Judy said, “I understand they’ve recently identified the sorcerous component of intent. That may make some new lands of anti-theft magic possible, provided the discrimination spell routines are sensitive enough to tell real larceny from a merchant’s legitimate appetite for profit”
The guards had given her the usual looks a man gives an attractive woman. They were polite about it—nothing to bother her or me. Now they looked at her in a different way.
I’d seen that happen a lot of times before, when people realized how sharp she was. I just smiled; I’ve known it for years.
“I sure hope they make something like mat work,” Pete said. “An awful lot of stuff you see here is stolen. Everybody knows it, but how do you prove it? If you could—”
“It’ll happen,” Judy said. “Not tomorrow, probably not the day after, either, but ifU happen. The principles are there.
The gremlins are in engineering the actuating sorcery and the support systems.”
“By God, I’d cheer for anything that made my job easier for once,” Pete said.
“I’d cheer louder if I thought the techniques would just be used for tracking down thieves, but I’ve got a bad feeling they won’t,” Judy said. The more effective magic becomes, the more the powers that be will use it to poke into ordinary people’s lives. That’s the way things seem to work, anyhow.”
Pete and Luke represented the powers that be. Now they looked at each other, but neither of them said anything—I told you they were polite. For that matter, I’m part of the powers that be, too, but I stood with Judy on this one. People often don’t realize how precious just being left alone is.
Even if the guards had decided to aigue, we’d have been too busy to cany it very far: dealers started showing up. Pete and Luke checked their permits and made sure they’d paid for their stall space. Judy and I monitored the spellchecker as they came through the gateway. Some of them had their goods and stall setups on carts that they pushed or pulled, others piled them onto little carpets. That sort isn’t Byway—legal, but it’s awfully handy for hauling things around.
Quite a few dealers weren’t happy about passing in front of a spellchecker. “What is this, the airport?” one of them grumbled.
So many dealers asked questions that my spiel got real smooth real fast By the time the first four or five had gone by, I’d taken out my EPA sigil and set it on top of the spellchecker. I’d point to it and say, “We’re looking for a very specific contaminant that we have reason to believe is being sold at swap meets, perhaps unwittingly. Nothing else we notice will get cited.”
That probably wasn’t quite true; if somebody’d come by with something as conspicuously illegal as a crate of black lotuses (better known as Kali’s flowers), for instance, we wouldn’t have let him take them in. But, to my relief, nothing like that happened, and the explanation kept the dealers from getting antsy.
Heavens, what a lot of stuff there was! Clothes, food, jewelry, nostrums (the microimps in the spellchecker seemed dubious a few times, but not dubious enough to make me stop anybody), ethemet receiver imp modules (I wondered how many of those were stolen), toys both mechanical and sorcerous, guitars, grimoires (Judy looked more than scornful at the quality)-I could go on for a lot longer.
The dealers were as varied as the stuff they sold: men, women, blonds, blacks, Aztedans, Persians, Hanese, Samoans, Indians in dhotis and saris, the other flavor Indians in feathers. I watched one bronze-skinned fellow slip out of his work shirt and put on a feather bonnet. He noticed me watching him, grinned land of sheepishly. “Gotta look authentic if you want the people to buy your medicine, man,” he said as he pushed his cart past me.
“Why not?” I answered agreeably. I glanced down at the spellchecker. From what the microimps had to say about them, the medicines weren’t strong enough to be worth buying. I wondered if the alleged Indian was even as genuine as the stuff he sold.
The next fellows through were a pair of Aztecans. The had a rug with their stuff on it, and were chatting with each other in Spainish.
Judy gave me a hard shot in the ribs with her elbow.
“Huh?” I said. Then I looked at the ground glass in the spellchecker. If they hadn’t been trained to tell what they were sensing, the little imps would have run and hid. As it was—My stomach lurched when I saw what they reported.
“Hold on there, you two,” I said sharply They hadn’t noticed me or the spellchecker. “What’s the matter?” one of them asked at the same time as the other one said, “Who are you?”
