Reginaud nodded, hooking his thumbs behind his suspenders.
“That is very true.”
Sandusky pressed on. “You know my . . . friends. They have discussed our needs with you before. We just want to make sure that you are on our side.”
Reginaud decided to add a little fuel to the fire. “Well, son, you might have heard that there’re other bidders in this sale now. I’m not saying that their money’s any greener than yours, but you need to be aware of that.”
Sandusky looked horrified. “No! We asked for your help first! We’ll give you more!”
Reginaud shook his head. “There are other things in this world than money, you know. Our savior Jesus said that the love of money is the root of all evil, and I never let myself get trapped that way.”
“What do you want?”
Reginaud leaned back. “Well . . . I like to have my views taken into account, you know.”
“Do you want a position? That might be a little difficult, considering your . . .” Sandusky halted, trying to find the right words.
“State of health? Haw haw haw!” Reginaud grinned over his unlit cigar. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’m a whole lot more likely to see the next century than you are. No, I’d rather have the ear of the next-but-one president. That’s where you’re aimin’, isn’t it, 2008, or is it 2012? This candidate you’re backin’ is so big and wonderful that the whole country’s gonna be on fire for him once they see him in action.”
“Well, you know that’s true. But we’re not there yet.”
“Well, I suppose not; that’s for the future. But your man won’t be positioned to run unless you get him national attention right now, in 2003. You can’t do that unless the field’s clear for him. He’s got one big-time rival, one who is likely to attract interest away from him—good kinds of interest. And that’s where I come in, isn’t that right?”
Sandusky grimaced. Reginaud read his face and nodded.
“Your man don’t even know I exist, do he?”
“No, sir. As far as he knows, we’re just an ordinary special-interest group. You’re kind of our secret weapon.”
“As I was for your daddy before you, and your granddad before him.”
“Yes, sir. A lot of people are counting on our man not having to face off against her.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Reginaud said. “I don’t like hurting little girls, you know.”
“She is not an ordinary little girl—I mean, woman!”
“No, she’s not. But I have to be fair and hear the other side of the argument. She might be reasonable, you never know. I don’t know. She might even be better for the job than your man.”
Albert sulked. “We’ll withdraw our offer.”
“Then I doubt I’ll have the time to listen to anything else you have to say in the future,” Reginaud said, with genuine regret. “I’ve got my pride, young man. Pardon me while I finish my drink. Miss Nita and I will get a taxicab back. Thank you for your hospitality. I genuinely appreciate it.”
“No, I didn’t mean that!” Albert exclaimed, stretching out his hands. His eyes were wide with alarm. “We want you! We need you.”
“To do what, exactly?”
“Get her out of the way. She’s a bloodthirsty beast! Our man’s a rising star. She’ll just muddy the issues and set us back to square one. Nothing’s off the table, up to and including . . . removal.”
“I know what you want,” Reginaud said. “That’s always my last resort, and it’s always on the table. Let you know what’s what soon’s I hear from the other side.”
The look on Sandusky’s face was a mixture of skepticism and horror.
“The other side? What do you need, a Ouija board?”
“Nope. Telephone’s enough.”
Sandusky wasn’t happy. “All right. We’ll do it your way. But I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say the future of the whole country is on your shoulders.”
“Do what I can, but you may have an inflated idea of what I’m capable of, son.”
His look said he doubted it, but Albert Sandusky didn’t say what he was thinking. Instead, he got up and leaned out the door. Dempster was waiting with a rolling tray full of covered dishes. Reginaud tucked a napkin into his collar. He could smell the veal grillades and shrimp étouffée. Talking business always gave him an appetite.
