city of dragons 07 - fire and flood

by Val St. Crowe

  I gripped my phone, cringing. “Why? Is she pissed at me for not calling?”

  “I told her she should just call you herself,” said Connor, “but she’s stubborn.”

  “Did something bad happen? Are you guys okay?”

  “Oh, we’re fine,” said Connor. “She just was under the impression that you were going to want a daily accounting of everything that’s been going on over at the hotel, I think. She wanted you to call and her to tell you that they put in new flooring or that they painted the walls in the downstairs bathroom or whatever.”

  “I’ll call her after I get off the phone with you,” I said.

  “I guess you’re not calling about the hotel?”

  “I had a question about computer stuff,” I said.

  “Ooh.” There was excitement in his voice. “I get to help with the case? Awesome.”

  “Actually, you might be a big help,” I said. “Do you know anything about electronic locks in a prison?”

  “Are they key cards?”

  “No, they’re real locks,” I said. “They have metal keys, but they can also be opened remotely, from a computer. Do you think that’s something that could be hacked?”

  “Uh… well, I don’t really know about hacking per se,” said Connor.

  “Could someone take control of the system and make the doors open?”

  “Maybe? I don’t know. I can look into it if you want me to.”

  “I would love that. Thank you so much.”

  “Not a problem. Let you know what I find out.”

  I hesitated. “So, what’s going on with the hotel?”

  He laughed. “Call Felicity.”

  I hung up with him, and I did. Felicity didn’t seem upset at not having heard from me, but she did go on and on detailing every single thing that had been done to the hotel, which was a lot of stuff. The jist of it was that progress was being made quickly, and that I could possibly reopen soon.

  It was good news, but I was wary. I couldn’t help but fear that the minute I got the hotel up and running the Green King would strike again, tearing down everything I’d rebuilt.

  Though I was relieved that we hadn’t had any further attacks, I was anxious as well. Why hadn’t he struck at us again? What was he waiting for? And when was he going to attack the next time?

  * * *

  The next morning, Lachlan and I took the rental car and a flock of dragons to visit jail drug kingpin Simon Wells’s empty house. Wells hadn’t sold it or anything, despite being behind bars for years. He was apparently single and had lived alone, so there was no one currently occupying the house. Obviously, he was making enough money selling drugs that he didn’t need to worry about wanting revenue from the sale of a house. He could pay to keep this one, even if he wasn’t living in it. It would be here, waiting for him, should he ever get out of prison.

  The house was nice, but not overly fancy. It was two stories tall, with three nicely decorated bedrooms. Most of the furniture was covered in sheets, but the steps to the upper level were a deep, polished, dark wood.

  And I knew so much about the interior of the house, because Lachlan and I had broken in.

  Technically, there had been no breaking of anything. Lachlan and I could use magic to open deadbolts easily enough, and so we had been able to get into the basement door that way.

  Once inside, we went up to the second floor and walked through all the rooms—kitchen, dining room, living room, and bathroom—before heading up the dark wood steps.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked as I trooped up behind Lachlan.

  “Anything that might prove he’s a drug dealer,” said Lachlan. “Anything that might connect him to Tim or to Jonah Poole.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lachlan. “But I’ll know it when I see it.”

  At the top of the steps, we split up. I went into one of the guest bedrooms and Lachlan went down to the master. The bed in here wasn’t made and the closet was empty. So was the chest of drawers, except the bottom drawer, which was stuffed full of three different Christmas tree skirts, one of which was purple. I didn’t really think purple was a Christmas color.

  On the other hand, maybe it could be pretty. Purple and gold together? Even purple, green, and gold.

  But no red, of course. Red would clash. Probably because red was in purple. Of course blue was in purple, and blue was also in green, and they looked nice together. Maybe that was the ticket.

  No.

  Because orange and purple? Ugh. And both of those colors had red in them.

  So—

  A gurgling noise interrupted me. It had been faint, but somehow sinister. I swallowed, feeling a shot of adrenaline go through me.

  I shook myself. It was only a noise. It must have come from the bathroom attached to this bedroom. The door was next to the closet.

  Thrusting the door open, I was greeted by a closed shower curtain covered in illustrated lady bugs. They were meant to be cutesy, but there was something about their little eyes that I didn’t like. They looked a little creepy. I felt as if the lady bugs were all watching me.

  I gulped. I pushed aside the shower curtain.

  There was a little puddle of water over the plug, which was stopped up. Which was weird, because the toilet was completely drained and winterized, with the back of the tank propped up against the sink.

  Where was that water coming from if the water in the house was turned off?

  Why had I heard a gurgling noise?

  And now, the air seemed full of something impending, and it was surrounding me. I could almost hear it, like a crackle in the stillness.

  Could the Green King have brought the water? Hadn’t I said something earlier about the Green King coming through the pipes? Maybe it wasn’t him in the flesh, but one of his underlings instead. Maybe the children of the deep were inside the pipes, watching me and waiting.

  At any moment, water would gush out of the shower head and gush out of the sink, and splash upwards out of the toilet like a water fountain, and the Green King would be inside it. I’d be tugged down into the dark water again, like I had been on the beach, tangled up and unable to fight.