I picked up my sigil. “Environmental Perfection Agency,”
I said. “What do you have in those boxes?”
“Nostrums,” one of them answered. “I got a friend, his brother-in-law hunts dragons down in Aztecia. He gets the blood, sells some to us, we dilute it, sell some here. Everybody makes some money.”
He didn’t sound like a crook, just a fellow doing a job.
That’s what he looked like, too, he and his friend both: ordinary guys in work shoes and jeans, cotton tunics and caps.
The first thing you learn is, you can’t tell by looking. Pete and Luke came alert They didn’t move toward us, not yet, but they quivered like lycanthropes just before the full moon rises.
“Which one of you is Jose?” Judy asked suddenly.
The one in the red cap jerked in surprise. “How’d you know that, lady?”
I unreeled the long probe from the spellchecker (actually, I wished I had one of those eleven-foot Rumanians). Tm going to have to ask you to open one of those jars of dragon blood for me,” I said.
Jose shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” He flipped the lid off one of the boxes. The jars inside looked like the ones Cuauhtemoc Hemandez kept in his workroom. Once upon a time, they’d held mayonnaise. Now… As soon as Jose unscrewed a top, I knew what they held: Judy, who was at the spellchecker, made a small, strangled noise. I’d told her what kind of stuff was in there, but hearing about it doesn’t pack the same punch as seeing it in the ground glass.
I waved to Pete and Luke. They came trotting over. The fellow in the blue cap, who’d kept pretty quiet up till now, saw them and said, “What the hell’s going on?”
Thafc just what I want to know,” I snapped. Considering what was in the jars, I meant it literally. I turned back to Jose.
“You ever sell any of this, ah, ‘dragon blood’ to a cumndero named Cuauhtemoc Hemandez?”
“I sell to lots of people, man,” he answered. They pay cash. I don’t ask who they are. You know how that goes.” He spread his hands and looked at me, one man of the world to another.
I knew how it went, all right. It meant he didn’t pay taxes on the money he made at the swap meets. It’s theoretically possible for the Crown to keep track of all the crowns in the Confederation. The financial wi2ards in the gray flannel suits back in D.StC. would love to do it, too. Trouble is, of course, that the sorcery involved is so complex that it makes getting the Garuda Bird off the ground look like tossing a roc by comparison. And so people like Jose will go on cheating on what they owe, and people like you and me will end up footing the bill for them.
Except now Jose was facing some time at public expense of an altogether different sort. I said, “By what the spellchecker shows me, sir, there isn’t any dragon blood in here. There’s human blood, and human skin, and”—I looked back at Judy, who nodded—“a godawful strong stink of Huitzilopochtli.”
Jose and blue-cap (I found out later his name was Carlos, so I’ll call him that) looked at each other. If they weren’t utterly appalled, they should have been making their money at the light-and-magic shows, not swap meets. They wouldn’t have gotten it in cash, but they’d have made enough to keep from complaining.
As soon as he heard Huitzilopochtli, Pete (or maybe Luke) said, “You gentlemen are under arrest. Anything you say may be used against you.”
The off-duty constable who hadn’t arrested the nostrums peddlers—whichever one he was—headed for the office.
As soon as he’d gone maybe twenty feet toward the door, Jose and Carlos tried to run for it. Being off duty, Pete carried only a club. He yanked it out and pounded after Jose.
That left me with Carlos. “Be careful, Dave!” Judy yelled at my back. It was good advice. It would have been even better had I been in a position to take it.
Carlos was a little wiry guy, and shifty as a jackrabbit. But every one of my strides ate up twice as much ground as his.
He looked over his shoulder, saw I was gaining, and didn’t watch where his feet were going. He fell splat on his face. I jumped on him.
His hand darted for one of the pockets in his jeans. I didn’t know what he had in there: maybe something as simple as a knife, maybe a talisman like the ones at Loki, except with a demon ordered to attack whoever was bothering him.
Whatever he had, I didn’t care to find out the hard way, either. I grabbed his wrist and hung on for dear life.
