by Ari Marmell
“Lemme guess. And then you had your first premonition.”
“And then I had my first premonition, yes.”
“So that’s not just how you helped me,” I guessed, “but why. Just had the feeling you oughta?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s the kinda feeling I can get behind.”
After a quick courtesy chuckle, she said, “All right, your turn to sing. What are you?”
Y’know what? I told her. Didn’t go into a lot of depth or detail, but the basics? Aes sidhe, former noble of the Seelie Court, alla that? Gave it to her straight. Didn’t seem to be a whole lotta point in doing otherwise, given what she already knew.
Explained Ramona, too, so far as I could. That I didn’t know what she was, exactly, but that I knew what kinda power she could throw around, and how she’d used it to put us in our current circumstances.
I did not mention Adalina, or why I was involved in this steamin’ heap as deep as I was. I wasn’t anywhere close to trustin’ her that much. Hell, I only barely trusted Pete that much!
By the time I was through… Well, my mouth tasted like sandpaper and I wanted milk, but that ain’t the relevant part. Tsura’s blinkers were right on the verge of poppin’ out and bouncin’ around the room like billiard balls. I figure she musta wondered in her life, If I got these weird abilities, what else is out there? But whatever she’d imagined, obviously it hadn’t gone far enough.
And in the midst of all that, she’d still had it in her, when I talked about Ramona, to look at me with… Not pity, no; that woulda steamed me but good. Sympathy, though. Genuine sympathy. Guess she read more of my history with the woman in what I said than I’d meant to reveal.
I tried to give her a few minutes to take it all in, but I’d already lost a couple days. Patience wasn’t really my strong suit at the moment.
“Hey.” I snapped my fingers at her. “Hey! Fedora!”
I knew that’d do it.
“Please don’t call me that!”
“Sorry. Tsura. We can discuss the finer points of possible and impossible later on, if you want. Right now, I gotta know what I missed.”
“How do you mean?”
“The carnival, sister. I’m sure you been checking in, even if you’ve spent most of your time here. Tell me what’s happened since my, uh, sudden headache.”
“How did—? Were you expecting something to happen at the fair?”
“Wasn’t there to ride the Ferris wheel, doll.”
“I suppose I should have guessed. Well, the… Mr. Rounser’s trying to keep it out of the papers, but the mummy’s been stolen from the funhouse.”
Can I just tell you how utterly not shocking that was? ’Cause it was so unsurprising I think it could actually have cured a heart attack.
“Nobody’s entirely sure when or how,” she continued. “I mean, everyone was running around like their trousers were on fire after you got… Um…”
“Beat to a pulp and shot? It’s okay to say it.”
“Yeah. It was weird, Mick.”
“Heh. You shoulda tried it from my end.”
“I believe I’ll pass,” she said, chuckling softly. “I think it’d look even worse on me than it does on you. But no, I mean, nobody seemed to know exactly why they’d attacked you. Once you went down, everyone just sort of… woke up. They’re all convinced you were hurting somebody and they were trying to stop you, but none of ’em could say what you were actually doing! I’m guessing that was the work of this… Webb person?”
“Ramona Webb. Yep.”
“Well, of course, some of the people who weren’t involved called the police, especially once you’d been shot. And everyone was dealing with that, and trying to figure out what’d sparked the mob, and where the victim was, and—”
“Wait. Nobody reported that you carried me outta there?”
“I’m not really that distinctive out of my ‘Madame Tsura’ makeup. And you looked bad, but not as bad as somebody who’d just been shot in the head, so I don’t think some of the witnesses even realized you were the guy they’d been attacking.
“Plus, most of the people who’d actually been pounding on you skedaddled as soon as they heard the cops coming, and Rounser had the staff giving contradictory reports because he didn’t want anyone looking too hard at his people. Bottom line, Mick, is it’s a damn mess, but I don’t think anyone knows who you were, or who yanked you out of there.”
That sounded a little too convenient to me, honestly, but I wasn’t gonna push it.
“And you know all this ’cause of…?” I tapped the side of my head.
