Текст книги "Known Devil"

Автор книги: Justin Gustainis

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

“Sure,” Rachel said. “The Quarterly Journal of Thaumaturgy is one of the big ones. Then there’s Critical Studies in Sorcery, the Annals of the American Academy of Witchcraft, and a whole bunch of others.”

“OK,” I said. “I guess I can see how an issue of Supe doesn’t belong in with that crowd.”

“On the other hand,” Rachel said, “it so happens I’ve heard of the witch who carried out this experiment. Annabelle Araguin has made quite a name for herself in thaumaturgical research circles over the last few years. So it’s possible that this article is actually on the level.”

“How fast can you find out? Like I said, we haven’t got a lot of time.”

Rachel shrugged. “I can send her an email right away. But how fast she responds is up to her.”

“You know this Annabelle …?”

“Araguin. Yes, slightly. We’ve met at conventions a few times.”

I used to smile at the idea of witches attending conventions, until Rachel set me straight. All fields have their own professional meetings, she’d explained, and witches were nothing if not professional. I knew that much – you’ve got to be licensed to practice magic, and that license is a lot harder to get than the kind that lets you drive a car.

“Have you got her email address?” I asked.

“No, but I should be able to find it online easily enough. I’m sure she’s got a website. Most practicing witches have one.”

“Of course they do,” I said. “How soon can you track her down?”

“As soon as you get out of here and let me start looking.”

I stood up. “I’m practically gone already,” I said, and headed for the door.

Our shift ended about ninety minutes later, and I checked in with Rachel before leaving.

“No joy yet,” she told me. “I got Annabelle’s email address without too much trouble, and sent her a message. She hasn’t replied, but it is pretty damn late for people who don’t keep the kind of hours that you and I do.”

“How about a phone call?” I asked.

“I’m working that angle, too. Her number’s unlisted, which isn’t surprising. But I’ve sent out some more emails to people who might know her, asking for the phone number. No responses yet, but, again…”

I nodded. “Most people are still in bed. Well, I’m heading home, but if anything develops, don’t hesitate to call – no matter what time it is.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

I went home, spoke with Christine briefly, then went to bed and slept for eight hours straight. Normally, that’s a good thing – but this time, it meant that Rachel didn’t have any news worth reporting.

When I got to work, there was no message from Rachel waiting for me. I was about to go down to her office when McGuire sent Karl and me out on a call. There’d been a near-riot at Eric’s, one of the local dance clubs, the night before.. Word was, every male patron in the place had tried to rush the stage during the final number, performed by a local band called the Banshees. After a certain amount of head-scratching, management had finally decided that a supernatural influence had been at work, and called the Occult Crimes Unit.

The band members weren’t really banshees, of course. Those Irish spirits are harbingers of death, and nothing else. Their singing, although beautiful enough to break your heart, isn’t something anybody looks forward to hearing. Besides, it hasn’t got much of a backbeat.

As soon as I learned that only the male patrons had been involved in the disturbance, I thought I knew what we were dealing with. Karl and I had a conversation with the band members in the club’s dingy dressing room before they went onstage, and it didn’t take long to find out that I’d been right.

The Banshees’ bass player was a crew-cut blonde who called herself Scar, but whose real name, I finally got her to admit, was Meredith Schwartz. She didn’t usually sing, I learned, but last night they’d let her take lead vocal on the final song of their set.

I turned to Meredith. “You’re a Siren, right?”

She locked eyes with me for a couple of seconds, then looked away. “Ain’t no law against it,” she muttered. She wore a sleeveless black top, and I saw that her upper right arm bore a large heart tattoo – not the valentine kind, but an anatomically correct human heart, valves and all.

“Of course not,” I said. “There’s no law against being anything. It’s the stuff you do that can get you in a shitload of trouble.”

“There’s a city ordinance against Sirens singing in public places – or at least, in front of any audience that includes males,” Karl said. “You guys know that – or you ought to.”

“And if you’re wondering why that ordinance exists,” I said, “what happened in the club last night should give you a pretty good idea.” Looking at the three male members of the band, I asked, “How come you guys weren’t affected by her voice?”

After a moment, their leader, a beanpole named Artis Bowdin who went by the name of “Daddy Longlegs”, shrugged and said, “Earplugs, man. We always wear ’em when we play. Nobody wants to end up stone deaf, like, ten years from now. You know?”

