“Hello,” I said while muting the Masked Avenger’s face’s introduction to Mr. Turnbuckle.
“Daddy?” said a quiet teenage girl’s voice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
’VE been trying to call you all day,” she said.
“I was working.” I eased back up on the couch and stared at the ceiling. The TV carved out blue abstract patterns in the ceiling. Sarah’s voice was too damn close on the phone. I should be able to hear the distance from Cleveland to San Francisco. Her voice should have been echoey and small, not like she was down the street. “How’re you doing, kid?”
“Awful. Perfectly rotten.”
I’m a soft touch, and I have a pretty vivid imagination. For a few moments I was picturing everything from my ex’s townhouse burning down to the city of San Francisco sliding into the ocean. I sat up, muscles tightening in the small of my back. “What’s the matter, honey?”
“She’s ruining my life,” she said in a harsh whisper.
“The bitch!”
To avoid hurting my daughter’s feelings, I made every effort to keep my sigh of relief from being audible. I sank onto the couch as the possible crises reduced to those of a more manageable variety. “Don’t talk that way about your mother.”
“You don’t know what she’s doing.” It was strange to hear the California in her voice. Just enough to be disconcerting.
“No, honey, I don’t.” I rubbed my forehead. “How, exactly, is she ruining your life?”
“I’ve been planning to go to this concert
all
summer, Dad.”
“Uh-huh.” A picture was beginning to form in my head.
“You’ve got to talk to her.”
“
You
need to talk to your mother if you want to go out.”
Silence.
I waited a beat before I asked, “Why did she ground you, Sarah?”
“
Dad.
”
“Why, honey?”
“I was fifteen minutes late. Fifteen minutes, Dad, and she’s acting like I
killed
somebody.”
“And this was the first time?”
Silence again. Despite the distance between us, I knew my daughter, and I knew my ex-wife. Margaret, my ex, wasn’t one to lay down the law unless someone repeatedly ignored her warnings. I should know. “How many times did you violate curfew before she grounded you?”
“Dad, you don’t understand, it wasn’t my fault. Chris got lost on the way back home—”
I smiled and shook my head. “Sarah, it might not be your fault, but it
is
your responsibility.”
“
But—
”
“But nothing. You tested your mother enough times to use up all the slack you had coming. Now you’re calling me hoping that, since I haven’t been present for all the sordid details, I might be oblivious enough to argue with Margaret about how unjustified her punishment is.”
“
Please
, Dad,” She segued into the sobby little girl voice to tug at the old man’s heartstrings. “Chris spent seventy-five bucks
each
for these tickets. We waited in line for
hours.
He’ll never forgive me—”
“No. I’m not going to second-guess your mother. Besides, if you ask my opinion, if this Chris guy has the gall to be angry at you for a situation
he
created—”
“He didn’t—”
“You just got through telling me that
he
got lost and caused you to miss curfew. So it’s
his
fault.”
“But—”
“He does know to get you home by ten, right?”
There was a long pause before Sarah said, meekly,
“Eleven.”
“Young lady, I just lost any sympathy I had for you. And you better let Chris know that if he so much as gives you a harsh look over this, I am personally going to come down there and force-feed him the entire one-hundred-fifty dollars in pennies.”
Long silence.
“Are you still there, Sarah?”
“Yes.” There wasn’t any affected sobbing now. Just a sigh of resignation.
“I’m sorry you can’t go that concert. But it’s not my place to get involved in this. You know that.”
“I know.” Another sigh. “It just meant a lot to me.”
“Is this Chris a good guy?”
“Yes,” she sounded surprised at the question. “Of course he is.”
“Is he a smart guy.”
“Yeah.”
“Does he like you?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m just saying that a good, smart guy who really likes you would, I think, scalp the tickets that you can’t use and save the money for another concert—or at those prices, ten or fifteen movies.”
I heard her try to hide a chuckle. “I’ll tell him that.”
“Good.”
“If you don’t mind, I won’t tell him about the pennies.”
At that point in the conversation drifted to less critical matters. I got to tell my daughter about all the weird things I was writing about in Cleveland, and I got to hear more about this Chris guy than I wanted to know. At least, more than I wanted to know when I was thousands of miles away from doing spot checks on the guy.
All in all, though, small price to pay.
After an hour-long talk with my daughter, I fell asleep dreaming about pro wrestlers named Chris.
Now, the guys who woke me up would not have made the WWF All Stars. Much too scrawny. However, the nine-millimeter Glock in the short one’s hand made up for anything they lacked in the physical intimidation category.
“Mr. Maxwell,” said the tall one. “I think the time for sleep is over.” The tall one was
tall
, NBA territory—if the NBA could be conned into holding all their games at the Gund Arena. The guy, all eight and a half feet of him, was an elf.
I was still waking up, and trying to get the scene to gel into some sort of sense.
The TV was droning on in the background showing some sort of hyper-testosterone extreme-sports broadcast involving snowboards, dog teams, and a gasoline fire. Elf One, the eight-footer, sat on the edge of my couch, just within arm’s reach—his, not mine. Elf Two, the middle one, stood off to the side where—due to the shotgun design of my condo—he could watch both entrances at the same time. Elf Three, the shortest at about six-five, stood between me and the burning snowboarders, holding the Glock pointed roughly at the half-eaten container of Kung Pao chicken between my legs.
