow of the bare bulb hanging nearby.

“You look like an injured Muppet.”

“You look like a hundred miles of bad road.” Jugs shifted on the narrow step of the pull-down ladder. “Did you find it?”

“Considering we don’t know what ‘it’ is yet, I’m going to have to go with no.” Cody resumed crawling along the dust-coated plywood laid over ceiling joists and blown insulation. The insulation was most likely fiberglass, and he figured he should probably be wearing a mask. But it was so damn hot in the attic, just the thought of it left him a bit lightheaded. Then he heard Demmy’s voice in his head calmly telling him a mask was a lot less trouble to deal with than a lung condition.

He groaned and sat back on his heels. Reaching into a pocket of his coveralls—drenched with sweat the entire length of his body—he extracted an N95 mask. Removing the glasses, Cody put the mask on and settled the glasses in place once again.

“I’m going to need five gallons of water once I get out of here,” he said.

“Yeah, you are pretty ripe. I can smell you from here.”

Cody resumed crawling, the knee-pads helping keep most of the ache at bay. He wore a headlamp he could activate and shut off with a wave of his hand, and he aimed the light along the base of the wall, searching for a nest or a hole gnawed in the soffit. Or even a furry face staring at him. Their client, Gerald Dorchester, a man in his sixties with hair like Doc Brown from Back to The Future, had told them he’d been hearing something running around in the attic, he just didn’t know what it was.

The dust he stirred up mixed with the sweat on his face and the back of his neck to form a disgusting paste. Every time he reached out a hand, the scratches across his chest pulled, reminding him they were still healing, even six weeks later. It also reminded him he had a follow-up appointment that afternoon with Zenona.

“Demetrius conveniently had business stuff to do today,” Jugs said, then made a sound of disgusted disbelief. “He should be standing here breathing in a metric-ton of dust and your funk.”

“Demmy likes the smell of my sweat.”

“You may want to get him checked.”

Cody snorted a laugh. “He’s not a dog. You’ve lived with a veterinarian too long.”

Jugs made a noncommittal noise. “She’d probably say the same thing.”

Cody paused and checked over his shoulder. In the harsh glow of the bulb Jugs tugged at the cervical collar, pulling it away from his jaw. He looked around the attic, not settling on any one spot for long. Now that Cody was paying closer attention, he could see bags beneath Jugs’s eyes. “Trouble at home, buddy?”

“I don’t know. Apparently I’m doing a lot of things that annoy Aggie.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Cody resumed moving, the wounds pulling with every reach.

“Breathing. Eating. Using the bathroom.”

“Wow, that’s quite a list. Have you thought about stopping all of that?”

That earned a low rumbling chuckle. “You’re a dick, Bonker.”

“I’ve got it, and I swing it.”

A soft squeaking ahead made him freeze. He waved a hand by the headlamp, turning it off.

“Got something,” he whispered.

“Finally. What is it?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Then how do you know you found it?”

He resisted cussing Jugs out. Barely. “I heard it.”