The Long Chain

by Dan Willis

  “I have shield runes on my jacket,” he said, wincing as she squeezed him. The runes might keep the bullets from killing him, but he’d be bruised up pretty good by morning. “Sorry about the mess,” he said, looking around at the destruction the fight had caused. His eyes rested on the door to the back room, which stood open. Inside was the brewing apparatus for Dr. Kellin’s polio cure. Alex felt the air squeezed out of his lungs when he saw a stream of bluish liquid pouring down from the distiller onto the table.

  “Uh, Jessica?” he said, pointing to the leak.

  She followed his finger and when she saw the spilling liquid, she screamed.

  13

  Growth Medium

  “Help me,” Jessica screamed as she rushed to the brewing table in the little back room. “Get me a clean rag, something to stop the leak.”

  Her voice was high pitched and desperate, but her words were calm. Alex looked around, then pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it over.

  “It’s clean,” he explained as she eyed it suspiciously.

  If she wanted to argue, she shoved the urge aside, grabbed the handkerchief instead and jammed it against the crack in the glass body of the distiller. Above the apparatus a chunk had been torn out of the brick wall, though whether it was the result of a ricochet or a stray bit of buckshot from Alex’s shotgun, he couldn’t tell. What was obvious was that the chunk of wall had hit the distiller.

  “This isn’t going to hold,” she said, looking around, desperate.

  Alex pulled out his rune book and began turning pages.

  “I’ve got a mending rune,” he said, tearing out the page. “It’ll repair the crack, good as new.”

  “No,” Jessica said. “I can’t let any foreign magic near the potion.”

  Alex dropped the lesser mending rune and darted back out into the lab. Finding a brew line that wasn’t damaged, he grabbed the empty beaker at the end of the line.

  “Here,” he said as he ran back. “Catch the liquid in this.”

  He stuck it under the steady stream of drips falling from the bottom of the rapidly saturating handkerchief.

  “That won’t work,” she said. “This is growth medium, the enzymes in the potion need it to mature. Once it leaks out, anything could contaminate it, the potion will be useless. Think.” This last she directed at herself.

  Alex watched the liquid in the distiller drop, slowly. It was almost half gone and showed no signs of slowing.

  “Alex!” Jessica shouted even though he was standing right there. “Do you remember the day we met?”

  Alex nodded and she went on.

  “I took some blood from you. Do you remember the case where I kept my syringes and collection bottles?”

  Alex thought back.

  “Brown leather case,” he said, picturing it in his mind. “Thin, with a zipper.”

  “That’s it,” she gasped, obviously relieved that he remembered. “Do you remember where it is?”

  Alex closed his eyes and cast his mind back to when he first met Jessica. The image of her in her white shirt and green scarf, mocking him from the back gate, flowed over him, but he resisted the urge to linger.

  “Fourth table from the end against the windows,” he said. “in the little cabinet underneath.”

  “That’s it,” she confirmed. “Get it for me. Hurry.”

  Alex ran. The blood kit was exactly where he remembered it and he paused only long enough to unzip it and make sure it was what he sought. Inside were four glass syringes, each fitted with a needle. Several small bottles with screw on tops were held in place by elastic loops and there was a container of alcohol and a box of cotton.

  “I got it,” Alex called, running back across the wreckage of the lab. He didn’t even register that he was having to jump over the corpse of one of the thugs as he went.

  “Hold this,” Jessica said as Alex put down the blood kit on the workbench. She stepped away from the distiller to make room so Alex could move in and take over pressing the sopping handkerchief to the cracked glass.

  Jessica opened the blood kit and poured alcohol from the little bottle all over the needle of one of the syringes. She jerked a handful of cotton from the box, wet it with the alcohol and used it to wipe the rubber tube that connected to the bottom of the cracked distiller.

  “Pinch this,” she said, pointing to the rubber tube a few inches down the line from where she had wiped it. “Hold it as tight as you can.”

  Alex did as he was told, gripping the rubber tube between his thumb and forefinger.

