Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  “Bonita.” I hated my full name, but Steve’s words came back to me, and I figured formality was better. “Bonita Berg Torres.”

  “And you came here to see me, Bonita Berg Torres. To make an exchange. For what you carry in that sack?”

  “Don’t all the best fairy tales begin that way?”

  A snort of laughter, the sulfur smell hit the back of my neck, and every single atavistic impulse I had rose and screamed at me to Get. The. Hell. Out. Of. There.

  The cave opened in front of us, and we were in his—I couldn’t call it an office. His lair. Because there, in the middle of the space, was a pile of greenbacks. Literally. Old cash, crumpled and dirty, the dark green of old-style bills. The pile was at least four feet high, and about ten feet in diameter, and had a depression in the middle that looked exactly like the shape my head left in my pillow every morning.

  “So. What is it you want from me?”

  “Don’t you want to see what I have to offer?”

  “You’re a smart human. You will have done your homework.”

  God, I hoped so. “A man came to see you. A human. A cosa-cousin.”

  “Many do.” The dragon passed me, crawling into the pile and curling up, exactly like a cat. Its eyes stared at me. I had no desire whatsoever to pet it.

  “This one…” What the hell did I say now? I didn’t know what Zaki might have said, or asked, or anything. “You loaned him money. Or something of value. His name is Zaki Torres. My father. You took his marker, and told him he could have a decade to repay.”

  The dragon rose, the wings that had been furled until then spreading like the shadow of doom. I stumbled back, landing hard on my ass.

  The stone might have been smoothed, but it sure as hell wasn’t soft.

  “He stole from me!”

  “What?” That was not Zaki. Clueless and useless, yeah, but never a thief.

  “He stole from me!” the dragon insisted, its full fifteen-foot length rising in the air over me but not—thank God—doing anything more threatening than looming.

  I straightened my spine and stared up into red eyes.

  “Back. Off.” I waited, then repeated myself, really really proud that my voice sounded so uber-bitchy. “Back off, cousin. Or theft will be the least of your worries.” I strummed the threads of current, building it up into a crescendo, letting it fill my body. God, I hadn’t thought to recharge before I came out, because I was an idiot, but there hadn’t been much call for it at college, so it was relatively easy to pull current out of my own body without too much stress. I’d feel it the next day, though. Assuming I felt anything.

  “This man?”

  An image, of Zaki the last time I had seen him. His head back, teeth showing as he laughed, his shaggy brown hair a little too long on the back of his neck, his black eyes filled with mischief, his face totally without any remorse, conniving, or treachery.

  “No.” The dragon backed down, settled down. “Not that human. But that was the name he gave me.” His eyes were red, and angry, but somehow less unnerving. “Why did this human lie to me, cosa-cousin?”

  It was a shame that the fatae, as a rule, couldn’t use current, or he could show me what the human who had used my father’s name had looked like. I couldn’t go in and take it out of his head, either. Someone else, maybe, but I didn’t have the juice or the training. Especially not a dragon’s head. He might talk, and react in a way so he could communicate, but he was a dragon. Humans who went into dragon brains didn’t come out the same, if they came out at all.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “But I will find out.” I remembered my manners then and extended the sack. “Here.”

  One huge paw took the bag and opened it with a surprisingly delicate claw. Bright, brand-new pennies fell out, a copper waterfall.

  “Lovely. Truly lovely.” He sounded enchanted. I was, too, for a moment—they were so bright and pretty, and the sound they made wasn’t.

  He scooped his paw through them, creating the waterfall effect again. “But I did not give you the information you came here for.”

  “You gave me information that contradicted what was established. That makes it better than what I came for. But the price remains the same.”

  Did cave dragons laugh? That one did. “You are a wise kit, cousin. And brave.”

  No, just desperate, I thought.

  Steve took one look at me and didn’t say a word all the way back to the airport. I don’t remember much of the flight home. I could feel the thoughts running like salmon upstream in my head, but nothing went anywhere.

