5
Zadok’s Rare and Used Books was a cozy shop in an
old, ivy-covered townhouse in a quiet street in the West Village.
The discreet exterior meant that few window shoppers or casual
browsers ever entered the bookstore. But since the shop specialized
in rare and expensive occult books, many of them written in ancient
languages, it wasn’t really a foot-traffic kind of business,
anyhow.
“Your friend’s a
bookseller?” Lucky said as we approached the shop. “Our problem
don’t seem to me like a book problem,
kid.”
“Max has special
expertise that we may need. He just sells books to show the
Internal Revenue Service a visible means of support,” I
explained.
“Ah,” Lucky said,
nodding. “You mean the store is his perfectly legitimate business
interest.”
In a sense, that was
exactly what I meant.
“I just don’t know if
he’ll be awake this early,” I said. We had come by foot, cutting
over to Hudson and heading north, since it was an easy walk and
since I thought Max might be more coherent if I let him sleep as
long as possible, instead of dashing here from Little Italy in a
cab by dawn’s early light. “He often works late into the night,
and—”
A muffled explosion
coming from the depths of the bookstore made me
flinch.
“What the hell was
that?” Lucky demanded.
“I don’t know, but it
came from below the shop!” Worried about Max, I headed toward his
door.
“Wait a minute,
Esther!”
“He might be hurt!”
Though he was a skilled sorcerer, not all of Max’s alchemy
experiments went smoothly.
When I opened the
door of the shop, Lucky said, “It’s not locked? There’s something
fishy about this.”
In fact, it
was locked. Magically. Max couldn’t
keep track of the key, so he used a spell that kept out strangers
when the shop was closed but allowed him access at all times. I had
become a regular enough visitor since Golly Gee’s disappearance
(and subsequent reappearance) that Max had modified the spell so
that I, too, could enter the shop at will.
But this was no time
for an explanation that would require even more explanations. So I
just said, “No, it’s fine.”
I entered the
bookshop and quickly headed to the back of the building. There was
a little cul-de-sac there with some storage shelves, a utilities
closet, a bathroom, and a door marked PRIVATE. I opened that door
onto a narrow, creaky stairway.
One set of steps led
down to the cellar, where Max’s laboratory was. The other steps led
up to the second floor, where he slept. There was also an apartment
on the top floor. Hieronymus had lived up there, and I assumed
Max’s next assistant would, too. It had been empty for several
weeks now. Apparently, finding a decent sorcerer’s apprentice
wasn’t easy. Especially after recent experience had convinced Max
to add “must harbor no evil ambitions whatsoever” to his list of
requirements for prospective candidates.
“Whoa!” Lucky said
behind me. “Weird.”
I assumed he meant
the method of lighting the stairwell: there was a burning torch
stuck in a sconce on the wall. Like the front door lock, it
functioned via mystical means.
I smelled something
foul floating up from the laboratory, a putrid, acrid odor mixed
with smoke, incense, and . . . wet dog fur?
“Max?” I
called.
The only response was
a menacing sound—like a hungry demon’s stomach
growling.
“Max! Are you all
right?” I called, my voice sharp with anxiety.
Lucky elbowed me
aside to peer down the steep, dark stairway that was filling up
with foul-smelling smoke. “You ain’t saying he’s down there?”
I faintly heard some
coughing from below.
“Max?” I
shouted.
The growling sound
turned into a roar.
Then I heard a man
scream in terror. “Argh!”
“Max!” I started down the steep, narrow stairs,
holding tightly to the railing so I wouldn’t stumble.
“Esther, no.” Lucky made a grab for my arm, but I slipped
away, too scared for Max to pay attention. “I’ll go. You stay—goddamn it!” I heard the thud of
his footsteps behind me as he started descending after
me.
The roaring sound
from the laboratory got louder, bouncing off the narrow walls of
the stairwell.
I choked on the
smoke, covered my nose and mouth with my hand, and shouted over my
shoulder, “Watch your step! These stairs are uneven!”
“No shit!” Lucky
shouted back.
I knew the bad
language—so common among wiseguys, but so rare for Lucky to use in
a woman’s presence—was a sign of how perturbed he was.
Understandable. As
the roaring reached a pitch that seemed to make the stairs shake,
fear ran through me hot and fast. I reached the landing and burst
into the laboratory.
At first glance, I
thought Max was being attacked by a demonic hellhound. I stared in
shock, peering through the smoke-filled room.