  When Jessica was sure he had a good grip, she turned a valve on the bottom of the distiller and the liquid inside began to flow into the tube. Taking the syringe, she pressed it into the tube, through the rubber, and then began drawing out the liquid within. It was a strange teal color with mottled bits of yellow and red swirling inside. When she’d pulled the plunger all the way back, Jessica withdrew the needle, leaving a small dripping wound in the rubber.

  “Don’t let go,” she said to Alex.

  He hadn’t intended to, but he nodded in agreement anyway.

  Jessica picked up the wad of cotton she’d used to clean the rubber hose and rubbed it on the inside of her left arm.

  “Hey,” Alex protested as she took the syringe in her right hand. “What are you doing?”

  She pressed the needle against the crook of her arm and casually pressed the needle through her flesh.

  “Growth medium,” she said, grimacing as she wiggled the needle a bit. After a second she pressed it all the way in. She looked up at Alex, took three quick, deep breaths, then slowly and deliberately pressed the plunger down. The bluish liquid disappeared as it rushed up the needle and into her arm.

  “You can let go, now,” she told Alex.

  “You kept me busy,” Alex protested as he let go of the rubber tube and set the soaked handkerchief on the workbench.

  She simply raised an eyebrow at him, daring him to object.

  “You want to tell me what that was all about?” he pressed, pointing to the syringe.

  “During the final phase of this potion it has to rest in a growth medium.”

  “So you said.”

  “Don’t interrupt,” she chided. “The medium is prepared along with the potion. It would have taken weeks to brew up a new batch and the potion might go bad in the meantime.”

  “So you decided to use your own body as a growth medium?” Alex said. “Didn’t you just say the growth medium had to be some special mix?”

  She smirked and nodded.

  “You always were too smart for your own good,” she said. “This potion has needed infusions of human blood. It started with Laura’s, so she would be able to handle the finished potion. Along the way, however, both Dr. Kellin and myself have...donated to the cause.”

  Alex felt a little queasy at that, wondering which of the potions he’d consumed over his life had been made with things he’d rather not know about.

  “That’s disgusting,” he said.

  Jessica laughed and put her arms around his neck.

  “We all like sausage,” she said, “but no one wants to know how it’s made.”

  She kissed him and he let her.

  “Speaking of sausage,” he said, nodding in the direction of the ruined lab.

  The intensity of the last few minutes had obviously driven the memory of her attack from Jessica’s mind, and her face soured as it came back to her.

  “I’d better go call the cops,” he said. “Someone’s bound to have heard the shots, so they’re probably already on their way.”

  Alex turned and started to make his way across the lab. He knew from experience that there was a phone in the storage room on the far side.

  “Alex?” Jessica said from behind him.

  Her voice sounded strange. He turned to find her standing next to the workbench in the back room, swaying unsteadily.

  “Alex, I think...I think I might have…”

  She never f
inished whatever she had been about to say. Alex had seen it coming but as he rushed forward, he was almost too late to catch her before she collapsed. Staggering under the unbalanced load, Alex hefted her up into his arms. Her head lolled to the side, and he tipped her unconscious form backward so her cheek pressed against his shoulder. He didn’t know if this was the realization of what had happened catching up with her, or an effect of the unfinished potion she’d just injected herself with, but since there wasn’t anything he could do either way, he carried her out into the lab.

  Alex’s first thought was to put Jessica down in her own bed, but the police would want to search her room for any evidence left by the remaining thug. Instead, Alex lifted her up onto an empty workbench. Once he was sure she wouldn’t roll off, he pulled out his rune book and opened his vault. Carrying Jessica inside, he moved to the back room and deposited her on the bed. He covered her with a blanket, then went to the little dresser in the room and pulled a bottle of scotch and a glass from one of the drawers. Pouring himself a shot, he downed it, then left the bottle and the glass on the bedside table along with a note explaining that this was his vault, in case she woke before he returned.

