Jazz: Monster Collector In: Crime Scenes (Season 1, Episode 9) Read online

As soon as I stated up the steps to my office I got a bad feeling that had me drawing the MacDaddy.

  “What’s with the gun?” the big oaf said as he squeezed through the door to my building.

  Pressed to the wall and easing my way up the steps, I waved a hand behind me to hush my hairy companion. I hit the landing and sure enough the door to my waiting room was cracked open an inch. I ducked beneath the glass etched with my name and pressed myself tight to the wall. I eased the door open. I heard papers rustling.

  Soft as a cat, I crept on well trained feet through the waiting room. The mallow light in my office was on and I heard something fall to the floor.

  Using the noisy cover, I scurried to the side of the open door. Someone, a human I thought, was crouched down picking up a spilled file folder.

  Enough research, time for answers.

  I holstered the gun and charged.

  “What the—” the intruder said standing and turning. But I hit him before he could finish his utterance of surprise. “Ooomph!” Air bust from his lungs as I slammed a palm into his softer, floating ribs. He, and it was a he, crumpled forward. I swept his feet out and dumped him face first to the floor. I dropped a heavy knee into his lower spine as I twisted his arm around to his back and shoved it closer to the base of his neck.

  “Ahhhhh!” He looked like he was trying to push his head though the floor to ease the pain in his shoulder.

  All the anger I’d built up over the past few days poured through me and I pushed his hand up a little further.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  Then, grinding my knee into his back, I leaned in close to his ear. “I have a few questions that you’re gonna want to answer, skumbag,”

  “Ah—ah—ah!” he screeched, then, taking a difficult breath in, shouted in one great gasp, “Cole!”

  My head snapped up and disappointment overwrote my rage. “Samuels?”

  “Ahhh!” he cried out, and then gasped again. “Yes!”

  “Crud.” I let his arm go and stood up. I dropped my gloves on my desk and ran a hand down my face trying to wipe away some of the tension piled there.

  Very, very slowly and painfully, he slid the twisted arm off his back and wrenched it down to his side. “Oww. Oww.”

  I scratched at my short, spiky hair. “What are you doing here?”

  “Getting my ass kicked, apparently!”

  “Obviously, so no need to shout.”

  He cursed me though a barrage of pain expressing grunts and wheezes as he sat back on his legs, stretched out, and then eased himself around to sitting on the floor with his back resting against my desk. He rubbed his shore shoulder with the opposite hand and his breath shuttered. His eyes were wet with tears.

  I didn’t like uninvited guests—actually I didn’t like guests at all. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for traffic tickets.”

  “You’re what?”

  Bracing against the desk, he got himself up standing. “I’m trying to—look out!” his eyes burst open, a bright contrast against his dark completion, and he drew his stun-pole.

  I reached out and eased his armed hand down. “Relax, Inspector, he’s with me.”

  “What is it?” Samuels asked with still bulging eyes.

  I jammed a thumb in Mickey’s direction, who stood in the hall watching. “He’s Boss Geeter’s big f’n foot.”

  “I never heard of a—Geeter’s? As in the mobster?” Samuels exclaimed and raised his weapon again.

  “Cool it.” With a heaved sigh, I circled my desk and sat behind it. “Like I said, he’s with me.”

  “Cool it?” he said as his thick eyebrows rose in confusion. Then, letting my antiquated colloquialism go, slid his head into a slow shake. “I don’t know Cole, I keep sticking my neck out for you, and you keep giving me reason to drag you back to the magistrate.”

  “Who’s Cole?” Mickey asked, leaning back against the wall in the hallway.

  “Tickets?” I asked ignoring the question.

  “What?” Samuels dragged his eyes off the sasquatch and circled his sore shoulder. “Your traffic tickets.”

  “Why? Finally going to clear those up for me, out of the kindness of your heart?”

  The inspector set his hands on his hips, and I caught an impressive set of abdominal muscles, no doubt magically augmented, beneath his stretched shirt. The idle citizens of Mirth didn’t need to bother with exercise, so they didn’t. “I’m not here to do you any favors if that’s what you’re asking. We impounded your flycraft you know?”

  “I know,” I said and kicked my filthy boots up on the desk. “So what are you here to do?”

  “I’m going to clear those tickets up for you.”

  I felt my brow wrinkle. “I thought you weren’t here to do me any favors.”

