Legend of the Gypsy Queen Skull: The Devil's Triangle - Book 1 Read Free Page A

racing.
    Pressing his head into the steering wheel,
closing his eyes, Paul resigned himself to his fate.
    Surely within seconds a convoy of black
Suburbans would come screeching around the corner, surround his car
and end his life as he knew it.
    But that never happened.
    Instead, a short, fat man appeared and
rapped his chubby knuckles on the Vega’s driver-side window.
    When Paul didn’t immediately respond, the
man knocked more vigorously until Paul regained his senses and
looked over at him.
    “Roll down your window,” the man said in a
muffled voice, getting annoyed.
    But Paul couldn’t understand him through the
closed window.
    “What?”
    The one-sided conversation continued until
the impatient man made a circular motion with his hand, directing
Paul to roll down his window, which he did.
    “You Paulie?” the fat man asked gruffly. He
was younger than Paul and spoke in a thick Jersey accent.
    “Um, yes. Yeah, that’s me. And you?”
    “And you what?” the man mocked.
    Down below on the street, the police
cruiser’s siren that had sent Paul into such a panic fell silent.
The DC police were pulling someone over for running a red light.
Even so, Paul was still not totally trusting of who he was talking
to.
    “You with the Feds?” he suspiciously
asked.
    “No, you idiot,” the man answer with a
bemused smirk. “We gonna do this or not?”
    Paul cleared his throat.
    “You Deep Throat?”
    “Well what do you think, Ace? See anybody
else beatin’ on your window?” he asked, looking around the parking
garage. “We’re the only two losers out here.”
    Paul’s mind went blank. He was having
trouble processing the moment.
    “You want the goods or not?”
    “Yes of course … how silly of me… of course
you’re him. One sec,” Paul said, trying to unbuckle his seatbelt
but it wouldn’t release. Clicking down on its button a few more
times, nothing happened.
    “Um, one sec,” he stammered, wrestling with
the stubborn buckle.
    The man lit a cigarette and watched with
amusement as Paul struggled, fighting a losing battle.
    Soon though, Deep Throat grew bored, and
with time wasting, decided to take mercy on his hapless client. In
one fast motion, he jerked open the car door and flipped up the
seat’s release lever, propelling Paul backwards.
    “Thank you,” Paul blurted out, lying flat on
his back now.
    With the extra wiggle room, he managed to
squirm out from under the seatbelt and oozed out onto the parking
garage floor, where he laid panting.
    “Bravo. Nice job, Ace,” Deep Throat said,
hovering over him, slow-clapping.
    “Now can we get down to business?” he
added.
    ~*~
    Historically provocative nicknames aside,
Deep Throat was actually a twenty-something filing clerk at the
Library of Congress. There, he was basically a glorified gofer for
the many snooty executive librarians who were his higher-ups. His
thankless job was to be at their beck and call, to hunt down lost
documents in the library’s many cavernous basement levels.
    Most of these darkened storage vaults were
stacked from floor to ceiling with documents long forgotten. Hence,
he and his fellow clerks were collectively referred to as the
rat pack , or simply as rats , since they spent their days
foraging through these filthy paper-filled catacombs.
    Paul had found the clerk on an online
chatroom, where Deep Throat had offered to help him for a hefty
fee. Occasionally the clerk would supplement his meager income this
way. The majority of his clandestine dealings were usually with
archeologists or the occasional treasure hunter. His one rule
though was no documents or books under 50 years old. Older
documents were exceedingly less risky to deal in than the more
recent ones.
    ~*~
    Standing up, Paul extended his hand to Deep
Throat, who shook it as he blew out a puff of smoke and asked, “You
got my dough?”
    “I do,” Paul replied. “But first I need to
see the package.”
    The clerk took another drag off his
cigarette and