I looked at the CD. “Me?”
“The CD is tied up with Bone’s death. Not coincidentally, we’re talking magic here. The guy it’s for, he’s tied up with it, too.”
“What’ve I got to do with his death, Cutler?”
“You’re the last person to see him alive, outside his killers. You gave the cops the plate number of his BMW. You were in his presence and in the presence of the elves who would kill him—”
“We’re assuming they’re the cops who shot him.”
“Do you think we’re wrong?”
There was something about Cutler’s manner that I was starting to find unnerving. “I think you’re reaching about this CD. You were a lot more tied in with Bone Daddy than I was.”
“A day after you become involved his pet elves turn on him? I think there’s a connection.” He slid the CD across the table. “Try it.” There was an uncharacteristic note of desperation in his voice.
I opened the notebook and slipped the CD inside. “I don’t know what this is worth even if we could read it. It’s three years old.” I typed on the keyboard, trying to access the CD. Predictably, the only result was a little gray box asking for a passphrase. “How good a seer was this guy?”
“Damn good,” Cutler said, lighting up another cigarette.
The password box stared at me. The guy who was supposed to see this thing would know what to type.
On impulse, I typed, “Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unusual.” The little text box filled with asterisks. My finger hovered over the return key.
“Cutler, I’ve got a question for you.”
Cutler looked at my hands, still hovering over the keyboard. “What’re you waiting for? Afraid it won’t work?”
More likely, afraid that it will . . .
“How did you know I was the one who gave the plate number of his BMW to the cops?”
“Damn it, Maxwell—” he reached over and actually pressed the return key for me.
I grabbed his wrist. “What the fuck do you think you’re—” I was interrupted by a beep from my notebook as a small gray window notified me, “Loading . . .” with an ominously slow-moving progress bar.
“Cutler, if this is a virus—”
“Christ. You got the passphrase in one shot? I spent hours with that mother before I called you.”
I felt the sweat on my back freeze into solid little balls of ice on my spine. If this wasn’t a practical joke on Cutler’s part, I just guessed a sixteen-word passphrase, punctuation and all. That was better than a billion-to-one shot. The only explanation was that Bone Daddy had left this CD for me, and had divined my guess at a passphrase over three years ago.
The way that bar was moving, and the CD was rattling, I hoped the guy divined my processor speed and the space on my hard drive as well. I looked up at Cutler, “What did you give me?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” He looked up from the screen of my computer. “The CD was meant for you. Why the hell would he be giving you messages? After all the crap I went through—”
The questions weren’t right, and his expression was all wrong. Tense, strained, muscles taut, eyes darting, a few beads of sweat by the hairline and the upper lip. His wrist, which I still held, was shaking very slightly.
“How,” I repeated, “did you know I gave the cops Bone Daddy’s license plate number?”
“You told me you did.” The voice had lost a lot of confidence, and a note of pleading had entered it.
I shook my head. “We talked about dragons, about kidnappings, about questionings. Never once did I mention what I talked to the cops about.”
“Lucky guess, then.” I saw Cutler’s hand drift toward his chest, and stop. I saw fear in his eyes.
“What’s going on here?” I stared at the spot on his chest where his hand was moving. There was a slight bump visible beneath the thin cotton shirt. “Christ, man? Are you wearing a wire?”
I stood up, pissed and confused. I smelled a setup. Cutler raised his hands, and I saw panic in his eyes. “Kline,” he whispered. “Don’t, they’re watching.”
I don’t know exactly what possessed me. I supposed, from Aloeus’ death until this point, everything had been a step removed from me. Even my abduction had been dreamlike, not as threatening as it should have been. So, instead of sitting down and playing it out like I should have, I bent over the table and pulled Cutler’s shirt open.
No wire.
Hanging on a chain around his neck was a small charm the size of the last joint of my index finger. In a half second my brain registered what it was—
“You stupid bastard!” Cutler was reaching for me, fury in his eyes. His hands were almost at my neck as I realized the charm was a forty-five caliber bullet covered with intricate engravings that were just starting to glow.
I was deafened by the sound of a gunshot. Cutler spasmed away from me as flecks of gore erupted from the sudden crater in his chest. The odor of smoke was rank as I watched Cutler slump backward into the booth. The casing from the charmed bullet bounced off of the table and struck my right hand, burning it. My left hand still held part of Cutler’s shirt. I let it go.
Someone screamed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NO, no, no. This shit is not happening.
I looked up, and everyone in the diner was backing away from me. I silently mouthed my innocence, knowing, already that it wouldn’t do any good.
Worse, out the windows, I saw the blue of police flashers. Too soon. They’d been waiting. There wasn’t any time. Normal course of events, I’d patiently wait for the cops. After all, I was obviously unarmed, and forensics was bound to get a lead on the magic bullet from the engraved casing.
This wasn’t normal. Those blue flashers probably belonged to the folks that’d just cashed in Cutler, and I saw a good likelihood that—like the late Bone Daddy—they’d shoot me and plant an appropriate weapon on my corpse after the fact. My gut told me to run, and I’ve always been good about following my gut.
