Hallow Point (3 page)

“Staten, what the fuck is wrong with you? You’re supposed to be taking Baker’s beat while he’s here securing…”

I kinda tuned out, right about then. I’d heard these rants before, and it was gonna drag on a while. I tried to nose around some without actually going anywhere, tried to find an angle on what’d happened here. I couldn’t tell much from where I was, though, and while I woulda taken some of the heat off Pete if I could, I didn’t think maybe getting pinched for trespassing on a crime scene was the wise way to go about it.

Which meant I couldn’t accomplish bupkis other’n note a wet tang in the breeze and figure it was gonna rain again before sunup.

Then I heard every copper’s favorite phrase, “have your badge,” and figured I’d have to do something after all.

I
thought
about just stepping between the two, snagging Galway’s gaze and fiddling around with his noodle a bit until he thought about this whole situation how I wanted him to think. While there weren’t an awful lot of people around, though, there were enough. I don’t like to fall back on the hocus-pocus with too much of an audience.

So I just needed to get Galway’s peepers on me some other way.

Whistling softly, I stuck my hands in my pockets and made straight for the last lonely remaining couple’a camera-wielding reporters.

Got Galway’s attention faster’n a priest at a peepshow, I’ll tell you what.

“Hey!
Hey!
” he yelled. Almost wanted to ask if he had a bit of mojo himself, given how quick he was at my elbow. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Going to talk to the newshawks, see what’s up, since it don’t look as if you’re gonna tell me.” I shrugged. “Why? What’s it
look
like I’m doing?”

He tossed me a glare sharp enough I felt I oughta be sitting in a barber’s chair.

“Oberon, right?”

“Oberon, actually,” I corrected instinctively.
Aw, damn it.
The drive and the interrupted snooze had
really
taken it out of me. I’m so used to people mistaking my name for “O’Brien” in this city…

Anyway, he blinked at me a few times, I blinked back—glad I don’t blush like you mugs—until he finally let it go.

“You trying to get arrested?” he demanded.

“Wasn’t my
first
goal, no.”

“You got any idea how bad you’ll gum this up if you start flapping your yap to the press before we suss out what was stolen?”

“If anything,” I added, just to prove that I knew what the hell I was talkin’ about. (Figured Pete wasn’t gonna get in any
more
trouble.) “Look, detective…”

We still had folks watching, yeah, but now he was right up in my puss. Nobody was gonna glom to anything hinky if I… pushed a little. His peepers went wide as I slipped my focus in past ’em, plucking at his thoughts a bit. Not a lot, just shuffling a few cards around: suspicion and anger to the bottom of the deck, confusion and impatience with the case to the top.

“You and me,” I continued, “we both know the department’s behind the eight ball on this one. Break-in at the Field? No way the press is gonna buy that nothing, or almost nothing, is missing. You’re gonna be chasing more rumors’n crooks. You’re gonna have the mayor and the city council climbing up your ass like cheap long johns to shush those whispers. And you’re gonna have biscuits for resources, since the force’s got better crimes than breaking-and-gift-giving to worry over. So what’s the harm in letting me give this an up-and-down? I don’t find anything, I go home. I do find something, and you’re the genius who thought to bring in somebody to take the heat off the department.”

All nice and reasonable-sounding, yeah? Least, it was thanks to the mental nudge. Galway might come out of it later wondering why he went along, but by that point I didn’t think he’d say much.

“Okay, Oberon,” he said, sounding just a touch slow, scratching under his hat with one finger as though he wasn’t quite sure what itched. “You’re on. But it’s off the books—and off the account—unless you find something.”

Sigh.
Fine
. “I’m sure Officer Staten can guide me from here.”

I think Galway wanted to argue that one—he was still pretty sore at Pete—but another
aes sidhe
-special push took care of that.

The rest of the bulls gave me and Pete some queer stares as I stepped up to him and steered us toward the entrance, but nobody said boo about it.

“You called it, Pete. He was just
real
tickled to see me.”

“I mighta figured that one wrong,” he admitted quietly, out of earshot of the other uniforms. “Guess I don’t got Galway worked out as good as I thought. Everything jake now, though?”

“Long as I’m here, yeah. After I make tracks, you’re on your own.”

