Gentleman Takes a Chance (32 page)

"I'll get someone to come post bail as soon as—"

"I wasn't arrested, Dad. It's . . . hard to explain over the phone. Do you remember the pearl?" He raised his eyebrows and had trouble concentrating on the flow of conversation, as Rafiel was making his way back, a bundle of fabric swinging from one hand.

"You didn't steal it again?"

"No, I didn't steal anything. Ow." The last sound was because Rafiel was roughly and very matter of factly putting a hooded sweat shirt over Tom's head and dressing him in it without so much as by your leave. It involved pulling Tom's hands through the sleeves, as if he'd been a child or a mental patient. "Ow, all right. I can dress myself, Rafiel."

"What?" Edward asked.

"Nothing. Rafiel has decided I'm not properly attired for the weather and is making me put on a hoodie." He glared at Rafiel.

"Seems sensible to me, if what I'm seeing on the weather channel is any indication," Edward said. "So, you were saying about this pearl."

"Not the pearl. The . . . owner of the pearl. He seems to think I belong to him. Because of who I am, you know?"

"Because you're my son and I worked for him?"

Sheesh. His dad could be surprisingly dense. "No, Dad. No. Because I am . . . you know, like him and his relatives."

"Oh. What is he doing? We could file a—"

"Father." Despite his annoyance Tom almost laughed. At least his father was trying to help. Which was, all things considered, not bad. "I am sure he wouldn't be the least intimidated by a legal order of some sort. He eats lawyers for breakfast. Probably literally."

Rafiel pulled the hood up over Tom's head. Tom said into the phone, "Look, I have to go. I'll call you from The George when I get there."

Right now the diner, with its warmth and warm coffee and food seemed to Tom like a vision of lost paradise. He hung up and gave Rafiel the phone. And then he noticed that Rafiel had a flashlight in his hand. One of the larger ones of the type people said the police often used as a weapon in a pinch. Tom stepped back. But Rafiel said, "Come on. Let's go look for your phone one last time."

"Kyrie will be worried," Tom said.

"Just a minute. We'll look for your phone and if we don't see it, with the flashlight, then we go back. And, you know, Kyrie is probably not that worried. She knows I'm looking for you."

Tom bit his tongue to avoid saying that of course that would calm down anyone's anxiety, because who could ever doubt that once Rafiel was on the case everything would turn out for the best? But considering that Rafiel had found him, and gone out of his way to try to help him, his sarcasm would be misplaced. "All right," he said.

Seeing Tom subdued always frightened Rafiel a little. He'd been through law enforcement courses. He knew Tom's type.

Tom was the kind of person who usually had to be dragged away from whatever incident had just happened, still kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. The sort of person who could never get a traffic ticket without adding resisting arrest to the charges. The sort of person, in fact, who wasn't subdued unless he were very sick or very scared. Since Tom didn't look either, Rafiel had to assume freezing did something to shifter dragons.

Reptiles. Cold blood. Can't they die if they get cold enough?
He didn't want to think about it, and besides, he'd given Tom a hoodie. Granted, it was Rafiel's size, and therefore a bit long on Tom, but that was good as it would go over Tom's hands.

Rafiel started towards the river, and then started, slowly, down the slope. His knee still hurt from banging it on the path when he had fallen and he had no intention of taking another header.

"Here," Tom said, stepping up beside him and offering him a hand. "My boots are sturdier than yours."

Rafiel took Tom's hand for support, half afraid that the very cold-feeling fingers would snap off under the grasp of his hand. He was sure—more than sure—that a normal person would have hypothermia from this adventure. But it always came back to . . . they weren't normal, were they?

They made it all the way to the bottom, where the frozen river glistened two steps from them. Unfortunately, it only glistened in the spots not covered up by snow. The rest was an amorphous, lumpy mess. He turned his flashlight on, and pointed it at the river and at that moment, Tom's phone rang. This helped Rafiel pinpoint the roughly rectangular snow-covered lump. "There," he said, nailing the shape with the beam of his flashlight. "Right there. Can you get it?"

Tom looked out speculatively. "I don't know if the ice will hold up. But if the ice breaks under me and I wet my feet, it's okay, because you'll give me a ride back to the diner, right?"