“Huh? Oh, my visions? No. Just from talking on the horn with my friends back at the carnival.” That surprised me to hear, at first, but then I vaguely recalled seein’ a payphone near the premises. “This, uh, this isn’t the first crime we’ve had on premises that Mr. Rounser made go away. Though I think it’s the first near-murder.”
I’d slid into a sorta slouch while we’d gabbed. Now I shifted my back a little, trying to get the arm of the sofa out from between my shoulder blades, and squeezed a finger up inside the bandages to scratch. I tried not to shudder or change my expression any when I felt a small bit of skull move under the pressure.
“Well,” I said, “it’s always nice to be first.”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, everybody was so wrapped up in all that, it was a few hours before they noticed the robbery. Police asked Mr. Rounser if anything else was out of order, messed up, or missing, so then he hadda do a whole walkthrough of the park—insurance and paperwork and all that—and it was only then that he discovered the missing mummy.”
I spent a while after that pressin’ for details—any damage to the surroundings; obvious points of entry to the funhouse other’n the usual; suspicious activity beyond what’d happened to me—but Tsura wasn’t a whole lotta help in that regard. Even if she’d known what questions to ask, it ain’t as if that woulda been easy to work into conversation over the blower. Nah, there was no help for it. I was gonna have to give the crime scene an up-and-down myself, and hope that neither the bulls nor Rounser’s people had trampled too hard over the evidence by the time I could get there.
Not that “hoping” seemed a real effective step to take right now. What about the curse, assumin’ there was one? If the mummy was the source of the sour luck that’d been haunting me, I obviously didn’t have to be too near it—just bein’ in the same city seemed to be enough—but would it have left any sorta aura or residue behind? If I walked into its former resting place, in all its sideshow glory, would it be just another patch of floor? Or would I wind up even more behind the metaphysical eight ball than I already was?
I’ll tell you what, though. If nothin’ else, I oughta have an easier time deflectin’ Ramona’s mind-whammy next time we crossed paths. Right now, between the broderick, the shooting, and the missing mummy, I was angry enough to spit nails. Iron nails. It’d take a lot more’n even she had to push through that shield of fury, savvy?
Just thinkin’ that way set my conk spinning something fierce, though. Obviously I still needed another day or two before I was anywhere near a hundred percent.
I suppose a slug in the brain’ll do that to even the best of us.
Dunno what Tsura saw, but she leaned in and stood at the same time, comin’ uncomfortably close to toppling over on me. That also probably wouldn’ta done my somewhat mushed skull any favors.
“Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
“Just… glass of warm milk and a while longer to snooze, I think.”
“I understand.”
She helped me slide back down so I was lyin’ flat, which was nice of her.
“I don’t know if I’d recommend going home, but I’m sure Preacher Hewlett can spare the room another night or two. Or I could take you to those friends of yours, you could stay with them a while…”
“Friends?”
She was half-lost in thought, gazing at the wall like she was reg
retting her choice in paint.
“The couple with the strange-looking girl, the sick one. They—”
I don’t remember the words that followed. I don’t remember deciding to sit up, or how I did it without intense pain or my head spinnin’ hard enough to unscrew itself and fall off. I don’t remember anything but findin’ myself half off the sofa, fist wrapped right in Tsura’s collar, and her startled yelp as I hauled her down until our noses damn near bumped.
“What do you know about them?” I demanded.
“Wha—Jesus, Mick! Simmer down, and—”
“What do you know?”
“Nothing, you creep! Get your mitts off me!”
Not that she was gonna wait to see if I listened to her. She smacked my hand away with the back of her own, and I wasn’t in any shape to hold on, so I wound up not only lettin’ her go but yet again slumping back down onto the ugly brown sofa.
“It was just an image!” she snapped at me, switching back and forth between rubbing her wrist and straightening her collar. “Something I saw while I was helping nurse your crummy carcass back from the brink of death!”
“Sorry.” I probably meant it, but no way she was gonna buy that, not when I didn’t have it in me to even try to sound as though I did mean it.
