Dragon's Luck: The Dragonbound Chronicles
Page 19
I found one picture of Vic and his new car, parked in front of the family house. The next one showed Vic sitting out back of the garage, next to his flag, staring off into the distance. At least with the flagpole in its holder, he wouldn’t have been tripping every time he walked behind his car.
I sat down again and looked over the pile of stuff we’d unearthed. There wasn’t a lot to it. We’d found two Mauser pistols, one in the well with the spare tire and one hidden where someone locked in the trunk could retrieve it. Nothing special about either. The screw jack and jack handle were standard early-fifties issue, other than the wood and leather grip on the jack handle.
Boudreaux tugged on the bottom of a whiteboard covered with part numbers, swinging it up against the ceiling and revealing a hidden plasma television. He latched the white board in place and flipped the television on. “You guys said you came from Vegas, right? There’s some crazy shit happening there. I just got a news text about freak thunderstorms and a couple of meth labs blowing up.” He turned it to a weather news channel and sat down. Soon enough, they cut to a windswept woman wrapped in an oversized raincoat for local coverage of the storms in Las Vegas.
“As we showed you earlier, this is one of the storm drains that parallels Las Vegas Boulevard and carries flood waters out of town. It empties into a wash a few miles from here. From there the water flows into Lake Mead. You can see the water level in this drain is running high, around seven feet deep and moving incredibly fast. Earlier tonight, Metro Police did a sweep of those tunnels they know to be inhabited by the homeless in an attempt to evacuate as many, I guess you’d call them ‘residents’, from the storm drain system as they could in the time they had. We do know that at least twenty homeless people, possibly living together in one of the larger cisterns, were caught by the rising water and drowned.”
The scene cut to a building burning in the rain. “Emergency services were already taxed by a series of fires and possible explosions inside several abandoned properties in North Las Vegas. Police suspect the unexpected weather change may have caused unstable chemicals used in the production of methamphetamine to explode and ignite the properties in question. Police stress this is only a preliminary theory and that further investigation is needed.”
Boo turned the volume down and shook his head. “Are you sure you want to go back? Some heavy shit going on there, man.”
“Yeah, we have to.” I turned to Nadia and asked, “Any word from your parents? Were they…able to visit their friends?”
Nadia looked up from her phone and shook her head. “They tried, but the folks they wanted to meet weren’t home. Geneva says they’re going to try to set up another visit. They did pick up that kid, Toni, and Mom is going to be giving her some, uh, job mentoring.” She stretched and winced. “I need to get some actual sleep, if you want me at the top of my game tomorrow. Is there someplace I can sack out? I need at least three hours.”
“Um, just the pew out back. We spray for scorpions pretty regular, so you should be fine.”
“Lovely. I’ll take it. Don’t wake me unless somebody needs killing.” Nadia headed around to the back.
I put my head in my hands. We were no closer to figuring this out than we’d been hours ago, and we were down to ten hours plus drive time.
Boo coughed and shuffled his feet. When I looked up, he asked, “Look, I’m not saying yes, but…how much money were you thinking of offering for the car?”
I took a clue from Josephine and opened low. “Fifty, maybe sixty thousand. More, if we can get it running and make our appointment back in Vegas.”
“I see.” He pondered that for a bit before asking, “What is this all about?”
“I had a vision, telling me to come here, showing me that car, and telling me to get back to Las Vegas by seven-fifteen tonight. I thought there might be some information we needed hidden in the car, or a weapon of some kind. I mean, yes, knowledge is a weapon, it’s just that in this case I was thinking something a bit more stabby-stabby.” I picked up the wooden hood brace. “The closest we’ve come is a not-terribly-well sharpened stick.”
“Hard to gain knowledge when you don’t know what question to ask.”
“No kidding.” I looked over the pictures again, particularly at the men Vic was standing near. “Are any of the men who helped Victor with that vision ritual still alive? Maybe someone who was involved could be persuaded to talk about it.”
“Sorry, they’re all dead. There are still some living code talkers out there, but the one time I asked a couple to translate some notes Granfer left, they refused because it might be classified.”
