The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

Like coming to the end of a merry-go-round ride, the up-down, round-and-round motion slowed, then stopped. From what felt like the inside of a full-body cast, I peered out at a room of muddy shapes.

I—I’m out of the vault. It worked!

“And man, don’t listen to what they’re sayin’ on the streets,” the sleepy voice beside me continued. “Shit. There’s money to be made if you got the right enterprise. Then all you need is capital.”

My, or rather Ed’s, legs were stretched out in front of me. I recognized the pants I’d given him, though they were caked with filth now. His shoes had either come off or been stolen. Two sets of gray, blocky toes stared back at me. Beyond his feet, the rest of the room came into dull focus. I was in a bedroom layered with mattresses and languid bodies. The bodies sprawled across one another, smoke drifting from their sallow fingers and lips.

Somehow Ed had landed in a flophouse.

Newspapers slid off me as I tested my right arm, then my left. The movements were stiff and clunky. I pawed my chest for the amulet. Still under the shirt, though the power that sustained Ed’s life was ebbing.

When I tried to stand, an arm around my neck restrained me.

“Hold on a sec, man,” the sleepy voice said. “You need capital, which means you got to look for investors. But it’s better to secure a loan, see? Then you don’t got to share ownership. Problem is, my credit’s shot to shit. Rap sheet don’t help none, either. That’s where I could use you.”

The man leaning into me was gaunt, his eyebrows and mustache threadbare scratches on the skeletal contours of his face. With his free hand, he combed back a pile of brittle-looking hair. He blinked a few times, his hooded eyes like muscadine grapes in the deep pits of his sockets.

I tried to tell him to let go, that I needed to take off, but all that emerged were lumpy mumbles.

The man’s mouth stretched into a grin. “Yeah, man, you see where I’m goin’ with this. Fifty-fifty split. Even Steven. You secure the loans, I manage the enterprise.” He cinched me closer, until the bill of my Mets cap was indenting his brow. “Look man, I don’t say this to just anyone, but you got that look about you. I trust you. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m an honest Joe. I don’t lie, cheat, steal. None of that. Not anymore. That shit’s all behind me, sure as I’m sitting here.”

I could have pointed out that he was sitting on a filthy mattress in a drug den, but the clock was ticking. I peeled his clammy arm from around my neck and struggled to my feet.

Have to figure out where I am.

“Hey, man, where you going?”

Unaccustomed to piloting Ed’s body, I stumbled over an array of junkies in front of a window and parted the blinds’ plastic slats. The view was of a fenced back lot and a crumbling field of buildings. I wasn’t one hundred percent, but it looked like the Lower East Side.

The man behind me tried to stand. “I haven’t told you my idea for our enterprise.”

I emerged into a living room that featured a pair of old couches and another sprawl of bodies.

“Soft pretzels, man,” he called from the back room.

I searched the living room for a phone, but if there were any around, they were buried.

Staggering through a stench of urine and sweat, I made my way to the front door and into a hallway. From there, I found a stairwell. I fell several times on my journey to the lobby. Ed had no sensation in his extremities and zero peripheral vision. It was a wonder he had managed at all these last days.

By the time I reached the street, I was moving more like a man buzzed than blottoed. The street sign on the corner told me I was in the Bowery.

Need to find a working phone.

I lumbered south to Canal Street, aware that the fiend could return to the vault at any moment. I was on borrowed time, and little more. A payphone leaned at the corner. When I rounded it, though, I discovered that the receiver had been torn out. Wires sprayed from the bottom of the dented box.

“Shit,” I managed to grunt.

“Hey, there you are!”

I turned to find the man with the soft pretzel plan hustling to catch up to me, his peeling loafers slapping the sidewalk as he lurched this way and that. He came to a wheezing stop in front of me, a filthy floral shirt hanging from the thin rack of his shoulders. “Why’d you bail, man?”

Because I need to make a goddamned phone call, I tried to say. But with the amulet’s power ebbing, the only intelligible words that emerged from Ed’s mouth were “need” and “phone.”

“The hell didn’t you say so?” Pretzel reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a flip phone, and pried it open. “Got it from my sister.” He squinted over the display as he coughed into his fist. “One bar of battery left, man.”

I nodded and gave his shoulder an enthusiastic pat that almost knocked him to the ground. God bless this man. He handed over the phone, but my fingers were too fat to punch in the numbers. On my second try, I nearly dropped the phone. My clay face creased with stress.

I don’t have time for this.

“Here, man, give me the digits.” Pretzel took his sister’s phone back.

With monumental concentration, I articulated each number. Pretzel entered them, then held the phone up to my ear. I felt the blood I’d used in creating Ed pumping through me. The call hadn’t gone straight to voicemail. For the first time in months, Caroline’s line was ringing.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Carllln,” I said, feeling like I was speaking through a mouthful of M&Ms.

“Who is this?”

“Eh-eh-sn.”

“I can’t understand you.”

In the background I heard heated conversation. The