Live and Let Fly Read online

  So instead, Santry turned his anger to me. "Well?"

  Normally, I'd ask if the city was going to pay us, but Charlie is a friend. Besides, I'd marked the lot as my territory; that made this personal. I'd bill the city later.

  Even though I already had his answer, I made a show of concentrating on my dragon senses. I alternately took in and disregarded the stench of the decaying garbage in the dumpster, the flowery perfume Kelly wore—Elvin Sun, I thought—the chemical odor of Santry's cheap deodorant, the distinctive wood-chip and glue of the plywood making up the Gloria Quattrinis façade... Once upon a time, I could have smelled the blood running through my human companions' veins, but that was pre-George. My magic sensing picked up Grace, her spell, and the wards around the area. Nothing more.

  "Damn," Santry muttered when I reported my findings. He always watched his language around Grace but didn't have any problem cussing around his people. "So what'd Charlie tell you?"

  "'Bout the same as he told you, he said," I replied. "He was taking a shortcut though here.

  Said they were filming some noisy scene—Mardi Gras or something—when somebody kicked him from behind, and he went sailing, ten or twenty feet, to impact face-first into the dumpster.

  That's all he remembers."

  "And no magic. So we know it's not a human. Which leaves half the cast—"

  I sat down and wrapped my tail around my feet, cat-like, twitching the end. It always annoys Santry. "The cast is clean. Grace and I checked them."

  "Yeah. I know how good your police records are in that medieval—"

  " Grace checked them," I emphasized. Faerie do not have the technology or the fanatical need for record-keeping that Mundanes so coveted, but some of our methods outshine yours.

  When a Mage of the Church says a person is clear of immoral behavior or criminal intent, you can be sure she didn't merely guess based on some paperwork.

  Santry knew this. "Fine. Outside job, maybe. I'm not ruling anything out yet. People can change, can be tempted." He said the last with a sarcastic twist. "Unless your Sister has everyone under some kind of compulsion spell?"

  "She won't mess with free will. You know that."

  Santry puffed out a sigh and surveyed the scene, thinking aloud. "So something kicked him hard enough to break ribs, knocked him into a dumpster with enough force to kill him if it hadn't been a prop, yet didn't bother to finish the job. Instead it drags him—"

  "Lifts," Kelly interrupted.

  " Lifts him off of the smashed dumpster, steals that courier's bag of his, and tosses him behind the dumpster. Why leave him alive? There was time to slit his throat—"

  "Blood evidence?" Kelly ventured. "Not that a bloody nose isn't messy, but the only blood we found was confined to the immediate area or on Charlie himself. If the perp got anything on him, he didn't leave a trace."

  "Step on his windpipe and crush it. If who- or what-ever could kick him this far, it was strong enough to do that."

  "That would leave imprints on his skin. As it was, we didn't get anything immediate from the bruising on his back because the shield he wears diffuses the energy of impact."

  Charlie's shield was a spell woven into the fabric of his uniform. Although not quite as efficient as Kevlar, it could stop a bullet, yet was lightweight and comfortable on hot days. No, I don't know why it tears yet can stop a bullet. I suspect the work of a cliché, personally. Faerie are nothing if not cliché.

  "So is our perp smart or rushed?" Santry rubbed his chin. He looked at Grace, who was now kneeling in front of the destroyed dumpster, face tilted upward, rocking slightly. "That's not a good sign, is it?" he asked, jerking his head in her direction.

  "She's not finding anything," I said. I didn't snow Santry; we were on the same team this time. Besides, it never worked on him anyway.

  "Fine. Motive. What was in the bag? He refused to tell us. If it weren't for diplomatic immunity, I'd—"

  "He can't tell you; we'll have to ask the Duke. Besides, the diplomatic pouch is ceremonial more than anything, and he was done with his runs for the day. His briefcase should still be locked in his car. Anyone check that? Okay, then. Only thing in the pouch was a print copy of an article he got online and an engagement ring."

  Kelly's eyes lit up at the news, which didn't surprise me. I knew she was a big Rhoda fan.

  Then she sighed. "Poor guy. All the rotten luck."

  "Much of a rock? Worth attacking a herald?" Santry asked.

  I shrugged. "Some diamond chips surrounding a dragon stone, but not one big enough to have any real value. More of a pebble, really."

  "Thought dragons were all crazy about those things."

