Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [24]
“Yes.” He nodded. “However, since the young man caused you some heartbreak, it seemed to me that my mentioning his name would be insensitive. And since my thoughts on this matter, in any case, are mere speculation based only on suggestive circumstances . . . Well.” He gave a little shrug. “But since you happened to see him last night, I must admit to some curiosity.”
I again remembered that night, more than two months ago, at the Church of St. Monica in Little Italy. I was in the clutches of a ruthless murderer who was handling me brutally and threatening to kill me unless Lopez allowed him to flee to safety, with me as his hostage. The prospect of stopping the killer was thwarted by the pitch blackness inside the church, where all the lights had been disabled. . . .
I was choking, close to blacking out, with my captor’s hand around my throat as chaos ensued in the darkened church, with Lopez frantic to find me. I heard his voice . . .
“Esther! Goddamn it, where are you? Esther!” And then Lopez screamed, “I want LIGHTS!”
And the lights came on, blazing throughout the church.
That sudden shift from darkness to light may well have saved my life that night.
There was no logical explanation for how or why the deliberately sabotaged electrical system had revived at the very moment that Lopez demanded light. Max, however, thought there might be a mystical explanation for it: The sudden illumination could be the unconscious imposition of Lopez’s will on matter and energy at a moment when he feared for my life.
(He cared about me; he just wouldn’t date me.)
“As I confided to you during the funeral of our enemy at St. Monica’s,” Max said to me now, “I believe we need to keep our minds open to the possibility that Detective Lopez has talents of which he is unaware.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” I admitted. I knew that on a good day, Lopez would be amused and dismissive if I mentioned Max’s vague suspicion to him. And on a bad day? He’d go back to threatening me with remand and a psych evaluation. “But apart from estimating the age of a severed hand, he didn’t evince any unexpected talents last night.”
Max blinked. “A severed hand?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That has a lot to do with why the subject you mention didn’t cross my mind. Other things were claiming my attention.”
“Whose hand was severed?” Max asked, aghast.
“Well . . .” I shrugged. “He told me his name was Darius Phelps.”
I recounted the night’s events to Max. He listened with focused interest, interrupting only to ask for clarification or additional details, a faint frown of concentration on his face. When I was finished, I realized I was hungry, and so I picked up a little bagel and started spreading cream cheese on it. Nelli’s eyes followed my movements as intently if the fate of this dimension depended on what I would do next with that bagel. Avoiding her gaze, I bit into it and chewed while I waited for Max’s reaction to my tale.
“I don’t wish to alarm you . . .” he said slowly.
“Too late now,” I said. “A guy with a sword, an attack by gargoyles, a severed hand, arrest, and imprisonment kind of took care of alarming me.”
“What you experienced may not have been, as Detective Lopez thinks, a mundane prank.”
“Actually, he thinks it was an elaborate prank.”
Max shook his head. “By ‘mundane,’ I mean—”
“Ah. Right. The opposite of mystical.”
“Yes.” He stroked his beard as he pondered the ramifications of my misadventure. “What intrigues me is that the man you met is reputedly dead.”
“That intrigued the police, too.” I paused, recalling the cops’ merriment as they released me last night. “Well, no, I suppose ‘intrigued’ is the wrong word.”
“Your encounter with Darius Phelps may not be unrelated to the thorny problem which has lately been keeping me awake until late at night and making my sleep restless.”
“Oh? Is this problem the reason you say you were ‘barely asleep’ when I got here around four o’clock in the morning?”
“Indeed,” Max said. “There has been a recent change in the normal current of