The Dragon Done It (26 page)

Bogey gave me a worried look and meowed. Carlisle laughed again. "Poor pussy. You'd like to destroy us as well, wouldn't you? But I'm afraid you'll remain a cat for the duration. If your mistress so much as begins to utter her demon-freeing spell, I'll kill her by the third syllable." Bogey's tail drooped. I felt the same way.

"Game, set, and match, Carlisle," I conceded. "Since you've got me licked, do an old lady a favor? Before you rub me out, I mean."

"How can I refuse so elegant a plea? What do you want?"

"The black bird," I said. "I want to know how you managed to hide something that size from LeGras and his goons."

"She really
isn't
a very good detective, is she?" Hansel giggled. "The hell with her and her last requests, she's too stupid to live. Shoot her and let's blow."

"Not so fast." Carlisle could've been the love child of Vincent Price and Leslie Howard, a good-looking bad guy who liked to watch his victims squirm. "It's a not unreasonable request. Let us show her, by all means."

They took me out of the house and down the front walk to the pond. As soon as I locked eyeballs with the swans, I knew. Swans are nasty, evil-tempered creatures with vicious streaks a yard wide. Three of the birds sailing across the water looked like they'd wreck their own nests just to throw an eggnog party, but the fourth . . .

"You bastard," I breathed. "You sharp little bastard."

Carlisle was loving it. " 'The Purloined Letter' never does go out of style. Care for a closer look before you die?"

"Don't bother on my account."

"No bother, my dear," he replied, like we were all sitting down to cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea. "None at all. Hansel, if you would—?"

"
I'm
not wading in there." Hansel pouted like a hell-spawned Shirley Temple. "Bad enough I had to let LeGras's apes work me over and
now
you want me to get my pants wet?"

"Would it be the first time?" I muttered.

Carlisle made an impatient sound. "Very well. Gretel,
you
do it."

"Me?" she squealed. She eyed the birds nervously. The three genuine swans gave her the glad eye, a trio of feathered sharks. "Why do
I
have to? I'm with Hansel: Shoot her now."

Carlisle sighed. "Whether I shoot her now or later, we must retrieve the bird
sometime
. Get it."

Gretel began to whimper. "But I'm scaaared! Those swans
bite
. Can I at least go into the house and get a golf club or something to—?"

Carlisle shifted the gun. "If you don't do as I say, I'll be pleased to teach you the meaning of the word
expendable
, my dear."

Grousing and whining, Gretel kicked off her shoes, stripped off her stockings, hiked up her skirt, and stepped into the pond. "Here, goosey," she called timidly, holding out one hand to the ringer swan. "Here, nice goose-goose-goosey. Come to Mama." The way all four of the birds kept their distance, she might as well have been waving a hatchet. Hansel and Carlisle observed her fruitless efforts at poultry-herding with rising amusement, laughing until the tears ran down their faces.

"Good Lord!" Carlisle exclaimed, gasping for breath. "That girl couldn't get a goose at a stag smoker."

"Let the old doll do it," Hansel suggested. "She wanted to see the black bird so bad, make her work for it."

"A capital notion," Carlisle said. He gestured meaningly with his gun.

As a disgruntled Gretel waded out of the pond, I sloshed in past my ankles. It took me all of twenty seconds to cut the right swan from the flock and herd it onto the grass, much to the astonished whispers of Carlisle and his cronies. I'll tell you a little secret from my long-gone childhood: Before Hansel and Gretel, before the gingerbread cottage, even before I first heard the Black Arts whispering my name, I was a snot-nosed German peasant brat like ten thousand others. And when you're a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, you know the first job they hand you, almost as soon as you can toddle? Goose-girl.

The three of them gazed at the phony swan like it was the answer to the fifty dollar question on
Beat the Band
. Carlisle said a few words over the critter's head: Its neck shortened and its webbed feet went from black to red while its plumage went switcheroo from white to black as a cheating woman's heart. The bird looked around stupidly, honked once, settled down on the grass and laid an egg.

A golden egg.

Gretel pounced on it like a studio head on a starlet, but Hansel got there first and strong-armed her away. "What's the big idea?" she shrilled. "I
earned
this!"

