Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  “You have a shaman study the body, I take it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you know it wasn’t one of my knives did the deed. They got an energy all their own, one as singular as a fingerprint. Your shaman find anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t mean much, though. Could have used another weapon, couldn’t I?”

  “Let’s assume you didn’t kill Transe. Who do you think did?”

  “I’d put my money on John Dark, myself.” I frowned. “Who’s that?”

  “You don’t know about John Dark? I guess you’re not as far along the trail as I thought.” He puts his elbows on the table and leans forward slightly. “John Dark was Wertham’s second in command. He vanished at the same time Wertham did, but with one big difference: He’s been seen alive since.”

  “Cali Edison told me she was the only survivor.”

  “Yeah? Well, you shouldn’t take everything ol’ Cali says at face value. She’s got a nasty way of turning on you.”

  “I noticed.” There’s an odd smell coming off Silverado that I haven’t been able to identify; I abruptly realize it’s sewing machine oil, like the kind my grandmother used to use on her old Singer. “What makes you so sure that Dark survived and Wertham didn’t?”

  “Saw him die. Right in front of me, in fact.”

  “Yeah? Who killed him?”

  “Don’t see how that matters now. Wasn’t me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then who?”

  “You got any other questions, or are we done?” Interesting. I get the feeling that he’d own up to it in a second if it were him, but he’s protecting someone. “Tell me about John Dark.”

  “John Dark was the real boss of the cult. Wertham had the ideas, but Dark had the clout. Still does, in fact.”

  “Yeah? You know where he is?”

  “Funny you should bring that up. I been hunting Dark a long time… kind of a hobby of mine, you might say. I understand he’s somewhere in Washington State, maybe even Seattle. And then you two show up.”

  “Dark didn’t send us,” Charlie says. “That may or may not be so. But even if he did, you might not be aware of it. Just the thing to slow an old cowboy down…”

  “You don’t seem too slow to me,” I say.

  “Slow, no. But old? When I replace a part, I could sell the worn-out piece as an antique.”

  “You sure could,” said Charlie. “Except your parts don’t wear out, do they? You’re factory original, right down to your refill plug.”

  “Not true. I’ve got more patches than an old tire.”

  “Maybe so,” I say, “but when you leak, it’s not sand that comes out. It’s quicksilver—which is how you got your name. And somehow, I don’t think your mind is any slower than your draw.”

  “So I’m not stupid. Thanks, I guess.”

  “I didn’t say you were a genius. I just meant you think like a cop.” He turns his head ever so slightly to study me. “That I do,” he says. “Some folks say I think like a rattler, all speed and venom, but that’s not the truth. I was built to be a lawman, and that’s what I am.”

  “Laws change,” Charlie says.

  “That they do. Me, I try to stick with what I know; they might call me something different now, but I’m still doing the same job. Tracking down bad men and bringing them back to face justice.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s what we do. Takes a lot of patience, doesn’t it? People don’t get that—they think about cops, they think about bravery, alertness, determination. They don’t understand how much of the job is just about waiting.”

  “That’s true.” He pauses, a pause that gets longer and longer. I don’t say anything to break it—that would contradict what I just said.

  “There was this one time,” he says, “when I was set up watching an old barn. Young girl had been kidnapped, and I thought she might be inside. Problem was, I didn’t know if the kidnapper was, and he had detection spells rigged to let him know if anyone came snooping around. I tripped one of those, I could scare him off and cost the girl her life.

  “So I waited.” A fly lands on his face, crawls to the corner of his lip. He ignores it completely. “It was a hot day. She’d been missing a few days already, and I wondered if she was on the main floor or up in the hayloft. Ever been in a hayloft on a summer day? Heat rises up, gets trapped against the rafters. Like a big oven.

  “I waited all day. Waited all night. Waited until noon the next day. No sign of the kidnapper, no sound from inside. Didn’t know if the kidnapper was going to come back at all—in fact, he never did. Finally had to leave without ever going in. Ran him down two weeks later, spending the ransom in a bar in Laredo; thought he was free and clear.”