“If you let Scar sing lead again, going deaf is gonna be the least of your problems,” Karl told them. “Incitement to riot is a felony, no matter how you do it. And you guys could also be sued for any damages that result, either to the audience or the joint where you’re playing.”

“We’re not going to bust you this time,” I said. “And the club management says there wasn’t enough wreckage to worry about – not much more than they get on an average night, anyway. But if this happens again, you guys are gonna find yourselves in a world of hurt. Understand?”

Nobody gave me an argument, which was probably the closest this bunch was ever going to get to “Yes, officer, whatever you say, sir.”

As we turned to leave, Daddy Longlegs said, “Hey – we got a gig next week at Susie B’s. You got any problem if Scar sings at that one?”

Susie B’s is the city’s biggest lesbian bar. For reasons nobody’s ever been ever to explain, women are immune to the Siren’s song.

“Sounds OK to me,” I told him. “Go wild.”

“Just be sure they keep all the windows closed while you’re playing,” Karl said. “Wouldn’t want guys who were driving past to crash their cars against the front of the building, would we?”

When we got back to the squad room, our PA, Louise the Tease, handed me a message slip that read, “See Rachel Proctor, ASAP.”

“It took a while, but I finally hit the jackpot,” Rachel told me. “Unlike most people I know, Annabelle isn’t compulsive about checking her email. I never was able to dig up her phone number on my own, but when she saw my message, she got back to me right away and suggested I call her. Which I did.”

“And how did that go?”

“Quite well, actually. Once I explained to her the seriousness of the matter – without telling her too much, I hope – she sent me a PDF of an article she’s written that’s already been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Magical Association. That’s the most prestigious journal in the field, although Annabelle’s article won’t see print for another couple of months.”

“And this PDF she sent – it contained the spell?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve read through it once already,” Rachel said, frowning. “The mathematics and symbology are pretty involved, but thank the Goddess for computer programs that handle most of that stuff.”

“So, can you do it?”

“Keep Karl awake and functioning past dawn tomorrow?”

“That’s what we need, yeah.”

Rachel blew out a slow breath. “Maybe. If I put all other work aside and bust my hump for the next twenty-four hours or so, I might – might – have the spell ready in time, and if I do, it might even work. No guarantees.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d make the effort,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

She stared at me for a couple of seconds, a hand on one slender hip. “Explain to me again what’s going to be achieved if I put myself through all of that – an activity for which I will almost certainly not be paid overtime.”

I’d had a little speech prepared, in case this question should arise. I was going to talk about duty, and sacrifice, and the greater good, and blah, blah, blah. But looking at Rachel, I knew she’d see all of that as the self-serving bullshit it really was.

Then I remembered a scene from All the President’s Men, that movie about the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal all those years ago. As Richard Nixon said much later, “It wasn’t biting all those people’s necks that did me in – it was the cover-up afterward.”

I’d seen the movie a several times, most recently on HBO a couple of weeks earlier. I thought about what the editor of the Washington Post, played by Jason Robards, had told his two star reporters near the end of the story. So I said to Rachel, “Well, there isn’t very much riding on this, really – just the election, the future of our city, and maybe a few dozen lives – human and supe both.” I tried for a casual shrug. “Not that any of that matters.”

After a couple of seconds, Rachel gave a tired-sounding sigh. “Tell Karl not to go too far from the station house tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for him – but once I am, there won’t be any time to waste.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “And thanks, Rachel.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “Thank me if the fucking thing works.”

Twenty-six hours later, I was standing next to my partner in Rachel’s office, saying, “I owe you a big one, Rachel. I’ve got some of an idea of how hard this must’ve been to pull off in such a short time” – how could I look at her haggard face and think anything different? – “and I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

After looking from me to Karl and back again, Rachel said, “Why don’t you wait and thank me in” – she checked her watch – “an hour and forty-two minutes.” Rachel’s habit of cynically telling us to postpone gratitude might’ve started to annoy me if I hadn’t known about all the intense effort she’d put in for this thing to work. If it did.

“What happens then?” If I’d taken a second to think, I would’ve realized the answer to that question even before Karl and Rachel said, at the same time, “Sunrise.”

