Unsympathetic Magic Read online

  I turned to face the other gargoyle, the one that was still attacking the man staggering around the sidewalk. Remembering the ruthless boots I wore, I raised a leg and kicked the creature in the back as hard as I could, striking it mercilessly with Jilly C-Note’s long, sharp heel. The creature screamed loudly in pain and rage, whirled to bare its terrifying fangs at me, and then—to my relief—also turned and ran off.

  The struggling man, freed of his attacker, staggered into another garbage can and fell down.

  “Dangerous shit,” I choked out, panting with fear and exertion.

  Shaking, I found myself in a sitting position on the sidewalk without quite knowing how I’d gotten there. I stayed there for a few moments, catching my breath and trying to absorb what had just happened. Then I turned to look at the prone figure nearby. He was lying there in a heap, not moving. I crawled over to him.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I said, my voice still breathless.

  He moaned pathetically.

  “Did they bite you?” I asked. “Or scratch you?”

  Dangerous shit, indeed!

  He said, “Unnng . . .”

  “Jesus, what the hell are those things?” I said. “Do you know?”

  “Ba . . . ka . . .”

  “What?” I said.

  “Ba . . . ka . . .” he said faintly.

  The disjointed syllables meant nothing to me. They probably meant nothing, period. And that wasn’t important right now, I realized. “Are you hurt?”

  In response, he moaned again.

  “My name is Esther Diamond,” I said, trying to sound much calmer than I felt. “Can you tell me yours?”

  He was a black man, tall and well-built, with a neatly trimmed beard. He looked very ill and smelled weird, but he was wearing a well-cut tuxedo, though it was a little worse for wear after his struggle.

  “Your name,” I said. “Tell me your name.”

  He seemed so dazed, I was afraid he might not know his name. But then he said, “Da . . .”

  “Da?”

  “Dari . . . Darius.”

  “Darius! Excellent,” I said encouragingly. “Darius what?”

  “Mmm . . . Ph . . . Phelps.”

  “Okay, Darius Phelps.” Since he seemed unable to tell me whether he was hurt, I said, “I’m going to check you for injuries now. All right?”

  He neither protested nor agreed. After a moment, I started my search for injuries in the obvious place: the arm that the greenish gargoyle had been attacking with such ferocity while I fought its companion.

  I also stopped my investigation there, since I immediately saw that the hand had been torn off the wrist and was hanging by just a thin shred of flesh.

  I gave a choked scream of horror. Then I tried to get control of myself so as not to alarm the wounded man.

  I steeled myself to look again . . . and saw that the hand was moving. I uttered a sharp cry of shock and threw myself backward, flinching away from the active appendage.

  Darius grunted, evidently wondering what was wrong.

  I heard myself panting with panic and revulsion. My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding frantically.

  Calm down, I told myself, unwilling to look at Darius’ dismembered appendage again. It’s just a spasm or something. Like a chicken running around without its head.

  I needed to get help for this man. Right away!

  I reached for my cell phone so I could call 911 . . . which was when I realized that my phone was in my purse, and my purse was in the clutches of a demented gargoyle.

  “Shit!” I said.

  No reaction from Darius. I checked to see if he was still conscious. His eyes were half-open, his dazed expression unchanged. I thought he must be in shock.

  I tried to pull myself together and think.

  My first thought was to go find a hospital or a police station.

  I was already on my feet before I realized that wasn’t a practical plan.

  “No. A phone,” I muttered. “I need a phone.”

  I turned to Darius and forced myself to speak calmly. Or at least, I tried; I probably sounded as confused and scared as I felt.

  “Darius,” I said loudly, “I’ve got to find a phone so that I can call for help. I won’t go far. And as soon as I find a phone, I’ll be right back by your side. In the meantime, don’t try to move. That’s very important, all right? Don’t move.”

  Darius moaned pathetically again, which I interpreted as acknowledgment of my instructions. I repeated that I’d be right back as soon as I found a phone.

  Then I tried ringing the doorbells of a couple of nearby row houses. No one answered in the first one. In the second house, a resident shouted down from the second floor that he was calling the police.

  “Yes!” I shouted back. “Call the police! A man has been hurt out here!”

  “Get away from this house!” he shouted back. Which convinced me that he might not call for help after all. I rang his doorbell a few more times. No response.

  Then I heard a siren wailing. It sounded like it was only a block or two away. I followed the noise, moving as fast as I could in those cruel boots, and I reached Lexington Avenue. There were a number of businesses there, but it was past midnight on a weeknight, and they were all closed. I didn’t immediately see any pedestrians, either, but at least there was a modest quantity of vehicular traffic on the street.

  I started trying to wave down a car, hoping I could convince someone to stop and let me use their phone. But the cars on Lexington just kept careening past me. I was terrified that Darius would die from his wound before I got help for him, or that those vicious gargoyles would return to attack him as he lay on the sidewalk, alone and helpless. Frustrated, confused, and panicking at the prospect of Darius dying because of my failure to summon help, I waded out into traffic, boldly—or quite stupidly—trying to force cars to stop if they didn’t want to be responsible for running me over.

