Free The Curse Servant (The Dark Choir Book 2) by J.P. Sloan Page B

involved?”
    “More accurately, we’ve already involved ourselves and the matter is dealt with. The Sun and The Charm City Spectator threatened to expose hermetic activity close to a seat of political power. We simply can’t let that happen.” Brown cocked his head. “This can’t be news to you.”
    My stomach dropped to my knees.
    He took a long puff on his cigar. “Dangerously uninformed seems a bit on-the-nose.”
    My brain rewound the conversation a few seconds as I rose to my feet. I inched back into the main room as Brown looked on.
    “Mister Lake? This could have gone differently. Please try to remember that in the coming weeks.”
    I withdrew into the room and hustled over to the bar. I gripped the bar rail as I scanned the television hanging in the corner. All I could see were cars festooned in corporate logos taking several hundred left turns. Ben wandered over to me and coughed discretely into his sleeve.
    “Another?”
    “Can I get the news?”
    “It won’t be on for another hour-some. What’s up?”
    “Don’t know. Just expecting bad news, I suppose.”
    I waited at the bar for that hour-some, not speaking a word to anyone. By the time I realized what Brown was going on about, the room was largely empty.
    There was a massive pileup on the Jones Falls Expressway. It was a tragedy. An entire family had been killed when their car spun out from road debris. They speculated it was gravel from a poorly secured dump truck. A man, his wife, and two young daughters were killed upon impacting an overpass support column.
    Cecil Rawls deserved better than that. His children sure as shit deserved better. Whatever poor bastard at The Charm City Spectator that probably met with a sudden, tragic demise did, too.
    In one of those moments I generally regret later, I marched back to the side room. Brown was gone.
    I stared into the shadows, and spotted something flickering just beneath the wingbacks. Something small, withdrawing its impish legs before I could quite see it directly. The entire room seemed to crawl with malevolence. The shadows twitched like a fly-covered horse. They were getting restless.
    Things could have gone differently, Brown had said. It could have been an Audi wrapped around that support column.
    But still… two little girls.
    As I drove home with remarkable vigilance, I put a great deal of thought into my current vocational situation. Politics simply wasn’t agreeing with me. It certainly didn’t agree with Cecil. I couldn’t withdraw myself from Julian’s employ without a great deal of crow-eating and self-debasement. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to seeing more innocent people eliminated for the sake of hermetic expediency?
    As I turned off the freeway into downtown, I spotted the tops of Harborside Towers and remembered what Cecil had told me. This wasn’t simple politics. This was a quiet takeover of a city. I was certain Cecil would have done everything he could to protect his family from the inherent dangers he must have sensed lay in his line of work. And yet he persisted. Now that he was gone, I had a choice to make. I could let Brown muscle me out of the campaign, or I could try to honor Cecil’s memory by continuing his work.
    Perhaps I was simply being too sloppy? I had been too distracted with finding my soul. I let myself get photographed. I wandered up to the front of City Hall with damning photographs in a conspicuous envelope. This was as much my fault as anyone’s.
    I had to focus.
    I had to get my soul back.
    Happily, I was hours away from catching a flight to Oregon, and with any luck at all, I’d finally have a means to find it.

was musing on what reason the city of Portland, Oregon, decided to put a mountain at the end of their airport runway as our plane touched down. I had visited the Pacific Northwest only one time before, some six years ago when I helped Edgar negotiate a purchase of a Han Dynasty altarpiece. I remembered it had never stopped