Signatures Read online

  Like, when he ended up in an orphanage after butchering his parents in a tantrum and burning the house down around their corpses. Of course, we hadn’t figured that out until we reviewed the records with twenty years of hindsight.

  I checked my left armpit, out of reflex, and found nothing there. I’d pretty much quit carrying when I got off the force, even though I still had the license. I kept one SIG at the office, another in the apartment. When Cash showed up, I hadn’t bothered to dig out the shoulder holster and load up. She was a better shot than I’d ever be, and she’d made it plain we were going to a crime scene rather than a crime.

  Now I felt naked. In a fight between two wizards, a 9mm slug can tip the balance one way or the other. At times like that, a two-pound lump of metal in your fist or at least hanging under your left armpit feels awfully comforting.

  My apartment faced the back of the building, faced the parking lot. If I went back there to get the Lincoln, he could see me. I don’t drive much, anyway. When I retired from the force, I tracked down an office within walking distance of my apartment. I need to keep some muscles in working order.

  I started hiking for the office and sniffing, watching out for Kratz, thinking. I could call dispatch to have Cash swing back and pick me up.

  And have everyone with a cop radio gossiping about how I dreamed up an excuse to have her come over to my place.

  I could get another backup, even a beat cop to go in with me and cover my ass.

  And add him to the body count. A beat cop, even a seasoned precinct sergeant, against Kratz? Worse than useless. I’d need another wizard, at the least. I couldn’t pull . . . Pennington . . . off his crime scene. Didn’t know anyone else to call, except Sandy. Wasn’t going to drag her into this.

  I tested the door of my office building. There he was again, a slight touch of that off-key vibration, older than at the apartment, still enough to set my teeth on edge and make my ass-cheeks clench. Up the stairs, following his trail, my office sat quiet, shut, dark, no sense of tampering with either electronic or magical alarms, but he’d been there too, at least as far as the door. I couldn’t feel him inside. I didn’t think I could trust that feeling very far, not with Albert Kratz.

  I touched this and that before sliding my key into the lock, and still stepped to one side and into shadow when I opened the door. Nothing happened. That was exactly what I’d hoped.

  Three quick long steps carried me through the darkness and my desk drawer slid open and I had the SIG in my hand, shoving a magazine home and jacking a round into the chamber and squatting behind the oak desk with its Kevlar panel armor and feeling foolish.

  The empty room laughed at me. Foolish beat the hell out of feeling dead. Or maybe not — nobody has ever given evidence on what feeling dead feels like. I’ll try to let you know when I get data.

  The heavy 9mm auto with the high-capacity “cops only” magazine settled comfortably into my fist and reminded me that I preferred to wait on finding out. I switched on the light and checked all the corners and the toilet before I relaxed. I didn’t throw my shadow on the windows doing it. That’s how I’ve lived long enough to get fat and balding and retired.

  He hadn’t been inside the office. The stink ended at the door, ended at his hand on the knob. I’d have bet good money he’d been checking to see if he could feel me inside.

  Or maybe he’d left the traces to taunt me. That’s the thing with psychopaths. For some of them, like Kratz, it makes their day to play to an audience. Just being clever inside their own brains isn’t good enough.

  I shrugged into the shoulder holster and anchored it to my belt, the old routine of buckling a knight into his armor before battle. I checked the SIG before holstering it, and added a spare magazine to each front pocket of the Burberry. And wished I had been paranoid enough to bid on a Kevlar vest at the same time I bought that desk at a police-surplus auction.

  Then I headed back downstairs, back out on the cold wet dark of the streets, back hiking through the blocks and turns and blocks and turns, to the side entry of my apartment building. I couldn’t feel any touch of Kratz on this one, even after I sniffed my best sniffs just in case he’d left any little presents waiting inside. I took a deep breath, settled my head, and mapped each step of my route through the door and up the stairs to find out what the hell the bastard had in mind.

  I’d done that a hundred times, carrying a badge, but this time I didn’t have anyone for backup.

