"Would you like a closer inspection?"
"Do you have to ask?"
P"tol P"kah stomped off stage and came back wheeling out a set of metal stairs, the kind they used at airports too small to build Jetways. He wedged the steps against the side of the tank and motioned to Bal.u.s.trade. "After you."
Clutching the handrails, Bal.u.s.trade climbed up the stairs. At the top, he peered down suspiciously at the tank"s lid. "I suppose you won"t let me open this."
"You may do as you wish," P"tol P"kah said. "Although I warn you, you may not be happy when you do."
"Yeah, I"m the one who"s going to be unhappy," Bal.u.s.trade said. He knelt down on the top step, opened a latch, and, groaning under the weight, pulled back the lid. When he looked down into the tank, his face fell.
"Would you like a closer look?" P"tol P"kah had climbed the stairs behind Bal.u.s.trade, and now, even standing two steps below the magician, towered over him.
Bal.u.s.trade suddenly looked nervous. "No, I-"
"I insist," the green man said, giving Bal.u.s.trade a shove that knocked him off balance and sent him tumbling into the tank.
Bal.u.s.trade sunk slowly to the bottom, his ponytail floating up behind him. Flailing desperately, the magician tried to turn himself right side up, but the tank was too narrow to maneuver in. His face reddening, cheeks puffed out with his last breath of air, the magician pounded feebly on the inside of the tank as if he hoped to break through.
The green man put his hands on his hips and let out a booming laugh. "Do you think he"s had a close enough look?" he shouted to the crowd.
A couple of people in the audience laughed, but most were silent as they watched Bal.u.s.trade struggle to bring himself back above the water.
"Help him!" a woman in the crowd shouted. "He"s drowning in there!"
The green man peered out into the audience to see who was talking to him, cupping an ear to suggest that he couldn"t hear what was being shouted.
"What"s he doing?" Gus said to Shawn.
"Proving I was wrong," Shawn said. "There really is water in there."
"There"s a guy in there, too," Gus said. "We should help him."
"And mess up the trick?" Shawn said. "I"m shocked."
"This isn"t part of the trick."
"Isn"t it?" Shawn said.
Shawn pointed to the stage where the green man was reaching his hand up behind the proscenium arch and pulling down a st.u.r.dy cable with a noose at the end. He dropped the noose into the water and looped it around Bal.u.s.trade"s ankle. Then he gave the cable a sharp tug and it retracted quickly, like a cheap roll-up window blind, pulling Bal.u.s.trade straight out of the tank.
Gasping and coughing, the magician hung by his ankle, high above the stage. The green man closed the tank lid, then took the magician gently by the hand and pulled him along as he went back down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he settled Bal.u.s.trade on the stage, then unhooked the cable from around his ankle. The magician flopped on the floor, gasping like an angelfish scooped from its tank by a curious kitten.
Benny Fleck emerged from the wings. "Let"s have a round of applause for our gracious volunteer," the small man said as he helped the still-coughing Bal.u.s.trade to his feet. A small spate of confused clapping came from various corners of the room as Fleck led the magician off stage.
"Volunteer?" Gus asked Shawn. "Is that a regular part of the act?"
"I don"t know, but I bet the green guy never gets a second heckler," Shawn said. "Besides, it accomplished its purpose."
"To humiliate Bal.u.s.trade?"
"That was a bonus," Shawn said. "It was to keep you watching Bal.u.s.trade so you wouldn"t pay attention to whatever the green giant was doing."
"What was he doing?"
"Something he didn"t want you to notice."
Gus waited for more details, but Shawn didn"t have any to offer. He turned his attention back to the stage, where the green man had climbed back up the stairs and reclosed the hatch, bolting it shut. He faced the audience, hands on his hips.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the moment where we must take our leave from each other," he said. "If all goes according to plan, I will see you shortly. In fact, I will be right there."
He pointed to a spot exactly in the center of the showroom. Unconsciously, the crowd edged away from his destination, in case he was planning to materialize inside of them. The three nondampened magicians who had challenged the green man in the lobby all moved a little closer.
