Smoke poured out of the windows of the century-old building which had housed Yee & Sons Trading Company for decades. Fire roared upward through the roof and out the front door. Emergency services were still arriving. As I stood there, my mouth hanging open, an ambulance and two squad cars pulled up, their sirens wailing and lights flashing.
And then, without conscious thought—certainly without anything resembling a decision—I dropped Nelli’s leash and ran toward the burning building, screaming, “Max! MAX!”
A policewoman dived out of a squad car and threw herself bodily against me. The momentum knocked us both sideways, so that we staggered against another police car that had just pulled up.
“No! Stay back!” she shouted.
Nelli was barking, distressed by my screaming and this altercation. I heard Lucky shouting, but I had no idea what he was saying.
I fought the policewoman, wailing Max’s name as I tried to get free of her grasp. Another cop joined her in restraining me.
“You have to get back, miss!” he shouted into my face. “Stop!”
I barely saw or heard the two people wrestling with me. All I could see was the burning building that had swallowed my cherished friend. “Max!”
“Esther! Esther!”
The familiar voice penetrated the panicky roaring in my ears.
Panting and still fighting the two cops, I called, “Max?”
“Esther, I’m here! I’m right here!”
I looked around—and when I saw Max trotting toward me, I sagged with relief. The cops were shouting stern instructions into my face, but I ignored them.
“Max!” I flung myself at him, squeezing him tightly and giving a sob of relief.
“It’s all right, my dear. I’m fine.” He returned my hug and patted my back. “Everyone is fine. No one was hurt.”
“God, you scared me.” I put a hand over my pounding heart as I stumbled back a couple of steps to get a good look at him.
A short, slightly plump man who looked about seventy (though his true age was well over three centuries), Max had innocent blue eyes, fair skin, a neatly trimmed white beard, and slightly long white hair. He was usually tidily dressed, but he’d obviously had a narrow escape from the fire. From head to toe, Max was smeared with soot and ash. His elegant calf-length Russian coat would never recover from this incident, and his hat was singed and stank of burned fur.
“Thank God you got out okay!” Lucky, who was holding Nelli’s leash now, put a hand on Max’s shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Grazie a Dio!”
“We all got out.” As the police loudly urged us to step behind the barricade they were erecting, Max gestured over his shoulder. I looked across the narrow street, and I saw that Lily and Ted were both there, alive and well, though as smudged as Max. After a moment, Max added quietly, “Grazie a Dio.”
Standing behind the police barricade now, I watched Ted and Lily arguing on the other side of the street. Two police officers approached them. I could tell from their gestures that the cops were urging them to get farther away from the burning building. Ted and Lily were too engrossed in their argument to pay any attention. The rest of the street was being evacuated, and the police were taking control of the scene quickly, despite the crowds and the chaos.
Between the festival, this fire, and Susan’s attempt to kill John, this precinct was having quite a busy day.
I turned my gaze to the burning building, recalling the abundance of retail stock inside the confusing maze of the Yee family’s store. There had been some lovely objects and art in there, as well as some mind-bogglingly expensive furniture and antiques. I mostly had negative memories of the place, but it seemed like a sad loss, even so.
Watching the building burn, I asked, “Max, what happened?”
He started to speak, coughed a little, and pulled a bottle of water out of his pocket. I supposed that first responders had given it to him right before we arrived. He took a few sips, then cleared his throat and began explaining.
“Lily and I went down to the cellar to destroy the workshop where she and her daughter made those curse-carrying fortune cookies.” Max’s English was excellent, but it was not his native language. He had a slight, elegant foreign accent, reflecting his origins in Central Europe centuries ago. “Lily asked Ted to stay upstairs and mind the store, but he followed us down to the cellar, full of questions, accusations, and recriminations. I do not think he can forgive his mother or sister for any of this.”
“Go figure,” I said.
