2

After V left, I ran down to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine. I wasn’t sure what was appropriate for an Unseelie ambassador, but Autumn Chill red seemed like it might do the trick. I splurged on a bottle of Kahlua and some high priced vodka just in case the fae wasn’t a wine drinker…or in case I got lonely while Veruca was on assignment. Without the familiar comforts of road life, I found it harder and harder to sleep at night. If vodka was strong enough to help people survive Communist Russia, it would work for me, too.

I stopped by an ATM to see if my paycheck had made it into my account yet. Not that I was in any danger of going broke: with the next check, I would be approaching seven digits in the account. My check was in, so I went back into the bank and requested twenty grand (which they provided after another phone call to Valente’s office), and separated it into two stacks. The first stack went into my wallet as mad money. The second I wrapped in plastic wrap, then in aluminum foil, and added it to the growing pile under Dora’s spare tire. It would take some explaining in the event of a police search of my vehicle, but I knew I might not be a personal wizard forever. An escape fund could come in handy if Valente ever decided I had outlived my usefulness. I now had fifty grand squirreled away for a really bad rainy day.

“Rainy day? More likely the second coming of Noah’s flood.”

When I closed Dora’s trunk, I was startled to discover I wasn’t alone in the strip mall parking lot. Special Agent Rick Salazar leaned against the trunk of a sidewalk-encased tree. He had experienced a wardrobe change, too, in the intervening month: only the tan trench coat looked vaguely FBIish. Beneath it, he sported threadbare blue jeans and a white t-shirt. “Mr. Fisher.”

I wondered how much of that process he had just witnessed. It wasn’t illegal to store bricks of cash in the trunk of your car, but it wasn’t normal, either. As I slowly walked towards him, I absentmindedly brushed the pen in my shirt pocket. “Agent Salazar. Is this an official visit?”

He shook his salt-and-pepper hair. “Furthest from. If anybody asks, I’m just leaning here, trying to remember my ATM code.” He glanced around the parking lot furtively. “I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

“Not allowed? The bureau’s still convinced I’m a psycho?”

“No.” He shifted the peppermint he was sucking on to the other side of his mouth. “Your employer. Nobody talks to Valente employees in a formal capacity without a warrant and the director’s personal authorization.”

That shook me. “Is Valente under investigation?”

“Don’t know. Don’t want to know. Either he has been for the last decade and we don’t know enough to arrest him or he’s bought the whole damn bureau from the deputy director level on up.” He paused, clearly deliberating whether he should ask what he had come to ask. “Were you working for him last time we talked?”

“Nope. He hired me the morning after.”

He nodded, his internal lie detector apparently satisfied. “Do you have a clue who you’re working for?”

“The devil I know.” That line drifted back to me from my first interview.

Salazar grunted. “Close enough. He’s bad news, Mr. Fisher. I can sympathize with some terrorists: they believe that what they are doing is the right thing, at least within their own twisted logic. Lucien Valente…all he believes in is money and power. He’ll sell weapons to the Israelis, then invent counter-measures to sell to the Palestinians, then upgrades to let the Israelis bypass the counter measures. Drugs, slaves, guns, brand-name clothing…he’ll sell anything if the money is good.”

“Nobody else wanted to pay for my skills. A man’s got to make a living somehow.”

“Like this?” Salazar thrust a manila envelope at me.

I looked inside and wished I hadn’t. The contents were a stack of forty or fifty black and white crime scene photos. The people in them resembled the aftermath of a war, just waiting for the bulldozer to dig the mass grave. All of them were dead from the same wound: massive, gaping holes where their hearts should have been. I recognized a few of the faces despite slight decomposition, especially the large man with his right arm in a crude sling. The last time I had seen him, he had been trying to separate my head from my body via tomahawk. “The Old Ways. When?”

“Hard to tell. We didn’t find them ’til more than a week later. Sometime between when you asked for directions at the drug rehab center and when you and Veruca Wakefield left town two days later.”

I shot him my best tough guy look. “Are you sure this isn’t an official interview?”

He shrugged. “You could tell me you killed all of them and I couldn’t use a word of it in court.”

“I didn’t kill any of them.”

“That’s the damnedest part of it, you didn’t. It would work so much better if you had. You found one of the bodies, you went to work for the victim’s employer, heck, took over the victim’s old job for all I know. I’ve got witnesses that show you were out there trying to find a group of people, who all just happen to get killed that same way a couple days later. The more I look at those pictures, the more those chest wounds look like what a really big animal maw would do to a human body…and your old car got tore apart by wild animals, then burned to slag, a few nights before they died. You leave town and the murders stop.” He held up his hands in puzzlement. “If I found a guy who swore he saw you working as a lion tamer, I might have something that made half a lick of sense.”

“What if you found me in possession of a trio of severed wolf heads?” I tried to sound sarcastic.

“Now that’s more like what I’ve been orbiting around. Whatever killed those people, you took it out: But where’s Valente fit? And why did you visit the Old Ways before they were killed? And when did the big, bad wolves learn to fire forty-five caliber bullets through a glass-packed silencer?” Salazar tapped the photo still in my hands. “That’s what they dug out of his shoulder.”

He sighed. “Mr. Fisher, I’ve made a career out of understanding the weird ones, but this mess is beyond me. Serial rapists, arsonists who get a sexual thrill from fire, men that are homicidally attracted to seven year old girls…I understand those cases. This…I suspect you’re the only man on the planet who knows what really happened in Oklahoma.”

“You might want to move.”

I did so, a casual step to the right, just as a plump bumblebee dive-bombed over my shoulder. It crashed into Agent Salazar’s stomach with an angry splat. My time with Veruca was paying off: I ducked for cover, before turning to look for the gunmen trying to kill me.