It was too much. I was tired, I hurt, and now this? Somethin’ else for Adalina to get dragged into? No. Uh-uh. I hadn’t mentioned her earlier, with good cause, and I hadn’t suddenly changed my mind about that in the last few minutes. I had every reason in the world to trust that Tsura wasn’t a threat, but I didn’t know her, not really. And more to the point, I didn’t know who else knew about her.
Yeah, I was behaving the fool. I coulda handled it a hundred better ways. Played it off as nothin’, unimportant. Or explained that it was somethin’ I couldn’t have her digging into. Made up any number of lies.
But I hadn’t. I’d blown my wig at her, and I didn’t see any way of fixin’ it that wasn’t too exhausting to fathom right now.
“Sorry,” I muttered again, then rolled over with my back to the room, burying my face against the back of the couch. “I need to sleep.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you do that.”
Pretty sure it was respect for Hewlett, and not concern about letting me nod off in peace, that kept her from slammin’ the door on her way out.
CHAPTER NINE
Took me another thirty-some hours before I was shipshape enough to dust out. I heal swift, but there’s only so quick even the best of us can recover from that kinda hurt. Tsura didn’t show again during that time, and Preacher Hewlett was far too proper to stick his beezer in and ask why. We shook hands, I passed him a card for if and when he needed to call in his marker. He insisted I take a handful of change for the L—along with a clean shirt from his wardrobe, which hung loose on me but had the advantage of not bein’ blood-encrusted—and we parted ways.
It was raining when I left the church, a light shower as much flyin’ in the breeze as falling. More a wet wind than anything else, just enough to make everything glisten and squelch. Streetlights and passing flivvers reflected off wet walls and wetter streets, and the folks still out and about after sunset quickened their paces to that silly, useless run people do when they get weather on ’em. Some held newspapers or umbrellas overhead, equally useless since the water wasn’t comin’ straight down.
Me, I ain’t gonna say I didn’t notice it; I’m way too sensitive for that at the best of times, even more so when I’m still—pardon the expression—under the weather. The rain was a nuisance, gettin’ into everything, makin’ the wound itch where it’d healed over. And the train was worse. Dry, sure, but the usual buzz in my head from sittin’ inside a moving box of technology turned that itch into a dull pounding. Guess I looked none too happy about the whole thing, ’cause the other passengers gave me a wide berth.
That was good by me. Helped me focus past the discomfort and do some noodling.
I never much care to put my pals in danger if I can help it, but sometimes I ain’t got a lot of choice. I had too many opponents on the board, and I still wasn’t even sure quite what game we were playing. How were Ramona and McCall tied together? What kinda mojo or secrets did the stolen mummy hold? Was Ramona’s boss the only one who wanted it? What about the Uptown Boys? What was their interest? Was Goswythe tied up in that, too, or just after me personally? Or even involved at all?
Goddamn it. At least when I’d been chasin’ the Spear of Lugh, I’d known what the fuck everybody wanted. Or, well, I’d thought I had, which had been enough for me to keep it all straight in my head. This? Still way too much I didn’t know.
Until I did, and while I was still less than my full self—health- and luck-wise, both—I needed help. That meant Pete. Soon as I made it back to the office, I’d get on the blower to the station (and lemme tell you, I was lookin’ forward to that like it was a lemon-juice enema), and leave a message for him to gimme a ring.
Maybe I should phone Rounser’s carnival while I was at it. Me’n Tsura weren’t exactly best buds, but she’d done right by me. No, I didn’t want her involved any further in what was goin’ down, but I didn’t much wanna leave things off where they were, either.
Or maybe I could…
Hmm.
I was on foot again, tracin’ the old familiar steps from the L to my office. The drizzle was even lighter on this side of town, to where it was somewhere between real rain and just patches of excess humidity. It wasn’t even enough to wash the smell of industry and meat processing outta the air.
And someone was tailing me again.
