by K. J. Emrick
Even more so, because Katarina Borishev is sitting right there on the bed.
“Who… who are you?” she asks in a raspy voice. She has a deep accent, underlined by a note of fear.
Her eyes are bloodshot. She’d been crying. A lot. She’s still in the same red dress that she’d been wearing when she was at the bank. It was rumpled and messy and there was a rip in it down the length of her left leg. She’s still alive, though. That was what mattered to me.
I make sure to close the door behind me before I say anything. No way of telling who else was in this house and I don’t want to give myself away now that I’m this close. I found Katarina!
“I’m Sidney Stone,” I tell her. “Barlow hired me to find you.”
She lifts a trembling hand to her face, her green eyes growing wider. “Barlow? My Barlow? Then… you not here to kill me, da?”
“What?” Her English isn’t very good, but I get the gist of it. “No, I’m here to rescue you, why would you think…?”
Somewhere in the house, I hear a muffled noise.
A door closing, maybe. Or someone dropping something. I couldn’t tell.
All I knew for sure, is that me and Katarina weren’t alone in the house.
“Come on,” I tell her, reaching out to take her hand. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”
When my hand pulls on hers, it rattles the chains bound to the metal cuff encircling her wrist. She was chained to the wall. Locked in a room, and then chained to the wall.
Someone really wanted to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.
You not here to kill me…
None of this is good.
All right, well, I could always find a phone and call for help from the police. I’d use my own cellphone but that was something else I’d left behind, just like my flashlight. And, I remind myself, just like my .38 pistol. Next time I travelled by making a wish I was going to make sure I was prepared a lot better than this.
Okay. Well, I could overpower whoever is down there and then use the house phone to make the call, I guess. Didn’t I tell Harry that I was capable of taking care of myself? Right. No problem…
Someone’s coming.
Right on the heels of that flash of the future I could hear someone coming up the stairs.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Here we go. I look around for a weapon, anything I could use to defend me and Katarina but all I see is that ceramic washbowl up on the dresser. Picking it up in both hands I turn it over and let the water splash out all over the floor. This would hurt coming down on someone’s head. Maybe even crack their skull. Yeah. This could work.
“What you are doing now?” Katarina asks, sitting up further on the bed, pulling her chains against the wall. “You here to help me, da?”
“Yup. I’m the cavalry. Just have to take care of something first.”
“What is… cavall-ree?”
“The good guys. I’m the good guy.”
The footsteps were closer. In the hallway now.
And that’s when I felt the tug in my insides, deep in the core of my belly, like someone trying to pull me away…
No. Oh no, no, no. I forgot… five minutes. That’s all the time I had here. Just five minutes!
And my time is up.
I turn to Katarina, frantic now with too much to ask and no time to ask it all. “Where are we? Where is this house?”
The tug on my body is stronger now, and around me the lights were dimming even though I know they really aren’t. It was my vision trying to adjust to being in two places at once.
Outside, the footsteps stop. Whoever it was must have seen the door is unlocked.
“Katarina, where are we?” I whisper-hiss to her, desperate for an answer now.
She looks at me helplessly, shaking her head over and over. “I do not know. I do not know this country. We are… in a house…”
“I understand that part, but where is it? Where are we?”
She can only shake her head. She didn’t know.
The window! If I could take a look out this window, at the front of the house…
The doorknob turns.
The tug on my insides turns into an insistent pull. One that I couldn’t stop.
I was out of time.
“Katarina, listen…”
That was as far as I got before I’m taken away. The ceramic bowl drops from my hands, and shatters against the floor.
Just as the door opens.
I stumble when I find myself standing back in my kitchen. My balance fails me completely, and I pitch forward, the floor rushing up at my face.
Harry is there to catch me, grabbing me up in his strong arms just a heartbeat before I would have broken my nose.
“I’ve got you,” he tells me. He sets me up on my feet, but still he keeps his arms around me, and for a moment I let him comfort me. Until I got my bearings.
Then I beat both of my fists against his broad chest just as hard as I could. “Damn it, Harry! I was there! I had her, I was right there with her and I could have gotten her out, but you pulled me back here. Why did you bring me back here!”
“Was she alive?”
“What? Are you kidding me right now? Yes, Harry, she was alive. She’s alive and she’s being held against her will. She’s chained to a wall, for the love of God. I need to be there, not here. Why did you bring me back?”
My pounding on him isn’t phasing him in the least, not with those muscles. He looks at me, a blend of confusion and worry in his eyes. “My lady, you wished to be back here in five minutes. This is what you wished for.”
“Well now I’m wishing to go back! You put me back there, right now! I wish to go back to wherever the hell that house is. You hear me? That’s my wish. Now you make it happen!”
His hands spread wide, in a helpless gesture. “My lady, I can’t.”
“Yes you can! You have this power. You have all this power to make things appear and reorder my notebooks and you can do this!”
“My lady… no.”
