Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [49]
They all looked at me.
“Never mind,” I said. “You were saying?”
Jeff pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. “Look, if it’ll make you people happy, I’ll call Frank again. And I’ll say . . .” He looked at Max. “What will I say?”
“We want to know exactly what happened on Monday night.”
Frank was still not answering his phone, so Jeff left him a rambling message. “Look, man, don’t worry about the Livingston classes. It’s cool. I mean, I’ve found someone to fill in for me. You. Me. Anyhow, the workshops at the foundation are covered. But I need to ask you about Monday. Did you happen to see anything, uh, a little out of the ordinary that night? Or were you—oh, I don’t know—attacked by green gargoyles with bad breath, for example? Call me back. It’s important.”
As he hung up, I said, “Smooth. Very smooth.”
“Like you could’ve done better.”
Puma smiled warmly at him. “Thank you so much, Jeff. I know you didn’t really want to call him, and I appreciate it.”
That helped. He stopped sulking.
“With Frank still unavailable and Biko still at the foundation, perhaps we should continue with Puma’s recitation,” Max suggested.
Jeff hoisted himself up to sit on the sales counter, next to the cash register. My feet were starting to hurt again, so I gratefully sat on a tall stool that Puma brought out from behind the counter. Max declared himself comfortable standing where he was.
Puma continued her tale. “Biko looked for the victim, but there was no sign of him. So he came home and told me what had happened. I suppose it seems like jumping to conclusions, but given everything he told me, and the imbalance I had been feeling during my rituals . . . I had a strong feeling that my brother had seen baka.”
Max nodded. Jeff closed his eyes and looked like he was trying to imagine himself elsewhere. I kept listening attentively.
“So the next night, Biko took his sword and went out hunting in the same area. He figured if the baka came out to attack someone else, he’d find them. But he phoned me after about two hours to say it was starting to seem like a waste of time, so he was coming home.” Fear and revulsion crossed her face as she said in a low voice, “I don’t know if they realized he was hunting them, and hid and stalked him. Or if they picked up his scent, recognized it from the night before, and followed it. Either way . . .” She shuddered again.
I gasped as I realized what she meant. “They followed him home?”
Puma nodded. “We had a little mixed breed dog. Maybe twenty pounds. His name was Gilligan. He always comes . . . came to the shop with me. Gilligan was getting old and slept most of the time. I’ve still got his daybed here, behind the cash register. And his little food and water dishes.” Her face crumpled briefly, then she cleared her throat. “Biko always took him for his bedtime walk. Gilligan was gentle and easygoing, and he sure didn’t move fast anymore, but he and Biko were barely outside the door of our building that night when Gilligan went crazy. I’d never heard him bark like that. So I looked out the window of the apartment right away—we live on the second floor—and I saw that little dog take off down the street like a bat out of hell. Faster than he had run in years! My brother had dropped the leash and was staring after him. I don’t blame him. Gilligan never ran, so he took Biko totally by surprise.
“And then I knew,” she said. “Because it had to be something really strange to make Gilligan act like that. Something out of this world. So I was out the door like a shot, down the stairs, and out onto the street, running after them. Biko was already half a block ahead of me. It was dark, so I couldn’t see Gilligan, but I could sure hear him. He was barking his head off!”
Puma took a shaky breath and continued. “Then I could hear him attacking something. And since he was the friendliest dog in the world—loved kids, loved other dogs, even loved cats—I knew he’d only do that if he’d met with something truly evil.”
“The baka,” I murmured, totally immersed in her tale.
“So I’m running down the street, and I