Max, a small and
slightly plump man, was rolling around on the floor, grunting and
crying out in protest. His long white hair was disheveled and
tangling with his beard as he tried to ward off his
attacker.
An immense, tan
canine beast was jumping up and down on top of him as it barked
noisily. Its teeth were bared, its pink tongue lolling and its big
ears flopping around. The huge creature’s paws batted playfully at
Max as its tail wagged . . .
Its tail was
wagging?
I said, “What the
hell—”
“Esther, get down!”
Lucky shouted. “I’m gonna blow it away!”
I turned around to
find myself facing the barrel of a gun. I gasped and staggered
backward.
I stepped on Max, who
howled in pain. Startled, I lost my footing. I tried to regain it,
but I instead did an involuntary barrel vault over the dog. I
landed on my head and lay there in a helpless daze as an immense
pink tongue started washing my face.
The beast’s breath
smelled exactly the way you’d expect a hell-spawned canine-demon’s
breath to smell.
“Esther?” Max said.
The disgusting facial
was interrupted by a paw, which was the size and density of a
baseball bat, poking me for signs of life. The creature’s nails
needed cutting.
“Get down!” Lucky
shouted—presumably at Max, since I was flat on my back with a
massive paw giving me a dermabrasion treatment.
There was an
explosion of noise so loud I thought my skull would
shatter.
Lucky had fired. The
shot missed the dog and instead hit a jar full of dried animal
organs. The jar exploded, sending a spray of organs and organ dust
all over me. This revived me enough to sit bolt upright and scream.
Then I gagged on the acrid smoke and dust I inhaled.
Another shot
convinced the now terrified dog to try to hide, and I nearly
smothered when it chose my lap as the handiest refuge. Pinned down
by the beast’s weight, I was unable to escape when Lucky’s next
wild shot shattered a beaker that spilled some sticky blue
substance all over me and the animal.
“Don’t shoot!” I
screamed, shoving at the dog and trying to see Lucky through the
gradually clearing smoke.
If his next shot came
closer to the dog, he might kill me,
since the creature was huddled on top of me, whining and drooling
in my hair.
Max shouted something
in another language as he pointed at Lucky. Suddenly the mobster’s
gun flew out of his hand and turned into a bat—the nocturnal kind
with creepy looking wings. The bat hovered over Lucky for a few
moments, as if contemplating biting him.
Lucky’s eyes got as
big as golf balls. He fell to his knees and crossed
himself.
Then the bat flew
toward me. I don’t like bats, so I screamed again and covered my
head with my arms. The dog thought I was trying to play and,
recovered from the emotional crisis inspired by Lucky’s gunshots,
it started jumping up and down on top of me.
“Max! Help!” I
cried.
“To the rescue!” A
moment later, Max grabbed the dog around the neck and heaved
backward with all his body weight.
The dog resisted for
a moment, then decided to play with Max instead of me. The two of
them flew backward together and landed with a thud. The dog got up
and wagged its tail, looking from me to Max, who lay prone and
motionless.
I sat up, trying to
catch my breath as I looked around warily for the bat. I saw it
sinking to the floor on the far side of the room. To my relief, it
was dissolving and oozing back into its original shape, the
inanimate weapon which had given it such brief life. Moments later,
Lucky’s gun lay on the floor where the bat had been.
I glanced at Lucky.
His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was praying fervently in
Italian.
“Max? Are you
conscious?” I asked hoarsely.
“More or less,” came
the faint answer. After a moment, Max sat up slowly, disheveled and
panting. He rubbed his shoulder as he asked me, “Are you all right,
Esther?”
“Sort of.” I coughed
again and waved smoke away from my face. “How about
you?”
“I think I’m being
robbed,” he said, eyeing Lucky anxiously.
“Oh! No, no,” I said,
“he came with me.”
Max looked confused.
“Are you being robbed?”
“I didn’t know he had
a gun with him. I swear.” But I supposed it should have occurred to
me that a notorious hit man—even a semiretired one—probably never
left home without his piece. “He’s a friend of mine, Max. The
gunfire was, um, a misunderstanding.”
“Well . . .” Max
watched Lucky praying. “At least he seems repentant.”
After the smoke
cleared and we felt strong enough to haul ourselves off the floor,
it took us some time to convince Lucky to stop praying and have a
seat while we restored order to Max’s laboratory. It took even
longer to clean up the mess.
