Whip Smart, page 11
part #6 of The Salt Mine Series
The doctor extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Walker.”
“I’m his niece, Tiffany,” she replied as she shook his hand.
Walker smiled warmly before flipping through the chart Peel had handed him moments earlier. “Everything looks good. Are you having any pain or problems urinating?”
“You should be so lucky to pee as well as I do at my age,” Johnson remarked.
“Any fever, change in appetite, increased incontinence, or confusion?” he asked Peel.
“No report of any from the nurses,” she answered.
Walker unwound the stethoscope, put the earpieces in, and rubbed the bell between his hands to warm it. “I’m just going to do a quick exam,” he prefaced before snaking the bell up Johnson’s shirt. “I’m listening to your heart, so you can just stay still.... Good, now take a deep breath in...and again.”
The doctor moved to the back. “Another deep breath...and once more.” Then he moved the bell to Johnson’s lower stomach. “Don’t mind me, just want to see how breakfast is doing,” he joked. Peel smiled even though Martinez was pretty sure it was the umpteenth time the nurse had heard that one.
Walker took off the earpieces, wound up the stethoscope, and tucked it into his pocket. “I’m just going to press on your stomach. Tell me if anything hurts when I do.” He quickly pressed in deep but released just as quickly in two or three places. “Anything?”
“You keep going and you’re going to have to buy me dinner, young man,” Johnson quipped.
“I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to make jokes, Mr. Johnson,” Walker replied as he scribbled some notes in the chart. “Do you have any questions for me, Mr. Johnson?”
“When am I getting out of here?” Johnson asked earnestly.
Walker smiled. “You’re here for your safety, Mr. Johnson. How about you, niece Tiffany? Do you have any questions for me?”
“Just one,” she piped up. “What happened this weekend?”
Walker’s expression changed from folksy to clinical in the blink of an eye. “Sunday evening, your uncle had a psychotic episode where he believed he saw things that weren’t there. The staff tried to calm him down, but ultimately, we had to give him a sedative for his own safety. It can happen in dementia patients, and my concern was that it stemmed from a urinary tract infection. I tested his urine and started him on a short round of antibiotics. Things seem to have cleared up.”
“All this talk about my pee is making me need to go.” Johnson leaned forward in his chair and grabbed his walker. All three of them immediately tried to help, and he shooed them away. “I’m losing my marbles, not my ability to take a piss.”
Martinez saw her chance. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll wait for him to finish. You guys can continue your work.”
Peel was already readying the next chart while Walker made his excuses, “Have a nice day, Mr. Johnson, niece Tiffany.” The doctor closed the door behind him.
“Would you like me to give you a hand?” Martinez offered once they were out of the room. She interpreted Johnson’s grumble as an affirmative. She positioned herself at Johnson’s side, and braced the walker with one leg. He put his hands on the walker and on the count of three, he stood and she assisted in that effort. It was a maneuver she had done for her grandfather many times before in another life.
Once he was out of the recliner and had a hold of his walker, he was pretty steady on his feet. He slowly plodded to his bathroom and closed the door once inside. As soon as she heard him take a seat on the commode, Martinez pulled out her vape pen and cast salt throughout the room. She didn’t have the luxury of time to do them serially. Luckily, it was a small room.
She waited for magical patterns to shake themselves out while the sound of Johnson’s urine stream started. The salt in Johnson’s recliner revealed his signature. She snapped a picture and used the broad side of her hand to brush aside as much of the salt as possible.
The salt on Johnson’s bed was a different matter. It was mostly Johnson’s signature, but there were definite spots of interference. Martinez had seen it before on her first case in the Salt Mine in the former, demon-possessed coroner for Chiltern Hills in the United Kingdom. Unless it was early days in the possession, she seriously doubted it was a demon—Johnson was still too human-shaped to contain chaotic aethermorphic feedback. She took a picture and shook the salt off the quilt with a quick flick of the wrists.
