I hit him with my will. “Stop!”
He did. He just looked at me curiously. “Hey, you shouldn’t be back here.”
“It’s okay, just wait.” This wasn’t part of the plan. I leaned back against wall and waited for my head to clear a bit. I tried to examine my options.
We can burn the place down!
No Spring, we can’t burn the place down. Too many people would be hurt. Now hush, unless you have a suggestion that doesn’t involve hurting anyone.
I got nothin’.’
My nerves were jangling, and the noise was interfering with my thinking. It made no sense, but I was sure that any minute now this guy’s supervisor would come walking in. I took a moment before I leaned down, grabbed the box, pulled the cabling off it, and stuck it under my arm.
I looked at Eli. “You have no idea what happened to this box. No one ever came into the back. It’s been a normal, uneventful day. Wait here for a moment, then carry on normally.”
I turned and left unsteadily on rubbery legs. I came through the door just as a man was ringing the bell for service.
“Can I help you sir?” I asked unevenly while trying not to look as dazed as I felt.
Behind me, I heard Eli say, “Hey, you shouldn’t be back here!”
I cringed and gritted my teeth. I commanded them both. “Just stand there and don’t move.”
The man at the front shook his head and said, “What are you talking about?”
Aw, poop on a Pringle. I tried not to collapse from the wave of fatigue that washed through me. I gave the man an ingratiating smile that probably looked more like a death rictus. “I’m sorry sir, it’s been a long day.”
I turned my back to him and prayed that the force was still with me, and that I wouldn’t black out. “Okay, okay, Eli, I’m going home, and you won’t even remember I was here. The desk is yours, please help this man.”
Eli’s brows furrowed at me with confusion, then he turned to the customer and said, “May I help you sir?”
I offered up my thanks to whatever saint represented wizards, fools, and idiots and staggered away with the dented box under my arm. I followed the signs to the stairs, sat down for a couple minutes, then painfully climbed to the second floor. No way was I going to wait and maybe have to take an elevator with another guest. I was worried that I had been gone too long and that Colette had split, or gotten attacked, or something, but I couldn’t push myself any faster.
I walked to her room and knocked on the door. She opened it quickly, and I waddled in with the box while trying to ignore the foul smell.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s the box that holds all the surveillance video. I, uh, snuck it out of the back room.”
“What happened to it?”
“Er, I dropped it?”
Happily, for me she wasn’t really interested in the box. She said, “You are very resourceful. Are you sure that you’re willing to do this for me?”
I nodded emphatically. “Yes, I know you didn’t do this.”
Unless she’s a spy, or a diamond thief.
Colette smiled at me. She gave me an enthusiastic hug and a real kiss that made me forget all about my annoyance at Spring. When we were done, I flopped down on the bed.
“You do not look well, Finn.”
I waived my arm in the air above me. “Oh, just too many adrenalin rushes this evening. I’ll be fine. It was hard to not stare at the body, but Colette and I managed to talk seriously for a moment making sure our stories matched, then we made the call and went down to the lobby. We packed up a bunch of Colette’s things in a carry-on along with the recorder, took it to the car, and hid it in the trunk. When I came back in, Eli was chatting amiably with Colette. I eyed him warily and joined them. He looked up at me, gave a frown, and I got ready to hoodoo him again.
“Sir, is that your car right out front?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, but you aren’t allowed to park there. Could you move it to the parking lot?”
I breathed a sigh of relief, and not too long after I got back to the lobby, the cops showed up. I guess that Colette hadn’t told him what was waiting up in her room because Eli was cool and relaxed up till that point.
When two cruisers with flashing lights pulled up, his eyes bugged out, and he said, “Sorry, I’ve got to go use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” He nearly fled into the back offices. Colette and I shrugged at each other and waited for the officer’s to come in.
Officers Buck and Tandy were the first to arrive. In the last few months, I’d reluctantly become acquainted with a lot of the cops in the city. Buck was thick in the body and a bit pompous, but he wasn’t a bad sort. On the other hand, I rather liked officer Tandy. When I’d been in jail, she’d brought me back a couple of her homemade cookies. That automatically made me her fan. Seeing them side by side, I realized she was a bit thick around the middle as well. Both had graying hair. I guessed them pretty old, somewhere in their mid-forties.
We guided them up to the room, answered their questions, and then we were relegated to the lobby. Several more cars and an ambulance showed up and there was a steady stream of people for a while. Sometime during the general coming and going, Detective Hunter showed up and started running things.
There was some consternation when they discovered the recorder missing. They gave Eli the third degree about it, and he just wilted under the heat of their ire.
Their exchange made me realize something. I slouched down into my chair, put my face in my hands and tried not to groan.
Colette put her hand on my arm and asked, “Finn, are you okay?”
I heaved a big sigh and said, “I’ll tell you later.”
Great idea, Finn. If the killer has been caught on the tape, we can mail it to the police station anonymously.
Well, what if Colette and I are on it coming in at different times?
Can’t you erase that?
I don’t know. It depends on the hard-drive the operating system, and the amount of damage done to the drive. I suppose. God, this sucks.
