Dragons & Dwarves (19 page)

Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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It was a little less than six feet, and this time my fall was somewhat controlled. I hit with my legs, which buckled with the impact, not because that’s the way to absorb the impact of a fall, but because my legs were having third thoughts about supporting my weight.

This wasn’t part of my normal work experience. The most physical I ever got was about every other month when I got guilty about my lifestyle and used the gym at the
Press
building for about twenty minutes.

The ground here was lower than the parking lot, and graded away from the fence. I rolled through a bed of pine needles into the trunk of another tree. I finished facing upward, in time to see the blue lights of a cop car washing the tops of the trees.

“Fuck.”

It had reached the point where I was pissed off that I hadn’t broken any bones, which would give me a legitimate excuse just to wait here for the elves. Instead, I sucked in a breath and pulled myself up as quickly as I could manage. As I did, I whipped my head around looking for three things: pursuit, my notebook, and an escape route.

The first thing I saw was the notebook. It had hit the ground out of the shadow of the fence, where there was some light from the streetlights in the parking lot. The bad news was that the three-grand machine was now in about four separate pieces. Another thing I was going to have to justify; the machine belonged to the
Press
.

I half stumbled and half ran past the remains. I grabbed the lower half of the base unit, now just a plastic slab with a circuit board bolted to it. The keyboard was off elsewhere in two pieces, the screen even farther away. That didn’t matter right now. This section of the remains had the two important bits, the CD unit, and the hard drive.

I heard some commotion behind me, and I burst into a limping run through the backyard of the house in front of me.

By all rights, the bastards should have caught me. I wasn’t making good time on foot, and they had seen where I had jumped the fence. I’d almost considered ditching the remains of my notebook, because it seemed so inevitable.

But I eluded them. When I managed to slow down enough to think about what happened, I came up with the reason why.

These guys, while they might be cops, only had the one car. For a foot pursuit, you need backup. Cops don’t outrun suspects, they flank them. The guy chasing you is radioing your position to a second car that’s moving to cut you off. If these guys were who I thought they were—which was a guess, since I hadn’t taken the time to look back at them—then they had to radio some Cleveland Heights cops for backup. Not only would the Heights cops not immediately be in position to cut me off, but the jurisdictional issues would probably add at least a minute or so to the response time.

My getaway vehicle was a blue-and-white Americab summoned via cell phone and met in a church parking lot. I gave the guy everything in my wallet to get me downtown, which amounted to a fifty to keep his mouth shut.

As I rode, I had time to attempt a coherent explanation for what happened.

Bone Daddy was a black market mage with a long criminal record and no small ability. Cutler was investigating his connection with a quartet of SPU elves. Bone Daddy and the bent elf cops had some interest in the demise of Aloeus, and my investigation of it.

They killed Egil Nixon, presumably to cover up the fact that Aloeus was murdered. Dr. Shafran had made it clear that a murder would be impossible to mistake for an accident.

Then Bone Daddy winds up dead, presumably killed by these same SPU elves. Cutler was right that a coincidental falling out was pushing the bounds of probability. He also seemed to have access to an inside source, since it seemed pretty certain that it was these bent cops that were holding his fatal leash.

I was also becoming certain that he wasn’t telling the whole truth about the origins of the CD. I suspect that it was more than likely that the elves on the other end of that bullet handed the CD to Cutler, with marching orders to get it into my hands, preferably in a public place where they could see the keystrokes as I entered the passphrase.

Given the way he died, I doubt the elves were willing to have any unapproved data floating out there with Bone Daddy’s name on it.

I had the cabbie let me out by a bank machine, where I got a large cash advance from my
Press
Amex. Then I proceeded to disappear for a few hours.

Bone Daddy sat on a leather couch pointing a remote at a digital video camera. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans that rode on his hips. He had a muscular torso and wiry arms, both of which were covered by black tatoos, dozens of circular charms made of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin text.

The hand with the remote was trembling slightly, and the other hand carefully set a bottle of amber liquid on the glass coffee table between him and the camera. He ran his hand over the skin of his scalp and shook his head.

“Man,” he whispered. The remote clattered to the table.

Bone Daddy looked up into the camera and smiled—lips pulled tight and muscles locked. “Hello, Will,” he said. “I’m going to call you that cause I don’t know who the fuck you are. Chances are, you don’t know who the fuck I am either.” He grabbed the bottle and took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ain’t the Oracle a bitch?”

He stood up a little shakily and started pacing. “Word of advice, Will. Don’t ask questions about your own future. Especially don’t ask how you’re going to die. The Oracle ain’t going to lie to you, and the bitch ain’t going to tell you anything you can change.” He was quiet for a few moments, staring into the middle distance between him and the camera.

“You want to know what this is about, don’t you? Well, I’m dead—smoked by some motherfucker I’m supposed to trust. And, no, I don’t know who. If the bitch let me know
that
, I could do something about it, and she can’t screw a perfect record, can she?” He grabbed the neck of the half empty bottle, lifted it up, and slammed it back down on the glass table. The table shattered, leaving him holding the bottle hovering over empty space.

He stood there a moment, staring at the remains of the table. Then he let the bottle drop.

“What you are, Will,” he spoke into the camera, “is the guy most likely to fuck up the shits who killed me.” He crouched, bare feet crunching the broken glass, and stared into the lens of the camera, leaning forward as if he could see the person he was talking to. “That’s what you’re going to do.” He pointed a trembling finger up at the lens. “Fuck up these shits.”

