Vision In Silver

CHAPTER 48

Watersday, Maius 26

Smiling as he listened to the children’s excited jabbering, Monty pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and turned it on. Not that he expected anything. Captain Burke knew he’d taken the day off to spend time with Lizzy. Now that the question of custody was settled, at least for the time being, he had decided it would be safe to take Lizzy to the movies as a treat and had invited the Denby family to join them.

“Do we all want something to eat?” Pete Denby asked.

“Pizza!” Lizzy said.

“Pizza, pizza, pizza,” Sarah said.

“Hamburgers,” Robert said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a hamburger the size of a cow!”

“A whole cow?” Eve Denby gave her son a disbelieving look. “Even the hooves?”

Before Robert could reply, Lizzy looked at Monty. “Daddy! You turned on your phone.”

“I have to check in, Lizzy girl.” And what he saw made him uneasy. Three messages from Burke’s phone number while he’d been in the theater? That wasn’t good.

“You always put work first. Mommy said—”

“That’s enough,” Monty snapped, stung to not only hear the same words but Elayne’s disapproving tone of voice coming out of his own daughter. He looked at Pete. “Check your messages.” Then he listened to his own.

“Lieutenant, there’s been an incident at the stall market. Call me when you can.”

“The Courtyard is under attack. Do not, I repeat, do not take Lizzy back there until you talk to me.”

“Lawrence MacDonald was shot. He’s in surgery. Come to Lakeside Hospital as soon as you can.”

“Mikhos, watch over us,” Monty whispered. As he put his phone away, he looked at Pete’s pale face and grim expression.

“We’ll take Lizzy with us back to the duplex,” Pete said.

“Can you drop me close to Lakeside Hospital?”

“Sure.”

“What’s going . . . ?” Eve looked at both men and didn’t finish the question.

“One of my men,” Monty said, knowing he didn’t need to say more.

They hustled the children to the car. Monty wondered if he looked hunted. The gods knew, he felt that way.

“Gods above and below.” Captain Zajac shook his head as he looked at the destruction outside the stall market, which was in his precinct.

The older patrol captain had brushed against the Others when a former Courtyard employee named Darrell Adams died under mysterious circumstances—and a lot of people in the same area ended up in the emergency room with sudden ailments. Since then, Zajac had been fiercely insistent that he be kept informed about the “doings at the Chestnut Street station.”

“A third of the vehicles in this lot destroyed in seconds,” Zajac said. “I saw them burst into flames and felt the explosions as we were pulling in. Saw that female running past the cars just before they went up.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” Burke replied. He watched as the Courtyard bus was righted and attached to a tow truck. The bus would go to a garage that serviced police vehicles. If it could be sufficiently repaired, they would do that. If it couldn’t, he’d be sitting down with the mayor and the city’s comptroller, doing his best to persuade them of the necessity of purchasing a new bus for the terra indigene. The Others could afford another bus, and it wouldn’t be a hardship on the Courtyard’s annual budget—provided, of course, there were buses in the appropriate size for sale. A shortage of steel was starting to make itself felt in several industries, including the manufacture of vehicles. He’d heard from a couple of his sources that public transportation like cabs and buses would be given priority, and individuals might end up waiting six months or more to purchase a family car—and would have to choose from whatever models were available at the time or do without.

What his sources couldn’t tell him was why there was a shortage of steel when the terra indigene were selling the same quantity of raw materials to the manufacturers as usual.

A problem for another day, Burke thought when he heard the older man sigh.

“I know it could have been worse,” Zajac said. “Two exits for the whole damn building, and the back exit blocked by debris that had been thrown against the door. And people stuck behind a barricade of tables and merchandise blown around by a freak wind, with no chance of getting out if a fire had started in that part of the building.”

“That wasn’t a freak wind,” Burke said quietly. “That was done by an angry Elemental. The debris wasn’t blocking the back doors by accident, the roof wasn’t torn off this place by a chance gust of wind that just happened to find a weak point, and those cars didn’t explode because of a leak in someone’s gas tank and the heat of the sun on the pavement. That would be a plausible explanation—maybe—and if we’re smart, we won’t offer a different explanation, because if Fire had entered the building first instead of burning the cars as a way to disrupt the attack on the Courtyard bus, we would have had a lot of corpses and very few survivors.”

“Is this going to spoil things?” Zajac gave Burke a bitter smile. “Besides paying attention to what is happening at your station, I do keep my ear to the ground, Douglas. I’ve heard the Courtyard stores aren’t open to humans anymore. I’ve heard Wolfgard has bought at least one building outside the Courtyard to use as rental property. And I’ve heard from a couple of friends who serve on the Talulah Falls police force, what’s left of it, so I have some idea of just how bad it can be for us humans when the terra indigene truly hate us.”

Burke had heard a few rumors about Talulah Falls too. If anything like the attack in the stall market had happened there, the Others would have killed everyone, and it wouldn’t have mattered that the majority of those people hadn’t been involved in the attack. “Simon Wolfgard wants to use the Lakeside Courtyard as a kind of graduate school for terra indigene who need to interact with humans in one capacity or another. The shops might be closed to the general human population, but all their stores are open now to a select group of humans who are interacting with a lot more of the Courtyard’s residents. That gives us a chance to show the Others that humans can work with them for the benefit of all of us.”

