Known Devil (26 page)

I nodded. “Most people are still in bed. Well, I’m heading home, but if anything develops, don’t hesitate to call – no matter what time it is.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

 

I went home, spoke with Christine briefly, then went to bed and slept for eight hours straight. Normally, that’s a good thing – but this time, it meant that Rachel didn’t have any news worth reporting.

When I got to work, there was no message from Rachel waiting for me. I was about to go down to her office when McGuire sent Karl and me out on a call. There’d been a near-riot at Eric’s, one of the local dance clubs, the night before.. Word was, every male patron in the place had tried to rush the stage during the final number, performed by a local band called the Banshees. After a certain amount of head-scratching, management had finally decided that a supernatural influence had been at work, and called the Occult Crimes Unit.

The band members weren’t really banshees, of course. Those Irish spirits are harbingers of death, and nothing else. Their singing, although beautiful enough to break your heart, isn’t something anybody looks forward to hearing. Besides, it hasn’t got much of a backbeat.

As soon as I learned that only the male patrons had been involved in the disturbance, I thought I knew what we were dealing with. Karl and I had a conversation with the band members in the club’s dingy dressing room before they went onstage, and it didn’t take long to find out that I’d been right.

The Banshees’ bass player was a crew-cut blonde who called herself Scar, but whose real name, I finally got her to admit, was Meredith Schwartz. She didn’t usually sing, I learned, but last night they’d let her take lead vocal on the final song of their set.

I turned to Meredith. “You’re a Siren, right?”

She locked eyes with me for a couple of seconds, then looked away. “Ain’t no law against it,” she muttered. She wore a sleeveless black top, and I saw that her upper right arm bore a large heart tattoo – not the valentine kind, but an anatomically correct human heart, valves and all.

“Of course not,” I said. “There’s no law against
being
anything. It’s the stuff you
do
that can get you in a shitload of trouble.”

“There’s a city ordinance against Sirens singing in public places – or at least, in front of any audience that includes males,” Karl said. “You guys know that – or you ought to.”

“And if you’re wondering why that ordinance exists,” I said, “what happened in the club last night should give you a pretty good idea.” Looking at the three male members of the band, I asked, “How come you guys weren’t affected by her voice?”

After a moment, their leader, a beanpole named Artis Bowdin who went by the name of “Daddy Longlegs”, shrugged and said, “Earplugs, man. We always wear ’em when we play. Nobody wants to end up stone deaf, like, ten years from now. You know?”

“If you let Scar sing lead again, going deaf is gonna be the least of your problems,” Karl told them. “Incitement to riot is a felony, no matter how you do it. And you guys could also be sued for any damages that result, either to the audience or the joint where you’re playing.”

“We’re not going to bust you this time,” I said. “And the club management says there wasn’t enough wreckage to worry about – not much more than they get on an average night, anyway. But if this happens again, you guys are gonna find yourselves in a world of hurt. Understand?”

Nobody gave me an argument, which was probably the closest this bunch was ever going to get to “Yes, officer, whatever you say, sir.”

As we turned to leave, Daddy Longlegs said, “Hey – we got a gig next week at Susie B’s. You got any problem if Scar sings at that one?”

Susie B’s is the city’s biggest lesbian bar. For reasons nobody’s ever been ever to explain, women are immune to the Siren’s song.

“Sounds OK to me,” I told him. “Go wild.”

“Just be sure they keep all the windows closed while you’re playing,” Karl said. “Wouldn’t want guys who were driving past to crash their cars against the front of the building, would we?”

When we got back to the squad room, our PA, Louise the Tease, handed me a message slip that read, “See Rachel Proctor, ASAP.”

 

“It took a while, but I finally hit the jackpot,” Rachel told me. “Unlike most people I know, Annabelle isn’t compulsive about checking her email. I never was able to dig up her phone number on my own, but when she saw my message, she got back to me right away and suggested I call her. Which I did.”

“And how did that go?”

“Quite well, actually. Once I explained to her the seriousness of the matter – without telling her too much, I hope – she sent me a PDF of an article she’s written that’s already been accepted for publication in the
Journal of the American Magical Association
. That’s the most prestigious journal in the field, although Annabelle’s article won’t see print for another couple of months.”

“And this PDF she sent – it contained the spell?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve read through it once already,” Rachel said, frowning. “The mathematics and symbology are pretty involved, but thank the Goddess for computer programs that handle most of that stuff.”

“So, can you do it?”

“Keep Karl awake and functioning past dawn tomorrow?”

“That’s what we need, yeah.”

Rachel blew out a slow breath. “Maybe. If I put all other work aside and bust my hump for the next twenty-four hours or so, I might –
might
– have the spell ready in time, and if I do, it
might
even work. No guarantees.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d make the effort,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

She stared at me for a couple of seconds, a hand on one slender hip. “Explain to me again what’s going to be achieved if I put myself through all of that – an activity for which I will almost certainly
not
be paid overtime.”

I’d had a little speech prepared, in case this question should arise. I was going to talk about duty, and sacrifice, and the greater good, and blah, blah, blah. But looking at Rachel, I knew she’d see all of that as the self-serving bullshit it really was.

Then I remembered a scene from
All the
President’s Men
, that movie about the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal all those years ago. As Richard Nixon said much later, “It wasn’t biting all those people’s necks that did me in – it was the cover-up afterward.”

I’d seen the movie a several times, most recently on HBO a couple of weeks earlier. I thought about what the editor of the
Washington Post
, played by Jason Robards, had told his two star reporters near the end of the story. So I said to Rachel, “Well, there isn’t very much riding on this, really – just the election, the future of our city, and maybe a few dozen lives – human and supe both.” I tried for a casual shrug. “Not that any of that matters.”

