He came back. “Want to stop for breakfast?”
I knew his question was just a formality. If he was driving, we were stopping. I told him sure, why not. He turned down Jefferson and headed for the Perc.
Though admittedly, I did not have much of an appetite when I agreed to his request, once at the restaurant, I decided to order a two-egg omelet with toast and coffee. This, because Carlos ordered up his usual breakfast; three eggs scrambled, four bacon strips, two pancakes, hash brown potatoes, rye toast and jam with orange juice. I figured if I was going to sit there and watch him eat, I had better eat something myself. Otherwise, I might feel as if I were watching a condemned man finish his last meal. He puts that much dedication into it.
“Tell me again about the oil thing,” he said, pausing only briefly between mouthfuls of egg and bacon.
“What?”
“The other night. You and Ursula. You didn’t tell me how long it lasted. Was it like all night?”
“No. It was not all night. Besides, the amazing thing was what happened when we slipped into the black mirror. Why don’t you ask me about that?”
He shook his head. “Not as interesting. I’m more interested in naked women.”
“Forget it. It’s too embarrassing, especially after what happened yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t say.”
“You have to now. You brought it up.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tony. Tell me what happened. What? Did Ursula walk in on you taking a crap or something?”
“No, but you’re close.”
He dropped his fork. “Oh, this is juicy. Come on. You have my attention now.”
“Okay, but you cannot tell Spinelli.”
“Tony, please. Do I look like a tattle tale?”
I felt a twinge of regret for wanting to tell him, but I had to tell someone. If for no other reason than to clear my conscience. Besides, he had kept quiet about the oiling incident. I figured I could trust him on this one, too.
“I walked in on Ursula,” I said. “In the bath.”
“Nooo.”
“And I was naked.”
“Naked? Tony. Are you insane? Lilith would kill you for less.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I had no idea she was home. Remember yesterday when that cruiser soaked me out front at work?”
“You? Hell, I’m getting wet just listening to this.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“All right, but give me details.”
“It was perfectly innocent. I went home to shower and change. Lilith had called me earlier to tell me she was going shopping. Naturally, I assumed Ursula would go with her.”
“Naturally.”
“Yeah, well she didn’t. I got home, stripped naked at the front door, grabbed a towel and walked into the bathroom.”
“And?”
“And Ursula was in the tub taking a bubble bath.”
“Awesome. Wait.” He closed his eyes and drew a mental picture of the incident in his mind. “Okay. Got it. Continue?”
“What the hell was that?”
“What?”
“You were thinking of Ursula in the tub naked. Weren’t you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So stop it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like it. You know Lilith looks just like Ursula. When you picture Ursula naked you picture Lilith naked, too.”
“What, are you Dominic now?”
“No. I just don’t like you picturing my girlfriend naked.”
“Oh, listen to Mister squeaky clean over here. I’m not the one walking in on someone else’s girl with my pecker swinging in the breeze.”
“It wasn’t swinging.”
“It was hard?”
“No, it wasn’t hard.”
“Oh, it was cold. I get it. Say no more.”
“What? No. It wasn’t cold. Screw you.”
“All right, forget it. Tell me what you did next.”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you do after you walked in on her?”
“Hell, what could I do? I apologized, backed out of the room and took a shower in the other bath.”
“Huh. Man, that does sound embarrassing.”
“It was. I suppose that’s why I had that dream about her last night.”
“You dreamed about Ursula?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a dirty dream?”
I tried to stifle a growing smirk. “Well….”
“It was. Holy smoke. Stop the presses. This is great. Tell me everything.”
“No. I can’t.”
“Why? Was it that perverted?”
“No. It was not perverted at all. It was sweet and tender.”
“Really?”
I gave in and laughed. “Nah. It was erotic.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t. Sorry. Pass me the salt.”
“Did you…you know?” Carlos gestured a jerking motion with his hand and made a squirting fountain noise.
“Carlos. See, this is why I don’t tell you stuff like this. Now come on. Pass me the salt.”
“Tony, I’m here for you, man. Dirty dreams are my specialty. Now if I were you, I would––”
His phone rang and stopped him in mid sentence. I pointed to the salt. “Before you get that. Pass me––”
“Hello? Hey Billy. Yeah how are you?” He partially covered the phone to tell me it was his car salesman, Billy. I tried to tell him one more time to pass the salt, but he ignored me. “What? No, we can talk. Tell me what you found.”
I put my fork down and reached across the table as far as I could. Still, my fingertips remained just out of reach of the salt. I could see Carlos watching me, yet he made no effort to assist. My frustration nearly peaked when something astonishing happened. With just the thought of it, the saltshaker slid across the table the last several inches and into my hand on its own. Carlos’ eyes grew wide. His jaw dropped and his phone clicked shut.
“I’ll call you back,” he said, unaware he had already hung up. He looked at me in disbelief. “How did you do that?”
I shrugged at the question, not exactly sure of the answer myself. “I don’t know. I think I just pulled off a level four spell.”
“A what?”