“All of that would have been gone if Wolfgard had died today?”

“All of that would have been gone. And the next leader would not have looked favorably on any of us.”

They stood in silence for a couple of minutes, watching people absorb the loss of property. Watching people follow paramedics to the ambulances that would take loved ones to one of the city’s hospitals.

Watching the medical examiner’s van take away the dead.

“Douglas? Don’t know if you’ve seen the alerts yet, but there’s a lot of people who have gone missing all of a sudden.” Zajac stared straight ahead. “Not from Lakeside, thank all the gods. Closest to us is a dozen people in the Finger Lakes area, all from the same town.”

“Maybe they ran off together.”

“A fair number of alerts have come in from all the regions,” Zajac said as if he hadn’t heard Burke’s comment. “Groups of people all gone missing around the same time. Almost like someone had decided to put a company out of business by eliminating the employees. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that so many people can disappear and no one has caught sight of any of them?”

“Did the missing people live close to roads where the pregnant blood prophets were found?”

“Close enough.” A beat of silence. “What are you thinking?”

I wonder who gave the order to hunt down the people who ran the breeding farms. “I think those people are truly gone, and we shouldn’t look too hard for them or ask too many questions.”

They watched their men escorting people out of the building. A few people were taken out on stretchers, but most walked out on their own.

Yes, things could have been a lot worse.

Finally Burke stirred. “I have to go. I’ll get the statements from Wolfgard and the rest of the terra indigene who were here and send you a copy of the report.”

“Appreciate it. I hope your officer pulls through.”

“So do I.”

Burke got in his car and drove toward the Courtyard. The Lakeside Hospital was on the way, but he needed to ascertain what else the Others might know about why Lieutenant Montgomery should keep Lizzy away from what had been a safe place. Once he knew that, he’d go to the hospital to check on his men and begin a vigil while waiting for news about MacDonald.

And while he was waiting, he would consider whether these two attacks had happened at the same time by chance or design.

When Monty reached the small, private waiting room, he found Burke at the door talking to Louis Gresh.

Gresh nodded as Monty joined them.

Burke said, “Tell him.”

“At the same time that Captain Burke was apprised of the need for backup at the stall market, the station received a call about a possible attack at the Courtyard,” Louis said. “Captain Burke was on his way to the stall market and you were off duty, so I responded at the Courtyard, figuring a familiar face would be a better choice.”

Monty nodded. “It would be, especially if the Others felt any of their more . . . vulnerable . . . residents were in danger.” Meaning the youngsters and Meg Corbyn. Or had this been some kind of attempt by Theral MacDonald’s ex to get to her? “Did the intruder damage one of the stores?”

Louis shook his head. “Person or persons unknown entered two of the efficiency apartments, with the probable intent of taking items of value. Ms. Lee is residing in one of those apartments, and you’re currently using the other.”

Monty felt sick. Someone was still after Lizzy? Why? The Toland police had Boo Bear, and only the terra indigene knew where the real jewels were now hidden.

“Did they take anything?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Louis replied. “They didn’t tell me why, but the terra indigene had cleared out all the personal possessions from both those apartments right before the attempted burglary. Since nothing was stolen and there was no sign of the burglars, there wasn’t much we could do. The street door was dusted for fingerprints. We took down the license plates of the four vehicles parked in the lot and tracked down the owners. Wasn’t hard. They were all having drinks and nibbles at the Stag and Hare.”

“Together?” Burke asked.

“No, but I’d bet they knew each other and had parked in the Courtyard’s lot as a kind of provocation. And one of the men kept fingering an HFL pin and smirking, as if he knew some big secret—especially after being asked if he’d seen any other vehicles in the parking lot.”

“Those cars were camouflage,” Monty said. “A single vehicle in that lot would be noticed. Several vehicles parked where they shouldn’t be looks more like mooning the Wolves and daring them to make a big deal out of a minor transgression.”

“That sounds idiotic enough to be true, but there wasn’t another vehicle in the lot when we got there,” Louis said. He looked at both of them and added slowly, “And neither of you think we’ll find the vehicle.”

“Oh, we might find the vehicle,” Burke said. There was something in his tone that warned about asking any questions about the occupants of that vehicle.

“Well,” Louis said after an awkward silence. “I’d better get back to the station. I’ll stop by again later. Hopefully we’ll all have good news by then.”

They waited until Louis was out of sight. Then Burke blew out his breath in a gusty sigh. “All right, Lieutenant, let’s talk to your boys and find out why a simple outing went so very wrong.”

His boys, Monty thought as he followed Burke into the waiting room. Not his men, not his officers. His boys.

When he saw them, he understood Burke’s choice of words.

Kowalski and Debany sat on the outside chairs, bookending Ruth and Merri Lee. They all looked young and scared and exhausted. Blood on their clothes. Bruises and bandages. One of Merri Lee’s fingers was splinted and the hand wrapped. She looked groggier than the other three, and Monty guessed she’d been given a painkiller.