After a couple of seconds, Rachel gave a tired-sounding sigh. “Tell Karl not to go too far from the station house tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for him – but once I am, there won’t be any time to waste.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “And thanks, Rachel.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “Thank me if the fucking thing works.”

 

Twenty-six hours later, I was standing next to my partner in Rachel’s office, saying, “I owe you a big one, Rachel. I’ve got some of an idea of how hard this must’ve been to pull off in such a short time” – how could I look at her haggard face and think anything different? – “and I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

After looking from me to Karl and back again, Rachel said, “Why don’t you wait and thank me in” – she checked her watch – “an hour and forty-two minutes.” Rachel’s habit of cynically telling us to postpone gratitude might’ve started to annoy me if I hadn’t known about all the intense effort she’d put in for this thing to work. If it did.

“What happens then?” If I’d taken a second to think, I would’ve realized the answer to that question even before Karl and Rachel said, at the same time, “Sunrise.”

The Q-and-A session with Slattery was scheduled to take place in what McGuire calls the Media Room, where us detectives go whenever there’s a briefing that involves visual material. It’s got a four-foot-square white screen on one wall and a projection system that’s hooked up to both a Blu-ray player and an Apple computer on the opposite side of the room. I once had to watch a snuff film in there that still gives me nightmares. But the projector wouldn’t be in use today.

McGuire told me he’d picked the media room because it was about the only place in the building big enough to hold the number of people who were going to be present. I was pretty sure he had another reason for the choice, too – the media room doesn’t have any windows.

But there
were
windows between the Occult Crimes squad room and the media room, and covering them to keep out the sun would probably have roused Slattery’s suspicions. So Rachel and I were in the media room with Karl well before sunrise, which was due to arrive in Scranton at 7.24 this morning, according to
Weatherwitch.com
. The three of us sat in the last row of chairs, with Karl in the middle.

“How you feeling, buddy?” I asked Karl.

“About like usual,” he said. “A little hungry, since Rachel said it was better to do this on an empty stomach. But that’s no big deal – I been hungry before. I’ll survive.”

I sure as hell hope so, I thought.

“Do you normally conk out exactly at meteorological sunrise?” Rachel asked.

“Beats the shit out of me, Rachel,” Karl said. “I don’t go by the clock.”

“Then how do you know when it’s time to close the coffin lid?” Rachel smiled. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean.” She knew that most vampires don’t spend the day inside a mahogany box these days, if they ever did. Karl used a sleeping bag, just like Christine did. I found that thinking about Karl, Christine, and sleeping bags put an image in my mind that I didn’t much care to have there, so I banished it by focusing extra-hard on what Karl was talking about.

“It’s hard to describe,” Karl said. “You can feel it coming, getting closer you know? It’s like when they give you anesthesia before surgery.”

“When did you have surgery?” I asked. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Ah, I got gang-tackled during a football game when I was in high school,” he said. “Broke my leg in three places, and they had to operate on me to fix it – put plates in or something. So, yeah, I know what anesthesia’s like.”

“
Count backward from one hundred
,” Rachel intoned with a little smile.

“Yeah, kinda like that, except without all the counting,” Karl said. “You feel yourself going, and the feeling gets stronger, and then” – he snapped his fingers – “you’re gone.”

“Well, if you start to experience that sensation, be sure and say something,” Rachel said.

“So you can do what?” he asked.

She shrugged tiredly. “Catch you before you hit the floor, I guess.”

I didn’t tell them, but I had a back-up plan ready in case the spell failed. As a favor, Homer Jordan from the ME’s office had loaned me one of those green plastic body bags that they use to transport bodies to and from the morgue. If Karl turned into a corpse at dawn, the way he usually did, I was going to get him into the body bag and find somebody stronger than Rachel to help me carry him out of the building and to the trunk of my car. The deadly sunlight would never touch him.

I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, the three of us, as we sat in that big, empty room, waiting for the sunrise. Somebody started a conversation about a TV program, but that didn’t go anywhere. Small wonder – we all worked nights, and at least one of us hadn’t seen any daytime TV for quite a while.

Then Rachel mentioned that she was a mixed martial arts fan. That surprised me a little, but then I’ve been accused of stereotyping people in the past. We got into a mild debate over whether supernaturals should have their own MMA league, and that went on until the moment when Rachel glanced at her watch, then looked up and smiled.

“What?” I asked her.

“Checked the time lately?” she said, the smile still in place.

I looked at my watch: 7.26.

Not wanting to put complete faith in either my Omega Spellmaster or the Internet’s posted time for sunrise, I stood up and said, “Excuse me a second.”

I turned left out of the media room and took the next right. Walking another twenty feet put me right in front of a window. I spent a few moments there, looking out at the sun rising over my city. This part of the building was still in shadow, dark enough for me to see my own reflection in the glass. I watch a smile sprout on my face and quickly grow into a full-out grin, like one of those high-speed films that shows a rose going from bud to bloom in only a few seconds.

I walked back to the media room and resumed my seat. Trying to sound casual, I said, “Pretty sunrise out there. Looks like it ought to be a nice day.”

Karl gave us a razor-sharp grin. “Shit,” he said. “I never even noticed.”

“Well, that was the object of the exercise,” Rachel said. Although she still looked tired, her face had a glow about it now that made even exhaustion look kind of attractive.

“Eagle, this is Houston,” I said, trying to imitate a super-serious space program guy. “Your mission is a
go
.”

 

Phillip Kevin Slattery, the Patriot Party’s candidate for mayor, was one of those guys some people refer to as Black Irish. Although his great-grandparents supposedly all came from County Cork, he didn’t look like anybody who’d be invited to dress up like a leprechaun for next year’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade – besides, everybody knows they use real leprechauns for that.