Dragons & Dwarves (18 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves
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“Why would they kill him?”
“Why you think I’m calling all over the place for you, Einstein? The dragon shit blew this open, and the hell if I’m going to lose a story because of one of you op-ed prima donnas. You and I gotta talk.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“Bring your notebook, I got another CD to show you.”
 
I met up with Cutler at an all-night diner in Cleveland Heights at about four-fifteen. Cutler was getting a refill on his coffee when I walked in. I was carrying my computer, like he’d asked me.
He waved me over to the booth and waved the waitress away—rather rudely, since I didn’t get a chance to order anything myself. He ground a cigarette out in the ashtray next to him and said, “Come on, let’s boot this thing up.”
I put the notebook on the table between us. Before I opened it, I asked him. “What is it?”
He reached down and put a clear crystal case down in front of us. The platter inside had the blue tint of a recordable CD. “You ain’t going to believe this one.”
“Try me.”
“I hear Bone Daddy bites it. You aren’t the only one I’m trying to get hold of. I’m running down everyone I know who knew Bone and who might talk to me.
Everyone.
The fucking case of my fucking life is bleeding away, Maxwell. I gotta get
something.
”
“And you got this?”
“An old girlfriend—not even his current, this is, like, three bitches ago, but I’m running out of people who’ll talk, right?—I knock on he door. She doesn’t know that the cops capped her ex’s ass.”
I can picture Cutler at this woman’s door. He wasn’t exactly the soul of subtlety or discretion. This must have been only hours after the shooting, Bone wasn’t even cold yet.
“So she loses it when you tell her,” I said.
“Hell, no.” Cutler taps the CD case. “She gives me this. Says that our wizard gave it to her three years ago, saying to give it to the man who tells her he’d been killed.”
“What is it? A will?”
“I don’t know,” Cutler said. “It’s encrypted.”
I picked up the case and looked at the CD inside. I shook my head. “I hope you didn’t call me here for my prowess as a code breaker.” When it came down to it, there was enough hard encryption on the Internet that chances were that the CD was essentially useless, unbreakable without a passphrase.
Cutler shook his head. “No, but let me tell you this. Bone Daddy said to this chick, ‘Pass this on to the man who tells you I’ve been killed.’ He didn’t say, ‘when I die.’ he said ‘killed.‘”
I shrugged. “Not a tough call in his line of work.”
“Kline, this guy was an eye, a fortune-teller. He
knew
he was going to end badly. And, three years ago, he knew that someone was going to bring the news to this babe he was shacked up with.”
“Fat lot of good it does anyone if the CD’s encrypted.”
“She told me that he knew that the guy who was supposed to see this thing would know the password.”
I shrugged. “So if this guy is—was—such a seer, why don’t you know it?”
“I don’t think it is meant for me.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve tried passwords six ways from Sunday. Like I said, he’s
good.
He’d know what passphrase to use to let it fall into the right person’s lap. Not me.
You.
”
I looked at the CD. “
Me?
”
“The CD is tied up with Bone’s death. Not coincidentally, we’re talking magic here. The guy it’s for, he’s tied up with it, too.”
“What’ve I got to do with his death, Cutler?”
“You’re the last person to see him alive, outside his killers. You gave the cops the plate number of his BMW. You were in his presence and in the presence of the elves who would kill him—”
“We’re
assuming
they’re the cops who shot him.”
“Do you think we’re wrong?”
There was something about Cutler’s manner that I was starting to find unnerving. “I think you’re reaching about this CD. You were a lot more tied in with Bone Daddy than I was.”
“A day after you become involved his pet elves turn on him? I think there’s a connection.” He slid the CD across the table. “Try it.” There was an uncharacteristic note of desperation in his voice.
I opened the notebook and slipped the CD inside. “I don’t know what this is worth even if we could read it. It’s three years old.” I typed on the keyboard, trying to access the CD. Predictably, the only result was a little gray box asking for a passphrase. “How good a seer
was
this guy?”
“Damn good,” Cutler said, lighting up another cigarette.
The password box stared at me. The guy who was supposed to see this thing would know what to type.
On impulse, I typed,
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unusual.”
The little text box filled with asterisks. My finger hovered over the return key.
“Cutler, I’ve got a question for you.”
Cutler looked at my hands, still hovering over the keyboard. “What’re you waiting for? Afraid it won’t work?”
More likely, afraid that it will . . .
“How did you know I was the one who gave the plate number of his BMW to the cops?”
“Damn it, Maxwell—” he reached over and actually pressed the return key for me.
I grabbed his wrist. “What the fuck do you think you’re—” I was interrupted by a beep from my notebook as a small gray window notified me, “Loading . . .” with an ominously slow-moving progress bar.
“Cutler, if this is a virus—”
“Christ. You got the passphrase in one shot? I spent hours with that mother before I called you.”
I felt the sweat on my back freeze into solid little balls of ice on my spine. If this wasn’t a practical joke on Cutler’s part, I just guessed a sixteen-word passphrase, punctuation and all. That was better than a billion-to-one shot. The only explanation was that Bone Daddy had left this CD for
me
, and had divined my guess at a passphrase over three years ago.
The way that bar was moving, and the CD was rattling, I hoped the guy divined my processor speed and the space on my hard drive as well. I looked up at Cutler, “What did you give me?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” He looked up from the screen of my computer. “The CD
was
meant for you. Why the hell would he be giving
you
messages? After all the crap I went through—”
The questions weren’t right, and his expression was all wrong. Tense, strained, muscles taut, eyes darting, a few beads of sweat by the hairline and the upper lip. His wrist, which I still held, was shaking very slightly.
“How,” I repeated, “did you know I gave the cops Bone Daddy’s license plate number?”
“You told me you did.” The voice had lost a lot of confidence, and a note of pleading had entered it.
I shook my head. “We talked about dragons, about kidnappings, about questionings. Never once did I mention what I talked to the cops about.”
“Lucky guess, then.” I saw Cutler’s hand drift toward his chest, and stop. I saw fear in his eyes.
“What’s going on here?” I stared at the spot on his chest where his hand was moving. There was a slight bump visible beneath the thin cotton shirt. “Christ, man? Are you wearing a wire?”
I stood up, pissed and confused. I smelled a setup. Cutler raised his hands, and I saw panic in his eyes. “Kline,” he whispered. “Don’t, they’re watching.”
I don’t know exactly what possessed me. I supposed, from Aloeus’ death until this point, everything had been a step removed from me. Even my abduction had been dreamlike, not as threatening as it should have been. So, instead of sitting down and playing it out like I should have, I bent over the table and pulled Cutler’s shirt open.
No wire.
Hanging on a chain around his neck was a small charm the size of the last joint of my index finger. In a half second my brain registered what it was—
“You stupid bastard!”
Cutler was reaching for me, fury in his eyes. His hands were almost at my neck as I realized the charm was a forty-five caliber bullet covered with intricate engravings that were just starting to glow.
I was deafened by the sound of a gunshot. Cutler spasmed away from me as flecks of gore erupted from the sudden crater in his chest. The odor of smoke was rank as I watched Cutler slump backward into the booth. The casing from the charmed bullet bounced off of the table and struck my right hand, burning it. My left hand still held part of Cutler’s shirt. I let it go.
Someone screamed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
N
O, no, no. This shit is not happening.
 