  “And the girl?” I ask.

  “Oh, she was in the barn all along. Knew it before I left.”

  “If you didn’t go inside, how—”

  “The smell.”

  Right.

  It’s a horrifying story, but I understand why he told it. Every cop has a story like that, usually more than one, and it’s one of things that binds us together. I might not have done the same thing in the same situation, but I knew what it was like to face that kind of choice.

  “And the perp?” I ask. “He get what he deserved?”

  “Watched him hang a month later. So did the girl’s parents, for what good it did.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Cold comfort.”

  “Sometimes that’s all there is.”

  There’s another pause, this one not as long, and when he continues it’s in a matter-of-fact voice. “Dark’s a pire, born in 1431 or thereabouts. Powerful shaman, likes the African stuff. Spent most of the last six hundred years or so behind the scenes—he’s a mover and a shaker, but he doesn’t like people seeing him pull the strings.” He falls silent.

  “That’s it?” I ask. “Kind of thin.”

  “He’s a thin man. That’s how he likes it.” There’s more, but Silverado isn’t going to give it to me. I switch subjects. “Tell me about taking down the Kamic cult.”

  “You’ve read the comic, haven’t you?”

  “I’d like a more direct version.” I sense he’d shrug if he could, but he just isn’t built for it. “They’d already killed a bunch of folks. Dark had them set up in this old mansion on the side of a mountain, and they were fixing to kill a bunch more. We busted in and stopped them. That’s about all there was to it.”

  “What about the power Wertham had accumulated? The comic said Transe redirected it into a volcano, making it erupt.”

  “Sure. Mount Saint Helens. Wasn’t much of a blowup, but enough lava oozed out to destroy the house. We were all gone by then.”

  “You still in touch with any of them?”

  “Not for years. Shame about Transe, though—he seemed all right to me.”

  “How about the others? You have any problems with them?” He leans back in the booth. “We weren’t exactly a close-knit bunch. I never knew the real names of any of the others, and I didn’t want to. We were there to do a job, and that’s just what we did. And speakin’ of jobs, I’d kinda like to get back to mine.”

  “One more question. If John Dark was the real force behind the Kamic cult, who led the Bravos?” He picks up his straw hat from the seat, snugs it down over his copper curls. “That’d be the Solar Centurion. He was definitely the man in charge—and if anybody knew where the rest of the Bravos are, it’d be him.” He gets out of the booth, moving with a clockwork kind of precision. He looks back and nods at Charlie. “Good arm you got there.”

  “You, too,” Charlie says.

  The Quicksilver Kid turns and strides out of the diner. A moment later I hear the roar of the Mustang’s motor as he burns out of the parking lot.

  “Think he was telling the truth?” I say.

  “Not all of it,” Charlie answers.

  SEVEN

  When we get back to Seattle, I ask Gretchen to meet me in the break room
. She’s taken a close look at Julian Wiebe and gives him the all-clear; if he’s involved in anything shady she can’t find a trace of it. I give her the lowdown on what we discovered about John Dark, and she tells me she’ll do a little more digging.

  I ask her how she’s doing. She tells me she’s fine, but she seems a little distracted, not her usual razor-sharp self. Now may not be the best time to ask her about this, but I can’t just ignore what Tair told me.

  “Gretch, how long have you known Dr. Pete?” I blow on my cup of coffee, trying to make the question sound more intimate than professional.

  Gretchen raises her eyebrows and takes a sip of her own tea before answering. “He’s been with the Agency for several years. I don’t know much about him personally.”

  That would be a perfectly reasonable answer coming from anyone else—but it’s Gretchen’s job to know everything she can about people, and she’s very good at it. Her saying she doesn’t know much about someone is like a master chef being vague about the ingredients in a soufflé.

  “Any idea what he did before that?” I keep my tone light.

  Gretchen studies me for a second before answering. “Well, he was a doctor, of course. Exactly what are you getting at?”

