I pressed an eye up to the window and looked both up and down the corridor. I couldn’t see much. The Chem Lab wasn’t on a major thoroughfare. Quite the opposite. Only the technicians who pulled shifts here or crime scene analysts who needed work done made their way down to this corner of the OME.
And since Shelly had been so kind as to reserve the lab for the rest of the morning, no one was coming for at least two or three hours.
I dug in my pocket and checked my cell phone. Sure enough, no signal.
A flashbulb went off in my head as I remembered that Shelly had used the landline to take a call. I turned and ran to where the phone sat on the counter, but the LCD screen, which normally displayed the time and extension numbers, was blank. A quick press of the receiver to my ear confirmed that the phone was dead.
I dropped to my knees and looked under the counter. Sure enough, the line had been severed. It was a clean cut, but the ends of the cord were blackened as if someone had taken a flaming-hot knife to the thing.
Or if someone had used a magic spell to cut it.
Between my concentration on the spectrometry readouts and Shelly’s focus on her new equipment, Destry had been able to move about the lab at will. And no one could move as quickly and silently as a pooka.
Shelly’s voice, sounding strangely muffled, called out to me.
“Dayna!” Shelly called. “Dayna, where are you?”
I got up and ran over to the clean room. Shelly stood at the window, trying to see out through the spiderweb of cracks. Destry’s powerful kick had dented the door in two places, dishing in the entire panel.
“I’m here, I’m here!” I called, as I came up to the window. “Are you all right?”
“Just fell on my butt, that’s all,” she declared. “Someone, or something shoved me. And I’m about as mad as a wet hen! What in blazes is going on out there?”
My voice struggled to form the words.
“Shelly, I figured out that Destry murdered that unicorn wizard, Master Dekanos. That Destry’s sold us all out to the Creatures of the Dark.”
“He did what?” Shelly sounded as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. “That son-of-a-mare! I was just startin’ to like him, too. Had me fooled, I’ll tell you that.”
“You and me both.”
“Can you get me out of here?”
I braced myself and gave the handle a couple of desperate tugs. It didn’t budge.
The pooka’s blow had caught the door just before it had slid closed all the way. About a half-inch remained open, which was lucky. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been able to speak to or hear Shelly. However, there was no way the door was coming open without the use of a cutting torch. It had been wedged against its slide tracks at both the top and bottom.
“Destry’s jammed it,” I huffed. “He fried the sensor in the outer door and disabled the landline phone. Unless…is there another extension in there?”
Shelly let out an unladylike curse.
“There’s supposed to be one installed in here tomorrow afternoon. Doesn’t do us much good now, does it? Hold on a sec.” I waited as I heard a couple of beeps and then a second curse. “Well, I had to check. No cell phone signal in here. What about you?”
“I already checked. Nothing. Wait, didn’t you say that there’s a paging system down here?”
A groan. “They’re putting that in next week.”
I let out a breath. “Okay, stand back. I’m going to try something.”
Shelly’s face disappeared from the window. I grabbed one of the lab’s orange plastic chairs. The thing was light enough for me to easily heft it in my hands. I wound up and swung it in the same way that Shaw had used the statue back at the Wizard’s Guild.
With a CRASH, the chair’s legs hit the window. A shard of glass the size of my pinkie nail flew into the air. It made a tiny plink as it hit the floor.
The chair didn’t hold together quite as well. It split apart into modular chunks. Legs, seat, and armrests came loose and fell with a clatter. I was left holding just the back cushion. I tossed it away with an even more unladylike curse of my own.
“Well,” Shelly remarked, from inside the clean room. “That was a grand how-de-do.”
“I’m not finished just yet.”
I strode over to the red handle marked FIRE ALARM. That had worked well enough during the bomb scare. While it wouldn’t get us out immediately, at least the firemen would find us trapped in here. Then I could come up with some story about what happened. A story that didn’t involve shadowy dream horses.
I yanked the handle down.
Nothing happened.