“What notes?” I asked.
Boo took the photo of Vic next to the flagpole off the wall and removed the cardboard backing. Inside were four sheets of onionskin paper, covered with tight handwriting spelling out long strings of phonetic syllables. “I’m not as fluent as the old guys, but I know most of these words. They’re not spelling out the standard phonetic code. This is something with some kind of additional encryption. I think that’s why the other old guys won’t touch it.”
Rose walked out of the darkness, adjusting her clothes and wiggling her shoulders. “Is there a bathroom somewhere? I don’t feel like squatting on a cactus.”
Boo handed her triangular piece of wood with a key ring looped through the narrow end and pointed to the end of the garage. “You’ll need this to get in. This used to be a gas station. Only the women’s side works. Bring it back. It’s the only key we have.”
“Is there anything stored in the men’s room?” I was starting to reach for straws here.
“We use it for a battery room. There’s a shower head in there that still works, so it’s our acid safety station. What if the family wanted more for the car? Like, hundred thousand?”
I smiled. “How much do you need?”
Boo looked out the window. The first light of dawn was tinting the eastern sky and traffic was starting to pick up on the dirt road outside the gate. “I want three million. Enough for a real house for my parents, and one for my sister and her family. Enough to hire some of the kids taking auto shop once they leave school, and to hire my buddy Rosho to manage this place. He fixes diesels down at the truck stop, but he hates it.”
“And for you?”
“For me…I don’t know. Enough for me to do whatever I should be doing. I always wanted to—”
Rose’s shout and a loud thump from behind the garage cut him off. She wasn’t hurt, just angry. Boo and I ran around the building and found Rose kneeling next to the flagpole holder, scooping out large clawfuls of dirt. She’d partially transformed her hands, just enough to add muscle and Earth-breaking talons. “This thing is a hazard in the dark,” she growled.
With all the noise, Nadia looked up from where she was lying on the pew, cast a quick spell around herself, and rolled over to face the back of it.
Rose stopped digging and said, “I’m sorry, Boudreaux. This is yours and I shouldn’t just rip it out, but it really does need to be moved. Do you still even use it?”
“No, but I’d rather you don’t damage it. The family’s tried to move it before and we didn’t get anywhere. I could have cut the top off with a hack saw, but I didn’t want to do that.” Boo pointed to the edge of the buried concrete. “We’ve tried digging it out, but Granfer Vic used a huge amount of concrete in that hole.”
“It wasn’t enough,” Rose muttered. Then her hand hit something and she snatched it back. “Now what?” She poked around a bit more and said, “The concrete is expanding outward and has steel bars sticking out of it.”
“No flagpole needs that kind of support,” I said. “Any family stories about this?”
Boudreaux shook his head. “Nothing. I always thought he dug the hole with a posthole digger. You’d need a backhoe for this.”
Rose snorted, sending jets of smoke out her nose. “No, we don’t.” She stepped sideways and vanished.
“How’d she do that?” Boo asked.
Clouds filled the area where Rose had been standing, only to be pushed aside as Rose—the real Rose, all fifty feet of amethyst-colored Dragon—approached the hole. She gave Boo a toothy smile and waved her talons at him.
Boo backed away, eyes wide. I caught him by the elbow. “Relax! It’s fine. That’s what Rose really looks like.”
He stopped moving back and stared at me. Pointing to Rose, he said, “You’re tapping that?” At my nod, he added, “Goddamn, I don’t know if you’re the bravest sonofabitch in the world, or just the craziest.”
Rose slashed her talons through the topmost sections of rebar and bent the remains out of her way. I clapped Boo on the shoulder and said, “I’m the luckiest. Remind me to get your address so I can invite you to the wedding.”
Nadia finally sat up and dismissed the spell around her. “I could use another hour and…oh, wow…”She walked over to me, not taking her eyes off Rose, and handed me her phone. “Get a few pictures of us.” Nadia went the long way around the car and I took several pictures of her sitting on Rose’s shoulder and rubbing behind her ear fins. As she posed, she asked, “Is this what we came here for?”