Four
Watching Malcolm try to get anything out of Val’s boyfriend, Gris-gris, was like watching the immovable object take on the irresistible force. Griffen stood beside the hospital bed, wondering whether the effort was harming the patient or adding to his will to live. Gris-gris, even two days after what would have been a fatal injury to a lesser man, was impatient to get out of his bed at Charity Hospital. It was futile, and all of them knew it. Griffen could have held him down with one finger in the middle of his chest. Gris-gris was very slim to begin with, but it seemed that he had lost weight in the two days since they had brought him in with a knife wound in his belly. The apples in his cheeks were thrown into greater prominence because of the hollows below, and his skin, almost ebony black, had a gray cast. Privately, Griffen was worried about him, but he couldn’t fault the other man’s energy.
“What are you doing, asking me where Val’s gone to?” Gris-gris demanded. He shook his armful of tubes and electronic cables at Malcolm. “Do I look like I been out and about, whisking my lady off to the ends of the Earth?”
“You were the last person to see her before she went missing,” Malcolm pressed. Griffen could see he was getting nowhere, but the elder dragon had to reinvent the wheel. He wouldn’t take anyone’s word, not even Griffen’s.
Gris-gris was adamant. He glared back at the elder McCandles.
“I am not. The man you’re looking for, or woman—I ain’t no sexist—is the one who took her away. And if I get my hands on that person, you better get there fast if you want to hear his last words.” The heart monitor standing on a white pole next to the bed started beeping alarmingly. The nurse came running: a short-legged, stout, African-American woman with an opera singer’s bosom, wearing a green uniform dress under a white smock. She slapped the device in the side with her open palm. It stopped bleating.
“You all right, Gris-gris?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Justine,” he said.
She put her hands on her hips.
“Hmmph! Then you calm down. I got better things to do than come running every time you get excited. Give me your arm.” She took a sphygmomanometer off the wall and wound the cuff around his biceps. She put her stethoscope’s earpieces in and applied the disk end to his inner arm. “Hold still!”
Gris-gris turned pleading eyes to Griffen.
“Griffen, you got to get me out of here. I want to help you. I need to find my lady.”
“Gris-gris, you need to heal,” Griffen said, seriously. “Val would gouge out my eyeballs if I let you go anywhere until it was safe.”
The thin man’s deep brown eyes flashed. “Safe? Nothin’ in this world is safe.”
“Okay, I won’t argue with you,” Griffen said. “If the doctors will let you out, then I’ll drive you home.”
“Not a chance,” Justine said, waving him back. “He’s here for a good while yet. Look at that blood pressure! You could run a hydraulic pump off him!”
Gris-gris shot him a wry look, gambler to gambler, as the nurse unfastened the cuff. “You always do check the odds before you make a bet, man,” he said. “No. They got no intention of letting me out on the streets. I keep tellin’ ’em I’m fine, and they pump me full of more stuff. All it does is make me pee.” He glanced out the window.
“We’re keeping your circulation running,” the nurse said, pushing Gris-gris by the shoulder so he fell back against the pillows. “You lost a lot of blood. You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
“I got
a business to run, ma’am,” Gris-gris said, respectfully if impatiently.
“Can you run it if you’re dead?”
This sounded like a long-running argument that must have been repeated numerous times over the last two days.
“I can try,” Gris-gris said.
“Well, then, you better try astral projection instead because this is your center of operations for now. You want me to get you some Jell-O?”
Gris-gris sputtered. “And you think I got a death wish?”
Laughing, the nurse left the room. The dealer shook his head.
“She won’t let me out of here until I pass gas, or better. They got me on liquids and IVs. How am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Griffen said. “I’ve never been stabbed in the stomach.”
“You ain’t been in town long enough,” Gris-gris said.
Gris-gris knew that Griffen’s skin couldn’t be penetrated by anything but dragon teeth, but he was quick on the uptake. He must have guessed if Griffen made no reference in front of his uncle to the unusual goings-on during Mardi Gras, then he wouldn’t, either. Griffen was grateful. Malcolm impatiently brought them back to the subject of their visit.
“Was Melinda here with Valerie after the parade?”
