Boom Time

by Michelle E Lowe

“I was told by a goddess.”

  “I see,” Kayden remarked doubtfully. “I’ll admit you have captured my interests. Continue.”

  Mara sucked in a breath. It sounded as if the wild elf didn’t believe her and her whole body rose in temperature.

  With as much composure as she could muster, Mara explained, “The Priest understood these energies would eventually find a way to come together, and then the djinn would be reborn. To keep this from happening, the Priest designed a set of laws and had his djinn slave bind itself to them before he had it destroy its kind altogether.”

  The elf again arched an eyebrow. “And what are these commandments?”

  To keep her from leaving, Mara decided to tell her. “Only the parent of the child or children with the bloodlines of the djinn is allowed to become a master, and only one parent can be alive. However, the parents are forbidden to kill each other. Even a blood relation is prohibited from killing any of those involved. If these rules are broken, then the djinn cannot return.”

  “And how exactly is the djinn recreated?”

  “Through The Life-bringing Verse. It must be read in the presence of the offspring who have these bloodlines.”

  “The Life-bringing Verse, you say? All right, what does any of this have to do with me?”

  “You are related to Pierce Landcross.”

  “And who is he?”

  “He’s the boy whom the witch wants dead.”

  “Who is this witch you are referring to?”

  “Her name is Freya Bates, but she calls herself Mother of Craft.”

  Kayden snorted. “I wasn’t aware there was another Mother of Craft. And this enchantress wants him dead?”

  Mara nodded slowly. “In order to bring forth the djinn. She has a daughter of her own who has some of these bloodlines, and Pierce is the father of the child with the other half that she needs. She plans to merge the children, thereby bringing back the most dangerous creature to have ever existed.”

  The elf’s posture stiffened and she took in a breath. Mara’s urgent tone had finally gotten through to her.

  “It is paramount we strike now,” Mara went on. “You’re Pierce’s cousin, and if you end him, it will break the Priest’s rules and ruin Freya’s plan.”

  “How do you know I’m related to him?”

  “The goddess informed me shortly after I escaped the prison the witch put me in.”

  “Is that so? Is that why you want to destroy Freya’s plan? Out of revenge for imprisoning you?”

  “This goes far beyond that,” Mara returned hotly. “What Freya wishes to accomplish puts everyone in danger.”

  “If ‘The Story of the Priest’ is even true, mare. Just because it’s been told to you doesn’t make it so. It goes for all stories.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not willing to risk it. The witch has gone to great lengths to make this happen, and I don’t believe she would have done so based on a hunch.”

  Kayden considered her statement. “Perhaps. Why not ask me to take her life?”

  “She has a god—a Trickster—protecting her. If you go after Freya, he’ll stop you and kill you. Trust me, I wish you could.” There was a long moment of silence before Mara continued. “It’ll only take a single life to stop this madness. You’re a wild elf whose free spirit is so untamable your kind is capable of bypassing certain rules.”

  “That doesn’t mean I am able to sever a mortal’s fate thread before his or her time,” the elf pointed out matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, but you’re the best option,” Mara threw in. “If anyone can kill him, it’s you. For the sake of everyone on this planet and beyond it, please . . .”

  Kayden held up her hand to stop her. “Enough, mare. I’ve heard all I need to. Where can I find Pierce Landcross?”

  Mara’s excitement blossomed. “You’ll do this?”

  “I might. Where is he?”

  “The last place I saw of him was a year ago in Plymouth.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “England. I’ve learned since then he has been out at sea, but I suspect he’s returned some time ago.”

  “Do you believe he’s in England, then?”

  “I do. I wish I could tell you where exactly, but Freya has kept a close eye on him since she found me out.”

  “Why hasn’t she killed you?”

  Mara snorted. “I’m well protected.”

  “I see,” said Kayden. “All right. I shall hunt for the boy, but I make no promises I can, or will, take his life, understand?”

  “I do.”

  The wild elf leaped high into the thick twisted branches above and vanished into the darkness of the forest.

