She laughed a little. “Oh, yes, I suppose I should apologize for that.”
“I was just asking a question, Rachel – not complaining.”
That earned another brief laugh. “Well, the kiss served two purposes, actually – one mundane, the other magical.”
“Which one of those covers knocking my socks off?”
“I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, the mundane reason was a simple distraction. I didn’t want you ducking away when I put that salve on your injury.”
“Assuming I was gonna be all macho about it.”
“Yes, assuming that.”
“And the magical reason?”
“A healing spell involves the transfer of positive energy from the practitioner to the patient. There has to be a generation of what another religion’s tradition would call ‘good karma’. I should add that I put on some lipstick with a mild enchantment on it, to make you want to stay with the kiss for a while.”
“I’m not sure that was necessary, but I’d say it served its purpose pretty well.”
“Yes, and a good thing, too. If the kiss hadn’t worked, my only other option was to increase the positive energy of the spell in a more… extreme way.” I swear she actually blushed as she said that last part.
“Extreme? You mean… sex? You and me?” If I wasn’t such a tough guy, I think I might have been blushing a little myself by that point.
She gave her head a toss. “Well, it was either that or give up on the spell – and, as I said, I had spent a lot of time on it.” She took her time drinking some water, then said, “White magic draws its strength from nature, from the earth itself. And the earth is, as you know, the ultimate life force.”
“I think I read that someplace.”
“Well, that’s why generation of the life force is sometimes called for, especially in healing spells.”
“So, if the kiss hadn’t worked, you were prepared to…?” I let my voice trail off rather than say what I’d been about to, which was “fuck my brains out.” That seemed a bit crude, considering the circumstances – and the company.
“Fuck your brains out?” said Rachel, another mind reader. “I’ll just say that I would have given it serious consideration, and leave it at that. Let’s be glad that it proved unnecessary.”
“I know what you’re saying,” I said, “but I’m having a little trouble being glad about something like that.”
“As far as the Scranton PD is concerned, it might well have raised some ethical issues.” She put her water bottle aside and started gathering up the magical materials from her desk. Without looking at me, she went on, “Not to mention emotional ones, quite possibly.”
That’s the advantage of having a bottle of water in your hands – drinking from it gives you something to do while you’re trying to figure out what to say to something like that. But the best I could come up with was “Yeah, quite possibly.”
“Anyway,” she said, “the spell worked, and you’re feeling more like your old self, which was the object of the exercise. There’s too much weird shit going on right now not to have you at your best.”
“‘Weird shit’ is right. Speaking of which – how’s your research on Slide been coming along?”
“No breakthroughs so far,” she said. “Although I’ve learned quite a bit about its properties, which is a good first step. The work, as they say, continues.”
I finished off my water and put the bottle aside. “Rachel,” I said, “I don’t know how to say ‘Thank you’ for what you did.”
“I’d say you just managed pretty well.”
“Alright, then,” I said, and stood up. I braced myself for the pain that would follow, then remembered that there wouldn’t be any – not any more. “Duty calls.”
I was almost to the door when she said, “Stan…?”
I turned back. “Yeah?”
“You should know that I wouldn’t have used that healing spell on just anyone – at any level of intensity.”
I looked at her. She stared back. Neither of us spoke, but when the silence started getting awkward, I said, “Is this something we should talk about?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But not right now. Go out and bust some bad guys, Stan.”
“Count on it.”
As I sat down at my desk, Karl looked up for the first time since I’d seen him tonight. “Looks like you’re moving around a little better than you were before,” he said.
“Yeah, Rachel worked some magic and made my fucking lump disappear. My head doesn’t hurt at all now.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, and went back to whatever he’d been doing at his computer.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” I asked him.
He looked up again, his face a study in innocence. “Course I would,” he said.
“Really?”
“Sure – you just told me about it, remember? Jeez, Stan, maybe that knock on the head fucked you up worse than you thought.”
I decided to give it up. “Guess there was no call for us while I was downstairs.”
“Nope. Slow night – so far. There is one interesting thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You see the paper today?”
“No, I haven’t had a chance,” I said. “Why?”
He handed me the front section of the Times-Tribune. I saw that another judge from Luzerne County was being charged with corruption and lying under oath. I’m surprised they even bother to put that stuff on the front page anymore.
“Page three,” Karl said.
I opened the paper and found that the good folks at the Patriot Party hadn’t been letting any grass grow under their feet. They’d taken out another full-page ad, characterized by their usual restraint and statesmanlike approach to the problems facing our city. This one was expressing their sober concern regarding of the recent bombing outside Ricardo’s Ristorante.
“OUTRAGE” was centered at the top of the page in letters that had to be two inches high. The rest was pretty much what I would have expected, even if the print was a little smaller. “Another bomb explodes!” it read, followed by “More human lives snuffed out! More human property damaged!” The worst property damage had been at Ricardo’s, which was owned by a supe – but I guess the Patriot Party wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of a good rant. The ad continued. “How much longer will this go on?”
