Something Magic This Way Comes (25 page)

We turn to see the little critter who started the whole thing.

“You betcha,” says Joey. “Make him go away.”

The creature says something in French or some other alien tongue, makes a mystic sign in the air, and
whoosh!
, Milton is gone (though he later turns up in a house of excellent repute in Brooklyn.)

“I’ll have a tall one,” says the critter.

“You got it,” says Joey, drawing one from what remains of the tap. “By the way, I’m really sorry we hassled you before. You looking for work?”

The critter shrugs. “Doing what?”

“Protection,” says Joey. “Keeping the riffraff out of my establishment.”

“Sure, why not?” He extends a wiry little threefingered hand. “By the way, my name’s Louie.”

“Louie,” says Joey Chicago, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

H
ARRY Wilson stood across the small street from the park where a pickup game of football was being played. He looked up as a shadow passed overhead.

A huge black bird landed on the power pole above him. The bird cocked his head as if he were watching the people across the street running on the grass. The bird croaked and launched himself again, wings spread wide, and soared across the field.

Harry pulled a small digital camera out of his jacket pocket and walked across the street to the little park and the touch football game he’d been watching. He stood on the sidewalk, with the camera half-hidden in his hand. He waited until one of the players ran very close to where he was standing and then quickly snapped the player’s picture. The player didn’t notice, in the press of the play.

Harry waited until the game broke up and then approached the player he’d photographed.

“Excuse me,” he asked, “are you Darryl Jones?”

“Huh?” the player responded, toweling off his sweaty hair. “Yeah, I’m Darryl.”

“Darryl, is that your wheelchair over there?” Harry pointed to a very expensive black and chrome wheelchair, sitting beside one of the cars, a “handicapped” placard visible through the windshield.

Sudden light dawning, Darryl stood straight and glared at Harry. “Who wants to know?”

“Federal Mutual Insurance Company, Darryl,” Harry drawled. “That’s a gotcha.”

“You son of a—” Darryl began, but Harry held up his hand.

“Don’t say anything, Darryl. Our attorneys will be talking to yours in the morning. I think we might be able to settle your personal injury claim pretty quick now, don’t you?”

Harry fumbled the cell phone from his coat.

“Charlie, Harry here,” he barked, then listened.

“Yeah, I got him,” he answered. “Playing touch football. Both telephoto and closeup. Told him, too. I expect you’ll be able to get an abandonment of claim in the morning. I’ll email you the pictures from the digital camera when I get back to the office.”

Harry turned and walked back across the street, unlocked the door of his old Volvo, got in, closed the door, started it and drove off. During all this, Darryl Jones stood, frozen, with his mouth open.

Harry drove up the hill toward Maple Valley in the late afternoon traffic. He drove past Earthworks Park, with its sign advertising a Renaissance Faire. He figured he’d go one of these days. He had always wondered what he’d have done had he been born in Elizabeth I’s England. He snorted to himself as his inner cynic reminded him that his family had always been poor and that the lot of the poor in Elizabethan England was not the bright and shining past celebrated by Renaissance Fairs.

His cell phone rang. He fumbled it out without taking his eyes off the road, and thumbed it open.

“Hey, Harry, this is George! Your favorite Muckleshoot!”

“Hello, George, long time . . .”

“You up for a game of pool? I’m at the Piranha Tavern and I’ve got a table free.”

“Yeah. I can be there in . . .” Harry checked the traffic. “. . . about ten or fifteen.”

“We’re good to go. I can beat off the table stealers until then. Beer?”

“Sure. Just make it a cold one.”

“Will do.”

Harry smiled. Nobody ever remembered the actual name of the dive George was calling from because of the painting of the enormous piranha on the wall of the building facing the road and the marquee sign that said “35 pound piranha” above the door. Depending on the state of the fish’s health, there might even be a real piranha in the aquarium at the end of the bar.

Harry always believed it was really just a huge oscar, but Dave the bartender insisted on its piranhahood, and neither Harry nor the fish cared enough to argue.

* * *

Today, the place was pretty busy, especially since it wasn’t yet five o’clock. It was a famous lie that it always rained in the Pacific Northwest. The sky was blue, without clouds, and the June day’s temperature was in the high seventies. Very nice.

