“SHE PAID WITH a Visa,” I told Murphy when I came out of the store. “Meditrina Bassarid.”
Murphy frowned up at my troubled expression. “What’s wrong?”
“You ever see me pay with a credit card?”
“No. I figured no credit company would have you.”
“Come on, Murph,” I said. “That’s just un-American. I don’t bother with the things, because that magnetic strip goes bad in a couple of hours around me.”
She frowned. “Like everything electronic does. So?”
“So if Ms. Bassarid has Caine scared out of his mind on magic . . .” I said.
Murphy got it. “Why is she using a credit card?”
“Because she probably isn’t human,” I said. “Nonhumans can sling power all over the place and not screw up anything if they don’t want to. It also explains why she got sent to Caine to get taught a lesson and wound up scaring him to death instead.”
Murphy said an impolite word. “But if she’s got a credit card, she’s in the system.”
“To some degree,” I said. “How long for you to find something?”
She shrugged. “We’ll see. You get a description?”
“Blue-black hair, green eyes, long legs, and great tits,” I said.
She eyed me.
“Quoting,” I said righteously.
I’m sure she was fighting off a smile. “What are you going to do?”
“Go back to Mac’s,” I said. “He loaned me his key.”
Murphy looked sideways at me. “Did he know he was doing that?”
I put my hand to my chest as if wounded. “Murphy,” I said. “He’s a friend.”
I LIT A bunch of candles with a mutter and a wave of my hand, and I stared around Mac’s place. Out in the dining area, chaos reigned. Chairs were overturned. Salt from a broken shaker had spread over the floor. None of the chairs were broken, but the framed sign that read ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY was smashed and lay on the ground near the door.
An interesting detail, that.
Behind the bar, where Mac kept his iceboxes and his wood-burning stove, everything was as tidy as a surgical theater, with the exception of the uncleaned stove and some dishes in the sink. Nothing looked like a clue.
I shook my head and went to the sink. I stared at the dishes. I turned and stared at the empty storage cabinets under the bar, where a couple of boxes of beer still waited. I opened the icebox and stared at the food, and my stomach rumbled. There were some cold cuts. I made a sandwich and stood there munching it, looking around the place and thinking.
I didn’t think of anything productive.
I washed the dishes in the sink, scowling and thinking up a veritable thunderstorm. I didn’t get much further than a light sprinkle, though, before a thought struck me.
There really wasn’t very much beer under the bar.
I finished the dishes, pondering that. Had there been a ton earlier? No. I’d picked up the half-used box and taken it home. The other two boxes were where I’d left them. But Mac usually kept a legion of beer bottles down there.
So why only two now?
I walked down to the far end of the counter, a nagging thought dancing around the back of my mind, where I couldn’t see it. Mac kept a small office in the back corner, consisting of a table for his desk, a wooden chair, and a couple of filing cabinets. His food service and liquor permits were on display on the wall above it.
I sat down at the desk and opened the filing cabinets. I started going through Mac’s records and books. Intrusive as hell, I know, but I had to figure out what was going on before matters got worse.
And that was when it hit me—matters getting worse. I could see a mortal wizard, motivated by petty spite, greed, or some other mundane motivation, wrecking Mac’s bar. People can be amazingly petty. But nonhumans, now—that was a different story.
The fact that this Bassarid chick had a credit card meant she was methodical. I mean, you can’t just conjure one out of thin air. She’d taken the time to create an identity for herself. That kind of forethought indicated a scheme, a plan, a goal. Untidying a Chicago bar, neutral ground or not, was not by any means the kind of goal that things from the Nevernever set for themselves when they went undercover into mortal society.
Something bigger was going on, then. Mac’s place must have been a side item for Bassarid.
Or maybe a stepping-stone.
Mac was no wizard, but he was savvy. It would take more than cheap tricks to get to his beer with him here, and I was betting he had worked out more than one way to realize it if someone had intruded on his place when he was gone. So, if someone wanted to get to the beer, they’d need a distraction.
Like maybe Caine.
Caine made a deal with Bassarid, evidently—I assumed he gave her the bloodstone in exchange for being a pain to Mac. So, she ruins Mac’s day, gets the bloodstone in exchange, end of story—nice and neat.
Except that it didn’t make a lot of sense. Bloodstone isn’t exactly impossible to come by. Why would someone with serious magical juice do a favor for Caine to get some?
Because maybe Caine was a stooge, a distraction for anyone trying to follow Bassarid’s trail. What if Bassarid had picked someone who had a history with Mac, so that I could chase after him while she . . . did whatever she planned to do with the rest of Mac’s beer?
Wherever the hell that was.
It took me an hour and a half to find anything in Mac’s files—the first thing was a book. A really old book, bound in undyed leather. It was a journal, apparently, and written in some kind of cipher.
Also interesting, but probably not germane.
The second thing I found was a receipt, for a whole hell of a lot of money, along with an itemized list of what had been sold—beer, representing all of Mac’s various heavenly brews. Someone at Worldclass Limited had paid him an awful lot of money for his current stock.
I got on the phone and called Murphy.
“Who bought the evil beer?” Murphy asked.
“The beer isn’t evil. It’s a victim. And I don’t recognize the name of the company. Worldclass Limited.”
Keys clicked in the background as Murphy hit the Internet. “Caterers,” Murphy said a moment later. “High end.”
I thought of the havoc that might be about to ensue at some wedding or bar mitzvah and shuddered. “Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “We’ve got to find out where they went.”
“Egad, Holmes,” Murphy said in the same tone I would have said, “Duh.”
“Yeah. Sorry. What did you get on Bassarid?”
“Next to nothing,” Murphy said. “It’ll take me a few more hours to get the information behind her credit card.”
“No time,” I said. “She isn’t worried about the cops. Whoever she is, she planned this whole thing to keep her tracks covered from the likes of me.”
“Aren’t we full of ourselves?” Murphy grumped. “Call you right back.”
She did.
“The caterers aren’t available,” she said. “They’re working the private boxes at the Bulls game.”
I RUSHED TO the United Center.
Murphy could have blown the whistle and called in the artillery, but she hadn’t. Uniformed cops already at the arena would have been the first to intervene, and if they did, they were likely to cross Bassarid. Whatever she was, she would be more than they could handle.
She’d scamper or, worse, one of the cops could get killed. So Murphy and I both rushed to get there and find the bad guy before she could pull the trigger, so to speak, on the Chicago PD.
It was half an hour before the game, and the streets were packed. I parked in front of a hydrant and ran half a mile to the United Center, where thousands of people were packing themselves into the building for the
