“You aren’t going to catch me sleeping, clown,” Stacey said, her gun still pointing at Rhyme’s sprawled body. “I know you’ve already regenerated… all you’re doing by playing dead is saving my ammo.”
“Believe it or not, getting shot isn’t very pleasant for me,” Rhyme said. “Is it too big a stretch that I’m being cooperative because I know I’m caught?”
Stacey shot her in the leg.
“You’re faster than I am and don’t have anything to lose,” Stacey said. “Shut up and sit tight.”
“Shut up? You mean you don’t want to keep me talking?” Rhyme said. “That’s what your little cheat sheet says, isn’t it? The one from the other department.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you, crazy,” Stacey said.
“Oh, but I’ve got things to say to you, crazy,” Rhyme said.
“What, you want to dig around in my head and try to find something?” Stacey asked.
“No, that’s a futile exercise if I ever heard of one,” Rhyme said. “Let’s talk about where your money comes from, though.”
“We already had this conversation,” Stacey said. “I buy places and fix them up. Sold a few, rent a few others. There were a couple of fluff pieces on it, which is how you know about it.”
“But it takes money to make money, as the old adage goes,” Rhyme said. “How’d you get started, exactly? I bet there’s quite a story there… why, if you could patent your method, you could probably make a second bundle selling it. One of those late night TV commercials: How To Make A Fortune In Real Estate Without Spending Your Own Money, the Detective Lieutenant Bishop Way.”
“If you’re trying to blackmail me into letting you go, you’re going to need to do better than shots in the dark,” Stacey said.
“I’m just making conversation,” Rhyme said. “We keep running into each other, you know. You came to see me, I came to see you…”
“You were looking for me?”
“Of course,” Rhyme said. “What else would I have been doing in your neck of the woods, outside your favorite diner?”
These were guesses, but the only kind that Rhyme made: educated ones. The cops had met for breakfast in civilian clothes… if they weren’t in Karen Seven’s neighborhood, it was likely Stacey Bishop’s. It fit: there were any number of properties that might have caught her acquisitive eye. The Old Stationhouse would have a rather obvious appeal to a cop, especially one who defined herself so completely by her badge.
“What the hell do you want with me?” Stacey asked.
“You interest me, Detective Lieutenant,” Rhyme said. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, you’re hardly my type.”
“No, that would be more somebody like Lily Binder,” Rhyme said. “Somebody damaged… a lost soul, purposeless and adrift in the world. A fixer-upper.”
“So, I’ve got a little hero complex,” Stacey said. “Big deal. A lot of cops do.”
“Hero complex?” Rhyme repeated. She laughed. “Your words, not mine. Would you mind terribly if I sat up?”
Stacey shot her in the head. It was the last sound for a couple of minutes.
“Ugh… I’ll take that as a no,” Rhyme said, when her skull had knitted itself back together and her brain cells had reestablished all the necessary connections. “You know, that does funny things to my memory, sometimes… I do believe I’ve lost the scent of baking cookies. How long do you suppose it will be before I have a chance to get that back?”
“Good to know… I’ll make sure to aim for the head from now on,” Stacey said.
“You are a sadist at heart, aren’t you?” Rhyme asked. “Did you happen to notice that dear Lily mentioned seeing Athena last night? What do you suppose they were up to?”
“I don’t see how that’s…” Stacey said, then she stopped. Her mind flashed back to Rhyme’s half-assed “mindswitch” ruse… and something Lily had said when she showed up at Stacey’s door.
“I kind of ran into my ex…”
Lily and Athena. Her Lily. Athena Wisdom.
“Son of a bitch,” Stacey said.
“Daughter of one, actually,” Rhyme said. “I guess Lily didn’t tell you she used to date one of the very super-est of superheroines? Well, I suppose she didn’t want you to feel like you had to compete.”
Another bullet in the head shut her up. As the sound died away, she realized the phone was vibrating in her pocket. She flipped it open.
“Hey, partner,” she said. “Where are you? Did Lily find you?”
“She did… but with bullets flying, I thought I’d better do some crowd control,” Karen said. “I got everybody out of the hardware store. 4B just pulled up. You okay?”
“Tell them to get their asses up here,” Stacey said. “I’m getting tired of babysitting this loser.”
The seating area of the Owlery was crowded as it had ever been on a weekday morning, but business was terrible. The presence of serious-looking men in dark suits and mirrored shades had the effect of chasing away the college students and businesspersons who would otherwise be hanging out or stopping by for their morning lattes.
Professor Siobhan Chalmerson was one of the few regulars to brave the sea of stern, unfamiliar faces that peered out from the windows and scrutinized everybody who entered the bookstore and coffee shop.
“Buenos dias, Cari,” she said to the spiky-haired, bepiercinged barista.
“Good morning, Professor,” Caridad said. “Raspberry mocha?”
“Please. Bit of a different crowd today, isn’t it?” the professor asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Caridad said as she ground the espresso beans.
“Is there some sort of convention?”
“No, they’re like a security precaution,” Caridad said. “From the government. 4B, I think.”
“Oh? They don’t trust your bosses to look after themselves?”
