Black Magic

by Steven Henry

  “He killed Kathy Grimes,” Erin said. “Sawed her in half, in front of hundreds of people. You might want to reconsider your employment prospects.”

  “She betrayed me!” Whitaker snapped. “She stole thirty thousand dollars! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that kind of money? And she was fucking that worthless, smarmy, no-talent jackass Miller! The Amazing Lucien! It’s amazing he can walk across the stage without falling over. Of course he was trying to steal my tricks! He stole everything! He never worked for anything in his life. Do you have any idea how much work, how much planning went into my act? The timing? The showmanship of it? And she was going to make me look like an idiot. She was laughing at me the whole time. All of them were. I might as well have been wearing clown makeup out there, with white face-paint and a red nose. She wanted to hurt me.”

  “So you hurt her,” Erin said. “Makes sense.”

  “I loved her! This is her fault, not mine! She made me do it. That girl would drive anyone crazy!”

  “Okay,” she said. “I think that’ll do it. Ronald Whitaker, you’re under arrest for the murder of Kathy Grimes. You have the right to remain—”

  Whitaker was fast. One moment he was standing there, shouting. The next, he was behind the girl. Something bright and shiny dropped out of his sleeve into his hand, and he was suddenly pressing a sharp-looking knife against her throat.

  Erin snatched out her Glock. “Drop it!” she shouted. “Put your hands in the air! I’ll shoot you if I have to!” Rolf bristled and growled, waiting for his takedown command.

  “Put the gun down, Detective. You wouldn’t want me to get nervous and slip.” Whitaker was moving to the side, dragging the terrified young woman with him. Erin turned, tracking him, aiming at his head. She couldn’t chance a shot. If she put a finger inside the trigger guard, he could slit the girl’s throat before she could fire. Siccing Rolf on him wasn’t the answer either. The dog was fast, but not fast enough. But there was no way she was letting him walk out of the theater with a hostage.

  “Give it up, Whitaker,” she said. “There’s only two ways this ends. Either you leave in handcuffs, or in a body bag. It’s your choice.”

  He smiled again, and said the same thing Miller had said not ten minutes before. “Are you watching closely, Detective?”

  She was, but in spite of what she and Miller had discussed, she was watching the wrong hand, the knife hand. Whitaker’s left hand flexed. A small sphere dropped to the stage. It struck with a bright flash and a puff of smoke, like an old camera flashbulb. There was a bang like a gunshot.

  The girl stumbled toward Erin, out of the smoke cloud.

  “Get behind me!” Erin ordered. She kept her pistol leveled.

  The smoke was slow to dissipate. As it drifted toward the ceiling, Erin saw only an empty stage.

  Ronald Whitaker was gone.

  Chapter 18

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Erin said aloud.

  “Help,” the girl said. She clutched at Erin’s arm.

  Erin pulled free of her. This was no time to get tangled up with a civilian. “How’d you get in?” she snapped.

  “I... I don’t...”

  “Front door? Back? Talk to me!”

  “Side...”

  “Can you get out the same way?”

  “I... I think so...”

  “Go. Now! Find another officer, tell them what happened.”

  Erin’s words had the desired effect. A little focus came back into the girl’s eyes. She turned and left the auditorium in a stumbling run, hobbled by her high heels.

  Erin grabbed her phone and speed-dialed Vic.

  “Miss me?” he said lazily.

  “Get your ass in here! Whitaker’s here! He killed Kathy!”

  “On my way,” Vic said, coming instantly alert. “Where are you?”

  “Center stage.” Erin kept turning, trying to cover every exit. “He pulled a vanishing act. Could be anywhere. Rolf! Such!”

  The Shepherd cocked his head, and Erin could see him trying to figure out which person he was supposed to follow. She pointed where Whitaker had been standing. The dog walked to the spot she’d indicated, ducked his head, sniffed, and began scratching at the boards of the stage.

  “No,” she said. “I need to know where he went!”

  Rolf kept scratching. He whined.

  Then she saw it, the faint outline of a trap door. “Son of a bitch,” she murmured. “Good boy! Zei brav!”