  "Not ones so small, usually. Not much magical use, either. Have to be pretty desperate to want that stone. Charlie chose it for the symbolism." Since they'd met through me, I'd given him the stone, from where it lay hidden with my other treasure in Caraparavelenciana. I'd also brought back a useless but interesting artifact, a statue from the Sumarian era. Cambridge Ramada, an investigator specializing in finding unique items, had a customer for it. We used the profits to buy Grace a used car.

  Kelly sighed again. Santry gave her a dirty look. "Don't you have work to do?"

  "Don't you have a romantic bone in your body?"

  Santry snorted. "Not since my divorce. Go on."

  Kelly rolled her eyes as she passed me, but then her brows furrowed in thought as she focused on a platform on the back of the volcano set. "Vern? Can you fly me up there?"

  I stood, stretched, and with a little magic and a flap of my wings, rose. Hovering over her, I grabbed her arms in my front claws and wrapped my tail around her waist. She gasped as I pulled her from the ground, but she stayed focused on the platform. "I can't tell; is it big enough for both of us to stand on?"

  "Two humans, maybe. Not me and you."

  "Okay. Set me on it then. Can you not flap? I don't want anything disturbed."

  A little more magic, and I set her on the platform. First, she looked over the edge, gauging the angle to the dumpster and the place where Charlie had most likely been kicked, holding tightly to a two-by-four brace behind her. Next, she scanned the wood beneath her feet.

  "Gotcha!" she breathed as she pulled out another baggie and scraped a little bit of blood-stained wood into it. "Our mugger was here!"

  "Not for long,'" I growled. I sensed magic—the barest traces of a portal.

  Chapter Two: Murky But Present Danger

  Grace tossed the keys onto our desk, flopped into an office chair, and sighed. "I've spent the last three hours chatting up the customs officers on both sides of the Gap, and none have noticed any unusual travelers."

  I grunted. We'd expected that. The Gap had special detectors to alert us of the crossing of any high-powered Faerie, whether wizards, demigods, or someone packing a lot of magical hardware, and since Grace had helped set them up, she had woven a hidden "code" into the system to let us know, too.

  Weaving codes into spells. Yep, we've acclimated to the Mundane world, all right. I pushed away from the computer—or rather, I pushed the trolley bearing my computer back into its nook. The virtual keyboard that had displayed itself on the floor in front of me vanished. I love the set-up; saves me from having to sit on my haunches all day long like a technophile gecko. Manny Costa, second-born to the large family of one of my first friends and sometime source of information, Jerry Costa, put it together for me. Thinking of Jerry made me wonder if I shouldn't wander over to The Colt's Hoof tonight and see if I could dig up something from the less law-abiding types there. Jerry, a former fence gone straight thanks to a good woman and a boatload of kids, probably wouldn't be much help, but there were other contacts there with their ear to the underground. Couldn't do any worse than I'd done all day.

  "No luck retracing Charlie's footsteps?" Grace asked when I told her my plan.

  I shook my head. It had been a lousy day all around. We'd come home from morning Mass to find Kitty McGrue, yellow journalist f
or the Los Lagos Gazette, sitting on our porch.

  When I accused her of not being able to pick our locks, she'd reddened and countered with a demand to let her on the set of Live and Let Fly.

  "So you can stir up celebrity dirt for FMQ?" I'd sneered. A couple of years ago, a spell had turned me human, and while Grace had retreated to her workshop to find a counterspell—

  and to avoid me—I'd tried to find the villains responsible. Unfortunately for me, McGrue, for all her biases and faults, is the best investigator I know, and in a moment of weakness, I sought her help.

  Humans are weak, and being a dragon-turned-human confused me, as did the bizarre attraction I felt toward her, no doubt faerie cliché helped along by the enchanted perfume she was wearing...

  It ended rather badly for all three of us. I still get nightmares, and I know Grace still prays about it. Kitty got her catharsis by writing an exposé for Faerie-Mundane Quarterly. "I Dated a Faerie Dragon." Fuagh! I still get comments about it on EgoPages.

  "So I can investigate this mugging! This is local news. The Gazzette has the right—"

  " The Gazette isn't barred," Grace had pointed out.

  "Just you." I'd grinned. Needless to say, banning her from the set of Live and Let Fly was a fringe benefit of our taking on the security job.

