Hard Spell (25 page)

  "I have no intention of flying back to Washington, at least, not in the near future. The good Dr Santangelo made it very clear that he wants me to stay under observation, for at least a week. And since I have no desire to suffer another stroke, I'm inclined to agree with him."

  Prescott ran a hand slowly through his greasy hair. "But if I call my research assistant at G-town and describe what I need, she'll get it all together, and send it FedEx overnight. That's likely to be expensive as hell–" he grew a little smile "–so I'll let the university pay for it."

  The smile became a grin, even if it seemed a little forced. "By tomorrow, or at latest the day after, I should have those fragments here – or rather in my regular hospital room, where I gather I'm headed shortly. I will also have her send the proper dictionaries and any other research tools I can't get off the Internet. I assume they have wi-fi here at the hospital?"

  "If they don't, I will personally have it installed for you," I said.

  "This kind of work is slow going," he said, "but I'll push as hard as I can, given–" he made the gesture toward his head again "–everything. I know there's a time factor, so we'd best not waste any. In fact, my phone should be in my jacket pocket, which is probably hanging in that little closet over there. If one of you gentlemen would be so kind…"

• • • •

As we pulled out of the hospital parking lot, Karl said, "I'm not too well up on curses. Missed the two lectures on them at the academy, because I got the flu, and never made them up. There was some stuff I was supposed to read on my own, but you know how it is."

  "Yeah, I do. There's always something else to think about."

  "If the curse Prescott told us about is the real deal, who's gonna carry it out? I mean, the fucking pages aren't gonna grow arms to cut him up and burn him with, are they?"

  "Probably not," I told him. "A curse – a real one, not the crap that some gypsies deal in – usually involves a pact with a demon, one that's pretty low in the infernal pecking order. The lower they are, the weaker, and that much easier to summon and control."

  "Yeah, I didn't miss Demonology. I know that part."

  "Okay, then. So a curse, if it's legit, sets up preconditions for the demon to operate under. It's like one of those old mummy movies you see on TV late at night. A bunch of archeologists find Ramah-HoHaina's burial chamber, and go in for a look-see. And the usual looting, of course."

  "'Course," Karl said. "Can't have a mummy movie without looting."

  "So, say that back when old Ramah-Ho-Haina dies, the burial party includes a pretty powerful wizard. He puts a curse in place that automatically summons the demon if anybody messes with omb. Doesn't matter if it takes like three thousand years to kick in – demons don't give a shit, they're not going anyplace."

  "Yeah, I've seen those movies," Karl said. "The evil spirit follows the scientists home, then does a number on them, one by one."

  "Right, and the kind of number it does is one of the things that the wizard set up thousands of years ago."

  "So Prescott could be letting himself in for some serious shit, helping us."

  I shrugged. "Maybe. Just because some dude writes down that there's a curse doesn't mean there really is one. Still, we better assume the worst."

  "But, the hospital's already protected, Stan. It's gotta be. People die in there all the time, and they sure don't want demons hanging around, waiting to grab up somebody's soul."

  "Sure, it's protected. But I don't want to take any chances with something like this. We need to get some additional wards placed around Prescott's hospital room. Normally, that would be Rachel's job."

  "Yeah, I know. So, we'll have to subcontract it out," Karl said. "I know a couple of first-class witches..."

  "Call one of them," I said. "Now."

  "We don't have authorization yet, Stan."

  "Fuck it – I'll pay for it myself, if McGuire's feeling stingy. Now
call
, will you?"

  Karl opened his phone, but then stopped to look at me. "You really worried about this curse thing?"

  "Some," I said. "But it's more than that."

  Karl was squinting at his phone's directory. "Like what?"

  "I'm thinking about what might happen if Sligo gets wind of what Prescott's up to."

  Karl thought for a moment. "He'd probably want to do something about it, wouldn't he?"

  "Yeah. Shit, I would, in his place."

  "And since we know that, if we were ready for him..."

  "Uh-uh. No way, no how. I'm not using the guy as bait. We fuck it up, and Prescott's toast. There's got to be another way to get this fucking Sligo."