“Don’t be stupid,” I panted. “You won’t get away, and you will get yourself in more trouble.”
“Chinga tu niadre,” he said: no doubt sincere, but less than germane. Then he tried to knee me in a place which would have interfered with my carrying out his instructions.
I managed to twist away so I took it in the side of the hip.
It still hurt, but not the way it would have. As if from very far away, I heard people shouting back and forth, the way they do when they have no idea what’s going on and just get more confused trying to find out Carlos took another shot at refaceting my family jewels.
Then, from right above us, somebody yelled, “Freeze, asshole!” Somewhere in his past, Carlos must have painfully found out what happened when you disobeyed that particular command. He went limp.
Very cautiously, I looked back over my shoulder. There was (I think) Luke with his club upraised to do some serious facial rearrangement on anybody who felt like arguing with him. “He’s all yours,” I croaked, and got to my feet.
I hadn’t noticed till then that I’d torn my pants, ripped a chunk of hide off one knee, and scraped an elbow, too—not quite as bad. Things started to hurt, all at the same time. I felt shaky, the way you do in the first few seconds after a traffic accident Pete had hold of Jose. Luke was frisking Carlos: turned out he’d had a blade in his pocket, maybe two inches long.
Not exactly a terror weapon, but not something I’d have wanted sliding along—or maybe between—my ribs.
Judy ran up. “Are you all right Dave?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, taking stock one piece at a time. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was in high school; I’d forgotten the way you could taste fear and fury in your mouth, the way even your sweat suddenly smelled different.
I’d sort of hoped she’d throw her arms around me and exclaim, “Oh, you wonderful man!” Something like that, anyhow. As I’ve remarked, however, Judy is a very practical person. She said, “You’re lucky you weren’t badly hurt, you know that?” So much for large dumb masculine hopes.
A little man with a big mustache burst out of the office Luke had been heading for when the fun and games started.
By then Luke had Carlos handcuffed. He pointed to me and said, “Here, Iosef, fix this guy up, would you? Unless I miss my guess, he’s been working harder than he’s used to at the EPA.”
Iosef looked at my elbow, my knee, and my pants. “You’re right,” he told Luke. His accent—seems everybody has an accent in Angels City these days—was one I couldn’t place.
He reached up, patted me on the shoulder. “You come with me, my friend. We fix you up.”
I came with him. He fixed me up, all right. He sat me down in the office (an amazing collection of pictures of girls and succubi filled one wall; I was glad Judy hadn’t come along, even if she wouldn’t have done anything more than sniff), bustled out, and returned a couple of minutes later with a fellow who toted a black bag.
The doctor—his name was Mkhinvari—had the same odd accent as Iosef. He looked at my elbow, said, “Roll up your pants,” looked at my knee. “Is not too bad,” he said, which was about what I thought.
He cleaned the scrapes (though, being a doctor, he called them abrasions) with spirits, which hurt worse than getting them had. Then he touched each one with a bloodstone to make it stop oozing, slapped on a couple of bandages, and went his way. Iosef said, “Now we fix trousers. You wait here.” I dutifully waited there. This time he came back with a gray-haired woman. “This is Carlotta. She’s best in the business.”
Carlotta nodded to me, but she was more interested in my pants. She touched the two edges of the hole together, murmured under her breath. Yes, I know you’ll say any tailor’s shop has somebody who specializes in repairing rips. It’s easy to apply the law of similarity because the torn material is in essence like the untom doth around it, and to use the law of contagion to spread that cloth over the area with which it was formerly in contact But on most repairs you’ll be able to see, if you look closely, the seam between the real cloth and the whole dodi from which the fix was made. Not with Carlotta’s work, though. As far as I could tell, the pants might never have been torn. I even got the crease back.
That left a fair-sized bloodstain. Carlotta turned to Iosef and said, “Shut the door, please.” After he did, she reached into her sewing bag and pulled out a little nightbox, of the sort that are made so carefully no light can get in. When she opened it, a small pallid fuzzy creature crawled out “Vampire hamster,” he explained. They are drawn to doth and—well, you will see.”