Again, I knelt and traced the wiring. It had been sliced off at knee level behind one of the room’s structural posts. Destry had not only been busy, he’d been thorough.
I walked back to the clean room door, shoulders slumped. Shelly stood on her tiptoes, trying to see over the mass of fractured glass that hindered her view. That gave me an idea.
“Shelly, it looks like he got the fire alarm, too. But is there a fire axe down here? Maybe I could chop my way through this half-broken door window.”
“Chop through two inches of solid polycarbonate plastic? That’s a fine thought, but this ain’t the windshield on a car. And besides, they removed the fire axe down here when they started the remodel. For safety reasons.”
I gritted my teeth. This was ridiculous! I’d been in stone dungeons, the caves of the Hoohan, even underneath the ruined city of Keshali. And the worst I’d ever been trapped until now was here, in the bowels of my very own workplace!
“Okay, maybe the alarm’s out. But they wouldn’t turn off the smoke or heat sensors. There’s got to be something down here I can set on fire.”
Shelly goggled at me. “There’s a half-dozen things in here that could blow us to kingdom come! I’m not afraid to meet the Lord, but all in good time!”
“Then what about liquid nitrogen?” I fumed. “Maybe if I freeze off the–”
“There’s maybe a half-gallon tank down here, and nothing that’ll let you handle it safely,” my friend said, exasperated. “Stop tryin’ to come up with some clever scheme! We’ll be out of here in a couple of hours at most.”
I shook my head sadly.
“No,” I said. “It won’t be that long.”
Shelly heard the chill tone in my voice. “What do you mean, Dayna?”
“Destry said he wasn’t leaving just yet. He said there was one final loose end to tie up. And I’m in the biggest one he has. The only question is how he’s going to do it.”
My head came up as I heard voices from outside. They must have been talking very loudly for me to hear them at all. Suddenly, a figure appeared at the outer door.
“I think I heard–” I began. “No, wait. Someone’s out there!”
“Well, stand up and wave at ‘em or something. Make sure they see us in here.” Shelly let out yet another curse her church group would’ve frowned on. “Of all the times I’ve needed to visit the lady’s room, now has to be one of ‘em?”
I’d gotten halfway across the lab when the entire outer wall gave a shudder. The sensor, which I’d watched Destry short circuit, suddenly winked green. The door slid open as if on a greased track.
A horrified gasp escaped my lips.
Robert McClatchy stood in the doorway. His dark suit had a rumpled, slept-in look. He held his arms flat at his sides as if he were standing at attention.
A short-barreled handgun nestled in his grip.
The whites of McClatchy’s eyes had shifted from slightly bloodshot all the way to full-on bleeding red. A vein pulsed across his forehead like an alien thing, while a jittery tic of his cheek distorted his face even further.
“Well, now,” he said, in a deathly quiet voice. “You really are down here. It looks like the Monseigneur was right again.”
The ends of Bob’s mouth drew back into a ghastly, psychotic grin.
Just my rotten luck.
Chapt
er Thirty-Nine
Like a horrible windup toy, McClatchy lurched as much as walked into the room.
His lower jaw worked back and forth, as if gnawing on a tough cut of meat. The tic in his cheek spasmed, crinkling one eye. It made my skin crawl.
Bob’s eyes scanned the Chem Lab restlessly, confirming that no one else was nearby. He didn’t even flinch when the door slid shut behind him, sealing us off from the rest of the building. Great. Whatever magic Destry was using on the doors worked all too well.
I considered my options. Frankly, they were effing awful.
Not only had I been caught without a firearm, I didn’t have a single thing within grabbing distance I could use as a weapon. Bob could easily put two or three shots in me if I was stupid enough to try and charge him to grab his gun.
Even if he were to holster his pistol and decide to duke it out with me mano a Dayna, the odds were terrible. I wasn’t a martial artist. Maybe I could get lucky and kick him in the knees or the crotch, but he had a longer reach and outweighed me by at least fifty pounds.
That left me with the weapon of last resort: my charming personality.