“Sure. See, witches categorize spells by levels of difficulty. A whisper box, for instance, is a level one. A beckoning spell say, that’s a level two. Illusion spells are typically threes. A level four is when you get into some real magic. Fours consist of things like molecular modulation, or shape shifting. Then you have your fire lighting spells, the rite of passage spell and bone reconstitution, the spell that brought Ursula back.”
“Awesome.”
“I know. And of course, there is this one, the trans-molecular migration spell. It’s the dissipation of stagnant resistance through matter redistribution.”
“What, so you’re a molecular scientist now?”
“Look. Think of it as the thinning of mass between you and another object. When the mass, in this case air, thins to a near vacuum, it allows the thicker air behind the object to push it towards you. That’s what happened here.”
He shook his head at that. “This is amazing. Do it again.”
“Again? Hell I don’t know how I did it the first time. I mean, ever since I saw Lilith do it, I bet I tried it myself a hundred times. This time I wasn’t even trying.”
“It’s the coven,” he said. “You are becoming a super witch.”
I looked at my watch. “And you’re becoming a reason we might both get fired. Come on. Eat up. We have work to do.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I want to stop at the railroad crossing where Delaney kissed the train the other night. Maybe look around. See if there’s anything out of place.”
Carlos nodded, saving words so that he could shovel the rest of h
is breakfast down before I could finish mine. Damn if he didn’t do it, too.
We had barely rolled out of the parking lot of the Perc, when Carlos noticed the black sedan that had tailed us the day before. “They’re back,” he said, looking into the rearview mirror.
“The sedan?”
“Yup.”
“Sure it’s them?”
I watched his eyes ricochet from road to mirror and back again. “It’s them. Same tag.”
“All right. Let’s switch places. Get him to pass us and we’ll pull him over.”
“I’m on it, Kemosabe.”
Carlos waited until we hit a long stretch of vacant curb before pulling over suddenly. After the car passed us, we pulled out behind him and lit him up. When the lights did not get his attention, we hit the siren.
“He’s not stopping,” said Carlos.
“I see that.” I motioned a forward wave. “Just stay on him.”
We followed the sedan at speeds above the limit, but not dangerously so. And if not for the fact that he blew through every stop sign and red light he encountered, I might have thought the driver unaware we were trying to pull him over.
“What do you want to do?”
“Keep with him.”
“No. I mean you want to call back up? Get some black and whites ahead of us to toss out some sticks?”
“Yeah. Good idea. Looks like he’s heading for the docks. I’ll call it in.”
I picked up the radio and keyed the mike just as the sedan made a sudden turn down a one-way alley. Carlos yanked the wheel hard to follow, fish-tailing the cruiser and clipping a row of trashcans along the sidewalk. The cans scattered in a blizzard of garbage and tin, sending an old bagwoman scurrying for safety in a recessed doorway.
“You’re going the wrong way,” I said. “It’s a one-way alley.”
He gestured at the car in front of us. “Don’t tell me. Tell him.”
I called our position in over the radio and requested backup. “Looks like we’ll terminate at the docks,” I told dispatch, believing we could hold the sedan there once he ran out of roadway. Dispatch acknowledged and routed two units our way.
We exited the alley onto a cobblestone patch of road sandwiched between a string of fish houses and the docks.
“We have him now,” I said. “He’s going to have to stop or get mighty wet. Get ready to pin him in.”
Already, Carlos was breaking in preparation. “He’s ours. Hold on.”
The sedan skidded to a stop a couple of feet from the end of the pier. Carlos stopped behind him, tagging the car’s rear bumper and nudging it up to the edge. We bailed out with weapons drawn, assuming crouched positions behind the open car doors. Sirens in the distance indicated backup was only minutes away. Carlos ordered the occupants to exit the vehicle with their hands in the air. When they did not respond, I repeated the command. Through the tinted windows, we could see two male figures sitting perfectly still.
“They don’t hear us,” said Carlos.
I shook my head. “They hear us. They’re not listening.”
“I’m moving in. Cover me.”
“No. Wait for back up. We don’t want––”
My words yielded to the roar of a black helicopter gunship swooping in over the rooftops behind us in military fashion. It whirled around and assumed a fixed hover in front of the sedan. On its undercarriage, a double-barreled 50mm cannon trained its sights on us, while two machinegun-toting men hung from the open cargo doors like perverse gargoyles, their faces shielded behind bubbled helmet visors tinted as dark as the windows on the car.
“Holy shit!” said Carlos. “Is that one of ours?”
I shook my head. “You kidding? We don’t even have a weather balloon, let along one of those.”
“Look.” He leveled his weapon at the driver’s side door of the stopped vehicle. “They’re getting out.”
We fortified our stance and took aim at the emerging occupants. “STOP.” said a voice through a megaphone mounted on the chopper. “STAND DOWN.”
Carlos looked at me. “Is he talking to them?”
“STAND DOWN OR WE WILL FIRE.”
“No,” I said. “He’s talking to us.”
“Us? Hell no. I ain’t standing down.”
