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Once Shadow found out how much they were selling the thing for, he became furious. From what I understand, he paid both Trevor and Geoff richly, and never interfered in the work they were doing as long as he got his cut, and now they had betrayed him over an artifact worth more than all of the other pieces they had ever sold, combined.
Both men fucked up by having people they cared about, but while Trevor just had a live-in girlfriend, Rachel, Geoff had Nellie and the two kids. Once they knew they had been found out, Trevor had been left with the artifact, and according to Geoff, he had been desperate to force it on Geoff, kids or not.
When Geoff refused outright, and moved his family in the dead of night into hiding, Trevor had snapped completely. He had already been on edge, Geoff said, and it seemed like every time he was in possession of the Anubis he would begin to obsess over it, spending ridiculous amounts of money on books and journals that might give him any more hints as to where the statue originated.
“I think he wanted to return it to where it had been stolen from,” Geoff had said. “It wasn’t even about the money for him in the end. It was like the Anubis statue had gotten into his mind or something. It absorbed his entire existence.”
Trevor had moved out into the middle of nowhere, and tried to make himself disappear, transferring all his assets to his soon-to-be wife under her name, but it wasn’t enough. He left a trail for the Dark Hand gang with all the books he had been buying, and it was the beginning of the end.
Once he had gotten wind that Dark Hand was after him, Trevor planned to flee. Geoff hadn’t heard from him in weeks when he called one night in a panic, all sense of sanity long gone.
“They know where I live. They sent me a letter, Geoff! I’m leaving. Don’t look for me.”
The night he packed his things and drove into the night, the Black Hand Syndicate was waiting for him in the dark, right along the edge of one of those tight turns that would have taken him back to the city. Trevor crashed his car, and was pronounced dead on the scene, but much to the Syndicate’s dismay, the statue wasn’t with him. What they did find, though, was his phone, and the last call he had made to Geoff.
“They sent me pictures of Trevor’s crash,” Geoff had told me, voice shaking. “The message was clear. I was next. So what else could I do but run!?”
I remember surging across the table and grabbing him by the collar, causing the entire restaurant we had met at to go silent. “Protect your family, that’s what, asshole. Do you know that they’ve been getting threatening letters? If you don’t turn yourself in to them with that fucking relic, it isn’t going to be just you that suffers, and if my sister or nieces get hurt, I’ll kill you myself.”
“I know!” Geoff had sobbed. “That’s why I called you! I don’t know what else to do, or where else to go. Everywhere I look, I think I see them waiting for me. Please help me, Gunner.”
“Where’s the artifact?” I had demanded, pulling tighter on his collar.
“Trevor didn’t have it when he died, so he must have passed it off to his girlfriend. Rachel something.”
I released him, and he fell back into his seat with a thump. “If I help you, you have to promise me to leave everything you have for your wife and kids, and disappear from Nellie’s life forever. Got it?”
“Yes!” he exclaimed, and in that moment, my heart broke for my sister.
“You’d leave them behind to save your own ass,” I muttered in disbelief. “You’re a fucking joke.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Geoff pleaded. “I just want to live.”
“Fine by me. First and foremost, I’m going to need Trevor’s address.
Back in reality, it became tragically clear that, like Nellie, Rachel was a victim in all this, too. Now she had a dead fiancé, a crime syndicate creeping around her house at night, and a cursed relic probably hiding in her couch. It was going to be a rough week for this woman.
“So … what now?” Rachel asked suddenly, breaking my inner dialogue.
“I’d like to start in Trevor’s office, if you don’t mind. The sooner I find what I’m looking for, the sooner I’ll be able to be out of your hair, and you won’t have any nocturnal guests, either.”
I hadn’t told Rachel the whole story yet, not wanting to feed her any information that might make it easier for her to lie to me down the road.
“That’s fine. Office first. But … can I ask you an embarrassing question?”
“Sure.”
She looked anywhere but at me, eyes finally landing on an enormous ceramic container that was half as tall as she was. “Could you possibly move that urn to the office desk? I feel bad leaving it on the floor for too long, but it weighs a ton.”
“Absolutely,” I said, only a little weirded out that I would be moving a man that I hated over to a peaceful place of honor. “That’s the biggest fucking urn I’ve ever seen, though.”
She looked at it sadly. “Me too. If it was a little less flashy and reasonably sized, I could have moved him myself. Can you just put it on the office desk with the chair behind it?”
“I can,” I confirmed, going to lift the urn. Like she said, it was shockingly heavy, and a bit disturbing to hold so close to my body, but I got it on the desk, and Rachel sighed in relief.
“Finally. No more floor urn.”
I looked at her with a raised eyebrow, to which she responded, “What!? I told you I couldn’t move it.”