  Only later did two important things occur to me.

  The first was that, considering my costume that night—which I had by then completely forgotten about—my behavior was bound to be drastically misinterpreted.

  Indeed, it didn’t take long for two cops in a squad car to find me. Given the way I looked, my misunderstood aggression toward the passing strangers whom I stopped, my lack of ID, the crazed things I was babbling, and the fact that, in my frustration, I struggled physically with one of the cops, the results were probably predictable: They cuffed me, arrested me, and tossed me into the squad car.

  The second important thing that finally occurred to me, as I was being taken to the Twenty-fifth Precinct to be processed and locked up, was that despite the gruesome severity of Darius’ injury, there had been no blood at all.

  3

  I was leaning against the cool bars of my jail cell in the Twenty-fifth Precinct, exhausted, angry, crazed with worry, and also plagued by a vague feeling that I should start singing the blues . . . when Detective Connor Lopez entered the detention area.

  He flashed his gold shield at the female cop on duty, introduced himself, and said he’d like to talk to me. She grinned and said they’d all been looking forward to his arrival. Then she announced she was taking a coffee break and tactfully left us alone. (Well, “alone” unless you count my only cell mate, who seemed to be sleeping off quite a bender.)

  Lopez looked roughly the way you’d expect a guy to look after being hauled out of bed by an urgent summons in the middle of the night. His straight black hair was rumpled, he needed a shave, and there were circles under his blue eyes. He had evidently dressed in a hurry, just grabbing the first items at hand when he’d staggered out of bed: cut-offs, a faded SUNY T-shirt, and flip-flops. Oddly, the overall effect of his untidy fatigue made him look younger than his thirty-one years, more like a grad student during exam week than a police officer dragged from his bed to bust me out of stir.

  He’d inherited exotic good looks from his Cuban immigrant father and clear blue eyes from his
Irish-American mother. I noticed that his golden olive skin was darker than usual. Maybe he’d spent some time out at the beach this summer, or maybe he’d been helping his parents with yard work at their home in Nyack, just north of the city and across the Hudson River. Or perhaps he had taken a vacation since the last time I’d seen him. Which had been in May. When he had told me he couldn’t date me anymore.

  My relationship with Lopez, though short- lived and unconsummated, was complicated. So I had been extremely reluctant to ask him to come to my rescue tonight. By the time I had decided to do it, I was out of other feasible options.

  Besides, he had said that if I ever needed his help, I should call him.

  And this was certainly an occasion when I needed his help.

  Lopez’s thick- lashed gaze traveled over me now, taking in the black high- heeled boots, purple fishnet stockings, and embarrassingly short vinyl skirt. When he got to my tight, leopard-patterned top, he lingered on my well-exposed cleavage, which looked noticeably more impressive than usual; one of the things that made Jilly’s costume so uncomfortable was the push-up bra beneath it.

  “Eyes front, soldier,” I said irritably.

  His gaze shifted to my face, where Jilly’s makeup was probably making me look like a tubercular raccoon by now.

  “Sorry.” Lopez gave my overall appearance another quick appraisal, then said, “Are you really that hard up for money?”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.

  He smiled wearily. “I take it you got a job?”

  He meant an acting job, of course. As a detective in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, as well as a personal acquaintance of mine, he presumably knew that I still waited tables regularly at Bella Stella, which had been my day job in recent months (though it mostly involved working nights). It was a famous restaurant in Little Italy that was owned by a woman with close connections to the Gambello crime family. Lopez had been involved in investigating a Mafia murder that occurred there in May. I had witnessed the hit, and the subsequent strange events surrounding that murder had ultimately led to Lopez breaking up with me—before we’d even really started a relationship.

  “Yes, I got a job,” I said. “A TV guest spot. One week of work.”

  Stella Butera, owner of Bella Stella, had given me the whole week off for D30 without any fuss or complaint. Stella was good about letting her singing servers schedule our restaurant work around our professional opportunities, and it was one of the reasons I liked working for her.

  “TV, huh?” Lopez tilted his head. “And you’re playing—let me guess—a Benedictine nun?”

  “Yes. I suppose the outfit gives it away,” I said sourly, recalling some of the insulting comments that the arresting officers had made tonight, assuming that I was exactly what I appeared to be.

  “Well, I’m glad you got work, Esther. But the sixty-four thousand dollar question is,” Lopez said, “why were you wearing your hooker costume and soliciting tricks on Lexington Avenue?”

  “I was not soliciting tr—”

  “I got a call from the desk sergeant here saying—”

  “I told them what I was doing!”

  “—that a crack whore who claims to be a friend of mine was stopping cars on Lexington and reaching into the windows to grab the drivers’ crotches.”

  “I was not grabbing crotches!”

  In my agitation, my voice got loud. I shushed Lopez, stopped speaking, and glanced over my shoulder to see if I had woken the other resident of my cell, an overweight young African-American woman who was lying on a bench and snoring loudly. She had been like that ever since I was put in here, and her tough appearance made me very reluctant to risk disturbing her.