  “It’s been brought to my attention that he may have been involved in a less-than-legal enterprise.” My own voice sounds stiff and unnatural. God, I hate doing this; investigating people I know makes me feel like some kind of peeping Tom.

  Gretchen shakes her head. “Well, he is an NSA operative. Many of our people have skeletons in their closets, and Agency policy dictates that is exactly where they should stay. Whatever he’s done, it’s in the past.” Her voice is firm, and I realize I’ve crossed some kind of governmental spook line. Asking questions is what I do for a living—but apparently, I’m not supposed to ask those questions about the people I work with.

  “Yeah, of course,” I say. “He’s entitled to his privacy. I’m just worried about him, that’s all—I think someone from his past has popped up.”

  “I’ll pass that along to Cassius. We take care of our own, Jace.”

  Sure. Choosing whether or not you want to become one of the gang isn’t always an option, but once you’re here we’re all one big, loyal family. I wonder if Dr. Pete signed up of his own free will, or if he was dragooned the way I was. If I want to find out, I’ll obviously have to do so from some source other than Gretchen.

  “One last thing,” I say. “I’d like to talk to the shaman who brought me over.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the evidence suggests the killer may be from my world. If so, I need to talk to someone with expertise in these matters.” If what Neil told me is true, the killer is actually more likely to be someone from here who’s simply been spying on my world—but I don’t mention that. I have my own reasons to talk to him.

  “That could prove difficult.” She glances away as she takes another sip of tea. “It takes a very high-level shaman to perform that sort of transfer, and, no offense, but I’m not sure you’re cleared for that information. The Agency frowns on transfer subjects being in touch with the shaman that performed the procedure, in any case.” She smiles apologetically.

  She’s lying. Gretch is good, but her body language gives her away. In fact, she may be so good that she’s doing it deliberately, sending me a message she hopes I’ll pick up but no one else will—and if that sounds paranoid, you haven’t spent much time around the intelligence community. I meet her eyes and nod. “I understand. Thanks anyway.” She holds my gaze for just a second longer than she should. “Not at all. I’ll see if I can find someone more appropriate for you to consult.” Her expression softens. “And Jace—I appreciate all you’re doing.”

  “Just doing my job,” I say. I find Damon Eisfanger where he usually is, up in his lab. He’s got Saladin Aquitaine’s green skeleton on a stainless-steel table, and a small jar in one hand; he’s moving the jar in slow circles over the rib cage, muttering something under his breath in a language I don’t recognize as he does so. He looks over as I come in. “Hey, Jace.”

  “Hey, Eisfanger. Find anything new?” He shrugs. “Hard to say. Thought I’d try a different approach—I’m interrogating the lightning itself.”

  “The body’s still electrified?”

  “Oh no—I drained that all off into a battery.” He holds up the small jar. “I needed a good medium to talk to it, though, so I transferred some to this.” A pickled frog regards me dolefully from inside the jar. It’s definitely not alive, but there seems to be a certain sparkle in its eyes just the same. “You electrified a dead frog?”

  “Sure. It’s the animist equivalent of adding a reagent to a chemical solution. The flesh of the frog acts as both a conductor and a translator, giving the lightning a more organic expression. That’s the problem with talking to pure energy—its experience is so far removed from our own it can be hard to understand the language.”

  “But zombie amphibian you’re fluid in.” He grins at me. “Technically, it’s the one in fluid… but yeah, I can understand what it’s saying.”

  “Which is?”

  “That the lightning was generated by a storm, not magic. It remembers arcing downward into some kind of metal rod, and then bouncing around until it was released into the body. Magic was used to direct it, but it was created in the sky.”

  “How would that be different from other magic-based methods?”

  “Some animists would call a lightning bolt directly from a storm. Most would use house current if they wanted to store it for later—raw lightning is harder to work with. This is the work of an experienced animist with a great deal of control.”