Every muscle in his body was tense. Sweat shone on the surface of his arcane tattoos. His eyes were wide and the pupils were points, nearly invisible in the iris. Reflected in the iris was a small image of the brick-sized digital camera pointing at him.

“I know you, Will. I spent three hours with that cold bitch, and she told me things. Not your name, but I know you’re searching. Looking to find out something these shits don’t want you to know. Don’t know what, just that either you’ll find it, or these shits will kill you, too.”

He grinned. “Ain’t life a bitch?” He shook his head. “Just in case you’re thinking of dissing what I have to say—remember your quote, Mr. Shakespeare? Ironic one, too, ain’t it?”

He shifted his weight to the sound of crunching glass. If he felt the glass under his feet, it didn’t show in his face. “Anyway, I expect you understand, I know my shit. I think you also know you’re in a world of trouble, too. You’re at a nexus, Will. Right now, or very shortly, you’re going to be in the sights of powers you only brushed against till now. You’re not a powerful man and you threaten powers a lot greater than yourself.” Closed his eyes and muttered to himself, “Fuck, as if I’m telling you shit you don’t already know.”

He reached for the camera and looked down at it. His face held a haunted expression. “I’m a dead man, Will. I got wasted and wanted to know more than I should. This message might seem fucking weak, but damn it all, I tried not to seal your fate the way that I did mine. I didn’t ask if you’d succeed or fail, if you’d live or die. You still got the freedom, Will, and fuck Fate—” He stood up and walked with the camera. “I got three things I busted my hump for. You
better
use them.”

He was holding the camera right up to his face, staring into it, looking into the eyes of the person who would view this record. “You got three enemies, Will, all badasses. A villain of deeds, a villain of thoughts, and a villain of words. The first will kill you if given the chance, but he is the least of your opposition. The second is the mastermind, driving plots that others follow to your undoing. But the last is the greatest threat, for with only a well chosen word he will destroy one man, or empires unborn.”

He held up a hand with two fingers extended up to the camera. “Your path has been chosen for you by forces you’ve known and have not seen, and they fear your allegiance because the masters you serve are not theirs. The alliance they offer will not be an easy one.”

A third finger extended. “Finally, Will, there are many hands, but no head.”

He blinked and lowered the camera. “That’s all we got for you. Good luck, you poor bastard,” Bone Daddy said as he switched off the camera.

I was watching Bone Daddy’s auto-eulogy at one of the PCs in the Cleveland Public Library. You weren’t supposed to load outside software on these things, but when no one was looking, I’d slipped Bone Daddy’s CD into the base unit, and called it to life. It took me a few tries this time, I couldn’t remember the exact punctuation and capitalization that I’d used the first time.

I watched the grainy digital movie three times trying to intuit why the elves would kill over this. The whole setup with Cutler had to be to get me to unlock this CD.

I had a room at the downtown Raddison, paying cash along with another generous bribe to buy silence. I had managed to clean myself up somewhat, and get most of the crap out of my clothes. I had slept until noon, which meant that the desk clerk hadn’t phoned the cops on me.

When I had emerged, I didn’t gather too many stares. My slacks were dark and didn’t show the stains from sap, dirt, and blood. Most of the bruising was beneath my shirt which, while it had sustained a few tears and lost a button, was casual denim so it didn’t show the damage so blatantly. The remains of my notebook had made it into a dumpster behind a restaurant I passed on the way to the library.

The only thing that made me look the fugitive were my hands. The effects of splinters and pine bark had made them a bloody mess. They were mostly scabbed over now, but they had been bad enough that my bloodstained jacket had joined my notebook in the dumpster. They’d be all right if I didn’t try to make a fist.

At one-forty-five I checked for people watching me and slipped the CD out of the PC.

I still couldn’t quite get what was up with the SPU cops. If it wasn’t a bunch of elves, their actions of the last thirty-six hours would’ve struck me as desperate, even panicked. But elves were too damn cold to be panicked. The interrogation struck me as an elf job, but not Bone Daddy’s execution. That was sloppy. The little setup with me and Cutler was even worse, messy, witnesses, and not only did I make it out in one piece, but with the CD they seemed interested in.

I slipped the enigmatic disk into my pocket.

He had made it pretty clear that there was more than one power at work here.
There are many hands, but no head.

“Well,” I whispered to myself, “did we ever really believe that this thing was
just
the elves?”

I pushed away from the table and looked out the window.

The sane thing to do was to turn myself in to some clean cops. I actually knew a few. Staying on the lam like this was borrowing trouble. I knew that there’d be no way to make the charges stick, even if they’d tampered with the evidence any competent pathologist was going to be able to tell that Cutler hadn’t died from a conventional gunshot wound.

Yeah, then why don’t I?

I flipped open my cell phone—which had survived the night intact—and hit the third autodial button.

After a moment, a familiar, stressed voice said, “City desk.”

“Miss me yet, Bea.”

“Holy sh—” Her voice lowered. “What the hell are you doing? There’re cops crawling all over here.”

“I didn’t do it, Bea.”

“Christ, I know that. But we have policemen here, with
warrants.
They’ve already taken fifteen boxes of paper, your workstation—”

I knew how she felt. In spite of all the voyeurism inherent in the profession—or perhaps because of it—journalists are incredibly sensitive to invasions of privacy.

“Look, Bea, I am on to something. Big.”

“Big enough to get Cutler killed?”

“And me, if I’m not careful.”

“Where are you? I’ll send a car.”

“No, not a good idea. I just need to know, is the SPU there?”

“What are you into?”

“Are they?”

Whispered this time, “There’s an SPU detective here, why are—”