  Lopez folded his arms across his chest and leaned one well-muscled shoulder against the bars of my holding cell. “One man told the cops that you tried to steal his phone.”

  “Well, I did do that,” I admitted in a subdued voice.

  He sighed wearily and ran a hand over his face. “I assume there’s a perfectly logical explanation for all this, Esther?”

  “I got you out of bed, didn’t I?” I said with regret.

  “Nah, I was out shooting hoops when my phone rang in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m really sorry about this.”

  “What the hell were you doing?” he said.

  The mingled exasperation, bewilderment, and concern in his tone were all too familiar to me. It was the essence of why he wouldn’t date me: He thought I was crazy and possibly felonious. And although that was completely inaccurate, he nonetheless had some justification for thinking it. Moreover, I had to admit that involvement with me seemed to be bad for him. In order to protect me on previous occasions, he had done things that violated his better judgment, his duty, and his honor—such as concealing evidence in a homicide investigation, lying to his superiors, and filing false reports. Lopez didn’t like the choices he had made to shield me, and he was afraid he’d make more of them if we remained involved.

  And now I was going to ask him to get the charges against me dropped and expunged. They were bogus charges, of course; but it was still a lot to ask, all things considered.

  I said to him, “Look, you’re the last person in the world that I wanted to drag into this. And I swear to you, I really tried not to.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you called. I wouldn’t have missed your outfit tonight for the world. But the desk sergeant here must lead a sheltered life.” Lopez’s gaze dropped to my cleavage again. “You look way too healthy to be a crack whore.” After a moment, he met my eyes again and smiled as he added, “But much too obvious to be an escort, of course.”

  “Perhaps we could discuss my character’s position in the hierarchy of the oldest profession after you get me out of here?”

  “Ah. Which brings us to the point.” There was a little regret in his expression as he said, “If you want me to get you out of this, then your story had better be damn good.”

  “Why?” My gaze flickered anxiously to the door. The night-shift cops of the Two- Five were somewhere on the other side of it. “Are they going to be difficult?”

  “No, I’m going to be difficult, Esther,” he said irritably. “You got picked up while playing in traffic in Harlem in the middle of the night, dressed like a hooker and acting like a lunatic. And it’s going to take a really good explanation to convince me that arraignment, remand, and a psych evaluation aren’t the best things for you.”

  “What?” I gripped the bars. “No!”

  My cell mate grumbled in her sleep and rolled over.

  “Shh,” I said to Lopez.

  “I’m not the one raising my voice,” he pointed out.

  “Lopez, you’ve got to get me out of here,” I said desperately. “And you’ve got to get them to delete any record of my arrest! I don’t want it on my record. I don’t want a record at all.”

  “Start talking,” he said implacably.

  “First things first,” I said. “Please get them to send a squad car to look for this guy I found tonight. He’s severely injured.”

  “They sent a car, Esther. There’s no sign of the man you described.”

  “What?” I frowned. “That’s not possible! Darius was hurt too badly to get up and walk away. The cops must have looked in the wrong place.”

  “No, they looked in the right place.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The two cops who went over there to check it out, in response to your story, turned on their cherry top—”

  “Their what?”

  “Uh, the red light on the roof.”

  “Oh.”

  “And that attracted the attention of a resident who came downstairs to ask if they were looking for the drunk hooker who’d been ringing his doorbell and shouting up at him a little after midnight.”

  “I wasn’t drunk,” I said wearily.

  “So that sounds like the right place?”

  “Yes. But Darius must have crawled into a doorway o
r something. He couldn’t have gone far. The cops just didn’t look hard enough.”

  “They were thorough, Esther,” Lopez said patiently.

  “They didn’t even believe me!”

  “No, they didn’t,” he agreed. “But it’s a slow night, and you claimed you saw a man who’d been, er, attacked and maimed, which is serious stuff. So, just in case you’re not quite as insane as you seem, they decided to be thorough.”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “You didn’t waltz right in here as soon as you arrived. You talked to the cops out there first, didn’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Shit. While waiting for Lopez to get here, I had planned what to tell him: a version of the night’s events that was close to the truth, but a tad more plausible.

  He lifted one brow. “A man with a sword? A severed hand? Gargoyles?”

  Too late now.

  “That’s what I saw,” I said defensively.

  “Sadly, I don’t find it hard to believe that’s what you think you saw,” Lopez said. “Which is why I’m not so sure that getting you out of here is such a good idea.”

  I tried to control my frustration and focus on the most important thing. “Fine, let’s forget about that for a minute. But, please, you’ve got to get them to find Darius.”

  “Esther, he’s not there,” Lopez said firmly.

  “Then check the local hospitals. Maybe—”

  “He’s not at a hospital, either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute. For now—”

  “But—”

  “For now,” he said, “I want you to tell me what happened. As clearly and rationally as you can.”

  “All right.” I took a breath and tried to calm down. “That’s fair.”

  “Glad you think so.”