Further down, there was some text claiming that the bombing represented the latest atrocity in the ongoing supe gang war – I noticed it was “supernatural gang war” and not “vampire gang war”, which would have been more precise. The ad said a gnome was a suspect in the bombing, which caused me to wonder just where the Patriot Party got its information. I hadn’t had the chance to tell anyone what I’d learned from Loquasto, and I doubted that he or anybody else in the Calabrese family was spreading that information around.
The thrust of the ad was the same theme the Patriot Party had been playing for some time now: the city was going to hell, the supes, who were all either gangsters or drug addicts, were responsible, and the city government had been too inept or too corrupt to stop it. Blah, blah, blah.
I folded the paper and put it back on Karl’s desk. “I can’t exactly say I’m surprised. Are you?”
“Not about that shit, no,” he said. “But I got an email from a guy I know who works at the Times-Tribune, and what it said did surprise me a little.”
“And that was…?”
“The text of that ad, all laid out and ready for uploading, was emailed to the T-T at 7.29 pm yesterday. They just made the deadline for the next morning’s edition – the cutoff time for ad copy is 7. 30, he tells me.”
“OK – has this joke got a punch line?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Karl said, “and it’s a doozy. You know what time the bomb went off?”
“No, I didn’t hear the blast. Don’t forget, Mercy Hospital’s on the other side of town from Ricardo’s.”
“I wasn’t sure of the time myself,” Karl said. “So I checked the 911 log. The first call reporting the explosion came in at 7:17.”
After a couple of seconds, I reached over and retrieved the paper from Karl’s desk. I wanted another look at that ad.
There was a lot of text, and most of it was very specific to the bombing at Ricardo’s. This wasn’t a bunch of boilerplate that could be pulled out of a document file and turned into ad copy in no time at all.
I put the paper down and looked at Karl. “Somebody at PP headquarters works pretty fast, don’t they?”
“Maybe too fast.”
“Uh-huh. And there’s something about this mess that I haven’t told you yet. Before I racked out this morning, I called that number that Loquasto gave me.”
“The consigliere.”
“That’s the guy.”
I gave Karl the details of my conversation with the Calabrese Family’s consigliere. When I’d finished, he looked at me as if I’d just told him that the Girl Scouts were going to be selling hash brownies along with their cookies this year.
“That’s just… fucking ridiculous,” he said.
“It sure would be nice to think so.”
“The fucking Patriot Party is going around blowing shit up so that they can blame it all on supes and sweep the election? Stan, I knew those guys were assholes, but … come on.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. Except that it’s been done before.”
“Where?
“Germany,” I said. “The Thirties, soon after Hitler was elected Chancellor. One night the Nazis burned down the Reichstag, which was their Parliament building. Burned it to the ground. Then they found some Communist doofus and hung the whole thing on him.”
“Why that guy?”
“Because, like I said, he was a Commie, and the Commies were the Nazis’ biggest political rivals. As a result of the public panic over the fire, the Communist party was outlawed and the Nazis gained absolute power – which they hung onto until the end of the war.”
“OK, I see the parallel, assuming what we’re thinking about the Patriot party is true,” Karl said. “But, dude, this is Scranton. Not Nazi Germany. Scranton.”
“I know,” I said. “But when I was talking to Loquasto about this earlier, he said something that had a weird association for me, but I don’t know why.”
“What’d he say?”
“Just like us, he was trying to get his mind around the idea that somebody would do all this bad shit just to get political control of Scranton. And then he said something like ‘Maybe it’s a pilot project.’”
“Pilot project,” Karl said. He chewed his lower lip, which is a tricky thing for a vampire to do. Then he said to me, “Maybe we better go see McGuire.”
After Karl and I had finished talking, McGuire sat back in his chair, the worn springs creaking under his weight. He studied Karl, then spent a few seconds looking at me.
“I suppose I could order both of you to see the department shrink,” he said. “He’s probably seen a lot of cops with paranoia and has some ideas on how to treat it.”
“Doc Watson, you mean?” I said. “Yeah, he’s pretty good. He’ll probably have Karl drinking Type O laced with clozapine. He’d still be paranoid, but it wouldn’t bother him so much.”
The look McGuire gave me said he thought I was about as funny as diarrhea. It’s a look I’ve seen from him more than a few times.
“Alright,” he said. “Assume, for the sake of discussion, that the two of you aren’t bat-shit crazy. What do you plan on doing about this… conspiracy you think you’ve stumbled onto?”
“We were hoping you might have some advice for us, boss,” Karl said.
“I hope you weren’t thinking about arresting somebody,” McGuire said. “Right now, you haven’t got enough probable cause to justify a fucking traffic ticket.”
“We don’t need probable cause to bring somebody in for questioning, though,” I said.
McGuire raised an eyebrow at me. “Who’ve you got in mind?”
“How about the head of the Patriot Party…?” I looked at Karl.
“Slattery,” he said. “Phil Slattery.”
“You’re assuming he’s the head of the party,” McGuire said, “because he’s their candidate for Mayor?”
Karl frowned at him. “You’re saying he isn’t? If not, then who is it?”
“I didn’t say that Slattery wasn’t the head honcho,” McGuire said. “But there’s a rumor floating around City Hall, something about a power behind the throne.”
