Precinct 13

by Tate Hallaway

  He gestured for me to take a seat. Fishing into his pocket, he pulled out the kind of notebook detectives always had in the movies. He stole a pen from the cup on the desk. “Tell us what happened.”

  Jack started to park his butt on the edge of a nearby desk, as though intending to settle in to listen to my story. Officer Jones gave him a sharp look. “Why don’t you fetch our guest a cup of coffee, Jack?”

  Jack’s crinkled nose clearly said “why don’t you do it yourself,” but his mouth managed a very terse, “Certainly. Do you take milk or sugar, miss?”

  I smiled at the incongruous image of this nose-ringed, leather-jacketed, scruffy man playing butler. My stomach growled at the thought of coffee, but the back of my throat still burned from my recent bout of nausea. From an industrial coffeemaker in the corner of the room wafted the aroma of stale, burnt coffee, so I waved away the offer. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “At least let me take your coat,” Jack offered, still playing Goth butler.

  Considering how much I’d been sweating with all this talk about magic, I happily agreed.

  He stood up and held out a hand, like a gentleman.

  I shrugged out of my coat. When I gave it to him, our fingers brushed. My tattoo squeezed sharply. I gasped and broke contact. My skin buzzed angrily, and I cradled it to my chest gingerly. Jack jumped back, just as startled. The coat fell to the floor in a heap.

  “Bloody hell!” Jack shook his hand out like he’d been zapped by a joy buzzer hidden in my palm. Then his eyes zeroed in on the tattooed arm I had pressed against my chest protectively. He pointed with his uninjured hand. “What’s that?”

  FOUR

  All eyes focused like lasers on the snake tattoo on my arm. None of them seemed to approve. In fact, Officer Jones seemed disgusted to the point of hostility. His fingers strayed to his gun.

  Was he going to shoot me for having an ugly tattoo?

  Stone backed up a step. It was less a gesture of fear than one making ready for a fight.

  In fact, the entire office hushed. All eyes turned toward me and I heard whispers of, “Maleficium.”

  “Is that what I think it is? What’s your game?” Jack demanded, moving in closer, as if protecting his colleagues from me. “This is natural space. You trigger any kind of maleficium in here, you’re going down.”

  “What? Trigger ‘mal’—what? Do you mean this?” But when I raised my arm to show them the snake, Jack’s hands went out protectively in front of Jones and Stone.

  Jack pulled something from the inner pocket of his leather jacket. I half expected a gun, but instead it was one of those whip-thin, segmented car antennas. He pointed it at me menacingly, the button tip waving from the sudden movement.

  People around the office ducked behind desks or took up other defensive postures.

  It was like I had a bomb strapped to my chest, not just a butt-ugly tattoo around my arm.

  Meanwhile, Jack began tracing a series of lines and circles in the air with his car antenna. Underneath his leather jacket, the Wi-Fi indicator on his T-shirt pulsated brightly.

  My skin itched under the tattoo.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, my eyes frantically searching for a sane answer to this sudden, bizarre turn of events.

  “You don’t know?” Jack paused in the middle of his fourth downward swipe. He shook his head, as if he’d lost track of something. “Bollocks. Do you know how hard it is to spell in binary? Now I’m going to have to start over.”

  “Start what over?” I was so confused that I was on the verge of weeping from frustration.

  Jack must have seen the tears I held back glistening at the corners of my eyes. He dropped the point of the antenna, and frowned into my face, “Are you serious? You have no idea what’s happening?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re all acting like I’m the mad tattooed bomber, and I don’t know why, especially since I had nothing to do with this stupid snake on my arm. One minute, I was doing a normal autopsy like a regular, sane person, and the next this…this…thing jumps out from behind the heart and now it’s on my arm.” I looked to where Officer Jones glared at me from behind Jack’s shoulder. “You should understand,” I said to Jones. Turning to Stone, I added, “You, too. You’re the ones who brought him to me.”

  “Who?” Jones asked.

