“Hello?”
“Cannonball?”
“Palagapos?”
“Where on earth are you?”
“Right now?”
“This second.”
“Outside.”
“Doing what?”
Caff looked around, almost as if he had forgotten where he was or what he was doing.
“Drinking what a waitress described as a summery wheat ale.”
“It must be warmer there than it is here.”
“How did you find me?”
“What the heck, you think the ole gumshoe has lost a step?”
“No.”
“Keep this weekend open.”
“Why?”
“You’ll be getting something in the mail on Friday.”
“You know my address, too?”
A crumpled-up package came at the end of the week. Washed-up classic rock disc jockey Bill “Cannonball” Cafferty stuck his pinky in a crack on the upper right-hand side and ripped it open. He pulled out a file that was eighty or ninety pages thick. The title across the top was in Segoe-Script, brokencursive: Do you want to know why celebrities die in threes?
Each page had pictures of celebrities stapled together in sets of three. A singer, an actor, and an athlete were on top. An inventor, dancer, and cellist followed. He kept looking through combinations of people who were deceased who had gained some kind of notoriety. All in threes and all of whom died within a few days of each other. There were maps and coordinates with lines and crazy patterns and arrows connecting locations and symbols designating important landmarks. Caff flung each page up into the air. The more he kept looking through everything, the more he kept remembering the people and places, dates and times of when these occurrences happened.
After going over it intensely for hours, Caff came to the end. He stood up. The only area in his room where he could see any carpet was the spot where he’d been sitting; he had tossed everything around himself. There was some contact information written on the inside of the folder. Caff recognized the name and the address. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he pulled out his phone and scrolled down to Gus Palagapos.