“Why not!”
“Because you’ve used up your three wishes.”
I push him away from me. I don’t want him near me right now. “What are you…”
Except, I know what he meant. I was angry, and I was confused, and I was even more worried than ever for Katarina now that I’d seen what was happening to her, but as I thought about it, I knew he was right. The wish for sleep, the wish for the help with my notes, and now the wish to be wherever Katarina was and back here in five minutes. That made three.
Three wishes per case. That’s what he’d told me.
And I used up each and every one.
The smell of his Kofta still lingered even now that it was cold on the table. Everything around me is familiar, and comforting, and it should make me feel better. It doesn’t. It makes me feel worse to know that I was here, and safe. Katarina was out there somewhere chained to a bed in someone’s house and I couldn’t find her because I wasn’t smart enough to know all the rules that went along with having a genie as a friend.
I should have been smarter. I should have been faster.
And I wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “It’s not your fault.”
“I feel like you believe it is.” He crosses his arms over his chest. Maybe to protect himself from me beating up on him again.
“No, I know it’s not your fault. Really. You told me the rules. I didn’t listen.” I’m still angry, very angry, but now it was more like anger at myself. I’d been there. I was right there in that room and I never once thought to ask Katarina where she was until it was too late. She might not know much about Detroit, being an immigrant to the country, but she must have seen some sort of landmarks along the way. Something that would have helped me find her. A street sign or a building or… or something!
Was she even still in Detroit?
I had no idea. She was somewhere, and most likely within a day’s drive from where I was standing,
maybe two, but certainly no further than that. For all I know she could be two streets over from here. Or closer. All I had to go on was a rusty swing set in a back yard surrounded by trees. That could be anywhere.
So why didn’t I look out the window when I had the chance?
Because sometimes, I’m a lot slower about things than I like to admit.
I went back to my seat at the kitchen table and drop myself into it. My plate was right where I’d left it, but I pushed it away. “Oh, man. I’m really going to have to call Christian now.”
“Hmm. Is that another game?” I could hear Harry asking. “If I call Druid, do I win?”
“What? No, not that kind of Christian.” He comes around to the other side of the table so that I wouldn’t have to twist around to talk to him, but he didn’t sit down. “Christian Caine is a friend of mine. He’s a police officer. I don’t think I can keep this to myself anymore. Barlow didn’t want them involved but this… I think I need help. Even more help than a genie can give me.”
When he doesn’t say anything, I reach across the table and put my hand over his, just to show him that I really wasn’t mad.
He wraps his big fingers around mine, and then with just a little bit of his usual smile, he nods his head. “Don’t give up on yourself, Sidney Stone, and I will not give up on you.”
“I’m not giving up.” The words are an automatic response because I never give up, ever. I had been a Marine stationed in the Middle East, for the love of God. I’ve run every single one of my private investigation cases right down to their end. It wasn’t always a happy ending, but I closed every single one of them. This time is different, though. I usually have something to go on.
This time? I’m out of ideas.
“All right,” I say, “so maybe I’m giving up a little. A smart woman knows when to ask for help.”
He nods his agreement. “Yes, they do. So, this Christian Caine is a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, he is. He’s been my friend for a very long time. Although, I think maybe some days he’d tell you the exact opposite. I may have tested the bounds of our relationship a little. Okay, maybe a lot. Still, he’s one of the good ones. If he knows Katarina’s in real trouble, then he won’t hesitate to help.”
“Hmm,” is all Harry says.
It’s the kind of thing a guy does when there’s more he wants to say about your personal life, but he knows it isn’t any of his business. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Harry’s a genie. He’s not even from this time, for that matter. Things were different back then. The entire culture was different. Guys today… they don’t act the same as guys back then.
Don’t they?
I shrug and take my hand back from the warmth of Harry’s grip. “I just don’t know what Christian’s going to do that I haven’t already. I’ve run down all of my leads. I don’t have anything new to tell him. It’s not like I can say you whisked me to the house where she’s being held captive. He’s not going to take me seriously if I tell him my new partner is using magic.”
My glass of wine is still on the table, I notice, still there in the middle of the spill. I’ll clean that up later. In the meantime, the rest of what’s in the tumbler will do a lot more good in my belly than it will in that glass.
I drain what’s left in there and go to put more in, only to find that the bottle has disappeared. I guess Harry figured we were done with it.
Across from me, he picks up his own glass to hand it to me. “May I ask you a question?”
“As long as you’re giving me wine, sure.” I take a long sip from his glass. It’s a really good wine. “Go ahead.”
“If you are now out of leads, as you say, how would you go about finding new ones?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well. Say, for example, that I had not sent you to that house where Katarina is being held prisoner. If you still didn’t know if she was alive, what would you have done next?”
“Well, I guess…” No leads. No suspects. What would I do in that case? Simple. I’d do the same thing that any good investigator would do. “I’d go back to the source. I’d sit down with Barlow and have him go through the story again. How he discovered Katarina missing, the theft from his bank accounts, all of it.”