“For a minute. Mrs. Melinda and Val were kind of tight with each other. Val was mad at you, Grifter, that’s for certain. I told her it was my idea to keep quiet about gettin’ shanked not to spoil the day for her, but you know what she like.”
“Yes,” Griffen said. “I do. She was angry because she was worried.”
“Do you think that Melinda used that anger to spirit her away with her?” Malcolm asked. “With every moment that passes, the trail grows colder.”
“I know that!” Gris-gris leaned back in bed, looking up at the ceiling. It was a sign of how much pain he was in that he didn’t maintain his characteristically fierce eye contact with them. “No. That Mrs. Melinda left before Val did. She said . . . she said she had to go check on her daughter. Val sat with me for a while. I was pretty groggy. They dosed me up for the pain. I closed my eyes, and the next time I opened them, she was gone. That’s all I know. She didn’t leave me a note. I told Nurse Bossyboots out there to wake me up anytime Val came back, but she didn’t. Hasn’t even called.”
“She hasn’t called me, either,” Griffen said. “And she’s not answering her phone.”
“That’s bad. If she’s in trouble, I want to help.”
“You will!” Griffen assured him. “But if you die trying, she’ll kill me.”
Gris-gris’s narrow face split in a brilliant white smile. “That just mean she have two guardian angels.”
“And what makes you think you’re going to heaven?” Griffen countered. Gris-gris laughed.
Malcolm stepped back from the bedside.
“That’s enough, Griffen. There are other people I need to speak to.”
“I’ll be back,” Griffen promised Gris-gris. “Anything you need?
“A one-way ticket out of here,” the thin man said with a grin. “But you could pick me up a decent burger next time you come. Maybe from Yo Mama’s. The food here’s nasty.”
“I heard that!” Nurse Bossyboots called. “Don’t you dare!”
• • •
Griffen followed Malcolm out of the ward to the elevator. They emerged into the streaky sunshine forcing its way through iron gray clouds. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of mold. An ambulance, red roof light flashing, screamed past them into the emergency bay. At the door, medical personnel in anonymous green and white poured out to pull a folding gurney from the rear of the square vehicle. Griffen couldn’t tell much about the figure lying on it, only that it was limp and unconscious.
Griffen worried that Val could be somewhere in the city, hooked up to life support, unable to let them know where she was. He could not allow himself to believe that he would never see her again. Their parents had disappeared when he was a boy. He and Val only had each other. He was more determined than ever to track her down and bring her home safely.
“So we have to consider that there might be another agency besides Melinda involved in her disappearance.” Malcolm scowled. “That complicates matters.”
Griffen studied him. “You don’t look surprised.”
“Griffen,” Malcolm began, then paused. “I regret not having given you more time to absorb the truth about your heritage and to be available to answer questions. But it will have been brought home to you one way or another that an infant dragon of nearly pure blood, as Valerie’s will be, is an immensely important asset, either as ally—or pawn.”
Griffen felt anger rising in him. “You had the chance to tell us to be more careful. You had years.”
“I thought you had the common sense to monitor your own fertility.” Malcolm sighed. “But I am forgetting what it was like to be twenty. It has been a long time.”
The way he said it made Griffen curious. He peered sideways at his uncle.
“How old are you?”
“Now, what kind of question is that?”
Griffen was a little embarrassed but told the truth.
“Well, I have been reading up on dragons. Some of the old ones are thousands of years old.”
“Reputed to be thousands of years old,” Malcolm corrected him. “The truly ancient are . . . well, we must speak more deeply on the subject another time.”
Griffen felt frustrated. He hated having people hold out on him. “I’ll remember that. In the meantime, I put in a call to a friend. She might be able to help us find Val, or at least set us going in the right direction.”
Malcolm raised his eyebrows.
“Excellent! Did she witness Valerie’s departure?”
Griffen hesitated.
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is the nature of her information?”