"But it is possible that I will not return at all," the green man continued. "To dissolve one"s molecules is difficult, but to reintegrate them is much harder. If I fail, then I will forever remain a cloud of dust suspended in a tank of water. And if that is to be my fate, then so be it!"
The green man took a deep bow, then unlatched the lid and threw it open. He stretched to his full height and stepped off the platform. Weighted down by the heavy boots, the Martian Magician sunk to the bottom of the tank. For one long moment, he stood absolutely still, staring out through the gla.s.s at the audience.
Gus knew this was a trick. He understood that everything Shawn had said was right. But as he watched the green man standing patiently at the bottom of a tank of water, he could feel the pounding of his heart, the thin trickle of sweat on his palms. His lungs began to ache for air, and he realized he"d been holding his breath since P"tol P"kah slipped under the water.
"This can"t be part of the trick," Gus whispered to Shawn. "There"s got to be something wrong."
"That"s what you"re supposed to think," Shawn said.
"Well, I"m not the only one here who"s good at taking instruction." Gus gestured at the crowd of bachelor partyers. They were staring, transfixed, worry on their faces. Even some of the magicians in the room were beginning to look concerned.
"We should do something," Gus said.
"You"re right," Shawn said. "If we left now, we could beat the rush to the parking lot."
Before Gus could respond, there was a gasp from the audience. He turned back to the stage to see that the water in the tank had changed. Before it had been perfectly still. Now it bubbled and frothed like a gla.s.s of cheap champagne. As Gus stared, he realized that the bubbles were coming from the green man"s body.
P"tol P"kah raised his hands over his head, sending a storm of froth rising to the surface. As the bubbles flew from the green fingertips, Gus saw with a shock that the fingers were shrinking. No, dissolving. Within seconds, they were gone down to the first two knuckles, and quickly the hands were reduced to clublike stumps.
The green man lowered one deformed hand to touch his stomach, and immediately the bubbles began fizzing out of his abdomen. But they didn"t rise to the top of the tank. They spun around, as if caught in a whirlpool. And when they cleared, Gus could see they had eaten a hole clear through P"tol P"kah"s midsection.
This has to be a trick, Gus told himself. Shawn must be right. But he didn"t see a trick. What he saw was a giant man dissolving like an Alka-Seltzer tablet. Where moments before there had been rock-hard green abs, now there was a void. And it was growing in all directions, devouring his chest, his hips, his shoulders. His arms, eaten from both sides, fell off his body and dissolved into bubbles before they hit the tank floor. All that was left was the grinning green head floating seven feet over the enormous black boots.
The bubbles were working on P"tol P"kah"s chin now. Before they could reach any higher, the green man opened his mouth as if to speak-or to scream. But what came out wasn"t just a blisteringly loud roaring sound. It was light, a blast of pure white light that lit up every corner of the showroom, blinding Gus temporarily-but not before he could see the stunned faces of everyone in the audience.
Then the light went out, and the room was plunged into darkness.
For a moment the room was so silent, Gus thought he might have been struck deaf as well as blind. And then he heard a sound from across the room. He was so stunned by what he had just seen, it took his brain a few seconds to understand that what he was hearing was the clapping of hands. At first, it was just one person, but soon the entire auditorium had erupted into wild applause and cheers.
Gus knew exactly what he should be doing at this very moment. He should be constructing the perfect pithy phrase to shoot at Shawn, something that would take all his friend"s premiracle jibes and throw them back in his face But Gus didn"t feel like lording it over Shawn. He didn"t want to win an argument or grab a few well-deserved points. All he wanted was to luxuriate in the moment. Before he even started the inevitable-and inevitably futile-process of trying to figure out how P"tol P"kah had achieved this impossibility, Gus wanted to replay the moments in his mind and marvel over the vision.
As the cheering started to subside, the houselights flickered on. Gus turned instinctively to the spot in the crowd where P"tol P"kah had promised to materialize. He wanted to see the giant take his much-deserved bows.
But P"tol P"kah wasn"t where he said he would be. No one was. The magicians surrounding the spot had kept it clear, just in case, and the entire audience was staring at the empty hole in the crowd, but the giant hadn"t materialized. The applause faded away to a confused muttering.
