"Oh, listen to Mister squeaky clean over here. I'm not the one walking in on someone else's girl with my p.e.c.k.e.r swinging in the breeze."

"It wasn't swinging."

"It was hard?"

"No, it wasn't hard."

"Oh, it was cold. I get it. Say no more."

"What? No. It wasn't cold. Screw you."

"All right, forget it. Tell me what you did next."

"What do you mean?"

"What did you do after you walked in on her?"

"h.e.l.l, what could I do? I apologized, backed out of the room and took a shower in the other bath."

"Huh. Man, that does sound embarra.s.sing."

"It was. I suppose that's why I had that dream about her last night."

"You dreamed about Ursula?"

"Yes."

"Was it a dirty dream?"

I tried to stifle a growing smirk. "Well...."

"It was. Holy smoke. Stop the presses. This is great. Tell me everything."

"No. I can't."

"Why? Was it that perverted?"

"No. It was not perverted at all. It was sweet and tender."

"Really?"

I gave in and laughed. "Nah. It was erotic."

"Then tell me."

"I can't. Sorry. Pa.s.s me the salt."

"Did you...you know?" Carlos gestured a jerking motion with his hand and made a squirting fountain noise.

"Carlos. See, this is why I don't tell you stuff like this. Now come on. Pa.s.s me the salt."

"Tony, I'm here for you, man. Dirty dreams are my specialty. Now if I were you, I would"

His phone rang and stopped him in mid sentence. I pointed to the salt. "Before you get that. Pa.s.s me"

"h.e.l.lo? Hey Billy. Yeah how are you?" He partially covered the phone to tell me it was his car salesman, Billy. I tried to tell him one more time to pa.s.s the salt, but he ignored me. "What? No, we can talk. Tell me what you found."

I put my fork down and reached across the table as far as I could. Still, my fingertips remained just out of reach of the salt. I could see Carlos watching me, yet he made no effort to a.s.sist. My frustration nearly peaked when something astonishing happened. With just the thought of it, the saltshaker slid across the table the last several inches and into my hand on its own. Carlos' eyes grew wide. His jaw dropped and his phone clicked shut.

"I'll call you back," he said, unaware he had already hung up. He looked at me in disbelief. "How did you do that?"

I shrugged at the question, not exactly sure of the answer myself. "I don't know. I think I just pulled off a level four spell."

"A what?"

"Sure. See, witches categorize spells by levels of difficulty. A whisper box, for instance, is a level one. A beckoning spell say, that's a level two. Illusion spells are typically threes. A level four is when you get into some real magic. Fours consist of things like molecular modulation, or shape shifting. Then you have your fire lighting spells, the rite of pa.s.sage spell and bone reconst.i.tution, the spell that brought Ursula back."

"Awesome."

"I know. And of course, there is this one, the trans-molecular migration spell. It's the dissipation of stagnant resistance through matter redistribution."

"What, so you're a molecular scientist now?"

"Look. Think of it as the thinning of ma.s.s between you and another object. When the ma.s.s, in this case air, thins to a near vacuum, it allows the thicker air behind the object to push it towards you. That's what happened here."

He shook his head at that. "This is amazing. Do it again."

"Again? h.e.l.l I don't know how I did it the first time. I mean, ever since I saw Lilith do it, I bet I tried it myself a hundred times. This time I wasn't even trying."

"It's the coven," he said. "You are becoming a super witch."

I looked at my watch. "And you're becoming a reason we might both get fired. Come on. Eat up. We have work to do."

"What do you have in mind?"

"I want to stop at the railroad crossing where Delaney kissed the train the other night. Maybe look around. See if there's anything out of place."

Carlos nodded, saving words so that he could shovel the rest of his breakfast down before I could finish mine. d.a.m.n if he didn't do it, too.

We had barely rolled out of the parking lot of the Perc, when Carlos noticed the black sedan that had tailed us the day before. "They're back," he said, looking into the rearview mirror.

"The sedan?"

"Yup."

"Sure it's them?"

I watched his eyes ricochet from road to mirror and back again. "It's them. Same tag."

"All right. Let's switch places. Get him to pa.s.s us and we'll pull him over."

"I'm on it, Kemosabe."

Carlos waited until we hit a long stretch of vacant curb before pulling over suddenly. After the car pa.s.sed us, we pulled out behind him and lit him up. When the lights did not get his attention, we hit the siren.

"He's not stopping," said Carlos.

"I see that." I motioned a forward wave. "Just stay on him."

We followed the sedan at speeds above the limit, but not dangerously so. And if not for the fact that he blew through every stop sign and red light he encountered, I might have thought the driver unaware we were trying to pull him over.

"What do you want to do?"

"Keep with him."

"No. I mean you want to call back up? Get some black and whites ahead of us to toss out some sticks?"