"Right," Rafiel said. Had the idiot thought that Rafiel was going to just come out, then leave him to freeze out here? "If parts of your body start breaking off from the cold I'm fairly sure Kyrie would kill me," he said, and grinned sheepishly at his friend. "So, yeah, I'll give you a ride back, you idiot."

Tom nodded and edged cautiously on top of the frozen river, with the sort of duck-footed waddle of someone trying to neither slip nor skate on the surface. In the middle of the river, he picked up the phone, then, as he was straightening, dropped it again.

"Would you stop that?" Rafiel asked impatiently. "The idea is to get back into the car and back to The George. Not to stand here and play find the phone."

But Tom shook his head, and bent, and picked up the phone again. He walked back close enough that he could whisper and Rafiel would hear him. "There's something in the tunnel under the little bridge, Rafiel. I saw a tail disappear that way."

A tail. Great. Rafiel was going to assume that, no matter how much Rafiel might want it to be otherwise, Tom didn't mean he had seen the friendly, furry, potentially wagging tail of a kitten or puppy. "Uh . . . a tail?"

"Reptilian. Dragging."

Rafiel frowned in the direction of the bridge and the shadows under it. It seemed to him, as he concentrated, that he did hear something very like a rustle from under there. But . . . a tail? "Perhaps the Great Sky Dragon sent one of your cousins to look after you."

"They're not my cousins."

"Whatever," Rafiel said, feeling an absurd pleasure, as if he'd scored a point. "They think they are."

"I'm hardly responsible for people's delusions."

How could someone like Tom, who didn't so much get in trouble as carry it into the lives of everyone around him, sound so much like a New England dowager?

"Yeah, but anyway, maybe he sent one of his underlings to look in on you?"

Tom shook his head. "Well, he did. Conan. But I sent him back his merry way. Or not merry." Tom frowned. "Besides," he whispered, "the tail looked like an alligator's."

"An alli—" Rafiel resisted an urge to smack his own forehead, and, shortly thereafter, an urge to smack Tom—hard—with the flashlight. "You mean Old Joe? The homeless guy said he told you he was at the aquarium."

"Yeah," Tom said. "I figure he's hiding out here, in alligator form."

"Is that why you're whispering? Look, what do you want with Old Joe, anyway? So he's hiding here, as an alligator. Perhaps we should leave him alone?"

Tom shook his head, which was par for the course. Of course he didn't think they should leave Old Joe alone, because that would be the life-preserving, not-getting-into-worse-trouble solution.

"Okay," Rafiel said. "So what do you want to do?"

"I figure he knows something," Tom whispered back. "And I want to find out what it is."

"Uh . . . what he knows is probably the best places to sleep when a storm threatens, and, Tom, you aren't even that with it. You ought to be indoors." And watched. By a nursemaid. Or a psychiatrist.

Tom shook his head again. Snow and ice flew from his dark hair. He frowned at Rafiel. He'd become alarmingly pale in the cold, so that he looked like he was wearing white pancake make-up, from which his lips—a vague shade of blue—the tip of his nose—a lovely violet—his dark eyebrows and his blue eyes emerged looking vaguely unnatural in all their chromatic glory. "Look, he knows something. And it's something that might help us. He knows about the Ancient Ones."

"Okay, even supposing he knows," Rafiel said impatiently, "what do you propose to do about this? And why are we whispering? If he didn't hear the cell phone ring, and doesn't know we're here, then he's way too addled to help us."

"That's not it," Tom said. "I don't want him to know we're about to go after him."

"We are? Into a sewer tunnel? After an alligator?"

"I don't think it's a sewer," Tom said, looking into the shadows under the bridge. "At least, I don't think the city would have an open sewer through a recreation area. I mean, I'm well aware that they're all crazy, but all the same, there's a difference between crazy and loony."

Not from where I'm standing, buddy.
Aloud, Rafiel said, "Look at it this way—that connects to a drainage pipe somewhere. And that drainage pipe is connected, somewhere, to the Goldport sewers. You have heard of people flushing baby crocodiles, right?"

Tom made a sound of profound exasperation. "Yes, in New York City. Some science fiction writer or another wrote a very unpleasant story about it. But it's an urban legend, you know. No pet stores have sold crocodiles, that I remember. So it mustn't be legal anymore."

"Doesn't matter," Rafiel said, pragmatically. "It was legal back in the fifties. And crocodiles live forever."