  "Hope we think of it soon," Karl said, and began to tap in numbers.

At certain times of the day, getting around Scranton is quicker if you use side streets and stay away from the main thoroughfares, such as they are. That's what I was doing, and I managed to get the speed up to about forty while Karl tried to track down a witch who had apparently changed her phone number a couple of times.

  A hundred feet or so ahead, a black cat was just starting to lead three of her kittens across the wide street. I'm fond of animals, so I figured I'd better speed up a little – that way, I'd be past them and gone before they reached my side of the road. I could've just slowed down and let then go first, but that would mean a black cat – hell, four of them – would be crossing my path. I'm not superstitious or anything, but I still thought that was a bad idea.

  Turned out I was right.

  Because if I hadn't speeded up right about then, the dead body that fell on top of us would have gone right through the windshield, instead of just putting a humongous dent in the roof.

  Close to two hundred pounds of dead weight moving that fast – it might well have killed one or both of us if it had gone through the glass, or at least hurt us pretty bad.

  But we were fine. Being scared shitless doesn't count. Or so they tell me.

I've been around plenty of crime scenes, but this was the first time I found myself the focus of one. Since there was igh place nearby – either manmade or natural – that the guy could have jumped, fell, or been pushed from, the first uniforms on the scene started kicking around the idea that maybe I'd hit a pedestrian who'd been crossing the street – him hard enough with the front bumper to toss his body onto the car's roof. The pricks.

  The doc from the M.E.'s office put the kibosh on that pretty soon, though. Even without an autopsy, body temperature showed the dude had been dead for at least two hours.

  The M.E.'s guy wasn't a guy this time, but a gal. Instead of Homer, they'd sent a thin, I mean
really
thin young woman named Cecelia Reynolds. Fine with me – she's as good at pathology as Homer, maybe better. I'm always telling her, in a kidding way, to go eat a cookie, and she usually responds, in an equally joking way, by telling me to go fuck myself.

  I was explaining, to the third pair of my brother officers – these two from Homicide – what had happened to Karl and me, when Cecelia called me over. She was squatting over the dead guy, who had come to rest on the asphalt after sliding off the car's roof.

  "We're just about to bag him," she said to me, "but I thought you'd be interested in this."

  Cecelia tugged on a fresh pair of latex gloves. "It was just a hunch I had," she said, "and turns out, I was right." She leaned forward and used her fingers to peel back the corpse's upper lip.

  Fangs. Two nice long, sharp vampire canines.

  "Thanks, Cecelia," I said after a moment. "And, listen: I realize you can't undress him here, but when you get him on the table, I'm betting you'll find some weird symbols, probably three of then, carved into the body someplace. If you do, I'd be
real
grateful if you'd give me a call, okay?"

  She looked at me for a couple of seconds before nodding slowly. "Okay, Stan, I'll be sure to do that."

  I straightened up and headed back to the Homicide cops to answer more questions. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that Cecelia would find three more of the arcane symbols carved into the dead guy. Because now that I knew he was a vamp, I was also pretty sure I knew something else about him, too.

  He was the fourth sacrifice.

• • • •

Whenever a cop is involved in anything where somebody gets killed, whether it's an officer-involved shooting or something more unusual, like having a dead guy drop out of the sky on you, Internal Affairs takes over – and the only reason we don't call them Infernal Affairs is that we don't want to be insulting to Hell.

  I had to relate the details of my current case, over and over, to a couple of IA cops named Famalette and Sullivan. Karl was going through a similar routine down the hall with another pair from the Rat Squad. Maybe my two interrogators figured I'd get sick of the repetition sooner or later, and confess to something, just to make it stop.

  But they didn't get any confessions out of me, because I hadn't done anything. And I kept bringing the conversation back to the central fact that the undead guy had been truly dead for at least two hours before he ended up on top of my car, however the hell he got there.

  "How do you know the vamp had been iced two hours earlier?" Famalette asked, as if he'd just caught me in a slip-up. He had a rubber band wrapped around the spread fingers of one hand and he kept twanging it with the other. I think Internal Affairs training must include lessons on how to be annoying.