  Mara sat cross-legged upon the tree stump. She wanted to leave, and eventually, she would, when it was safe to do so.

  Eight

  Leon Clark and Violetta Romano

  Leon Clark sat behind his desk inside his office. The tink-tink of a few metal insects tapping their robotic legs against the bronze logs got him to turn his head their way. He had a long, thirty-gallon tank housing eight spiders, five beetles, a couple of dragonflies, caterpillars, and cockroaches. He even owned an ant farm filled with tiny mechanical ants burrowing tunnels throughout their narrow glass chamber. The paint had long faded and chipped away from the insects, and some parts didn’t work well or at all. The spiders had trouble with their legs. A few were stiff, forcing them to drag them. Leon was even able to obtain a praying mantis—the hardest to find. He’d spent years locating one. It was a shame when people began destroying them. After the fall of the Machine People, nobody wanted any kind of robotic nuisance around. Thousands of insects were gathered up and incinerated. There were still some hiding out in the wild, but now they were kept mainly as illegal collectibles.

  Leon’s bugs were over a hundred years old and put together with whatever their builder could find. The praying mantis’s front legs were built from severed key shafts bolted together, and the other legs were of brass. The wings were constructed from tin and brass, and the head had been sculpted from copper with eyes made of glass. Lastly, it had a bullet for a body.

  Leon had designed the terrarium for his collection. A mixture of organic and artificial plants. Twisted wires for branches were threaded throughout the extended tank, along with living Clematis Josephine vines that sprouted attractive purple flowers. Stones carved from brass, as well as real rocks, were piled here and there. Painted tin mushrooms were set within beds of live moss, and there were desert plants sculpted from glass embedded in actual sand. The moisture and humidity that was required to keep the living plants alive never seemed to affect the metal creatures.

  After admiring his collection, he went back to jotting down how much he needed to spend of his budget for the cargo he was soon going to purchase. He documented the cost into his little black book where he kept all his most important records of purchases, along with a list of cops and city officials he had bribed.

  Leon Clark had built a pretty good enterprise for himself over the years. His nightclub, The Brass Ring, was the classiest joint in town.

  He finished writing and closed his small ledger. A painful tightness clutched his lungs, strangling them. Leon grabbed his breathing mask and pressed it to his nose and mouth. Twisting the gauge on the small brass oxygen tank, he released the air inside. It rushed into him when he inhaled, opening his lungs as it filled them. He felt the burn of the bullets within his body.

  A knock came to the door and one of his men opened it. “Mrs. Romano is here, sir.”

  Leon removed the mask, the oxygen whisking from the nebulizer and roiling around his head as Violetta Romano entered the room.

  She was a short Italian woman with a healthy physique. She had short black hair, clear blue eyes, and a round but pleasant face. The dame was classy in appearance. Romano always wore the finest clothing, applied the right amount of makeup, and smoked from pearl root cigarette holders. Despite her persona, the widow was no dumb Dora. She was almost as ruthless
as Leon used to be. A fierce crime boss, Romano could have easily taken the city if she’d had enough people working for her. Her business was located in Sugar Hill, where she had moved it after the murder of her husband, Adalgiso Romano, by Dominicus Dijk, leader of the Dutch mafia.

  With Romano were two of her bodyguards. Leon had his goon, Carl Jenkins, standing behind him. Leon never wandered about without bodyguards, except for that goddamn night when he’d been robbed.

  Romano stopped underneath the four-season art deco hanging fixture where the light was the brightest, and one of her thugs helped her out of her mink coat, folded it, and carefully laid it over his large arm. Underneath the coat, Romano wore a plum, beaded-sleeved flapper dress.

  “You’re early,” Leon noted, his weak voice finding strength after his brief episode.

  “It’s good to see you too, Leon,” she remarked, glancing at the stuffed, full-sized grizzly bear by the door. “Aren’t you going to offer a lady a drink?”

  She approached and took a seat in the chair across from him.