The Q-and-A session with Slattery was scheduled to take place in what McGuire calls the Media Room, where us detectives go whenever there’s a briefing that involves visual material. It’s got a four-foot-square white screen on one wall and a projection system that’s hooked up to both a Blu-ray player and an Apple computer on the opposite side of the room. I once had to watch a snuff film in there that still gives me nightmares. But the projector wouldn’t be in use today.

McGuire told me he’d picked the media room because it was about the only place in the building big enough to hold the number of people who were going to be present. I was pretty sure he had another reason for the choice, too – the media room doesn’t have any windows.

But there were windows between the Occult Crimes squad room and the media room, and covering them to keep out the sun would probably have roused Slattery’s suspicions. So Rachel and I were in the media room with Karl well before sunrise, which was due to arrive in Scranton at 7.24 this morning, according to Weatherwitch.com. The three of us sat in the last row of chairs, with Karl in the middle.

“How you feeling, buddy?” I asked Karl.

“About like usual,” he said. “A little hungry, since Rachel said it was better to do this on an empty stomach. But that’s no big deal – I been hungry before. I’ll survive.”

I sure as hell hope so, I thought.

“Do you normally conk out exactly at meteorological sunrise?” Rachel asked.

“Beats the shit out of me, Rachel,” Karl said. “I don’t go by the clock.”

“Then how do you know when it’s time to close the coffin lid?” Rachel smiled. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean.” She knew that most vampires don’t spend the day inside a mahogany box these days, if they ever did. Karl used a sleeping bag, just like Christine did. I found that thinking about Karl, Christine, and sleeping bags put an image in my mind that I didn’t much care to have there, so I banished it by focusing extra-hard on what Karl was talking about.

“It’s hard to describe,” Karl said. “You can feel it coming, getting closer you know? It’s like when they give you anesthesia before surgery.”

“When did you have surgery?” I asked. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Ah, I got gang-tackled during a football game when I was in high school,” he said. “Broke my leg in three places, and they had to operate on me to fix it – put plates in or something. So, yeah, I know what anesthesia’s like.”

“Count backward from one hundred,” Rachel intoned with a little smile.

“Yeah, kinda like that, except without all the counting,” Karl said. “You feel yourself going, and the feeling gets stronger, and then” – he snapped his fingers – “you’re gone.”

“Well, if you start to experience that sensation, be sure and say something,” Rachel said.

“So you can do what?” he asked.

She shrugged tiredly. “Catch you before you hit the floor, I guess.”

I didn’t tell them, but I had a back-up plan ready in case the spell failed. As a favor, Homer Jordan from the ME’s office had loaned me one of those green plastic body bags that they use to transport bodies to and from the morgue. If Karl turned into a corpse at dawn, the way he usually did, I was going to get him into the body bag and find somebody stronger than Rachel to help me carry him out of the building and to the trunk of my car. The deadly sunlight would never touch him.

I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, the three of us, as we sat in that big, empty room, waiting for the sunrise. Somebody started a conversation about a TV program, but that didn’t go anywhere. Small wonder – we all worked nights, and at least one of us hadn’t seen any daytime TV for quite a while.

Then Rachel mentioned that she was a mixed martial arts fan. That surprised me a little, but then I’ve been accused of stereotyping people in the past. We got into a mild debate over whether supernaturals should have their own MMA league, and that went on until the moment when Rachel glanced at her watch, then looked up and smiled.

“What?” I asked her.

“Checked the time lately?” she said, the smile still in place.

I looked at my watch: 7.26.

Not wanting to put complete faith in either my Omega Spellmaster or the Internet’s posted time for sunrise, I stood up and said, “Excuse me a second.”

I turned left out of the media room and took the next right. Walking another twenty feet put me right in front of a window. I spent a few moments there, looking out at the sun rising over my city. This part of the building was still in shadow, dark enough for me to see my own reflection in the glass. I watch a smile sprout on my face and quickly grow into a full-out grin, like one of those high-speed films that shows a rose going from bud to bloom in only a few seconds.

Damn!

I walked back to the media room and resumed my seat. Trying to sound casual, I said, “Pretty sunrise out there. Looks like it ought to be a nice day.”

Karl gave us a razor-sharp grin. “Shit,” he said. “I never even noticed.”