“We’re about to find out,” Rose said. She scooted Nadia out of the way and exhaled a short, tight jet of blue flame, which she kept centered on the most exposed section of concrete. She kept the flame going for close to five minutes before she had to stop and breathe. The concrete was too hot to get close to, with trails of steam and wisps of smoke coming off it.
Rose took a deep breath and looked at us. “You might want to back up a bit.” Once we were safely around the corner of the building, she exhaled a stream of ice onto the same spot. The concrete hissed and cracked, enveloped in billowing steam. When the vapor cleared, several chunks had broken away, while others hung there, clinging to a thick copper wire mesh.
Rose crushed one of the hanging pieces to reveal more of the mesh. “This can’t be a structural component, but it has to be here for a reason.” She looked at me and asked, “Could it be a booby trap?”
“I don’t think so. Is there a wire running from it into the ground?” I tried to get a look into the hole, but the leftover heat drove me back.
Rose felt around and nodded. “At least two of them. They’re connected to heavier wires wrapped around the steel ones. What are they?”
“It’s a Faraday cage. It’s used to ground…electromagnetic energy…” I looked up at Rose. “It’s safe to crack open. I think we found what we’re looking for.”
“I found what we’re looking for,” Rose said. She drove her talons into the concrete half a dozen times in rapid succession. The concrete broke along two large faults. Rose got a good grip on one of the pieces of rebar and split a third of the block off. With a little more talon work, the iron flagpole base popped out.
It was two feet long, with a heavy, square point on the end. It was the business end of a Roman pilum, and it was old…about two thousand years old, if I was right. I took the key ring off the triangular piece of wood and slid the narrow end into the base of the spear tip. It fit, nice and solid, and the bolt holes lined up perfectly.
Boudreaux fished in a soup can and came up with two bolts that looked workable. I fastened the bolts finger-tight and held up the spear point. In the light, it was easy to see the dark, red-brown stain running the length of the iron shaft. “We need the rest of those wooden pieces.”
Rose cocked her head to the side. “I don’t smell anything special. Are you sure this is what we need?”
“It is a stabby-stabby kind of thing,” Boo said. “But, yeah, what is it?”
“It’s the Spear of Longinus. The real one. The spear that pierced the side of Jesus.” I held it against my chest as though stabbed from below. “Damn… That would punch a half-inch wide hole clear through the heart. This was what killed him. This spear had the power to kill the son of God, and it still has it.”
“Crom’s beard,” Nadia whispered. “Um, try not to poke anyone with it, agreed?”
“So now you got it,” Boo said. “What are you going to do with it?”
I turned the spear, running the light along the length of it. “Kill a demon bitch suffering from delusions of grandeur, thereby bringing an end to centuries of civil war between the Dark Elves of a parallel world and destroying a cult preying on the homeless children of Las Vegas.”
“Guess we better get the car running, then.” Boo looked up at Rose and asked, “Should we hook some tow chains to you, or what?”
Rose growled at him. It didn’t quite shake the ground.
I patted Boo on the shoulder. “That’s an ‘or what’. Let’s see what else we’ve got.”
Chapter Eighteen
It’s Three Hundred and Eighty-Two Miles to Las Vegas…
“I hope you’re right about this.” Boo set the valve cover aside and wiped his hands. “All yours.”
Nadia grimaced. “And I hope it goes back together faster than it came apart.” She held her hands over the engine and stared at it. Her jaw twitched and she narrowed her eyes. The smells of penetrating oil, gasoline, and old motor oil faded, overpowered by the stink of ozone and hot metal. As Nadia spread her fingers, decades of oil sludge and dust contamination vanished, leaving shining steel and bright paint gleaming under the garage’s work lamps.
Nadia held the spell until both engine and transmission were shining and spotless enough to eat off of. When she released the spell, she collapsed into Rose’s arms, gasping for water. I took care of that while Rose carried her into the office.