The room was
cavernous, windowless, and shadowy. The walls were decorated with
charts covered in strange symbols and maps of places with
unfamiliar names. Bottles of powders, vials of potions, and dried
plants jostled for space on the cluttered shelves. Beakers,
implements, and tools lay tumbled and jumbled on the heavy, dark
furniture. Today there was also a lot of shattered glass to clean
up, as well as crumbling pieces of dried animal parts and a sticky
blue liquid that was staining everything it touched, including me
and the dog.
“Max, is this stuff
ever going to come off?” I asked, rubbing at my arm.
Lucky, who still
seemed dazed, muttered, “There’s some on your face,
too.”
“Damn,” I
said.
Jars of herbs,
spices, minerals, amulets, and neatly assorted claws and teeth sat
on densely packed shelves and in dusty cabinets. There were antique
weapons, some urns and boxes and vases, several Tarot decks, some
runes, two gargoyles squatting in a corner, icons and idols, a
scattering of old bones, and a Tibetan prayer bowl. An enormous
bookcase was packed to overflowing with many leather-bound volumes,
as well as unbound manuscripts, scrolls, and even a few clay
tablets.
For weeks, there had
also been piles of feathers all over the lab. Today, for the first
time since I’d met Max, the feathers were all gone.
“You solved your
feather problem?” I asked as I swept the floor.
Max paused in his
efforts to clean up the sticky blue ooze and gestured to the
massive dog, who lay on the floor assiduously licking a
blue-stained paw. “As you see,” he said.
“I see a dog,” I
said. The huge animal had short, smooth, tan-colored hair, with a
darker face and paws, and a long, square-jawed head. “Part Great
Dane, I think?”
Max’s baby blue eyes
widened beneath bushy white brows. “Oh, no, Esther. No. This isn’t a dog.” He glanced anxiously at the beast, as if
fearful my comment had caused offense. “I have conjured a
familiar!”
I looked at the dog.
It looked back at me. Despite its immense size, its floppy ears
were too big for its head. Its long pink tongue hung out of its
mouth as it panted cheerfully at me.
“This is a familiar?” I said.
The dog
burped.
“Yes.” Max beamed at
me.
I supposed this
explained (somehow or other) the wet dog fur odor I’d smelled
floating up from the cellar when Max first confronted his conjured
companion down here. And the explosion Lucky and I had heard must
have signaled the creature’s arrival. Magic sure was
noisy.
“What’s its name?” I
asked.
“She has chosen to be
known in this dimension as Nelli,” Max said, his flawless English
bearing only the faintest trace of his origins in eastern Europe
centuries ago.
“Your familiar is
named Nelli?”
He nodded. “I believe
it’s an homage to the great Fulcanelli.”
“Who was
that?”
Max look surprised at
my ignorance. “An early twentieth-century alchemist of great
renown. Author of The Mystery of the
Cathedrals. Fulcanelli’s writings influenced my thinking on
transmutation, the phonetic cabala of Gothic architecture, and
sacred geometry.”
“I guess it’s always
good to keep learning,” I said.
“Alas we never met.
But no doubt Nelli chose her name because she shares my feelings of
affinity with the great Fulcanelli’s work.”
“No doubt,” I said,
glancing at the drooling dog. “But you seemed sort of, um,
disconcerted by Nelli when I arrived.”
“I had not expected
quite so large a canine,” Max
confessed. “For a few moments, I thought I had made a dreadful
mistake and conjured some sort of . . .”
“Hellhound?”
“Precisely.”
I looked at Max’s
familiar again. As we exchanged gazes, Nelli began wagging her
tail. It was long and thick, and its wagging carried enough force
to knock over a floor lamp.
I caught the lamp
before it fell. “But, Max, I thought familiars were always, you
know, black cats or something.”
“Cats can be familiars,” Max said, “but it’s not as
prevalent as people think. That was mostly a rumor started in the
sixteenth century by men who resented widows who preferred
acquiring a good mouser to acquiring a second
husband.”
“So a dog can be a
familiar?”
“A familiar can take
any animal form it chooses,” Max explained. “My difficulty in
summoning this one was—Well, in point of fact, my first mistake was in assigning the task to
Hieronymus, as you may recall.”
“I don’t think he was
making the effort he told you he was making.”