Yes, I was doomed.
“Bob,” I said carefully, “if you were looking for me, I was on my way upstairs. After all, if we’re going to get that IA agent to leave us alone, we have to work together.”
McClatchy’s jaw stopped its side-to-side motion. He glared at me hatefully.
He uttered one word, one that echoed off the bare metal walls.
“Liar!”
His gun came up. My legs froze as the muzzle turned into a black circle that encompassed my entire world. A pull of the trigger, and I was history.
One of McClatchy’s eyebrows went up as he heard Shelly calling out from where she’d been trapped.
“Dayna? Hello? Dang it, is there anybody still out there?”
“Go ahead,” McClatchy said, nodding in the clean room’s direction. “You might as well tell her we’re out here.”
I took a couple of sideways steps in Shelly’s direction. That wouldn’t help her hear me any better, but it did put me within diving distance of one of those silly, orange plastic chairs.
“Shelly,” I called back, “Bob’s here. We’re…just talking.”
I heard the dim sound of a box or chair scraping against the metal floor. Then Shelly’s silhouette appeared back at the window, only a few inches higher up. I spotted her face as she peered over the opaque spiderweb of cracks in the window.
Her voice sounded aghast.
“Oh, my dear Lord,” she quailed. “Bob, what in God’s name are you–”
One of the veins in McClatchy’s forehead pulsed. His gun hand twitched to one side. He squeezed his fist.
The bang! as his firearm went off in the enclosed space was like a sonic boom. I staggered back a half-step as a second spiderweb of cracks appeared in the window. Shelly screamed and fell over backwards.
The two inches of polycarbonate plastic had held. I heard a moan and a curse come from inside the clean room as my friend picked herself up off the floor. But the window wasn’t going to hold up much longer under that kind of abuse.
As soon as McClatchy finished with me, he’d murder Shelly in the same cold blood.
Something inside me snapped.
The fear of dying melted away. I had to do what I could to prevent McClatchy from pulling that trigger in Shelly’s direction. Every second I delayed him was another chance that someone would hear the gunshots. Or walk past the outside windows. I was willing to accept divine intervention right about now.
Once again, all I had was my force of personality. That, and whatever luck had rubbed off from hanging around a fayleene prince and protector.
“Stop it!” I shouted. “Dammit Bob, you’re supposed to be here for me. Me!”
The gun came back around. Well, that part had been easy enough.
“That’s right,” he admitted, as his cheek gave another disconcerting twitch. “The Monseigneur said that you’d be here. He said that you were behind it all.”
My throat had gone dry. I had to swallow before I could speak again.
“Behind what, Bob? It would help if you could be more specific.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know!” he bellowed. His face turned purplish-red, stuck somewhere between anger and anguish. “You and all the others! You’ve always been against me! Always holding me back, tying me down, keeping me from becoming the great man I was always supposed to be!”
“Bob, listen–” I began.
McClatchy talked over me even as he advanced a step. A sticky sheen of sweat beaded on his forehead, threatening to run into his blood-red eyes.
“You’ve always thought you were so clever. Always laughing with the others behind my back. Thought you were protected from on high, didn’t you? Well, that’s over and done. Go ahead and talk. I want to hear you deny that you had anything to do with it. That way, I can sleep all the better when I put a bullet in your brain.”
I blinked as I absorbed his words. They were insane, but they finally gave me a clue. McClatchy’s insecurities and petty grievances had finally melded into a delusional conspiracy theory wider than Hollywood Boulevard. Everything I said to validate my innocence got put into a mental feedback loop that I was guilty as sin.
It was no different than when I’d confronted a half-sane-at-best griffin, the High Elder Belladonna from the Reykajar aerie. I’d had a devil of a time figuring out how to deal with her, too.
Wait a minute…
It couldn’t be that simple, could it?
Maybe yes, maybe no. But I had nothing left to try.
So, I decided to do what McClatchy least expected.
I laughed.
