Signatures Read online

  Religious.

  Which was odd in its own way. A lot of religions don’t welcome us. Some hate us outright, branding wizards and witches as pawns of Satan, burn them all, that sort of thing. They want magic banned. That crowd is heavy on the fundamentalist Christians, Jews less so, with Muslims it varies. But tolerance definitely ranks as a minority opinion. I think it’s a matter of professional jealousy, myself, or a turf war.

  Religions use magic. How do people think those charismatic preachers work their congregations? How did Moses and Aaron whip Pharaoh’s wise men and sorcerers? How did Elijah bring God’s fire down on the sacrifice? All the miracles, Old Testament or New, they reek of magic. Calling it God’s Power doesn’t change the substance.

  Religion is magic. The priests just don’t want our competition.

  So Bycheck was religious? I thought more about his signature — the subtleties, the flavor. Not Catholic or one of the Christian Orthodox groups — all of them seem to add a grace-note of incense to their aura. Even the austere Dominicans, the guardians of doctrine, do it. Not an ecstatic sect, Muslim Sufi or mystic Christian, you can taste that God-mad joy a mile away. No, this came through as cold and dry, something old-school Calvinistic and holier-than-thou. You know the kind: “You’ll burn in Hell forever if you don’t believe exactly as I believe.”

  I shrugged to myself. That was his problem, not mine. I picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory, a cell phone she probably carried with her in the shower, Detective Sergeant Nefertiti Cash. We needed to compare notes on our friendly neighborhood G-Man.

  V

  I had to drive out to a client’s place the next day — no rain for a change, a beautiful fall day with the leaves still burning bright yellows and reds and purples against a clear blue sky once I got out of the city and its brown pall of pollution. Yeah, I had other projects going on during this mess, other clients.

  I’m not going to mention them all the time, just like I’m not going to bring up Maggie’s name in every other sentence, just like I’m not going to sing rhapsodies about every meal I ate and count the fifths of Jack Daniels I killed. And like I warned you, some of these details are faked, or stolen from other cases. You’ll see why.

  Anyway, I hauled my fat carcass out to the old Lincoln, checked the car for any little surprises Kratz might have left, and grunted my way into the driver’s seat. I spared a sneer for Special Agent Bycheck once I’d settled my butt. As if a fat man wouldn’t understand handicap access. You ever try to squeeze over three hundred pounds into a Toyota? I need the seat shoved way back for some clearance under the steering wheel, and I’m not particularly tall. So I’d had the old beast fitted with extensions for the brake and gas pedals — adaptive equipment, just like a wheelchair lift.

  Anyway, I had this job out beyond the horse-car lines. Considerably beyond. Think of it as maybe one of those Hudson River estates above the Tappan Zee Bridge, places for rich folks who didn’t need to commute in to the office every day. They liked to think they were “old money,” not dot-com millionaires or other nouveau riches but inherited wealth and aristocracy.

  Most of them, my client included, you didn’t want to look too closely at the real source of the cash. You’d find things like bootleg liquor from Prohibition, railroad cartels or stock swindles in the Gilded Age. For the real “old money” you might reach all the way back to profiteers from the Civil War, selling defective muskets and bad gunpowder, wormy biscuits and salted horse-meat to the Union Army. Fine upstanding citizens, all of them.

  Yeah, I didn’t care much for my client. But then, I spent over twenty years as a cop. Like I told you, that shows you a sorry picture of the human race. Anyway, Malcolm Ridge’s great-great-grand-pappy armed both sides of a few South American revolutions. Another brilliant example of capitalistic talent.

  So after an hour or three of genteel country driving, I found the genteel tiny sign and gate I was looking for, and turned in, and drove through genteel gardened forest between more genteel fieldstone walls. With that one-lane driveway between old trees, sunken like an English country road, I wondered what happened gin a body met a body coming through the rye. Or when they really wanted to get some largish fire trucks in. Then I noticed turnouts here and there, wide places where you could pass after negotiating protocol on exactly who perched lower on the pecking order and had to back up. Anyway, a quarter mile or so of hills and glens and bosky fairy-haunted dells delivered me to fake Gothic stone overlooking Scenery.