“Well, that was the object of the exercise,” Rachel said. Although she still looked tired, her face had a glow about it now that made even exhaustion look kind of attractive.

“Eagle, this is Houston,” I said, trying to imitate a super-serious space program guy. “Your mission is a go.”

Phillip Kevin Slattery, the Patriot Party’s candidate for mayor, was one of those guys some people refer to as Black Irish. Although his great-grandparents supposedly all came from County Cork, he didn’t look like anybody who’d be invited to dress up like a leprechaun for next year’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade – besides, everybody knows they use real leprechauns for that.

Slattery’s thick, carefully combed hair was the same dark brown as his eyes, and his complexion wouldn’t have earned him a second look at any Sicilian’s family reunion. I doubted he’d ever known a freckle in his life. He had a heavy beard growth that I’d bet he shaved twice a day to avoid looking like a common thug. That impression would have been misleading, anyway – as far as I was concerned, Phil Slattery was a very special kind of thug.

His blue pinstripe suit was good quality, and the shirt he was wearing – white with thin blue stripes – went with the suit well enough, but whoever had picked out that tie for him must have been either color-blind or demented.

The interrogation rooms that we use to question suspects were way too small for the number of people who’d be involved this time. Besides, the Media Room had the advantage of being windowless – good thing, too, since the sun was well up in the sky now, shining bright and clear.

Slattery had brought three men with him. The thin, balding one with wire-rim glasses had been introduced as Bob Franks, his campaign manager. He had the pinched look of somebody who has ulcers on his ulcers. The stocky guy with prematurely gray hair was somebody I already knew. Jerome Duplantis was a partner in Archer, Duplantis, and O’Brien, the biggest law firm in the city. I guess he was along in case we tried to violate Slattery’s rights or something. His own suit made Slattery’s look dowdy, but then Duplantis wasn’t running for anything.

The last man’s name, we were told, was Robert Brody. Slattery referred to him as “my personal assistant.” In my experience, that’s usually a fancy name for “gofer”. but not this time. Brody had big shoulders and a narrow face, with blue eyes that were colder than a five hundred year-old vampire’s – and I ought to know, since I’ve met a five hundred year-old vampire. He had a way of standing, with feet spread and the right foot slightly forward, as if he was waiting for someone to knock him down – or try to. Personal assistant, my ass – I know a bodyguard when I see one.

McGuire had ordered every detective on the squad who wasn’t on the street that morning to be sitting in one of the media room’s uncomfortable folding chairs, even if it meant he had to pay overtime to several of them. There were even a couple of guys from Homicide there, because McGuire had asked Scanlon for a few warm bodies to fill the seats. The chairs were laid out in twelve rows, with a central aisle running down the middle.

Most of those cops didn’t have speaking parts in the little drama we were staging, but that didn’t make them unimportant. For one thing, they would provide strength in numbers, which McGuire thought might intimidate Slattery and his people a little. Fat chance of that – the Patriot Party crew looked about as bothered as a bunch of cats at a mouse convention.

But more important, such a large group of detectives meant that introducing them all was impractical. We didn’t want any of Scanlon’s group to hear a name that might raise a red flag, and lying about who Karl was could come back to bite us later. Besides, McGuire and I had figured that a crowd this large gave us a chance that neither Slattery nor his entourage would notice one of the detectives in the room was a vampire. Karl knew enough to keep his fangs out of sight, and none of our visitors would be expecting one of the undead, anyway. It was broad daylight, after all, which meant that all vampires were asleep snug in their coffins. Everybody knew that.

Karl had remained in his back-row seat, just as we’d planned. I was down front, since I intended to take an active part in the questioning. As I took my seat, I resisted the urge to look behind me and see how Karl was doing. Being awake during daylight hours must’ve been a weird experience for him. I hoped he could make his Influence work under such unusual conditions.

Four chairs had been moved to the front of the room, and that’s where Slattery and his crew were asked to sit. Once they were in place, McGuire got up from his front-row seat and turned to the audience of cops. “Alright, quiet down,” he said, loud enough to cut through the buzz of a dozen quiet conversations. “We’re about to get started.” The low murmur of voices stopped almost at once.