I grabbed the notebook off the counter and ran for the back of the diner. I reached the emergency exit in the back before I had the thing closed. A siren started when I slammed through the door out into the parking lot in back of the diner.
There was no real cover. The cops were out front, and the diner was a single building surrounded by parking lot. Running right or left, I’d expose myself. The blue flashers were sweeping the cars in the lot to my left. If there were four of them, like last time, there would be two going into the diner, and a pair in the car to move around back. If they were smart, one got out of the car, and they were flanking me.
I ran straight back, toward a tall fence that separated the parking lot from the residences on the other half of the block. It was a twelve-foot wooden privacy fence, which I didn’t have hope of climbing without help. Fortunately I had help in the form of a Buick Century parked next to a minivan that was backed in by the fence. The cars were almost straight back.
I’m no athlete, but adrenaline and fear can do some surprising things. I sprinted flat out for the Buick, and I reached it before I heard the warning whoop of the cop car’s siren. I half jumped and half stumbled onto the hood and managed to keep moving.
Behind me I heard an elf-accented voice say, “Freeze.”
Call me an idiot, I didn’t freeze. Instead, when I scrambled on the roof of the Buick, I tossed the notebook up, over the fence. I didn’t know what was on that CD, but I knew I didn’t want my elvish adversaries to have it.
As I jumped for the roof of the minivan, I heard a gunshot. Something shattered underneath me. I cursed as I rolled on to the top of the van, the luggage rack gouging my shoulder. I didn’t let myself stop. I got into a crouch like a sprinter, gasped as I felt the effort in my groin and my left knee, and sprang toward the fence.
The top was just in reach, which was good because the protests my lower body was giving me meant I wouldn’t be able to make any substantial jump. I
slammed into the flat face of the fence, slivers tearing into the meat of my hands as I grabbed its irregular top. I pulled up, trying to swing my right leg up as I kept a precarious foot on the roof of the van.
Another gunshot. It wasn’t a warning shot. It barely missed, and I could feel the impact shake the fence. The shot of life-and-death fear that gave to me was enough to convince my forty-three-year-old body to pull itself over the top.
That almost finished the job for the elves. I flipped over the top, and couldn’t hold on. I rolled off, and would have fallen the twelve feet straight down if a stand of pine trees weren’t growing up right next to the fence. I rolled off into a tree, the trunk slamming into my lower back, sending a shock through my kidneys that made me forget the splinters in my hands and the burning muscles in my legs.
The branch beneath me snapped under my weight, spilling me down onto another branch, and another, thrashing me like whips for six feet or so, before I ended folded over a branch too thick for me to break.
At this point, just about every part of my body was screaming “bad idea” at me.
I heard the branch beneath me strain. I took it as my cue to finish my descent. I tried to lower myself by my hands and drop gracefully, but the bark tried to grind the splinters deeper into my hands and I couldn’t hold myself up, even momentarily. As soon as my weight was supported by my arms, I fell.
It was a little less than six feet, and this time my fall was somewhat controlled. I hit with my legs, which buckled with the impact, not because that’s the way to absorb the impact of a fall, but because my legs were having third thoughts about supporting my weight.
This wasn’t part of my normal work experience. The most physical I ever got was about every other month when I got guilty about my lifestyle and used the gym at the Press building for about twenty minutes.
The ground here was lower than the parking lot, and graded away from the fence. I rolled through a bed of pine needles into the trunk of another tree. I finished facing upward, in time to see the blue lights of a cop car washing the tops of the trees.
“Fuck.”
It had reached the point where I was pissed off that I hadn’t broken any bones, which would give me a legitimate excuse just to wait here for the elves. Instead, I sucked in a breath and pulled myself up as quickly as I could manage. As I did, I whipped my head around looking for three things: pursuit, my notebook, and an escape route.
The first thing I saw was the notebook. It had hit the ground out of the shadow of the fence, where there was some light from the streetlights in the parking lot. The bad news was that the three-grand machine was now in about four separate pieces. Another thing I was going to have to justify; the machine belonged to the Press.
I half stumbled and half ran past the remains. I grabbed the lower half of the base unit, now just a plastic slab with a circuit board bolted to it. The keyboard was off elsewhere in two pieces, the screen even farther away. That didn’t matter right now. This section of the remains had the two important bits, the CD unit, and the hard drive.
I heard some commotion behind me, and I burst into a limping run through the backyard of the house in front of me.
By all rights, the bastards should have caught me. I wasn’t making good time on foot, and they had seen where I had jumped the fence. I’d almost considered ditching the remains of my notebook, because it seemed so inevitable.
But I eluded them. When I managed to slow down enough to think about what happened, I came up with the reason why.
These guys, while they might be cops, only had the one car. For a foot pursuit, you need backup. Cops don’t outrun suspects, they flank them. The guy chasing you is radioing your position to a second car that’s moving to cut you off. If these guys were who I thought they were—which was a guess, since I hadn’t taken the time to look back at them—then they had to radio some Cleveland Heights cops for backup. Not only would the Heights cops not immediately be in position to cut me off, but the jurisdictional issues would probably add at least a minute or so to the response time.