Lily had inflicted bad luck, illness, and injuries on Ted’s associates, but she had not planned to kill anyone. Susan was the one who had raised the stakes by adding murder to the mix. And Lily, who had taught her dark secrets to her talented daughter, soon realized that she couldn’t control her. But the two women didn’t fall out until Susan decided to kill John Chen.
Lily had not prevented the other murders—nor the attempt on Lopez’s life only yesterday—but she had drawn the line at letting Susan kill a fine young man who was a longtime family friend. Lily had destroyed the cursed cookie Susan was preparing for John, which was why Susan—by now reckless in her homicidal obsession—had resorted to the more mundane method of simply trying to shoot him. She got the gun from a local thug named Danny Teng, who had been loosely connected with ABC.
I shuddered when I thought of Danny, who’d been hanging around the film set lately, bullying Ted, eyeing me with lip-smacking lust, and making lewd comments. There was at least one benefit to production shutting down and costing me my job: I’d never have to see that dangerous creep again.
Max continued, “But although Susan had run mad, her intelligence did not desert her. She suspected Lily might have an attack of conscience and try to destroy the workshop.”
“So she booby-trapped it?” Lucky guessed.
“Precisely.” Max removed his singed hat and examined it with regret. “A mystical booby trap. Susan didn’t have the necessary time or skill to conjure wards that could withstand an assault from her mother, who possesses power similar to her own. Instead, she tried to make the consequences of destroying the workshop too dangerous to risk.”
He dropped his ruined hat into the ankle-deep slush at our feet and gazed up at the burning building. “It was quickly apparent to me there would be a cost for obliterating her dark ritual space. But I underestimated how destructive Susan could be. Even knowing about the murders, I still didn’t anticipate that she was prepared to destroy her home and her late father’s legacy—the shop has been in the Yee family for many years.” Max shook his head. “So I proceeded. And by the time I realized the full extent of the danger, it was too late. The whole building burst into flames. As you see.”
“You and Lily and Ted were lucky to get out alive,” I said, feeling my chest constrict as I realized how close Max had come to death. He often said that fire was the weakest element of his power. His ability to shield himself and the Yees from that conflagration long enough for them to escape with their lives had probably been precarious.
Thinking of fire made me think of Lopez again. He’d been present during Susan’s mad murder attempt today. I recalled the way that unexplained flames had suddenly poured from the mouth of John’s lion costume (he was one of the athletic dancers who roamed the streets during the festival), blazing at Susan the moment after she turned her gun on me . . . I felt sure Lopez had done that, though he didn’t know it.
“We were very lucky indeed,” Max said, glancing to where Ted and Lily stood. “I shall not be taking any of life’s pleasures for granted for some time to come, I assure you.”
I watched the flames rise from the building and recalled other incendiary incidents involving Lopez, before today’s fire-spewing lion costume had probably saved my life by distracting Susan.
When Lopez was trapped in an underground tunnel with a serial killer who was about to slay again, there was a sudden, fiery explosion that killed the murderer while leaving Lopez and the other people present (including me) unharmed. When a villain had tried to escape from Lopez by holding a gun to my head, he’d been foiled by a shower of fiery sparks that rained down on him from light fixtures on the ceiling. On an occasion when Lopez and I were having a particularly volatile evening, my bed had burst into flames—while we were on it together. And during a Vodou ritual last summer, he had been involuntarily possessed by a fire spirit. Lopez remembered nothing about that trance, during which he had played with flames and hot coals without incurring any injury (though I assumed he’d had to throw away the trousers he’d been wearing that night, which were not nearly as impervious to fire damage as his own flesh was).
When I had realized earlier today what Susan intended to do to John, I’d called in the cavalry—that is, I’d phoned Lopez, who arrived within minutes, accompanied by a reassuring number of police officers, to help stop her. And then an unexplained burst of fire saved my life at a moment when Lopez was scared to death for me—as he subsequently told me with more crankiness than affection.