When I got back to the car, Boo was turning the engine by hand, using a baseball bat-sized socket wrench. He gave me a thumbs-up and set the wrench back in his tool box. “Granfer Vic must have known the car would be waiting a while. Draining the radiator was a good precaution. That pipe on the clutch pedal kept the plates from freezing together, so we’re in decent shape there. The oil in the cylinders kept them from seizing, and the valves cleaned up nice. We need to pull the oil pan and make sure there’s no nasty gunk in there. The bad news is all the hoses and belts need to be replaced and we got no parts that’ll work. And no, there’s nothing like this in the yard. Pickup trucks and such, those we got.”
My watch said it was a quarter of eight. Five hours left, and Kayenta was awake. I was not looking forward to explaining to Boo’s siblings why we were working on a car they couldn’t see, but Boo didn’t seem concerned. He tossed me a tube of gasket stuff and I went to work on the oil pan.
At least the news from Las Vegas had quieted down. Aerin’s last text had been a code for radio silence, but indicating all was well. Nadia shook her head after reading it, but didn’t reply.
Boo’s sister Jeanne and their brother Earl arrived at ten after eight, carrying a basket of chorizo-stuffed breakfast burritos and a carafe of fresh coffee. Neither of them saw the car as it was; they thought it was just another junker.
Jeanne looked us over and said, “You know, our cousin Harold owns a used car lot about a mile down the road. I’m sure I saw a fifties-era hard-top sedan there a few days ago. It has to be in better shape than this one.”
“Thanks, but we really want to get this one going.” I snagged a burrito and coffee. “It’s a…singular vehicle.”
“Why do we need it?” Nadia raised an eyebrow at me. “Seriously, why not rent something made in the last decade and drive back in comfort? Or look at…other options?”
“Because…” I flicked my eyes toward Jeanne. Nadia rolled her eyes, but nodded. “Because I like this car and I want it in our garage. End of discussion.”
The phone chose that moment to ring and Jeanne went into the office to answer it. I glanced around and said, “I have no idea. Driving this car back makes no sense, and if I saw this scene in a movie, I’d be yelling at the characters to just scry the bitch, teleport in behind her, and backstab her ass. We can’t do that. It’s…the timing won’t be r
ight. We can’t hit the hotel until after seven-fifteen tonight.”
“I guess that’s that, then.” Nadia punched the seat back and recoiled at the dust and bits of desiccated padding filled the air. She jumped out of the car, brushing debris off her shirt. “If we have to do six hours in this bucket, we’re damn well going to be comfortable. You might want to stand back a little.” She pointed to the boombox on the wall and it burst into life with the 1812 Overture. For several seconds, she focused, wrapping her hands and arms in layers of light. It built through the first portion of the movement, until the air felt thin and all the hairs on my arms rose up. When the cannons finally sounded, Nadia cut loose.
Liquid silver fire poured out of her hands, streaming over the car’s windows and cascading down onto the seats and instrument panel. She lifted herself off the ground, pouring fire on the ancient hoses and belts. More fire raced over and through the engine.
The music changed to the “Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem. The car lifted off the ground so the now-pristine tires could re-inflate. The body panels smoothed back to their original futuristic contours, and chrome blazed back to mirror-bright life. As the car settled back onto the cement, the body turned arterial-spray crimson with titanium-white accents.
The magic faded and Nadia sat down on a bar fridge. “All right, gentlemen. Start her engine.” She swayed back and forth a bit, steadying herself by grabbing the workbench.
I looked around the garage and into the office. Earl was finishing the carb rebuild we’d pulled Boo off of last night. He hadn’t seen any of Nadia’s display. Judging by the earbuds and MP3 player, he hadn’t even heard the music.
Jeanne and her customers in the office missed it, too. Probably the DGI field. I was just as happy not having to provide explanations.
We still needed to add oil, antifreeze, a battery, and gas, but those took only minutes. In no time, we were primed and ready to go. Boudreaux turned the key…and the engine went rur-rur-rur, just barely turning over. We swapped the battery for the newest one in the shop and tried again. The engine caught, coughed, sputtered, and died. Boo sprayed a shot of ether into the carburetor and hit it again.