“Well . . . it’s hard to explain. I don’t know exactly how she does what she does.” That explanation was not going down well with Malcolm. Griffen did a mental shrug. “She’s a witch.”
“Griffen!”
“I have a lot of faith in her, Uncle Malcolm. She has been a good ally lately.”
“An ally? In what way?”
Griffen glanced at the people streaming in and out of the hospital entrance.
“That’s a long story. I don’t think I should go into it here.”
“Griffen, it’s unwise to associate with others. They are . . . beneath us, you know.”
“No, they aren’t! They just have different talents!”
“Not as powerful as ours. That can engender jealousy and put you in danger. You can’t trust them.”
Griffen kept his face as blank as if he held four aces. “I do trust her. She knows about me, Uncle Malcolm. There’s nothing to hide and no reason for her to be jealous.”
“So the damage is already done,” Malcolm said. His face set into a stone mask. “I might have to do something about that.”
Griffen felt a chill race down his spine.
“No!”
Malcolm turned and headed toward their parking place. “Come on, then. I don’t see how much good it will do, though.”
Five
Griffen held his temper as he drove, but inwardly, he was fuming. His uncle sat beside him, surveying the city with a haughty air.
“I cannot believe that you revealed our heritage to outsiders,” Malcolm said, for approximately the tenth time. “You endanger us all! Do you know how many humans I have told that we are dragons?”
“None,” Griffen said. “And minus-two dragons, Val and me. Holly would have figured it out anyhow. She already knew when we met the first time. I ran a convention for, uh, alternative life-forms. Lycanthropes, fairies, vampires, ghosts, all kinds of people. And witches. I was the only dragon. Well, exc
ept for Val, but she wasn’t really a participant. I was master of ceremonies. The, er, person who asked me to run things said that only a dragon would have the credibility and power to make the event go smoothly.” He hoped Malcolm wouldn’t ask if it had. “Then Holly and I were both parade royalty during Mardi Gras. Her title wasn’t king, but it meant the same thing.” Griffen realized he was babbling. He shook his head. It seemed an eon ago that he had ridden on the Fafnir float, throwing doubloons and beads to the screaming crowds. The last forty-eight hours felt like forty-eight years. He wondered if Val was all right. He glanced at his uncle.
Malcolm hadn’t heard a word. His lips were pressed together as he stared out the windshield.
“You may have caused a total breach, Griffen. This is serious. I refuse to compound your error.”
“Then don’t come with me,” Griffen said. He wrenched the wheel, and Brenda’s car veered right off Rampart Street onto Canal toward his uncle’s hotel. A man in a T-shirt hopped backward out of his way. “I’ve already put my life in her hands more than once. I trust her. You don’t have to. I’ll meet you back at your hotel and tell you what she says.”
Malcolm grumbled. He hung on to the Jesus strap with both hands. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you to give me a full briefing,” he said.
“But you don’t trust me.”
“No. I think you don’t know what questions to ask. Besides, she may be a charlatan.”
“No,” Griffen said positively. “She’s not a charlatan. You may not be able to trust the people you work with, but I can.”
“Only because no one else has met their price yet, Griffen. Always remember that.”
Bah, Griffen thought. But he steered the car back toward the French Quarter.
• • •
For a city as laid-back as New Orleans seemed to be, Griffen was surprised how swiftly all traces of Mardi Gras had been swept away in two days flat. He was afraid that some of the evidence of Val’s last movements might have been swept away with them, but he was relieved to see the end of the festival. The purple, gold, and green bunting had been removed from all the storefronts. Images of jesters in motley had receded to the windows of knickknack shops and a few advertising posters. Hanks of beads still hung in nearly every open store in Jackson Square, but those were always there for the tourists. He was frankly relieved it was all over. That seemed to be a common feeling among his fellow denizens. The few tourists left seemed at loose ends, but New Orleans was a town for wandering. They’d find plenty to do, at a much easier pace.
Robert Asprin's Dragons Run Page 3