Burke moved some magazines and sat on the table in front of them, ignoring the way it creaked from his weight.

Monty crouched next to Kowalski’s chair. “Karl?”

Kowalski made an effort to steady, although he couldn’t quite stop his hands from shaking. “MacDonald is in surgery. Ruthie did what she could to apply pressure to the wound, but he lost a lot of blood before the paramedics arrived. Michael called Lawrence’s folks. They’re on their way. Haven’t reached Theral yet. She’s not answering her mobile phone.”

“There was some trouble at the Courtyard,” Monty said quietly. “She may have left her phone somewhere.”

“Is Theral all right?” Merri Lee asked, rousing for a moment.

“I’ll find out.” He’d also have to tell her that her cousin had been shot.

“We’ll get a formal statement from each of you later,” Burke said. “Right now, I’d like to know what happened.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ruthie whispered. “A field trip, a treat for the Crows. Karl and I asked the people who run the stall market as well as some of the merchants if there would be any objections to the Others shopping there. We asked.”

“The impression we got is the merchants would welcome anyone who wanted to spend money,” Kowalski said. “But . . .” He looked at his friends.

“Just say it,” Burke said.

“It’s just an impression,” Debany said.

“That’s fine. In fact, impressions are good if we’re going to do effective damage control.”

“The people who run the stall market rent that building every weekend,” Kowalski began. “Then they rent out floor space for the merchants’ tables. You can rent up to three tables, either together or in different areas of the market. The center cross—the wide main aisles that divide the building into four quarters—are the prime locations and cost the most to rent.”

Ruth shifted in her chair. “A lot of shoppers never go beyond the center cross unless they’re looking for a specific item or looking for the people who are trying to unload a lot of little stuff from a moving or estate sale and will sell cheap.”

“What we noticed was that a number of merchants we recognized as usually having tables on a side aisle had tables on the center cross today,” Kowalski said. “And they had the kind of merchandise that would appeal to Crows. Windup toys. Sets of blocks, gaudy crap.”

“Jenni and her sisters were so excited, so happy,” Merri Lee said. “And they had so much money.”

Debany nodded. “Jenni did most of the buying, and she had a money belt around her waist that was stuffed with cash. I thought a couple of merchants were going to faint when she pulled out a wad of bills to pay for what they wanted.”

Burke pursed his lips. “So you made slow progress down the main aisle of the market, and everyone was having a good time.”

“Yes,” Kowalski said. “We had just reached the center of the market. The Crows were still going strong, but I had the sense that Simon Wolfgard had had more than enough noise and people. Michael was going to talk to the girls about calling it a day. Before he could do that, Wolfgard got a phone call, and suddenly we were on the move, in danger, had to get out now.”

“So he stopped you all before you reached the back half of the market?” Monty asked.

“Yes, sir. He grabbed Jenni and began hauling ass for the front entrance where the bus was parked. Ruthie and Merri had Starr with them, and Lawrence was escorting Crystal. Henry Beargard was to Simon’s left. Don’t know where Vlad was. Behind us, I think. We could see the doors when a group of men blocked our way. They all carried weapons—clubs mostly, but a few had knives. Michael and I identified ourselves as police officers and ordered the men to step aside.”

“Is that when you called the station?” Burke asked.

Kowalski shook his head. “Before. We called the station and called you as soon as Wolfgard indicated we were in danger.”

Burke took them through the rest, confirming that the humans attacked their group after Kowalski and Debany identified themselves as police officers; that the shots that killed Crystal Crowgard and injured Lawrence MacDonald came from behind them; that they had fired their off-duty pieces to protect themselves and the people with them.

That Simon Wolfgard had broken clear and could have gotten away, but turned back to help them when MacDonald went down.

When they finished, Burke looked at Merri Lee and Ruth. “Ladies, could you give us a minute?”

Ruth helped Merri Lee to her feet. The two women slowly left the room.

“Will Merri be able to stay at the Courtyard tonight?” Debany asked.

“The lieutenant and I will be going to the Courtyard soon. We’ll assess the situation and let you know.” Burke leaned closer. “Now. I want a straight answer. When MacDonald went down and you called for more backup, was there any delay before officers arrived to help you?”

Monty saw the shock on Kowalski’s and Debany’s faces. They looked at each other, hesitated, then shook their heads.

“It felt like the fight went on for hours, but I don’t think the whole thing lasted more than a few minutes,” Kowalski said. “The Elementals got there first, but backup was right behind them, and you were right behind the backup.”

Burke slapped his hands on his thighs and stood. “All right. Good. We’ll check out the Courtyard and then we’ll return.”

Monty walked out with Burke. Holding the door for Merri and Ruth, he looked at his men, then said quietly to Burke, “I know why you had to ask the question, but did they need to wonder about that today? The question came as a shock. They’ve had enough shocks.”

“Help arrived before they had a chance to wonder if it would arrive. I think that’s going to matter a lot in the days ahead. Come on, Lieutenant. Let’s find out if Simon Wolfgard also believes help arrived in a timely manner.”