The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1)
Page 40
“Enough bullshitting,” the man cut in. “Where is she?” I could make out his hair now: iron-colored, combed back in severe lines. He shifted a pair of broad shoulders that were almost level with his ears.
“Believe it or not, I’m trying to find that out, too. I did manage to get an address for this Angelus. It’s on the Upper East Side, Seventieth Street. A butler stonewalled me, but I’m—”
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I cried in exasperation. “I don’t know where she is, but I’ve tracked down the address of the last person I saw her with. Someone who…” I stopped, uncertain how to complete the sentence. …can change his appearance? …has wild-crazy powers?
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” the man said. He turned until an aging face waxed into view. “Where’s Caroline?” Familiar blue eyes stared hard into mine. “Where’s my daughter?”
17
“Mr. Reid?” I said.
I’d met him once, a year before, his hand crushing mine when we shook. I had known that if my trial relationship with his daughter progressed, there was a good chance I’d be seeing him more often—something I was inwardly dreading—but, Jesus, not like this, not on a pier in the back of an SUV with a wise guy jamming a pistol against my ribs.
“I spoke with your department chair,” Mr. Reid said.
“Who? Snodgrass?”
“He said he’s caught you watching Caroline through her classroom window while she teaches.”
Heat broke out over my face. “Once or twice, maybe.”
“And that you frequently ask her out to lunch.”
“Well, yeah. But to which she frequently says yes.”
“He described it as an unhealthy infatuation.”
“I don’t know about the unhealthy part.”
“He also says you’re unstable. That you were the main suspect in a homicide investigation a couple of years ago, a crime you were arrested for but made some sort of a plea deal to get out of.”
“Well, Snodgrass doesn’t like me much, either.”
“Sounds like your unpopularity crops up whenever it’s most convenient.” Though Floyd snorted beside me, Mr. Reid didn’t crack a smile. “Be that as it may,” he continued, “Snodgrass was telling the truth. The records were buried, but everything he told me was in them.”
“If you’re implying I hurt your daughter, Mr. Reid…” I licked my lips. “God, nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been trying to reach her on her phone since late last night—you can check the phone records. And right after Floyd and Whitey visited me this morning and I understood she was missing, I started looking for the man I’d last seen her with. I got a street, I found the townhouse, I interrogated the butler. I mean, we’re wasting our time sitting here.”
“The townhouse on East Seventieth Street?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“So what were you doing in lower Manhattan?”
“I was, um, helping the NYPD with something.”
He sighed and turned away. “The NYPD again.”
“I know how that sounds. I know how this all sounds.” I had never felt more impotent in my life. Not only were my powers offline, but every word I spoke sounded like utter horse manure. And this in front of a man whose daughter I was in love with.
Though I did have to wonder how Mr. Reid had gotten mixed up with Moretti’s men, especially since Caroline insisted he would never deal with gangsters. Either there was a side to her father she didn’t know about, or, desperate for his daughter’s safe return, he had decided to compromise his ethics. Filing a missing person report with the NYPD was no guarantee of action after all. If you wanted results, you had to pay for them. Hiring Moretti’s men, who could probably use all the work they could get these days, fell into that category.
“There’s only one way you’re getting out of this,” Mr. Reid said. “And that’s by giving me something I can use.”
I racked my brain. “I, ah…” I remembered something and leaned forward. “When Angelus first asked to speak with your daughter at the gala, she blew him off. But when he said it had something to do with her father, with you, she agreed.”
Mr. Reid stared through the windshield in the direction of a garbage boat chugging up the East River.
“Do you know why that might have been?” I pressed.
He turned just enough to make eye contact with Floyd.
The pistol jabbed into my side. “Let’s go,” Floyd said.
“Wait. Mr. Reid,” I pled, “I’m telling you the truth.”
“The first time I met you, you struck me as a bullshit artist,” Mr. Reid said. “I even told Caroline that. Wish she would’ve listened.”
My door opened, and Whitey was there to yank me out by the arm. I stumbled into the harsh gray light, Floyd emerging against my other side. As the two wrestled me back toward their car, I heard the Escalade wheeling around behind me and leaving the pier.
“Where are you taking me now?” I asked. “The zoo?”
“No,” Floyd replied. “But by the time we’re through with you, you’re gonna be singing like one of them macaws.”
I planted my feet and resisted. I didn’t have a plan, but I wasn’t getting back into their car.
“You want us to work you over out here?” Floyd asked. “That it?”
“What can I say?” I grunted, resisting their efforts to drag me forward. “I’m an exhibitionist.”
“Hear that, Whitey? Man wants to be beaten bloody for the world to see.” He jerked the cane from my hand and sent it clattering across the pier. When he turned back to face me, I drove a fist into his nose.
“That’s for this morning,” I said.
Floyd staggered back, a hand to his spurting nose. “Y-you broke it!”
“Believe me, it’s an enhancement.”
“Oh, you screwed up.” I turned toward Whitey’s raspy voice and met a pair of pale eyes as devoid of empathy as the black bore staring at my forehead. “You screwed up big time.”