  III

  I eased the building door open, sniffed some more, listened, and then slipped inside. I didn’t shield myself, because other mages can sense that. The vestibule yawned at me, empty, no sound from the stairwell. You had to hike through the length of the building to reach the elevator from this entry, so few of the tenants used it. Me, I like to rotate through all the ways out of my little fox den. Habits can keep you alive.

  I still didn’t find Kratz in the air, on the handle of the door, touching the steps or the handrail in the stairway. I couldn’t hear or feel anyone, didn’t need to worry about scaring the civilians, so I eased my SIG out of its holster and carried it ready, muzzle at the ceiling, round in the chamber but hammer down. With fifteen high-velocity hollow-points in the pistol and another fifteen in each front pocket, I could start a small revolution if I wanted. And I might need all of that ammo to take Kratz down.

  If he was here.

  I climbed one flight of stairs and paused, listening. I couldn’t hear anything, not even the background buzz of minds in the city. I chose this building — not fashionable, not a “good address” — for the same reason I chose the office. Both of them were old buildings, shielded, from the bad old days when people lived and breathed fear of magic, from the days when we’d learned that magic was real but before we learned to detect wizards at work and track them and identify their signatures. Before we had college majors in forensic thaumaturgy at half the universities in the country.

  Which also meant I couldn’t feel Kratz if he was lurking up there from three floors down. I hiked up another floor, sixteen steps, eight and turn and eight, I’d counted them long ago in case I needed to find my way out in the dark, in case Kratz or someone like him came calling and I had to flee blind and deaf with phantom hands squeezing my throat. I stopped and listened again. Still quiet.

  I was smashing about twenty police rules and protocols, going in alone. But I wasn’t a cop anymore. And I owed that butchered courier — if I’d done my job right the first time, he’d still be alive.

  This time, I was damn well going to see Kratz dead, taste the blood straight from his veins. I swore I wasn’t going to leave any questions behind and nagging, no stone rolled back from the tomb on Sunday morning. Yeah, besides the Albertus Magnus thing, he’d sometimes claimed to be the Messiah, did the miracles to prove it, another magical Jew come to lead His people out of bondage. He’d had a dozen different shticks.

  And all of them turned nasty at the end.

  So I climbed up to the fifth floor, top floor, the best views out over the park and the best apartments in the old days, with nobody above you to tap-dance on your ceiling at three in the morning. And the old plaster and heavy timbers, the brick load-bearing walls killed sound just as well as the copper shielding killed aetheric noise. I eased the stairwell door open and listened, sniffed, and spread my other senses.

  I grimaced. Kratz. Yes, he had come up here. Several hours ago, I guessed, maybe as much as three or four. Judging by the age of his trail, he’d left that warehouse, gone to my office — calling from a payphone on the way, from what Cash said — and then here. He took his sweet time about it, too, not running, he’d worked out how long his train of dominoes would take to fall. The bastard could still be here, or could have just left his calling card in the hall for me to find. He’d always liked giving the finger to the hounds on his trail.

  I hate show-offs. Psychopathic show-offs were the worst. No, smart psychopathic show-offs took that prize.

  I crouched a
nd looked around the door jamb, low — probably should have pulled that horse-opera trick of sticking my hat out from behind my rock first to see if it drew fire. Quick glances gave me empty corridor in both directions. A burned-out wall sconce still left shadows halfway toward my door, had been out for two weeks now, which meant the building super was pinching pennies again, the downside of low rent. But they were empty shadows.

  I eased along the corridor, terrazzo floors over heavy plank decking, quiet, solid, and just like I’d taught Cash, I never wore shoes that squeaked. Old habits, like I said. I felt Kratz on the doorknob to my place, couldn’t feel him inside, didn’t know if that was my shielding, his shielding, or the simple fact that he wasn’t there. Both magical and mundane alarms still seemed to be live. I switched both kinds off.

  Then I slid my key into the lock, keeping my body behind the twelve-inch-thick brick load-bearing wall of the corridor, another little bit of security hidden by the plaster. This would be the point where he’d try to put a few slugs through the door. I unlocked the door. Silence.