  Leon snapped his fingers at Carl. “The usual gin and tonic?” Leon asked her.

  She nodded and Carl immediately went to the small bar at the corner of the room and started making her request. Romano reached into her pocketbook but managed to eye the little black book as she pulled out her cigarette case. Leon opened his top drawer under the desktop and slid the book in. He twisted the key that was already inserted into the lock until it clicked.

  “I saw you using your mask,” she confessed, clicking the case open.

  It was a silver case with a golden octopus in the center of it.

  “I use it often,” he returned.

  She shifted her focus to a small jar on the desk where Leon kept some bullets that the doctors had plucked from his body on the night he was shot.

  “How has it been since the attack?”

  Subconsciously, Leon rubbed his chest. Last summer, one of his rival gangs, the Clergymen, tried snuffing him and his entire gang out. In an ambush, the Clergymen shot him and the people he was with up, including one of Leon’s dames, outside a restaurant in Harlem. They’d killed everyone but him. Leon had had eleven bullets pumped into him. Four were fired into his lungs. Doctors managed to remove two and a handful more from other parts of his body, but due to the risk to his life, the rest had to be left in. Leon spent months recuperating in the hospital. When he was finally released, he found he was confined to an oxygen tank for the remainder of his life.

  When he was well enough, he regrouped with his surviving forces and claimed his revenge on the Clergymen.

  “It hasn’t gotten any better or worse,” he answered.

  Romano nodded with a little smirk. She really wasn’t concerned for him, and why should she? She lit her cigarette and put the case away. She drew in a long drag, leaving a fresh lipstick imprint on the end of the holder.

  She blew out the smoke and said to him, “I heard you were robbed.”

  “Word travels fast in the underworld,” he grunted as Carl came over and handed her the gin and tonic.

  “So it’s true?” She rattled the cubes inside her glass before taking a drink. “Where were your men?”

  Leon had decided to go out alone to a secluded dive restaurant that served the best soul food in the city. Sometimes a man needed time to himself with his thoughts even if it was dangerous.

  “I didn’t have them with me,” he wheezed.

  The tightness in his chest took hold again. He pressed his mask to his face and breathed in deeply.

  “Do you have any idea who the ballsy thief was?”

  “No,” he answered, lowering the mask. “He was just some punk limey. I got a good look at his mug, though. He was armed with this.”

  He pulled open the drawer and slowly brought out the gun without startling her or her bodyguards. He placed it down and she leaned over to have a better look under the lamplight.

  “Is that a flintlock?”

  “It’s real, too.”

  She shook her head with a tsk. “Kids these days.”

  She took a drink and sat the glass down next to his rare elephant sculpture.

  “I’d set that on the other side,” Leon cautioned. “Any contact with liquids and the statue will flare up.”

  Romano looked at him queerly, then eyed the elephant.

  “Flare up?”

  “The statue is made purely out of sodium metal,” he explained proudly. “A touchy material that explodes in water.”

  Romano slowly pulled her gin and tonic away with a level look. “This is new?”

  “I bought it recently.”

  “Why would you want it?”

  “I enjoy collecting oddities.”

  She briefly turned her gaze to the tank of mechanical insects. “I’ve noticed. So, let’s get down to brass tacks. I called this little meeting because it’s too risky to talk over the telephone, what with the phone taps and all. My sources tell me the bull have gotten themselves tanks and are about to use them on bootleggers.”

  “I’ve heard the same news on a similar grapevine, Romano, but it isn’t like that’s top-secret information. The governor will most likely announce it soon enough.”

  “Oh, well, I thought that in regards to our treaty, I’d inform you.”

  Leon leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “Really? In that case, why didn’t you ask Kelly Quinn to be here?”

  “I don’t trust him. You better keep an eye on that Irish pug.”

  “Quinn? He’s low-rent. He only wants to make enough to stay afloat.”

