KISS THE WITCH (20 page)

“
Hell, what could I do? I
apologized, backed out of the room and took a shower in the other
bath.”

“
Huh. Man, that does sound
embarrassing.”

“
It was. I suppose that’s
why I had that dream about her last night.”

“
You dreamed about
Ursula?”

“
Yes.”

“
Was it a dirty
dream?”

I tried to stifle a growing smirk.
“Well….”

“
It was. Holy smoke. Stop
the presses. This is great. Tell me everything.”

“
No. I can’t.”

“
Why? Was it that
perverted?”

“
No. It was not perverted
at all. It was sweet and tender.”

“
Really?”

I gave in and laughed. “Nah. It was
erotic.”

“
Then tell me.”

“
I can’t. Sorry. Pass me
the salt.”

“
Did you…you know?” Carlos
gestured a jerking motion with his hand and made a squirting
fountain noise.

“
Carlos. See, this is why
I don’t tell you stuff like this. Now come on. Pass me the
salt.”

“
Tony, I’m here for you,
man. Dirty dreams are my specialty. Now if I were you, I
would––”

His phone rang and stopped him in mid
sentence. I pointed to the salt. “Before you get that. Pass
me––”

“
Hello? Hey Billy. Yeah
how are you?” He partially covered the phone to tell me it was his
car salesman, Billy. I tried to tell him one more time to pass the
salt, but he ignored me. “What? No, we can talk. Tell me what you
found.”

I put my fork down and reached across the
table as far as I could. Still, my fingertips remained just out of
reach of the salt. I could see Carlos watching me, yet he made no
effort to assist. My frustration nearly peaked when something
astonishing happened. With just the thought of it, the saltshaker
slid across the table the last several inches and into my hand on
its own. Carlos’ eyes grew wide. His jaw dropped and his phone
clicked shut.

“
I’ll call you back,” he
said, unaware he had already hung up. He looked at me in disbelief.
“How did you do that?”

I shrugged at the question, not exactly sure
of the answer myself. “I don’t know. I think I just pulled off a
level four spell.”

“
A what?”

“
Sure. See, witches
categorize spells by levels of difficulty. A whisper box, for
instance, is a level one. A beckoning spell say, that’s a level
two. Illusion spells are typically threes. A level four is when you
get into some real magic. Fours consist of things like molecular
modulation, or shape shifting. Then you have your fire lighting
spells, the rite of passage spell and bone reconstitution, the
spell that brought Ursula back.”

“
Awesome.”

“
I know. And of course,
there is this one, the trans-molecular migration spell. It’s the
dissipation of stagnant resistance through matter
redistribution.”

“
What, so you’re a
molecular scientist now?”

“
Look. Think of it as the
thinning of mass between you and another object. When the mass, in
this case air, thins to a near vacuum, it allows the thicker air
behind the object to push it towards you. That’s what happened
here.”

He shook his head at that. “This is amazing.
Do it again.”

“
Again? Hell I don’t know
how I did it the first time. I mean, ever since I saw Lilith do it,
I bet I tried it myself a hundred times. This time I wasn’t even
trying.”

“
It’s the coven,” he said.
“You are becoming a super witch.”

I looked at my watch. “And you’re becoming a
reason we might both get fired. Come on. Eat up. We have work to
do.”

“
What do you have in
mind?”

“
I want to stop at the
railroad crossing where Delaney kissed the train the other night.
Maybe look around. See if there’s anything out of
place.”

Carlos nodded, saving words so that he could
shovel the rest of his breakfast down before I could finish mine.
Damn if he didn’t do it, too.

We had barely rolled out of the parking lot
of the Perc, when Carlos noticed the black sedan that had tailed us
the day before. “They’re back,” he said, looking into the rearview
mirror.

“
The sedan?”

“
Yup.”

“
Sure it’s
them?”

I watched his eyes ricochet from road to
mirror and back again. “It’s them. Same tag.”

“
All right. Let’s switch
places. Get him to pass us and we’ll pull him over.”

“
I’m on it,
Kemosabe.”

Carlos waited until we hit a long stretch of
vacant curb before pulling over suddenly. After the car passed us,
we pulled out behind him and lit him up. When the lights did not
get his attention, we hit the siren.

“
He’s not stopping,” said
Carlos.

“
I see that.” I motioned a
forward wave. “Just stay on him.”

We followed the sedan at speeds above the
limit, but not dangerously so. And if not for the fact that he blew
through every stop sign and red light he encountered, I might have
thought the driver unaware we were trying to pull him over.

“
What do you want to
do?”

“
Keep with
him.”

“
No. I mean you want to
call back up? Get some black and whites ahead of us to toss out
some sticks?”

“
Yeah. Good idea. Looks
like he’s heading for the docks. I’ll call it in.”

I picked up the radio and keyed the mike
just as the sedan made a sudden turn down a one-way alley. Carlos
yanked the wheel hard to follow, fish-tailing the cruiser and
clipping a row of trashcans along the sidewalk. The cans scattered
in a blizzard of garbage and tin, sending an old bagwoman scurrying
for safety in a recessed doorway.

“
You’re going the wrong
way,” I said. “It’s a one-way alley.”

He gestured at the car in front of us.
“Don’t tell me. Tell him.”

I called our position in over the radio and
requested backup. “Looks like we’ll terminate at the docks,” I told
dispatch, believing we could hold the sedan there once he ran out
of roadway. Dispatch acknowledged and routed two units our way.

We exited the alley onto a cobblestone patch
of road sandwiched between a string of fish houses and the
docks.

“
We have him now,” I said.
“He’s going to have to stop or get mighty wet. Get ready to pin him
in.”

Already, Carlos was breaking in preparation.
“He’s ours. Hold on.”

