Dragon with a Deadly Weapon Read online

  Dragon with a Deadly Weapon

  Book Ten of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  Michael Angel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

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  COLOR MAP OF ANDELUVIA

  B&W MAP OF ANDELUVIA

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COLOR MAP OF ANDELUVIA

  B&W MAP OF ANDELUVIA

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Afterword

  The Detective & The Unicorn

  Other Books by Michael Angel

  About Michael Angel

  Chapter One

  Some days, a hot cup of coffee was all that helped me maintain my ‘never murdered anyone before breakfast’ streak.

  Today was definitely starting out as one of those days.

  Technically, the sun was up. But it was one of those rare summer days in Los Angeles where the sky looked as if it had been smudged over with a soft graphite pencil. The cloud cover acted like the lid on a boiling pot of water, holding in both heat and moisture. That didn’t do any favors for my complexion, my hair, or my temper.

  I’d gotten the message a half hour ago. My phone’s screen displayed a code that meant ‘Homicide’. Which meant I only got a single cup of caffeine in me before pulling the OME van out of Shelly’s driveway.

  I made the drive with bleary eyes. But at least it was early enough that Los Angeles’ notorious traffic was only warming up by the time I got the van parked. I went around to sit on the rear bumper and looked around while I suited up. A suite of glass-sided midrise buildings clustered together like a flock of silvery birds on the west side of downtown. The one I’d parked next to had a fleet of police cruisers and a garland of yellow crime scene tape wrapped around the outside.

  Off to my right, a wedge of manicured parkland jutted from the building’s main entrance. Someone had put up a small circle of orange cones wrapped with more yellow tape just inside the park’s boundary. That was odd. I put it out of mind as I slipped on my Stompy Boots of Doom. Once I locked up the van, I grabbed my battered forensics equipment case and lugged it over to the building.

  ‘Lugged’ was the right term today. The caffeine I’d downed at Shelly’s wasn’t putting much of a dent in my fatigue. In the days following Destry’s betrayal and his confirmation of the Deliberati’s prophecies, I’d tried and failed to keep insomnia at bay. Both the pooka and the unicorns’ words drilled into my brain with the persistence of a dentist working on a bad tooth.

  My very being seemed enveloped in a cloud of utter, bone-deep exhaustion. One as total as when I’d dealt with Hollyhock’s death. At work, at home, it didn’t matter. Hours dragged by in slow motion. Even when I managed to doze off, I’d wake up in two, maybe three hours. It wasn’t a pleasant waking, either. More often than not I’d sit up with a gasp, heart whamming against my ribs as if I’d just surfaced from deep, icy water.

  But I’d be dammed if I was going to sit around and play ‘poor little Dayna’. My friends needed me. Work needed me. Or maybe it was I who needed the work now. To give me something to focus on besides my impending doom.

  The patrolman who met me at the tape barrier had a brown mustache that drooped at the ends like the young Sir Quinton. While I didn’t get bow or nod of respect, he did greet me respectfully once I identified myself. That was a relief. Once McClatchy had been hauled off in quick succession to the hospital, and then the psych ward, my treatment at the hands of LAPD’s finest had gotten a lot better.

  The answer I got from the officer still rankled me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I have orders from Lieutenant Ollivar to hold off on admitting you until he gives me the go-ahead.”

  “Hold off on admitting me?” I said, incredulous. “You’ve got to let me pass, I’m from the OME. Ollivar’s going to need me to examine the crime scene.”

  The patrolman coughed into his hand before answering.

  “Actually, the OME has already been here for half an hour.”

  Okay, that one stopped me in my tracks. The early hour and my insistent fatigue weren’t helping things either. Before my ragged mind could come up with some retort that probably would have made the situation worse, a second uniformed officer emerged from the side entrance and joined us. He was a red-haired beanpole of a man, but I recognized Officer Ullenbach easily enough.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting out here,” he apologized. “It’s not an intentional stonewall or anything. Like Stevens here said, it’s orders from the Lieutenant.”

  I chewed that over for a moment. Luis Ollivar and I had gotten off to a rocky start, but once he’d seen how McClatchy had persecuted me, his tune had slowly changed. The Lieutenant had assigned Ullenbach and Jackson to shadow me and provide security, at least until the former police chief finally lost the last of his marbles. So I knew that whatever Luis had in mind, at least it wasn’t personal.