McGuire then turned to Slattery. “On behalf of the Scranton Police Department, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come down and talk to us,” he said. His voice held nothing but formal politeness. Me, I wouldn’t have been able to deliver a line like that without wrapping some sarcasm around it – I guess that’s one reason why McGuire is a lieutenant and I’m not.

“You’re quite welcome,” Slattery said. He took a slow, deliberate look around the room. “But I can’t say I was expecting such a large group of inquisitors.”

McGuire had sat down by now, and he didn’t rise again as he said, “This is no inquisition, Mister Slattery. Most of these officers won’t be asking you any questions today.”

Slattery tilted his head a little to one side. “Then why are they here?”

McGuire was ready for that one. “My understanding is that, like me, they are concerned about the recent violent events and want to hear your views on what’s been happening,” he said smoothly, then made himself smile. “Although I’m pretty sure that some of them are fans of you and your party. I’m afraid you might be asked for a few autographs before you leave here today.” McGuire paused, then took the big gamble. “Of course, if having so many police officers in the room makes you… uncomfortable, I can send most of them back to their duty stations before we start.”

McGuire and I had talked about this earlier. It was important that he offer to clear the room before Slattery could ask him to, which he just might do. But now, if he said, “I want them out,” people might start to wonder what he had to hide. After all, as a politico, he was used to speaking to crowds much bigger than this one.

Of course, if Slattery took McGuire up on his offer, we were screwed, blued, and tattooed. But I didn’t think he would – and I was right.

“No, it’s fine, let them stay,” Slattery said with a tight smile. Then Duplantis, the lawyer, piped up.

“I want the record to show that my client is here of his own free will, Lieutenant,” he said. “He is under no legal obligation to answer any of your questions, and is prepared to do so, for a limited amount of time, purely out of his sense of civic duty.”

That was as fine a layer of rhetorical bullshit as I’d heard in quite a while – but then, for what Duplantis charged, it ought to be good.

“There is no record here, Counselor,” McGuire said, still polite. “This meeting is not being recorded in any fashion, although I suppose I can’t stop some of these officers from taking a few notes, if they want to. But if there was some kind of record, I’d certainly want it to show my appreciation for Mister Slattery’s… exemplary citizenship as shown by his willingness to come down here today.”

Duplantis nodded with satisfaction, but I saw something glitter in Slattery’s eyes. He was pretty sure that all this elaborate courtesy was McGuire’s way of pissing on his shoes, but he couldn’t say anything about it. How do you complain about somebody being polite?

“Right, then,” McGuire said. “Mister Slattery, I’d like to start by asking you…”

Like McGuire had said, nobody was recording the session. But I’d asked Louise, our PA, to sit in. She shouldn’t have been there, strictly speaking, because she isn’t a cop. But she is a master – or maybe that should be mistress – of the arcane art of shorthand. I had her sitting in back, next to Karl, with instructions to keep the notebook she was writing on out of sight from the visiting politicos. After the Q-and-A session, she typed up her notes for me. Far as I could tell, she got down everything said in that room as accurately as if she’d been transcribing it from a tape recording. Louise is good – damn good.

This is the transcript as Louise typed it, along with my own snarky comments in brackets.

McGuire: Right, then. Mister Slattery, I’d like to start by asking you about your party’s position on supernaturals. In your party platform, as well as in your speeches, you’ve got some pretty inflammatory statements.

Duplantis: I object to the use of the word inflammatory.

McGuire: I appreciate your diligence, Counselor. But we’re not in court here, and the rules of trial procedure don’t apply. Perhaps you could just let your client speak for himself.

Slattery: If anything I’ve said has upset people – good. Some people deserve to be upset. The Patriot Party doesn’t indulge in political correctness. We say it like it is.

[“Say it like it is.” Reminded me of the hippies, back in the day – although Slattery was about as far from a flower child as you could imagine.]

McGuire: But you are aware that the law says that supernaturals are entitled to the same rights as anybody else, right?

Slattery: I respect the law – I’ve never said otherwise, even though, like many Americans, I regard the Supreme Court’s decision in Stevens v. US to be misguided. But if the supernatural community expects the protection of the law, then they should be prepared to obey the law.

Markowski: Are you saying that all supernaturals are lawbreakers?

[Of course, that’s exactly what he was saying – but I wanted to see if the son of a bitch would admit it.]

