Jackaby (Jackaby #1)(53)
Swift, of course, took notice. “Who the hell is that idiot?”
Before Marlowe could answer, Jackaby addressed the crowd.
“Excuse me! May I have your attention, please!” he called out, completely unnecessarily. Every eye was already on the mad detective, who was hunching slightly under the rearing hooves of the marble horse. “Yes, hello, everyone. Many of you know me, but if you have never had occasion to work with me—or to arrest me—my name is R. F. Jackaby. I would like to thank all of you for coming out tonight. I’d have liked a slightly larger showing, but I suppose you will have to do. And thank you, Inspector Marlowe, for pulling this together on my behalf.”
Swift’s head turned very, very slowly to Marlowe. “This is your informant?”
Marlowe, in turn, deflected the attention to me. “What is that lunatic doing?”
“I’m afraid I really can’t tell you, sir,” I said.
Jackaby continued from atop the pedestal. “Now then, I would like to assure you all that we will have our man tonight if we all work together. We shall need to prepare a few things first, so pay attention. First of all, it would be helpful if one of you toward the front could get a small fire going. It needn’t be overly large, no bonfire, just a little campfire should do. Yes, you, there, with the turquoise aura and the cigarette tucked up in your ear—have you got a matchbox? Yes? Splendid. I’ve already collected up a bit of kindling that isn’t entirely damp—here you are.”
A soft ripple of subdued laughter and hushed voices was sneaking through the crowd, and the man Jackaby indicated was pushed forward. Jackaby reached down and dropped the branches into his hands.
Commissioner Swift’s face was reddening to nearly the same tone as his hat. “Marlowe . . .”
“His methods are . . . unconventional.” Marlowe stared at the detective as if the strength of his glare could will Jackaby to be less, well, Jackaby. “But, strange as it sounds, his meddling has managed to push investigations to their turning point on more than one occasion.”
A voice from the ranks called out, “Come on, then! Make him a fire, Danny! He can’t cast his magic spells without a good fire!” This was quickly followed by a round of barely muffled chortling.
Jackaby straightened and called out, “I assure you, I am a consummate professional. I do not cast spells!” Which might have done a better job of quieting the crowd had he not clocked his head on the horse’s rampant hoof as he said it. That would have been enough, but he insisted on defending himself further. “And, for your information, seldom has an open flame been requisite in the successful spells I have observed, and it appears to be a negligible factor in spell casting on the whole.” He said it with such earnestness that the crowd paused for a moment, holding its collective breath before launching into another round of jeering and laughter.
Jackaby looked mildly hurt. Swift looked homicidal. “This is on your head, Marlowe. If your crackpot imbecile makes a laughingstock of my police force—a laughingstock of me right in the damned center of town, so help me . . .”
“Understood, sir.” Marlowe was still staring daggers at the detective. “If he can point us to our killer, though, even if he is making an ass of himself publicly, then there’s no harm done to the department’s reputation.”
“Gentlemen,” Jackaby said, resuming his announcement, “this will not be easy news to bear, but the villain we’re after is hiding behind a badge. I mean to say, he is here among us, even now, hidden in plain sight—a terrible creature in the guise of not just any man, but a policeman.”
As he spoke, the clouds drifted apart, washing the square with moonlight and illuminating the faces of a hundred policemen—suddenly uncertain whether to be amused, offended, or afraid. The onlookers lost their smiles, and still more faces appeared in the surrounding windows.
Swift was practically vibrating. His eye twitched, and a dark vein had popped out on his temple. “You’re through, Marlowe,” he said through gritted teeth, and then took a step toward Jackaby and pronounced loudly, “That’s enough!”
The commissioner’s booming, furious command was all but lost in the sound of everything, which had already been going all wrong, suddenly going terribly worse.
Chapter Twenty-Five
One cry of alarm, and then another burst forth from the back of the crowd. The wall of uniforms surged, not parting fluidly as it had for the commissioner, but stumbling and shoving itself away from something on the far side. Even Swift, not accustomed to being ignored, looked more startled than angry as he attempted to identify the source of the disturbance. I stepped up onto a flower box to see what was happening just as a woman in a second-story window erupted into a sustained, throaty scream.
The officers had fallen back, leaving a wide radius around Junior Detective Charlie Cane. He was doubled over, clutching his sides as a spasm shook his body. Something was terribly strange about his arms. They looked dark, and the texture was all wrong; then his leg buckled and he dropped to the ground. His head shot up, and I saw his face in the unforgiving clarity of the moonlight—only it was not the same gentle face I had come to recognize over the past two days on the streets of New Fiddleham. It was not the face of a man at all, but the feral grimace of a beast.
I stood, transfixed, as my heart and stomach raced each other into my throat. Charlie’s legs looked broken, bending in places a man should not have joints, but still he rose, pivoted, and launched himself into a run down the cobbled streets away from the stunned officers. He stumbled and caught his fall with his hands, throwing himself back into his run so quickly he scarcely broke stride. He tore off his uniform shirt, and tossed it behind him, revealing stiff, dark hair now covering his torso. His whole body shook with another spasm, and again he stumbled, and again, until he was on his hands nearly as much as his feet. As he ran, those polished shoes clattered, empty, to the pavement behind him, the moon highlighting the sharp point of the toe. By the time the figure that had been Charlie Cane vanished into the billowing steam of an alleyway, it was not a fleeing man, but the form of a massive hound, bounding away on four great paws.