  “The body! The necromancer, of course!” I yelled.

  “The necromancer,” Officer Jones said slowly, his brows still knit tightly, as if he was trying to unravel a particularly difficult puzzle. “You’re saying this spell isn’t yours? That it came out of the necromancer?”

  Spell?

  Not that again.

  “Can we please have a conversation that doesn’t use the word ‘spell’?” I asked.

  “Not until you explain that,” Jones said, pointing to my arm.

  Explain it? How could I?

  Slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, I lifted my arm to inspect the ink. I tried to see what it was that had armed police officers cowering behind their desks. The snake’s eye stared back at me with a kind of dark, unblinking intelligence. I had to admit that, if I were looking at this several months ago, I’d have had no trouble believing it was an evil spell.

  All around the room, people held their breath. A blond woman crouching behind her chair watched me with wide eyes and her hand clasped over her mouth, as if holding back the urge to scream. Were they all afraid of the tattoo because they thought it held some kind of magic? Magic that I was assured by many doctors wasn’t supposed to be real?

  The two uniformed cops and Jack waited for my response to their question. I didn’t have an answer I felt comfortable giving. I had no experience with people asking me the details of my delusions and treating them as though they were real or important.

  Finally, I said, “I don’t really know anything about all this. I mean, I really, really don’t like to think about this too hard, but this thing on my arm started out three-dimensional and came out of the corpse sort of”—what was that word Jack had used?—“unnaturally. Like, as an attack snake.”

  When everyone continued to look at me as if they expected me to explode, I finally gave an exasperated sigh. “Believe me, I don’t like this any more than you do. I mean, look at it! This thing is like some kind of prison tattoo on steroids, for crying out loud. Do I look this hard core? Seriously? The only ink I have is a tramp stamp of a butterfly I got when I was too stupid to know better. It’s pink for fucksake.”

  Jack’s tight expression melted into a smile at my words. His eyebrow quirked as if to ask: “A tramp stamp? Really?” Lifting his car antenna again, Jack placed the flat of his palm on the button tip. With a deft movement, he collapsed it between his hands. He stowed it back into its spot inside his jacket. The Wi-Fi icon on his T-shirt dimmed to two bars.

  As if following Jack’s cue, the others began to relax a little as well. Officer Jones’s fingers left his holster. Stone dropped her shoulders, too. People around the office let out their breath. A few cautiously stood up, though no one went back to work yet. The office remained hushed, though the timbre changed from fearful to curious. The only voices were muted ones coming from the reports or whatever streamed on the video screens.

  “You say the snake came out of the necromancer?” Jack asked again. When I nodded, he shook his head. “I don’t understand how it ended up on you. If it was protecting him, it’s done a piss poor job of it. I mean, that is”—he ran a hand through his mess of hair and gave me a half-apologetic, half-thoughtful grimace—“since you’re still alive and all.”

  “You sound disappointed,” I noted, unable to keep from smiling at him.

  “It’s not that,” he assured me quickly with a bright, disarming smile of his own. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s just very unusual that, well, it seems to have transferred its loyalty to a…uh, that is, someone nonmagical.”

  “Or, woefully unschooled,” Jones muttered.

  Jack started at tha
t comment, and shifted his attention to Jones. I followed his gaze, and gasped in surprise. For a brief second, I thought Jones’s eyes glowed bright green with an inner light. At my sound, he blinked and the brightness instantly faded.

  I took a step back, and nearly collided with a nearby desk. I shook my head, as if denying what I’d just seen. No glowing eyes, I admonished myself. All the rest of this stuff, sure. But no glowing eyes. That was too much like what got me in trouble back in Chicago.

  I tried to refocus the conversation on something, anything else. “You said something about loyalty?” I asked Jack. “You make it sound as though this tattoo is alive,” I said, trying to keep myself, unsuccessfully, from looking into the tattoo’s glittering eye again.