I didn’t know the half of it. Detective Hunter walked through the entrance and
Detective Hunter stepped up to us.
“Finn, we’ve gotten what we needed from you, you can go home.”
“Okay, thanks.” I stood up to leave. “Come on, Colette.”
Hunter put her hand in front of Colette. “Unfortunately, Miss Delacroix needs to come down to the station with me.”
“But she was with me all night!”
Hunter stared at me through narrowed eyes before she said, “Relax Finn, this has nothing to do with this evening.” Relax? It was all I could do to peel my shoulders off my ears.
I glanced at Colette. She didn’t look frightened, just annoyed.
“So, why do you need her? She’s going to stay with us tonight.”
“Sorry Finn, but there are some irregularities in her passport and I’ve been asked to hold her overnight.”
“But—”
“It is no problem Finn, I will go with her,” said Colette. She put her hand on my arm and gave me a quick smile. “I will see you tomorrow, no?”
I nodded, suddenly afraid for her. She calmly walked out with one of the officers.
“Finn?” Hunter’s hand touched my shoulders and I jumped. I’d forgotten she was there.
“Huh?”
“Go home, get some sleep. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Okay.” For the first time all night, I felt tired. Dead tired and anxious.
Missing Person
“Why won’t they let me go down and see her? What could Homeland Security want with Colette?” I couldn’t keep the whine out of my voice as I sat at the breakfast table with my mom.
“I don’t know, Finn, maybe this guy in her room was some sort of terrorist?”
“I don’t know. This sucks. If I could just talk to her...” She hadn’t answered her phone or responded to any of my texts.
“Maybe you should go back to bed, hon. You look terribly tired. Vicky said she’d call and let you know when you can come down.”
I was tired. My brain was a bubbling cauldron of exhaustion, but it boiled on a sea of anxiety.
Calm down, boy, if she’s a spy and they whisk her away, we’ll find someone else to give you some pity sex and you’ll forget all about her.
Spring! Don’t try to be Dave. One’s enough.
I’m just saying...
Well, don’t.
Fine. She mentally harrumphed and retreated into her hole.
Sleeping wasn’t an option so I went upstairs and started taking apart the surveillance box. If I couldn’t help her directly, maybe I could find the person responsible for McCormick’s death. I retrieved the disk and tossed the battered case and its internals into my closet where my old computers went to die.
Unfortunately, the drive had an old SATA interface, and I didn’t have any way to read it.
I ended up over at Dave’s place. He was more of an electronics tinkerer than I was. He got the drive hooked up. Fortunately, it was a standard and Dave’s Linux box recognized it immediately. We spent most of the day figuring out the files and then scanning through them.
We’d gone backwards and forwards through the tape looking for guys who looked Irish or were otherwise suspicious. Our search had given us nothing but bleary eyes. I much preferred the way they do it on TV—skip all the boring parts and get right to the villain and their treacherous deeds.
Once more, I watched up to the moment when Colette walked in the door. She checked in with Eli and again went into the little office provided by the Suites for their customers. She spent about fifteen minutes there before emerging and heading up the stairs. I really wanted to know what she had been doing in there. After that came the one man, followed by me.
I bet she was arranging for the sale of the hot diamonds she stole from the Irishman.
Yeah, Spring, I’m sure that was it.
I stopped the playback. “Damn!”
“What?” Dave jerked beside me. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d fallen asleep.
“Way to watch there, Dave.”
“Hey, you’re the jerk who called me at eight this morning, and CSI Newark is as boring as you would expect.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Find anything?”
“Not that I can tell. There are so many people coming and going, it’s impossible to know.”
“Just give this to the police. I’ll bet they’ve got facial recognition software that will give them a list.”
“Maybe.”
“Look, we’ll just delete the last half hour or so, and mail it in to Detective Hottie with an anonymous relay. Then she can do whatever it is she does.”
“Why won’t they let me see her?”
“Maybe she’s here illegally?”
“No way,” I said. I couldn’t believe it.
“Well, whatever, it’s time for dinner and you owe me a pizza.”
I got up and stretched. “Okay, come on let’s go.”
Detective Hunter phoned me in the car on the way to Frankies.
“Hey Detective, can I come and get Colette?”
“No Finn, I’m sorry, but she’s not here anymore.”
“What? Why didn’t she call me to pick her up?”
“Finn, she was taken into custody by Homeland Security agents.”
“You let them take her?” I’m afraid my voice was a little louder than necessary. “What do they want with her? Why did—”
“Finn, I didn’t have a choice in this, and they were not forthcoming on the why.”
“Do you know where they took her?”
“No Finn, I’m sorry, but I’m sure she’ll be alright.”
“How nice for you!” I hung up on her.
Ian Finn Morgenstern’s new book: “How to Make Friends and Influence People.”
Oh, be quiet.
In the end, there wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t reach Colette, nor did she call and leave me any messages. It made me crazy, to be so completely impotent. I’m afraid that I annoyed everyone around me for the next few days, and got myself banned from the police station.
I even called Senator Gayle, the senior senator from Ohio from whom I’d removed a shadow. He promised to look into it, but in the end couldn’t find any more information than I. Homeland Security was disavowing any knowledge of having Colette in custody. I felt like I was suddenly living in Nazi Germany.