  That door would have stopped slugs — heavy, thick, I’d replaced it years ago when I moved in, ballistic panels underneath the wood veneer, still copper-shielded and grounded. Back then, I’d cared more about living and I slept better at night. I swung the door open, keeping my big fat carcass out of any line of fire.

  Nothing happened, a perfect result. I reached inside and flipped on the lights. Still nothing. With the shielding open, I could tell Kratz had never gone inside. I smelled my own signature in there and I smelled Sandy from a day or so back, a little interpersonal interlude. I still smelled Maggie after all that time and distance. No Kratz.

  Inside, door locked and dead-bolted, I double-checked each room and closet and under the beds and behind the sofa before I holstered the SIG. Kratz had been a tricky bastard. With another ten, fifteen years under his belt, he might have learned some new tricks, like how to hide his stink.

  Theory said you couldn’t do that. Theory sometimes has to change in the face of new experimental evidence.

  I shucked the Burberry, pulled that bottle of Jack Daniels out of the liquor cabinet and poured myself a stiff double over ice, flipped the stereo on for some music, didn’t much matter what. I spun the dial and came up with some trucker’s lament about a bad stretch of road, a tombstone every mile. Usually I like silence. Right now, though, silence seemed full of accusations — sins of omission and commission, a list stretching back a fair number of years.

  I pulled a gallon or so of lamb stew out of the refrigerator and set it to warm on the stove. Keeping three hundred pounds going takes a considerable amount of fuel. Then I settled into my chair, out of line of sight of any sniper outside the windows and with a clear view of the door.

  I sat there, letting someone else’s problems stand between me and my own despair, letting noise soak into my bones and sour-mash whiskey soak into my tongue, both working on the tension and that clenching sensation at the base of my spine. Kratz. I didn’t need Kratz in my life. Again. I didn’t need any of that in my life. Not after Maggie.

  When I heard the key in the lock, my hand twitched and the SIG notched its sights on the oak panels of the door, about chest height, before my brain processed the sound. Music and the whiskey still had a ways to go. I laid the pistol back down on the side table. My hand only shook a little.

  It had to be Sandy. She had keys to both the locks, the only person besides the building super who did. Lockpicks or magic wouldn’t have made that sound.

  The door swung in and she stood there, big and beautiful and blond, her quick glance darting to the SIG and then to me, nose wrinkled as if she’d smelled Kratz but hadn’t quite remembered what that stink meant. “Trouble?”

  While I told her, she closed the door behind her and checked the locks. I could tell by her spine that she remembered now, rage and fear and disgust coming off her in waves. She’d been my backup that afternoon. We’d tracked Kratz to that abandoned deli his father used to run. I’d followed him in, followed him up rotting cat-piss stairs to the empty apartments above, with backup that time, all procedures followed. We’d burned the place down around our ears, not magic but a fire started by a tear-gas canister thrown in just to annoy him. We got out. He didn’t — clear trail going in, nothing coming out. The bastard died in the fire.

  Or hadn’t.

  She’d quit the force two weeks later. Showed more sense than I had, that’s for sure.

  Then she turned back to me. “That . . . black . . . bitch. . . .” She swallowed her anger. “That’s why I smelled her at your office. She has no right to drag you back into this. You’re retired now.”

  Sandy had grown up in Mississippi, way back when. Long before the concept of “politically correct” hatched in the nation’s mind. “Black” equaled “nigger” in her deepest, darkest vocabulary, the words learned at her mother’s knee. Sandy had grown beyond that, but you could still see her mother’s generation if you looked close enough. We all have baggage we aren’t proud of. My father thought Hitler had been right about the Jews.

  Dad would have loved Al Kratz — would have fit the old man’s world-view like a glove. Probably way deep down in some shadowy Freudian cavern of my soul, that was why I’d been so obsessive about tracking down the bastard. And why I wanted to get him now.

  It isn’t pretty, but it’s part of me. At least I know it’s there and I can fight it. Sandy was the same way about blacks. She couldn’t do a damn thing about where and when she was born, but she could wrestle with the way she acted on it.

