The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Though I didn't really need to, I picked up the map to check the route south. We could either head back to Winnetka the way we'd come and then down, or else we could fly west to…

"Michael," I said hoarsely, "I know where we can find a pay phone."

"Do you?" He glanced over to me. "I did not think you were overly familiar with this section of St. Ferdinand's Valley."

Tm not," I said. "But look." I pointed to the map. The next major flyway, a couple of blocks west of where we were, was Soto's. And the next decent-sized street north of Nordhoff was Plummer. "I know there's a pay phone there because that's where Judy called me from."

"Good heavens," Michael said. "The concatenated implications-" 'Yeah," I said. "Chocolate Weasel is involved in something really hideous, they're doing their best to hide if it leaks out of the Devonshire dump, we find out about it (I find out about it, I mean), somebody tries to get rid of me, somebody does kidnap Judy, and then they make her call me from a phone just around the comer from Chocolate Weasel."

"Since there is a phone at that location, and since it was undoubtedly working as recently as last night, I suggest we use it," Michael said. He lifted the carpet off the Chocolate Weasel parking lot eased onto Nordhoff, and flew west toward Soto's. Just getting away from Chocolate Weasel felt good, as if I were escaping cursed ground. Considering what I thought was going on inside the building, that might have been literally true.

Michael turned right onto Soto's and flew up to Plummer.

The comer there had a bunch of little shops. I didn't see a pay phone in front of any of them. I wondered if Celia Chang and Horace Smidley had screwed up. But what were the odds of their both screwing up the same way? Astrologically large, I thought.

"When a solution is not immediately apparent more thorough investigation is required," Michael said, a creed which for the research thaumaturge ranked right up there with the one hammered out at Nicaea.

He parked the carpet in front of a place whose skin had two words in the Roman alphabet - DVIN DELI - and a couple of lines in the curious pothooks Armenians use to write their language. I don't read Armenian myself, but I've seen it often enough to recognize the script.

Sure enough, the fellow behind the counter in there looked like Brother Vahan's younger cousin, except that he sported a handlebar mustache and had a full head of wavy iron-gray hair.

"God bless you, what can I do for you gentlemen today?" he said when Michael and I walked in. "I have some lovely lamb just in, and with yogurt and mint leaves-" He kissed the tips of his fingers.

Even if mixing meat and milk wasn't kosher, it sounded good to me. I hated to have to say, "I'm sorry, we're just looking for a pay phone."

"Across the street, behind the camiceria next to the Hanese bookstore," he said, pointing. "I don't know why they didn't put it out front, but they didn't. And when you've made your call, why don't you come back? I have figs and dates preserved in honey, all kinds of good things."

He was a salesman and a half, that one. I got out of the Dvin Deli in a hurry, before I was tempted into spending the next hour and a half there, buying things I didn't need and half of which I wasn't permitted to eat.

The Hanese bookstore also had a two-word English skin - HONG'S BOOKS - and the rest was in ideograms. For a couple of seconds, I didn't see the pay phone back of the Aztecian meat market. It was on the far side of a very fragrant trash dumpster; nobody flying casually down the street would have noticed anything going on while whoever had Judy made her call me. The camiceria's back door didn't have a window, either, so people in there might not have spotted anything amiss, either.

I dug in my pocket, found change, and fed it into the greedy little paw of the pay phone's money demon. I called Plainclothesman Johnson, Saul Klein, and Legate Kawaguchi, in that order. Johnson and Klein weren't altogether convinced that Chocolate Weasel was involved in Judy's kidnapping, though they both said the evidence was better than anything else they had. Kawaguchi said I'd handed him enough so he could give Chocolate Weasel a good going-over.

"Don't just send constables," I warned him. "That place is major sorcerous trouble. If you don't call out a hazardous materta magica team for it, you'll never, ever need one."

"I appreciate your concern, Inspector Fisher,"

Kawaguchi said, "but I assure you that I shall make all necessary arrangements. Good day." Shut up and let me do my job, was what he was saying. I just hoped he knew the kind of trouble his people were liable to walk into at Chocolate Weasel.

After that, I had to cadge some more change from Michael. I called Bea to let her know what was going on.

Instead of Bea, I got Rose, who told me the boss was at a meeting away from the Confederal Building and couldn't be reached no matter what for the next couple of hours.