He pulled into the dirt and gravel parking lot, turned off the Volvo. He looked south and saw the huge white cloud shrouded shape of Mt. Rainier. Even though it was less than thirty miles away, it was raining and snowing on the huge volcano. No wonder the Native Americans feared and worshiped the mountain as a god. Harry could see the big divot on the mountain’s side where the last explosion had blown out the side of the volcano, sending a huge wall of superheated mud and stones straight at Puget Sound at a thousand miles an hour. If it happened again, like right now, Harry reflected, where he was standing might be high enough to escape. Maybe not.

A huge black bird swooped down and landed on the roof of the old Volvo, startling Harry. He looked at Harry, first with one eye, then the other, cocking his head.

“Well, hello, bird,” Harry said.

The bird croaked back, as if acknowledging the greeting.

“Nice day,” Harry said, “so please don’t mess up my car, okay?”

The bird ducked his head, cocked it from side to side, and then croaked softly, as if agreeing.

“Thank you, kind sir,” Harry said, lifting his hand in a wave. The bird mantled his feathers, and took off, landing on the very top of the power pole that served the tavern. Harry laughed and went inside. It was dark as sin and smelled of very old beer.

Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he spotted George Mason. George was a Muckleshoot. Many of the other Native American tribes and a lot of local whites still didn’t think Muckleshoots were really a tribe, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs had ruled them a real tribe and given them a postage-stamp-sized reservation on the slopes of Mt. Rainier between Puyallup and Tacoma. Mostly, as far as Harry could tell, they used the reservation for a school, a cigarette store and a huge casino and amphitheater, which were making a very large amount of money for the tribe. It was George’s oft-stated belief that it was only fair that the Muckleshoots should be fleecing the mostly white and Hispanic gambling crowds since in their turn, they had fleeced the Muckleshoots of their traditional fishing grounds up the Puyallup River.

George, a little over five feet three, and like many West Coast Native Americans, almost as wide, was standing next to an open pool table way in the back, near the door to the outdoor beer garden. He saw Harry enter and waved his pool cue over his head, causing a stray patron trying to get past him to go outside to flinch and duck as the cue swept through the air where his head had just been.

“Sorry, man,” George rumbled. The patron was a biker, and he looked for a minute as though he wanted to discuss the matter further. George’s eyes got hard, and the biker noticed that for all his bulk, not much of George was fat.

“Yeah, sure, man,” the biker replied nervously, as he headed out the door carrying his beer bottle.

“Heya, Harry!” George greeted him, and motioned him toward a bottle of Pyramid sitting on the other side of the table, sweating with the cold. “How you been?”

“Could be better, George.”

“Yeah, been tough since Sally died, I bet.”

George had lost his own wife three years before, and one of his sons to the traditional Native American diseases of drugs and alcohol earlier in the year.

“You know. One day at a time,” Harry shrugged.

He took off his coat and hung it up. He turned and selected a cue from the rack, picked up a chalk, rubbed it all over the head of the cue, and turned back to face George.

“You break?”

“Sure.” George compensated for his short stature by hiking up and cocking his buttock on the side of the table, reached over and shot the break. The balls scattered, and the six ball went in the corner pocket.

George set up again and shot. This time, he missed.

“Harry, you’re up.”

Harry went through the motions, waiting patiently for George to get to the reason he had invited him to play pool. They played three games, ate bad bar food, and both went to return their beer to the salmon streams twice before George cleared his throat and began to talk seriously.

“Got a problem, Harry,” he began. “There’s a disturbance in the Force.”

Harry had a mouthful of beer. He sprayed it all over the table, being just able to turn away from giving it to George full in the face.

“Shit, Harry!” George ducked away from the spray.

“I didn’t mean it to be funny. Honest I didn’t.”

“Right.” Harry was using a bar towel Dave the bartender had nonchalantly chucked at him to blow his nose. “I got beer up my nose, you damn Muckleshoot idiot!”

“No, listen, Harry, I mean it!” George insisted.

