“It’s me,” I said.
“I was wondering when you’d call,” said Zeke. “How’s your ear?”
“My ear’s totally fine,” I said. “Why?”
My thought process while saying that: “If he thinks the voodoo doll doesn’t really work, I’ll have much more leverage.”
My thought process immediately after saying that: “He’s going to poke the doll again to make it work! Retract statement! Retract statement!”
“Okay, I lied,” I told him. “I barely have any ear left. Are you happy?”
“Send me a phone picture of your missing ear. Right now. If I don’t have it in sixty seconds, the doll gets hurt again.”
Zeke hung up. Ack!
“This phone has a camera, right?” I asked Mildred.
“Why would my phone have a camera? I didn’t buy a camera. I bought a phone.”
“Every phone made since 1974 has a frickin’ camera!” I said. But this one didn’t even have a touch-screen display, and I didn’t see a camera lens anywhere. “Listen to me! I need a camera in the next few seconds, or I am going to splatter!”
“We have a Polaroid in the attic,” said Glenn.
“What’s a Polaroid?” I asked, not that it mattered. Franklin probably had a better phone, but he was still unconscious. Unless I could somehow stop time, there was no way I could meet the driver’s deadline!
Could I stop time?
No. I couldn’t stop time.
What part of me was going to explode next? My eyeball? My eyebrow? My chin? My uvula? The knuckle of my left ring finger? One of my thighs? My torso? Several inches of my lower intestine? My teeth? What if my teeth exploded in my mouth? I couldn’t even stand having the dentist drill a tiny little spot for a filling, and now there was a very real chance that my teeth could explode all over my mouth!
I frantically hit redial and called him back.
While it rang, I gave Kelley a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
It probably would have been more reassuring if the hand doing the patting wasn’t covered with blood.
Adam hadn’t screamed in a while.
“Where’s the picture?” asked Zeke.
“I don’t have a camera,” I said. “But I swear to you I’m not lying. If I hold the phone up to what’s left of my ear, you can probably still hear it oozing.”
“I think I should pierce the doll again just to be sure.”
“No! Listen to me. The doll is way more powerful than you think! It’s.. .it’s.. .it’s like the Red Bull version of voodoo.” “Prove it with a picture.”
“I said I don’t have a camera! Why are you asking me to prove to you that you have the upper hand? You’ve won! You’ve got me! What do you want?”
“I want to know that you’re not just yanking me around.” “Listen, Zeke—”
“Don’t call me Zeke.”
“That’s what’s on your card.”
“I don’t care.”
“What should I call you?”
“Don’t call me anything! You don’t have to use people’s names to talk to them! We’re not trying to bond! And it’s been more than sixty seconds.”
“No, no, don’t do it. Believe me when I say that there isn’t enough Windex in the world to clean up the mess if you aren’t careful with that doll! Please, just tell me what you want. We’ll get it. I promise.” “I want one million dollars.”
“I can’t get you a million bucks. Not gonna happen.”
“One million dollars, or I shove this doll into a meat grinder.” I was willing to bet he didn’t even have a meat grinder handy, but I didn’t try to call him out on the fib.
“I’m sixteen years old. Where am I gonna get a million dollars?” “That’s not my problem.”
“Well, it is your problem, because you’re asking for something I can’t give you. This whole thing started when we didn’t have enough money to pay your fare!”
“Then you’d better come up with a good offer, kid.”
“You’ll go to prison,” I said. “I’ve got your business card right here. They’ll know you did it.”
“What, you think I’m going to get arrested for jabbing pins into a doll? Seriously? What kind of an idiot would worry about going to jail for voodoo?”
“I can get you five hundred dollars,” I said.
“I want a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Can’t do a hundred and fifty thousand. I can get you six hundred.”
“A hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
“Seven hundred.”
“One hundred thousand even.”
“Seven hundred and fifty.”
“I’m not going lower than one hundred thousand.”
“I’m not going higher than seven hundred and fifty-five.” “Then I guess that’s the end of the doll.”
Kelley grabbed the phone out of my hand. “Zeke? This is Tyler’s girlfriend. Do you know anything about this kind of negotiation? You have to ask for an amount that’s within the realm of possibility, or else you’re just wasting everybody’s time. I don’t like having my time wasted. When I feel like my time is being wasted, it makes me want to get rid of those who are wasting my time, understand? No? Okay, I’m sorry.” She listened silently for a moment. “Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can be there. Thank you.” To me, she said, “We’re going to deliver ten thousand dollars in thirty minutes. If we call the police, you’re dead. We’re meeting him at the junkyard. Cool?”
“Uh...”
“Cool?”
“We need more time.”
“Thirty minutes. That’s perfectly fine, right?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“Good.”
“Don’t hang up.”
Kelley handed the phone back to me. The voodoo doll issue was taken care of, except for having no possible way of getting that much cash that quickly, but we still had the problem of the Basers. Mildred and Glenn were watching me closely. I didn’t think they’d just let us casually walk out of their home.
“Zeke?” I asked, forgetting the don’t-call-me-Zeke rule. “Yeah?” Apparently he had forgotten about it too.
“In the meantime, I need you to create an aura of destruction.” That sounded pretty intimidating, right? I know that if I thought there was an aura of destruction in effect, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, my behavior would be much more cautious.
“A what?”
“Yep, exactly. Right now. Using voodoo, the one true religion.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go with burning flesh. The more charred, the better.” “Huh? What?”
“I’ll let you decide that one.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Be creative.”
“What?”
“And painful.”
“I truly don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Zeke. “Is somebody else there? Is this some kind of fake-out?”
“Fifteen seconds will be fine,” I said. I hung up the phone and handed it back to Mildred. “Thanks.”
“Fifteen seconds for what?” she asked.
“For the aura of destruction,” I said, giving her just a hint of a smile. Or at least that was my intent. Despite my attempts to maintain a cool demeanor, my voice was all shaky and squeaky, and my face was twitchy because of, y’know, the whole shredded right ear thing. So it was probably less a hint of a smile than a grotesque grimace of agony.
“What’s that?”
“It’s part of the same power that blew up my ear,” I said. “You should never have let me call Zeke, because now everybody in this house is under its spell. If you negatively impact my aura, your flesh will burn.”
“It’s true,” said Kelley. “Black and crispy.”