  “You should let me look at that.” Stone came out from behind the desk she’d put between us, and held out her hand. I pulled the sleeve of my T-shirt over my shoulder to let her see all the damage.

  She took my wrist without hesitation. I nearly jerked away, expecting another painful response from the snake, like what had happened at Jack’s touch, but it didn’t come. Her hand on my skin was cool, but solid.

  The tension I’d carried in my shoulders drained at her touch. It was like she grounded me. I sank back against the edge of the desk that had nearly tripped me, letting my butt rest against it.

  “It’s very attached to her,” she told Jones, letting go of my arm. My arm flopped at her release. I blinked, shaking off the uber-calm her touch had inflicted.

  Officer Jones’s hands hooked on his belt. “You’re sure?”

  “I’d tell you to test it for yourself,” Stone said, “but considering what it did to Jack, it would probably knock you out.”

  “I don’t get it.” Jones crossed his arms in front of his chest. The stiff fabric of his uniform bunched up and caused his silver badge to reflect the fluorescent light. “How could the spell attach so easily to an ordinarius?” He looked like so many police officers I’d seen in my life, standing there; it was getting harder and harder for me to cope with the fact that everyone seemed to be talking about magic like it was real.

  Finding a nearby chair, I swung it around. I let myself drop into it. “It would be really awesome if someone would tell me what the hell is going on. Or at least, you know, tell me that I’m not going crazy. Again. More.”

  Surprisingly, it was Officer Jones who spoke first. His voice was still as gruff and abrupt as ever, but the certainty in his tone was reassuring. “You’re not crazy. Something very weird is going on here.”

  I shut my eyes and let his words wash over me. Not crazy. I liked the sound of that.

  I was just about to let out a sigh of relief when he added, “Something went wrong with that spell, at the very least it should have knocked you out. That’s what I was expecting when I smelled it on him. I can’t understand how you countered it.”

  Squeezing my eyes tighter, I tilted my head until it rested against the back of the chair. A perfectly sane police officer did not just suggest that he knew that there would be some kind of magical booby trap inside that corpse. I should count to ten. Maybe when I opened my eyes again, I’d be sitting in the middle of an empty store.

  One…two…

  “I said we should have tried to defuse the protection spell before we handed it over to an unprotected human. What if it had been set to kill?”

  That must be Stone with her weird use of “human.” I’d lost count. Better start over with one…Okay, breathe slowly.

  One…

  “She clearly took care of herself.”

  Two…

  “I’m not sure that’s Hannah’s point, Spense,” Jack said. “You kind of took a big risk with someone who is completely helpless.”

  “Is she, though?”

  Through my closed eyes, I sensed a shadow looming over me. I opened them in time to see Jones stepping closer to me. He knelt down, looking at where my arm was cradled in my lap. He inspected the snake as closely as he could without touching. At his nearness, the snake buzzed angrily. Jones seemed to sense the hostility and rocked back on his heels, putting a bit more distance between himself and the tattoo. He looked up into my face, and seemed to study me, as if for the first time.

  “You’re not an ordinarius, are you? You’re not normal.”

  Wow. A stab right to the heart of my greatest fears. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jones squinted at me in that penetratingly suspicious way cops had that always made me feel guilty of something, even when I wasn’t. “Are you magic?” he asked.

  “No,” I said quickly and perhaps a bit too loudly. I looked him hard in the eyes, and repeated myself very clearly, and as calmly as I could, “I am definitely not.”

  “All right. Was someone else there when this happened?” Stone asked.

  I shook my head.

  Jones continued to scrutinize me, as if he didn’t believe me in the slightest. This close, the overhead lights reflected the amber highlights in his green irises. They flashed, almost glowing, and I tried desperately not to notice.

  “Someone must have countered the spell,” Jones insisted. “Did anyone intervene or interrupt you in any way? Did you hear a curse?”

  “Curse? You mean like swearing? I was defiantly swearing up a blue streak,” I said with a little, slightly hysterical laugh.

  “Someone besides you,” Jones insisted, his tone clearly chiding me for not taking all this seriously.