  It spelled Money, with the capital em. I hadn’t liked him, even on the phone. But he’d mailed me a hefty retainer and the check didn’t bounce. That meant I didn’t have to like him.

  He met me at the door. I didn’t know if that was the common touch or just that he didn’t want the servants to know what was going on. Flip a coin. Anyway, he presented himself as an almost-youngish male wearing “country casual” from the money-set shops, corduroy pants and a hand-knit turtleneck sweater in tasteful shades of gray that played off the gray he allowed to invade the temples of his hair, obviously premature and granting a distinguished air of maturity. I almost checked his face for makeup to go along with the rest of the stage set.

  He boomed out, “You’d be John Patterson,” in a hearty just-folks voice. “Malcolm Ridge. Glad you could come out. Like I said over the phone, it’s something I can’t bring to your office.” He extended a paw, and I shook it.

  Of course I could come out. He was paying me a hundred bucks an hour, including travel time. I can get real accommodating with incentives like that. I can even get polite. I said I hoped I could help him.

  “Come on in.” He waved into the portico and the waiting open door, blackened oak studded with wrought-iron nails and fancy hinges, more of the Gothic manor look. “Like I said over the phone, I inherited this place about a year back from my late uncle. There’s a bit of fun with the ancestral wills and deeds, it goes to the oldest male carrying the Ridge name, and I lucked out. Don’t worry about gender equity, the other heirs got equal value in stocks and bonds and stuff. And they’re just as happy they don’t have to pay to fix the roof. But I never spent much time here, growing up, and I think you can help me out with understanding it.”

  That carried us through the foyer, dark wood paneling and leaded-glass arrow-slit windows of tiny diamond panes, into a hall that soared two stories up past balconies on three sides under heavy timber trusses. The fourth wall, we faced stained glass backlit by the autumn sun, blazing greens and golds and reds, good work, maybe real Tiffany, a woodland scene with nymphs and satyrs having fun in a suggestive but not too suggestive fashion. More stage set, twelfth-century, fourteenth-century construction built in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, with electric lights and running water. I wondered what the place cost to heat.

  To one side, a huge stone fireplace dominated the wall, one of those monsters big enough for roasting a whole ox on a spit. Over the mantel and patina-green copper hood, in place of a maybe-fake coat of arms, hung crossed cavalry sabers — real weapons with the battered look of combat, not parade-ground dress-up toys. Homage to the source of the family fortune?

  He noticed my interest. “Those belonged to the Old Major. You can’t tell from here, but one of the blades is broken at the guard. Bad steel. He took the other away from Johnny Reb, killed him with it, and rode on. Came back after the fight was over, through the dead, the blood, the groaning wounded, and picked up his broken sword from where it lay next to the man he’d killed. He’d seen the Reaper, old Josiah, up close and personal. He knew he was selling death. But I guarantee he never sent a man into battle with a defective weapon. Damn few governments can say that.”

  He nattered on, leading me to the fireplace side of the hall and through a heavy door with double locks into a smallish room — wood paneled walls and an oak roll-top desk, neat shelves of leather-bound books, a room that smelled stale and old like it hadn’t been used in a generation or maybe four. A shielded room, I noticed right away, his esteemed ancestor had worried about spying wizards back in those bad old days. The windows repeated the arrow-slit theme of the foyer, too narrow for a body to fit through, and they were shielded as well.

  The guy nodded at my narrowed eyes and obvious glance around, checking off defensive features. I like clients who pick up on details. Saves time and words and stress.

  “This was my great-great grandfather’s office. He had a few enemies. Not really a nice man, Major Josiah Ridge. No worse than the average of those days, but that’s not your highest ethical standard.”

  At a hundred bucks an hour, I thought I probably should quit gossiping and get down to work. “You said you wanted me to look for hiding places?”

  He nodded. “Yep. It’s a funny old house. I know they built in secret compartments and such, my uncle showed me a couple. I’d bet he didn’t show me all he knew, and likely didn’t know all of them himself. You say you can find that sort of thing?”

  “Usually. The energy flow shows hollows. The thing is, most buildings have lots of empty space — space between studs in the walls, space between ceiling and the floor above, space closed in under stairs. Sometimes it’s tricky to tell that from a hiding place, tell how to open a place once you’ve found it.”