  She snorted. “No man just wants anything. He’s always looking for opportunities to expand. When you assassinated Oisin Charke’s entire Clergymen gang and gutted his enterprise, did you find everything he had?”

  “Are you talking about Charke’s submarine?”

  She sipped her drink, took a drag off her smoke, and then nodded.

  “No,” Leon answered with sincerity. “I think it was just a rumor.”

  The word for some time was that Oisin Charke had bought a one-man-crew WWI submarine at an auction and was keeping it somewhere near the bay in New York City. He had planned to fix it up and use it to smuggle in booze. Leon was very interested in finding out if that was true or not. If so, then he wanted to get his hands on it. Charke had found out about the investigation when he’d caught one of Leon’s men snooping around. That night, Charke attacked.

  Romano stared at him without blinking.

  “I told you I found nothing,” Leon chided with as much force as he could muster without putting too much of a strain on his lungs.

  Whether she bought it or not, she didn’t let on. He began to suspect that there was more to this little meeting than simply giving him a warning about the police tanks.

  The assassination attempt had snuffed out much of Leon’s fight. Once he’d taken his revenge and eradicated the Clergymen from off the face of the Earth, he’d decided to form a truce between Kelly Quinn on the Greenwich Village territory and Violetta Romano in the Upper West Side. No actual treaty had been drawn up or signed. They simply gave their word that each of them would keep to their own territory and not try to expand into each other’s turf.

  “All right, Leon,” Romano said, pulling her cigarette out of the holder and crushing it into the ashtray. “I best get back before the roads ice over again.”

  She stood, but Leon stayed seated, eyeing her.

  “Good night, Romano.”

  She gave no response, only slipped into her fur coat as her goon held it open for her and left the office.

  After closing The Brass Ring, Leon made a telephone call and headed for the marina. The icy streets made for a slow drive, but eventually, his driver got him to Englewood Boat Basin in New Jersey, where Leon had rented a boathouse. Carl parked in front of a dock and then opened the door for Leon. They went into the boathouse where a few more people were sitting at a table covered with playing cards and ashtrays
on the walkway.

  Beside them was the submarine of the late Oisin Charke.

  Leon turned to Mitchell Collins, a tall, skinny cat who spoke with a lisp, and demanded, “When will it be ready?”

  “After tweaking the gearbox, your propellers are now working fine. The valves in the ballast tanks still need repairing. Otherwise, you can’t go underwater.”

  “But when will it be ready?” Leon demanded again.

  Collins stiffened. “She’ll be seaworthy in no less than a day.”

  Leon admired his underwater wonder. The machine would transport a great deal of product right under the Coast Guard’s noses. He’d make a fortune!

  He pulled in an excited breath from his mask, the oxygen bloating his weak lungs.

  He only needed to keep everyone else—especially Romano—from finding out about it. Treaty or not, the submarine was a treat for any smuggler to gain. Romano was right. No man just wants. Not when there’s room to expand. The submarine was a prize—one Leon refused to share with anyone. Murderers and cutthroats didn’t share nicely with other murderers and cutthroats.

  Nine

  Jerry’s Diner

  “Cheers for driving me, lad,” Pierce said to Frank inside the car.

  “I’z like the ways youze tawk, Chaplin.”

  Pierce wished he could say the same for Frank. Every time the man spoke, Pierce felt compelled to give him a grammar book or a dictionary.

  “You’re headin’ out to sea tomorrow,” Frank reminded him. “Youze ought to be sleeping. Youze itchin’ to get under the broad’s skirt or somethin’?”

  “Get under the broad’s skirt?”

  “Yeah, y’know—fuckin’. I mean, she’s cute an’ all, but if it’s tail youze want, I can arrange some company for ya.”

  “No, thanks. And I’m not aiming to get under her skirt, as you put it, chum. Lucy is a nice kid.”

  “Uh-huh, so youze saying you’d turn her down if she was willing to sleep with you tonight?”

  “I may be more of a gentleman than a bloke such as yourself, but I ain’t dead, either,” he said with a touch of resentment.