I couldn’t tell who, not this time. Couldn’t even be positive I wasn’t jumpin’ at shadows, imagining the whole thing. It ain’t as if I didn’t have good reason to be paranoid at this point. But I had that hunch, that feeling, of unfriendly peepers locked onto me from the darkness, probably from behind a mug I wouldn’t even recognize. Maybe even one that wasn’t the same mug from one blink to the next.
So… what? I was on my guard, one mitt in my coat and wrapped around the L&G. (And I only now thought to wonder what Hewlett or Martha had made of it, when he found a hardwood stick in my shoulder holster instead of a roscoe.) But what else could I do? Location of my office was no secret, and I had nowhere else to go right now anyway. All I could was keep alert, try to get a slant on whoever was dogging my steps, and hope I spotted something before they started something.
And I did, though it wasn’t what I expected.
What I spotted was a sleek black Cadillac Fleetwood Imperial limo idling at the curb in front of Mr. Soucek’s place, and a handful of mugs in fairly spiffy glad rags loitering around the stoop, huddling under the overhang to avoid the worst of the not-quite-rain. The bright cherry glow of gaspers were a constellation in the shadows, reflecting off teeth and castin’ just enough light for me to make out some features I’d seen a few days ago.
“I ain’t an expert,” I said as I approached, “but it seems to me that when you tell a guy you don’t ever wanna see his face again, it’s maybe counterproductive to show up at his place afterward.”
Nolan Shea spat the almost-burnt-out butt of his cigarette onto the steps.
“Was up to me, boyo, I wouldn’t be seeing you again. Or maybe one last time, over a gat. Ain’t my call to make, though.”
“Lemme guess. You’re about to invite me to take a ride with you.”
“Ain’t with me. And it ain’t an invitation.”
Shea and a handful of Uptown Boys? Pretty sure I coulda handled ’em, even in my current state. Probably not without makin’ a lotta noise, though, and maybe not without takin’ a few more injuries I could really do without. And hey, a sitdown with Fleischer—to whom I figured the flivver’d take me, since I couldn’t off the top of my noggin come up with anyone else Shea’d be playin’ messenger for—might just get me some answers.
It meant time in one of those motorized hell-boxes, which was enough to make me sick as a dog on a good day, but I’d live.
“All right,” I told him. “You think we can pick up my dry cleaning while we’re out?”
“Get in the damn car, Oberon.”
I moved toward the flivver, slow and sauntering. I’m sure Shea took that as me bein’ a wise-ass, tryin’ to make like I wasn’t scared of him. Fine; let him think that. What I was actually doin’ was suckin’ up some of the ambient luck, not too much from any one thing or any one guy—’cept Shea himself, who cursed somethin’ fierce when he tried to light up another butt and burned the hell outta his thumb in the process—and feedin’ it into my own aura. Wouldn’t provide much of a buffer against the chafing of the motor on the raw edges of my soul, but some was better’n nothin’, right?
The interior of the Caddy was customized, stretched some—not quite to the point of bein’ what you’d call a genuine limousine, but near enough—with a bench seat installed back-to-back with the driver. Perfect setup for a private little gab session. Since that backward-facin’ seat was the only one available, what with the two mugs already planted in the others, I took it.
Reminded me some of my trip inside Eudeagh’s horse-drawn carriage, ’cept the leather seats here were more comfortable. Also, silky smooth as it was, presumably not made outta tanned baby skin. I may have a serious hate-on for the Mob, but it ain’t anything compared to how much I despise the Unseelie Court.
Right. Two guys in the back with me. I focused on ’em, piecin’ together what I could, partly since it was the only wise thing to do, and partly so I could concentrate on somethin’ other than the fingernails dragging across my brain as the driver put the damn contraption in gear and took us rumbling off down the street.
Gink on the right—well, my right—was your typical suited gorilla. Big square jaw, soulless blinkers, reeking of cheap aftershave, shoulders wider’n a buggane’s appetite, and carryin’ a heater under his coat so damn big and heavy I wasn’t sure it wasn’t wearin’ him. I could safely ignore him until and unless things went south.