  The K-9 wagged his tail and kept scratching. Erin ran to the door and looked for a button, a handle, anything. She couldn’t see any way of opening it. Lifting a foot, she stomped as hard as she could. The boards held, but the door rattled and gave a little. She stomped again. Wood creaked and cracked.

  “Rolf! Hier!” she ordered.

  He obediently returned to her side.

  She briefly considered waiting for Vic. But Whitaker knew the ground better than she did, and already had a head start. Every wasted second made it more likely he’d be able to escape the theater altogether.

  “Well, here goes,” she muttered and jumped on the trapdoor as with all her weight.

  The latch gave way. She dropped straight down in a shower of splinters. Erin fell no more than eight or nine feet. She dimly saw some sort of pad, like a wrestling mat, rush up to meet her. She tried to bend her knees to take the impact, but went down heavily on her hip. She kept her grip on her gun, rolled to the side, and came up to one knee, ignoring the flare of pain in her leg.

  Rolf barked twice, sharply, looking down at his partner.

  Erin got to her feet and quickly scanned the space under the stage. Whitaker was nowhere in sight. The only illumination was the red-glowing letters of an exit sign.

  “Rolf! Hupf!” she called, giving him his “jump” command.

  He didn’t hesitate. She heard the thump of his landing. Then he was there beside her, none the worse for wear.

  “Such!” she told him again. He was off toward the exit. Erin ran after him, catching up at the door. He scratched at the base of it and gave his signal whine.

  Erin hit the door’s locking bar at full tilt and launched herself into a basement hallway. She plunged into a cloud of thick, dark smoke that smelled like gunpowder. Whitaker apparently hadn’t run out of tricks yet. As she waved a hand in front of her face, she felt Rolf push past her thigh. He vanished into the smoke. She followed.

  It was nearly pitch-black. There were a few faint emergency lights, but the smoke blotted them out. Erin had left her flashlight in the car. She promised herself never to make that mistake again. Up ahead, she heard Rolf bark. Then came a sound that buried her confusion and caution in an avalanche of pure rage. It was the distinctive rapid-fire click-click-click of a Taser, accompanied by her K-9 yelping in pain.

  Erin ran. She came out of the smoke cloud at a T-junction. Rolf was lying on the floor, legs kicking in helpless spasms. It was too dark to see the Taser wires, so she couldn’t tell where the darts had come from. She had to guess, left or right. She pivoted right, Glock leveled.

  Ronald Whitaker stood in the middle of the hallway, a Taser pistol in one hand, the blade of his knife gleaming in the other. In the red emergency lights, the weapon looked bloody. He cocked his arm back in a wind-up.

  “Drop it!” she shouted.

  He just smiled. His hand was poised.

  Erin fired twice, center mass. Whitaker shattered. One moment he was there, the next his image fell apart in sparkling shards.

  It was a mirror, Erin realized, cleverly angled so she hadn’t noticed her own reflection. Which meant Whitaker was behind her. She started to turn, twisting sideways.

  The knife tumbled end-over-end. If she hadn’t been quick, it would have buried itself squarely between her shoulder blades. She felt a sudden, deep, sickening pain in her arm, just above the elbow. The Glock dropped out of her hand and spun across the floor with the momentum of her turn.

  Whitaker put out a foot and stopped the
skittering pistol under his toe. He dropped the Taser carelessly to one side and stooped to pick up Erin’s gun. He was still smiling.

  “Presto,” he said.

  Erin gritted her teeth, ignoring the pain, ignoring the knife that still jutted from her arm. She went down to a crouch, going for her backup ankle gun, knowing she didn’t have time to draw it.

  “That’s all, folks,” Whitaker said.

  Tasers were one of the many things portrayed inaccurately in the movies. On screen, when someone took a jolt of the happy juice, they went down unconscious. In reality, Tasers incapacitated their victims by locking up muscles, overriding the brain’s electrical impulses with their own high-voltage shock. But they only worked as long as the current was flowing. Rolf had ridden the lightning, but the Taser’s timer had run out and now his muscles worked just fine. Pain didn’t stop the K-9; it just made him mad.