“Not with that Rhyme lady on the loose, apparently,” Caridad said. “Minnie isn’t happy about it, but at least they keep Claire out of my ass, you know? Ever since she started dating, she keeps asking me to make out with her.”
“Uh…”
“Oh, sorry, I’m venting,” Caridad said. She handed the professor her finished drink. “Three sixty-five.”
“Go ahead and keep the change,” the professor said, handing her a five. “Gracias, Cari.”
“Thanks for stopping in!”
Minerva had watched the exchange from two floors up.
“Claire!” she called into the stacks of books behind her.
“What, Minerva?” Claire Clevenger, her sister’s “youthful ward”, called, poking her blonde head around a bookshelf.
“Claire, did you ask Caridad to make out with you?” Minerva asked.
“No!” Claire said. Her eyelid twitched.
“Why would she say that you did?”
“I only asked her to help me practice making out.”
“…why?”
“So I can figure out how to do it without… without… s-s-seizing,” Claire said. Her face spasmed uncontrollably as she spat the word out. “Because she’s bisexual, and I’m not… I thought it would be a good way to do it without getting too excited.”
“Claire, hon… you know Athena says you’re too young to be fooling around, for a few more months, anyway,” Minerva said.
“I know that!” Claire said. “That’s why I have to practice now, so I’ll be ready when I turn eighteen.”
“Well, figure out some way to do it that doesn’t involve sexually harassing our best employee, okay?” Minerva said.
“You know she smokes pot, right?” Claire said.
“We’re a college hangout,” Minerva said. “We’re across the street from a head shop. A third of our customers smoke pot. As long as she’s not bringing it into the store, I really don’t care.”
“Do you think Athena knows?”
“Athena has supersenses half the time,” Minerva said. “Do you really think she’d miss something like that?”
“I just think it’s interesting that you guys have an employee who breaks the law on a regular basis but I can’t have the internet in my room because of a stupid court order,” Claire said.
“The day marijuana shuts down the Japanese stock market, I’ll take Caridad aside and have a little talk,” Minerva said.
“That could have been a coincidence,” Claire said sullenly, folding her arms beneath her massive chest.
“Hold on… something on the news,” Minerva said, cocking her head to the side. Whatever she was hearing, Claire heard something, too… a bustle of activity from below. She ran to the railing and looked down on the coffee shop.
“I think they’re leaving,” she said.
“They got her,” Minerva said. “Rhyme’s been arrested in Singleton. I wonder what the hell she was doing all the way out there?”
“I think she’s got a safehouse out that way,” Claire said. “I’ve been plotting her known movements during her past breakouts, and correlating it with certain…”
“Well, whatever, at least they nailed her,” Minerva said, waving her hand. “Evelyn can crawl out of her bunker, Athena can come down from the clouds, and we can actually sell some damn coffee today. I just hope this time they manage to hold onto her a little bit longer.”
A pair of ambulances had arrived at the scene of the fracas in Singleton. Stacey Bishop was being checked out by a medic in the ordinary white one, while an elderly patron of the hardware store was being administered oxygen. The other ambulance, the black one, had backed up to the front of the hardware store. Rhyme was brought downstairs, strapped into a stretcher. She was wearing a restraining vest rigged with electrodes and completely wrapped in something that looked like a transparent body bag.
“Let’s get her loaded up and out of here!” one of the 4B agents said, as they shoved the stretcher into the back of the heavily armored ambulance.
Two women in full-body hazmat suits received the villainess headfirst, then locked the stretcher in place. One of them gave the agents on the ground a thumbs up while they slammed the doors closed.
The black ambulance pulled away from the curb and then raced down Singleton’s main street, its sirens blazing. One of the women unfastened her hood while the other unzipped the top of Rhyme’s enclosure.
“Ms. Henderson?” the unmasked woman said. “I’m Andi Markham. I don’t know if you remember me, but you’re among friends.”
“Well, that was faster than usual,” Rhyme said. “And I do remember you, Ms. Markham. I don’t remember what comes after ‘one, two, buckle my shoe’, but I remember you. You were fronting for Geppetto’s little group. Don’t tell me that hoary old fool is still kicking around? No… he isn’t, is he? You’re working for somebody else.”
“That’s correct,” Markham said. “And my current employer urgently needs your help on a little project, involving the reanimation of the dead.”
“Ooh, are you sure about that?” Rhyme asked. “Because that very rarely ends well.”
“If you don’t feel like cooperating, we can go ahead and drop you off at the hospital as scheduled,” Markham said.
“I didn’t say no,” Rhyme said. “I’m just telling you upfront that even if I can guarantee the results, I can’t guarantee satisfaction. What exactly are we talking about? Zombie horde? Ubermensch? Replacement goldfish?”
“We have a specimen,” the other woman said. She was a tall, unusually busty woman, with wisps of platinum gold hair visible through the faceplate of her suit. “A head with cybernetic components. The brain is intact and well-preserved. It’s the brain that interests us, Ms. Henderson… we don’t need a body to go with it.”
“Ah… Dr. Clevenger, I presume?” Rhyme said, glancing at the woman’s face and chest. “I do believe this may actually get interesting.”
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