“Indeed, no. And
since his dissolution—”
“Let’s not use that
word,” I suggested, thinking anxiously about Lopez, various
episodes of Crime and Punishment, and
my desire to stay out of prison. “Let’s get into the habit of
saying since he left.
Okay?”
“Of course, Esther.
If that will make you more comfortable.”
“It
will.”
“Since Hieronymus
left, I have found the demands of protecting New York City from
Evil to be a little overwhelming on my own, so I’ve been
increasingly anxious to find a familiar to support my efforts until
the Magnum Collegium can send me another assistant.” He added a
little bitterly, “Preferably one who doesn’t want to take over New
York by demonic means and, in the process, kill most of its
citizens.”
“So you kept trying
to summon a familiar after Hieronymus left?” I finished my sweeping
and poured a dustpan’s worth of disgusting substances into the urn
that served as a garbage can.
“Yes, but I
mistakenly interpreted the spirit I was summoning as avian in
nature when, in fact, it found the canine lifestyle more
congenial.” He shook his head. “I’ve been distracted by my various
duties, as well as by a summons from the Internal Revenue Service,
or else I’d have realized sooner that I was able to conjure nothing
but feathers because the familiar offering its services to me
wanted a different corporeal form.”
“So a familiar, er,
applies for the job?” I
said.
“It would be more
precise to say that a particular entity chose to answer my
summons,” Max said. “An entity that deemed itself equal to the task
of helping me protect New York from Evil.”
Nelli rolled over
onto her back. Her tongue dangled sideways out of her mouth. Her
paws flailed as she wriggled to scratch her back against the
floor.
Lucky, who had been
sitting immobile in a chair with a dazed expression on his face,
suddenly became alert. “Did you say the IRS is bothering
you?”
Max said to me, “Ah!
I think your friend is feeling better.”
“ ’Cuz, you know, I
can maybe help you with that,” Lucky said. “Discourage unnecessary
inquiries into your perfectly legitimate business interests. As a
favor. For a friend of Esther’s.”
I was glad that the
very first thing I had thrown into the garbage urn was Lucky’s gun.
I didn’t think he had noticed its rematerialization, and I thought
everyone would be safer if he didn’t get his hands on it
again.
I said firmly, “I
don’t want anything bad to happen to a civil servant, Lucky. On
behalf of me or Max.”
He shrugged. “If you
change your mind . . .”
Despite some
misgivings, I decided it was time to make introductions. “Lucky,
this is Dr. Maximillian Zadok. He’s sort of a specialist in strange
events.”
“Yeah,” said Lucky.
“I think I get that. How do ya do, Doc?”
“How do you do, Mr. .
. .”
“Lucky Battistuzzi,”
was the reply. “I’m a hitter for the Gambellos.”
“A hitter?” Maxed
asked with a puzzled expression.
Lucky waved aside the
question. “Mostly retired. I just come out now and then when
something special needs doing. Like this problem we got
here.”
“Ah, a problem!” Max
looked interested now. “I suppose that explains why you’re here so
late, Esther?”
“Late?” I glanced at
my watch. “Max, it’s not even nine o’clock in the
morning.”
“It’s Saturday
morning?” he asked in surprise.
“Sunday morning. Just how long have you been in the
lab?”
“Good heavens! I
really did lose track of time.” He explained to Lucky, “Conjuring a
familiar is most absorbing work. Not to mention time
consuming.”
“Are you talkin’,
like, a sorcerer’s familiar?” Lucky asked.
“Precisely.”
“That’s your familiar?” Lucky asked, pointing at the
dog.
“Yes.”
“That dog?”
“Yes,
but—”
“It’s your familiar?”
“Yes.”
Lucky took a long
look at Nelli. She looked back at him. After a long moment, the
gangster said, “In that case, Doc, I’m real sorry I tried to whack
it.”
“Hmm.” Max tugged
absently on his beard as he considered what we had told him about
Chubby Charlie’s death. “Interesting. Very, very
interesting.”
“Yes, but is it
supernatural?” I asked.
I immediately
realized my mistake. Max started lecturing. The gist of it was,
there is no such thing as “supernatural,” that’s a false construct;
almost everything (though not quite
everything) in the universe is natural, but some things are
mystical or magical, and some are not.
Lucky summed up my
feelings perfectly by interrupting Max’s monologue to say,
“Whatever. Who cares? The point is, Doc, do you got any idea what
the hell is going on here?”