"The hell you did," he countered, shoving her away a second time. "I guess it was
your
face got treated like a tough steak? If anyone earned anything, it's me!" The overconfident little creep bent over to seize the egg. He learned the error of his ways when his adoring sister kicked him in the pants, sending him headfirst into the pond. He got up dripping duckweed and grabbed her by the ankle, dragging her into the water with him. The swans took off, flapping their wings and making enough racket to wake the dead.

"Children, please." Carlisle rolled his eyes like a woman who's wondering whether retroactive birth control isn't such a bad idea after all. "The bird will lay more eggs; there will be enough for all of us, in time."

The pair of them paused in mid-shindy. Hansel glowered at the English prettyboy: "This is between me and my sister."

"Yeah!" Gretel hauled herself out of the muck bottoming the pond and tucked a dripping lock of hair behind one ear. "Don't tell us what to do. You wouldn't even be in on this caper if not for Hansel. He was the one who made sure LeGras got an eyeful of you up in Frisco, but he could've picked any other two-bit swish for the job. We were the brains, you were just the bait. You think you're the only pebble on the beach?"

"No," the limey admitted. He raised the .45. "But I
am
the only one with a gun. And now that I come to think about it, I don't believe I want to share at all."

He sent a bullet whizzing past Gretel's ear. Any closer and you could call the story "Hansel and." Brother and sister exchanged a look, then took to their heels like they had a flock of Zeros on their tail. Carlisle squeezed off a few more shots to speed them on their way. The black bird honked like crazy at the sound of gunfire but stayed put surer than if someone had driven a railroad spike through its foot. Carlisle laughed like a crazy man.

He was anything but.

"Now that's what I call sporting," I remarked. "Aren't you afraid they'll come after you . . .
sister
?"

He quit laughing and flashed me a look like a shiv, sharp and ugly. "How did you know?" His features started to blur at the edges, then to run like cheese on a griddle, but his grip on the .45 was rock-solid.

"Maybe I'm not such a bad shamus after all.
You
were the one who lifted the disguise spell off the black bird. That means
you
had to be the one who slapped it on in the first place." I looked over to where the goose was still trying to take it on the lam, in spite of the invisible tether holding her down. "Pretty impressive sorcery from a sugarpuss-for-hire. That little holding spell you've got on the goose confirms it: You're one of us, sister."

Carlisle's prettyboy looks were all gone by the time I finished. His slender body filled out, his short blond hair went long and gray, and his gigolo get-up flashed into a heap of gypsy-bright glad rags. Me, I prefer to work in traditional black, but it's not like we're unionized.

A witch can wear what she wants.

"You
dare
include me in your pathetic, penny-grubbing witcheries?" my newly-unmasked colleague countered. "You are a petty hireling, I am a mastermind! I used those stupid mortals as my tools: They did the dirty work, I reap the prize. And it was so easy!" She threw back her head and laughed. "Like you, I was a refugee, a despised foreigner in this so-called 'Land of the Free.'
Free
! All things here have a price, all costly. I lived hand-to-mouth on
their
sufferance, accepting the pittance they deemed a 'fair' wage for my services. Bah. I spit on their 'fair' wages."

She did, too. Bogey jumped out of the way. It was all he could do. She'd sold her soul to his Head Office, same as me, so he was powerless to attack her, with or without my say-so: professional courtesy.

I didn't like her spitting on my cat, but there was something I liked even less: She was riding the Red broomstick. If she was so in love with Comrade Stalin's way of doing things, why did she bother coming here when she left the Old Country? Maybe because back then, Iron Joe was in Hitler's pocket deep enough to call him sweetheart? I got a bad feeling in my gut. If they ever got up another witch-hunt in this country, I'd know who to blame.

"There was a better way, I knew it," she went on. "A road to the big score, a clean shot at Easy Street. No more dabbling in love potions and impotence tonics, no."

"Six of one—" I began. She ignored me. She was tuned in to
Life Can Be Bitterful
and she couldn't hear anything else.

"My chance came when LeGras hired me. While in his employ, I discovered he possessed the black bird. I resolved to make it mine, to use it to obtain luxury beyond my wildest dreams."