Given the pattern that seemed so apparent to me, I didn’t understand how Lopez could fail to realize—or at least start to suspect—that he was the common denominator in these fiery incidents. But Max, who hypothesized that he was exhibiting some form of pyrokinesis, didn’t consider his obliviousness surprising.
If this was an ability Lopez had possessed since birth or early childhood, Max had told me, then the unconscious processes that created these events might feel so normal to him as to be unnoticeable. And since the incidents seemed to occur only in moments of extreme stress, then they might be too irregular for Lopez to perceive a pattern, let alone identify himself as the source of that pattern.
In other words, I shouldn’t be puzzled by his obtuseness. Anyone as stubbornly prosaic as Lopez was bound to be dense about this sort of esoteric phenomenon.
And it wasn’t a subject I could picture myself raising with him. Well, not unless our pending conversation about the misfortune cookie that I’d stolen from his car last night went a whole lot better than I was expecting it to go.
As I watched the Yee family’s store burn, I wondered if anyone else in Lopez’s life—anyone besides me and Max—had ever suspected that he possessed mystical power of which he was unaware.
“It looks like the building will have to be gutted,” I murmured. “They won’t be able to save anything, the way the fire is consuming the place.”
“It had a fierce beginning,” Max said, “and it spread with terrifying rapidity.”
“But despite the brushes with death on this one, I guess it’s all come out good, huh?” said Lucky. “Not even someone as smart as the Gambello family’s lawyer could get Susan off the hook after what she did today. Attempted murder right in front of a bunch of cops? Stupid don’t even begin to cover it.” He shook his head at the unprofessional sloppiness of that.
“Susan has been taken into custody?” Max asked.
“Yes. And she seemed completely demented while they were arresting her,” I said. “Max, do you think she’s got the ability to free herself from behind bars?”
He shook his head. “Only if she’s in a facility foolish enough to let her set up a private laboratory and have access to many unusual ingredients. I’ve seen no evidence that she’s able to exercise power in other ways.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I want her to stay in prison.” After all, besides Lopez, she had tried to kill me and John, too.
Lucky said, “And what with this whole building burning down, the evil mother can’t get any second thoughts about rebuilding that basement workshop to do some more dark magic.”
“True,” Max said pensively, his gaze drifting toward Lily for a moment.
With her daughter in prison, her business destroyed, and her son presumably planning to distance himself from her, there might not be anything left in her life that Lily cared about enough to go to such lengths again.
Max had told me before that Evil often consumed itself with its own voracious appetite. Looking at Lily, I realized once again that he was right about that.
Assuming a deliberately more upbeat tone, Max noted, “Fortunately, despite inconvenience to the neighbors, no one in the area appears to have been injured due to this conflagration.”
“And it looks like the fire department is managing to prevent it from spreading,” I added, watching them work and impressed by their efficiency. “So I don’t think anyone besides the Yees will lose any property, either.”
I looked at Ted and his mother again. They were now being examined by paramedics—and still arguing. Lily looked sullen and tragic—and still beautiful. Ted looked furious—which wasn’t surprising, though it was unusual. He was normally a very affable guy, though feckless, incompetent, and unreliable.
“I feel sorry for Ted, though,” I said. “He’s done nothing wrong, and he didn’t know his mother and sister were doing wrong. Yet he’s lost everything. Even the store. I know he didn’t care about it, but it was also his home—and it must have been worth some money.”
“It’s bound to be insured,” said Lucky. “So unless someone can prove this fire was caused by mystical arson—”
“Unlikely,” Max said. “They will look for mundane causes and will never find any.”
“Then there’s probably gonna be a nice payout,” Lucky said to me. “If he’s got any brains at all, the kid will talk his mom into splitting it with him.”
“Well, after what she did, he’s certainly got the guilt leverage for that.” And I thought that walking away from his toxic family and their past with a wad of money in his pocket, free to live on his own terms and forced to become self-reliant, might be a very positive outcome for Ted Yee.