I looked up, and everyone in the diner was backing away from me. I silently mouthed my innocence, knowing, already that it wouldn’t do any good.
Worse, out the windows, I saw the blue of police flashers. Too soon. They’d been waiting. There wasn’t any time. Normal course of events, I’d patiently wait for the cops. After all, I was obviously unarmed, and forensics was bound to get a lead on the magic bullet from the engraved casing.
This
wasn’t
normal. Those blue flashers probably belonged to the folks that’d just cashed in Cutler, and I saw a good likelihood that—like the late Bone Daddy—they’d shoot me and plant an appropriate weapon on my corpse after the fact. My gut told me to run, and I’ve always been good about following my gut.
I grabbed the notebook off the counter and ran for the back of the diner. I reached the emergency exit in the back before I had the thing closed. A siren started when I slammed through the door out into the parking lot in back of the diner.
There was no real cover. The cops were out front, and the diner was a single building surrounded by parking lot. Running right or left, I’d expose myself. The blue flashers were sweeping the cars in the lot to my left. If there were four of them, like last time, there would be two going into the diner, and a pair in the car to move around back. If they were smart, one got out of the car, and they were flanking me.
I ran straight back, toward a tall fence that separated the parking lot from the residences on the other half of the block. It was a twelve-foot wooden privacy fence, which I didn’t have hope of climbing without help. Fortunately I had help in the form of a Buick Century parked next to a minivan that was backed in by the fence. The cars were almost straight back.
I’m no athlete, but adrenaline and fear can do some surprising things. I sprinted flat out for the Buick, and I reached it before I heard the warning whoop of the cop car’s siren. I half jumped and half stumbled onto the hood and managed to keep moving.
Behind me I heard an elf-accented voice say, “Freeze.”
Call me an idiot, I didn’t freeze. Instead, when I scrambled on the roof of the Buick, I tossed the notebook up, over the fence. I didn’t know what was on that CD, but I knew I didn’t want my elvish adversaries to have it.
As I jumped for the roof of the minivan, I heard a gunshot. Something shattered underneath me. I cursed as I rolled on to the top of the van, the luggage rack gouging my shoulder. I didn’t let myself stop. I got into a crouch like a sprinter, gasped as I felt the effort in my groin and my left knee, and sprang toward the fence.
The top was just in reach, which was good because the protests my lower body was giving me meant I wouldn’t be able to make any substantial jump. I slammed into the flat face of the fence, slivers tearing into the meat of my hands as I grabbed its irregular top. I pulled up, trying to swing my right leg up as I kept a precarious foot on the roof of the van.
Another gunshot. It wasn’t a warning shot. It barely missed, and I could feel the impact shake the fence. The shot of life-and-death fear that gave to me was enough to convince my forty-three-year-old body to pull itself over the top.
That almost finished the job for the elves. I flipped over the top, and couldn’t hold on. I rolled off, and would have fallen the twelve feet straight down if a stand of pine trees weren’t growing up right next to the fence. I rolled off into a tree, the trunk slamming into my lower back, sending a shock through my kidneys that made me forget the splinters in my hands and the burning muscles in my legs.
The branch beneath me snapped under my weight, spilling me down onto another branch, and another, thrashing me like whips for six feet or so, before I ended folded over a branch too thick for me to break.
At this point, just about every part of my body was screaming “bad idea” at me.
I heard the branch beneath me strain. I took it as my cue to finish my descent. I tried to lower myself by my hands and drop gracefully, but the bark tried to grind the splinters deeper into my hands and I couldn’t hold myself up, even momentarily. As soon as my weight was supported by my arms, I fell.

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