  The dog twisted his body, coming up off the floor with astonishing speed. Whitaker’s mouth dropped open. Before he could recover, Rolf sprang at him and clamped his jaws on the magician’s forearm. When his partner had been attacked, he didn’t need anyone to tell him what to do.

  Whitaker didn’t even get a shot off. The dog’s jaws flexed, bone cracked, and Erin’s Glock hit the floor for the second time. The magician followed it down, dragged to the ground by ninety pounds of pissed-off K-9.

  Erin came up with her backup revolver in her left hand. She hurried to the fallen man and snatched up her sidearm. “Don’t move,” she said through clenched teeth. “You fight him, it only gets worse.”

  “Erin! Erin!”

  “Down here, Vic!” she yelled. “Under the stage, down the hallway!”

  A flashlight beam showed through the smoke-bomb’s murk. It was followed in short order by Vic, flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other. The big Russian took in the scene. Erin was standing over her dog and her prisoner, guns in both hands, blood running down her arm.

  He whistled. “Damn, girl. How come you gotta have all the fun without me?”

  “Shut up and cover this asshole,” she growled, holstering her guns and taking out her cuffs. “As I was saying, Ronald Whitaker, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent...”

  Once they had the cuffs on Whitaker, Erin yanked the Taser needles out of Rolf. The dog was apparently uninjured, but he kept bristling and growling, giving Whitaker a very unfriendly stare. Only then did Erin let Vic take a look at her arm.

  “You’re fine,” he announced after a quick inspection. “It went in the bicep, clean entry. The artery’s not hit, and neither is the bone. We’d better leave it in until we get a first-aid kit. It’ll bleed some, and you’ll want to get it stitched up, but it’ll just leave a scar.”

  “And chicks dig scars, right?” she said.

  “Damn right,” he said. “Hey, you got stabbed in a knife fight. Not everyone can say that.”

  “I’d hardly call it a knife fight,” Whitaker said.

  “Shut up,” Vic said. “You’re just lucky my partner’s more forgiving than I am. I oughta take this knife out of her and shove it right up your magic ass.”

  “I’ll be filing suit against the department, of course,” Whitaker went on. “Excessive force. A magician’s hands are his greatest asset. Your animal broke my arm. This is a career-affecting injury. When my lawyer hears—”

  “When your lawyer hears what went down,” Vic said with a grim smile, “he’s just gonna have two words for you. The first one is ‘plea,’ the second is ‘bargain.’ Morris is a weasel, but he’s a smart weasel. I’d listen to him.”

  “You’ve got a class A misdemeanor for zapping my dog,” Erin said. “Plus a class B violent felony for knifing me. That’s on top of the murder charge. You ever want to see the street again, I agree with Vic.” She turned to the other detective. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They followed the Exit signs to a back stairway, which eventually led them to the service door by which they’d entered the theater. Vic held on to Whitaker, letting Erin concentrate on her injury and her dog. They stepped outside and started toward Erin’s Charger, which was where they’d left it in the alley.

  “Hey, Vic?” Erin asked as they got closer. “What’d you do with Miller?”

  “He’s in the back,” Vic said.

  She squinted at the tinted glass. “No, he’s not.”

  “Yeah, he is,” Vic said. “I left the cuffs on him and everything.”

  Erin opened the back door of her car and wordlessly indicated an empty vehicle.

  Vic stood there like he’d taken a baseball bat to the face. He blinked a couple of times. “He’s not here,” he finally said.

  Erin felt a slightly hysterical smile spread across her face. “Tell me again, Vic, how you left a magician all alone, handcuffed, in a locked car?”

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Son of a goddamn bitch. I’m never gonna live this one down, am I?”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “Better call it in. We’ve got one in custody, and another running. We’ll put out a BOLO. I don’t care if he’s a magician, I don’t think he’ll get far. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this knife out of my arm.”

  Chapter 19

  “O’Reilly. Neshenko. Something you want to share with me?” Webb asked.

  “Sorry, sir,” Erin said. “We got sidetracked.”

  “But we got our guy,” Vic said.

  “Really? Who?”

