Karl stuck his head through the opening that had once contained my windshield. 'Jeez, Stan, are you okay?'
To my great joy, I managed a small nod.
'Sorry I took so long,' Karl said. 'I was parked over the other side of the lot. Turns out, somebody left me one of these little prizes, too.'
I commanded my arm to move, and it did – a little slowly, a little stiffly, but it moved, allowing me to start brushing pieces of glass out of my hair.
'I saw my statue through the rear window of my car,' Karl said. 'I knew it didn't belong there, but it took me a couple seconds to figure out what the fuckin' thing was. Then I figured I'd better haul ass over here and see if you'd got one, too.'
'One of the better ideas you've had lately,' I said. My voice was husky and my lips felt numb, but I could talk. 'Thanks for the rescue mission, kid,' I said. 'Perseus couldn't have done a better job himself.'
'He used a sword, haina?' Karl asked. 'Saw the reflection in his shield, then just closed his eyes, and swung.'
'Something like that,' I said. 'Well, I'm glad you kept yours open. That was some damn fine shooting, Mr…' I let my voice trail off. The kid deserved it.
Karl grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. He was still holding his gun, so he brought the arm across his body, cupping the elbow with his other hand so that the pistol was pointing in the air. In a passable imitation of the young Sean Connery he said, 'Renfer. Karl Renfer.'
We'd originally been heading home, but Karl and I decided to have breakfast together, instead. I bought.
As we sipped our first cups of coffee in Jerry's Diner, breathing in the good breakfast smells of coffee and cholesterol, I noticed that Karl was frowning into his cup.
'What's the matter?' I asked. 'Something swimming in your java?'
He looked up, the frown still in place. 'No, I'm just trying to figure out who wanted to turn us into lawn ornaments.'
I added a big slug of milk to my cup. We'd ordered what Jerry's menu calls Ranger Coffee, a special blend with double the caffeine. I liked the jolt, but poured straight, the stuff was strong enough to dissolve a badge in. 'I was assuming the Evil Wizard Sligo,' I said. 'But I haven't given it much thought, yet. I think some of my brain cells are still a little rocky.'
Karl smiled. 'That's a good excuse. I'd stick with that one – it oughta be good for ye.' Then the smile faded. 'Yeah, I figured it was Sligo too, at first. But think it through. Why would Evil Wizard Sligo want to off us – or turn us to stone, which is even worse?'
I drank some coffee and ignored the urge to go scale a cliff barehanded. 'Standard answer is, we're getting too close to him. He wants to stop us before we get the chance to stop him.'
'Yeah, but we ain't got shit. This case is no closer to being cleared then it was when they found Kulick's body.'
'We know a lot more than we did then,' I said. 'We know why Kulick was killed, and we've got a pretty good idea why the vamps are being murdered.'
'Yeah, we're pretty sure about the why, but we come up nearly empty on the who.'
I started to speak, but Karl waved a hand to cut me off.
'I know, one of your snitches overheard some dude saying that there's a new wiz named Sligo in town. We've been running with it cause it's all we got, but it's thin, Stan. Not even enough probable cause to get a search warrant, assuming we had someplace to search. Which we sure as hell don't.'
'Well, if you got some great idea that we haven't tried yet-'
'That's not what I mean.' Karl leaned toward me. 'We're doing what we can with this bitch kitty of a case. But right now, we don't have anything worth killing us over. If Sligo, or whoever it is, knows so much, how come the motherfucker don't know that?'
Our food came, and I started into my eggs-overgreasy while I thought about what Karl had said.
After a while I put my fork down. 'Okay, so maybe Sligo doesn't know we've got shit. He knows we're on the case, but thinks we're doing better than we are. Guess he doesn't know us too well.'
Karl swallowed a mouthful of French toast before saying, 'I dunno, Stan. The Evil Wizard is slick enough to find out who's investigating the murders, and a good enough magician to get in and out of that parking lot without tripping an alarm – hell, he even knows which cars we drive. But he hasn't figured out that we're going nowhere with this case?'
'Well, when you put it like that…'
We ate in silence for the next few minutes. Then Karl said, 'Look, could be I'm full of shit. Wouldn't be the first time. Maybe Sligo's just paranoid, and decided to take us out as a precaution.'
Brave man that he is, he signaled the waitress for more coffee.
'Or maybe,' he said, 'somebody else besides Sligo wants us dead.'
The next night, we hung around the squad room just long enough to check messages and make sure that Rachel Proctor hadn't turned up yet – alive, or dead. After that, it was just like the old song: we were off to see the wizard.
Jonas Trombley made magic, and maybe worse, out of a big old house in Clark Summit, a borough just east of Scranton. When we rolled up a little after 9:30, there was no light showing anywhere. That didn't mean anything; if the wizard was working tonight, it would most likely be in a room with no windows at all.
I rang the doorbell a couple of times, with no result. So I put my thumb on it and kept it there. Even from the porch, I could hear the buzzing sound the thing was making inside. I was prepared to keep my thumb on that button for an hour, and I was betting that Trombley knew it, too. 'So,' I said over my shoulder to Karl, 'You been watching that documentary series on HBO, True Blood?'
A couple of minutes later, Karl was describing a book he'd been reading about some scientists who'd accidentally opened a doorway to Hell. I was about to asif it was fiction or nonfiction when the big wooden door finally cracked open.
A man's voice said from inside, 'Do you realize what I could do to you, without lifting a finger, for disturbing me like this?'
'Nothing, I hope,' I said. 'If you did, that would be black magic, wouldn't it, Jonas? And that stuff's illegal. Now open the, uh, darn door, so we can get this over with.'
I heard the voice mutter something that sounded suspiciously like 'asshole,' but the door opened wider. There was enough light from the street for me to make out a human shape inside. Then it waved one hand, and at once the house was ablaze with light.
Once we were inside, Jonas Trombley said, 'Close the door.'
I was tempted to say, 'Why don't you show off some more, and close it yourself?' But the visit had already started on a negative note. No point in growing that into a symphony.
'In here,' Trombley said, and motioned us into what turned out to be a living room furnished in what I think of as Thrift Shop Modern. Whatever money Jonas Trombley was making off the practice of magic, he wasn't spending it on an interior decorator.
Once we were seated, he looked at Karl, then at me and said, 'So?'
I didn't answer right off, which is an old cop trick. Sometimes, if you don't tell them what you want right away, citizens will fill the silence with some interesting information. I took those few seconds to study Jonas Trombley, who I hadn't seen in three years.
He didn't seem to have aged any, which could be the result of magic or just good genes. Blond, slim, and fit- looking, he looked to be in his late twenties, although I knew he was thirty-four. He wore a zippered velour shirt in what I guess is called royal blue above a pair of designer jeans that were no tighter then the skin on your average grape. The sandals he wore displayed what I was sure was a professional pedicure.
I didn't know, or care, if Trombley liked girls, boys, or both – but whatever his preference was, I would have bet that he got more ass than a rooster, even without the magic.
Once I realized that he wasn't going to blurt out anything useful, I said, 'Made any Gorgon statuettes lately, Jonas?'
He tilted his head a little and looked at me, not answering right off. Maybe Trombley wanted to give me a little of my own silent treatment, but most likely he was taking a few seconds to think. I'd always figured there was