“Waste him,” I heard Floyd call from behind me, his voice clogged with blood. “Screw the job, just waste him.”
I’d been gambling that Mr. Reid wouldn’t want a professional hit on his hands. Plus, what good was I to him dead? What I had underestimated was Moretti’s men taking matters into their own hands.
Whitey smiled thinly as he cocked the revolver.
I threw my forearms over my face and crouched away. But the shot never came. When I peeked out, Whitey was on his back, arms and legs spread like a man after a night of extreme bar-hopping. Floyd lay nearby on his side, blood pooling beside his head.
I turned around to find Blondie straightening the sleeves of his jacket. Two more blood slaves stood at his back.
“I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said, peering back at Moretti’s men, “but twice in one day?”
“Arnaud has another lead for you to give to the detective,” Blondie said.
I accepted the piece of paper he held out and looked it over. Arnaud’s spidery handwriting read:
Claudette Poole, Headmistress
Hangar Hall School for Girls
Hauppauge, New York
From a strip joint to a girl’s boarding school?
“We still have eyes on the boy,” Blondie reminded me.
I read the contact info a second time, wondering how in the hell I was going to convince Vega to pursue another Arnaud lead, especially one so far away.
“Fine,” I sighed, pocketing the paper. “But do you mind telling me what the trip to Sonny’s was all about?”
Intelligence seemed to infuse Blondie’s empty gaze. “Well, it is like the old line goes,” he replied in a familiar, taunting voice. “Do as you’re told and no one gets hurt.”
“Is he involved with the killer?”
“Sonny has been involved with many people,” Arnaud-as-Blondie said. “And for some, that’s a problem.”
“W
ho?” I pressed.
“Who, indeed?” Arnaud smiled impishly as though to say the Q&A was over.
“Can you at least explain the new lead? Give me something I can use to convince Detective Vega?”
“For someone as resourceful as yourself, Mr. Croft, I trust you’ll come up with a compelling reason all on your own.”
He gave a small wave and disappeared from Blondie’s eyes. I looked back at Floyd and Whitey, who had begun to stir. Time to make tracks. I would need to stop off at my apartment to grab a few things and explain the situation to Tabitha, but with Mr. Reid and Moretti’s men after me, I wouldn’t be able to stay there. I had to come up with another staging area, somewhere they wouldn’t think to look for me.
After a moment’s deliberation, I had one.
I grabbed my cane and left the pier at a run.
18
I poked my revolver into the East Village apartment. “Hello?”
No answer, no sounds of movement. I stepped inside and made a quick tour of the rooms. The unit appeared to have seen at least one more squatter since Clifford Rhodes, the stringy-haired vagrant who had summoned a shrieker six months earlier, but it was presently vacant. I set down two duffle bags loaded with items I’d gathered at my apartment and bought en route. Fortunately, Moretti’s men hadn’t recovered in time to head me off.
From one of the bags I pulled out a padlock, screwdriver, and two door-hasp kits. I spent several minutes screwing the thick metal hasps to both sides of the door and adjacent frame, then clicked the padlock home through the inside hasp. The security system was nowhere close to what I had at my own apartment, but I hoped it would keep just anyone—and hopefully anything—from wandering in.
And it looked like this dump was going to be home for a while.
I sighed as I made another tour of the apartment. No electricity, a trickle of cold running water, and from the bathroom, a sewer-like smell that could fell an ogre. On the plus side, the steel bed frame and roll-up mattress remained, as well as the table, Bunsen burner, and propane tank from Clifford’s time here. With dusk dimming the unit, I set several candles around the old lab and lit them. I then pulled an iron pot and several spell items from my bags.
One of the spells I had been planning was a nullifying spell—to try to neutralize the fae magic protecting the townhouse. But with my powers scrambled, that spell was out. Instead, I would have to cook a potion to neutralize the effect the fae magic was having on me.
I opened the valve on the propane tank and fired up the Bunsen burner. I set the iron pot on a mesh platform above the burner and poured in some green absinthe. To the absinthe, I added salt, iron dust, and shavings of rowan wood, stirring the ingredients with my engraved spoon. With none of my own power to channel, I directed my intentions through what energy remained in my coin pendant, which I held over the potion.
I was just tapping the spoon against the rim of the pot and setting it on the table when the pager went off.
That’ll be Vega, wanting her bullets.
I twisted the Bunsen burner to a low blue flame, checked the pager, and then left the unit, moving the padlock to the outside hasp and snapping it closed behind me.
Dusk had settled over the city by the time I stepped out onto the street. It took several blocks of wandering through the bombed-out neighborhood—the last place Moretti’s men would think to look for me—before I found a working payphone.
“Did you get them?” Vega asked without preamble.
“Two boxes’ worth,” I replied. “What’s up?”
“We’re going down tonight.”
“Into the storm lines?”
“No, Funky Town,” she said in exasperation. “Yes, the storm lines.”