"Sweet dreams," I remarked. "That must've been when it hit you: You couldn't use your magic to pull off the heist because you set up most of the spell-shielding tools in this dump before you found out about the bird.
That
must've stuck a burr under your saddle."

She ground her teeth together, remembering. "A galling situation, but temporary. It was only a matter of finding the proper cat's-paw for the job."

"Namely Hansel? I'll bet he jumped at the chance to get rich quick. Greedy little bastard."

Her lip curled. "Will it surprise you to learn that the lure of gold was secondary in persuading him? Who would expect a common gunsel who sold his favors to be a romantic at heart? It was simple to disguise myself as Carlisle and seduce him, then open his eyes to the possibility of obtaining a fortune at his former master's expense. I even made him think it was his own idea. Oh, I am brilliant!"

"And still you chased him off like that? After all the two of you meant to each other?" I clicked my tongue. "Flirt."

The look on her face would give Beelzebub a case of frostbite. "He is lucky I let him escape alive, him and his floozy sister. Do you think I ever intended to share
anything
with them?"

"That goose can lay enough gold eggs to satisfy everyone in L.A., if you don't count the boys down at City Hall. What's the matter, Einstein? You can't divide by three?"

"
You
would ask me to retain them as my partners? To
trust
them?
You
?" She sneered. "How long do you think it would be before they decided there was one too many hands in the egg basket and shoved
me
into a bakeoven, hmmm? Perhaps you did not learn from your previous experience with those brats, but I am no such fool. Farewell." She was done with the .45, so she turned it into a hankie and waved bye-bye with it before picking up the goose and starting to go.

"Hold it, sister!" I called after her. "You think you can just walk away from this?"

I'd been dealing with mortals too long; I forgot what it's like to confront one of my own people. I just got my last word out when she turned on me faster than milk on a hot summer day and slammed me with the same lousy immobilization charm she'd used on the black bird. I felt my feet root themselves so firmly to the ground that I knew my ordinary escape spell was useless. A team of hopped-up gophers couldn't dig me free. Unless she ended it or something ended her, I was planted for the duration.

Maybe I couldn't move, but I could still fight. I struck back with my own incantation. It left my fingertips like a bolt of lightning, but it hit her like a splash of cheap cologne.

"My specialty is shielding spells," she said, coolly wiping my splattered sorcery off her face. "Or have you forgotten all I did for LeGras? None of your puny magics can touch me.
Now
will you let me leave in peace, or do I make you regret it?" She didn't bother waiting for an answer. I was beneath her contempt. When she showed me her back, she might as well have slapped my face.

"Aloha," I growled, and whispered the rest of what I had to say.

The black bird exploded in her arms like a honking cherry bomb. Feathers flew everywhere, blood drenched her carnival-colored skirts, and one webbed foot landed smack on top of her head like the latest word in Paris millinery fashion. She whirled on me, shrieking: "
What have you done?! What in seven hells have you done?!
"

It was my turn to gloat and I did it pretty. "Just a little something for the war effort, sugar.
My
war. How long you think it'll be before the cops show up and find me stuck here? Bogey's a sloppy eater. With all the blood he spilled inside that house, they're gonna be asking a lot of questions, like about what happened to LeGras and his buddies. If my neck's got to pay the final bill for your shell game, I'm making sure that you don't get anything out of it except a couple slices of white meat and a belly full of might-have-beens." I slipped my hands into my pockets, casual, and added: "Don't you listen to
The Shadow
, sister?
Crime does not pay
." I tried to ape Lamont Cranston's creepy laugh; it came out a cackle.

"And fools do not live!" she screeched, her empty hands filling with the biggest damn fireball I'd ever seen in all my years of witchcraft.

That was when I knew I'd bought me some serious trouble. You don't use a fireball unless you mean business, and a witch only means that kind of business when she steps into a no-holds-barred duel-to-the-death of sorcery. Fireball spells contain the power of five hundred thousand sticks of dynamite. Casting one takes so much out of you that you're useless for a week after. On the other hand, one is usually all it takes.

A fireball spell is so much destruction tucked into one little package that it's a good thing only a few witches know how do it. Too bad I'm not one of them.