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602: What's in the Box?

From Split LongWays

Synopsis

The group heads upstairs at the Couronne Creuse. Tallahassee takes room 5011, the room that "Victor Franks" stayed in, and puts his crate in the adjoining room, 5012. Major Bakersfield and Grant Jameson share a room on the floor above, and Dr. Shrimp Puerto Rico and Devin Black take the rooms beside it. In 5011, a threadbare room with a lumpy bed that overlooks a grimy alley, Shrimp uses his biology to look for traces of Corbitt's work. He is familiar with it from studying the arm bone and the "soy sauce", but there is no sign of chemicals or experiments in the room.

Tallahassee finds a blank spiral-bound notebook in the nightstand and does a rubbing of the impressions on the top page. It reveals a sketch of a hand giving him the middle finger and the words "I knew you would be here, Tallahassee." When Tallahassee lifts Shrimp onto the desk so that he can see it, the desk shifts and a torn scrap of paper drops out from between the desk and the wall. Shrimp reminds Tallahassee of Rondo Corto, his late sidekick from the adventure books. The scrap reads, in part: "...gates, but every gate needs a key. The bloodline holds the key. Blood leads. Find it." Tallahassee fumbles his first roll and pushes it, studying the note by the light of his snake-insignia lighter while Shrimp rides on his back, covering his ears. Thanks to all the hours he spent reading Corbitt's journals, he confirms that it is Corbitt's handwriting. The group concludes that Corbitt was in New Orleans at least two weeks ago, and Bakersfield suspects a connection between Corbitt and the Axe Man. They plan to visit the voodoo practitioner in the morning and to look into the police side of the killings.

Before bed, Shrimp corners Devin in the third-floor hallway and asks his real purpose. When Devin dodges, Shrimp spends magic points on a spell and wins an opposed power check, and Devin blurts out that he is there to track down Corbitt and get rid of him because he is "a loose end." Recognizing that he has been compelled by magic, Devin punches Shrimp in the face, pulling the punch just enough to make his point, and warns him never to do it again. Shrimp apologizes, saying that he does not trust easily, and Devin's psychology roll suggests that Shrimp really is there only as the expedition's scientist. Devin then uses the front desk phone, while the night clerk, Michelle Casey, sketches, to call his contact for Goodman Gray with a passphrase and a briefing.

The Major and Jameson go up to the roof to see whether Saavedra, Gray's dead agent, left anything behind. Lost in thought at the corner overlooking the courtyard, the Major wonders why anyone would choose to jump that way. Jameson, looking down the alley behind the hotel, glimpses through the mist the silhouette of an oversized man with a head that is too tall and too thick at the neck, almost with a snout, and something like a pole or a spike above it, before the figure vanishes. He loses a point of sanity, and the Major, lost in thought, does not notice. Jameson says only that the chill got to him, and they go to bed.

Late in the night, Tallahassee wakes to thumps and scraping from downstairs, like a chair falling over or a scuffle. Wearing only his boots and hat and carrying his Colt .45, he opens the crate in the next room and releases Necronomidog, his eight-legged, six-tongued companion, who has a bad case of the zoomies. Together they head into the hallway to investigate.

Funny Moments

  • Shrimp checks Corbitt's room with his biology roll, and someone announces: "Oh, hey, I found an arm under the bed. That's why it was lumpy."
  • The notebook rubbing reveals a middle finger. "Corbitt got me again." The Keeper calls it the oldest trick in the book.
  • Shrimp fails his spot hidden because he cannot see above the desk, and the desk drawer hits him in the face.
  • Shrimp asks Tallahassee to credit him in the book by taking Shrimp's daughter as his wife. Shrimp's wife, Elena, is "super alive" and well hidden in Puerto Rico, where she is a botanist, so the Keeper cannot kill her.
  • Shrimp piggybacks on Tallahassee to plug his ears and "heighten his senses." The Keeper narrates Shrimp running his fingers through Tallahassee's hair under the fedora, and the table asks what the song from Ghost is called.
  • The table turns Saavedra's death into a long riff on being skewered "long ways," and Shrimp later orders Devin to "jump off the roof and impale yourself on the fence," landing him on top of Saavedra like "a gray man shish kebab."
  • When the Major asks Jameson to come to the roof, Jameson says that he is tired and is called worthless ("Why did I save your life?"). He changes his mind but first has to put his eye patch back on.
  • Tallahassee heads downstairs in his hat, boots and "tighties."

Notable Quotes

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