“Gee, thanks. You’re all heart.”

“Oh, and if I come up with anything, it was Galway’s idea to call me in.”

“And if you don’t? Lemme guess.”

“Yep.
Then
you get the credit.”

“You this nice to
all
your friends, Mick?”

“Hey, you just wanted what was best for the case, right? Now, why don’tcha show me where the break-in happened, before you gotta find a doctor and get that twitch looked at?”

Turned out, though, that the actual point of entry told me squat. Nothing but a smashed window. Not a pro job; anybody with a rock or a brick coulda done it. I was kinda surprised the twit had managed not to bleed all over the jagged glass.

Sloppy. Careless. ’Cept for one teeny problem.

None of the alarms had gone off.

That much, I remembered Pete telling me in that rolling torture chamber he calls a Plymouth. And even if I hadn’t, I’d have picked it up from the whispers and conversation among the lingering coppers outside. The Field had some real high-technology stuff, with bells and klaxons, and nobody’d heard so much as the squeak of a goosed mouse.

So what kinda ham-fisted galoot smashes his way in like a caveman but manages not to trip any switches or break any connections? That’s a sort of luck even
I
might have some trouble arranging.

I wasn’t sure what any of that meant, yet, but I knew it meant
something
.

“All right,” I said to Pete. “Lead the way.”

Suppose I was kinda unfair earlier. The place actually does a decent job of emulating Ancient Greek architecture, or at least what you lot
think
it looked like. Got your caryatid columns and bas-reliefs and white stone and everything. It’s not your fault you weren’t around to see the real thing before it was stripped to ruins.

I just ain’t inclined to be charitable. I don’t much care for museums, see? You might think I’d feel better around all the history and old dinguses and whatnot, and yeah, sometimes I can take comfort in ’em for a few. And they’re
bursting
with mojo, or at least potential mojo, thanks to all the luck’n history’n symbolism of everything on display. But there’s always this bitter aftertaste of technology to it. All the lighting and alarms, all the science buzzing along downstairs, the echoes of a few million modern souls passing through… Well, imagine a relaxing, soft-handed masseuse suddenly switching to sandpaper, or free-floating globs of cod-liver oil in your cocktail, and you probably get the gist of it.

As I discovered, though, maybe I wasn’t gonna have to deal with any of that.

“Not an exhibit,” Pete told me when I asked which particular exhibit had been, uh, un-robbed. “Was in the stores, downstairs.”

So, after just a wink of the sorta dead lighting and antiseptic smell of museum hallway, we passed through a door with a big warning sign saying “authorized personnel”—sounds like a big deal, but it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be—and tromped down an open, echoing staircase, which was full of even deader lighting and an even stronger antiseptic stink from below. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

It wasn’t a long staircase, but we still got interrupted before we made the bottom. Voices, not shouting but sure as shootin’ not happy, drifted up to us. Pete dropped a hand to his heater, and I almost went for the L&G Model 1592 I keep in my shoulder holster in lieu of a roscoe, but none of that was necessary. Couple more of the boys in blue appeared on the steps. They were shoulder-to-shoulder with the bird doing most of the yammering: a pale old man with pale bushy hair and a pale beard, in a dark three-piece. He looked like a dandelion undertaker.

“Clancy, Pat,” Pete greeted the two of ’em. “How’s it figure?”

“Pete,” the one on the left—Clancy, I think—said. “I don’t… We’re not…”

He and Pat gave me a once-over; dunno if they figured I was another plainclothes, or what, but I guess being with Pete was good enough.

“Galway ain’t with you, is he?” Clancy asked. They both peered around me, like the fat gumshoe was somehow hiding behind one of us.

“Uh, no…” Pete replied.

“Good. I dunno how the hell we’re supposed to explain—”

“Explain?
Explain?
” That was the dandelion squawking now. “You had damn well better do a damn sight more than ‘explain,’ officers!”

The two flatfeet grimaced pretty much in unison.

“Pete,” Clancy said, “this here’s Morton Lydecker. Assistant Curator. Mr. Lydecker, this is Officer Pete Staten and… Uh…”

“Oberon,” I chimed in. “Mick Oberon. PI and consultant on cases of certain, let’s say, historical interest.” It wasn’t even a fib, really. There was history here, and I
was
interested, so…

“What,” I continued, so nobody could ask any questions or whine any whines, “seems to be the problem now, Mr. Lydecker?”

