Emerald City Blues by Peter Smalley Page A

otherwise. If I can't lay eyes on you any hour of day or night I feel like it, we're going to have an issue and there's going to be a judge involved in it. Understand?" I did, and let him know it by carefully rolling my eyes as I adjusted my father's fedora and shrugged back into my trench coat. I'd just laid my hand on the door knob to escape when Sneer resurfaced for one last thrust.
    "Oh, by the way - you wouldn't happen to know where the Lenin went, now would you?"
    I gaped at him. "It's gone? "
    He smiled in polite disbelief and took another drag, then shook his head as he blew out grey smoke. "I have to hand it to you, lady, you're one hell of an actress. Yeah, she's gone, angel. Vanished in a cloud of smoke. Poof." He illustrated with his hands. "Convenient. That's what we call it in the cop trade when material evidence of a crime disappears. Con-ven-i-ent. " He dragged out the word.
    I snorted. "Let me get this straight, Lieutenant . You let the scene of a crime disappear on you?" I snorted. "You're going to have to do better than that in the future, Mercer, or they'll take away your shiny bars and your cute little office." I let myself out before he could reply. The door closing behind me was the sweetest sound I'd heard in days.
    I went out onto the street and was surprised to see it was already late afternoon. Time flies when you're arguing with idiots. I caught a trolley, riding it just long enough to make sure I wasn't followed leaving the station. I jumped off a block later and walked down Second Avenue to Yesler Street, loitered a few minutes more, then went into the Seattle Hotel. The desk clerk immediately recognized the description I gave him and told me she was in room 37.
    I went up the stairs, weary and yet elated. I'd unraveled a major case, brought Tommy's murderer to justice, and kept myself alive. Now I was about to pay a call on a beautiful woman who had more than one excellent reason to keep me happy. If I could just discover I'd been adopted by the Rockefellers, life would be peachy.
    I stopped to rest at the top of the stairs to the third floor. Maddening as Mercer's ham-handed interrogation techniques were, they had given me a chance to figure out something that had been bothering me ever since I woke up in chains in the hold of the Lenin. Gordon Beskins, my eternally patient lawyer, had come down to the police station to protest the unconscionable mistreatment of his client et cetera et cetera . But while he had the bluebottles running out to fetch me coffee and a sandwich and for goodness sake just look at her, am I the only one with common decency in this sorry excuse for a police department, he slipped me a note. It was his research on Gerd's bequest. As I was still a minor at the time of Gerd's death, it had been given over to my father in trust for me. But I wouldn't have to go far to find it. I was wearing it now: his fedora.
    After Gordon took point on keeping the blue-uniformed dogs at bay, I went to the ladies' room and sure enough, inside the hat band was a thin coil of blood-stained silk thread, exactly the length of the perimeter formed by the pentagram of Nikolai's head and outstretched limbs. Nikolai's measure had been in my father's hat all along. No wonder I hadn't noticed it when I tried that Seeing on the dock - it was on top of my own head. And a good thing I was still wearing that fedora when I was chained up, let alone when I confronted him there in the bowels of the Lenin.
    The enormity of everything that had happened still h adn't quite sunk in. The context mattered, but I'd been betrayed, struck unconscious, hung from chains, suffered interrogation - twice - and shot a man to death, all in the last twelve hours. And now I felt nothing but exhaustion and a mounting sense of anticipation at the prospect of meeting Dasha. Shouldn't I feel something more? Guilt, perhaps? Relief? All I felt was a tension, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
    Promising I'd feel something all