  Satisfied that Jessica was as safe as he could make her, Alex left the vault, pulling the security door closed behind him. When he’d first put it in, Alex hadn’t bothered to make a way to lock the door from the outside; after all, the whole reason for a security door was to keep people out. Fortunately he’d thought about it and realized that there might come a time when he needed to keep a client somewhere safe while he investigated. He could lock the vault door, of course, but if he was injured or killed with someone inside, there would be no way for them to escape. He decided an external lock he could control was probably a good idea.

  “Lock up,” he said, leaning close to the door. The same purple rune he used to secure his cashbox glowed briefly and he heard a metallic click.

  Alex made his way across the wreckage of the lab, where he called the police to give them the address of the alchemy shop, along with instructions to come around to the back. That done, he went and picked up his shotgun and unloaded it, laying it and the shells out on one of the workbenches in full view. His 1911 hadn’t been involved in the gunfight, so he returned it to the gun cabinet in his vault.

  Since he had no idea how long it would take the police to arrive, Alex went back to the phone and called Iggy. It was after midnight, so it took him a few minutes to get to the phone.

  “I don’t like that,” the old man said when Alex explained about Jessica injecting herself. “I’ve never heard of anyone trying to mature a potion in their own body.”

  “Is there anything I can do for her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If this is just her nerves, give her some spirits when she comes to. For now, I think the best thing you can do is let her sleep.”

  Alex explained about putting her in his vault to keep her away from the parade of police who were about to descend on the alchemy shop.

  “Good idea,” Iggy said. “Just let her sleep as long as possible before you let the police talk to her.”

  Alex promised that he would, then hung up.

  It was almost an hour later when the first police officers arrived. When they saw all the dead men, they drew their guns and searched Alex before continuing. Unlike the nice officer he’d met in Dr. Burnham’s workshop, these cops weren’t swayed by his P.I. license and winning smile. They handcuffed him and left him sitting on a stool while they took stock of the scene.

  “What’s this?” asked one of the cops, a blocky man with bushy hair and eyebrows that looked like two caterpillars trying to mate. He gestured to the locked door leading to Alex’s safe. Caterpillar brows had thus far proved to be a man of little imagination and Alex was regretting not simply closing his vault door to avoid such questions. Of course if he spent the night in jail, it would be hours before Iggy or Danny could get him out, and he didn’t know what Jessica would do if she woke up and couldn’t leave the vault.

  “I’m a runewright,” Alex explained for what felt like the tenth time. “That’s my vault. It’s a magical room where I keep my supplies.”

  “Open it.”

  “No,” Alex said.

  The cop got an ugly look on his face and walked over to where Alex sat.

  “I said open it,” he growled.

  “Not until somebody with authority gets here,” Alex said. “I’m sure you can busy yourself until then; there’s lots to do.”

  “For a guy who admitted to three murders, you’re not making it easy on yourself,” the cop said in a dangerous voice.

  “I didn’t admit to murder,” Alex said. “I found these men assaulting my girl, and she lives here.”

  “So you just decided to shoot them? You’re going to need all the help you can get to stay outta the chair.”

  Alex gave the cop a bored look.

  “You pulled handguns off all of them and at least two of them have been fired recently. I’ll take my chances.”

  “You coulda staged all that before we got here,” he said, leaning close and dropping his voice. “Those guns are probably yours.”

  Alex grinned at that.

  “You wound me, officer,” he said with as much mock sincerity as he could muster. “I’d never lie to the police.”

  “Well we both know that’s not true,” a familiar voice cut in.

  Alex turned to find Danny’s boss, Lieutenant Frank Callahan, striding through the door. Alex hadn’t seen Callahan for months, but the man seemed impervious to change. He still looked like a recruitment poster for the Police Academy, square jaw, big shoulders, and at six foot four he towered over everyone.

  “You know this mug, Lieutenant?” Caterpillar brows asked, pointing to Alex.

  “I do,” Callahan said with a sigh. “Uncuff him.”