The stop and start of his stream was petering off, and Martinez heard him start to rise. She looked at the last salting at the desk and bookshelf and gasped. The salt had formed an entirely different pattern, one she knew immediately—Furfur, Great Earl of Hell, currently bound hundreds of feet in the depths of the Salt Mine.
She pulled her equipment out of the bag and donned her gloves. Martinez picked up the offending bauble—a diminutive plushy green brontosaurus out of place with the other bric-a-brac on the bookshelf. When she made contact with the dinosaur, her amber pendant that fought off charms amongst other things grew warm on her chest. I know you are not trying to target me! she fumed as she put the tiny toy in a sack and surrounded it in salt. The warmth against her skin waned. She sealed it and stashed it in her leather bag just as Johnson flushed the toilet.
The water started running, and Martinez hastily took off her gloves and threw them in her bag. With a swipe of her hand, she knocked the salt off his desk. By the time he turned off the faucet and opened the bathroom door, Martinez was positioned outside it, waiting to assist him.
Johnson was started by her presence. “Who are you?” He suddenly looked very confused and fragile.
Martinez smiled. “Sam, I’m here visiting you. I’m Tiffany, Abby’s daughter.”
Johnson’s friendly facade returned. “I have a sister named Abby,” he affirmed.
“Why don’t I help you back to your chair, Sam, and we can watch a little TV before I have to go back to work,” Martinez spoke tenderly.
Johnson accepted her arm and cheerfully said, “I’ve never said no the company of a pretty girl.”
Chapter Seventeen
Detroit, Michigan, USA
27th of September, 11:15 a.m. (GMT-4)
––––––––
Martinez wove her muscle car in and out of traffic, shifting aggressively and punching her engine when she could. If it didn’t mean she’d have to break the circle of his prison, she would’ve decked Furfur in his smug devil face. She took the exit to Zug Island, and the security guard at the entrance waved her through once she presented herself as Tessa Marvel of Discretion Minerals. Martinez pulled into the underground parking and backed her car in. She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and approached the elevators. Her charm had cooled once the plushy was secured, but it remained warmer than it normally was. She took that to mean there was some seriously bad mojo in the thing.
She flipped out the titanium key that granted access down to the first floor of the Salt Mine; all others could only go up. Abrams sat behind her clear ballistic glass window as always. When Martinez exited the elevators, the metallic slot in the wall opened and Abrams’s voice came over the tinny speaker, “Please put your possessions in the slot.”
Martinez deposited her bag inside. The metal door closed and the whirling sounds began as always. She heard a ding, but the door to the elevators beyond remained shut. “Angela, what’s the deal?” she said a little surlier than she intended.
“Just a moment,” she stalled with the impersonal courtesy found in service jobs. Finally, the doors opened.
Martinez walked straight into LaSalle, all six-foot-three and 230 pounds of him. She had contacted the Salt Mine before she left Evergreen Meadows to let them know what was coming, but she wasn’t expecting to see him on entry.
He was holding her bag. “This way. Leader is waiting.” He led her to the elevators she took to her fifth-floor office every day, but instead of pressing the button, he opened the locked door beside them. Martinez had never seen the door open before and often wondered where it went. It looked like today she was going to find out.
The hallway was narrow, with less than six inches clearance on either side of LaSalle’s broad shoulders. The door shut behind her and she had nowhere to go but forward. The first thing she noticed was that her steps lacked the gritty traction of the salt floors found in most of the corridors. In this hallway, the floors were titanium and covered in glowing blue sigils.
She caught the more common ones—devils, demons, fae, shapeshifters—but there were others that were completely foreign to her. She didn’t have time to analyze them because she had to hustle to keep pace with LaSalle’s longer stride. Martinez deduced this was where people and things who failed security had to pass through—a magical gauntlet.
The hallway ended in a junction and LaSalle took a right and opened the first door. “Please take a seat,” he instructed, and allowed her to pass through the door first.