  "Because the M.E. doc said so. What's her name – Reynolds."

  "The M.E.'s report hasn't even been filed yet," Famalette said, in an
a-ha
tone.

  "She told me at the scene. She knew from the body temp."

  "What's she doing revealing confidential information like that to you?"

  "She thought I'd be interested," I said, "since I'm the one who had the dead guy dropped on top of him, and all. Well, me and my partner. And who says it's confidential?"

  "All M.E. reports are confidential, Markowski, you oughta know that," Famalette said.

  "Yeah, but the M.E. report hasn't been filed yet – you said so, yourself."

  His face started going red, and he turned away.

  "You real chummy with this chick from the M.E.'s office?" Sullivan asked me. He had a Brillo pad of curly hair that reminded me of that singer from the Seventies, Art Garfunkel. I hoped that he wasn't going to break into "Bridge Over Troubled Water" – although even that would have been better than the crap I'd been listening to for the last two hours.

  "Chummy?" I said. "I dunno – the last thing she said to me was 'Go fuck yourself.' Draw your own conclusions."

  "You sure the one you're fucking isn't her?" Sullivan said with a leer.

  "Not me," I said. "I like women with some meat on their bones." Like Lacey Brennan, for instance, but I kept that thought to myself.

  Famalette turned back from some graffiti on the wall he'd been pretending to read, still twanging that damn rubber band like a Spaghetti Western soundtrack. "You don't like vampires much, do you, Markowski?"

  "Vamps aren't so bad," I said. "At least, I never heard of one working for Internal Affairs."

  "Word is," Sullivan said, "you'd just as soon stake a vampire as have lunch."

  I shrugged. "Depends on what's for lunch."

  Sullivan leaned close, and his breath should have been banned by the Geneva Convention. "Face it, Markowski, you're not exactly broken up over this vamp's death, are you?"

  "I wouldn't be broken up if you two walked in front of a truck tomorrow," I said. "Doesn't mean I'd be the one behind the wheel."

  "Are you threatening us, Markowski?" Famalette said, trying for indignant and failing.

  I just shook my head slowly and wondered how much longer it was going to last.

Eventually they turned me loose. Karl, too. The rat fuckers had no case, and no choice. McGuire agreed with that assessment, and he told Karl and me as much in his office. By then it was end of shift – the double shift that Karl and I had pulled, again. I'd planned to spend the time doing something more useful than answering questions for morons, but McGuire was philosophical.

  "They're like the clap," he said. "The best you can do is take precautions and try to avoid them."

  Karl and I laughed at that. Then McGuire said, "None of which answers the question of who dropped a dead vamp on top of you guys – and why?"

  "Not to mention how," Karl said.

  "Had to've been magic," I said.

  "I wonder." McGuire leaned back in his chair. "I've been thinking about this. Let's say the vamp is in bat form, and he's flapping along, on his way to Joe's Blood Bank, or someplace. But there's a guy on the ground, or maybe on a roof, who's got a rifle loaded with silver, or that charcoal stuff we've been seeing lately.
Bang!
He nails Mr Bat, who turns back into human form upon death, like they do, whereupon gravity takes over and he drops like a rock – right on top of you."

  I glanced at Karl. I was pretty sure we had the same thing in mind: this is what happens the boss has too much time to think about stuff.

  "Be a hell of a shot," I said. "Especially at night."

  "More than that, it fails the test of Occam's Razor," Karl said.

  "
Whose
razor?" McGuire asked.

  "William of Occam, big philosopher dude in the Middle Ages. He said that 'The simplest explanation that fits the known facts is probably true.'"

  McGuire and I both stared at him.

  Karl shrugged. "Just something I read in a magazine, is all. But it makes sense. No disrespect, boss, but that thing with the rifle is just too complicated to be real likely."

  McGuire didn't get mad. "I wasn't pushing it," he said. "It was just a thought. And if that's not what happened, then why is some magician dropping a dead vamp on a couple of cops?"

  "We might have the beginning of an answer once I hear from Cecelia Reynolds," I said. "She's doing the post on the vamp and I asked her to look for those symbols carved on the body."