The sedan skidded to a stop a couple of feet
from the end of the pier. Carlos stopped behind him, tagging the
car’s rear bumper and nudging it up to the edge. We bailed out with
weapons drawn, assuming crouched positions behind the open car
doors. Sirens in the distance indicated backup was only minutes
away. Carlos ordered the occupants to exit the vehicle with their
hands in the air. When they did not respond, I repeated the
command. Through the tinted windows, we could see two male figures
sitting perfectly still.

“
They don’t hear us,” said
Carlos.

I shook my head. “They hear us. They’re not
listening.”

“
I’m moving in. Cover
me.”

“
No. Wait for back up. We
don’t want––”

My words yielded to the roar of a black
helicopter gunship swooping in over the rooftops behind us in
military fashion. It whirled around and assumed a fixed hover in
front of the sedan. On its undercarriage, a double-barreled 50mm
cannon trained its sights on us, while two machinegun-toting men
hung from the open cargo doors like perverse gargoyles, their faces
shielded behind bubbled helmet visors tinted as dark as the windows
on the car.

“
Holy shit!” said Carlos.
“Is that one of ours?”

I shook my head. “You kidding? We don’t even
have a weather balloon, let along one of those.”

“
Look.” He leveled his
weapon at the driver’s side door of the stopped vehicle. “They’re
getting out.”

We fortified our stance and took aim at the
emerging occupants. “STOP.” said a voice through a megaphone
mounted on the chopper. “STAND DOWN.”

Carlos looked at me. “Is he talking to
them?”

“
STAND DOWN OR WE WILL
FIRE.”

“
No,” I said. “He’s
talking to us.”

“
Us? Hell no. I ain’t
standing down.”

And we didn’t, but still we could not stop
the two men from scaling the landing skids on the chopper and
hopping in. The two black and whites arrived just as the chopper
rolled back over the water, climbed some sixty feet and shot back
over the rooftops.

“
What just happened?”
Carlos asked, his brows gathered in a nest. “Was that our
military?”

“
Not regular army,” I
said. “That’s for sure. Did you notice that chopper had no
markings?”

“
CIA?”

“
I don’t know about CIA,
but it was definitely not the Department of
Agriculture.”

He pointed at the sedan. “What do we do with
that?”

“
What can we do? Impound
it and see who shows up to claim it. In the meantime, let us get to
that railroad crossing. I have a feeling all these loose ends tie
to the same big ball of yarn.”

“
Biocrynetix
Laboratories.”

“
You got it.”

We left one of the black and whites to deal
with impounding the sedan and headed across town for the railroad
crossing at Lexington. It had been several days, but there were
still plenty of telltale signs of the accident. The wreckage had
been considerable, as broken glass, shards of sheet metal and bits
of rubber still littered the gutters and easement along the tracks.
We even found blood in dried pools as far as two hundred feet from
the intersection. Where we really hit pay dirt, however, was at the
foot of the crossing itself.

“
Carlos, look at this,” I
said, kneeling at a patch of rubber stretching ten feet to the
tracks. “What does this tell you?”

He pulled absentmindedly at his chin
whiskers. “I don’t know. Looks like someone tried to stop before
hitting the warning gate. They left a big skid mark.”

“
No. Look again. First,
there are actually two sets of tire marks. One of them solid and
evenly laid, the other starts out dark and gets lighter as it nears
the tracks.”

“
Okay?”

“
A vehicle stopping
suddenly leaves a skid pattern that starts out light and gets
progressively heavier until the vehicle stops. This first vehicle
here didn’t do that.”

“
So what? He was peeling
out, driving into the oncoming train on purpose?”

“
No. he was sitting here
with his foot on the brake, trying desperately not to enter onto
the tracks.” I pointed at the wider set of tracks. “This second set
of tire marks. This came from a bigger vehicle, maybe a light
truck. You can see here that he was spinning his tires. He had his
foot on the gas.”

“
He pushed the first
vehicle onto the tracks.”

“
Exactly.”

“
That’s
murder.”

“
Yup. Call Spinelli. Have
him get forensics back here to collect what evidence they
can.”

Carlos and I arrived back at the office
around ten o’clock. Spinelli caught up with us shortly after. He
said he called the impound lot to have the sedan towed in, but when
the truck arrived at the docks, agents from Homeland Security
showed up and confiscated the vehicle.

“
That’s bullshit,” Carlos
complained. “What right do they have to take our car?”

“
Every right,” said
Dominic. “Homeland Security trumps NCPD every time.”

“
You sure it was Homeland
Security?” I asked.

He offered up a passive shrug. “They had
guns, badges, IDs and wireless headsets. You tell me.”

“
It’s a shadow operation,”
said Carlos. “This case makes no sense.”

Spinelli agreed, adding, “If Howard Snow is
dead, why are these guys still screwing with us? What do they
want?”

I kicked back in my chair, propping my feet
up on the desk. “Maybe Snow isn`t dead.”

“
He is,” said Carlos. “We
saw him get blown up in his Hummer.”

“
Did you, or did someone
else get blown up?”

“
Who?”

“
I don’t know, the
ex-roommate, maybe.”

“
No, I don’t see
how.”

“
You said you took video
of your surveillance. Where is it?”

“
Still in my camera. I’ll
get it.”

After Spinelli retrieved his camera, we
hooked it up to my computer and uploaded segments of video from
before and after the blast. One segment in particular caught my
eye.

“
There,” I said, pointing
at the screen. “Is that supposed to be Snow running out to his
car?”

“
Spinelli answered, “Yeah,
just before it blew up.”

“
Looks like it was
raining.”

“
It was.”

I shook my head. “That’s not him.”

“
Sure it is,” Carlos
offered. “He’s wearing the same raincoat he wore when we talked to
him.”