by Dan Willis
“Mr. Lockerby,” a voice called as he was shutting the door to his suite.
Alex peeked out quickly, in case of trouble, then opened the door wide as Julian Rand came trotting down the hall from the elevator.
“I saw you in the lobby, but I was with a guest,” he explained, then handed Alex a sealed envelope. “This was left for you at the front desk.”
Alex took the envelope and turned it over. His name was printed on the front in a legible hand, male if he had to guess.
“Thanks,” he said, pulling a fiver from his wallet. He hesitated, then pulled out another one. “Can you get me a good bottle of Scotch?”
“How good?” Julian asked, taking the cash.
“Single malt, old enough to vote. Smoky, a bit of peat; easy on the iodine.”
“I have several excellent Scotches fitting that description in my office,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “For just such emergencies. I’ll have one sent up right away.”
Alex thanked him and went inside to wait. There was still some brandy left in the bottle from last night, but he was a dedicated Scotch man, and he needed a serious drink. While he waited, he sat down on the couch facing the window and opened the envelope. Inside was a single line of text followed by a name.
Call me when you get this.
Connie
Alex dropped the paper on the couch next to him and sighed. After his experience with Zelda, and the subsequent discussion with Sorsha, he wasn’t looking forward to explaining his thoughts to Connie.
“Or his boss,” he mused out loud.
At that moment, a knock sounded at the door, no doubt the busboy with his Scotch.
“Thank God,” he said, standing up. He had a feeling he was going to need a drink.
“Where have you been?”
Alex was greeted by Connie’s irritated face when he opened the door. It took his mind a moment to adjust from what he expected to what he saw, then he stepped back, holding the door open.
“I was just about to call you,” he said. “Come in.”
“I thought we were going over to the aerodrome this morning,” Connie said, striding through the door.
“Change of plans,” Alex said. He was about to close the door when a man in a hotel uniform approached with a bottle. Alex accepted the liquor, tipped the man, then shut the door.
“Drink?” he asked Connie, holding the bottle up.
“Tony is getting impatient,” the mobster said by way of an answer.
“Did you tell him our theory?”
Alex removed the paper seal from the bottle, then the stopper.
“Your theory,” Connie growled. “And no, I like breathing.”
Alex poured two fingers in a clean glass and handed it over.
“I have new information,” he said. “You’re going to need this.”
Connie accepted the glass, somewhat apprehensively, then Alex sat down on the couch and spun the tale of the robbery at the museum and his subsequent evening with Zelda Pritchard.
“Alchemy can’t do that,” Connie scoffed in response. “There’s no such thing as a potion that can turn a man into a wolf.”
“And there wasn’t a potion that could make one sip of beer feel like going home again, either,” Alex pointed out. “But Colton invented it. It isn’t crazy to think he might have invented the other one as well. And it is possible…I’ve seen something like it with my own eyes.”
“I don’t care if your mother turned into a wolf,” Connie said. “This doesn’t make sense. Why would Colton want some old cards from a…a…”
“Loom,” Alex supplied.
“Yeah. What possible use could he have for something like that? I don’t know whether your wolf man is an alchemist or not, but it’s not Colton.”
“It is quite the coincidence, though,” Alex said.
“I suppose that’s just what it is,” Connie replied. “A coincidence.”
“I hate coincidences,” Ales admitted. “My mentor told me that there are no coincidences in murder.”
“Colton didn’t make a potion that turns men into murdering monsters,” Connie insisted, though he sounded much less sure than he had a moment ago.
“There’s one way to know for sure,” Alex said, standing. “If Colton was involved with the heist, there’s bound to be something at his house that will link him to the museum.”
“You already looked there,” the mobster pointed out.
Alex shook his head and drained the remainder of his glass. The liquor singed his throat and fired his synapses.
“The last time we were at Colton’s house, we were looking for evidence of where he’d gone on the day he disappeared,” Alex said. “This time he’s a suspect. I’m going to look in every nook and cranny of that house, and if there’s any secret compartments, hidden caches, or hollowed out books, I’m going to find them.”
Connie fixed Alex with a challenging look.
“And if you don’t find anything?”
“Then we go to the aerodrome,” Alex said. “We keep following the trail until either it disappears, or we find Colton.”
Alex stepped out of Connie’s car in front of Colton Pierce’s townhouse, being careful to hold the urn carrying the ashes of Colton’s mother firmly. He should have just put it in his vault and opened it inside, but Connie had already seen far too much of Alex’s vault already.
“You have the key?” Alex asked as they headed for the concrete stairs that led up to the building’s stoop.
“Relax,” Connie said, holding up a ring of keys as he came around the front of the car.
Alex started to turn back to the building, but Connie’s eyes suddenly went wide, focusing past Alex on something behind him. Not hesitating, Alex took a big step sideways and turned to face whatever it was that Connie saw.
Gunfire erupted and the urn in Alex’s arms exploded, giving Alex a face-full of ashes. Three more shots rang out, but nothing hit Alex as he struggled to clear his vision and spit out the remains of Colton Pierce’s mother.