“Slattery hasn’t got the throne yet,” I said.
“Just an expression,” McGuire said. “But there’s some guys in the Mayor’s office who think there’s somebody behind the Patriot Party, pulling the strings.”
Karl shook his head. “And you called us paranoid,” he said quietly.
“Has this somebody got a name?” I asked McGuire.
“Fuck, no,” he said. “Like I told you, it’s just a rumor.”
“We can’t bring a rumor in for questioning,” I said. “Which brings us back to Slattery.”
McGuire put his feet up on the open top drawer of his desk, a sign that he was expecting this discussion to take a while. “We call Slattery in here for questioning,” he said, “and his campaign’s gonna scream bloody murder. They’ll claim the mayor’s using the police to harass him.”
“Let him,” Karl said. “Doesn’t look to me like the Mayor’s office has got a whole lot left to lose at this point. According to the last poll I saw, the Patriot Party’s expected to kick serious ass in the election.”
“Anyhow, that sword cuts both ways,” I said. “If Slattery balks, he could be handing the mayor a nice campaign issue: ‘Why won’t the PP cooperate with a legitimate police investigation?’ he could say. ‘What’s Slattery afraid of?’”
McGuire pursed his lips for a second. “OK, that could work,” he said. “But say we get him in here – so what? He’ll have his lawyer with him, for whatever that’s worth – I hear Slattery’s pretty sharp all by himself. What do you expect the guy to say that’s gonna do this investigation any good? He won’t even be under oath.”
“That’s right,” I said. “He won’t be under oath. He won’t even be under arrest.”
“Not without probable cause, he won’t be, and we sure as shit haven’t got any,” McGuire said.
“Which means we won’t be reading him his rights beforehand.”
McGuire didn’t say, “Well, duh!” but the look he gave me got the point across pretty well, anyway.
“The Barlow decision says you can’t have a vampire anywhere around a suspect who’s being questioned by the authorities,” I said. “Once he’s been read his rights.”
My boss isn’t stupid, and neither is my partner. They were both looking at me now, and their expressions said they thought I might actually possess an IQ higher than two digits. I tried to enjoy the experience, since it happens so rarely.
“Nothing Slattery says’ll be admissible in court,” Karl said, but not as if he was disagreeing with my idea.
“It wouldn’t be admissible, anyway, since we’re not gonna read him his rights,” I said.
“He won’t come alone,” McGuire said.
“No,” I said. “We’ve already stipulated that he’s not stupid.”
“So whoever’s with him,” McGuire said, “his lawyer or his bodyguard or his mother or whoever the fuck he brings, is probably gonna figure out pretty quick what we’re doing.”
“Yeah, the boss is right,” Karl said to me. “We might get only one question under Influence.”
“In that case,” I said, “we’d better make it a good one.”
McGuire said he’d do his best to get Phil Slattery down to headquarters some night for questioning, but nothing was likely to happen until tomorrow at the earliest. It was already after 11pm, and I agreed with McGuire that guys like Slattery probably weren’t available to anybody as unimport
ant as a cop at that hour of night.
For a while after that, Karl and I sat at our desks in the squad room and tried to figure out what to ask Slattery, assuming that Karl would be able to use vampire Influence on him.
“Should we assume that Slattery or his people are gonna shut everything down once they figure out that I’m using Influence?” Karl said.
“We should probably assume the worst,” I said, “which is that we’ll only get one crack at him, if that. But what the hell – we could also have some backup questions prepared, in case somebody on Slattery’s side has a sudden attack of the stupids and lets him keep talking.”
“You figure that’s likely?”
“No, but I can dream, can’t I?”
“Something else just occurred to me,” Karl said. “What if Slattery says, ‘You cops wanna talk, then come to me. I’m not going down to police HQ – not until I walk in as mayor, anyway.”
“That would kinda complicate things, wouldn’t it?”
“Just a little,” Karl said. “There’s a good chance one of Slattery’s people would figure out that I’m undead before I ever get near him –- which means I never would get near him.”
“Discrimination against supes is illegal,” I said.
“Yeah, I bet that matters a great big bunch to the haters in the Patriot Party.”
“Good point,” I said. “It’s probably as little account to them as sparrows’ tears.”
I figured Karl would recognize that I was quoting the last line from You Only Live Twice, and the grin he gave me showed I was right.
“Hey, not bad, Stan,” he said. “Your taste in reading is improving.”
“Even I get tired of Reader’s Digest sometimes.”
I went to the front of the squad room and poured a cup of coffee that I didn’t really want, just to give myself a chance to stretch a little and think. By the time I got back to my desk, I figured I might have an answer to the problem Karl had raised.
“So, alright,” I said to Karl. “Let’s say Slattery’s people give us that ‘You come to us’ bullshit. So we tell them, ‘Sure – we’ll be happy to come over there to talk to Mister Slattery. We’ll have to work it into our busy schedules, though. And we can’t guarantee that we won’t show up in the middle of the candidate’s next press conference. Wonder what all those reporters would make of a couple of detectives showing up to talk to the Big Man himself?’”
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