"And migrate from New York City to Goldport, Colorado?" Tom shook his head. "Rafiel! Next thing you know, you're going to tell me we'll find Denver's lizard man from Cheeseman Park under there. Come on. Just come here, shine your flashlight under there. I promise I won't make you actually go under there and look amid all the dangerous animals."

He gave Rafiel one of his more irritating smiles.

"Oh, all right," Rafiel said, grudgingly.

For all that Tom had cajoled Rafiel into shining his light under the bridge, he was somewhat scared of what it might uncover. What if Rafiel was correct, and it would show a bunch of dragons under there, all of them spying on Tom?

Choking back a laugh at the absurd image, Tom told himself he was getting worse than his father. Any moment now, he'd start asking himself if he'd eaten people.

Rafiel slip-skated to stand beside Tom, closer to the center of the river, and shone his flashlight searchingly into the space beneath the little arched bridge.

It was cozier under there than Tom expected—or at least, there was none of the trash he'd come to expect in that sort of place. He'd slept in that sort of place, sometimes, and it seemed never to be empty of a few rusting cans, a couple of unidentifiable, shredded cardboard boxes and perhaps the rotting body of a road-kill racoon. But under this bridge, it looked pretty clean. A couple of branches and some leaves, and other than that, just the clean shine of ice.

"Fine," Tom said. "I guess there isn't—"

But at that moment he heard the clack-clack-clack of alligator teeth that seemed to be Old Joe's way of laughing. It was faint and muffled, but definitely there. Tom grabbed Rafiel's wrist and aimed the flashlight at the place the sound had come from. There in the dark, Old Joe was squeezed under the place where the bridge came down to meet the bank and where it was, therefore, almost impossible to see.

Tom heard himself make a sound that was much like that of a steam train stopping. "Come out," he said, peremptorily. "Come out now."

He didn't know what he expected. Old Joe had obeyed him in the past, but in the past he'd caught Old Joe raiding The George's dumpster, and therefore he was, technically, trespassing on Tom's property. This time, Tom half-expected him to turn tail and run very fast, which, Tom understood, could be very fast indeed for an alligator.

Old Joe must have thought it too. For a moment there was a rebellious light in the tiny eyes, in the reflection of the flashlight. Rafiel must have thought of worse things, because he tried to pull the flashlight away from Tom and started to say, "Enough. You know—"

But Tom said, in his best voice of command, "Don't you dare. Don't you even think about it. I thought you were dead. I've been worried sick for days. Now, you'll come out here, shift, and explain yourself."

Old Joe slithered forward, swinging his tail from side to side. Rafiel must have been still pretty unsure about what the creature meant to do, because he took a step backwards. But Tom stood his ground and Old Joe gave him a sheepish look, as if sorry that he had tried to scare him, or perhaps simply sorry that he hadn't managed to scare him.

He shifted, right there on the snow, and stayed sitting down on his butt on the ice, his hands around his knees. Rafiel made a sound and said, "I have clothes. In my car."

Old Joe gave him an indulgent, almost amused look, the sort of look grown-ups give cute little children. "No need," he said. "I will shift again, after you're gone." He looked up at Tom. "And now, what do you want? Why did you think I was dead?"

"Because of the dire wolf," Tom said. "You said he had talked to you and you clearly knew him, so I thought . . ." He felt as though he'd lost some of his capacity to command and his righteous indignation too, now that Old Joe was treating him as if he had been silly and alarmist.

Old Joe shrugged. "Yes. Dire is a bad person," he said. "He and his council of ancients, always dictating the way in which people are supposed to live, the way in which shifter people are supposed to be people, and whom we should respect and whom we shouldn't." He shook his head. "He's a very bad person." He looked up at Tom, intently. "You stay away from him."

"I have every intention of staying away from him," Tom said, hearing his own voice sound sullen, like an annoyed little boy's.

"You stay away from her, too."

"Her?" Tom said, with some strange notion that Rafiel had paid Old Joe to warn him against Kyrie.

"The girl that came to the aquarium, in the car," Old Joe said. "Just a little while ago."

Rafiel cleared his throat. "I know he spends more on his hair product than most third world nations produce in one year, but that wasn't a girl. It was my subordinate, McKnight. Though he might have had a girl with him," he said, vaguely remembering something about Michelle, one of the part-timers.