Sorry about the lack of updates over the past couple of days. This Upper Respiratory Infection (aka Cold) has really been kicking my ass.
However on the plus side Codine is Awesome. Totally totally awesome. Sleepy, yes, which of course is why I haven't been updating.
So then let's get back into it!
* * * * * * * *
Gary went up to his current apartment penthouse, which was just south of Lincoln Park, off Lake Shore Drive, and had a fantastic view of Lake Michigan.
When the previous occupants moved to San Diego a few months ago, the listing somehow failed to show up on the listing agencies website, or in the classified ads if the Tribune (or any other paper) though the listing agency somehow didn't realize this fact. After a month they'd only had a few disinterested inquiries, but nothing serious.
Finally after a month and a half an "offshore business interest" made an offer which was about 25% less than the asking price, which was already mid-seven figures. The listing agency declined the offer without even making a counter.
A few days later a buyer that sounded interested asked about the "curse," then backed out of the deal a few days before the close of the deal. When the listing agency checked into this "curse" they found several stories on the internet about a supposed haunting, and about several rumored deaths that had occurred at that location. The stories dated back several years, but the listing agency had never had any record of any killings, or hauntings. Only 2 people had ever died in that apartment. One a 78 year old man who had a heart attack while entertaining two young ladies, who, when taken together added up to about half his age.
The other was a lady who had slipped while getting out of the shower and broken her neck on the sink, a freak accident. The police and the coroner had ruled out any foul play or even any suspicious activity, it was just an accident, plain and simple.
But the websites had listed tons of other deaths as well as those two, and though none of them could be proven, no prospective clients looked too hard before declining.
So when the offshore holding company called back with an offer that was 20% below list price, there wasn't even a counter offer, the agency accepted the deal, and pushed through the paperwork as quickly as possible.
Gary would have felt a little bad about that if he hadn't known how much of a commission the agents got from these deals. On the other hand he did the agency a few favors by ferreting out a nasty worm in their system which had been stealing client and agent information, and uncovering and exposing that one of the agents had been skimming, to the tune of several million dollars per year. He figured in the end the agency came out ahead in the end.
And the owner of the penthouse made their money by investing in and buying clothes and shoes and other items from Chinese sweatshops that employed absurdly underpaid child labor. The death rate in those shops made Gary shiver a little in his soul. He was working on some way to fix that, but the issue was... troublesome. But at any rate they would never get paid for the penthouse. By the time they realized that the payment reports were spoofed, and not genuine, it would be far too late, and Gary would have moved out a long time ago. Then the holding company would fall apart at the merest glance, and then the whole thing would be wrapped up in court forever before they would get the apartment back, if they ever did.
But that had nothing to do with what was going on now. Right now he had to get ready to go to...
He stopped and thought about that for a second. He knew that Raul had died in a storage park in Terre Haute Indiana. Since finding that out he had read up on everything he could about the place, though there wasn't a ton to know. There was a University that specialized in metaphysics and metaphysical engineering, aka "Magic" and "Practical Application thereof." He wondered if that had anything to do with it.
He didn't know a ton about magic, except what was written in Wikipedia about the subject, which was pretty far over his head. He had some vague notion that it somehow resembled computer engineering, except it required a lot more in the way of memorization, using mnemonics, and a lot of math, and chemestry, and formulas, which were a lot like computer code from what he could see. The layouts were novel, but most of the alchemy code he had seen seemed sloppy to him, though there was probably something he simply didn't understand about it.
He read up about the University, which was actually the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, which had a reputation for being one of the finest engineering schools in the country, if not THE best. But he couldn't see anything that would explain what was going on.
So he focused on the other thing he knew for sure.
"Sonka," Jackie had said. He searched it phonetically first, adding the term Terre Haute, and immediately got a hit.
Sonka Irish Pub. 4 1/2 stars on Yelp. Well wasn't that nice. For someone who was acting so paranoid Jackie wasn't really trying to cover his tracks was he?
Or was he? Maybe it was that obvious on purpose? To throw others off?
He tried searching the term in general, and found that it meant "Ham" in Hungarian. So he tried searching Ham and Terre Haute. The first 2 results he found were The HoneyBaked Ham Company and Cafe, which seemed far to obvious, and Heavenly Ham, which was some kind of sub shop. That one seemed more likely based on recent circumstances.
There was also refferences to T.H.'s HAM radio scene, and something about a HAM radio field day, where they were all going to be jamming on the radio waves. Apparently it was starting today.
'Well,' he thought. 'It's a start at least.'
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