“The problem?
Problem?
”

I swore right then that if he kept screeching, I was gonna drag him up to the African elephant display and dangle him from a tusk.

“The problem, Mr. Oberon,” he said, calming himself with a big, deep breath, “is that it’s vanished.”

In what was already a seriously hinky case, that was
not
what I’d expected to hear.

“What?” I asked, ’cause that was the sort of brilliant questioning that made me a successful dick.

Lydecker nodded, resembling nothing so much now as a frantic feather duster.

“We never strayed far from the room,” he swore, though whether he meant himself and the two bulls or some other “we” I couldn’t say. “I can’t imagine how anyone might have sneaked past us! But why ever someone would break into a museum to
leave
an artifact, someone else must have wanted it. It’s gone again!”

* * *

A catacomb of winding halls, some brilliant as noon—if noon was, you know, electric—while others were lit by single, lonely bulbs, manmade fireflies dangling and dying in a spider web. Wooden doors with brass plaques, a few of which were even legible. So-’n-so’s office here, the department of physical anthropological what’s-who’s-ery over there; and everywhere the bug-song of halogen lights and the echoes of footsteps I wasn’t sure we’d even taken yet.

Yeah, this place wasn’t hair-raising at all.

Thing is, I only remember a lot of that in retrospect. At the time, I was too busy gawking bad as a dumb wheat fresh off the bus.

Not at the halls. The rooms.

Rooms? No, more like man-made caverns, even if the rows of metal shelves made ’em feel smaller. Bones, claws, rocks, tools, weapons, dishes, clothes, pelts… A million different gewgaws from a thousand places and a hundred centuries. Some of the crap here was older’n
I
was. And I wanted to study
all
of it, spend a few decades just glomming the whole shebang.

Couldn’t help but think of my drawer of curios, back at the flop. All kinds of weird little dinguses, stuff I collected or asked for on whim, payment for my services instead of dough. Sometimes valuable, sometimes not; sometimes important, sometimes not. But always
symbolic
.

That’s the language of magic: symbolism. Everything’s got power, from holy relics to a worn-out old shoe, if you got the know-how to tap into it, and you figured out what it means, and to who.

This place? Made my drawer look like… well, a drawer. Most people woulda wanted to study all the goodies and oddities here for the history. Me? I wanted to take it all in for the symbolism. I knew there was power here, mentioned that to you before. But this? A strong enough magician might rule the world with all this.

Then I thought about the last powerful magician I’d met, just earlier that year, and decided maybe I wanted to ponder on something else for a while.

All of which is a long way of bringing me back around to the table we stood around, in the room where we’d finally stopped.

According to Lydecker, the museum staff did a lot of work on their Polynesian exhibits right here. A couple of flat stone faces sneered from a nearby shelf, while a much bigger face made of feathers and wicker and teeth contemplated eating me from another. On the table itself, a bunch of necklaces made of shells and hair had been pushed aside, leaving room for the main event.

A tall wicker basket full of spears lay on its side. The wood was dry-rotted, the tips were stone and scratched up yet good, but it was still plain as day you wouldn’t wanna get stuck with one.

“Right in there,” the curator was spouting, not for the first time. “I just came into the room, and it was right there.”

“What was?” I asked him. I’d sorta already picked up on it, from his rambling, but I wanted to get it all straight.

“A spear! As I’ve already told you!”

“Uh-huh.” I made a show of giving the whole bundle a good once-over. “And you know this collection so well you, what, just knew it didn’t belong with the others?”

Lydecker got all huffy, which was what I wanted. I’ve met the type; you probably have, too. Best way to get ’em to explain anything in detail is to imply they might not know it.

“While neither the Polynesian peoples nor the tools of warfare are my specialty, Mr. Oberon, I can assure you that anyone with even the
faintest
understanding of history would have recognized that something was amiss. I honestly can’t fathom how the intruder thought he might hide the thing here. He must have been truly desperate, or—” no mistaking the slant he cast my way, then, “—a true idiot.”