Powers of Detection

by Dana Stabenow

  -

  By the time she made it out to the edge of the museum’s property, it was almost twelve-thirty. She perched in the vee of a large oak and contemplated the street. The empty street.

  “Dammit, Didier . . .” She’d had to duck and wait while a guard went by her; too close, that one. They were getting smarter. She’d have to put a no-go on any jobs here for at least two years. Maybe three.

  Not for the first time she wished for a cell phone. But even if they hadn’t been too risky—too easy for someone to check the last few numbers dialed—she still couldn’t carry one. No cell phone, no PDA . . . even the odd watch was prone to strange fluctuations under current, and when she pulled down a surge, all bets were off.

  Another fifteen minutes, and she had to accept the fact that Sergei had probably been forced to call it a night. The glitches she had the elementals set off might have caused a patrol car to take a swing by, even though none of it had been enough to trigger an actual alarm.

  “Good thing you wore the comfy sneakers,” she told herself, swinging herself down from the tree and landing with lazy grace on the grass. It was going to be a long walk back.

  -

  It might have been the night air. Or the current still running high in her system. Or, as Sergei claimed, just a natural-born stupidity. But at the time, the idea to kill two jobs with one evening seemed just a matter of common sense and practicality. She had to walk by the site anyway, so why not?

  “Why not,” Sergei said over his tenth mug of high-test tea, the first five of which had cooled while he was waiting for her, “is because a) you were carrying a retrieved object. And b) because you hadn’t done anything more than a cursory glance at the job write-up.”

  She knew he was mad, then, when he called it a job instead of a situation.

  “And c) because you got caught!”

  Wren winced, fighting the urge to duck under the diner’s table. “Not so much caught,” she protested meekly. “More like . . .”

  -

  “Who’s there?”

  Wren swore, wrapping herself in current and fading into the shadows. The store was a hodgepodge of clichés, down to the motheaten thing stuffed and mounted on the counter, its crystal eyes reflecting light back at her. At least, she hoped it was just crystal reflecting light . . .

  “I said, who’s there?” An old man to match the shop stomped downstairs, a megapowered X-Files-quality flashlight in one hand. Wren closed her eyes so she wouldn’t reflect the light. The beam flashed across her face, passed on . . . then came back.

  “I know what you’re here for,” the old man cackled. “But you can’t have it. Can’t, can’t can’t!”

  Nobody said anything about the guy being a Talent she thought with irritation, then common sense reasserted itself. He wasn’t a Talent, or a seer, or anything that would have allowed him to sense what she was or what she intended. He was just old-fashioned bugfuck. Crazy had a way of messing with the brain in ways even current couldn’t work around.

  “Yeah, old man?” Her voice was low, dangerous. She’d copied it from Blue Angel, practicing until she had it down just right. If anyone reported her to the cops, they’d get laughed out of the station for claiming they’d been robbed by Marlene Dietrich.

  “Yeah. It’s mine. Mine I tell you. I bought it, I got it, and I’m going to keep it.”

  Any moment Wren expected him to break into a round of “mine, my precioussss.” If he did, she was out of there, and the Silence could keep their damn retainer that month.

  “My staff, mine. Going to make me a wizard. Going to teach me how to talk to the birds.”

  “I think you’re halfway there, old man,” Wren said, relieved that he was nattering about something other than her goal. And if the staff that he was talking about actually was an Artifact—an item used like a battery to store current—the Silence would just have to hire her to come back and get it. Sergei’s cat would have better luck working a manual can opener than the man in front of her actually accessing current.

  “What’s that? You, stop there. Who are you? How did you get in here?” The hand not holding the flashlight came up, the dark shape unmistakable even to someone as gun-shy as Wren. A sawed-off shotgun.

  Think quick, Valere!

  “I’m a djinn, come to gift you with a treasure,” she said, punting madly. Maybe, in her dark clothing, the shimmer of current still wrapped around her, visible or no, she’d be able to pull this off. “A painting, through which magic you might transport yourself instantly.”

  A combination of Bugs Bunny cartoons and Star Trek reruns, but he leaned closer, the gun not focused quite so threateningly as a minute ago.

  Moving carefully, she withdrew the tube from her knapsack, having to tug it free when it snagged on the dress’s folds.

  “All shall be yours . . . for one simple gift in return.”

  The old man checked himself, glaring at her suspiciously. The shotgun began to rise towards her face. “What’s that?”

  “A trifle, a trinket. One of no use to mortals but great significance to djinn.” She was dancing as fast as she could, the sweat crawling under her scalp and running down the side of her face and back of her neck. “A bell, a silver bell with a golden clapper, a bell that does not ring. You have such a thing, I am told. Give it to me, and the magic painting shall be yours.”

  -

  “You traded one job for the other.” Sergei was trying, really trying, to be his usual hard-assed self.