  “Whitaker,” Vic said. “Turns out, he sawed his assistant in half.”

  “We knew that already,” Webb said. “Did you find out who monkeyed with his equipment?”

  “He did it himself,” Erin said. “He wanted to make it look like someone else sabotaged it. He hoped we’d blame Miller.”

  “Which we did,” Vic said. “For about, oh, five minutes.”

  “I got a confession out of Whitaker,” Erin said. “Plus, he tased my dog. And stabbed me.”

  Webb stood up suddenly. “You hurt? Where?”

  “It’s not bad.” She flexed her right arm with more enthusiasm than she really wanted to. Pain pulsed through her bicep. She tried to suppress a wince. “We swung by Urgent Care on the way back to the precinct. I got it stitched up. I’ll be fine.”

  “Jesus.” Webb sat down again. “You didn’t shoot Whitaker, did you?”

  “No, but Rolf bit him,” she said. “Whitaker needed some first aid, too. But he’ll be okay to stand trial.”

  “Your dog got tased, and then bit him anyway?”

  “He’s a badass, sir,” Erin said.

  Rolf gave Webb a look as if to say he was, indeed, a badass.

  “And you got stabbed, but successfully arrested him?” Webb went on.

  “Yes, sir,” Erin said.

  “She’s a badass, too,” Vic said.

  “Where were you while all this was going down?”

  “I was watching our other prisoner.”

  “Who is...?”

  “Louis Miller,” Erin said.

  “But he didn’t kill Grimes.”

  “No,” she confirmed.

  “So you turned him loose?”

  Erin glanced at Vic. “Not exactly,” she said. “He was involved with a conspiracy to steal thirty thousand dollars. Plus he broke into a crime scene.”

  “Okay,” Webb said. “Where’s he now?”

  Erin and Vic shared another glance.

  “What?” Webb asked.

  “I called Vic for backup,” Erin said. “He left Miller cuffed in my Charger. It turns out, leaving an escape artist by himself wasn’t a good way to keep him in custody.”

  Webb actually cracked a smile. “So he’s in the wind?”

  “We already put out a BOLO,” she said.

  “And where’s Whitaker? You didn’t lose him, too, did you?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s in Interrogation Room One, waiting for his lawyer.”

  “How solid is the evidence?” Webb ask
ed.

  “Most of it is fairly circumstantial,” she admitted. “But he assaulted my dog and tried to kill me. And he did confess in front of a civilian.”

  “Tell me you got her statement,” Webb said.

  “No, but she ran straight to the nearest squad car,” Vic said, glad to give his commanding officer some good news. “Told them a crazy magician had held her at knife-point and was fighting with a cop. We’ll have her in shortly.”

  Webb smiled more broadly. “It’s always a pleasant surprise when civvies do the right thing,” he said. “So we’ve got Whitaker on assaulting her, too?”

  “He took her hostage and held a knife to her throat,” Erin confirmed.

  “This guy’s toast,” Vic said.

  “Not even lunchtime yet,” Webb said. “What are we going to do with the rest of the day?”

  “Well, sir...” Erin began.

  “That was rhetorical, O’Reilly,” he interrupted. “You’re going to do paperwork. You can start with the 61s, then the DD-5s, then the arrest reports, and... Get back here, Neshenko! Your name needs to be on the forms, too.”

  Vic had been unsuccessfully attempting to sidle out of the Major Crimes office. He shuffled back to his desk and sat down with a sigh.

  “Sir, I have one other thing to take care of,” Erin said.

  “What’s that?” Webb asked.

  “Loose end from the Bucklington case.”

  “Auto Crimes has him.”

  “It’s just one thing to run down.”

  “Can you do it from this office?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I have to go up to the Bronx.”

  “Then you can do it after you’ve finished your paperwork,” Webb said relentlessly. “God, I feel like a substitute teacher today.”

  Vic glanced up. “It’s okay, Erin,” he said. “Just tell him your dog ate your arrest reports.”

  Erin was already kicking herself as she drove up to the Bronx in the late afternoon. She should’ve taken care of this business already. She’d just been too distracted, too upset, not herself.