  “I’m not. But that creepy ship of yours won’t shut up. It’s got everyone in the building freaking out. So I’m doing all of us a favor.”

  I kicked my feet down, yanked open a drawer, pulled out a thick file-folder and dropped it heavy on my desk, which might just have been the last wooden desk in existence.

  Samuels picked it up, flipped it open, and whistled through his perfect teeth. “Quite an impressive collection you’ve got here.”

  “Which I’ll be all too happy to trade you for my flycraft.”

  Samuels closed the file and his expression sombered. “Look, I’m sorry Cole, but they’re going to disassemble your flycraft and recycle it. But on the bright side, you’ll loose all of these,” he said holding the folder up.

  I sprang to my feet and ripped the folder from his hand. “No. I’ll pay them.”

  Samuels made a pathetic grab for the folder. He was no match for me and he knew it. He crossed his arms in defiance. “I don’t get it, Jazz. You hate that ship…almost as much as it hates you, which is a sentence that gives me the creeps in and of itself. You know that thing shouldn’t even exist. You’ve been lucky that there’s no law against en-souling a machine or this would have happened a lot sooner. We’re doing you a favor.”

  “A favor!” I snapped and dropped my folder back in the drawer and closed it. Fact was, demon soul aside, that flycraft was loaded with illegal and illicit armaments and gadgets galore. Besides losing my flycraft, if the enforcer corps took that machine apart, I’d loose my freedom for a very long time. I leaned on the desk and lowered my voice. “Adam, I need that ship, now more than ever. There’s a big fight coming my way, and you’re going to need me to fight it. I can’t do that without Ship.”

  “Big fight? What big fight?” Samuels asked, the frustration raising both the pitch and the volume of his voice.

  I caught a glare and a head shake from Mickey. I had to be careful here, both the enforcer corps and Boss Geeter were, in essence, in the room with me listening. I walked to the transparency in the wall, stared outside and rubbed the back of my neck. “Something’s going on, something big, something bad. Someone, or something, is hitting monsters, hitting them hard and without apparent rhyme or reason.”

  Samuels shot me a patronizing smile. “I haven’t heard anything about attacks on deferred species.”

  “No one reports attacks on monsters. Even if they did, you and yours would write it off as in-fighting and forget about it. Hell, I made a career out of the fact that no one cares about a dead monster.”

  “You especially,” he said defensively. “Why?”

  My gaze drifted to the foggy horizon as I let my eyes go unfocused and relaxed my brain, making room for thoughts. The office sat respectfully quiet as I did. I couldn’t tell this cop that I’d been forced into working for monsters without endangering the lives of the people that actually cared about me. But I had to tell him something, so I told him as much truth as I could. “Because my gut tells me that there’s more behind these attacks than the deaths of deferred species.”

  “Like what?” Samuels and Mickey asked in a duet.

  I turned around. I hadn’t realized that I knew t
he answer until I’d said it, but it felt right. “Someone’s stirring up the evilest of evil creatures, manipulating them into a war.”

  The trenches running across the inspector’s brow deepened. “A war with who?”

  The obviousness of the answer shrugged my shoulders. “With humans.”

  The inspector’s mouth widened into a smirk. “Impossible.”

  “Why?” Mickey asked, squeezing though the door and into the office at last. Samuels was a tall man, but when he looked up at Mickey’s huge form, he eased himself further away. Of course it might not have been the sasquatch’s size, but his pungent order that drove the cop away.

  I was usually one to keep information to myself, but that seemed like a time for sharing. “I don’t know really, I’m going on guesses and hunches, but here’s what I’m sure of.”

  Mickey and the inspector leaned in closer to me.

  “Whatever or whoever’s behind this wants me involved, is inviting me in, but wants me weak. They’ve taken away my best, and worst,” I added thinking of Moxie, the flower fairy Boss Geeter was holding to coerce me into working for him, “people and weapons.”

  I caught the rise of Samuels’ brow, though his eyes were still wide with confusion. I could guess that his cop instincts were struggling against all the lies his Mirthen upbringing had taught him about the human triumph over the deferred species. There was a tense moment where I wondered which way he’d go, and if we be fighting against or with one another.

  “Ship’s a real, off-the-scale abomination, and a royal fruit, but he’s also the most dangerous flycraft in the sky. Word is