Like the floor of the hall, the small room was lined with titanium and covered in runes and wards. It was sparsely furnished—just a table and a few chairs. Martinez took a seat and inquired, “I thought you said Leader was waiting for me?” She rarely saw Leader outside of her fourth-floor office, much less this close to the surface.
Before Martinez could expect an answer, she was frozen in place and her mind just stopped. She could breathe, but that was about it. LaSalle unleashed his will and scanned her, each pass getting progressively deeper. She not only felt it in her bones, she felt it in her soul. Martinez didn’t know how long she sat there, but she realized it was over when she could consciously blink. She had long suspected LaSalle was a practitioner, but this was the first time—to her knowledge—that she had been subjected to his magic.
LaSalle handed her a bottle of water and opened the door. Leader entered and approached the table where the contents of Martinez’s bag were carefully laid out. Martinez had no recollection of LaSalle doing that. Leader was dressed in herringbone slacks, penny loafers, and a collared shirt under a cable-knit sweater—downright fancy for the otherwise casual attire. She put out her hand over the table and let it hover two inches above the array of items. Martinez opened the bottle of water and downed half of it in one go.
When Leader’s hand came to the dinosaur from Johnson’s room, she stopped in her tracks. It was out of the salt and sack Martinez had transported it in. Martinez reached up to check if she still had her amber periapt on, and a wave of relief passed over her when she felt its familiar shape and contour under her fingertips. She felt no warmth emanating from it—whatever targeted her before couldn’t in this room. Additionally, whatever LaSalle had done to her, the pendent had provided no protection. All she felt was the hawkish gaze of Leader as she turned around to face her. “Lancer, report.”
Martinez drank more water and found she could speak again. “Last night, I verified Sarah Pullman’s signature at her wake. While there, Meridiana made contact and requested a meeting with the promise of information about Sarah’s death. When I went to 18 is 9 later that night, she claimed to have seen Sarah Pullman’s final moments through her eyes and all signs indicated she was killed by an animator, but there was also a fiendish influence of unknown origin.
“I infiltrated the locked dementia ward this morning as a distant relative of Samuel Johnson. Upon investigation, I found three signatures: Johnson’s on his person, a mixed signature where he was sleeping the night of Sarah Pullman’s murder, and Furfur’s signature on that toy. When I picked it up with my gloves on, it was actively trying to target me, but Weber’s amber periapt gave me enough forewarning. I bagged it, packed it with salt, and called it in per protocol.
“Sarah Pullman’s red jade donut is still missing. Chloe, Dot, and Weber agree that it is most likely the resistor Sarah Pullman created as a detonator for her magical bomb. She was wearing it earlier the night she was killed. It wasn’t on the body on discovery. It wasn’t in her apartment. There was also no evidence of it at Samuel Johnson’s. Detroit PD are also looking for it.” Martinez didn’t know what came over her, but it all came out in one coherent narrative and her inner critic was notable absent.
Leader paced the barren room. “In your opinion, do you think Johnson killed Sarah Pullman?”
Martinez nodded. “Yes, but I believe he was influenced to do so in his vulnerable state.”
“Explain.”
“I spent about an hour studying him and his mental landscape is convoluted, magically speaking. He went to the bathroom and forgot I was there and who I was. Yet, when I showed him a picture of Sarah Pullman, he remembered something from almost a week ago. It suggests that the part of his brain that casts and the memories associated with practicing magic are still intact, even though he can’t remember other things in the short term. It would make him very susceptible to charming, and explain the mixed signature on the bed but his pure signature otherwise. Johnson isn’t possessed by Furfur, but somehow, he’s using him to perform magic.”
“Like a puppet,” Leader added thoughtfully.
“I also think there is another player,” Martinez added.
One of Leader’s eyebrows rose. “Continue.”
“There is no way Samuel Johnson could have physically taken the necklace from the crime scene. Someone ambulatory did. I also suspect the toy was placed in Johnson’s room, perhaps by the same person but not necessarily.”
