I locked up behind me, setting her deadbolt like a good boy. Ihauled my butt to the elevator and thence to my apartment. She wasn’t there,either, and I didn’t find any hint she’d stopped by. I’d half expected that she’dlift my bug-out stash as well, doubling her time free of credit cards and ATMs.
I stared out into gloom for a while, evening and mist with thestreetlights haloed against shadows. I kept wondering just how the hell I’d been so blind.
And I thought about Maggie rotting in her cell in the stateprison. If I could prove that Sandy had forged the signature on that heist, Icould get Maggie a new trial or a pardon.
But at what cost?
I felt sick, and it wasn’t just the whisky ebbing from mybrain and the concussion. Like I told you, signatures lay at the foundation offorensic magic, and forensic magic made witches and wizards tolerable tostraight people.
Looking out of my apartment window into shadows, I could seeMaggie walk out through the prison gate, a free woman. And I could see magic,all magic, thrown back into darkness and witch hunts and bonfires around stakesin the public square.
I didn’t sleep any better that night. Instead, I got morecrutch practice walking dark wet streets.
XX
The pearly hand of dawn pulling back night’s ebon shrouddoesn’t look all that poetic when you come on it from a sleepless prowl limpingthrough dark thoughts. I ended up back at my apartment, damp from the riverfog, arms and hands sore but getting resigned to the stress of the crutches,sober. At least I’d learned to move fairly well on those damned things. And I’dlearned why my hands and arms hurt, and I’d stopped and adjusted the damnedTorquemada Toys to put some weight on my armpits. That’s what those pads werefor. Believe me, working on a practical problem and solving it helped my mood alot.
I’m not going to bore you with hours of me debating myself,but I finally backed myself into a corner and couldn’t come up with any moreexcuses. No, I couldn’t set the official hounds on Sandy’s trail — I had totrack her down myself. No, I didn’t dare raise the ugly specter of wizardsforging magical signatures.
No, I couldn’t get Maggie out of jail.
Just for starters, I wasn’t sure I could sell my case. By now,a couple of other retired cop-wizards had sniffed at crime scenes and corpsesand wrinkled their noses and fingered Kratz as the perp. And everyone knew youcouldn’t forge signatures. I’d have to prove I could it, and that meantcatching Sandy first and getting her to tell me how she did it. I wasn’tall that optimistic about either step.
Second thing, I didn’t feel like telling the world why Sandywanted to kill Nef Cash. I’m just old-school enough to think that a gentlemandoesn’t talk about where he spent the night. Not even to save his neck from thehangman’s noose. This story doesn’t violate that rule — like I’ve told you, I’vechanged names and dates and places.
But neither of those reasons made the top of the list. As bestas I could sort things out in my head, Sandy’s little trick would raise thewhole medieval witch-hunt hysteria from its grave. In fact, it might turn worse than it had been in the nastypast. Everyone believed in magic now. You may not realize what that meant. Saythat most people didn’t believe in, oh, the cholera or typhoid bacillus. Howmuch would they care about keeping their outhouses a good distance from theirwells?
Don’t think I’m just protecting my own fat ass in this. ReadDobson’s Burning Canton for a dry statistical analysis of a witch hunt.Nine victims out of ten showed no proven magical powers. Or Witch-Hunt byBrown, written for a popular audience. That one gets into motivation of theaccusers, and it’s an ugly scene. Envy, greed, covetousness, jilted lovers, youname it. Covers just about the whole list of cardinal and venal sins. One womanwas accused because her cat kept shitting in her neighbor’s rose-bed.
Yeah, we had “History of Magic in Society” in college,sequence of eight courses. Most civilians don’t.
Take away signatures, and any witch or wizard could havekilled John Doe and Reverend Fred. Killed them and gotten away with it. Thatreality would scare the living shit out of a lot of people. Scared people don’t act rationally. Scared peoplescare me.
Of course, maybe this is one of the points where I warned youthat I’d be telling lies. Maybe I’m using signatures to cover up what she’d really done, where the real secret hidesin all of this. That’s why I’ve said this is a work of fiction, a novel,something you don’t have to believe. After all, no wizard has ever found a wayto forge or hide his signature.
Anyway, all my sleepless arguments boiled down to me huntingSandy on my own. In a fair-sized city, with her knowing everything I knew. AndI’d thought I knew her, but you’veseen how that turned out.
Enough of wallowing in my mistakes. I crutched into thebathroom, swabbed dried blood from my throbbing head, and shaved. I showeredwithout soaking either that scab onthe side of my half-bald scalp or the cast on my leg, and changed into cleandry clothes. Cooked up a thick slab of maple-smoked Vermont ham for breakfast,added a heap of hash-brown potatoes fried in bacon grease with a scattering ofchopped onion, good coffee, and watched the morning news while I ate.
One bright gleam in the mess, the talking heads claimed thatnobody had been hurt or killed in the fire at St. Joe’s. I say claimed, because I’ve learned to view TVor dead-tree news with a jaundiced eye. Every time I’ve had personal knowledgeof a news item, they’ve gotten something wrong. And this time, they had to gowith what the cop and hospital news-flacks told them, which obviously
