“That’s what the addicts say.”
“Well, I’ve been able to render the small samples you gave me into something that should cause nothing but a mild headache, which is nobody’s idea of fun.”
“Rachel, that’s fantastic!” I said
She made a face. “No, it’s not.”
Karl and I looked at each other, then he said to Rachel, “Sounds like there’s something here we don’t know about.”
“On the contrary,” Rachel said. “I’ve told you all there is to know about my experiments with the stuff. What you’re not getting is that my results have no practical value.”
I thought for a few moments, then told her, “I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Well, I’m not too bright,” Karl said, “so I wish somebody would fucking explain it to me.”
“What I can do in my workroom doesn’t affect what’s going on out in the street, Karl,” Rachel said. “I can hardly expect the… dealers, pushers, whatever they’re called, to drop by so that I can render their product useless before they go out and sell it. From their perspective, it would be a pretty bad business decision, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh,” Karl said, followed a moment later by “Shit!”
“OK, it was worth a try,” I said. “Thanks for giving it a shot, Rachel. Guess we’ll have to deal with the Slide problem the old-fashioned way – by busting the dealers and trying to squeeze them into giving up their suppliers.”
“Except we can’t bust the fucking dealers,” Karl said, “cause the shit they’re selling isn’t even illegal – yet.”
“Well, yeah, there’s that,” I said.
“I sympathize with your plight, guys,” Rachel said, “and I only wish…” Rachel stopped speaking, and I saw that she had a faraway look in her eyes, like somebody who’s trying to think of three things at once. She dropped back into her chair, as if her knees had suddenly given way.
“Rachel? Are you alright?” I asked.
She didn’t reply for a few seconds. “Me? I’m fine – apart from being a total fucking idiot, that is. Leave that out, and I’m doing just great.”
I looked at Karl, and it was clear that he didn’t know what was going on, either.
“Sympathize,” Rachel said. “I told you that I sympathize with your plight.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, just to be saying something.
“Sympathetic magic!” She slammed her small fists down on the desk’s polished surface. “That’s the fucking answer. Dear Goddess, I ought to have myself committed to an institution for the terminally stupid!”
“Rachel,” Karl said, it’d be good if you’d stop beating yourself up long enough to tell us what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Alright, sure,” Rachel said. The distracted look on her face was gone, replaced with something that looked to me like triumph.
“You guys know what sympathetic magic is, right?” she asked.
“More or less,” I said. “You cast on a spell on some object that represents another object, or maybe a person. Kind of like voodoo dolls – stick a pin in the doll, and the person it represents feels a stabbing pain.”
“That’s essentially it,” Rachel said. “I don’t mess around with vodoun – a lot of it comes under the heading of black magic. But I know that for the spell to work, the doll must not only resemble the intended victim, but also has to contain something that was physically part of him – or her.”
“You mean like hair, fingernail clippings, stuff like that,” Karl said.
“Exactly,” Rachel said. Then she turned to me. “You told me earlier that you had some baggies of Slide left, Stan. Do you still?”
“Yeah, two of ’em – they’re in my desk,” I said. “Are you telling me that you can cast a spell on a few bags of Slide, and that will affect all of the shit, no matter where it is?”
“Not by myself, I can’t,” she said. “Something like that, you’d need a great deal of magical power to make it work – a lot more than I possess.” She grinned at us. “But I bet I know where I can get some help.”
“The local coven, you mean,” Karl said.
“Yep. Quite a few of my sister witches are as concerned as I am about what Slide has been doing to our town. I bet they’d jump at the chance to help render the stuff harmless.”
“I want to be sure I’m following you,” I said. “You think you can change Slide – all of it – into something that won’t be addictive to supes anymore?”
“I would think so, yes,” she said. “We’d be able to alter its molecular structure – always assuming we can make the spell work, that is. No guarantees in the Art, as you know.”
“I’m no expert on magic,” Karl said, “but that sounds fucking brilliant to me, Rachel. Way to go.”
She shook her head. “Congratulate me if I can–”
“Don’t say it, Rachel,” I told her. “Just… don’t.”
As we walked back to the squad room, I said to Karl, “I just had the beginning of an idea. I think I’m gonna send an email to an old buddy of mine.”
“It’s always good to keep in touch with your friends, I guess.”
“Well, we used to be friends – at the U, before I dropped out to join the cops. Turned out, this guy became a cop, too – even though he stuck around to get his degree first.”
“He’s on the force? What’s his name?” Karl asked.
“Ted Kowal – but he doesn’t live around here. After college, he moved to Philadelphia – I guess he’s got family down there. Spent a couple of years doing this and that, then he joined the Philly PD. He’s a Detective Second in their Organized Crime Unit, now. Or he was, last I heard from him.”
“If you wanna talk to the guy, why not just call him?”
“Unlike you and me, he works days.” I glanced at my watch. “He’s probably in bed by now.”
“OK, and you’re gonna reach out for this dude because why?”
“Two reasons. One is Teddy probably knows as much as anybody – on this side of the law, anyway – about the Delatasso Family.”
“The original one, you mean – that Ronnie D’s old man controls.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t get it – you figure that by finding out about the old man, it’ll somehow help us deal with his kid up here?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re being mysterious again, Stan.”
“I prefer to think of it as enigmatic.”
Karl looked at me. “Reader’s Digest?”
“Yeah. The January issue, I think. Or maybe it was February.”
“I must’ve missed that one. So enigmatic is like mysterious, huh?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
After a few seconds, Karl said “Two.”
“Huh?”
“You said you had two reasons for getting in touch with this Kowal guy. What’s the other one?”
“Teddy owes me a favor – a big favor.”
I got through the rest of our shift by drinking enough coffee to float a battleship. Fortunately, it turned out to be a quiet night – too quiet, like they say in the movies. It was as if the whole city was holding its breath – waiting. That’s a worn-out cliché, I know. But sometimes even clichés are true. You could see the tension in the way people walked and held themselves, hear it in the way they snapped at each other over stuff that usually would get no more than a shrug.
When I got home it was still dark, but the birds in nearby trees were already chirping in anticipation of the sunrise. I checked my watch and estimated there was about half an hour until dawn.
Christine was sitting at the kitchen table, eyes focused on the screen of her laptop. When I walked in, she looked up at me, glanced down at the computer again, then did a double-take. Her welcoming smile quickly turned into a frown of concern.