  Wren reached across the diner table and snagged the pseudocream in its little tin pitcher; poured it into her coffee until it went from mud to diluted mud. “Hey, no problem. I’ll just go steal it back.”

  She drank her coffee, pretending not to hear the muffled, pained noises coming from her partner.

  -

  “Oh . . . hell.” Disgust dripped from every word as she stared down at the body of the pawnshop owner. Someone had staved in the back of his head with his own staff. There was a moral in there somewhere, but the smell of stale blood and feces was rising off the body, and she didn’t want to waste time thinking when she could be working. Wren wrinkled her nose, wiping her palms on her jeans as though there was something sticking to them. “If I’d wanted to see dead bodies, I’d have gone to work for the morgue, dammit.”

  Ten minutes since she’d walked in the door. Daylight retrievals usually weren’t her thing, but it wasn’t as though the guy was in any shape to report her.

  She risked another look down. Even less shape, now.

  Normally working current just required an internal adjustment and some finely focused concentration. But there were times that shortcuts were useful, and words were the surest way to focus current fast, if a little dirty.

  “Picture gone missing hands not meant, not deserving

  Retriever reclaims.”

  It wasn’t great verse, but it didn’t have to be. It just had to be meaningful, in form and function. Her mother loved haiku, and so using that form made her think of her mother, which made the form meaningful. And she needed to get that picture back. Which made the content meaningful. And . . . there it was. Her hands itched as the current she had generated reached like a magnet to lodestone, forcing her forward, stepping over the old man’s body, to where the painting was tacked up with thumb pins—Sergei’s going to shit—on the wall behind the counter.

  “Looks like the old boy was trying to make a getaway . . . pity he didn’t make it.” She took the painting down, the tingling fading once she made contact with the spelled item. She looked around for the tube, b
ut didn’t see it. Refusing to muck around any longer, she pulled the scrunchie out from her hair, letting the ponytail fall loose, and wrapped it around the rerolled painting. She was ready to get the hell out of there, but something made her look back over her shoulder to the body lying on the floor.

  “Ah . . . hell.” She sighed, tucking the roll under one arm and retracing her steps. Stooping low, she put her hand out, palm down and flat. A hesitation, a centering, and then she touched the corpse. Spirits fled in the moment of death, unless there was a damn good reason—or a very strong spell—holding them in place. But while the animus might be gone, the body still had current caught in the biofield every living being generated, the natural electricity that made Kirlian photography possible.

  “What? No! No, mine, mine, mustn’t take, mustn’t . . .” a fast-moving figure in front of him, angry, full of rage. “Where is it? She didn’t have it on her when she left, which means you have it, now where? Where. Is. It?”

  Whimpering, then another heavy blow. The old man spins under the force, falls to the ground. “Useless old fool . . .”

  The sound of something whistling down a shock of red-flaring pain, and . . .

  Nothing

  -

  Wren came out of the connection like a dog shaking off water, breathing heavy. “Damn damn damn damn!” He’d been killed for the painting. Killed . . . and she might have been . . . No time to think about it, she’d already stayed too long. Not that she was worried about cops showing up to investigate: Poor bastard had been dead a day at least.

  Her eyes narrowed at the thought. “Ah . . . hell.” Nobody deserved to rot like that. Slipping out the front door, she wiped the handle clean, then uncoiled a narrow rope of current from her inner pool and reached out with it, brushing the surface of the burglar alarm.

  The loud wail of the alarm covered the sound of her bootheels on pavement, moving in the general direction of away.

  -

  The painting remained untouched on the coffee table where Wren had tossed it when she came in the door to Sergei’s apartment. Wren was curled up on the sofa, while Sergei paced back and forth in front of her.

  “Who the hell are we working for, Sergei? Because I get the feeling there’s something they didn’t tell us. Something that almost got me killed. And did get that poor bastard—”

  “Bob Goveiss.”

  “Bob, killed. So give.”

  “Yes. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

  “What?”

  “The violence.” He shook his head. “Those paintings were on loan from the French government. The same government that’s about to splinter apart from the inside, which could have awkward repercussions on the current political scene.”

  “So sayeth CNN, amen,” Wren said, but she was listening. “And . . . ?”

  “And, the organization that hired us was planning on holding that painting hostage, to force the various factions to come back to the table.”

  Wren stared at her partner. “Okay, huh?”

  He paced back and forth, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. “It’s rare, but there have been a number of cases where an item is taken to force two sides to cooperate or risk being shown in public as the destroyer of a priceless work of art. Most recently in the theft of a Chagall painting: A ransom note was sent demanding peace in the Middle East before the painting would be returned. A useless demand, really, but it made a splash in the news.”

  Wren considered that, a small smile appearing on her face. “I like that,” she said finally.