  “Al Kratz alive. Sweet suffering Jesus. . . .”

  I shivered. Sandy must have stopped by my office after we left but before Kratz left his mockery. So close. He would have blindsided her. She wouldn’t have had a chance.

  She dumped her purse beside the door, sleep-walked her way across to that bottle of Tennessee whiskey, and uncapped it for a long swallow straight from the neck.

  “You mean it?”

  I shrugged. “You felt him on the door. I saw it on your face. You just didn’t make the connection, because it wasn’t possible.”

  She turned and stared at the door, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She’d probably learned that gesture from her daddy — she’d described him as a Southern Baptist drunk offering his prayers on Sunday morning with a holy hangover. More roots. Sometimes I think the human race would do better with the way fish propagate their kind — dump the eggs on some streambed gravel, fertilize them, and swim away. None of this nurture bit, making sure the kids get brought up with the right set of hates.

  Sandy shook her head at the door, turned back, and walked over to me and grabbed my hand. “You need something to take your mind off your troubles.”

  Afterward, I whipped up some batter and tossed it into the bubbling stew and covered it and we waited for dumpling magic. Lamb stew, simmered and then aged a few days in the refrigerator to strengthen and blend the flavors, fragrant with garlic and tomato and onion and thyme, reheated with fresh parsley dumplings — that’s a gift for the gods. Sandy and I wiped the whole pot clean. She ate as much as I did. Same amount of bulk as any other mage, same reasons. Calories are a measure of energy.

  And then she went back to her apartment, two floors down and the front side of the building. The sex was good but we couldn’t live together. Not like me and Maggie.

  I’d just spent an hour in bed with one woman, and as soon as the door clicked behind her size 20 butt, I was thinking of another. Maggie was part of me, part of everything I did. I could still smell her signature in the apartment we’d shared, smell her on my coat and hat in an office she’d never visited. I’ll never live a day without thinking of her.

  I poured myself another drink and lay back on the rumpled sex-sweaty sheets and stared at the ceiling, matching cracks in the ancient plaster against the street map of the city. Sandy hadn’t managed to take my mind off Al Kratz, after all. The bastard was out there, somewhere in my city
, gloating, taunting.

  Straight cop stuff, the city force could handle that. Cash could handle that, interviewing everyone in sight — everyone who’d talk, that is, with the diplomatic angle and the John Doe courier.

  The forensics guys knew their stuff. I had to assume the new mage on the force, Pennington, knew his. What the hell could I add, besides my bad dreams? Yeah, I was one of the few people alive who ever saw Kratz face-to-face and knew who, knew what he was. A city this size, I could walk the streets from now to doomsday and never see him. Or smell him.

  Unless he wanted me to.

  Sandy and good sex and good food hadn’t taken my mind off Kratz. The whiskey hadn’t washed his stink from my throat. I heaved my bulk upright again, shrugged into the shoulder holster, and checked the SIG before hanging it under my armpit.

  That chunk of metal was going to be my closest friend until I’d sorted this mess out, one way or another. I thought about old habits for a moment and added the snub-nosed Smith .38 Special to the back of my belt, no ankle holster like Cash used for her hold-out because my ankles are too far away on the south side of my so-called waist. On with the Burberry, on with the fedora, out the door.

  I spend a lot of nights walking the streets, that bad dream thing again. Most people never see me. I’d like to say it’s something macho about spreading fear everywhere I walk, people not willing to see bad news unless it got right in their faces. The truth is, it’s one of the first lessons that wizards and witches learn — how to hide. It’s another of those old habits that you do as automatically as you breathe. A few thousand years of persecution make it practically genetic. We’ve only been out of that damned closet for a couple of generations now, not enough to make anyone feel safe.

  Anyway, two AM, three AM, you’d have thought at least the beat cops cruising by would slow down, maybe pull over for a quick ID check and scan for stolen TV sets tucked under my trench coat. I used to think they knew me, knew my face and didn’t worry about another cop, but it kept on with new guys after I retired. I turn gray and fade out without even trying.