Gus tried to ignore the minor disappointment. After all, the Martian Magician had dissolved in a tank of water. If he didn"t stick the landing, that didn"t take anything much away from the rest of the performance. But he knew that Shawn was going to start mocking the show any minute now.
"If you"ve figured it out, you can say anything you want," Gus said, not even casting a glance at Shawn. "Until then, I don"t want to hear that it was cheap or cheesy or fake. Because I"ll know you"re not telling the truth."
Shawn didn"t answer. Which was odd, because in all the years they"d been best friends, Gus couldn"t remember a single time when Shawn didn"t answer a taunt. Even when he"d had strep throat and couldn"t talk for days, he"d scrawl a response on a piece of paper, or at least hit Gus with a rolled-up magazine.
Gus turned to Shawn and saw that his friend was staring straight at the stage, a look of pure fascination on his face.
"A-ha!" Gus said. "You can"t even pretend you"re not amazed. That was much better than you thought it would be, and you can"t figure out how he did it."
"I am amazed," Shawn said. "But I don"t think I"m amazed by the same thing you"re amazed by."
"You mean the fact we just saw a giant green man dissolve into bubbles?" Gus said. "That"s not what you"re amazed by?"
"No."
Even for Shawn this was a ludicrous level of stubbornness. Gus wanted to shake him until the truth dropped out onto the floor. "If you"re not amazed by the sight of a giant green man dissolving into bubbles, then would you please be so kind as to explain exactly what does amaze you?"
Somewhere in the auditorium, a woman screamed. "Oh my G.o.d, he"s . . ."
Gus whirled around and saw that the woman was pointing at the stage. The rest of the crowd was turning to see what she was pointing at. Gus followed them.
The tank was simple, a gla.s.s rectangle ten feet tall and four feet across with steel brackets reinforcing the corners and a metal lid on the top. It towered over the audience in the middle of an empty stage that was raised three feet above the showroom"s threadbare rug.
On the tank"s floor stood a pair of enormous, empty black boots. And at the top of the tank floated a bowler hat. This might have been only of pa.s.sing interest, except that the hat sat on a head, and that head was attached to a portly body clad in a three-piece suit. And the head and body were both obviously dead.
"That"s what amazes me," Shawn said.
Chapter Seven.
Detective Carlton La.s.siter hated the full moon.
Not the moon itself, of course. The head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department knew that it was nothing more than a hunk of rock spinning in orbit around Earth, and aside from a moment of weakness during Apollo XIII when he shed a tear for the astronauts who were never going to reach it alive, he"d never been able to work up any kind of emotional reaction to it.
It wasn"t the psychological effect the full moon had on people that he hated, either. He knew that there was no way that human psyches could be affected by the percentage of shadow Earth cast on its lone satellite in a given time of the month.
What La.s.siter hated was the belief shared by so many losers and lowlifes that the full moon had some bizarre power over their behavior. He hated the way they used the monthly lunar phase to justify abandoning the inhibitions they barely managed to hold in check the other twenty-nine or thirty days. And while there was only a relative handful of miscreants who felt compelled to submit to the lunacy, there were far more people who believed that crazy things happened when there was a large orb shining down instead of a thin sliver, so they started seeing them-and worse, reporting them to the police.
To La.s.siter, this was all nonsense. And the head detective was one hundred percent No Nonsense. A stern, dogged investigator who worked his cases with the unrelenting rigor of a bloodhound in full tracking mode, he refused to be distracted by anything he considered less than serious. He"d been like this all his life. In his high school yearbook, under a photo of La.s.siter wearing his hall monitor sash, he was called the "least likely to put up with nonsense," and his patience with the stuff had only grown shorter over the years.
That meant he was going to be extremely annoyed by the time this night was finally over. It was barely ten o"clock, the full moon was entirely invisible behind a thick wall of fog, and he"d already fielded calls from one citizen who had seen Charles Manson buying yogurt at the Shop King, a homeowner who insisted that the gophers in her lawn were holding a meeting on her front steps and that they kept pointing at her and laughing, and a group of teenage girls who claimed that Shrek was cruising down State Street in a convertible. Two guys had turned themselves in at the police station, begging to be locked up before they transformed into werewolves, and then gotten into a fistfight over the question of which one would lead the pack.