We had left the
laboratory and were upstairs in the bookstore, sitting in
comfortable, prettily upholstered chairs in the reading area set up
around the fireplace. The shop had well-worn hardwood floors, a
broad-beamed ceiling, dusky rose walls, and a soothing
atmosphere.
I had gratefully
helped myself to coffee at the small refreshments station that Max
kept stocked for his customers. It sat near a large, careworn
walnut table with books, papers, an abacus, writing implements, and
other paraphernalia on it.
Max didn’t bother
opening the store for business yet. No one but us was awake this
early on a Sunday in the West Village.
Nelli was busy
exploring the shop, getting acquainted with her new home by
sniffing row after row of bookcases, snuffling at modern books on
the occult, and sneezing at ancient leather-bound volumes that
needed dusting.
“Well,” Max said, “I
hesitate to theorize about poor Chubby Charlie’s death without more
information, but it sounds to me as if he may have seen his
doppelgänger.”
“His doppelgänger?” I
repeated. “I’ve heard the word, but . . .” I shrugged to indicate
that my familiarity with it stopped there.
“Understandable,”
said Max. “It’s a very rare phenomenon, and the study of German
mythology doesn’t seem to have deeply absorbed your generation in
the New World.”
“Kids these days,”
Lucky said, shaking his head. “If it ain’t on MTV, it don’t
exist.”
“Indeed,” said Max.
“Plus ‘doppelgänger’ is hard to spell.”
“So what does a
doppelgänger do?” I asked.
“It doesn’t really
do anything,” Max said. “It’s
traditionally a portent or omen rather than a proactive
agent.”
“Huh?” said
Lucky.
“A doppelgänger is an
apparition,” Max elaborated. “Loosely translated, the term means
‘double walker’ or ‘double goer.’ It’s a second physical version of
a person. A perfect double.”
I noted, “That’s
exactly what Charlie said. That he’d seen his perfect
double.”
“In some cultures,”
Max continued, “it’s believed to be a reflection of a person’s
soul; in others, it’s considered an entirely separate entity from
him. In any case, it is a seemingly exact replica of a living
person.”
Lucky said, “So are
you saying this thing, this dopp . . . dopp . . .”
“Doppelgänger,” Max
supplied.
“This
doppelgangster—do you think it could’ve done a smooth hit?” Lucky
asked. “Because if it was a replica of Charlie, well, he had a lot
of experience at that.”
“A smooth hit?” Max
repeated, puzzled.
I explained, “Lucky’s
asking if the doppelgangst . . . er, doppelgänger could have killed
Chubby Charlie.”
“Ah! I see. A ‘smooth
hit’? What an interesting expression.”
“It was very clean,”
Lucky said. “Very professional. One shot to the heart, instant
death, no muss, no fuss. And no witnesses.”
“And no logical
explanation for how it happened,” I said. “At least, not so
far.”
“So what I’m
wondering is, did this doppelgangster whack Charlie?” Lucky
said.
“Whack?”
“Hit,” Lucky
clarified.
“You think the
creature struck him?” Max
asked.
I said, “Lucky’s
asking if the doppelgangster killed Charlie.”
“Interesting!” Max
said to Lucky, “Your dialect fascinates me. May I ask where you
learned it?”
Lucky shrugged. “I’m
from Brooklyn.”
“I see.”
“To return to the
question, Max,” I said. “Could the double have shot
Charlie?”
“It seems unlikely,”
he said. “The appearance of a doppelgänger is associated with the
imminent death of the person replicated—”
“So that’s why Charlie was so sure that seeing his
perfect double meant he was going to die,” I mused.
“—but the
doppelgänger merely portends death, it doesn’t actually kill the
replicated individual.”
“How you pretend death?” Lucky asked.
“Er, I mean the
doppelgänger is a warning of death,” Max explained. “It’s a sign.
As Chubby Charlie seems to have known, seeing your doppelgänger
traditionally means you’re going to die by nightfall.”
“But does it mean
you’re going to get whacked out by a hitter no one saw and a bullet
that traveled around corners?” Lucky asked.
“Not as far as I
know,” Max said.
“So do you think a
doppelgangster could do a hit like that?” Lucky asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t
know enough about doppelgangsters—er, doppelgängers—to postulate a
response to that at this juncture,” Max said. “I’m not familiar
enough with the phenomenon. Did I mention that it’s very rare? I’m
going to need to do some research on this.”