  Except, if I was going to run with that metaphor, there was a bear waiting to chow down on my thoughts.

  “I really need to stop thinking.”

  The woman sitting next to me looked pointedly out the window, shifting her body so that there was no risk of my actually touching her.

  Hey, great, more space for me.

  The flight was too short to allow them more than drinks service. I grabbed a Diet Coke and watched the ice melt.

  The temptation to reach out with current was almost overwhelming, like the need to hug a teddy bear or stuff your face with chocolate. Tossing current in the middle of a plane held up entirely by electronics and faith, though? Next to the word “suicidal” in the damned dictionary.

  What the hell happened, Zaki? What the hell happened?

  The cab from Logan was where it hit me. He was dead. My father was dead. I knew that, somehow, now. No way to hope. Only to discover what happened. I needed to know what happened.

  Traffic was mercifully light, and I had the right amount of cash on hand. I paid the cabbie off and slogged through the lobby, barely falling in through the apartment door when J. was in my face. “Steve called. He said you were a disaster. What the hell happened?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” I said, too tired to take offense at his total lack of respect for my personal space. He was worried. “But I need to look at the tools again.”

  J. pulled back and was cool. He nodded, and I went into the guest room where I stayed when I was visiting, and pulled out the bag with Zaki’s tools. I took them into the living room, where J. was seated in his chair, a huge leather monstrosity with a hassock that had seen better decades. His English sheepdog, Rupe, was sprawled by the chair. Rupe lifted his head when I came out, let his tongue loll in his own form of greeting, then went back to contemplating his paws.

  Rupe had known me since I was eight, too. He wasn’t much impressed, although I think he liked me okay.

  There was a bottle of white wine open on the low glass table and two glasses poured. I ignored it for the moment and unrolled the tools out on the table.

  “This.” I put my hand over the chisel with the blood. “Dragon’s blood.”

  J. nodded; he knew that already.

  “But Zaki never went to see the dragon.”

  “His letter…”

  “Yeah. I’m getting to that.”

  I wasn’t going to get distracted. Anyway, having been nose to nose with that snout, picking up his echoes in the blood wasn’t quite as overwhelming.

  It was still pretty damn impressive, though.

  “I’ve never seen a dragon in person,” J. said thoughtfully.

  “I’ll introduce you sometime,” I said. “In about a decade or so. But this is too much. He’s annoyed but not hurt. Not really.”

  “Annoyed?”

  “Not like someone stabbed him with a chisel. More like…”

  “A scratch?”

  “Stealing enough blood to dip the point of a chisel in. Enough to leave a current residue that would trigger the memory of an angry dragon on it if anyone were to look.”

  “A Talent?”

  “Or someone who knew about Talent. And knew enough to go to a dragon, and what would be a likely reason why Zaki would have gone to a dragon.”

  My head hurt.

  Motive and means.

  There was that voice again! Annoying, intrusive bastard. I d
idn’t even bother chasing it down, because it was right. I knew the how—whoever had done whatever they had done to Zaki had set the scene to lead anyone investigating to assume that a dragon had killed him.

  “But then how would the tools have gotten back to the locker?” The answer came to me even as I asked the question. “Who would have wondered? Seriously, who would even have gone this far, and once they saw the dragon…”

  “Whoever did this was smart, but not clever,” J. said.

  “Yeah. And even if someone did, who would they go to? Not like we have a police force you can call, or anything.” The Cosa tended to settle things one-on-one. You didn’t need proof, but you’d damn well better be certain. And you had to be sure you were willing to bear the cost of making enemies who might be more powerful—or have friends who were more powerful—than you.

  So. Means. Someone who had access to Zaki. To his tools, which meant the job site. And someone who had access to the dragon, and knew that Zaki would have debts, and knew that Zaki had a daughter who would get the letter and connect the dots.

  But they hadn’t counted on my being clever.