“But you’ve already done that.”
“Sure, but this time I’d be able to ask better questions, based on the new information I have.”
His eyebrow quirks up. “Like how Katarina’s being held captive?”
He has a really good point. That is exactly what I should do. Here I’d been trying to find a way forward, and it turns out what I really needed to do was go back to the beginning.
“How’d you get so smart, Harry?”
“I don’t get out very much,” he says to me with a wink, “so I read.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Maybe he had a whole library hidden in the fibers of his rug. Maybe his life away from his masters wasn’t so bad.
Somehow, I had the feeling that it was. He must have felt so alone, all these years, stuck doing the bidding of his masters… whenever he had masters. Thirty-seven years since the last time he had one? And how long, I had to wonder, was the time before that? Then there would be these relatively short periods of time when he belonged to someone and had someone to talk to other than just himself. It must have been so hard on him.
Well, he was a part of my life now. He was my new partner. I was going to make sure that he knew he was my friend, and never felt like just a slave to my wishes. Pun intended.
“Of course you realize,” I point out, “that if Barlow’s got nothing new to tell me then we’re literally nowhere and Katarina might die anyway, unless I think of something.”
“Then, my lady, let us be grateful that you are just as good at investigating as I am at cooking.”
With a flourish of his wrist he rolls his hand around in the air. When it comes around again he is holding another glass of red wine, which he lifts toward me in a toast.
With a chuckle that I can feel down to my toes, I clink my glass against his.
Somewhere in this city, Katarina was waiting for me to save her.
I wasn’t going to let her down.
Chapter Ten
It was late when I got back to Barlow’s apartment. It had been a very long day. As much as I wanted to lie down on my nice comfy couch and take a nap, I didn’t want to wait too long to do this. I had no idea how long Katarina had, especially now that her captor must have heard me in Katarina’s room. I don’t think they saw me. I was being yanked back before that door opened or I would have gotten a good look at who was behind this. I didn’t see them, so they didn’t see me.
But they must have heard me talking. Not to mention, that ceramic bowl didn’t throw itself in the middle of the floor.
So I called him and invited myself over. He didn’t hesitate to say yes.
When I left my building, Mrs. Anderson’s car was still in my parking spot. I thought about spreading her windshield with shaving cream again but right now there wasn’t time. Besides, it felt kind of petty, somehow. The parking spaces are literally within a few dozen feet of each other. When you consider everything I’ve seen today, where Roxy rests her wheels doesn’t really seem that important.
At least… not right now.
The inside of Barlow’s apartment was just as nice as I figured it would be after spending so much time pacing the hallway outside. The floors were all polished hardwood. The kitchen was larger than my bedroom. The furniture all looked new and most of it was leather. Yeah. There’s some money tied up in this place.
Barlow met me at the door before I’d knocked more than three times. Obviously, he’d been waiting for me to get there.
“You’ve got news, right?” He’s already peppering me with questions as he shows me inside. “I’ve been on the phone with my lawyers for most of the day. After you told me that Katarina was pregnant, I had an idea and it turns out I’m right. Her baby will
qualify for citizenship, and then she will too, and now she doesn’t have to run anymore. You can tell her that, right? You’ve found her? Tell me that you’ve found her.”
The words came out of him in one long string without even so much as a breath in between. If it was possible it seemed like he was even more worried about Katarina now, after learning that some other man had gotten her with child, than he had been when he first came to my apartment-slash-office. I wish I had better news for him but like I told Harry, I can’t exactly tell him she’s still alive without telling him how I know that. Not sure that information would be very well received, and I’m not going to find out, either.
“I’m not actually in contact with her.” That’s what I decided to say on the way over here. “I have reason to believe she’s still alive, but I don’t know where she is.”
None of that was a lie. In fact, most of it was good news, even if I did have to shade it a little.
“Oh. Well. That’s something, I guess.” With a deep breath, his shoulders seem to unknot, and he motions for me to take a seat on the leather couch in the living room. He sits with me, at the opposite end. “I have to admit… I was hoping for more than that, but I suppose if she’s alive, that’s something.”
“Well, I’m not giving up but I’m kind of stuck about where to look next. I need your help.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“I want to go back to the beginning. Tell me the story again, about meeting Katarina online and bringing her here and finding her missing. All of it.”
He does, and it takes more than an hour this time with me asking lots of questions. I ask him to show me the emails between him and her, and the visa paperwork even, and by the time we got to the part about him coming home a few days ago to find Katarina missing… I hadn’t learned a single thing that I didn’t already know.
“I came home,” he says with a sad frown, “and she was just gone. I mean, I didn’t keep her here under lock and key, but she always made it a point to be here when I got home from work. When she wasn’t here, I messaged her phone only to find it was over there on the table. When she goes out, she never leaves without her phone.”
