Chapter 4

If I had known that the day would turn straight into crap almost right from the very beginning, I'd have just sent a simulacrum and gone back to bed. Bel picked me up from my hotel just minutes after sunrise and already it was going to be a wild race against time and luck, and both now seemed to be quite set against us.

Bel, as planned, had dropped off our progress report on her boss's desk early this morning, just before picking me up, and we had assumed that it would remain unnoticed until after our phone call later on this morning. Unfortunately, one of Probert's butt-boys, Desmond, had made an uncharacteristic early arrival into the office as well and had noticed Bel burying her report into the middle of the in-box files. Curious, he at once retrieved it and was already reading it as she made a hasty exit. Desmond was just nominally a higher grade agent than she was and didn't really have the right to review her reports, but unfortunately he was one of the favored sons in the department and a known tattler with a direct pipeline to the boss. The smarmy sycophantic wizard was quite bright enough to read between the lines and run off bleating to their boss, and/or anyone else involved in the protection of the gun smuggling operation. Immediately, if not sooner.

Our first major lead was about to be prematurely exposed and now it was going to be a race to see who got to him first. We barreled across town as fast as we could but when we saw the smoke rising from the city ahead of us we knew that we were going to be too late and had arrived second, and dead last in the race. Stout's house, along with himself and his family, were already engulfed in a bonfire that had also consumed another pair of houses on each side of his, along with those innocent people's lives as well. Ingrid, the witch we had hoped to catch in the act of mind-wiping Stout was nowhere in the area, nor was any other FBMR agent or official Bel recognized. To compound matters, our surveillance team was already there waiting for us to show up, so now we couldn't even claim we'd never been there. Damn it!

Bel got out to coordinate with CPD and CFD and after awhile I got bored myself just sitting and got out of the car to join her, but with less enthusiasm. The fire had been magically set, no doubt about it I could feel and taste it in the air, and it wouldn't take long at all for some eyes and fingers to start looking and pointing towards me. Very cute ... now this was a frame-up that I hadn't expected at all. You burn down half of one small suburban subdivision and a famous historic movie theater and then everyone thinks you're a deranged arsonist!

I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and tried to watch Bel's back while she helped with the arson investigation. There was no helping it, Bel had to admit that David Stout had been a person of interest in a federal investigation but that we had not yet taken a witness statement from him. Technically true, but that fudged the truth a bit more than she was comfortable with. Bel appeared to be an unfortunately truthful sort of woman. The fire was still burning too hotly for any direct investigation of the wreckage but Bel seemed to be able to gather some magical forensic evidence from the perimeter. This was the sort of thing that she really excelled at and even the CFD arson investigation unit deferred to her as they began to slowly get the blaze under control.

The sole bright point to this fiasco was that an introduction to the local FBI field office did present itself a couple of hours later. The investigation of the murder of a federal employee and his family fell safely within FBI jurisdiction, no matter how much FBMR might wrangle for oversight, due to the alleged magical nature of the fire. The agent now in charge, Janice Simms, came to take over the crime scene but allowed Bel to continue to work gathering evidence with the city fire department arson unit. The two women casually nodded at each other in recognition but didn't otherwise much coordinate with each other. Just as well, our watchers were still there about half a block away watching us, and as far as I knew the FBI and FBMR were pretty much vowed hated rivals and I didn't want to give away anything of our game plan, busted and shattered as it already was.

It wasn't until after lunch before Agent Simms even took even the slightest notice of me and wandered over to give me a rather thorough visual inspection. I probably confused her greatly as I didn't look anything like an effeminate dandy. Or maybe the cowboy boots made me look especially 'butch'. In any case, she raised a perky cute eyebrow in vaguely amused bewilderment and sidled up to make a more personal acquaintance. She was a beauty, a tall slender drink of fine perfectly aged wine and the most glorious example of the Gibson Girl ideal of ephemeral beauty I had ever seen in photo, let alone in real life. Her neck was thin and delicate with a dark blue velvet choker with a cameo decorating her sallow white throat, and her long soft amber colored hair was exquisitely piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant with a delicate overflow of few selected waterfall of curls across her ears. Her tall, narrow-waisted figure exuded feminine perfection with a classic 'S-curve wasp waist torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset in exquisite torment for a great many long years, since perhaps she was a young girl.

She was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever encountered and since a good deal of my blood flow had left my brain to descend into my pants, I was hardly at my best now that I had the chance to speak with her. I might have also been drooling vapidly for the first minute or two of our discussion.

"I see by your outfit that you are a Texas cowboy?" She smirked, but not unpleasantly.

"Nonsense ... vile slander and pernicious lies!" I retorted. "Why does every lonely under-appreciated woman think that just because a Texan is wearing boots he intends to brand, mount and give a good vigorous riding to every filly that he meets? My Aunt Millie, it is quite true, left me her horse with her small ranch just outside of Austin but I sold it off to a happier home years ago. I, in turn, can see by your outfit that you are a lady of exact propriety! Your French style blue afternoon dress matches your eyes flawlessly and is exquisitely cut with every frill, flounce, fringe or ruche tastefully and perfectly set. On the other hand, your corset does seems to be too tight, and your posterior probably doesn't require quite as much bustle as you presently have under your otherwise tight dress, and I'd suggest a bit more heel in those boots if you really want to get that bustle wiggling and waggling. The hat with the half-veil is also a darling touch, and it looks very authoritative the way you point out instructions with your folded silk painted fan. Absolutely ducky!"

