The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(14)

“Thank you,” Jackaby called back to her.

“Who am I bailing out?”

“Everyone.”

The carriage bumped along the paving stones for a silent stretch. “By everyone, you mean . . . ?”

“It is a rather large jar of banknotes,” said Jackaby.

“Right,” came Miss Lee’s voice at length. “You’re the boss.”

“Sir,” I said. “Are we sure about that? I mean, obviously the mayor has been wildly reckless, but you said yourself that those cells were loaded with nonhuman species. This is why we were there to talk to Marlowe in the first place, isn’t it? Their world colliding with ours, and all the dangers that come with that? Wouldn’t it be wiser to at least take their release on a case-by-case basis?”

“No,” Jackaby grunted. “I refuse to treat them all like suspects. That legitimizes everything Spade is doing. It is a greater travesty by far to see the innocent punished than to watch the guilty go free.”

“It’s just a funny sort of situation, sir. The entire reason we were there today was to try to convince Marlowe that we need to be wary of the otherworld. It seems as though we left doing just the opposite. Are you at all worried? That some of them might be dangerous?”

“Oh, some of them are certainly dangerous. That gnomish fellow, for instance. Snorri. He used to run an illegal cockatrice fight out behind Chandler’s Market. I’ve shut him down half a dozen times. He’s done more than enough by now to deserve a hundred nights in lockup. That doesn’t make it right. Not like this. We cannot make the world less awful by being more so ourselves.”

“We do it by the book, then?”

“Precisely. By the book. Yes. Except that there isn’t a book.”

“Right. We do it by a vague but nevertheless tenacious commitment to the book that there isn’t.”

“That’s why I like you, Miss Rook—you catch on to the subtle nuances so quickly.”

Shortly afterward, with a tinkle of old liniment bottles, Miss Lee pulled the coach up to the curb in front of 926 Augur Lane. New Fiddleham was a much smaller city when one was in possession of a carriage.

As we trod up the front walk, Jackaby let out a thoughtful “Huh.” I followed his gaze to the transom ahead of us. It read, in clean, frosty letters:

r. f. jackaby:

exquisite frustration



“Are you feeling exquisitely frustrated of late, Miss Rook?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t put it as such, sir,” I said. “I don’t think that one’s for me.”

Jenny materialized between Jackaby and the bright red door. “Ah,” said Jackaby. “Good afternoon, Miss Cavanaugh.”

“I couldn’t find it,” Jenny said without preamble as we mounted the steps.

“What? Right—the Bible. It’s fine. I’ll see to it myself. That church is a long way off. It was quite ambitious for you to even consider the trip. I shouldn’t reasonably have expected as much of you.”

“I made it to the church just fine, thank you very much for your vote of confidence. Do you have any idea how many Bibles and psalm books and hymnals there are in a parish that size? You said to look for a shield, but none of them had anything obvious like that. If the shield is somehow inside one of them, it could be any of them.”

“That’s all right, you did your—” Jackaby began.

“. . . So I just brought all of them.”

The door swung open to reveal a small hillside of books heaped on the front desk.

“Hrm.” Jackaby grunted. He stepped inside and began to dig through the stack, picking up battered old books and dropping them back onto the heap.

“Thank you, Miss Cavanaugh,” Jenny intoned behind him. “It was nothing, really,” she replied to herself. “I underestimated you, Miss Cavanaugh. Oh, I was just happy to help. You are special and precious to me, Miss Cavanaugh. Please now, Mr. Jackaby, you’re simply too much.”

Jackaby paid her dialogue no mind, and appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room at all.

“I’ll just go fetch that bail money for Miss Lee, shall I?” I suggested, and excused myself.

I nipped down the hall to the office, grabbed the jar, and brought it outside. It contained upward of three hundred dollars in bills of varying sizes and clinked merrily with the handful of coins thrown in for good measure. Miss Lee’s eyes widened as I passed it up to her. “How often does Mr. Jackaby need to make bail?”

“It comes up more frequently than you’d think,” I said. “Thank you, by the way. I don’t imagine most drivers get asked to go bailing out crowds of almost-humans from lockup in their first week on the job.”

Miss Lee tucked the jar into a little compartment in her seat and turned back to me. “You know our boss is crazy, right?” she said.

“I picked up on that fairly quickly, too, yes.”

“Well.” She shrugged. “If a crazy man is the only man in this town who wants to give me honest labor, does that say something about me, about the man, or about this town? Maybe all three? Whichever it is, I’m not about to turn my nose up at the job. Besides, even if it’s crazy, it’s good work.”

I nodded. “He might not have both oars in the water, but his course is sound.”