"Yeah. Good idea. Looks like he's heading for the docks. I'll call it in."

I picked up the radio and keyed the mike just as the sedan made a sudden turn down a one-way alley. Carlos yanked the wheel hard to follow, fish-tailing the cruiser and clipping a row of trashcans along the sidewalk. The cans scattered in a blizzard of garbage and tin, sending an old bagwoman scurrying for safety in a recessed doorway.

"You're going the wrong way," I said. "It's a one-way alley."

He gestured at the car in front of us. "Don't tell me. Tell him."

I called our position in over the radio and requested backup. "Looks like we'll terminate at the docks," I told dispatch, believing we could hold the sedan there once he ran out of roadway. Dispatch acknowledged and routed two units our way.

We exited the alley onto a cobblestone patch of road sandwiched between a string of fish houses and the docks.

"We have him now," I said. "He's going to have to stop or get mighty wet. Get ready to pin him in."

Already, Carlos was breaking in preparation. "He's ours. Hold on."

The sedan skidded to a stop a couple of feet from the end of the pier. Carlos stopped behind him, tagging the car's rear b.u.mper and nudging it up to the edge. We bailed out with weapons drawn, a.s.suming crouched positions behind the open car doors. Sirens in the distance indicated backup was only minutes away. Carlos ordered the occupants to exit the vehicle with their hands in the air. When they did not respond, I repeated the command. Through the tinted windows, we could see two male figures sitting perfectly still.

"They don't hear us," said Carlos.

I shook my head. "They hear us. They're not listening."

"I'm moving in. Cover me."

"No. Wait for back up. We don't want"

My words yielded to the roar of a black helicopter gunship swooping in over the rooftops behind us in military fashion. It whirled around and a.s.sumed a fixed hover in front of the sedan. On its undercarriage, a double-barreled 50mm cannon trained its sights on us, while two machinegun-toting men hung from the open cargo doors like perverse gargoyles, their faces shielded behind bubbled helmet visors tinted as dark as the windows on the car.

"Holy s.h.i.t!" said Carlos. "Is that one of ours?"

I shook my head. "You kidding? We don't even have a weather balloon, let along one of those."

"Look." He leveled his weapon at the driver's side door of the stopped vehicle. "They're getting out."

We fortified our stance and took aim at the emerging occupants. "STOP." said a voice through a megaphone mounted on the chopper. "STAND DOWN."

Carlos looked at me. "Is he talking to them?"

"STAND DOWN OR WE WILL FIRE."

"No," I said. "He's talking to us."

"Us? h.e.l.l no. I ain't standing down."

And we didn't, but still we could not stop the two men from scaling the landing skids on the chopper and hopping in. The two black and whites arrived just as the chopper rolled back over the water, climbed some sixty feet and shot back over the rooftops.

"What just happened?" Carlos asked, his brows gathered in a nest. "Was that our military?"

"Not regular army," I said. "That's for sure. Did you notice that chopper had no markings?"

"CIA?"

"I don't know about CIA, but it was definitely not the Department of Agriculture."

He pointed at the sedan. "What do we do with that?"

"What can we do? Impound it and see who shows up to claim it. In the meantime, let us get to that railroad crossing. I have a feeling all these loose ends tie to the same big ball of yarn."

"Biocrynetix Laboratories."

"You got it."

We left one of the black and whites to deal with impounding the sedan and headed across town for the railroad crossing at Lexington. It had been several days, but there were still plenty of telltale signs of the accident. The wreckage had been considerable, as broken gla.s.s, shards of sheet metal and bits of rubber still littered the gutters and eas.e.m.e.nt along the tracks. We even found blood in dried pools as far as two hundred feet from the intersection. Where we really hit pay dirt, however, was at the foot of the crossing itself.

"Carlos, look at this," I said, kneeling at a patch of rubber stretching ten feet to the tracks. "What does this tell you?"

He pulled absentmindedly at his chin whiskers. "I don't know. Looks like someone tried to stop before hitting the warning gate. They left a big skid mark."

"No. Look again. First, there are actually two sets of tire marks. One of them solid and evenly laid, the other starts out dark and gets lighter as it nears the tracks."

"Okay?"

"A vehicle stopping suddenly leaves a skid pattern that starts out light and gets progressively heavier until the vehicle stops. This first vehicle here didn't do that."

"So what? He was peeling out, driving into the oncoming train on purpose?"

"No. he was sitting here with his foot on the brake, trying desperately not to enter onto the tracks." I pointed at the wider set of tracks. "This second set of tire marks. This came from a bigger vehicle, maybe a light truck. You can see here that he was spinning his tires. He had his foot on the gas."

"He pushed the first vehicle onto the tracks."

"Exactly."