“You have to listen. You know that I am a shaman. Well, sort of, because a lot of our knowledge and traditions were lost when you whites kicked our butts around. And I can’t help it that I was a Star Wars junkie when I was a kid!”

Harry finished wiping his face with the beer-flecked towel. He turned to George and stared at him.

“So I call it the Force, okay? But it is real, as real as I am, Harry. Somebody is screwing around doing what he shouldn’t, and I need help to stop it.”

Harry continued to stare.

“I can feel this guy, and he’s really messin’ with stuff he doesn’t understand, and it is screwing things up. The tribe’s alcohol related arrests have gone up by one hundred fifty percent in the last three months, Harry. That’s because we have a lot of people who are sensitive to this kind of stuff, and I tell you, what we do when this happens, we try to drink it away. The more you drink, the deafer you get to the Force, or whatever you want to call it.”

George shut up. He glared almost defiantly at Harry.

“George, I don’t know what I can do to help,” Harry began.

“I’ll tell you what,” George said, “You’re a detective, you can help me find this idiot and get him to stop what he’s doing.”

“What is he doing, George?”

“He’s trying to summon something from beyond the world. I dunno what, yet, but the feel of it is really wild and uncontained and pretty evil.”

“Some kind of demon?” Harry passed a hand over his head, rubbing his thinning hair.

“Maybe.”

“Lord God Almighty, George, I’m a Methodist. This stuff isn’t supposed to happen to Methodists! Heck, my pastor says he isn’t even sure there’s a Heaven! I don’t know from demons!”

“Well, Mr. Methodist, I thought that you could practice another method: the detective method.”

George ducked as Harry threw a mock punch at his shoulder.

Suddenly, from the other end of the bar, they heard the sound of wood breaking.

Harry turned, to come face to face with Darryl Jones, armed with a broken pool cue and three friends.

“Harry, you know these guys?” George asked, backing away and giving himself room.

“Yeah, old fat man,” Jones said. “He knows me. What he don’t know is who he’s messing with. You can’t mess with me, you dumb bastard!” He threw himself at Harry, broken cue at high port.

“Looks like we get to practice another method, Harry,” George remarked, as he grabbed a cue, broke it on the bar, motioned to Dave to call 911 and turned to keep Jones’ buddies at bay. He needed quickly to coldcock one, so he picked the one on the left and stumped toward him, like a very large tank advancing on unprotected infantry. The buddy he picked was wearing a leather jacket, some chains, and hadn’t bathed in a few days. George continued to move quickly toward him, and as he did so, a knife appeared in No-Bath’s right hand. No-Bath waved it around.

George didn’t stop, which flummoxed No-Bath. Apparently he thought that a man armed only with a stick would be afraid of a man with a knife. George sideslipped the knife and laid No-Bath out with one blow of the broken cue to the side of his head.

“I hope I didn’t kill him,” George said to No-Bath’s stunned companion, in a conversational tone of voice.

“It is so messy, and there is so much damn paperwork. It’s your turn, friend. How do you want it?”

Harry and Jones were really muckling into each other, but despite Jones having twenty years on Harry and being in shape enough to play football that afternoon, Harry wasn’t giving any ground.

The third guy faded, turned and walked quickly out of the bar. No-Bath’s other friend was starting to back out of the fight, too. He lowered his arms, hands open and out at his sides and backed. His eyes were wide.

Suddenly he looked toward the spot that No-Bath was occupying on the floor. No-Bath had woken up, and was in the process of pulling a pistol. A shot rang out, and No-Bath suddenly acquired a round hole in the center of his forehead. Suddenly the center of attention, Dave the bartender held his smoking automatic.

“We’re all going to stop now,” he said. “And we’re going to wait for King County’s finest, who ought to be wheeling up about now. Until they get here, nobody move.”

Harry straightened up.

“That means you, too, Harry, and your buddy George. I don’t think you had any hand in starting this, but these guys came in here looking for you. So we’re all gonna just stand here, nice and easy, until the cops get here. Capisce?”

“Yeah, no problem, Dave, no problem,” George said, slowly putting the pool cue back on the bar, as the first cops bustled through the door, nightsticks ready.

The first one through the door recoiled when he saw Dave’s pistol.