Besides, my abilities are a good-news, bad-news joke. You wantto live to be eighty, ninety, or die at sixty of a stroke or heart attack ordiabetes? That’s the average naturallife expectancy of a male wizard. Women stretch it another three years or so,just like normal people. Something about the scrambled connections in thecorpus callosum or the other screwed-up bits in our brains, the way our bodieshandle lipoproteins, other things.
And few wizards or witches reach a natural death.
Hell, if that new mage — Pennington,I glued the name into my memory with his face and “signature” — went to collegeon GI benefits, he must have slipped past pediatric testing and the enlistmentphysical or they never would have sworn him in. He probably manifested undercombat stress and ended up with an instant discharge “for the good of theservice.” Army, Navy, Air Force, they’re just as touchy about magic in theranks as they are about homosexuals. Don’t want some private getting pissed athis damnfool lieutenant and causing a little accident under fire.
Sure, they have mages in the service. Trained mages, officers in special units with straight commanderswho keep a beady eagle-eye on everything they do. They wouldn’t touch anyonewho might go on to mage training afterservice.
Yeah, “queers” make a good comparison. Both of us live on thethin edge of what society will tolerate. Which side of that edge can change in a heartbeat. It colors everythingwe do.
“You want me to drop you off at your office or your apartment?”
Cash broke me out of dark thoughts. She’d driven us all theway back uptown in that little reverie, smooth and competent and silent likeeverything she did. I could get used to having that kind of woman around. Butany “relationship” with a wizard could kill her career just as dead as if shecould levitate a paperclip.
“Apartment, please. I was about to knock off for the day whenyou showed up.” And I didn’t feel like dragging this mood into Charlie’s Barand Grill — nice guy, he didn’t deserve my dark cloud chasing off the payingcustomers. And I had beer in the fridge.
Beer, or maybe a shot or five of Jack Daniels. I could stilltaste Kratz in the back of my throat. That bastard’s stink hung around like askunk’s spray.
A couple more turns, and she pulled the cruiser over to thecurb in front of my apartment. She’d driven to the precise point where she hadto make a choice before breaking into my thoughts. I still wondered if thestate testing had missed something.
Not my problem.
We sat there for a minute, then two, then three. I was chewingon bad thoughts and figured Cash was. But she turned to me and cocked her headto one side.
“You ever hear from Maggie?”
Not what I expected. But she’d known and worked a lot withboth of us, back when.
“You think that’s likely? She’s doing ten to twenty behindcopper mesh and cold iron, and I’m the one who put her there. Sorta drives thenails into the old relationship coffin.”
Hell of it was, I didhear from her every few weeks, letters on prison stationery with bits censoredand the “signature” of some mage or another on the paper telling me that TheMan still felt nervous about her record and her skills. She didn’t seem tocarry a grudge. I would have.
And she still claimed she was innocent.
I unbuckled the seatbelt, started to hoist myself out of thecruiser, and Cash reached across to touch my wrist. “I’ll pass those reports onto you, soon as we get ’em. And about your Kratz MO — someone called thatcorpse in, anonymous. From a pay phone. Just like you said he used to do, when he felt like thumbing his nose at the cops.”
She was strictly business, from the words and tone. Somethingbesides business lurked in her touch and in her eyes. She wasn’t afraid of magic.
She’d had a schoolgirl crush on me when I was training her asa rookie cop. Damned if I know why. Totally off-limits in about five ways, andI’d ignored every signal she’d sent. Then she went off to the state unit, and I’dfiled it away as a closed case. Maybe it wasn’t.
She wasn’t afraid of the scandal a white man and a black womanwould cause, either. But that socialstigma had faded a lot since I was young. Maybe the human race was proving itcould evolve at least a little.
A fat, balding old man with a skinny attractive young woman ofany color, now — that bit of back-biting was still alive and well. She didn’tneed that. I didn’t, either. No way I was going to follow up on what she seemedto be offering.
“Thanks. I don’t have a clue how I’m going to move on this.Sit and think for a few days, probably. Took us almost ten years to nail him,last time. The bastard may be crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. He won’t makethe same mistakes twice.”
And then there was the government angle, whatever governmentit was. I didn’t need that complication.
She looked me in the eyes, a slight smile on her lips. Sheknew what she was doing and knew I knew. A dangerouswoman in several senses of the word. “See you around.”
Her cruiser pulled away with a growl of muted power and leftme on the wet sidewalk in front of my apartment. Left me with the taste of AlKratz still buzzing in the back of my throat.
I shook my head. I didn’t need any of these complications. Maybe enough sour-mash whisky wouldwash that taste from my mouth.
Taste. I shouldn’t still be remembering it, carrying it. Istopped mooning over Nef Cash. I sniffed — damp November air, chilly, drizzlestill threatening to turn into something else. Wet pavement smell, exhaust fromthe cruiser, the earthy scent of autumn leaves blown in from the park, a waftof scorched garlic from the Chinese