Another shot split the air and Alex felt a slug hit him square in the chest. His shield runes were in place, and they stopped the bullet from killing him, but it still hurt like crazy, and he slumped forward at the impact. A bullet hit him in the shoulder and another in the thigh of the leg carrying most of his weight. The muscle spasmed, and it stopped supporting him, dumping Alex in an unceremonious heap on the sidewalk.
Belatedly Alex thought of his flash ring. The attack had come out of nowhere, so he wasn’t prepared. Despite the ache in his shoulder and chest, he pushed himself up. He could hear footsteps approaching, but his shoulder wasn’t responding properly.
“He’s got a shield rune on his coat,” someone said. “Shoot him in the head,”
Before Alex could turn or bring his flash ring to bear, the gun boomed again, sending a bullet slamming into the back of his head, and the world went dark.
Someone was shaking him.
Blissful unconsciousness faded into painful awareness and Alex groaned as he tried to lift his head off the concrete sidewalk.
“Don’t move, mister,” an unfamiliar voice said as a restraining hand grabbed his shoulder. “You’ve been shot.”
“I’m fine,” Alex slurred, pushing the hand away. His shoulder ached where he was lying on it, but the spasm that resulted from the bullet impact had passed and he was able to lift himself up. An older man in a woolen overcoat and dungarees was kneeling beside him with a shocked look. He had a haggard face with a short gray beard and spectacles.
“Where am I?” Alex asked, trying and failing to remember what he’d been doing, or why he was face down on the ground. As he sat up the pain in his head almost forced him back down and a wave of nausea swept over him.
“You’re in Georgetown,” the man said. “Someone shot at you and your friend. I thought you were a goner for sure.”
“Friend?” Alex said, reaching up to feel a large, painful bump on the back of his head.
The bearded man looked past Alex and nodded.
Moving gingerly, Alex turned to see a man in a dark green suit lying on the sidewalk a few feet away. There was blood on his chest, dripping down into a pool on the sidewalk.
“Connie,” Alex gasped as everything came rushing back to him. Ignoring the aches in his body and the pain in his head, Alex lurched to his feet and staggered over to the mobster. He lay on his back, and Alex could see that he’d been shot multiple times in the chest and at least once in his left hand. The middle finger on that hand was missing, but that was minor compared to the amount of blood soaking through Connie’s shirt. As he watched, Connie’s chest rose and fell, so at least he was alive.
For the moment.
Alex swore.
“Stay with him,” he said to the bearded man. Without waiting for a response, Alex hurried up the stairs to Colton Pierce’s stoop, which consisted of a large, concrete porch. Yanking out his chalk, he drew a door next to Colton’s actual front door, then pulled a vault rune form his book.
“Come on,” he urged as the rune burned and vanished. After what seemed like an inordinately long time, the steel door melted out of the brick of the town house front and Alex jammed the key inside.
Pulling the door open, he limped through his great room to the hallway on the left side. Down past his little kitchen on the left and his bedroom on the right was the door to the brownstone in Manhattan. Or at least it used to be.
Alex pulled up short in front of the blank wall where the opening to his bedroom in the brownstone should have been. That vault door was always open, blocked off by a magically protected cover door on the other side. Now it and the door were gone. They’d vanished like they’d never been, leaving a blank, gray wall at the end of the hallway.
Without the door, Alex had no chance to bring Iggy, and at the rate Connie was bleeding, he’d have to do something quick, or the big mobster was a goner.
Wincing as he turned, Alex hurried to his infirmary as fast as his numb leg would carry him. Most of the supplies in his medicine cabinet had been given to him by Iggy, and the old doctor had spent several hours going over the treatment for wounds of all kinds. As Alex pulled open the cabinet door hard enough to crack the glass, he tried to remember that lecture.
Pushing labeled bottles and jars out of the way, Alex finally found what he was looking for. In the back corner was a wooden box just large enough for a cigarette lighter. It was painted black with a red X on it, and Alex grabbed it and popped the lid off. Inside was a glass vial about two inches long with a rubber stopper in the top that had been sealed with lead. A sickly yellow fluid sloshed heavily inside as Alex grabbed the little glass tube and lurched back toward the open door of his vault.
He paused to close his vault door as he emerged, then hobbled back down the steps to the street. Connie was still lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood, but the bearded man was now kneeling beside him, holding the mobster’s hand.
“Connie,” he called as he knelt painfully next to the bleeding man.
“Alex?” he gasped. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see anything. “Tell Tony this wasn’t your fault. I shoulda seen them tailing us.”
“Here,” Alex said, breaking the lead seal with his thumbnail and carefully pulling out the stopper of the vial. “Drink this.”
Without any other warning, Alex shoved the open top of the glass container between the mobster’s lip and tipped it up. Connie gagged for a second, then swallowed.
“What was…” he gasped. “What was thaaaa…”
Connie’s words drifted off to nothing and his body lay still.
“Is he dead?” the bearded man asked, shock and fear in his voice.
“I hope not,” Alex said, lurching back to his feet. “Help me get him in the car.”
Between the two of them, they managed to get Connie into the back seat of his car. Once he was secure, Alex headed around the car until he remembered something important.
