Fire & Frost (9 page)

“Don’t forget, I’ll probably know the hitters. Which means I’ll have a big ol’ element of surprise when they bust in here and see me back among the living,” he said. “And then I’ll cover you through the kitchen. It means I shoot like crazy and drive them to hide while you scoot to the door, got it?”

“I get the concept of cover, Max.”

“This isn’t like Miami Vice. It’ll be loud and you’ll want to hide, but you just focus on getting downstairs. That’s how you help me.”

“FYI, I
won’t
want to hide.”

He rolled his eyes.
FYI
. Her pet phrase ever since that show with the Barney Miller guy. “Okay. There are only two outcomes here—I kill them, or they kill me. There’ll be no Max lying on the floor bleeding, needing you to rescue me, got it? So don’t let anybody trick you.”

Silence. What a stupid thing to say. Why would she come up to rescue him? She’d just wait for him to die and reconjure him. They had a business arrangement: he killed the hit men, and she re-upped him every week. It was probably all wrong in some divine way but he loved getting the chance to rid the world of killers. To make the world safer for cops, safer for his little girl. He loved being alive.

And he loved Veronica.

Aloof and imperious as she was, he loved the hell out of her. Or, he wished he could, anyway. She wouldn’t even let him see the leg. She didn’t understand how completely he would love her.

Twig snap. She gave him a dark look.

“You’re okay,” he said.

No reply.

He smoothed his thumb up and down on the grip of his Glock, wishing he could touch her, hold her. He tried to make out her expression in the shadows. Was she frightened?

She was a classic overachiever—good at everything, and at the height of her powers. He’d put her age around 40, same as him. She liked to boast how no witch could best her. But now there were four witches working with hit men. The god-like power her computers gave her didn’t apply to battles. It gave her the power to create.

And it took time to manifest.

Crackle crackle.
More twigs. He’d purposely put them around the place, not trusting her wards. There had to be a half dozen people out there. He told himself Veronica could do this.

Crack-crash!

The mudroom door crashed in.

Intruders in the kitchen now.

A voice. “Veronica Harding?” A slight drawl. It sounded to Max like one of the Kite brothers. He’d arrested the Kite brothers numerous times in his cop days.

Max stole nearer to the doorway and made a patting motion. Down.

She complied.

Max’s heart pounded in his ears like it always did before a firefight. The voice again. “We just want to talk. We want to talk about Benny.”

Ah yes, the familiar drawl:
We jess wow-n-talk about Benny.
This was Kenny Kite, a Missouri hitter. Which meant there were likely five Kite brothers in play—three back, two front, no doubt. Max had been worried that Salvo would send the Kites one day.

The Kite crew he could handle, but the witches were the wild cards. The Kites would come in before the witches to clear the way. “We just
wow-n-talk
,” Kite said.

A squeak. Kite was creeping across the kitchen floor.

“How’s the peanut biz, Kite?” Max asked, casual as could be.

Silence.

“Don’t you remember? The last time I arrested you, you said you were out of the game. Gonna raise peanuts.”

“Who is that?”

Max smiled. As far as psychological advantages went, you couldn’t do much better than people thinking you were a ghost. It was possible that Kenny Kite might’ve even seen Max go down. Hell, Kenny Kite could’ve been the triggerman for Max’s original death back in Chicago.

Another creak. More Kites on the scene.

“You should’ve gone with it. Peanuts are a lot healthier than all the candy you had me get for you in interrogation that last time. Remember that? All those Snickers. And did you give me the intel I was asking for?”

“Din’ need to.”

Fear in Kenny’s voice. If Max showed himself now, he’d be able to get off two or three shots while the Kites absorbed the shock of seeing him alive.

Veronica held up three fingers.

Max stepped out and shot. Kenny went down first, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Then Kyle. Kev got a shot off before Max plugged him. He put another bullet in each of them.

He shoved Kenny’s body out of the way of the basement door and yanked it open, shooting into the darkness of the living room with his left and back through the open mudroom door with his right. “Go!” She’d never have better cover.