  “Well, it looks like I’m out of choices for right now,” I admitted. “I’ll find someplace to park myself until you guys let me through the tape.
”

  “Shouldn’t be long, they’re going to need a CSA on a homicide case.” Ullenbach gestured towards one of the shops across the street. “The brass upstairs sent me on a coffee run. I’ll bring you back something if you’d like.”

  That came perilously close to wringing a smile out of my tired face.

  “Sure, I could use it.”

  “You want decaf?”

  I shot him a dagger-like glance. “You want to make this a double homicide?”

  He put his hands up. “Joking. No offense, but you look like you could use something with a few shots of espresso in it.”

  “Bring me something along those lines and all is forgiven.”

  Ullenbach tipped his duty cap before jogging off across the street on his mission.

  Officer Stevens left me alone as I walked over to the wedge-shaped park. I dropped my case on the closest bench and almost took a seat next to it before a thought occurred to me. Even in my sleep-deprived state, even though I was wearing my own jumpsuit-shaped portable sauna, curiosity won out. I made my way towards the small circle of tape-wrapped orange cones at the park’s boundary.

  Something sparkled on the pavement. I hitched up my jumpsuit’s baggy thighs so I could squat halfway comfortably. Then I peered down at the puzzle before me. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at.

  The cones and tape had been placed around a group of glass chunks, each at least an inch thick. They were similar to the longer shards I’d seen before at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Each piece had been laminated, meaning that two smaller glass sheets had been bound together with Grade-A polyvinyl butyral. Expensive stuff.

  No one installed laminated glass unless they were concerned with building safety codes. And given the color, I was willing to bet I knew where the chunks came from. I got up, then stepped back and craned my neck to look up. Right at the top floor I made out yet more crime-scene tape, this time laid out in large X-shapes across a couple of half-shattered windows.

  Before I could speculate any further, Officer Ullenbach emerged from the shop across the way with a cardboard tray in each hand. Both trays were loaded with paper cups ringed with beverage sleeves. The patrolman stopped next to me, nodding towards the cup at the very corner of one tray.

  “I owe you one,” I said, as I took it gratefully.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “Oh, you need to know something. This all came from a Vietnamese sandwich shop.”

  “Well, that’s a plus so far as I’m concerned.” That was true enough. Los Angeles had a multitude of ethnic coffee places. This kind was as dark as the inside of a coal mine and contained the kick of a pissed-off mule.

  “I asked for the strongest stuff they had. You’ve got a cup of bạn sẽ hối hận there.”

  “Is that bad?”

  He shrugged. “My boyfriend’s Vietnamese. He told me it means ‘you’re gonna regret it, and you have no one but yourself to blame’.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like just what the doctor ordered.”

  Ullenbach turned and headed back towards the building as I opened the top and inhaled the fragrant steam. The first sip burned its way down like a red-hot sea anchor and walloped me in the gut. So did the next four or five sips, but at least my synapses didn’t feel as if they’d been packed in grease anymore.

  Mentally, I went back to the glass chunks lying on the ground.

  Laminated glass was tougher and more likely to stick together after breaking. It had fractured into long shards at the Natural History Museum because something large and relatively slow – three Andeluvian griffins – had crashed through the skylight. Here, whatever had caused the breakage was small and fast.

  As fast as a speeding bullet? I asked myself. If so, then where did it come to rest?

  Inch-thick laminate wasn’t bulletproof, but it came close. Whatever had punched through there would have been seriously slowed down. I took a half-step to the side, raised one gloved hand, and extended an index finger towards the top story windows. Then I traced an arc from the exit point, along where the glass had fallen, and onwards. Beyond the marked cones lay a tree-lined concrete walkway and a long, rectangular public fountain.

  I considered. If the homicide committed on the top floor had involved someone shooting a gun, then the fired bullet would be a handy bit of evidence. There was a chance that a reduced-velocity slug could have fallen somewhere along the path I’d traced with my finger.

  It was worth a shot.

  I spent a minute or two draining the rest of my coffee before tossing the cup into a nearby trash receptacle. Then I walked slowly down the concrete path, sweeping the ground with my eyes. Nothing of interest attracted my attention, but I kept at it.

  Finally, I reached the two-foot high barrier surrounding the property’s water feature. The long, rectangular fountain wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Washington mall. The concrete that made up both the inner and outer surfaces had been covered in aqua colored tiles that radiated a forced cheeriness.

  A single high-step, and I stood on the barrier’s edge. The water had been turned off and left to drain so the level inside barely came up to the edge of my stompy boots. I stepped off, splashing my way up the middle of the fountain, all while continuing my visual sweep.