“Do you know where the nearest hospital is?” he demanded of the old man.
“Sure,” he said. “Just go down this street—”
“You drive,” Alex said, pointing to the car.
The bearded fellow looked like he might withdraw, but Alex grabbed him by his lapels.
“Do you know how to drive a car?” he demanded.
“Yes,” the man admitted, “but—”
“I don’t know how to drive,” Alex said. “If you don’t take us to the hospital, he’s a dead man.”
“All right,” the fellow said after a moment’s hesitation. He climbed into the driver’s seat and pressed the starter as Alex went around to the passenger side.
“You’re going to need to hurry,” he said, climbing in. “Can you do that?”
The old man gave him an astonished look, then did something Alex found very disturbing — he smiled.
“Hang on to your hat, youngster,” he said, then slammed the car in gear and pulled out so fast the tires squealed.
Alex had once been in Danny’s ’27 Ford when Danny’s sister Amy drove it. The experience was still a recurring nightmare that left Alex awake in a cold sweat. What happened over the roughly ten minutes it took to get from Colton Pierce’s town house to the nearest hospital drove every memory of Amy’s driving from his mind. It wasn’t that the bearded man was a bad driver; quite the opposite. He handled Connie’s car with the skill and precision Alex expected from a professional, he just did it at speeds humans were only meant to achieve in airplanes. Once, Alex was afraid the car was going to roll over as it lurched around a tight corner at what had to have been thirty miles an hour.
While Alex clung to his seat for dear life, the old man in the driver’s seat didn’t even look nervous. In fact he even took time to yell at a slow-moving delivery truck to get out of his way. By the time he skidded to a stop in front of the hospital, Alex resolved to learn to drive, so he’d never have to ask anyone again.
“What’s all this?” a uniformed policeman demanded, stepping up to the car as Alex got out. “You can’t park here, and I ought to run you in for driving like that.”
“I’ve got a wounded man here,” Alex said, brushing past the cop and opening the car’s rear door. “He’s been shot, get a doctor.”
The cop hurried away, and Alex and the old man pulled Connie out, supporting him between them. They’d made it halfway to the building when three men in white coats came hustling out carrying a stretcher.
“Put him down,” the one in the lead said as the other two laid the stretcher down on the walkway.
Alex and his driver did as they were told, and the lead man knelt over Connie.
“He’s not breathing,” the man said.
“I gave him hibernation oil,” Alex said. “It slowed his body down to give us time to get him here.”
The man in the white coat looked up at him in surprise, then nodded.
“I know what it is,” he said, turning back to Connie. “He’s been shot multiple times in the chest.” He stood up and motioned to the orderlies. “Get him inside right away.” As the men picked up the stretcher, the leader turned to Alex. “What’s his name?”
“Connie…uh…Constantine Firenze.”
Before Alex could ask anything, the man turned and hustled away after the orderlies and the stretcher. Alex wanted to follow, but Connie was out of his hands. Instead, he turned to the bearded man. “I’m sorry about your coat.”
The man looked down, and his face soured when he saw the blood covering the lower quarter of the woolen fabric. Alex pulled out his wallet and handed over a ten.
“Here’s cab fare to get you home and enough to have that coat cleaned,” he said.
The man took the money, and then chuckled.
“I hope your friend pulls through,” he said. “And don’t worry about me, that was the most fun I’ve had in years, young fella.”
“Alex Lockerby,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“Eli Oldfield,
” the man said. “I’ll park your car up the street for you, then catch a cab.”
Alex thanked him, then headed inside. He’d done all he could for Connie, but he needed to call Lucky Tony and fill him in, then he needed to go back to New York.
27
Extraction
“Tell me you have something from Grier or Kellin,” Alex said, storming into his office waiting room. Sherry almost jumped out of her chair, and her nearly-empty coffee cup spilled across the desk.
“Boss,” she gasped, trying to blot up the coffee with a piece of paper.
“Sorry,” Alex sighed, pulling out his handkerchief and helping. “It’s been a rough day.”
“You got shot,” Sherry gasped.
Alex stood up straight, his wet handkerchief dripping on his shoes.
“How?” Alex asked, then stopped. Sherry must have received a vision of it before he came in, he decided.
“There’s a bullet hole in your shirt,” she said, pointing to his chest.
He looked down, and sure enough there was a bullet-sized hole with singed edges just under his breast pocket.
“Looks like your linked shield runes worked,” his secretary went on.
“Yeah,” Alex replied, wadding up his handkerchief and heading for the washroom to wring it out. Once he’d discovered that he could use linking runes to connect himself to other runes, trying it out with shield runes was an obvious first step. Rather than writing the runes on his suit coat or vest, he wrote them on paper that he kept in his vault. From there, a linking rune would connect him to the runes no matter where he went, protecting him even if he was shot in the head.
Fortunately.
He touched the lump on the back of his head as he turned on the water in the washroom sink. If he hadn’t done it, he would have been dead right now.
Alex rinsed the coffee out of his handkerchief, then wrung it out and shut off the water.