  No, no, no.

  I shuddered.

  The gurgling noise again.

  I peered down at the water in the bathtub, expecting it to be rippling. But it was still and placid.

  I licked my lips.

  And then I reached down and let my fingers penetrate the surface of the water. It was a little cold, but it wasn’t freezing.

  I cringed, waiting for something to happen.

  Nothing did, so I pressed deeper.

  Now, surely the Green King would…

  But nothing happened. So, I pulled the plug and the water swirled down the drain.

  Then, everything was still and quiet.

  Well, except for the thudding of my own heart, which was louder than it had any right to be.

  Wait. Was it too quiet? Shouldn’t I hear Lachlan? I listened.

  I didn’t hear anything.

  I backed out of the bathroom, unable to take my eyes off the drain where the water had gone down.

  Trying to summon my voice, I parted my lips. But no sound came out of my mouth. I wanted to call for Lachlan. I didn’t.

  I stared into the bathroom for several more seconds.

  And then I turned my back on the drain.

  I could feel something at my back.

  I turned back around.

  And then—out of the corner of my eye—movement. A dark shadow.

  I whirled, pulling all my magic into the pit of my stomach, ready to release it.

  “There you are,” said a voice.

  I screamed, blowing out fire at the same time.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Lachlan held up both of his hands. Because, of course, it was Lachlan. Only Lachlan.

  I dragged a hand over my face. “Jesus Christ, Lachlan, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “Yea
h, I see that,” he said. “I was coming to get you. I want you to look at something.”

  I tried to steady my breathing.

  But he was already heading down the hallway toward the master bedroom without me. “Come on.”

  I followed him, but my whole body was still trembling.

  He led me to the master bathroom. He sat down on the floor next to a basket of magazines and books that sat beside the toilet, and held up a high school yearbook. “Look what was in here.”

  “A yearbook?”

  “Not just any yearbook,” said Lachlan. “This is Tim’s yearbook.”

  “What?” I said. “No way.”

  “Way,” said Lachlan. “Come here. I’ll show you.”

  I crossed the bathroom to him and settled down on the tile floor next to him. Lachlan shoved the open book at me, tapping a picture. “Look. There he is.”

  “That’s him?” I said, cocking my head to take him in.

  “Oh,” he said. “I forgot that you’ve never seen him before.”

  Tim looked like a normal kid. Short-cropped hair combed for the picture, a hesitant smile that only showed a hint of his teeth. Next to his picture, his name was printed. That was him.

  I turned to Lachlan. “Why would Wells have Tim’s yearbook?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lachlan. “It’s weird.”

  “Maybe there’s more to all of this. Maybe he wasn’t just killing Tim to send a message to others that they needed to pay for their drugs. Maybe this was personal in some way.”

  “But how could it be personal? What could the connection between them be?” said Lachlan.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I’m beginning to think you got a thing for me, sweetheart,” Wells leered at me from the other end of the interrogation room.

  “Don’t talk to her,” said Lachlan in a clipped voice. “She doesn’t have a thing for you.”

  Wells raised his eyebrows. “Well, well. So, you two…” He pointed back and forth between us. “Workplace romance?”

  I glared at Lachlan. He was going to make this all worse, wasn’t he?

  Lachlan decided to ignore the comment, thankfully. “How did you know Tim Abbott?”

  “What do you mean? What kind of question is that?”

  “We know that there’s a deeper connection between the two of you, something that’s lasted longer than just your association here in the prison.”

  “No,” said Wells. “There’s no deep connection.”

  Lachlan and I exchanged a glance. He was denying something? This was basically the first time Wells had volunteered anything.

  “But you knew him,” said Lachlan. “Before you were locked up?”

  “Before I was locked up which time?” said Wells, laughing.

  Lachlan folded his arms over his chest.

  “Look, usually, when I get locked up, it’s in some prison halfway across the state, too far for anyone in my family to visit. But this time, I happened to get put in jail in my own back yard,” said Wells. “I’m from the community. And so was Tim. So, I mean, I knew about him killing his sister. Little known fact, he actually shot his stepdad, too, but the guy didn’t die because he was secretly a vampire. It never made the news. People were too focused on the little girl. Did you know about the stepdad?”

  Lachlan licked his lips. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true,” said Wells. “But that’s the only thing I knew about him.”

  “Nothing else?” said Lachlan. “Nothing about his high school?”

  “What would I know about his high school? It’s the same high school everyone in town goes to, isn’t it? There something special about the school?” Wells turned back to me. “Listen, beautiful, I’m not admitting to anything, but if you’re interested in some, uh, refreshment, I could get you a real sweet deal on something. Ask some of the guards in this establishment if they haven’t sampled and enjoyed, eh?” He winked at me.

  After he left, because that was the extent of what we could get out of him, Lachlan sagged in his chair. “Doesn’t make sense. He has Tim’s yearbook, but he doesn’t know who I am? He paid enough attention to know about my being a vampire, but not enough to get it right to remember who it was.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “or maybe he knows exactly who you are, has known the whole time, and he’s playing games with us.”