And we didn’t, but still we could not stop the two men from scaling the landing skids on the chopper and hopping in. The two black and whites arrived just as the chopper rolled back over the water, climbed some sixty feet and shot back over the rooftops.
“What just happened?” Carlos asked, his brows gathered in a nest. “Was that our military?”
“Not regular army,” I said. “That’s for sure. Did you notice that chopper had no markings?”
“CIA?”
“I don’t know about CIA, but it was definitely not the Department of Agriculture.”
He pointed at the sedan. “What do we do with that?”
“What can we do? Impound it and see who shows up to claim it. In the meantime, let us get to that railroad crossing. I have a feeling all these loose ends tie to the same big ball of yarn.”
“Biocrynetix Laboratories.”
“You got it.”
We left one of the black and whites to deal with impounding the sedan and headed across town for the railroad crossing at Lexington. It had been several days, but there were still plenty of telltale signs of the accident. The wreckage had been considerable, as broken glass, shards of sheet metal and bits of rubber still littered the gutters and easement along the tracks. We even found blood in dried pools as far as two hundred feet from the intersection. Where we really hit pay dirt, however, was at the foot of the crossing itself.
“Carlos, look at this,” I said, kneeling at a patch of rubber stretching ten feet to the tracks. “What does this tell you?”
He pulled absentmindedly at his chin whiskers. “I don’t know. Looks like someone tried to stop before hitting the warning gate. They left a big skid mark.”
“No. Look again. First, there are actually two sets of tire marks. One of them solid and evenly laid, the other starts out dark and gets lighter as it nears the tracks.”
“Okay?”
“A vehicle stopping suddenly leaves a skid pattern that starts out light and gets progressively heavier until the vehicle stops. This first vehicle here didn’t do that.”
“So what? He was peeling out, driving into the oncoming train on purpose?”
“No. he was sitting here with his foot on the brake, trying desperately not to enter onto the tracks.” I pointed at the wider set of tracks. “This second set of tire marks. This came from a bigger vehicle, maybe a light truck. You can see here that he was spinning his tires. He had his foot on the gas.”
“He pushed the first vehicle onto the tracks.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s murder.”
“Yup. Call Spinelli. Have him get forensics back here to collect what evidence they can.”
ELEVEN
Carlos and I arrived back at the office around ten o’clock. Spinelli caught up with us shortly after. He said he called the impound lot to have the sedan towed in, but when the truck arrived at the docks, agents from Homeland Security showed up and confiscated the vehicle.
“That’s bullshit,” Carlos complained. “What right do they have to take our car?”
“Every right,” said Dominic. “Homeland Security trumps NCPD every time.”
“You sure it was Homeland Security?” I asked.
He offered up a passive shrug. “They had guns, badges, IDs and wireless headsets. You tell me.”
“It’s a shadow operation,” said Carlos. “This case makes no sense.”
Spinelli agreed, adding, “If Howard Snow is dead, why are these guys still screwing with us? What do they want?”
I kicked back in my chair, propping my feet up on the desk. “Maybe Snow isn`t dead.”
“He is,” said Carlos. “We saw him get blown up in his Hummer.”
“Did you,
or did someone else get blown up?”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, the ex-roommate, maybe.”
“No, I don’t see how.”
“You said you took video of your surveillance. Where is it?”
“Still in my camera. I’ll get it.”
After Spinelli retrieved his camera, we hooked it up to my computer and uploaded segments of video from before and after the blast. One segment in particular caught my eye.
“There,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Is that supposed to be Snow running out to his car?”
“Spinelli answered, “Yeah, just before it blew up.”
“Looks like it was raining.”
“It was.”
I shook my head. “That’s not him.”
“Sure it is,” Carlos offered. “He’s wearing the same raincoat he wore when we talked to him.”
“Same raincoat, maybe. Not the same man. Look. Snow has fifty pounds and six inches over this guy. You should know that, Carlos. You stood right next to him. He’s as tall as you are. This guy’s no bigger than Dominic.”
“Tony, it all happened so fast.”
“I understand that.”
Spinelli said, “He sent the poor bastard out to start his car. He must have known it was booby trapped.”
“Is anyone checking dental records to verify the charred body in the Hummer was Snow’s?”
“Negative,” said Spinelli. “The Feds swooped in right after you left and took everything. I mean they even swept the ashes off the street and took that.”
“No. This ain’t right,” I said. “If this was a Federal case, then someone from the Bureau would have come and told us to back off. Why is it no one from the U.S. government has done that?”
“I think they have,” said Carlos. “You didn’t get the message after that helicopter gunship nearly blasted us off the docks?”
I got up from my desk and started across the room. Carlos called out, “Where you going?”
“Back to Leonard Dwyer’s house.”
“The roommate? What do you think you’ll find there?”
“Don’t know. I just want to look around some. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”
“What about me?”
“You stay here with Dominic. See what you two can find on Howard Snow that we missed. Check everything this time, past known addresses, former employers, everything. Maybe somebody is helping him. And check his passport records. If he has been out of the country lately, find out where he went, and then check flight departures to those places.”
Kiss the Witch Page 14