Feeling very tired, I
looked around the store without enthusiasm. “Does that mean we have
to start reading?”
“Unfortunately,” Max
said, “the Germanic portion of my library is very thin. I will need
to summon assistance.”
“Will there be more
smoke and explosions involved in this summoning?” I asked
anxiously.
“No, no. I mean to
say, I’ll need to make some telephone calls to see if I can locate
some useful material.”
“What do you need
Germanic books for?” Lucky asked. “Charlie was Italian. His enemies
are all Italian. It don’t make sense that a German would be
involved in this.”
“He had enemies?” Max
asked with interest.
“Oh, yeah,” Lucky
said.
“Deadly enemies?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm. In that case,
we can probably rule out my second theory.”
“Which is?” I
asked.
“That Chubby Charlie
merely imagined seeing his double, and his violent death on the
same night of these delusions was pure coincidence.”
“So you think there
really was a double?” Lucky said. “A doppio? A doppelgangster?”
“A man with deadly
enemies who sees his perfect double and then dies by nightfall?
Absolutely,” Max said. “But the manner of the killing . . . Hmm,
clearly there’s something here that we don’t understand yet. I must
get some Germanic texts.”
Lucky objected, “But
like I just told you—”
“Yes, I understand,
my dear fellow,” Max said. “But the great German thinkers wrote
about doppelgängers in more depth than anyone else, as far as I
know, so my research must delve into their works if I am to gain
sufficient knowledge of this rare phenomenon.”
We heard a sudden,
piercing wail come from the far side of the shop, followed by Nelli
barking. Then we heard the slapping and slamming of rapidly closing
doors and drawers.
“What’s that?” Lucky jumped to his feet and automatically
reached for his gun. I was glad he didn’t have it.
“Oh, dear. That thing
is such a trial to me,” Max
said.
“I think it’s scared
your dog,” I said. “Er, your familiar.”
We rose to our feet,
too, walked past several bookcases, and found Nelli barking in fear
at a massive, dark, very old wooden cupboard that stood against the
far wall. It had a profusion of drawers and doors, and it was about
six feet tall and at least that wide. As near as I understand these
things, the cupboard was enchanted by Max’s predecessor, and the
effects seemed to be permanent. It could be dormant and inert for
weeks at a time, but then suddenly, without warning, it would act
up again. Apparently Nelli’s curious sniffing had stirred it
up.
Its drawers and
cabinets were opening and closing rapidly, slamming shut with a
violence that seemed downright irritable. As we watched, flames
started pouring out of some of the drawers.
“That’s dangerous,” said Lucky, wide-eyed and
disapproving.
“It’s a . . .” I
tried to think of a way to explain it to Lucky. “It’s a sort of . .
.”
“It’s a possessed
cupboard, right?” he said.
“Er,
right.”
“My grandmother’s
family had one, back in Sicily.”
“I see.”
“I keep trying to
neutralize its energy,” Max said wearily, “but I don’t know how it
got this way, and my predecessor cannot be reached for
consultation.”
This sort of
confusion seemed to be rather common among Max and his colleagues.
In fact, Max was 350 years old because he’d unwittingly drunk a
life-prolonging elixir in his youth (back in the seventeenth
century) that no one could replicate, no matter how many times they
tried. He had imbibed it so unwittingly
that he was in his fifties before he realized that he was aging at
an unusually slow rate.
He wasn’t immortal,
but it seemed likely he’d be around for another century or so.
Unless Evil got him first.
Unnerved by the
aggressive, flaming, drawer-slamming cupboard, Nelli gave up
barking at it and instead opted for hiding behind us and
whining.
My head was starting
to pound, and I decided what I needed most of all was a few more
hours of sleep.
“I’m going home,” I
said to my companions. “I’m tired.”
“I’ll contact you
after I’ve learned something more about this phenomenon,” Max
promised, looking pretty tired himself after spending the weekend
summoning his whining familiar.
“Wait, Esther,
there’s one more thing we gotta talk about.” Lucky turned to Max
and said, “She saw the hit. Do you think she’s in any
danger?”
Max frowned with
concern as he considered this, but finally said, “I doubt it. I
really do. A man with deadly enemies saw a portent of his own
death. I think it very likely this was an isolated incident that
will not recur, let alone involve Esther any further.”
At the time, it was a
reasonable supposition. We had no way of knowing then just how
wrong he was.