“Well, look. Arnaud gave us another lead.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, some administrator at a boarding school.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, just that it’s someone we would be interested in talking to.”
“Where is this school?”
“Out on Long Island.” I cringed before adding, “Hauppauge.”
“Forget it,” she said.
The finality in her voice was what I’d feared. “Why?”
“He’s playing us.”
“I don’t know… That visit to Sonny’s could well lead to something. I mean, the man did turn out to be a vampire.”
“The only thing it’s leading us down is a false trail.”
“I just think—”
“Forget it,” Vega repeated. “Where can I pick up the bullets?”
I thought desperately. Arnaud wasn’t dumb. The second his blood slaves observed us descending into a drain, even a drain blocks from Ferguson Towers, he would guess what we were up to. Which would mean I hadn’t kept up my end of the deal. Vega’s child would be snatched—or worse.
“I’ll bring them to you,” I said finally.
“When?”
“Give me an hour?”
“Fine, but no more.”
I hung up. I had bought some time, anyway. I turned from the phone and made my way around months-old trash piles back toward the apartment. A few blocks to the north, I could make out the silhouettes of ghouls in a roving pack. Before they could pick up my scent, I broke into a run.
I was going to love my new neighborhood.
“About time,” Vega said with a huff.
“Yeah, sorry.” I set the boxes of ammo on her desk. “Had a hard time catching a cab.”
She wasted no time opening the top box, inspecting the ammo, and loading the silver bullets into her service pistol. I patted my waistband and pockets. Damn. Still not used to carrying a gun, I’d left my own at the East Village apartment. I eyed Vega’s black body armor. A helmet with a headlamp sat on one end of her desk.
“So you’re really serious about this,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I just think we should give it another day. Check out the other lead first.”
“You’re doing it again,” she said without looking up.
“Doing what?”
“Squirming.” She checked her loaded weapon and holstered it.
“I’ve already told you, I can’t help you down there.”
“Who said anything about you going down?”
I stared at her. “Come again?”
“Do you think I’d put a civilian consultant in that kind of danger?” She gave a sharp laugh. “My new role is under enough scrutiny as it is.”
“You’re planning on going down alone?”
“Not alone.”
At that moment, Hoffman came waddling into the office in his own set of body armor. His eyes widened briefly when they met mine.
“Surprised to see me?” I asked.
“Disgusted is more like it.” He fidgeted with his Kevlar vest.
“Thanks for the alibi, by the way.”
“What are you talking about?” Vega asked.
“Do you want to tell her?” I asked Hoffman.
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” he said. “Couple of Moretti’s men wanted to know what time I picked up Dumbledore here last night. Told ’em I couldn’t remember.”
“You told them a hell of a lot more than that,” I said. “Including that Vega couldn’t be trusted.”
“Moretti’s men?” Vega’s eyebrows crushed down. This was going to be good. “You’re talking to Moretti’s men?”
“Naw,” Hoffman said. “I mean, it’s not a regular thing or nothing. Like I said, they—”
“Listen here.” Vega drew herself up in front of him. “If I hear you’re talking with Moretti’s men—or any of the bosses’ meat heads—I will personally walk you to internal affairs and see that your ass never wears the NYPD shield again. They might have worked their slimy tentacles into other units, but I’ll be goddamned if they’re going to infiltrate mine. Are we clear?”
“Sure,” Hoffman said, scratching his nose. “Geez.”
“So are we going or what?” Hoffman grumbled.
Vega glowered at him another moment before turning to collect her helmet.
“Guys,” I said. “There’s, ah, one other thing I need to do before you set out.”
“What?” Vega demanded.
“It’s a ritual of protection. Sort of a magical layer of armor against whatever you might encounter down there.”
“I don’t frigging believe this,” Hoffman groaned.
I was already sprinkling a circle of copper filings over the floor.
“Is a ritual really necessary?” Vega asked, eyeing the symbol skeptically.
I nodded. Yeah, but not for the reason I’m telling you. I stepped into the circle and, ensuring I had a view of the security monitors in the main room, gestured for Vega and Hoffman to join me.
“If this is some kind of trap…” Vega said.
“I swear on everything I hold dear, it’s not. Besides, I would be stuck inside it too.”
Vega looked at me another moment, eyes narrowing, before stepping into the circle. She turned to her partner. “Hoffman,” she ordered.
Still smarting from his dressing down, he muttered and joined us.
“In close,” I said. “Arms around each others’ waists.”
Hoffman leaned away. “You serious?”
“Do it,” Vega said, slipping her arm behind me.
“Can’t you see he’s playing us?” Hoffman said.
On the matter of holding waists, I was, actually. That part was completely unnecessary for the spell to work. I pulled Hoffman up against me and gave the fat roll on his far side a little pinch.
“All right,” I said. “You might get swimmy-headed, but that’ll pass.”
I spoke a Word to close the circle, then centered myself. The potion I’d drunk an hour before to break up the fae magic was still working on me, still smoothing out the final wrinkles in my magical lines.
“Imitare,” I said.