At any rate, it was certainly a positive outcome for anyone else involved in this whole fiasco whom his mother and sister would have willfully cursed with misfortune or death in order to sabotage Ted’s ambitions.
A shiver passed through me as I again recalled finding that deadly cookie in Lopez’s police car. He could have died at any moment. The second that fragile cookie began to crumble, he’d have been doomed . . .
I fervently hoped that Susan Yee would spend decades behind bars.
And I realized something as I watched her home burn in the wake of her mystical booby trap. “Lily and Ted don’t know about Susan’s arrest.”
“The cops’ll catch up to events soon and tell ’em,” said Lucky.
“Yes, I guess you’re right.” I suspected they’d both be relieved by the news, though probably for different reasons. And since I wasn’t eager to speak to the Yee family ever again, I was content to leave it up to the NYPD to tell them what had happened.
The NYPD . . .
I glanced at Nelli and recalled that there were pressing matters I needed to discuss with Max. But looking at him now, I realized this wasn’t a good moment for that. He had just survived a deadly inferno after performing mystical tasks that were probably exhausting.
I said to Lucky, “We should take Max home. He needs a shower, a hot meal, and some rest.”
“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” Max said on a sigh.
I looked around at the scene, wondering if he’d get in trouble for leaving it without making a statement to the authorities. But no one was paying attention to us—and I thought that Lily and Ted were unlikely to mention Max to anyone as a witness, let alone explain his involvement. It was in their best interests to stick with a simple and mundane story about today’s events; the building suddenly caught fire, they didn’t know how or why, and it had spread fast.
I took Max’s arm and we turned away from the blazing remains of Yee & Sons Trading Company. Followed by Lucky and Nelli, we headed back toward Canal Street. We could probably hail a cab there, despite how crowded it was around here today . . . but could we find a taxi that would let Nelli come with us? She was an inconveniently large animal.
I remembered that Max had recently found a pet transport service that he used when going places with Nelli that weren’t within walking distance of his home in Greenwich Village. I was about to ask him for the phone number, or at least the name, when my cell phone rang, startling me.
As a cruelly cold wind swept down the street, I pulled off a glove and reached into my pocket, clumsily answering the phone without bothering to see who the caller was.
“Esther Diamond,” I said wearily, realizing how ready I was to get out of the cold. It had been a long, busy, and very fraught day—and now darkness was descending.
“Hi, it’s me.” In response to my blank silence, the caller added, “John.”
“Oh! John.” I smiled for a moment, then asked with concern, “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty freaked out.”
“Well, yeah,” I said sympathetically. “I can only imagine. It must be freaky to see someone you’ve known your whole life suddenly point a gun at you with murder in her eyes.”
“It’s John?” Lucky asked me. “How is he?”
“Freaked out,” I said, putting my hand over the phone for a moment. “See if you can find a cab that’ll take us.”
Lucky grunted skeptically but started looking around.
“Oh . . . yeah, I guess I’m still pretty freaked out about Susan,” John said, sounding distracted. “I don’t even know why she was trying to kill me. Some cop was just here asking—”
“Cop?” I repeated alertly. “What cop?”
“—and, well, I don’t think he believed me when I said I have no idea why. Except that she seemed pretty crazy all of a sudden.”
“Was it Lopez?” I asked. “The detective I was talking to at the scene?”
Hearing that name, Lucky grumbled, “What’s Wonder Boy up to now?”
He was a little irritated with Lopez, who’d broken open a big case against the Gambello crime family a few weeks ago and was keeping busy lately by arresting a bunch of Lucky’s associates.
“I mean, really crazy,” said John. “Susan was like a rabid animal or something today . . .” I could hear him draw in a sharp breath as a new thought occurred to him. “I wonder if Ted’s all right? I mean . . . do we know if Susan targeted anyone else?”
That was a complicated subject, so I settled for saying that Ted was unhurt, and Susan hadn’t shot at anyone else. I started to tell John about the fire that was consuming the store, but before I uttered more than a syllable, he interrupted me to say that he hadn’t called to talk about Susan or Ted.