Veronica limped across the linoleum and onto the top of the basement steps. Once she’d started down, he shut the door and slammed up against it, firing until everything went quiet.

He slid to a crouch. Two Kites still out front. And the witches were out there, too. He snuck over to the drawer and reached up and into it to grab one of the spare clips he liked to keep stashed around the house.

That’s when a canon-like blast ripped through his head.

The blast overwhelmed him with a surprise he couldn’t jerk himself out of. The world spun and screamed in the language of color: reds, blacks, yellows. Cheek against the smooth floor. The back of his head hot.

The back of his head cold.

Breeze where it shouldn’t be. Yelling. Pandemonium.

They’d got him in the head. They’d undone Veronica’s magic and got him.

The men bent over their dead brothers with a kind of anger that was really grief. The women, all witches in red cloaks, scried for Veronica, but Veronica was safe in her warded lab.

He didn’t know how he knew any of this—his eyes weren’t working. Things became simple. Feeling and knowing merged.

It all seemed to unfold further and further away—these new witches, Veronica, the Kite brothers, his little girl.

VERONICA SAT IN HER COMPUTER lab, her view of the screen blurred. She should be typing, but instead she clutched her chest, pushed against her ribcage, as if she could contain the horrible feeling there, maybe push it back inside somehow. But it kept growing.

He was dead. She’d pushed out to him with her magic and felt him on the floor.

And she was trapped like a squirrel behind her own wards.

She’d wanted to go out and fight them straight on, but Max was right. You have to use your advantage.

She wiped her tears and started setting up the UNIX command files she’d need to conjure him again. It would take a day to get him back. She needed to hurry.

Four or five sets of footsteps above. Voices. Oh, those witches and hit men would pay for what they did to Max!

She’d originally conjured Max because he looked mean and tough and was an expert on fighting the Salvos. It’s why the Salvos had killed him in the first place.

And he loved being back alive, once he’d gotten over the shock of it, and was eager to reduce the population of hit men on Salvo’s payroll.

Clean kills
, he called them.
Right kills.

Max was like that. Concerned about doing right.

I’m finishing the job I started in life, baby.

She loved how he spoke, and that he called her
baby
, though she got the sense from stories he told that he called guys
baby
, too.

And he’d talk tough right to her face. Even with all her power, he’d talk tough to her face. That had surprised and offended her at first. Well, she’d
wanted
a tough one, she’d reminded herself.

Now she wouldn’t have it any other way. Nobody else would do.

She ran her fingers over the keyboard. He didn’t remember his original death, of course, but he’d remember today’s death if she conjured him back into this timeline. The memory from this timeline would cling. But Max could handle anything.

A thump on the door upstairs. One of the hit men going at it with his shoulder, probably.

She could do this.

The witches of the world had mocked her modern ideas about the new computer technology, and she’d mocked right back. People had ridiculed and rejected her for as long as she could remember. As a child, Veronica was teased because she was weird—not good-weird, but weird in a way that apparently made people dislike her. And then came the accident, the result of her futile attempt to impress the kids who always mocked her, monkeying around in the railroad yards. The chemical fire she’d accidentally started and the crushing fall she’d taken had landed her in the hospital for ten months, all pins and skin grafts and casts. Her family went bankrupt from it. She had to repeat third grade. She grew into a lonely and maimed teen trying desperately to hide her horrific injury, trying desperately to be normal, trying to reverse the stiffness and standoffishness that seemed to make her a magnet for mockery. But the more she was mocked, the stiffer and more unlikeable she became, and the more she focused on her leg.

And then she’d found magic.

Thump. Crack.

She pulled out her folder of Max photos.

Witches thought the only wisdom worth having came out of dusty old books. Veronica knew different. She could conjure anything in the world with her bespelled code—any person, any object, anything that could be photographed or even drawn. Everything was electricity, even the human body. Even emotions and thoughts—that had been her key breakthrough in computerizing the spells.

