the grip on his arms turned him back toward Nimue, he beheld Talisman now stretched out unconscious on the ground, his two chief opponents standing over him. One of them, Gregory, kicked the fallen man savagely. The jarred body on the ground looked less human than before, more like a puppet or a statue; for a moment Simon thought that Talisman was dead, but inward vision showed otherwise.
Gregory had put on his foolish-looking hat now and was squinting into the east. “Shall we just leave this one here, mistress, for the morning sun to find?”
There was a little silence while Nimue considered; the peasant’s cheerful singing had stopped some time ago. “No,” she decreed at last. “Too uncertain, for one of his power. But daylight has him frozen in man-form. Finish him now, with wood.”
Arnaud growled in his throat. It was a low, regular sound, of which he appeared to be no more conscious than of his breathing. He looked round him, then seized a green tree-limb, thick as a man’s arm. In a moment he had plucked it, like a flower. As Gregory stepped out of the way, Arnaud raised this weapon in both hands and brought it down like a spear at Talisman, splintery end first.
The stroke dug deep into leaves and earth, the end of the branch going two feet deep in solid ground. Talisman’s body had disappeared.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kate had brought along a new shirt and an undamaged jacket to the hospital on Sunday morning, along with a lot of other stuff. The doctors were ready to let Joe go, and early Sunday afternoon Charley Snider was there helping him get the fresh upper-body clothing on. Kate had gone up to her folks’ place on the North Shore to give them the facts, or some version of the facts, about the shooting incident in which the news media reported their son-in-law had been involved.
As he dressed, Joe reflected that Kate was probably mad at him for going right back to work from the hospital, without even coming home to her for a rest. But some of Carados’ friends, as much murderers as he had been, were known to be still on the loose. And Kate was religiously strict about not trying to interfere with any of the vital aspects of Joe’s job.
The bandage on his right arm wasn’t all that hard to work into a sleeve, with Charley’s gentle help. Trouble was, the hand was still just about useless. A nurse brought him a plain sling of dark cloth; Joe wasn’t sure if the sling was going to be a help or a hindrance, but he meekly enough let his arm be guided into the thing after his coat was on. Maybe at least the sling would be a reminder to other people not to bump him.
“You up to this, ain’t you?” Charley asked him when at last Joe was fully dressed.
“Now’s a good time to ask that. Yeah, I’m up to it. I’m lucky, the bullet missed the bones and the big blood vessels. And we’ll just be riding around for a few hours in a car, right? No harder than sitting around in a chair somewhere.” Still he wished he could be home.
Charley grunted, and picked up Joe’s bag. “Well, it’s important, so they say. They wanna do it today, on Sunday, I guess they figure they’ll find more people home. We got an FBI honcho comin’ along, a state police captain, some big shot from the attorney general’s office. Maybe they figure they could never all get together during the week.”
Now it was necessary to concentrate for a few minutes on the details of getting Joe officially checked out of the hospital. As soon as they were effectively alone again, with Charley carrying Joe’s bag for him across the lobby—it had taken Joe some arguing to keep from being forced to ride down in a wheelchair—Charley said: “Another reason, as I get it, is that there’s actually a couple—three big old houses out in that direction that could actually be described as castles. Owned naturally by some pretty big people, so we don’t want to bother ‘em unnecessarily. And our star witness is a little vague on his geography—he’s gonna ride in the car with you and me, by the way, once we get our caravan organized. Seems he requested it that way.”
In front of the hospital Charley’s unmarked police car waited, under the usual cloudy Chicago sky. When they were in the car and moving, and Charley had reported in on the radio, he asked: “What you think it is, anyway, with all these different names our star witness likes to use?”
“Who is he now? And did you find out how he got out of that cell at headquarters?”
“He just keeps sayin’ the door was open. We don’t want to push him on that until we find out if he can help us with Carados’ friends. And he’s still Falcon, as far’s I know. We still don’t have any better make on ‘im than that. No fingerprints, nothing.”
Joe turned the subject over in his mind, not for the first time. Feathers, Hawk, Falcon. There was certainly an association there, even a progression of sorts. “A falcon’s a kind of hawk,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Well, with or without a real name he ain’t much as a star witness. But maybe he can put us onto something if he can recognize this castle where he claims he was. Some of Carados’ people from New Orleans are still runnin’ loose somewhere, that much we do know. Including the one you shot at and hit down the alley. There was a good blood trail there and I thought we had ‘im. But then the trail just cut off. How come your gun was loaded with silver bullets?”
“What?” said Joe, weakly. Then understanding, of a sort, came, a few seconds after shock.
“You heard me, man. Silver. The bullets that you fired. The ones we could find, anyway. You emptied your piece and we found three, two in Carados and one ricochet all flattened out of shape, on the alley pavement.” Charley didn’t sound really perturbed. More as if silver bullets were something you were likely to run into maybe once a year.
There was one man Joe would have liked to be able to consult before he had to discuss this subject any more, but that man didn’t happen to be available. Somewhat to Joe’s surprise, he found himself wishing that there’d been a vampire in the hospital last night, to give him a nocturnal briefing.
But he was going to have to answer on his own. “Suppose,” he said carefully, “I say I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about?”
“Then,” said Charley, “we would have to hypothesize.” He brought the word out in carefully polished tones, but nonchalantly, as if he thought that coming from him it might have a certain surprise value. “And what we hypothesize is something like this: some unknown friend of yours was in that alley too, and carrying a piece, and his just happened to be loaded in that silvery and unorthodox style. And after your friend had departed, taking with him all his spent cartridge cases, we found some of his bullets but none of yours. This theory, however, however attractive it may be, fails when we hear from the lab that the silver bullets were all fired from your gun, don’t bullshit me, man.”
And all the time Charley, unperturbed, drove on quietly and safely through spattering rain. Not looking at Joe, he waited for an answer.
For years now Joe had been expecting the arrival of some moment like this one, when he would have to try to make such things as vampires and magic a part of some official record. He’d even had bad dreams about it a few times. He wasn’t ready to face the moment yet, if there was any way at all in which it could be avoided.
He said: “No regulation that I know of against loading silver.”
“And your old lady can afford it, if you can’t. Oh shit, man, don’t come on to me now with regulations.” At last Charley was irritated. “Off the record, now. Nobody in the Department really gives a damn if you fired diamonds or moneymarket certificates at that cat, long as you wasted him. I don’t think any reporters gonna get their hands on any of that silver. But—well, I didn’t figure you for going to fortune tellers, any of that jazz.”
“No,” Joe sighed. So far the reporters had been put off effectively, but sooner or later they’d have to talk to the hero who’d shot Carados. That would be another thing to face. “I didn’t figure myself that way either. Can we talk about all this later?”
“Sure. But you’re gonna have to talk about it pretty soon, with some people a lot higher up in the Department than me.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Their arranged rendezvous with the other lawmen was at a state police station in a western suburb. They reached the place a little after three o’clock, and Joe was introduced to FBI, State’s Attorney, State Police; they all gave him looks of large respect, somewhat tinged with envy. He was the wounded waster of Carados.
And they had Falcon with them, and were of course watching the old man continuously if casually. It was the first glimpse Joe had had of the old man since they’d both been carried out of the alley the night before. The old guy was unhurt, dressed now in a fresh issue of jail clothes, though not officially under arrest, and appeared to be much