  I cleared my throat. “I was alone. I mean, I was the only living person in the room. Mrs. Finnegan didn’t start talking until later.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Finnegan?” Jack wanted to know.

  “Ruby Finnegan,” Officer Jones supplied over his shoulder. “She’s been in the morgue waiting for a transfer to wherever her family has their plot.”

  “Minnesota,” I said absently.

  “Was she one of ours?” Jack asked.

  Jones shook his head. “I’m surprised she had anything to say. She was Lutheran. They normally stay dead.”

  “I think she was still dead,” I said, remembering her glassy eyes. “She was just talking while dead.”

  “What did she say, exactly?” Jones asked; he sought my eyes again and seemed to be searching for something. “Think very carefully.”

  “I’m not likely to forget the details of this morning. It was kind of out of the ordinary.”

  “Was it?” Jones insisted, like I was intentionally leaving something out.

  “Yes,” I continued to insist, but it was getting much harder.

  “I think maybe you’ve seen this sort of thing before,” Stone said quietly from where she stood to my right. “You shouted at me about something from your past, remember?”

  With Jack to my left, Stone on my right, and Jones far too close in front of me, I was starting to feel surrounded.

  “My past is off-limits,” I snapped at her. My fists scrunched so hard that my fingernails cut into my palm.

  “Not if it has to do with magic,” Jones said. “Then you’d better tell us all about it.”

  No way.

  “I can’t,” I struggled to say, my throat tightening. “I’m not supposed to talk about any of that.”

  “Not supposed to?” Jack looked at the two cops and then to me. “Who told you that you couldn’t talk about magic?”

  I glared at him. Was he serious? I practically shouted, “Everyone! In case you haven’t noticed, spells and necromancer and glowing eyes are not part of normal conversation.”

  “They are around here,” Jack assured me with a patient smile.

  Stone nodded encouragingly. “You can tell us. We’ll understand. Magic is our job.”

  Even Jones seemed to have a sympathetic look in his eye. “Please. This is important.”

  That broke me.

  For the second time that day, I told the truth, and, for the first time in a long, long time, I told all of it.

  FIVE

  The two cops and Jack patiently listened to the
whole story. Jack settled into his perch on the nearby desk, and Officer Jones pulled in another chair and resumed taking notes. At some point, Stone fetched me a cup of slightly burnt, industrial coffee and a cookie. The cookie was surprisingly delicious. However, it was the first thing I’d eaten since throwing up, so I probably would have thought cardboard tasted good.

  “He mentioned me specifically?” Jones asked.

  Around a mouthful of cookie, I said, “Yes. I mean, unless there’s another Spenser Jones in town?”

  Jones shook his head.

  “It’s not all that surprising, is it, Spense?” Jack asked. “You are the head magic copper, after all.”

  “You’re bound to be targeted,” Stone agreed.

  “I’d like to hear exactly what he said,” Jones insisted. “Do you still have the tape recorder? The pictures?”

  “Oh,” I said. Standing up, I emptied my pockets onto the desk. Jones and Stone huddled together flipping through the pictures on my phone. Jack immediately reached for the toe tag.

  “You’ve got good instincts,” he said with a bright smile, as he held up the tag. “This might be the big break we’ve been looking for.”

  “The toe tag?”

  But he didn’t answer me, as he was calling over another uniformed cop. If life were a TV show, the cop who approached us would have been typecast as “rookie.” His ginger hair was cut in a style last popular in 1952. He even had freckles across the bridge of his nose. “This is Boyd, he’s our psychometrist.”

  I felt like I’d heard that name before.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, with a nod.

  Jack explained, “Psychometry is the ability to read impressions from objects. Since this fell off the necromancer after he awoke, we might be able to get a sense of where he was going or his plans.”

  Boyd took the tag. I expected him to say something profound the instant he touched it, but instead he said, “I’ve got a bunch of stuff in front of this, but I should have results for you by morning meeting.”