Hers was an innovation so powerful she couldn’t even boast about it, much as she would’ve liked to.

Another thump. Another crack.

The door, they would get through. The Council witches would snap those wards up there with the crook of a finger.

The computer lab wards wouldn’t be so easy.

She spread out the photos. Tried to decide which Max to bring to life now. Oh, they would pay for killing him…pay, pay, pay!

It took 24 hours for a conjured thing to appear, and it lasted only seven days. These seemed to be the laws of it all. No surprise, really: 24 hours and seven days aligned to the math of nature. She hated the 24 hour gap, but seven days had been a saving grace at times. She’d brought some disastrous things and people to life, especially during her rock star phase. It was a comfort to know any mistake would vanish in seven days. And, if not, she had a titanium cage out back.

She had a system for conjuring Max where she entered the code to bring him to life a day before he was scheduled to blink out. Result: the new Max would blink in the second the old Max blinked out. Cascading, she called it. He’d hate to know she had a name for it.

She’d have to wait the full 24 hours this time. Because they’d gone and killed him. It would’ve been painful. Bewildering. Her Max, lying on the floor.

The screen started to blur.

She grabbed the newspaper photo she usually conjured him from and ripped it in half. That Max was dead. She had to grab him from a different picture now. He called them her devil computers.

Nevertheless.

When the code was set up, she powered up all five of her computers—mini-supercomputers she’d home-cooked with kits and off-the-shelf processors, all configured in a daisy-pentagram. She pulled out her Scotch tape, ripped off eight small pieces, and stuck them to the edge of the desk so that she could grab them easily. She positioned the first electrode on her forehead and taped the thing on.

Thump. Crack. Through the basement door. Thumps down the steps.

She affixed the second electrode. How did a mob boss know to send the Witch Council after her?

She positioned the third electrode as they tore apart the basement, looking for her. The lab door would appear as a wall. More crashes. One very close.

Concentrate!

She affixed the last two electrodes.

Max always said that if she were a good person, she’d destroy her devil computers. He had a point. Even
she
knew it was too much power for one person, but the power was all she really had.

Max sometimes threatened to destroy the computers himself. She doubted he would. His will to live, to make things right—it was far too strong.

“Not here.” A man’s voice. “Nuttin’ here.”

“The bitch is here. I feel her.” One of the Council witches. Veronica ran a quick side equation—an algorithm to scatter her voice—and wove it through the invisible wards that protected her. Then she laughed, loudly.

“The bitch is definitely here,” she said. “And here, and here.”

The modulating voice would unnerve the witches out there. Witches really were fools not to embrace higher mathematics and supercomputing.

She selected a different Max photo—one taken the same week as the press conference photo. This one showed him leaving a crime scene, ducking under the yellow tape. She chose it because he would have his gun with him, and he’d certainly be wearing a bullet-proof vest—he was a major mob target toward the end of his life. He’d be glad to have his gun and vest when he appeared on her front porch the next day.

She set the clipping onto her desk, tore a sheet of print-out paper in two halves, and covered the sides of the photo so that only Max was visible. She didn’t want the guys walking next to him showing up. She taped the sheets into place. She needed to look at Max and concentrate during this part. She was the interface.

A woman’s sing-song voice: “Ver-onnnnn-ica. Where are you hiiii-ding?”

“I’m up your nose with a rubber hose,” Veronica said, and then she laughed. She wanted them unnerved. Frightened.

It was only a matter of time before the witches got busy painting up the walls with all the blood they had at their disposal. They’d send the hitters around the house for candles. They’d pull hair from her hairbrush. It would be a spellcasting hootenanny.

“You won’t hide for long, Veronica.”

“I’m not hiding. I’m bringing the rain of hell down on you,” she said. “If you knew the gnarliness of my power, you would keen and scream and fall at my feet.”

She stifled a smile. Max, if he were there, would give her such shit for saying
keen and scream and gnarliness.
She missed him already.