  I closed my eyes and opened my mind to the flows of energy around me. That’s what wizards do. That and training are the only real difference between us and normal people. The world seethes with energy — heat and light and sound. And hidden power. Wizards can sense it. Normal people can’t, sort of like they are deaf or blind. Sensing it makes us better able to use it, find the strongest flows, move it, change its kind. Even normal people can use that energy, they just don’t understand it, can’t make it reliable. That’s where miracles and strange happeni
ngs come from.

  Anyway, I let my mind follow the flows of energy from earth and sky and water and fire, leaking past the shields that surrounded us. I zeroed in on fire. Something disturbed the memory of fire in the wall behind that monster fireplace. Something square, cold, like a solid lump of the shielding that filtered energy in this space.

  I touched the wood panel of the wall, searching for a spot of warmth in the moldings. That would be the latch.

  “Wall safe, set into one side of the chimney masonry. That’s one of the ones my uncle showed me. The Major kept his records there. Still some of his journals in it. Also his cavalry pistols — loaded. Touchy old bastard.”

  I nodded. Something else disturbed the flow on the other side of the room. I followed it, my mind’s eye tracing another rectangle, not as dense, didn’t give the same sense of being totally opaque like the cold grounded iron of the safe. I felt for a catch in the wood trim, pressed it, felt the wood panel pivot under my fingers. I looked inside.

  Bottles. Whiskey, brandy, port and sherry by the labels. All of them old and dusty. I glanced over at my client. He nodded. He’d known about this one, too.

  “We don’t change things in here, just keep it dusted and ready. Family tradition. If the Old Man left a bottle half-finished, half-finished it will stay. It’s sort of a shrine. I think the next generation or two was scared that the old son of a bitch was still hanging around, on guard.”

  So he’d brought me into this room first as a test, to see if I could do what I claimed I could. Fair enough. I checked the rest of the room, finding nothing more.

  And we moved on, room by room, thirty rooms I think it was, give or take a few, bedrooms and baths and attic garrets for the servants and kitchens and pantries and a grand ballroom. I found five other hideaways, ones he hadn’t known about. Four of them were empty. The fifth wasn’t.

  A windowsill, deep, windows set in thick walls, the sill lifted out once you released the catch. Underneath, I found a dusty hollow the size of an old ledger, and a short-barreled pistol — nickel-plated top-break revolver, a few spots of rust showing, looked like a .32 from maybe 1900, 1920, a lady’s handbag gun. I didn’t touch it.

  He looked at the pistol and also made no move to take it out. “So that’s where she hid it.” He shook his head.

  “Great-aunt of mine, maybe great-great, it’s an old story in the family. Supposed to have shot her husband three times in the chest, killed him, blamed it on a burglar. They never found the gun, and she got away with it. Partly, folks thought she had cause. And she earned bonus points because she’d let the upstairs maid dress and leave before she shot him. Nice ancestors, eh?”

  About average, probably. Most family trees, you don’t want to shake the trunk too hard. All kinds of fruits and nuts fall out if you aren’t careful.

  Anyway, down in the cellar, we found a bonus, a door hidden behind a set of shelves, a wine vault that hadn’t been opened since maybe 1940, judging by the dates on the cases. Must have been a hundred cases of booze — single-malt Scotch, brandy, Cuban rum, wines, champagne. Probably half the stuff wasn’t drinkable anymore, vinegar and corked and such, but the rest . . .

  He gave me a case of old Jack Daniels as a bonus and said he knew a wine merchant to call on the rest. Probably paid my fee ten times over.

  We climbed back up to that baronial hall. He paused and gestured at a portrait hanging there, murky with age and smoke. “The old tyrant himself. In uniform, although you couldn’t tell that without a searchlight. Just curiosity — can you wizards learn anything about a man from his picture?”

  I remember lifting an eyebrow. Something about my client’s voice, his stance — this wasn’t just curiosity. I had a sense that the whole “hidden treasure” game had been an audition for his real reason. I guess I’d passed.