  “Motive. Who has means, and motive?”

  J. shook his head and reached for the wineglass. “To murder, and to murder a person you know, that is a strong crime. It requires a strong emotion. Who would Zaki inspire that sort of strong emotion in?”

  Zaki had been a good guy. Not a great person, but a good guy. Seeing him as a man, not my father, was easy enough for me. And the answer to who he could piss off that much came pretty fast, but I wasn’t sure. Not yet.

  I needed to be sure.

  Another long trip down to New York City on the Chinatown Express bus, me and twenty-four of my closest friends and all their worldly belongings. But it was cheap, and fast. The ferry over wasn’t much fun. It was raining, and I stayed inside, huddled in my molded-plastic seat, ignoring the masses of commuters all trying to stay dry and just make it home.

  The site was deserted. I snuck through the fence and into the house. Lucky for me none of the alarms had been turned on yet.

  The door called to me. I could feel it, practically singing in the rain-filled dusk. My flashlight beam skittered cross the floor, allowing me to pick my way around piles of trash and debris. No tools left out. The carpenter’s daughter approved.

  “Hello, beauty,” I said to the door. In the darkness, in the beam of light, she was nakedly apparent, a sweet-eyed woman who gazed out into the bare bones of the room with approval and fondness.

  “Who are you, then? That’s the key to all this. Who are you?”

  The door, not too surprisingly, didn’t answer. But I knew how to make it talk.

  Or I thought I did, anyway.

  It was all instinct, but J. had always told me that instinct was the way most new things were discovered—instinct and panic.

  I held my hand over the door the way I had with the tools, carefully not touching it, and felt for the lightest levels of current, like alto bells.

  The woman’s hair stirred in a breeze, and her face seemed softer, rounder, then she disappeared behind the leaves again.

  Zaki really had been an artist, the bastard. I could feel him in the work. But I didn’t know, yet, what he had been feeling.

  Evidence doesn’t lie.

  Shut up, I told the voice. I’m working.

  I touched a deeper level of current, bringing it out with a firm hand and splaying it gently across the door so that it landed easily, smoothly.

  Oh how I love her, such a bad woman, such a wrong woman, and I cannot have her, but I will show her my love…

  Zaki, melancholy and impassioned, his hand steady on the chisel, his eyes on the wood, sensing even through his distraction how to chip here, cut there, to make the most of the grain. He was concentrating, thinking of his object of affection, the muse who inspired him. So focused, the way all Talent learned to be, that he never saw the man coming up behind him, the man who had already seen the work in progress, and recognized, the way a man might, the face growing out of the wood.

  The blow was sudden and sharp, and the vision faded.

  No, I told my current. More.

  It surged, searched, and found nothing. No emotions from the killer. No residue of his actions.

  “Damn it.” My flashlight’s beam dropped off the door; I was unwilling to look at the face of the woman who had cost my father his life.

  There is always evidence.

  The voice was back. And probably right. I let the beam play on the floor, unsure what I was looking for. Scan, step, scan. I repeated the process all the way up to the door, then turned around and looked the way I had come.

  “There.”

  On the floor, about two feet away. A spot where the hardwood floor shone differently. That meant that it had been refinished more recently than the rest of the floor, or been treated somehow. Zaki would have known. All I knew was that it was a clue.

  I touched it with current, as lightly as I could. Something warned me that a gentle touch would reveal more than demanding ever would.

  “The killer’s actions, I beg you wood, reveal.”

  J.’s influence. Treat current the way you would a horse, control it through its natural instincts. Current, like electricity, illuminated.

  A dent in the floor, sanded down and covered up. The point of a chisel stained with blood? No. The harder end, sticking out of a body as it landed, falling backward…

  Oh, Zaki, you idiot was all I could find inside myself, following the arc of the body. For a woman? For another man’s woman when you had Claire at home?

