He’d make it up to Luke somehow. In the meantime, he went to his office. The walls had originally been glass, but Sullivan had them torn down and rebuilt with solid masonry blocks, along with a heavy steel door.
It would have seemed like overkill, but Sam had been at the original hexworks when Fabiano’s forces attacked. A room they could hide in if bullets started flying was comforting to have.
How had his life come to this? From tending his family’s pharmacy in sleepy little Gatesville to worrying about being blown up or gunned down at his job?
Of course, if he’d stayed in Gatesville, he’d have been gunned down instead of Mom. So maybe nowhere was really safe.
No time to ponder it now. He shut the door behind him and hung up his overcoat and cap on the coatrack just inside. The office was large and contained a desk he seldom worked at, preferring to be outside in the old newsroom with Luke and Glenda. Bookshelves lined two of the walls, packed with every text on hexwork that Sullivan’s money could buy. There were three chairs and a low table, beside which was a sideboard with cold-hexed drawers. Sam used it to store bottles of ginger ale and Bevo.
The innermost wall held a safe, which itself was protected by the medieval look-away hex Sam had helped recreate when he first came to work for Sullivan. Even knowing it was there, his eyes slipped off it until he took out one of the counterhexes they’d come up with.
He reached for the warmth of his bond with Alistair. The hex in his hands seemed to shift from a two-dimensional drawing on a piece of paper into something with breadth and depth. Concentrating on it, he allowed the magic to flow from Alistair, through him, and into the hex.
Alistair would feel the drain of magic—more than a casual use, since the look-away hex was powerful and needed strong magic to counter it. Indeed, a moment later, he asked, “Everything all right, Sam?”
“Fine—I just needed to charge something.”
The sense of Alistair withdrew, the bond back to its base level. Sam held the hex up and spoke aloud the activation phrase: “Reveal all that is hidden to me.”
And there was the safe, in its ordinary place, right where it had been the whole time. Now that he could focus his eyes on it, Sam deactivated the alarm hex, spun the dial to enter the combination, and swung the heavy steel door open.
Inside waited the small wooden box from the night before, now closed. He took it out, feeling the weight of gold inside, and carried it out to the lab.
“…I know,” Luke was saying. “I just—” He fell silent at Sam’s appearance.
Had they been talking about him? His face heated, and he felt suddenly foolish, the way he had in school when other children would whisper and giggle while glancing in his direction. “Um, this is it,” he said uncomfortably, putting the box down and opening it.
“Holy Familiar of Christ,” Glenda swore when she saw the shimmering gold.
“I didn’t know you were Irish.”
“My gran was, and she raised me for a couple of years.” Her hands hovered over the disc. “May I?”
“Please.” Sam moved out of the way so the other two could examine it more closely. “This is what Mr. Sullivan wants us to figure out.”
Luke frowned slightly as Glenda passed it to him. “Are we sure it isn’t just some kind of primer to teach hexwork?”
“No, we aren’t.” Sam’s shoulders slumped. “Fabiano had it, so it might be something valuable? I mean past the gold and gems and all that.”
“Let’s take some pictures of it,” Glenda suggested. “That way we don’t have to handle the real thing while we work on it. It’s got to be worth a fortune.”
“We need someone who knows about Ancient Egypt.” Luke glanced up at Sam. “Otherwise, we’re flailing around in the dark.”
Sam hesitated. “Do you think an Egyptologist would work with us? Mr. Sullivan, I mean? It looked like Fabiano smuggled the artifacts into the country, and, well, now we have them.” After killing Fabiano’s men at the warehouse and taking everything, a thought which made him suddenly ill.
The look Glenda gave him was almost pitying. “Oh, Sam, you know there’s nothing money can’t buy. Mr. Sullivan will get what he wants, one way or another.”
7
In the late afternoon, Alistair left The Pride and made his way down Chicago Avenue in the direction of the water tower that gave Towertown its name. To the south, the newest skyscraper, the Tribune Tower, loomed over the shorter buildings. Still under construction, the steel girders that would underpin a neo-gothic crown clawed at the clouds like skeletal fingers.
His earlier conversation with Wanda had left him unsettled, so he dealt with the emotion by going out to hunt down the bootlegging gang that was rumored to drink at the Three Arms speakeasy. The Three Arms was named after either the Three Arts Club, which was meant to save virtuous young women from the sin of Towertown, or the fact you’d see three arms and five legs after you drank their liquor, the story changing with the teller.
The door was down an alley, in back of a building near a loading dock. The place didn’t look like much from the outside—but that was the point. As with The Pride, it gave the police a ready-made excuse as to why they hadn’t shut it down, even though some of them probably drank there.
He knocked on the door and waited. He was betting the Three Arms opened early, since a lot of its clientele, namely rumrunners, spent their nights working.
He was right; the door cracked open, letting out the distant murmur of voices. A suspicious eye glared at him through the gap between door and frame. “Can I help you, bub?” a man growled.
