Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [1]
I am not making this up.
How Max had eliminated Hieronymus was not entirely clear to me. Most things about Max were not entirely clear to me. He and a fellow mage, a man named Lysander—whose day job is keeping Altoona, Pennsylvania, safe from Evil (yes, really)—had done some chanting in another language, and Hieronymus had vanished. According to Max, this was dissolution, which he described to me as “something remarkably similar to death.” Since it was a permanent, all-dimensions solution to the problem of Hieronymus and his evil plans, I had no objection. But I also had a feeling that a jury might consider any legal difference (if one existed) between murder and dissolution to be so piddling as to make no difference at all in our conviction and sentencing, should these events ever come to light.
By the time Max arrived at Hieronymus’ secret lair to save me from becoming demon dinner, I had already beaten Hieronymus to a pulp with a candelabra and then thrown him as a decoy at the virgin-raping Avolapek (who did not refuse a free meal, so to speak). So a jury might reasonably conclude that I had actively assisted in the evil apprentice’s demise—or at least softened him up for it. I figured Max and I could both be in big trouble over those events—unless a jury also believed the part about Hieronymus summoning a demon and trying to kill a bunch of people (including me) at the very moment we snuffed out his life.
I pictured myself saying in a court of law, “Well, Your Honor, there was this evil sorcerer’s apprentice and a flesh-eating, power-granting demon he summoned from a primordial dimension . . .”
Even I couldn’t see a way to make that script work.
Which was why I felt it was imperative that Detective Lopez, who’d dogged our steps on that case, should never find out what had happened that fateful night. Happily, no one was pressing charges about the breaking and entering and vandalism that Max and I had previously committed (hey, we were trying to prevent more innocents from getting hurt, okay?), and Lopez had dropped that particular subject by now. He was, however, still perplexed about what had happened the night that Max and I, along with several missing persons (Hieronymus’ victims, whom we rescued when we defeated him), suddenly turned up at an obscure Morning-side Heights magic club without explanation, all looking (and smelling) as if we’d been to hell and back. There was also a white Bengal tiger with us—but I digress.
The problem was . . . I really liked Lopez. He liked me, too. But I was jumpy about any topic that might lead to his asking about that night. He sensed I was hiding things, and that raised his cop hackles. So our first couple of dates hadn’t gone that well. Nevertheless, he asked me out a third time. Obviously, it would have been smart for me to say no. From the beginning, actually. It would have been wise to avoid Lopez altogether, to stay off his radar.
But, come on, I’m a single woman in New York City. It takes more than a morbid fear of doing life in prison for homicide to make me turn down a date with an employed, attractive, single, heterosexual man who has nice table manners, listens when I talk, and knows how to kiss.
So I said yes to a third date.
We both worked nights, so we’d met for lunch on our previous two dates. This time, Lopez wanted to take me out for dinner. He said he had something to celebrate. He was a detective in the Sixth Precinct and usually worked second shift, getting off around midnight. I was doing eight shows per week as a chorus nymph