"Ah, a dedicated follower of fashion, I see!" She giggled.

"Oh, Madame! Your jibes sting! If I were to accost you and find you quite worthy of rustling away to my secret corral and wicked stable of debauchery, it would not be for your soft petticoats I would have most unwholesome thoughts for, unlike most of my rather effeminate American rivals who would know naught of how to properly minister to your more furtive secret longings and repressed desires."

"From a Texan? Certainly not! They're all mouth, but alas they all put their tongues to ill improper uses indeed, and scarcely where a woman, even of good breeding, would desire it placed for her enjoyment. You would woo a mirror and crow of your conquests until tedium, e're you'd ever back a brag of bravado with a single direct passionate deed. Even without rouge, powder or gloss, your face sir, is much too bold for your actions, for the dish you would present appears to be served with a rather weak sauce indeed!"

"Crushed! Besmirched my character has been! What is a Texan without his pride and honor? I would tussle with you further, in words at least if the rest of your bounty shall never be bestowed upon me, for we do need to have at some length words of substance, and in private, thus this pleasant piffle must be postponed for pleasanter hours. We've got some unfriendly eyes on us and it would be unseemly for your pure and inviolate reputation to be seen so boldly bantering with me in such a winsome and wanton manner."

"Oh, Sir! You bear every mark of being a scoundrel!" She giggled and then whispered, "Molly O'Grady's, nine o'clock tonight. Darlene knows the place; try to arrive without your lurking friends tagging along."

"Some women, even well-bred ones... especially well-bred ones, are often extremely partial to the intimate company of scoundrels!" I retorted to the back of her perfectly coiffed head, and then settled down to wait on some cement steeps at a house across the street for Bel to finish her investigations, which took several more rather tedious hours.

"Arson. Definitely, and it was caused by magic. Out of curiosity you wouldn't happen to have an alibi for early this morning?" Ha-ha, she smirked, but jovially. I didn't think it was quite as funny. "The fire destroyed most of the doorway and nearly all of the psychometric traces were burned away. I had a sense of something or someone familiar, Norman I'd guess, since it would be unlikely that Desmond could have beaten us here after reading our report, and with at least a half hour to spare. Under oath, I couldn't say who had lit that fire. Seriously though, someone at FBMR is going to suggest that you did it. Since I picked you up at your hotel at about the exact time the fire started, you're obviously in the clear ... but some asshole will hint you did it anyway, just to muddy up the evidence some more."

I didn't disagree.

On the way to the car we conferred briefly to revise our plan for the rest of the afternoon, deciding to pay a second visit back to Jesse Hollaway, just on principle. I didn't have a plan for getting us any good court-viable evidence but I did have a few more new questions that I'd thought of to ask him. We deftly ditched our tails but I needn't have bothered wasting the brain juice, because when we arrived at the gun store it was closed and locked up tight, permanently. Looking through the windows I could see that every legal hunting gun that had been displayed in the showcases was now gone. The place was empty, stripped to the walls except for the barren showcases.

Yep, our streak of bad luck today was continuing unabated and our final witness had now also disappeared.

Maybe Jesse had decided to make a run for it, but my gut told me otherwise. The shop owners next door hadn't noticed anything particular other than the gun store had never opened for business today. A slightly more observant clerk at the cleaners across the street had noticed quite a number of individuals inside of the place, moving things, but no one had gone in or out of the front door all day. The evidence would all be gone now, both above and below, moved out via the warren of tunnels under the city streets, and I didn't have much of any hope at tracking any of the weapons to their new secret location.

Perhaps I should have marked a few of the guns in the basement armory with a tag, so that I could trace them. Just exactly the same way I had found the gun thieves operating out of the gun show in Austin. Just because I was a much more powerful magician now didn't mean that some of the old simple tricks wouldn't still work! Now I wished I'd remembered to do it.

Bel didn't have much else to offer for clever suggestions either. She was game for a bit of breaking and entering to see if anything had been left behind downstairs, but a closer and exactingly careful examination of the shop's magical wards showed that all of the old ones were still present ... along with a few brand new ones. Nasty new ones. I thought I could disarm most of them, but if I fucked up the entire shop, along with several of its neighbors were going to blow up sky high. I wouldn't have any alibi for that magical fire ... and reluctantly we decided to leave the place alone for a day or two.

We had never paid a visit to the other name on our suspect list, the other crooked arms dealer, one Harold Bates, esquire. While a slightly less prominent legal arms dealer, Bates' family had money, a nose well into upper society, and an uncle who was a Ward boss and senior Alderman. None of these things apparently helped him. Like Jesse Hollaway, this bird had also flown the coop, leaving behind locked doors and empty showroom display cases. Again, according to local shopkeepers, the store had never opened for business that day and vague shadowy figures had been seen inside, but no one had entered or exited the main doors. Perhaps, as at Hollaway's, a van or truck had been used at the rear service door, away from unfriendly eyes, but I was pretty certain that everything had moved underground here as well.

Another careful inspection of the doors here showed near identical levels of magical protection, almost certainly performed by the same wizard, but with the faint touches of another wizard assisting with the fire spells. Honestly, I couldn't have done a better job myself. This meant that there were at least three magicians potentially arrayed against us. Ingrid, the superb mentalist; a very superior protection magician like myself; and a rather powerful fire wizard. All working together and able to react nearly immediately to any threat.