My getaway vehicle was a blue-and-white Americab summoned via cell phone and met in a church parking lot. I gave the guy everything in my wallet to get me downtown, which amounted to a fifty to keep his mouth shut.
As I rode, I had time to attempt a coherent explanation for what happened.
Bone Daddy was a black market mage with a long criminal record and no small ability. Cutler was investigating his connection with a quartet of SPU elves. Bone Daddy and the bent elf cops had some interest in the demise of Aloeus, and my investigation of it.
They killed Egil Nixon, presumably to cover up the fact that Aloeus was murdered. Dr. Shafran had made it clear that a murder would be impossible to mistake for an accident.
Then Bone Daddy winds up dead, presumably killed by these same SPU elves. Cutler was right that a coincidental falling out was pushing the bounds of probability. He also seemed to have access to an inside source, since it seemed pretty certain that it was these bent cops that were holding his fatal leash.
I was also becoming certain that he wasn’t telling the whole truth about the origins of the CD. I suspect that it was more than likely that the elves on the other end of that bullet handed the CD to Cutler, with marching orders to get it into my hands, preferably in a public place where they could see the keystrokes as I entered the passphrase.
Given the way he died, I doubt the elves were willing to have any unapproved data floating out there with Bone Daddy’s name on it.
I had the cabbie let me out by a bank machine, where I got a large cash advance from my Press Amex. Then I proceeded to disappear for a few hours.
Bone Daddy sat on a leather couch pointing a remote at a digital video camera. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans that rode on his hips. He had a muscular torso and wiry arms, both of which were covered by black tatoos, dozens of circular charms made of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin text.
The hand with the remote was trembling slightly, and the other hand carefully set a bottle of amber liquid on the glass coffee table between him and the camera. He ran his hand over the skin of his scalp and shook his head.
“Man,” he whispered. The remote clattered to the table.
Bone Daddy looked up into the camera and smiled—lips pulled tight and muscles locked. “Hello, Will,” he said. “I’m going to call you that cause I don’t know who the fuck you are. Chances are, you don’t know who the fuck I am either.” He grabbed the bottle and took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ain’t the Oracle a bitch?”
He stood up a little shakily and started pacing. “Word of advice, Will. Don’t ask questions about your own future. Especially don’t ask how you’re going to die. The Oracle ain’t going to lie to you, and the bitch ain’t going to tell you anything you can change.” He was quiet for a few moments, staring into the middle distance between him and the camera.
“You want to know what this is about, don’t you? Well, I’m dead—smoked by some motherfucker I’m supposed to trust. And, no, I don’t know who. If the bitch let me know that, I could do something about it, and she can’t screw a perfect record, can she?” He grabbed the neck of the half empty bottle, lifted it up, and slammed it back down on the glass table. The table shattered, leaving him holding the bottle hovering over empty space.
He stood there a moment, staring at the remains of the table. Then he let the bottle drop.
“What you are, Will,” he spoke into the camera, “is the guy most likely to fuck up the shits who killed me.” He crouched, bare feet crunching the broken glass, and stared into the lens of the camera, leaning forward as if he could see the person he was talking to. “That’s what you’re going to do.” He pointed a trembling finger up at the lens. “Fuck up these shits.”
Every muscle in his body was tense. Sweat shone on the surface of his arcane tattoos. His eyes were wide and the pupils were points, nearly invisible in the iris. Reflected in the iris was a small image of t
he brick-sized digital camera pointing at him.
“I know you, Will. I spent three hours with that cold bitch, and she told me things. Not your name, but I know you’re searching. Looking to find out something these shits don’t want you to know. Don’t know what, just that either you’ll find it, or these shits will kill you, too.”
He grinned. “Ain’t life a bitch?” He shook his head. “Just in case you’re thinking of dissing what I have to say—remember your quote, Mr. Shakespeare? Ironic one, too, ain’t it?”
He shifted his weight to the sound of crunching glass. If he felt the glass under his feet, it didn’t show in his face. “Anyway, I expect you understand, I know my shit. I think you also know you’re in a world of trouble, too. You’re at a nexus, Will. Right now, or very shortly, you’re going to be in the sights of powers you only brushed against till now. You’re not a powerful man and you threaten powers a lot greater than yourself.” Closed his eyes and muttered to himself, “Fuck, as if I’m telling you shit you don’t already know.”
He reached for the camera and looked down at it. His face held a haunted expression. “I’m a dead man, Will. I got wasted and wanted to know more than I should. This message might seem fucking weak, but damn it all, I tried not to seal your fate the way that I did mine. I didn’t ask if you’d succeed or fail, if you’d live or die. You still got the freedom, Will, and fuck Fate—” He stood up and walked with the camera. “I got three things I busted my hump for. You better use them.”
He was holding the camera right up to his face, staring into it, looking into the eyes of the person who would view this record. “You got three enemies, Will, all badasses. A villain of deeds, a villain of thoughts, and a villain of words. The first will kill you if given the chance, but he is the least of your opposition. The second is the mastermind, driving plots that others follow to your undoing. But the last is the greatest threat, for with only a well chosen word he will destroy one man, or empires unborn.”