  I nod. “I’ll keep that in mind. How would you say this animist would compare—in terms of power and expertise—with the one that brought me over?” He frowns. “I’m not sure. I mean, somebody doing an interdimensional transfer is definitely in the same league, but it’s apples and oranges—the type of energy involved is very different. I’d have to know more about the individual capabilities of both animists—”

  “So? He’s on the payroll, isn’t he? Take a look at his file.”

  “I can try, but I don’t know if I have the clearance for that.”

  “Go ahead—I’ll wait.” He uses a workstation in the corner, and I resist the urge to follow him and look over his shoulder. Any information Eisfanger gives me will depend on him thinking this is routine; I don’t really expect it to work, but any data at all will help. “Huh,” he says. “This is odd.”

  “What is?” I move a little closer, trying not to seem eager.

  “Well, I’m looking at our animist database, and you’re not in it. I mean, it looks like the transfer wasn’t done by one of our people at all.”

  So Cassius went to an outside resource. Interesting. He’d told me that the reason I was selected had more to do with chance than design, that I was simply in the right metaphysical time and place; now I wonder if that was true. “Damon, it’s starting to look as if the guy that brought me over may actually be connected to the Aquitaine case. I need to find him.”

  He spins around on the chair to face me. “Well, I don’t know if I can help you find him, but I might be able to help you ID him.”

  “How?”

  He gets to his feet. “Basic animist forensics. The more powerful the magic, the better the chance it’ll leave trace behind—some minute bit of energy from the process. A really powerful spell—like the kind that breaches dimensional barriers, for instance—will usually leave traces of the shaman’s life force, as well.”

  “Like a mystical fingerprint.”

  “More or less—it’s how I got a positive ID on Aquitaine. I took a sample from the lightning, too, but the caster isn’t in our database. I can run some tests on you and see if your guy is, though.”

  The tests start with Eisfanger telling me to take all my clothes off and stand in a circle marked on the lab floor. I raise my eyebrows at this, but he’s completely se
rious and not at all embarrassed—something I take as a sign of professionalism as opposed to someone setting me up for a prank. I highly doubt Eisfanger would try to pull something like that, anyway; I think he’s actually a little scared of me.

  Once in the circle, I pretend I’m being examined by a doctor. A doctor who’s swinging an actual shrunken head in a circle by the hair with one hand and blowing a cloud of red dust at me from the palm of the other, but still a professional.

  There’s a stack of envelopes and a jar full of cotton swabs at my feet. He tells me to swab my forehead, my throat, my chest, my belly, my groin, and the small of my back, and to put the swabs in the marked envelopes. When I’m done, he says I can get dressed, grabs the envelopes, and takes them over to a table with an iron brazier on it. He turns on a hooded fan, then lights a small fire beneath the brazier.

  I watch him burn the swabs one by one, checking data on a monitor as he does so. “Fume hood has a filter in it made of spiderwebs,” he tells me as I pull on my boots. “Very sensitive to magic emanations. The rate the web vibrates at corresponds to readings in our files.”

  I finish dressing and come over to stand behind him. “And the powder?”

  “Psychically magnetized. The dust that collected on your chakra points should be charged with any residual animist signature.”

  He studies the screen and frowns. “This can’t be right.”

  “What?”

  “The reading I’m getting. Not only is this guy not in our database, the flavor is all wrong. It’s…” He shakes his head. “There must be something wrong with the equipment.”

  “Tell me what the problem is.”

  “The kind of magic used to yank you from your world to ours is most likely some version of HPLC—High Power Level Craft. But these traces are very close to what you’d see from a low-level animist, the kind of guy that does mass-production at a lem activation plant.”

  “What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me I’m a golem?”

  “No, no, no. I’m trying to tell you only a five-star general gets to play around with these kinds of forces, and I’m finding the signature of a buck private. Although…” He frowns at the screen and moves a little closer, as if he can make the data change through sheer force of will. “These readings aren’t exactly normal for a lem maker, either. The pattern’s close, but it’s sort of primitive. I guess something this simple might be able to support higher levels of power, but I don’t think anyone’s used this kind of configuration in hundreds of years.”