  “Yeah. It does have appeal. But it doesn’t always work. Anyway, it still doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone who knew about the heist want to—”

  “Play a round of Kill the Retriever?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dunno. That’s your job to find out. I’m going home before I forget what it looks like, catch some sleep before my next turn playing peacemaker. Call me when you find out anything.” She got up, stretched, looked at her partner. “But do me a favor? Lock the doors when I leave. And don’t be careless.”

  Sergei shook his head, his squared-off face softening as he smiled. “I’m always careful, Zhenechka.”

  Wren thought briefly of the nasty little gun he carried on some jobs, and shuddered. “Right. Better them than us and all that jazz.” She kissed him good bye, rubbing her cheek against his five o’clock stubble, and let herself out.

  -

  The next evening he caught up with her on Park duty. A piskie had decided to pick on her, spluttering insults on her paternity, her maternity, and the general state of her underwear. Since piskies were, on average, twenty inches high and five pounds soaking wet, Wren’s reaction was closer to embarrassed annoyance than anything else. She kept trying to kick it, but it would dance out of the way and come back a few moments later, still talking.

  “Goid, you’re annoying,” she said to it.

  “And you could use a drag into the lake. Wanna try?”

  “Remember what happened last time you tried dunking a lone-jack?”

  Clearly it did, dancing back again until it was just out of reach. “Annoying human. Spoil all our fun.”

  “Be glad that’s all I’m spoiling, you bothersome little wart.”

  “Want me to shoot him?” Sergei asked, falling into step beside her.

  “You got a bullet small enough?”

  “I hear tell that’s all he’s got,” Goid crowed, then bit its tongue with an audible yelp when Sergei turned to glare at it. It was no secret in the Cosa that the Wren’s partner had little love for the fatae, the purely supernatural creatures of the Cosa Nostradamus.

  “Scoot,” he said to it. Goid scooted.

  “Damn. Next time the Cosa calls, you can answer, okay? What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” His voice was sharp, and she could practically feel the irritation rising off him, now that the distraction of the fatae was gone. “As in, not a god-damned thing. As in, my contact seems to have disappeared.”

  “The rest of the payment got deposited?”

  One or two of the lines in Sergei’s forehead eased out. “The rest was deposited this afternoon, soon as they got their hands on the painting.”

  “Well then.” Wren let out a little sigh. “What’s a possible attempt on my life, so long as we’re paid.”

  He cast a sideways look at her. “You mean that?”

  They walked a few more paces along a tree-shrouded path, ignoring the faint giggles and rustling branches following them. “No,” she said finally, on a sigh. “No, I don’t. Not after . . . I felt him. And I felt him die. I can’t walk away from that.”

  “Right. Lowell did a rundown on this organization for me. They check out clean, he says—but he was very surprised that they had the money to pay us. Not a dime in their collective kitty, and no fund-raisers going on in their name.”

  “Breaks my heart, it does.” She didn’t like Sergei’s assistant, but the twit did know how to do his research. “So they hocked the furniture to pay us?” The giggles got louder as they reached a particularly large tree, and Wren put a hand on Sergei’s arm to stop him. “Hang on.”

  She slipped out of her sneakers and planted her bare feet in the grass by the side of the road. Safely grounded, she opened herself to the current of the world around her. Colors swirled, electrons danced, and she sorted through the information tugging at her senses until she was able to discern the slightly off pattern twined around the tree
. A tendril snaked out, stroking the ends of the pattern, then retracting in a flash as the pattern snapped out, attempting to snare her within its own tendrils.

  She came back to herself with a blink, after confirming that the trap had been sprung. A chorus of disappointed “awwwws . . .” trailed after them as she slipped her shoes back on, and they walked on.

  “Okay. So: no money. And yet they manage to scrape together seventeen thou to pay us. So what’s the deal? They borrow the money from someone to pay for the retrieval, then that someone decides they’d rather have the painting than the promise of money?”

  He shot her a sideways glance. “Maybe. Or it was never actually the organization who wanted it, at all. We might have been set up.”

  “But then why make the final payment? I mean, we’re tough, but we’re not that tough. Are we?”

  “More to the point, do they think we are? If so, not a bad thing.”

  “Also besides the point, your ego aside.” And she squeezed his hand to soften the words. “Ignore who hired us for a minute. Who went after me? Did that same person kill poor old Bob? What do we have? An organization, poor as proverbial church mice, that still manages to retain us to retrieve an object that they claim they’re going to use to force political unity.

  “Okay, here’s a question for you.”

  Sergei nodded, indicating he was listening.

  “Why did they bother to tell you what they’d be using it for?”

  He let out a huff of breath. They walked in silence through the park, past human joggers running in pairs, and the occasional biker in bright spandex zipping through at high speeds. If any of the fatae were still watching them, they were being quieter about it.

  “I’ve been wondering about that too. At first I thought the guy was just a talker. But then I started to think maybe his verbal diarrhea had a purpose. The assignment was the kind of thing you can’t help talk about, because it’s so different from the usual. But we don’t talk about clients outside the office . . .”