  Kitty had snarled. "And let Ronnie Engleson write it? Please! He makes his living reviewing movies and interviewing high school thespians. Mark my words, there's more to this than a simple mugging. My Kitty senses are tingling—"

  "Well, don't look at me. I'm not human anymore," I'd said, and after a moment of shocked silence, she'd given a wordless yet very articulate shriek and stormed off.

  Grace had a few words for me afterward, and we didn't part on the best of terms, either.

  So while she'd gone to sing at a wedding, I'd gone to visit Charlie to get his itinerary of the day before, acting on the suspicion that our assailant had a lousy sense of timing and hadn't expected him to make all his drop-offs, or that he, she, or it had expected him to be picking up something.

  I told Grace, "Seven-thirty, he crossed over, dropped his car off at Dave's for work, then walked over to the municipal building and spent the day doing the usual governmental rounds.

  Took a taxi back to the Gap and crossed over at two-thirty, came back at four, where Dave picked him up and drove him to the garage for his car. Wouldn't let me in on what documents he delivered or picked up—said we'd have to get the Duke's permission on that—except that one of the henchmen on the set gave him a printout of the Evil Overlord List. Thought Duke Galen would get a kick out of it."

  I snickered. The Evil Overlord List contained very funny advice on how to avoid the usual clichéd downfalls of your average villain. Things like "Shooting is not too good for my enemies." Funny, and quite sound advice, actually. I wondered why more villains hadn't committed the list to memory.

  "So I called the manor, talked to Seneschal. He said the Duke is 'confident we can solve this case without knowledge of such minor details as comprise the mere administrivia of our humble duchy,'"—I mimicked Seneschal Ayers' nasal tone—"but could we please fax him a copy of the Evil Overlord List? I gave him our website link. I was due to blog something, anyway."

  "Of course." Grace closed her eyes. "Seven-thirty and two-thirty? Was he supposed to be back in Peebles-on-Tweed by eight?"

  "Probably not. He was groaning about it being his first night of freedom in weeks."

  Grace nodded. "That's what the Gap guards said. They told me he's been crossing the Gap at seven-thirty in the morning and two-thirty and seven-thirty in the evening every day for the past two weeks. 'By order of the Duke' was all Charlie would say. It was getting to be quite a joke."

  I snorted. "Sounds like one of the Duke's jokes all right." Duke Galen ruled Peebles-on-Tweed, where the Gap happened to form, and had used the opportunity to exercise his own puerile sense of humor, from sending over a bunch of peasants after the Mundane President gave him the "tired, poor, huddled masses longing to be free" speech, to exiling me to this side of the Gap. While he never went so far as torturing small animals for fun, he was known to torture small pages with pointless, inconvenient errands. This sounded up his alley. "He didn't have to return at four?"

  "Nope, as long as he crossed the Gap—not was in Faerie, but physically crossing—at two-thirty. They said he checked his watch each time."

  "Sure it was two-thirty, exactly?"

  Grace pulled off her shoes and massaged her feet. She wiggled her toes. She's never cared for shoes. "They didn't say exactly. Why?"

  "Something about that time..."

  Grace waited patiently while I mulled it over and then wracked my brains. Once upon a time, everything I learned I remembered; now "Wisdom of the Ages" is just a tag line on my Yellow Pages ad. I had my excellent memory back, but only of more recent events, and not always with immediate recall. There was something about the Gap and two-thirty. Two-thirty.

  Two hundred thirty. Two-Three-Oh...

  I felt more than heard Grace begin a prayer. She did that sometimes, prayed for a particular bit of knowledge to come to me. In fact, in our first case, her novena caused me to translate a popular song which turned out to be an ancient summoning rite—in the nick of time, too.

  I let it go. If there was something about the time we needed to know, God would help me remember. I settled myself down, arms tucked under my chest, and said my own dragon-style prayers until I saw Grace cross herself. "Hungry?"

  "Ach, no. I've been filled with snacks."

  "Sure, nuns get pastries, but who feeds the dragon? After all, by now they know I prefer lunch meat over lovely maidens."

  She chuckled. "Well, someone hit a doe on the Gap road. Randy asked me to see if you were interested."

  "Best tip I've had all day. So how was the wedding?"

  "Beautiful. Very simple; very heartfelt. A pleasure to sing at."