“No?” I said absently, pointing out an approaching cab to Lucky while deciding how to phrase the news about the fire.
“Oh,” John said. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t call about that, either, Esther. Not right now.”
Lucky tried to wave down the cab, but it roared right past us. Perhaps the driver had noticed our soot-covered friend and our pony-sized dog.
“What’s not right now?” I asked.
“Our date.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“I mean, I am going to ask you out. Obviously. Like we talked about today.”
We did? I blinked again. I had no memory of talking about it.
He continued, “Just not right now . . . Well, unless you want it to be right now?”
“Um . . .” I frowned, caught off guard.
John was asking me out on a date? And he thought we had talked about this?
I tried to remember what he’d said to me in the chaos after Susan was arrested. Something about thanking me, calling me, dinner . . .
Oh.
I realized, not for the first time, that I can be such an idiot sometimes.
I liked John. A lot, in fact. But I hadn’t realized until just now, when John baldly used the word “date,” that he had been showing interest in me—that kind of interest.
John was subtle and courteous about it (which was the kind of man he was), and that was one of the reasons I’d been oblivious until this moment.
But the main reason I hadn’t noticed John flirting with me—which I now realized he had been doing lately—was because I was obsessed with Lopez. Or at least very preoccupied with him. And we were dating again. Or trying to date, anyhow . . . unless, after last night’s smash-and-grab, we were already in another off-again phase? Either way, I was involved with him. Well, kind of involved. We had a relationship, anyhow, though we weren’t in a relationship. Not yet, really. Or maybe we were, but we didn’t—
Okay, stop.
I let my breath out in a rush and gave myself a mental kick. This was not the time to try to find the right word for whatever was between me and Lopez. So far, we had never found the right word for it, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen now, standing in ankle-deep slush on a noisy street corner in Chinatown while Max and Lucky both looked at me with concern, no doubt wondering what John was saying that was making me go all tense and fidgety.
On my phone, John said, “I mean, I want to ask you out later, when my head is clear, instead of right now when I’m so freaked out.”
Oh, no, I thought uncomfortably. John wanted to go out with me. What was I going to do? What should I say to him?
I’d had no problem recently turning down Danny Teng (multiple times), because he was a sleazy thug who made my skin crawl. But I hated the thought of rejecting John, who I really liked.
I was unprepared. How had I not seen this coming?
Come on, don’t beat yourself up. There’s been a lot of Evil and fear and deadly cookies ever since you met John. And you’ve been working long hours, too.
Plus, things had been so volatile with Lopez lately.
Oh, when are things not volatile with him?
“Esther,” John prodded. “Is that okay?”
I really needed to focus here.
“Is John okay?” Lucky asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“What’s going on?” Lucky demanded.
“I’m sorry, I know I’m babbling,” John said. “And not making much sense.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said vaguely. “You’re fine.”
“Is something wrong?” Lucky asked, worried about his honorary nephew, who’d had a close brush with death today.
“Would you just look for a cab?” I said.
“A cab?” John repeated blankly.
“Not you,” I said. “John, what’s going on? Why did you call?”
He took a breath. “I really need you to bring your friend Dr. Zadok here.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“Oh! Sorry. I’m at the funeral home.”
I looked at Max, covered in soot and patently weary, as I asked John, “When do you want to see him?”
“Right now.” When I didn’t answer immediately, John said, “It’s important, Esther.”
“All right. We’re still in Chinatown,” I said a little reluctantly. “We can be there in a few minutes. But what’s going on?”
“Well, um . . . This is going to sound weird.”
“Uh-huh.” I gestured at Lucky, trying to tell him we wouldn’t need a ride, after all.
John cleared his throat. “One of the departed . . . I mean, a few minutes ago, one of our corpses just kind of . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . just kind of got out of its coffin and walked away.”