Leader tilted her head ever so slightly. “What makes you say that?”
“Everything in the room except the hospital bed was from his life before he was diagnosed with dementia. The quilt on the bed, his desk, the books on his bookshelf, his framed photos—they all made sense, but the tiny green brontosaurus didn’t fit.”
A small smile almost formed on Leader’s lips. “Who has access to Samuel Johnson?”
“Staff, allied health, nurses, doctors, and visitors to the dementia ward,” Martinez answered.
“Find the necklace and any accomplices. Let’s nip this in the bud.”
“Yes, Leader.”
All five feet of Leader strode out of the room, and Martinez went slack in her chair. She took a deep breath, and it felt like the first that was entirely her idea in a while. Whatever just happened, she was glad to be on the other side of it.
“Are you okay?” LaSalle came over and offered her another bottle of water.
Martinez waved it away. “I’m fine. I just feel like a rag doll that’s been tossed around too much.”
“It’s part of the security protocol, to be certain you weren’t compromised,” he spoke earnestly. He sounded sincere, but she wasn’t sure if it was an explanation or an apology. Martinez couldn’t trust her perception so soon after her encounter with Leader.
“Can I pack the rest of my stuff up and go? I have work to do,” she glossed over his statement. She had more important things to think about.
“Sure, I’ll get you back to the elevators,” he offered.
Martinez started putting things away while he watched. “I also need to go to the sixth floor. I’m going to need some supplies and expertise from the librarians.”
“I can do that, too,” he stated almost sheepishly.
Martinez hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. They walked in silence down the hall back to the main elevators. LaSalle presented his palm and retina before pressing the button to the sixth floor. Martinez noted his intent of riding all the way down, instead of getting off on the fourth floor before sending her on her way. The mechanics of the elevator were resounding in the quiet between them.
When the doors opened, Martinez stepped out immediately. LaSalle called out after her, “Drink lots of water and get something to eat. It helps.”
Martinez kept her gaze forward. She could feel the salt crunch under her shoes as she walked. “In the future, warn a woman before you turn your full will on her.”
“Who said that was my full will?” he replied just before the doors closed. She wondered about that as she made her way to the librarians. It reminded her that she really knew very little about the people she worked with.
Chapter Eighteen
Detroit, Michigan, USA
27th of September, 1:20 p.m. (GMT-4)
––––––––
There was a strategy to summoning; it was more than just drawing the circle and sigils correctly. There was a vast array of supernatural beings, each with their own areas of expertise and price. It was about matching need with knowledge and weighing risk against gain. Practicing the arts was always a gamble, and summoning magical entities was no exception.
Martinez needed very specific information: who had taken Sarah Pullman’s necklace from her and where it was now. Superficially, it seemed like a simple ask, but there were a lot of parameters to consider. It involved events that took place in the mortal ream. It sought knowledge of happenings in the near-past and the present. It involved a dead magician, a living magician who wasn’t in complete mental faculty, and a devil.
She knew if Wilson was in her place, he would have gone devil every time, and the fiendish involvement was a pull, but ultimately, Martinez dismissed it for a couple of reasons. First, she had a deep distrust of them, even though intellectually she knew devils were bound to their word and always followed the letter of an agreement. The fact that they worked so hard to craft loopholes and corner cases to favor them in said agreement did not lessen her mistrust. Second, devils demanded blood payment. There were situations when it didn’t have to be the caster’s blood, but it was the preferred currency. Martinez didn’t relish the thought of a devil having the taste of her blood in its mouth, even though she could theoretically use magic to scrub its memory of it after the fact.
Martinez had then considered fae. She wasn’t bothered with their insistence on the summoner’s veracity even though they never told the whole truth. It was basically like solving a riddle, and she was good at riddles. They had their peccadilloes and their temperament was both flighty and mercurial, but their price was generally less onerous than blood. Unfortunately, they weren’t a good fit for the information required. If Martinez had needed to know something that happened on a different plane or something about fae, it would have been a no brainer.
