Magic Time: Angelfire (35 page)

Not a peep. Doc merely took the horse a little more in hand.

“You’re awfully droopy,” I told him. “What happened to the old ox?”

He glanced at me, met my eyes for all of two tenths of a second, then looked away to scan the alleys and empty cars. “I’m introspecting.”

“Sounds serious. Are you sure it’s good for you?”

His smile was weak. “Probably not.”

“And what are we introspecting about?”

He just shook his head. A private man, our dear Dr. Lysenko.

“My daddy told me that the ‘Russkies’ had raised pessimism to an art form. ’Zat so?”

He shot me a startled look, then laughed. “Do not judge all ‘Russkies’ by this one.”

“Why not? If all Russians were you, my elementary school wouldn’t have come equipped with a bomb shelter.”

He ignored that. “Your father seems to have had strong opinions about Russians.”

“My father had strong opinions about a lot of things.” “Like father like daughter.”

I grinned at him. “Thank you. Now, just so you know, my opinion about this particular ‘Russkie’ is that he ought to stop introspecting and…” I hesitated, looking for some nice safe words. “… and start paying attention to what’s going on around him.” (And if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black…)

A smile deepened the creases at the corners of his mouth.
“Da, glavah,”
he said.

Oh, joy, another nickname. “What’s that mean—
gla-vah
?” “I said, ‘Yes, Chief.’ ”

Oh, don’t go there
, I thought. “My father called me that, Viktor,” I told him. “You’re not my father.”

He looked as if I’d slapped him.

Damn
. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it—” He raised a hand to stop me. “I understand, Colleen,” he said, and kicked his horse into a trot.

“No, you don’t,” I murmured, then clucked at Big T and hurried to rejoin the train.

The Kennedy Expressway was clotted with abandoned cars, many of which had been stripped of tires, hubcaps, even window glass and seats. Fortunately, the Change had struck before the Chicago rush hour, or the road would have been an impassable maze. As it was, we were able to move at a trot or better if we single-filed it down the center line. It was windier up here, which wasn’t dangerous in and of itself, but made the horses a little crazy.

We’d been on the freeway for a while and had just swung southeast into an intricate cloverleaf when Magritte let out a cry of alarm. We all looked up at her, then followed the thrust of her arm eastward.

“Oh, God,” said Goldman. “What’s that?”

That
was a filmy bubble of something rising over what I took to be downtown Chicago. It looked like a dome from one of those futuristic movies about the colonization of Mars, but it seemed semiliquid, like a soap bubble. A rainbow of color oozed over the scarlet-tinted surface.

“Man, that wasn’t there when we left,” said Enid. “Looks like it’s sitting right over the Loop.”

Magritte had floated upward again, bit by bit. Now she settled onto Jayhawk behind Goldie, rubbing her upper arms and shaking her head. “That don’t feel right. That’s bad.”

Cal reined Sooner closer—intense, face all angles, eyes bright and sharp. “Goldie, talk to me. What’s happening? What are you hearing?”

Goldie’s face had gone as gray as the asphalt we rode in on. “A whole lot of nothing. But it … it feels like…”

Magritte finished for him: “It feels like the Preserve, but… but dark and sticky.”

“Like the Preserve, in what way?” Cal asked.

“Like firefly stuff … sort of,” said Magritte, nodding toward the gleaming bubble.

Every drop of color drained out of Cal’s face. Watching him, I felt like I’d been plunged back into the river. If there were flares here, he’d want to believe one of them was Tina.

“No,” I said. “It’s not possible. How could there be flares here?”

Cal’s eyes burned. “How could there be flares at the Preserve?” He nodded up the dotted white line beneath our horses’ hooves. “Let’s get moving. The sooner we find Howard Russo, the sooner we can get Enid free of his contract.”

He left the part about finding Tina and the Source unsaid.

We hustled then, due south and parallel to the Chicago River, and submerged ourselves in the Chicago ’hoods again at Des Plaines Street. It was a better neighborhood than we’d been in earlier—or at least it used to be. That did not mean I was about to relax. I rode rear guard with both eyes on the shadowy road, my crossbow at ready, flinching every time someone poked their head out of a window or doorway.

I can’t begin to describe how twitchy I was, riding down that dim corridor. The others moved ahead of me in pairs, with Magritte hovering among the packhorses. I watched their backs; there was no one to watch mine. I felt naked, the flesh between my shoulder blades crawling like ants tap-danced up and down it. I decided that if we saw a police station, I was going to go in and do some clothes shopping—something black and sexy in Kevlar.

