Getting Real

“Even fate yields to fire,” the dragon said. It opened its mouth wide. Its breath smelled like five sacks of groceries forgotten for two weeks in a locked car in the middle of August. And then the flame flowed forth. Whoever’d invented napalm back in the old days must have been thinking of dragons.

But nothing stopped napalm. When the sword with the dragonhide hilt smote the dragonfire, it magically transformed the flames to harmless mist. The dragon’s hoarse, guttural shriek of despair almost deafened Pablo.

He thrust home. He could feel the point piercing the hard scales of the dragon’s belly. He could feel it probing for the monster’s heart. And, as he’d felt his own heart pound, he felt the dragon’s stop. The creature tried to curse him, but died with the words still unspoken. That was good, because curses here were as Real as everything else.

Dragon blood steaming and smoking on the sword, Pablo pressed past the bend in the path to find out how big a hoard the great worm had had. Gold: coins and chains and rings and armlets. Silver: more coins, and bowls and spoons and a mighty drinking horn half as tall as a man. Jewels: some set into gold and silver, others simply sparkling alone, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. A king’s ransom? It was the ransom of a continent full of kings. And it was Pablo’s, all Pablo’s.

He’d pretty much expected that kind of stuff. What he hadn’t expected was that the dragon’s hoard also included the most gorgeous redhead he’d ever seen. All she wore was her hair, which fell nearly to her waist.

“My hero!” she cried in a voice like bells, and cast herself into his arms.

From then on, matters proceeded rapidly. They lay down together. He thrust home. He could feel everything that happened after that, too. Oh, could he ever!

* * * *

Shapur Razmara stared down in tired disgust at the guy lying on the sidewalk with a little square of green cardboard plastered to the side of his head and a shit-eating grin plastered all over his face. “Another one,” he said, in exactly the tone of voice he would have used to count cowflops at a fertilizer factory.

“Fuckin’ dingleberry,” Sergeant Kyriades agreed. “Let’s get Real.” He sounded about ready to york on his shoes.

“More and more of these stupid...” Razmara’s voice trailed off. Even though he was a cop with twenty years on the job, he couldn’t think of anything vile enough to call them. He wanted to spit into this unconscious punk’s face—not that that would have accomplished anything except to win him a disciplinary hearing, and not that the punk would even have noticed.

“We go through the motions?” Kyriades asked resignedly.

“Got a better idea, Stas?” Razmara said.

“They don’t pay me enough to have ideas,” his partner answered.

“Oh, yeah, like I’m so goddamn rich.” Razmara snorted. “Twenty million a month and all the acid-blockers I can pop. Hot damn!” Twenty million dollars a month and you could pick two out of three from child support, rent, and food. You couldn’t have ‘em all—he’d found that out again and again, the hard way.

“More’n I bring in,” Kyriades said. Which was true, but he’d managed to stay married. Not for the first time, Lieutenant Razmara wondered how. Sure as hell wasn’t his looks.

That was a worry for another day. “Gather up the goods,” Razmara said.

“Right.” The sergeant nodded. Persians and Greeks—they’d only been fighting for 2,500 years. But Razmara and Kyriades got on fine. And, since they were both white men whose first language was English, they counted for Anglos in Los Angeles. A Muslim Anglo? An Orthodox one? Why not? There were plenty of Jewish “Anglos” in L.A., but mostly on the West Side.

Kyriades pulled a plastic evidence bag and a tweezer out of his jacket pocket. He used the tweezer to capture the green square—you didn’t want to touch it barehanded. The LAPD had found out about that—again, the hard way. Along with the rest of the United States, the LAPD was finding out about all kinds of things the hard way these days.

“So we’ll take it back to the lab, right?” Kyriades said, carefully stashing the little square in the evidence bag.

“Sure.” Razmara nodded. “What else? Gotta follow procedures.” His great-granddad would have talked the same way about following the Koran. Stas’ great-grandfather, no doubt, would have yattered about the Bible the same way. To them in the old days, and to the lieutenant now, Holy Writ was Holy Writ. If you didn’t follow procedures (or the Koran, or the Bible—check one), Bad Things Would Happen.

Well, Bad Things were already happening. Getting Real, for instance.