Slattery: It’s Sergeant Markowski, right? You of all people should be aware of what’s been going on in our city, Sergeant. Shootouts in the streets, bombings that destroy life and property, drug addiction, armed robbery – the list of crimes is practically endless.

Markowski: I know supernaturals break the law sometimes, just like humans do. That’s what the police force is for, to deal with that kind of thing when it happens.

Slattery: Then when are you going to start dealing with it? So far, the police have seemed powerless in the face of this recent crime wave. It’s like you’re trying to stop a flood with buckets and squeegees. No disrespect intended, of course.

Markowski: No, of course not.

[Yeah, right.]

McGuire: Since you mentioned bombings, I’d like to ask you about that, Mister Slattery. Your party ran a full-page ad in the Times-Tribune the other day about the latest bombing, the one in front of a place called Ricardo’s Ristorante. The ad claimed that it was just another example of supernaturals run wild with the police helpless to stop them. Remember that?

Slattery: Yes, of course. We got a lot of positive response to that one.

McGuire: I’m not surprised. Somebody clearly put a lot of thought into that advertisement. Your case was very effectively argued, I thought.

Slattery: Yes, we’ve got some talented people working for us. A couple of former journalists, in fact.

[Slattery smirked a little as he said that. Maybe he thought McGuire was a kindred spirit. If so, he couldn’t have been more wrong.]

McGuire: I’m sure you do. But there’s one thing that puzzles me. I’m told that your advertisement, all laid out and ready to print, was received by the Time-Tribune’s advertising department less than twenty minutes after the bomb went off. Considering all the specific detail about the bombing at Ricardo’s contained in that ad, I don’t see how it was possible for anybody, even those well-qualified ex-journalists, to put it together in such a short time.

Slattery: Are you suggesting that my campaign had something to do with that act of terrorism? Is that what you’re implying, Lieutenant?

[Sounding really pissed now – although, since he was a politician, there was no way to tell if it was genuine.]

McGuire: I’m not implying or suggesting anything, Mister Slattery. I’m just asking a question. How is it possible to write an ad containing all that detailed information, not to mention layout and design, in something like fifteen minutes?

Slattery: Obviously, it isn’t. Therefore, I’d have to say that you’ve been misinformed, Lieutenant. Whoever told you about the arrival time of our advertisement is either mistaken or lying. It’s as simple as that.

McGuire: Well, here’s the thing, Mister Slattery. The ad copy was sent as a PDF, attached to an email. You know as well as I do, when an email is received by somebody, the time when it arrives is included in the message heading. Well, the explosion occurred at 7.17, give or take a minute. Your campaign’s email containing that advertisement was received by the Times-Tribune at 7.29 in the evening. Sounds to me like somebody was in a sweat to make the 7.30 deadline for getting an ad in the next day’s paper.

Slattery: Emails can be tampered with, Lieutenant, as I’m sure you’re aware. Some geek with the right technical background can make an email look like it came from Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, if he wants to.

[Snide bastard.]

Markowski: I’m pretty sure they didn’t have email back then, Mister Slattery.

[I can be pretty snide myself, when I want to.]

Franks: I think there’s been quite enough of this. Mister Slattery did not volunteer his time to come down here and be badgered about some foolish

[That’s when Karl made his move – the reason why this whole charade was happening in the first place. ]

Renfer: There’s just one thing I was wondering about. Mister Slattery, what do you expect to happen in Scranton if you and your party win the election?

[That was what they used to call the $64,000 question. And Slattery’s answer turned out to be worth every penny. He frowned deeply and blinked several times, as if trying to resist what Karl was doing inside his head. Finally, he answered.]

Slattery: Helter-skelter, of course. The race war will start here, but we have no doubt it’s gonna spread quickly, once other humans see that it’s possible to take a stand against–

[That was when his campaign manager grabbed Slattery’s arm, and he wasn’t gentle about it.]

Franks: That’s it! We’re done here. Don’t say anything more, sir. Not another word!

 

All four of the Patriot Party guys stood up and headed toward the door. Franks was in the lead along with his boss, still maintaining his death grip on Slattery’s arm, as the group headed down the central aisle between the chairs on their way to the door. Behind them, the murmur of conversations started again, as the cops asked each other what had just happened. Several of them stood up and made their way into the central aisle as well, probably figuring that the show was over. They couldn’t have been more wrong.