And now, this. On a night when the crazies were all out to play, La.s.siter had been called to a crime scene where almost everyone was a nut-job: the Fortress of Magic, or, as he liked to call it, the Kingdom of Clowns. As a rookie officer, he"d been called here innumerable times to break up fights between two self-styled wizards who"d gotten liquored up and started revealing the secrets of each other"s illusions. This wasn"t hard, because there were apparently all of three unique magic tricks in the world, and everything else was a variation of one or another.
And now he"d been dragged out again, this time to investigate a drowning-some investigation. As he strode determinedly up the steep path to the Fortress, he guessed that the only mystery here would be how a grown man could drown in two inches of vodka.
Somewhere on the landscaped hill, a guard dog growled angrily. La.s.siter"s partner, Detective Juliet O"Hara, stopped on the path, her hand instinctively reaching for the gun in her purse.
"Did you hear that?" she said, trying to peer into the darkness.
La.s.siter sighed wearily. There were many things he admired about his partner. Although she was the youngest detective on the Santa Barbara force, she was also one of the smartest cops in the country. She looked like she had just graduated from a high school cheerleading squad, but those looks hid a powerful mind-and she knew how to use her appearance as a key tool in her casework.
The one thing he didn"t admire about his partner was her willingness to put up with nonsense. Behavior that La.s.siter would simply forbid as foolishness, O"Hara chose to dignify with her attention. To be fair, that often gave her an understanding of human nature that had helped them solve many cases. But it also ate up valuable time La.s.siter could use for more serious purposes.
"Keep up, O"Hara. We"ve got to pull a drunken magician out of a whiskey bottle," La.s.siter snapped, not pausing on his way to the top.
The growl was joined by several others. O"Hara"s hand tightened on her gun"s grip. "There are dogs. We can"t just-"
La.s.siter didn"t slow down. "Turn that thing off or I"ll arrest you all for disturbing the peace and interfering with a police officer." The growling stopped. He took a second to cast a glance back at his partner. "You just need to know the magic words."
By the time the detectives reached the entrance to the fortress, uniformed officers had corralled the spectators in the two large parlors.
"We"ve segregated them into members and guests," Officer McNab volunteered as soon as La.s.siter and O"Hara stepped through the door. "The guests were all attending a couple of different parties, and they"re in the East Parlor. A lot of them want to know when they can go home. The members are in the West Parlor. They all want to know when they can go to the bar."
"There"s a surprise," La.s.siter sighed. "Get statements from the guests; then send them on their way. I want your primary focus on the magicians. Find out which ones had a grudge against the victim."
"I"ve already done that, sir," McNab said. "It seems they all did."
"Of course," La.s.siter said. "I"ll get to them as soon as I can. See if you can separate the childish, petty grudges from the substantial issues. If you can find any substance. Oh, and track down whoever"s in charge and tell him if he doesn"t disconnect that dog machine, I am going to spay and neuter it personally."
"Yes, sir."
"Now, where"s the body?"
"Still in the tank, sir," McNab said.
"Don"t you mean the bottle?"
"Um, no," McNab said. "You really need to see this. But there"s one thing you should probably know first."
La.s.siter didn"t wait to be told. He marched down the corridor as quickly as he could. Detective O"Hara gave McNab a sympathetic smile.
"Don"t take it personally," O"Hara said. "Detective La.s.siter likes to come into a crime scene cold so his first impressions aren"t colored by anyone else"s."
"I just wanted to say there"s something you"re not going to like in-"
O"Hara held up a hand to cut him off, the sympathy gone from her face. "All good detectives like to come into a crime scene cold."
She turned and scurried to catch up to La.s.siter, who had slowed enough to let her catch up with him at the closed doors to the showroom.
"You didn"t let him color your impression, did you?" La.s.siter snapped.
"Not a tint," O"Hara said.