  I couldn't help grinning at Grace's starry gaze. Who said nuns can't be romantics, too?

  Then her expression changed. "Vern, do ye not think it's time to apologize to Kitty?"

  "Apologize?" I resisted the urge to ask, "What for," since she'd come up with a list as long as my tail. "If I apologize to McGrue, she'll only consider it evidence that she's won somehow. That woman is as bad as—"

  "A dragon?"

  There were times I'd rather face McGrue's accusative stares than Grace's guileless looks.

  Couldn't she at least arch an eyebrow or something?

  "I'm going to see what I can pick up at The Colt's Hoof," I growled on my way out.

  * * * *

  It was early yet, and I was hungry, so I headed down Highway 292 toward the Gap. This early in the summer, a lot of incautious animals end up losing the bet that they can cross the road before the big shiny thing hits them. The sheriff and state troopers as well as animal control have always had the unpleasant duty of dealing with the carcasses until Sheriff Bradley got the brilliant idea to let the dragon do it. I work strictly on a volunteer basis so I can be picky about what I dispose of. Nonetheless it relieves them of a couple of calls a week during the heavy road-kill season, so everyone's happy. They even put my silhouette on some of those "Adopt a Highway" road signs.

  It felt good to stretch my wings after sitting in the office all day banging at a keyboard and talking on the phone. That's what PI work is most of the time: checking records and asking questions. Not that we didn't get our fair share of excitement—more than our fair share. We'd had so many Save the Universes Cases, we've given them their own code—STUC. Now if we could just arrange to get paid more for them. I was still working that angle. We had a rates scale, but asking for more money and getting it were two different things—and of course, we weren't going to not save the world while we negotiated. Grace was pretty firm on that point.

  Grace and I no longer worried about where our next meal came from, and we didn't have a lot of material needs, but the corrugated steel roof of our lair
was finally succumbing to years of weather and neglect, and Grace's magic can only do so much. Re-roofing a twelve thousand square-foot warehouse doesn't come cheap.

  I spotted the carcass easily enough. I hovered above the tree line until the road was clear, so I wouldn't startle some driver, then swooped down, and snagged it in my claws to carry it somewhere more discreet. I tore into cooling flesh—fur, flies, and all—stretched my neck to savor the raw meat sliding down my throat, licked congealing blood off my chops—in short, indulging in all the table manners the wild kingdom takes for granted but which send humans racing for the nearest bathroom with their hands over their mouths. And I didn't think about Charlie's mugging, the Duke's humor, McGrue's "Kitty senses," or the look Grace gave me.

  When I was sated but not full enough to need a nap, I left the rest for the crows and went to rinse off in a nearby stream; then headed to The Colt's Hoof for something to wash my meal down with. Cheap beer, looked like. We didn't have a lot of discretionary funds, and I was thirsty.

  The Colt's Hoof started life as a cowboy bar, but as Los Lagos fell into decline during the 1970s, so did it. As such, it was one of the first places to cater to the non-humans. Guess the management figured if you could handle the rough clientele, you belonged, regardless of your species. The proprietor didn't allow fights—much—and drug dealing and obvious illegal activities got you escorted out the door, usually on your head. Otherwise, it still served as the perfect spot for shady deals and information "off the record."

  Speaking of.

  I settled myself at my usual spot at the end of the bar where the stools had been taken out—the rest were bolted down so they couldn't get tossed around in a fight. I ordered a beer and took a casual look around, nodding at the regulars who recognized me and giving my "leave-the-dragon-alone" glare at the rubberneckers who pointed or stared. Another thing which encourages the Faerie and discourages a large percentage of Mundanes is that The Colt's Hoof doesn’t have a problem with tobacco use of any kind. Smoke from cigarettes, cigars, and pipes made a bizarre nasal bouquet and covered the room with a hefty haze. The jukebox was playing some old country song about friends in low places, and the tables were full of creatures of various species talking, laughing, and drinking, the noise rebounding off the walls to create a general din that worked almost as well as noise-canceling technology for hiding conversations. It still didn't stop me from noticing Jerry Costa, Jr. talking to someone in a corner booth. The guy he conversed with had his back to me, but the way he hunched and spoke in low tones despite the general ruckus of the room said, "informant." My suspicions were confirmed when Jerry, Jr. slid a bowl of peanuts at him, a couple of bills folded underneath.