He had a point, but I wasn’t as clueless about firearms as he assumed. And it was about time I started taking that thing seriously.
Victor was at his desk, working. He was usually working on something-just sitting around and chilling doesn’t seem to be part of his makeup, even with a bad leg. Timothy was there as well, which was unusual.
“Off work early?” I asked.
He ran his hand through dark, unruly hair. He’d recently added a couple of tiny gold hoops to his left ear to keep the others in it company. Pretty soon he was going to run out of ear, though.
“I quit.”
“Oh? Is that good or bad?”
Tim worked for a dot-com, one of the few that was still in business. Long gone were the days where you could bring your dog to work and get rich at the same time. Mostly, people there were now happy just to have a job.
“Oh, it’s good. I was getting bored. I made a lot of contacts there, though, and I think I can make a pretty good living just doing contract work, troubleshooting and stuff.”
Lou ran over to greet him. Timothy was not a practitioner; he was just a normal person, but he was still one of Lou’s favorites. Tim reached into his pocket, pulled out a Snausage, and offered it to Lou, who accepted it gravely. He was just being polite; he doesn’t really care for them that much. In fact, his attitude toward all things dog food are about the same as mine about tofu-he’ll eat it if he’s really hungry, but it’s no cause for celebration.
Victor looked up from his desk with a quick glance of inquiry. He knew I didn’t stop by for random chats.
“I need a gun,” I said.
“I seriously doubt that. What for?”
I told him about the fake Ifrit showing up at the Columbarium, as well as the vision of Sherwood I’d seen. Eli would have been more interested in the Sherwood story; Victor, ever the pragmatist, was more focused right now on the fake Ifrit. He had a point-Sherwood’s apparition could wait, but the Ifrit was a serious and immediate threat.
“So how did it find me there?” I concluded. “Why hasn’t it appeared before? And how about lending me something that will blow its head off next time it shows up?”
Timothy had been listening carefully. There was a time when I would have been more circumspect around him, since he’s not a practitioner, after all, but by now he was one of the family. I trusted him as much as I did Victor. Maybe more.
“Think a moment. What did you do that was different today?” he said.
“You mean besides calling up a vision of a long-dead girlfriend?”
Then I got what he was saying. Of course. Whatever the vision had been, it had involved some sort of enormous magical dislocation. For a creature sensitive to such things it must have lit up the magical landscape like a fireworks display.
Victor looked over at Timothy and nodded approvingly.
“Good point,” he said. “It was the evocation that drew it to you. And the last place we saw it was at the Presidio. It could easily have been hiding out in Golden Gate Park, right next door.”
“Wasn’t there a family of coyotes living there last year?” Timothy said. “They had to track them down and shoot them when they started attacking joggers, remember?”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “So it’s not going to be hiding behind every bush ready to leap out at me. But I’d still like something more than a couple of illusion spells for protection.”
“Fair enough,” said Victor, after a moment’s thought.
He walked over to the giant safe in the corner of the room and spun the dial a few times. The safe is at least six feet tall and surprisingly deep, and you could cram a lot of stuff in there. Sometimes I wondered if he hadn’t magically enhanced the inside space in some fashion. He was more than capable of something like that, and it always seemed there was way too much stuff in there, even for a safe that size.
Victor keeps his more potent magical tools in there, along with some rare artifacts. He also keeps an AK-47 assault rifle locked away, as I knew from experience.
After fiddling with the dial some more he swung open the safe door and rummaged around inside. Eventually he pulled out a long object swaddled in cloth. I could see a rifle barrel poking out of the top, and recognized it immediately.
“The AK- 47?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t trust me with such things.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You’d end up blowing off your own leg.” He reached back farther into the safe and pulled out another weapon, giving a grunt of satisfaction. “This should fill the bill.”
I was disappointed, but also relieved. I’d never shot an automatic assault rifle and a street confrontation is no time to be learning. But I did know how to use the weapon he had in his hand: a perfectly ordinary shotgun.
My grandfather was a man who had possessed quite a bit of talent himself, though I never knew it at the time. But he was also a hunter of small, inoffensive quail and large, strident geese, and by the time I was twelve he had taught me all I needed to know about those weapons. The one Victor held was a standard Remington 12-gauge pump, the workhorse of shotguns.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever fired one of these,” Victor said.
“That Remington?” I said. “What is it, an 870? Actually I prefer the Browning over and under. But that’s more for hunting birds. This one will do just fine, I imagine. Holds, what, five rounds?”
Victor looked at me suspiciously, sure I was putting him on. I gazed back blandly, then took the shotgun out of his hands, pressed the slide release catch, and cycled the pump a couple of times to make sure it was unloaded.
“What do you think?” I said. “Buckshot or slugs?”
For once I had Victor at a loss for words. His notions about me didn’t include my having familiarity with firearms of any sort, even after the session at the range. I couldn’t blame him, but it was nice for once to throw him a curve. Timothy watched, grinning, making no effort to hide his amusement.
Victor struggled for a moment with the desire to ask me where I’d acquired such expertise, then decided to pretend it was no surprise at all.
“Both,” he said, as if it were the most obvious question in the world. “You might miss with slugs; load four buckshot and one slug. Lead, not steel. Load the slug in first, keeping it for the last chance in case the buckshot doesn’t do the job.”
“Got it,” I said.
He stared at me again, shaking his head almost imperceptibly before reaching back into the safe. He brought out two boxes of shells, one of double-ought shot and one of rifled slugs. I closed the slide so there wouldn’t be a round chambered, slid a slug round in first, then the four buckshot shells so the slug would be the last to be fired. First in, last out. I clicked on the safety, just to be double safe, hefted the gun, and smiled.
“Thanks,” I said. “This might come in handy.”
I HAD JUST ENOUGH TIME TO CATCH A QUICK bite and make it to my gig at the Glow Worm. Now that Jazz at Pearl’s had closed once again, the Glow Worm was the only place left trying to uphold the tradition of quality jazz in North Beach. It was too bad about Pearl’s; it had been a great venue with a lot of tradition and history. But it had closed before-it’s not an easy task to make a jazz club financially successful. It always seems to resurrect itself from the ashes, though.
I debated about whether to take Lou along and decided not. I like having him nearby but he couldn’t hang out at the club, and North Beach is a tough place for a dog on the streets-the sidewalks are often crowded with tourists, and someone would eventually decide he needed a home and try to scoop him up. I didn’t want him biting anyone. Besides, I had the shotgun now, just in case. I couldn’t take it up on the bandstand, but I could at least have it handy in my van.
The Glow Worm is on Columbus Avenue, not far from Pearl’s. You’d think that since jazz clubs tend to struggle anyway, having two of them on the same street wasn’t the smartest move. Maybe that had been a factor in the demise of Pearl’s. So far, the Glow Worm seemed to be holding its own.