Finally, we swung east onto Polk. Enid called back over his shoulder that it was right up ahead, in the middle of the block between Jefferson and Clinton. The buildings were low rises, neither new nor old, and it looked like the zoning was mixed business and residential. Russo’s building was a four-story gray stone with that sparkly stuff in the concrete. The windows were tall, narrow, and covered with a facing of flat, vertical, fake marble columns. Very neo-something.

We drew to a stop in front of the building and Enid turned to Cal. “Now what? Do we just go in and get in his face?” “That’s my vote,” said Cal.

I raised my hand. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I would like to raise a practical issue. What do we do with these horses while we’re getting in Howie’s face?”

The cool thing about these older neighborhoods is the way they hid things behind their storefronts. In this case, what looked like a garage door led down an alley into a courtyard that contained a patio set with a folded-up umbrella, a woebegone Fiat, and an equally forlorn motorbike. There were also some trash cans and two bicycles sitting in a metal stand. Correction:
locked
in a metal stand.

We left the horses in the yard under the watchful eyes of Goldie, Doc, and Magritte, while Cal, Enid, and I entered the building from the rear. Cal’d drawn his sword. Enid’s weapons of choice were a switchblade someone had tossed into his guitar case during one of his street corner “giggles,” as he called them, and a bayonet he told us had been taken off a dead cavalryman by his great-grandfather, Soldier Heart, at Little Big Horn. In close quarters I like a good baseball bat. Especially if you don’t want to damage the other guy too badly. I was glad I’d thought to bring one.

Splitting up made me nervous, since I’d noted that the locks on those bicycles were brand new. We could only hope that nothing would happen in the courtyard that would separate Magritte from Goldie by more than a few feet.

Enid took us straight up to the third floor, but started

shaking his head as we came up onto the landing. “He’s not

here. But he’s in the building somewhere—I can feel him.” Cal peered up the stairwell. “We go up or down?” Enid’s brow furrowed, then he closed his eyes. “Down.” We went down. Enid first.

I traded glances with Cal before we moved to follow. “What do we do if he’s
not
here?” I asked in a whisper.

“I heard that,” said Enid from below. “He’s here.”

Cal cracked a smile. “We search the offices. We might find something. Maybe the original contract.”

I shrugged. “Which would do what for us?”

“Enid tried destroying his copy and couldn’t. I had a

thought that maybe we have to destroy the original first.” “Better light a lamp,” Enid called. “It’s dark down here.” “Could it be that simple?” I asked as Cal put a lighter to

the lamp wick.

“Now that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?” He looked up, caught my eyes and smiled. In the lamplight his eyes looked more gold than hazel. Breath stopped in my throat and my face felt suddenly warm and tingly.

“You comin’?” asked Enid from the darkness.

“Yeah,” Cal called down, then set the chimney firmly over the flame and started down the stairs, giving me a backward glance.

I allowed myself to breathe again and followed him. Russo wasn’t on the second floor or the first.

“Little shit’s hidin’ out in the basement,” muttered Enid. “He probably felt me coming.”

The basement was a warren of storage and utility rooms, all arranged around a central area. I could tell right away that somebody lived here. Furniture had been dragged into the corner of the main room: a table, a leather chair, a futon, a shelf loaded with books, a small but nice Persian carpet. Very tasteful. There was something wrong with the picture, though—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Smells funny,” said Enid.

Cal was looking over some stuff on the table. He held up a cigar butt—well chewed. A tendril of smoke curled limply from the end. “Still warm.”

Enid and his great-granddaddy’s bayonet stood guard in the “living room” while Cal and I made our way down the hall toward the storage areas. We got to the first door, a storage room. Cal set the lantern down in the corridor while I checked the lock. It had been jimmied.

“You open,” Cal whispered. “I’ll go in.”

I shook my head. “
You
open.”

“Colleen…”

“All right. I open, we both go in.”

He nodded.

I mouthed a three-second countdown, then flung the door against the wall with a bang, in the hope that if Russo was in there, he’d freak and blow his cover. I mean, how used to being stalked through a dark building by armed commandos could he be?

No one leapt out of the stuff that filled the storage room. It would take a thorough search to find anyone in there. I took a step farther into the room, wielding my bat.

“Hey, Howie. Come on out and say hi.”

Out in the hall a door slammed and someone pounded down the corridor. Enid shouted. Cal and I whirled in unison and vaulted out of the room and down the hall to the main chamber.

Enid was facing us, bayonet in hand, his lamp held high and a stunned expression on his face. Cowering between him and us, trying to shield its bulging, white eyes from the light, was a grunter in a brown tweed suit coat and little else.

Now I realized what was wrong with the charming domestic scene we’d stumbled into. There were no lamps.

Enid took a step forward, lowering his lantern. “Shit, Howie. Is that you?”