  And then I saw it, the shadow figure of the killer, indistinct even in his own mind—shading himself. That meant the killer was a Talent, if of even less skill than Zaki. Had that been a factor? The man—the foreman, I knew now—jealous not only of the carpenter’s attraction to his wife but of his skill to display it, driven to murder?

  The chisel was removed, wiped down, and…

  The blood alone flared bright in the pictorial, a shine of wet rubies in the shadows as the foreman dipped the chisel into a cloth still damp with the blood, laying the trace for me to find, a week later.

  The picture faded, rubies and shadows into full, rainy dark. I might be able to regain it if I used more current, but with two men on the crew Talented, others might be as well. I dared not linger.

  “So that’s it, I guess.” A long ferry ride, and I couldn’t face the bus ride back to Boston that night. I was tired, and cold, and I had a class in the morning I hadn’t done any of the reading for. I supposed the death of one’s father was reason enough to skip a chapter, but it didn’t feel right to me, somehow.

  So I ended up at Claire’s apartment, wrapped in a gold-and-brown afghan she had knitted, telling her—and J., who had the oomph to Translocate down for the night—what I knew.

  “He knew Zaki, had hired him. So he knew about the gambling, figured we’d believe a story about debts, and assume he’d screw up the repayment enough to get himself killed. Masqueraded as Zaki and went and offered his—Zaki’s—marker to the dragon, stole the blood from a scratch, planted it…”

  “And the letter?” Claire asked.

  “When was the last time you saw Zaki’s handwriting, J.?”

  J. had to think about that for a while, which was answer enough.

  “Yeah.” I figured as much. “Me? I got to see a signature on a check every now and then. Genghis Khan could have forged that letter, and I’d have no way to know.”

  Zaki hadn’t been a deadbeat dad, financially. Not even emotionally. He just hadn’t been the dad I needed. To be fair, I hadn’t exactly been the kid he was looking for, either, me and my Talent and my brains and my desire to actually get out there and do something.

  “What now?”

  J. asked a reasonable question. I had no idea. I could establish cause, means, and motive, but who would listen? Who would care?

  “A good daughter would take revenge,” I said. P
art of me liked that idea. I could prove I had loved him that way, right?

  “Zaki would be horrified by the thought,” J. said. He was right.

  “Let it go, honey.”

  I looked at Claire. “How can you say that? You loved him, and he was dicking around on you.”

  Claire had a wistful smile on her face, like she’d said her good-byes already. “He came home to me. He always came home to me. His dick wandered, but his heart never did. Zaki was a gentle man, baby. Hopeless, but gentle. The last thing he would ever want would be for you to have blood on your hands. Even for him. Especially for him.”

  She had known my father. She had known him right.

  J. forced the issue and Translocated me back to college. It’s a decent way to travel, if you’ve got the skills. Sure as hell beat the Chinatown bus. So I got to curl up in my own bed that night, listening to my roommate’s barely there snore, and the ticking of the alarm clock that was usually a surefire soporific. I should have been fast asleep, or so wracked with loss that I couldn’t close my eyes. Instead, all I felt was too tired to sleep.

  It’s normal, the voice said. After a case.

  “What case?” Across the room, Nancy stirred, but didn’t wake.

  An investigation. You did well.

  “Who the hell are you?” A reasonable question, I thought. Talent, obviously. Strong—very damn strong, to ping me like this. I should have been nervous, if not outright scared. I wasn’t.

  Nobody you need to know yet. Take your classes. Finish your degree. Stay out of trouble. We’ll talk soon.

  And then he was gone.

  I stared at the ceiling, mulling over the words. Male. Older. The voice of someone who knew how to mentor.

  I already had a mentor.

  But from the sound of it, maybe, I had—would have—a boss, too.

  Investigation. A lifetime of finding answers, figuring out the why of things. Bringing people to justice. Yeah.

  I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  The House

  Laurie R. King

  “All I’m saying is that names are important. You know, if you’re Bruce or Marvin or something, you’re really stuck with that, like, forever.”