  It wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. The overcast kept down the glare, but the bottom of the fountain was littered with pennies, nickels, and quarters. More than once, I had to stop and nudge a cluster of metal currency out of the way with my booted toe.

  Finally, my eye settled on something that looked out of the ordinary. Something else besides the neatly punched disk of a coin. I bent down and fished for what I’d seen. My fingers quivered as I trapped the object between two gloved fingers. Apparently, the extra-strong coffee I’d ingested was finally seeping into my veins.

  I squinted at the small piece of metal in my hand. It was roughly cylindrical, but the more tapered end had been deformed and squashed.

  “Gotcha,” I said to myself. “But what in the world are you made of?”

  It was a reasonable question. As I rolled the slug around in my palm, the silvery-gray metal threw off little glints of orange, like shavings from a new penny. It looked strangely familiar. I’d seen something like this before.

  But where? The caffeine that made my fingers shake also helped my brain supply the correct answer. My breath caught on the inhale as the memory came back.

  I’d found several like the one in my hand embedded in the ashy remains of a corpse. A corpse belonging to the Quondam Seraphine. The granddam of the phoenix had been snuffed out beyond all hope of reincarnation by her murderer.

  And that murderer was still at large.

  Chapter Two

  A warm chuckle came from behind me. I turned and spotted Detective Esteban standing off to one side, gazing up at me. His normally stubbled cheeks had been freshly shaved, and as usual his smile sent a warm thrill through my insides.

  “And what might you be up to, novia?” he asked. “Trying to change someone’s destiny?”

  I knew Alanzo was making a joke. Really, I understood that. Still, his words sent a chill down my back. If there was anyone’s destiny that I wanted to alter, it was mine. I’d spent enough sleepless nights over that very problem already.

  “Trying to…” I sputtered. “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen people throw coins in that fountain when they’re making wishes. And wishes are usually meant to change one’s life.”

  “I get it.” I shook my head as the chill ebbed away. “Yeah, if I was digging around for spare coins, I’d be messing with their wishes.”

  Alanzo gave me a concerned look. “Did I say something wrong? You look awfully pale.”

  “It’s nothing. I just found something for the sample bag. Help me down from here?”

  He extended his arms and clasped my hand as I stepped down. My boots made a rubbery squelch as I landed. I stayed in his arms just a bit longer than nece
ssary.

  Alanzo wasn’t in uniform, but his casual clothes had a carefully composed look that told me that he was still on duty. And the delightful male scents of leather and aftershave tickled my nose in just the way I liked.

  We’d only spent one more night together since he’d gotten me out of the hospital, but it was enough. It had to be. The LAPD had pulled itself together like a big blue family after McClatchy’s meltdown. Esteban knew they were his rock. And I in turn knew he was mine. The thought sent a warm quiver through my body as he released me.

  He gave me another look. “Ullenbach told me what he gave you to drink. Maybe you had a little too much coffee?”

  I gave him a wry look as we made our way back to where I’d left my evidence case. “Maybe I like twitching.”

  Alanzo considered that. “I suppose everyone needs a hobby.”

  I elbowed him playfully in his rock-hard midsection. “Did you come out here just to tease me, or was there another reason?”

  “Actually, I’m here to escort you up to the top floor.”

  “It’s about time, I’ve been wanting to get to work.”

  I opened my case, slipped the bullet into a sample bag, and then snapped the latch closed again. But even as I hefted the case’s handle, Alanzo shook his head even as he indicated that I should follow him.

  “You won’t be doing any of the heavy lifting,” he explained. “They called in Myun-Hee’s team before you got here. You’re supposed to remain in an advisory capacity only. So am I, as a matter of fact.”

  “Advisory? Why?”

  We came up to a section of the crime-scene tape. Esteban lifted the barrier for the two of us so I only had to duck my head. We walked through a pair of sliding glass doors and into a huge foyer made up of solid blocks of marble and faux Grecian columns. Our footsteps echoed like hoofbeats off the vaulted ceiling.

  “This is Ollivar’s case,” Esteban said. “As you can guess, he wanted you here because this case has gone more than a little bit chueco.”

  I let out a sigh. “Why am I not even surprised anymore?”

  “However, there’s a concern that you and I might be too ‘close’ to this case. It turns out that the wrong police code was sent out this morning. It’s not a homicide. We’ve got a multiple homicide on our hands. This is big. If anyone ends up in court over this, we don’t want the defense attorneys throwing the LAPD a curve ball over our involvement.”