  “But Lieutenant, he already confessed to killing the three guys we hauled out of here,” the cop protested.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Callahan said, picking up the shotgun. “This yours?”

  Alex nodded.

  “See,” Caterpillar brows said. “He don’t deny it.”

  “Did you look at those guys, Gibbons?” Callahan asked the man. When he didn’t respond, the Lieutenant went on. “Well, I did. One of them is James Monaghan, a.k.a Jimmy the Weasel.” He looked at Alex. “He’s a small-time hood with delusions of grandeur. He’ll do anything if you pay him enough.” Callahan looked back to Officer Gibbons. “Not the kind of company an upstanding citizen like Dr. Kellin would be keeping at this hour.”

  “We, ah, we still haven’t found Dr. Kellin,” Gibbons said.

  “She’s in Albany,” Alex supplied. “Like I told you before.”

  “Then what are you doing here, Lockerby?” Callahan demanded.

  “Her assistant, Jessica O’Neil, is my girl. We were coming home from the Plaza when one of them jumped me and grabbed Jessica. When I came to, they were slapping her around, demanding to know where the doc was.”

  Gibbons opened his mouth, but Callahan waved him quiet.

  “Where is Miss O’Neil now?”

  Alex nodded toward his vault.

  “As you can imagine, she was a bit overwrought,” he said, not bothering to mention her having injected herself with the polio potion. “She’s sleeping in my vault.”

  “He said he wouldn’t open it,” Gibbons added, helpfully.

  Callahan smiled at Alex the same way a shark might smile at a sea lion.

  “I’m sure he’ll open it for me, won’t you Lockerby?”

  Alex held up his cuffed hands and after a long moment, Gibbons unlocked them. Alex led them over to the open vault door and the security door behind it.

  “Open sesame,” he said, knocking on the hidden rune. It flared and glowed purple for a moment, followed by a metallic ringing sound. Alex took hold of the handle and pushed the door open. He started to go in, but Callahan grabbed him.

  “I’ll go first,” he said,
giving Alex a sideways look. “You stay here,” he told Gibbons.

  Callahan stepped inside and looked around. Alex saw him noticing the gun cabinet, but he didn’t say anything about it.

  “Jesus, Lockerby,” he said at last. “This place is bigger than my first apartment.”

  “The fruits of clean living,” Alex said without even the hint of a smile.

  “All right, Gibbons,” Callahan said, beckoning Alex inside. “I’m going to interview Miss O’Neil. Go make yourself useful.”

  Gibbons nodded, then scurried off. Once he was gone, Callahan turned back to Alex.

  “You could have gotten into a lot of trouble with this stunt,” he said, pointing around at the vault.

  “I guess I’m lucky you showed up.”

  “Where’s the girl?” Callahan said. He was only three inches taller than Alex, but he still managed to look down at him.

  Alex pointed toward the back room.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” the lieutenant said as he followed Alex across the sitting room to the little hallway at the back. “When three bodies drop a block from Central Park, in the home of a private citizen, you’re lucky they didn’t send Captain Rooney.”

  “So how did you get the call?”

  “There’s a list of names,” Callahan said. “When dispatch gets a call about someone on the list, they know who to call.”

  “And I’m on yours,” Alex said, positively beaming. “Why Lieutenant, I’m flattered.”

  “Shut up, Lockerby,” Callahan growled. “The way I hear it, you’re also on Detweiler’s list.”

  “Then I guess I really am lucky,” he said, knocking softly on the door that led to his bedroom.

  “I’m up,” Jessica’s voice came from inside.

  “I have the police with me,” Alex said, opening the door.

  Jessica sat on his bed with the blanket over her legs. She had retrieved a book from the shelf in his sitting room and the glass next to the scotch bottle was half full. There wasn’t any sign of the dizziness she’d experienced earlier, though that didn’t mean she was all right.

  “This is Lieutenant Callahan of the New York Central Office,” Alex said by way of introduction. “As you might imagine, he’s very curious about what happened.”