I don’t know how long I would have kept it up, but one special night cut my craze short.
Surprise
No one ever wants to be attacked in their sleep, but I’ve found it can be uniquely stimulating—especially when you share your brain with a dryad. The last time it happened, I awoke just in time to get punched in the face and fall onto a dance floor, so this time, when the call came, I was ready. Heh.
Finn! Wake up! Spring yelled right into my mind while she simultaneously jabbed a metaphysical finger into my adrenals. I shot up straight out of bed and shouted. “I’m awake!”
I landed gracefully on my butt beside my bed, still half covered in bed sheets. I groggily poked my head up and looked wildly around the room to find the threat. The sliver of moon and the twinkling Ohio stars cast practically no illumination, but it was enough to highlight the dark figure escaping through my window. To my second sight, he was surrounded by almost no aura.
I yelled, “Stop!” and put some force into the command. The intruder froze. I smiled in self-congratulations. I could really get used to these Jedi mind tricks that my Caduceus let me perform.
Still buzzing from the adrenal surge, I bounced around my bed and grabbed the stalker’s shoulders. His aura pulsed bright violet, he twisted in my grip, and a poorly seen fist flew at my face. I tried a Krav-Maga style elbow block-attack designed to stun my assailant while simultaneously protecting myself, but I mostly failed. His fist connected with the side of my head and rang my clock good. I fell back, pulling the ninja-wannabe backward into the room—on top of me.
Happily, he landed on my up-thrust elbow. His explosive exhale of air was followed by a gasp for breath. I grappled with the slim figure and was immediately distracted by some oh-so-interesting soft and squishy bits in my hands. He—was a she—and that discovery shorted my brain. In my defense, I was a horny 18-year-old boy, and my gonads frequently overpowered my higher cognitive functions. Anyway, her gender stunned me more than the blow to my head and stopped me long enough to allow the slender and very female attacker to spin in my grip and stab me in the chest with the knife I hadn’t seen in her hands.
Let me tell you, that can really ruin your evening. There was little pain at first. I didn’t even realize that I had been stabbed when she tried to grab the Caduceus from the string looped around my neck. I grappled with her for possession momentarily before the lights to my room turned on and my dad yelled wordlessly in alarm.
The light caught us both by surprise. Her eyes were all that was visible of her face behind her standard-issue black ninja-hoody-mask thing. They were wide, and the pupils were hugely dilated. The tableau held for a long split-second before she leaped off of me and was out the window with the flowing grace of a mongoose. As she went up and through, her bright violet aura now accented her slender legs and shapely derriere. That compelling, and oh-so-enticing, combination seemed very familiar. Unfortunately, I was distracted from the pursuit of that thought.
As I possessively clutched the Caduceus in my hand, the pain in my chest finally made it through the ultra-dense gray matter that composed most of my brain. The pain flared through me like white-hot fire. I looked down in shock to see the handle of the knife sticking horribly out of my chest.
Freaking out and panicking, I had to get that knife out of me. I grabbed it and pulled it out just as my dad was yelling at me to leave it in place.
My dad tossed my double bed out of the way, so he could get to me. It crash
ed against my room’s door and slammed it shut.
I looked up at my dad in shock and dropped the bloody knife. I then related the most important fact about the attack. “Dad! It was a girl!” I looked back down at the spreading blood and unnecessarily added, “She stabbed me!”
The pain in my chest doubled when I tried to inhale, and my brain ejected everything else.
I panicked and struggled to sit up, but my dad forced me back down.
“Lie down Finn! Don’t move!”
When I flopped back down, I exhaled and a fit of coughing exploded from me. Specs of blood spat out from my mouth onto my dad, myself, and my room. My cough got harder until I had no air left in my lungs. I raggedly tried to inhale again. Some air came in through my mouth, but the hole in my chest made a sound like the one you get when you are slurping the last of your milkshake through a straw—I still hate that sound.
I started feeling light-headed as I tried to breathe. This time, not so much blood came out of my mouth, but I managed to blow blood bubbles through my well-ventilated chest. That is seriously disturbing.
It seemed like no matter what I did, I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs and damn, it hurt!
My dad pressed his hand on my chest, causing more pain. He yelled to my mom. “Helen! Call 911, and then bring me some duct tape!”
I really wanted my dad to stop pushing on the knife wound, but every time I tried to talk, I ended up trying to cough my lungs out, so I gave up and tried to concentrate on my dad’s voice.
“Finn, you have a sucking chest wound, do you understand?”
That sounded bad. Fear thrilled through me and my panic stepped it up a notch, but then it felt like someone poured a bucket of calm over my head, which then flowed through my entire body in a cool wave. The pain didn’t go away but became distant and less important. My constant struggle for breath didn’t go away, but my fear did.
I relaxed and concentrated on breathing. My coughing stopped, and while I still felt short of breath, it didn’t really bother me anymore.
As I calmed down, my dad’s controlled panic became more obvious to me. I found I could now focus on what he was saying.
The Templar's Legacy (Ancient Enemy) Page 9
