phones aren’t safe. Forthill has some contacts down south. Tell him I’d like to know if any of them have reported anything unusual. Take Mouse to watch your back.”
“I can look after myself, Harry. It’s still daylight.”
“Your weapons, grasshopper,” I said in my Yoda voice. “You will not need them.”
She frowned at me in annoyance and said, “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.”
I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”
“That doesn’t even . . . Augh. It’s easier just to do it.” She stood up and held out her hand. I tossed her the keys to the Blue Beetle. “Come on, Mouse.”
Mouse rose from his position in the kitchen and shambled to Molly’s side.
“Hold up a second, kid. Susan,” I said. “Something about this is making the back of my neck itch. The bad guys knew where to find us last night. They must have some kind of tail on one of us, and we don’t need to walk around with a target painted on our backs. Maybe you and Martin could go see if you can catch our shadow.”
“They’ll see us and pull a fade as soon as we leave the apartment,” Martin said.
“Oh!” Molly said abruptly, her eyes brightening. “Right!”
I went out to get the mail and walk the dog around the little backyard while Molly, Susan, and Martin, under cover of one of Molly’s first-class veils, slipped out of the apartment. I gave Mouse five minutes, then called him and went back down into the apartment.
Molly had beaten me back inside, after walking Susan and Martin out of the view of any observers who had a line of sight to my apartment’s door. “How was that?” she asked. She tried for casual, but by now I knew her well enough to spot when my answer mattered.
“Smooth,” I said. “Did me proud.”
She nodded, but there was a little bit too much energy in it to be offhand agreement. Hell’s bells, I remembered what she was feeling: wanting, so badly, to prove my talent, my discipline, my skill—myself—to a teacher. It took me nearly a decade for my hindsight to come into focus, and to realize how inexperienced, how foolish, and how lucky I had been to survive my apprenticeship with both eyes and all my fingers intact.
I wasn’t too worried about sending the kid on a solo mission. It was pretty tame, and Forthill liked her. Molly wasn’t much in a fight, but she could avoid the hell out of them if she had an instant’s warning—which was where Mouse came in. Very little escaped the big dog’s solemn notice. If hostility loomed, Mouse would warn her, and hey-presto, they would both be gone.
She’d be fine.
“Don’t take too long,” I said quietly. “Eyes open. Play it safe.”
She beamed, her face alight. “You aren’t the boss of me.”
I could all but taste the pride she felt at making her talents useful to my cause. “The hell I’m not,” I told her. “Do it or I dock you a year’s pay.”
“You know you don’t pay me anything, right?”
“Curses,” I said. “Foiled again.”
She flashed me another smile and hurried out, bouncing eagerly up the steps. Mouse followed close on her heels, his ears cocked alertly up, his demeanor serious. He grabbed his leather lead from the little table by the door as he went by. Molly had forgotten it, but there were leash laws in town. I suspected that Mouse didn’t care about the law. My theory was that he insisted on his lead because people were more inclined to feel comfortable and friendly toward a huge dog when he was “safely restrained.”
Unlike me, he’s a people person. Canine. Whatever.
I waited until the Beetle had started and pulled out to close the door. Then I picked up Martin’s printed pages, tugged aside the rug that covered the trapdoor in the living room floor, and descended into my laboratory.
“My laboratory,” I said, experimentally, drawing out each syllable. “Why is it that saying it like that always makes me want to follow it with ‘mwoo-hah-hah-hah-hahhhhhh’?”
“You were overexposed to Hammer Films as a child?” chirped a cheerful voice from below.
I got to the bottom of the stepladder, murmured a word, and swept my hand in a broad gesture. A dozen candles flickered to life.
My lab wasn’t fancy. It was a concrete box, the building’s subbasement. Someone probably had neglected to backfill it with gravel and earth when the house was built.