A bag full of disappointment

A bag—full of cash and a talking severed head—arrived on my front porch today. All things considered, I wasn’t altogether prepared; I wasn’t expecting the bag to arrive until tomorrow.

The bag had less money than they promised me. While that detail was frustrating, I found myself more irritated by the fact that Luke was decidedly less funny than advertised. It was going to be a long trip.

Luke was the aforementioned talking severed head, and he was, rudely, dripping greasy mucus from his neck stump into the decorative bowl I placed him in. While it wasn't his fault per se, this too annoyed me. Luke was proving quite an annoying guest.

I took the time to count the cash twice to confirm what I fear. A square and juicy one thousand big ones were missing. I tapped the last stack of bills into a symmetrical pile before I turned to Luke for the first time in fifteen minutes. I rolled my eyes. Since he had arrived Luke hadn’t stopped talking once. There wasn't a second of that time that I had cared or listened to his rambles but that didn't seem to matter to him much. I wondered if he was this verbose pre-mortem. Perhaps he was funnier in smaller doses.

“We’re missing one K,” I said as I pushed the piles of hundred-dollar bills closer to the head.

That comment shut Luke up real fast.

I got up and grabbed a beer from the fridge. While it was barely past noon and I’m not usually one for day-drinking on the job, I was short 24 hours and one thousand bucks. No one would begrudge me some liquid courage as I tried to figure out how I was going to get through all of this.

I stared at Luke.

Luke stared at the money.

He was glaring at the stacks in front of him. Maybe coming back from the dead wasn’t his only magic trick. Maybe he could glare magic into existence. One could only hope. It might be his only meaningful talent. I had propped his head up against the side of the bowl, right above his ear. He had a scruff of red beard across his face in a goatee. His mouth that was slightly too big for the overall size of his face.

Upon further consideration, I concluded he had the kind of face that made a person want to double-cross him and bury him behind a fast-food restaurant. Considering that is exactly how Luke had died, I understood how Luke had gotten himself into this situation. But Luke’s loss of life was technically my gain.

The instructions had been clear: Luke had maybe a week of time to keep talking away and the money he came with should be enough to cover gear and transportation. There were several ways that this could go wrong.

If that one thousand dollars I don’t got was something I needed, I was fucked.

If I was caught at any time with a reanimated head, prison was the best-case scenario.

If anything happened to Luke through the journey, I was likely both lost and fucked.

If Luke was lying and he didn’t know where the site was, see above.

That was more variables than I was comfortable with. Considering that nothing had gone to plan so far, I wasn’t optimistic.

I had to believe the one billion dollar pot of gold at the end of this rainbow was worth it.

I chugged the rest of the beer before grabbing the map I had been working on. Luke and I had work to do.