Not just any old chortle, mind you. This was a full-out sinister cackle of a laugh. One that would’ve earned me some good cash as the Evil Baroness on a 1930’s radio drama.
“Well, now. Look what we have here,” I said, relishing in Bob’s expression of surprise and confusion. “The Monseigneur was right about you, McClatchy. You are both tougher and smarter than you look. I never thought that you would figure out that it was me all along. I’ve been putting up roadblocks for you, making your plans fail, setting people against you.”
Bob’s face went from red to white. “It was you all along, I knew it!”
“It was me, yes. I was behind all of it. Everything from your last failed attempt at getting promoted to the time you burned your microwave popcorn. All. Of. It.”
“Then it’s time,” he declared. “To end you.”
I didn’t let that faze me. Instead, I leaned forward and arched one eyebrow.
“Really? You want to end me? Don’t you even want to know why I did it? Why I spent my life tormenting you?”
The tic in McClatchy’s cheek went spastic. He shook his head as if to clear it.
“Yes! Tell me, now!”
“I don’t know,” I said, as if wavering. “Could you really handle the truth?”
Bob steadied the grip on his gun. “Tell me now, or I’ll blow your head off. I’ll learn to live without knowing.”
The funny thing was, I hadn’t been trying to toy with him. My mind was racing along furiously with this impromptu, cockamamie idea I’d come up with. I latched on to what Destry himself had said, the day he’d turned Bob’s brain into guacamole.
“I did it…” I said, drawing things out for maximum suspense. “…because I work for the Monseigneur. I’m his second-in-command. Don’t you see, McClatchy? Your life was like iron, fresh from the forge. And I was the hammer that beat you into shape. Everyone around you was a tool I put in place to sharpen you, make you better, make you–”
I don’t know how much further I could’ve gone on with this spiel. I would never know, because the shorted-out sensor next to the outer door flashed green again. The door slid open with a sinister hiss.
McClatchy sidestepped, keeping the gun pointed at me as he half-turned to watch who would walk
into his improvised killing zone next.
Chapter Forty
Detective Nathan Gavitt strode into the Chem Lab, an annoyed look on his face.
“Where the heck did you run off to, McClatchy?” he demanded. The man’s dark blue necktie bobbed at his throat as he went on. “We’re right in the middle of an audit of your hourly…”
He paused as he took in the situation. McClatchy stared back at him. For a solid second, maybe two, all I heard was the ferocious pounding of blood in my temples.
“What’s going on here?” Gavitt asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Another heartbeat of time passed. A flicker of movement beyond the open door caught my eye. The wavy, indistinct form of a horse stood in the hallway, watching the events unfold.
The pooka’s eyes flashed from a gentle yellow glow to a baleful blaze.
McClatchy’s facial tic vanished. The man’s tortured, conflicted expression vanished. The same psychotic grin I’d seen earlier took its place.
Oh my God, I realized, even as my gut clenched. Destry’s pulling all the strings here.
“What’s going on here?” Bob said mockingly. “That’s simple. I’m going to kill Dayna Chrissie. But only after I finish you off, of course.”
Gavitt had a split second to register his surprise.
And then everything went to hell, no handbasket required.
McClatchy swung his gun around. I dove for cover behind the nearest lab chair.
Detective Gavitt’s hand was a blur as it went to his holster. His weapon came up just as Bob drew a bead and squeezed the trigger. Three bangs ripped through the air, shaking the walls.
One bullet whizzed through the open door, passing harmlessly through the pooka’s ethereal shadow. The second punched through Gavitt’s shoulder, exited out the back in a spray of gore, and holed one of the file cabinets. The third hit the IA agent center-on just above the belt buckle.
The twin impacts knocked the man backwards and to one side. Gavitt’s free hand windmilled helplessly as he fell back against the base of one of the lab tables. He slid down, landing on his rear. The man looked surprised as blood pumped from his two gaping wounds, turning his khaki shirt and slacks a muddy brown.
The Conspiracy of Unicorns Page 22