The vampster didn’t like even the tiny bit of day sliding under the bottom of the door; it made a snuffly noise of complaint Before Carlotta could tell him to, Iosef went over and shoved a dirow rug into the crack. The vampster relaxed. Carefully—any undead, even a rodent, needs to be handled with respect—Carlotta picked it up by the scruff of the neck and set it on my pants leg.
I sat very still; I didn’t want the creature going after blood I hadn’t already spilled. But itwas well trained. It sniffed around till it found the stain on my trousers, then stuck out a pale, pale tongue and began to lap the blood right out of the dodi. When it was finished, not a trace of the stain was left… and the vampire hamster’s tongue had turned noticeably pinker as my blood began to enter its circulation.
When Carlotta plucked it off me, it wiggled and hissed; it was feeling frisky now. She plopped it back into the nightbox, closed the lid, and touched a crucifix to the latch so the vampster couldn’t get out by itself.
My pants didn’t even feel damp. I guess vampire hamsters don’t have spit And the stain was all gone. “Thanks very much,” I said to Carlotta. That’s beautiful work.”
“Tor a friend of Iosefs, it’s a pleasure. Of course”—she waved at the wall of succubi and giris—“Iosef has lots of friends.”
I’d have shriveled up and died (or at least looked for a nightbox to hide in) after a crack like that, but Iosef must have been shriven against embarrassment. “Oh, if only they were,” he said, rumbling laughter. “I would the young, but I would the happy.” He turned to me. “You are all right?”
“I am all right,” I answered. Thanks for taking care of me.”
I went back outside, blinking against the daylight as if I were undead myself. The black-and-white constabulary carpet had just flown in. One of the constables the looked just like Pete and Luke, except he was blond) took my statement.
“You’ll hear from us, Inspector Fisher,” he promised.
“Good enough.” I looked over to where his partner was transferring the vile potion from Jose and Carlos’ rug to the squad carpet “Handle that stuff with extreme respect. You don’t want it spilling.”
“So we’ve been warned.” He nodded back toward Luke and Pete, then touched the brim of his cap. “God give you good day.”
He went back to the carpet to keep an eye on Carlos and Jose. Judy walked over to me. She
inspected the bandage on my elbow, then the knee of my trousers. She felt the material. I winced, anticipating she’d poke the raw meat under there, but she didn’t. “That’s a wonderful patch job,” she said.
“Iosef has connections,” I said. “I just wish people were as easy to repair as clothes.” The elbow and knee were throbbing again.
Luke ambled up and said, “Now that we’ve dropped on the guys you were looking for, shall we let the rest of the dealers in without running ’em past the spellchecker?” He pointed outside the gates. Nobody had gone through since the dustup with Jose and Carlos started. Now they were lined up like carpets on St. James’ Freeway on Friday night, and not moving much slower.
“Sure, go ahead,” I told him. “Like you said, we caught the people we wanted.” Glad cries came from the dealers when Luke started waving them through. I stuck my head into Iosefs office and asked if I could store the spellchecker there so Judy and I could do some shopping. When he said yes, I cut across the incoming stream of dealers and lugged the gadget back across. I wondered for a moment if it would react to the pictures of succubi, but it didn’t. Iosef sure seemed to, though.
Judy said, “I’m glad we caught them. Now we can enjoy our own Sunday knowing they won’t be spreading their poisons to anyone else.”
That pair won’t, anyhow,” I agreed, but I wondered how much other contraband would get sold right here at this swap meet, and at all the others around Angels City. A lot, unless I missed my guess. I tried not to think about that.
The dealers who’d been delayed were all setting up their stalls in a tearing hurry. When you try to rush things, a lot of the time you end up doing them wrong. Some of the dealers seemed as if they were doing music hall comedy turns: poles and awnings and signs would go up, then a second later they’d fall down again. One guy had his skin fall over three times in a row. After the third time, he gave it a good kick.
Maybe that knocked the gremlins loose, because on the fourth try it stayed where he put it.
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 17