  “Not about the subject. I could tell things about the painter — he’s the one who touched the canvas and oils, poured his soul into the work, if he was any good. You want a reading on your Major Ridge, the sabers would be a better choice. If he really did carry them, fought for his life with them, sweated and bled on them, he’d have left his trace behind. The sabers, the journals, things he’d spent a lot of time handling.”

  He nodded, as if he’d gotten the answer he was looking for. And he shook my hand again, before I drove away, and thanked me for coming out.

  I was thinking about that, wondering what Mr. Malcolm Ridge had really wanted, while I drove the Lincoln along that narrow winding driveway through the trees. So I wasn’t paying as much attention as I might. And, late afternoon, the light wasn’t all that good. Excuses.

  I came to the bottom of a hill, last one if I remembered right, and headed up, and something gleamed in the road ahead. A truck waited at the crest, aimed in. It took me a minute to figure it out, funny shape — I finally ID’d it as a bulk propane tanker, coming in to fill up the tank at the house. It seemed to be waiting at one of those turnouts. The driver flashed his lights at me, signal that he saw me and I should keep coming, so I did.

  And I got about halfway up the slope and saw a heavy shape step down from the cab, fiddle with something at the side, and step away. And the truck started rolling forward.

  Okay, what I did next wasn’t very smart. Not in the cold light of day. I cussed, stopped, threw the Lincoln into reverse, and backed down the hill, aiming for the next turnoff. Backing up isn’t fun. Not on a narrow road, a big car, a fat man like me twisting around in the seat to watch where I was going. And stealing glances back at that truck growing larger and larger, speeding up, damn it, reverse gear is slow like molasses, I realized I wasn’t going to make it, the bastard wanted to hit me, and I finally processed the meaning of that bulky figure in coveralls stepping away from the truck.

  Kratz.

  I slammed on the brakes, slewing the Lincoln across the road and dropping rear wheels into the ditch, threw my door open, untangled the seatbelt, all this like in slow-motion with that truck rolling down on me. I hauled myself out and jumped clear just as his bumper speared the grill of the Lincoln and metal screamed and one wheel of the truck rode right up on the hood, crushing steel, smashing glass, sparks flying, grinding the car along the gravel drive, the truck tipping on its side, and I thought “sparks” and “propane” and saw the gray cloud of mist pouring from low on the truck where Kratz had opened a valve or something, liquid propane expanding into gas and turning the evening air to fog.

  I scrambled up the bank and did my best swan-dive imitation over the stone fence and rolled and tucked my head under my arms and the evening air turned bright yellow behind me, sparks hitting that mix of propane and oxygen with a huge deep thump and I didn’t even hear the blast. Ridge told me that it shook his house, broke windows, I found out later that people heard it in the town five miles away. Me, I was shielding against the rocks and shreds of metal that flew past my ears.

  Anyway, the fireball mostly bloomed upward, deflected by that sunken road and the fieldstone walls that lined it, and Mr. Wars-R-Us Ridge lost about a quarter acre of trees to the blast and fire. The tank didn’t actually blow, just the leaking vapors — relief valves vented the boiling propane in a jet about a hundred feet high, roared and whined like a 747 taking off, just burning as it hit air, no more explosions. Unless you count the diesel tanks on the truck, and the tank on my slagged Lincoln, and a couple of gallons of well-aged Tennessee whiskey, and all the tires blowing up one after another.

  I spared a moment’s prayer for the truck driver’s soul, damned sure Kratz hadn’t bothered to let the poor bastard run when he had, and then drew my SIG and headed back up that hill. Maybe the sicko had hung around to gloat.

  No such luck. I got to the turnout, found that buzzing set-your-teeth-on-edge signature again, much fresher than at the warehouse and John Doe’s corpse, followed it out to the road, and had the track break off just like before. The surface was hard gravel, no chance of any serious tire tracks, but I could see traces where he’d parked his getaway and left it waiting.

  Which implied an accomplice. I hunkered down on a rock and spent some time with bad memories. Kratz had usually worked alone. This setup, it meant driving somewhere, hijacking the truck, bringing the truck here. He’d need another driver to bring the car here, maybe stay with the car waiting in case a cop came along with a ticket book in hand, wouldn’t want records of date and time and license plate.