“Mr. Maxwell?” spoke Elf One. The accent is somewhat hard to describe if you’ve never heard it. Very cultured, soft and breathy, and higher in timbre than it should be coming from someone that tall. An Oxford-educated Jamaican recovering from a blow to the groin. “Are you awake now?”
I doubted feigning sleep would serve any purpose. I nodded and slowly sat up.
The trio were dressed in cheap suits that hung wrong on their nonhuman frames. That and the Glock made me think “cop.” Any other elves that would do armed home invasions would have the resources to get their suits tailored, and since the gun probably cost more than the clothes, it almost had to be department issue.
Elvish cops carried nine-millimeter Glocks because of their biological problem with iron. The mostly ceramic weapon not only didn’t set off metal detectors, but the steel content was small enough to suffer repeated handling by elvish hands.
Though everyone here, including the guy with the Glock, was wearing gloves.
“Not that I mean any offense,” I said. “But you mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing barging in here . . .” I almost said,
“without a warrant,”
the cop smell was so strong. But these guys weren’t flashing badges, and disclosing my suspicions might not be the best thing to do right now.
“No offense taken, Mr. Maxwell.” Elf One’s face was gray in the light from the TV. Its true color could be anything from powder blue to pastel rose. His eyes were metallic, with no discernable iris or pupil, nothing in them but a slightly gold-tinted reflection of myself. The face was ovoid, too angular and narrow, and surrounded by a mane of hair that—even cut short—was almost a ruff. The ears were impossibly contorted and twisting to a slightly forward curving point on their tips. While I watched, I could almost see them move in response to the noises in the room. “However, we are not here to answer your questions. I have to ask you to accompany us for a short while.”
Very calm, very polite. I doubt that more than three humans alive had ever seen an elf nervous, or angry. They all talked with the detachment of a bored psychoanalyst.
“It’s two in the morning. Don’t you think it reasonable that I might not want to go anywhere right now? Why don’t you come back at a more human hour?”
He gave me a sterile smile that showed a flash of very narrow, very even, very white teeth. “Since we do not suffer the human addiction to periodic unconsciousness, following a ‘human’ schedule would be an exercise in inefficiency. I think that, upon a moment of reflection, you will see the wisdom in following our schedule.” He gave a slight nod to the elf with the Glock. “The wrong decision would be inconvenient for everyone concerned.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I stood up, gingerly placing the takeout container on the coffee table between me and the elf with the gun. The tacky sides of the container made me overly aware of the sticky feeling of my sweat-stained shirt sticking to the small of my back.
I gave the elf with the Glock an ironic smile. He didn’t smile back. The bastards didn’t even appreciate the effort I was making not to freak out.
I turned back to Elf One. Even with me standing, I still had to look
up
at him sitting on the arm of my couch. “You mind telling me what this is all about?”
“As I have told you,” he stood up, towering over me and stooping slightly to avoid the track lighting, “we are not here to answer your questions.”
We walked down the stairs, I think because the elves didn’t like the elevator. Being enclosed in a solid steel box must be somewhat unnerving to them.
This time of night, Willie was long gone. There were supposed to be a half-dozen wards blocking unauthorized access to the building, but my escort walked through each magical barrier as if it wasn’t there. The fact that they didn’t trip a single alarm reinforced the idea that these were cops who had access to the talismans that allowed them free passage. My own talisman for the building was on my key chain, currently sitting on the kitchen table.
Elf Four was idling in a minivan out in front of my building. Probably not enough steel in it to bother these guys, mostly aluminum, plastic, fiberglass, and an acre of tinted windows.
I was hustled into the back, flanked by two elves, while Elf One took shotgun. I saw his head brush the roof. These guys needed the headroom of a van. In a normal car, Elf One would be looking out the windshield from between his knees.
As promised, none of my questions were answered, which didn’t stop me from asking—occupational hazard. They didn’t show any irritation, even though I was expecting a prod from the Glock at any moment to remind me who was in charge. Apparently, the elves didn’t think like that.
We drove through the processed quaintness of Shaker Square, a yuppie haven of upscale restaurants, chain stores, and the occasional art gallery. Like my condo, it was built in the nineteen-thirties, and had about seventy years as a nice piece of local color before the developers got hold of it. I’m waiting for them to put in the Disney Store.
We drove through the square and took a turn north up MLK. We stuck with Martin Luther King Boulevard to where it hit Case Western Reserve University, and University Circle. Up until this point I was pretty sure that we were going to be heading deeper into Cleveland proper. I had just about assured myself that these were detectives from the SPU who were going to take me downtown for some clandestine questions.
I was physically prepared for some inconvenience, but I wasn’t particularly scared . . .
Not until we made a wrong turn.
We hit the messy intersection where MLK feeds into Chester—one of the main East Side arteries downtown. We were caught at the light, and the area had a surreal feeling at this time of the morning. There were no cars anywhere, no people on the street, and the streetlights gave the whole place the feeling of a recently abandoned stage set.
The campus of Case Western loomed off to our right, the sprawling campus an aesthetic jumble of architectural styles, ranging from the Gothic church closest to us, to nineteen-sixties institutional. Floodlights illuminated the fluted stone sides of the church, and as I looked up at it, one of the gargoyles yawned.
The light changed, and instead of heading west down Chester, toward downtown, the van turned east, down Euclid. This wasn’t a good sign.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Silence.
We rolled down Euclid, the only vehicle on the street. We drove under the Conrail tracks and passed the downhill side of Lakeview Cemetery, then we came to a rather inauspicious signpost.