  “Huh,” said Lachlan. “You might be right. Who knows how deep this all goes?”

  “He’s still at the top of the list for me,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m getting there,” said Lachlan. “I only wish I had some inkling what this could all be about. What’s his motive? Why would he kill Tim?”

  “And what’s up with him saying he could sell me drugs, and that he sells to the guards in here?” I said. “Was that some kind of threat? Does he think they’ll protect him just because he has dirt on them?”

  Lachlan sighed. “That’s a strong possibility.”

  “Really? I was just throwing it out there,” I said. “Score one for me.”

  * * *

  Zach opened the door to his office and let us inside. “Hey, guys. Good to see you. How was your chat with Simon Wells? Was he any more forthcoming than before?”

  Lachlan pushed his way inside and went over to the chairs sitting in front of Zach’s desk. He didn’t sit down, though. He gripped the back of the chair. “Hey, first of all, do you know if there are alarms on the fences?”

  “Uh, there’s razor wire on the fences,” said Zach. “No one’s climbing those things. They’d get cut to ribbons.”

  “What if someone tampered with the fences using magic?” said Lachlan.

  Zach knitted his brow together. “Yeah, I guess we didn’t think of that. There aren’t many people out here doing magic. You gotta understand that.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Lachlan. “That’s why you’re so vulnerable to it.”

  Zach sighed. “You think someone could have gotten into the prison and we didn’t know, huh?”

  “Gotten close enough to do magic at least,” said Lachlan. “It’s a theory we’re working on.” He let go of the back of the chair. “But leave that aside for a minute. Here’s something else. You know of any guards who would buy drugs from Wells?”

  Zach raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “People who might protect him?” said Lachlan. “Guards who he might blackmail to get his way. Maybe to let him out of his cell at night or into another?”

  “Whoa,” said Zach. “You think that’s how he did it?”

  “I take it you can’t think of anyone?” said Lachlan.

  Zach pointed at himself. “Well, I’m clean, man. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t buy them, and if one of the other guys did, he would know not to talk to me about it. Hell, I barely ever even have a beer or two, to be truthful. I don’t much like the feeling of being drunk. It reminds me of being on some kind of amusement park ride you can’t get off.”

  “So, you think it’s possible there’s a dirty guard or two in the prison?”

  “Anything’s possible,” said Zach. “But if you’re asking for names, I can’t think of anyone who seems likely. I’m friendly with all the guys who work the same shifts as me, and none of them strike me as the druggy type.” He furrowed his brow. “What brought all this on?”

  “Something Wells said,” said Lachlan. “If it’s true, he wouldn’t have needed a magical talisman after all.”

  “Well, I can promise you that I never helped him do anything,” said Zach. “And you know what I can do for you? I can get you transcripts of every phone conversation he’s had in prison. We’ve been keeping tabs on him ever since we figured he was doing something suspicious.”

  “Oh, that would be great,” said Lachlan.

  “Yeah, the only thing is, they’re in code,” said Zach. “He doesn’t straight-up say he’s doing a drug deal. We think we’ve got a handle on the code, but because we can’t be sure, it’s still not enough to charge him. I’ll
bring you our cipher too.”

  “Thanks,” said Lachlan.

  * * *

  Hours later, we had waded through pages and pages of conversation, and I wasn’t sure it had gotten us much of anywhere. Wells had two different ways to use the code. He would sometimes talk about food—different kinds of food, but food was the dominant theme. He’d say things like, “Is Jemima getting enough to eat?” or “You know what we’re really missing in here is home cooking.” The precise meanings of these phrases were speculated on by the cipher that Zach had given us. Home cooking was thought to refer to meth. But food in general was just drugs. It seemed that he’d assigned several varied ingredients to the same drug. They’d all be within various cuisines. So, he’d have words for pot and cocaine within Italian cuisine and words for the same things in Mexican cuisine. This allowed him to talk about different kinds of food during different conversations, and it added a sophisticated layer to his code.

  His other theme for code was to talk about real estate. He would have long conversations about houses for sale in various neighborhoods. The people who had made the cipher would look up these addresses, and the houses were not for sale. Easy enough, they figured. They started staking out the addresses mentioned, thinking that drug deals were going to go down there. But no one ever showed up at the addresses. So, the addresses weren’t literal. They didn’t know what the addresses actually corresponded to, though. They’d tried some simple things, like inverting the numbers or changing east to west and north to south and none of that had worked. That part of the code wasn’t cracked for now.

  But it hardly mattered to us. We weren’t interested in the ins and outs of his drug selling business. Instead, we wanted to know what his connection was with Tim.

  The transcripts had been provided to us electronically, which meant that we could use a search function on them—which was a lifesaver—but we couldn’t find any mentions of Tim or of his high school or of yearbooks. We were spitting in the wind.

  We did note that he had most of his phone conversations with a guy named Matt Black, who was probably his associate in the drug business, we figured. He was someone to talk to in the future.

  And there was also a strange conversation that didn’t seem to be written in code, which went something like this.