Dead Beat

"Why?" Butters asked, bewildered.

"Because I know what those numbers mean," I said. "I know how to find The Word of Kemmler. And to do it, I need your help."

Chapter Thirty-six

The lights of Chicago were still out and the night was growing even darker. The storm had driven most people from the streets, and now headlights appeared only intermittently. The National Guard had set up around Cook County Hospital, bringing in generators and laboring to keep them running while providing a shelter of some sort and a presence of authority on some of the streets-but they were as badly hampered by the lack of reliable telephone and radio communications as anyone else, and rain and darkness had cast them into the same morass of confusion as the rest of the city.

The net result of it was that some streets were bright with the headlights of military trucks and patrolled by National Guardsmen, and some of them were as black and empty as a crooked politician’s heart. One section of State Street was sunken in blackness, and I pulled the Beetle up onto the sidewalk in front of a darkened Radio Shack.

"Stay, Mouse," I told the dog, and got out of the car. I walked to the glass door and considered it and the bars on it. Then I leaned my staff against it, drew in my will, and muttered, "Forzare."

There was no flash of light with the release of energy-I’d kept the spell tidy enough to avoid that. Instead it all went into kinetic force, snapping the plate glass as cleanly as if I’d used a cutter, and bending the center bars out into a neat bow shape, large enough to slip through.

"Holy crap," Butters said, his voice a hushed shout. "You’re breaking in?"

"No one’s minding the store," I said. I nudged a few pieces of door that hadn’t fallen out of the frame, then carefully slid into the building. "Come on."

"Now you’re entering," Butters informed me. "You’re breaking. And entering. We’re going to jail."

I stuck my head out between the bars and said, "It’s in a good cause, Butters. We’re the secret champions of the city. Justice and truth are on our side."

He looked at the front of the store uncertainly. "They are?"

"They are if you hurry up before someone in a uniform spots us," I said. "Move it."

I went back into the store, lifting up my amulet and willing it to light. I stared around me at all the technological things, only a very few of which I could readily identify. I turned in a circle, looking for one particular gadget, but I had no idea where in the store it would be.

Butters came in and looked around. The blue light of my pentacle gleamed on his glasses. Then he nodded decisively at a section of counter and walked over to it.

"Is this it?" I asked him.

"Something wrong with your eyes?" he asked me.

I grimaced at him. "I don’t get in here a lot, Butters. Remember?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah, right. The Murphyonic technology thing."

"Murphyonic?"

"Sure," Butters said. "You exude a Murphyonic field. Anything that can go wrong does."

"Don’t let Murph hear you say that."

"Heh," Butters said. "Bring the light." I lifted it higher and stepped up behind him. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "They’re right here under the glass." He peered around behind the counter. "There must be a key here somewhere."

I lifted up my staff and drove it bodily down through the glass, shattering it.

Butters looked a little wild around the eyes, but he said, "Oh, right, I forgot. Burglary." One hand darted in and plucked up an orange box. Then he looked around and picked up a couple of packs of batteries from a rack on the wall. He hadn’t touched a thing but what he had taken with him, and neither had I. Without security systems, the only way we would get caught would be by fingerprints or direct apprehension, and I was glad we didn’t have to take the time to wipe anything for prints before commencing the getaway.

I led Butters back to the car, and away we got.

"I can’t see anything," Butters said. "Can you make the light again?"

"Not this close to the gadget," I told him. "A minute or two wouldn’t be a problem, but the longer I work forces near it, the more likely it is to give out."

"I need some light," he said.

"All right, hang on." I found a spot near an alley and parked with the Beetle’s headlights pointing at the overhanging awning of a restaurant. I left the car running and got out with Butters. He opened the box and took out the batteries and did gadgety things with them while I kept an eye out for bad guys, or possibly the cops.

"Tell me why you think this is it again?" Butters said. He had drawn a little plastic device the size of a small walkie-talkie from the box and fumbled with it until he found the battery cover.

"The numbers in Bony Tony’s code are just longitude and latitude," I said. "He hides the book, see. He records the coordinates with one of those global satellite thingies all those soldiers raved about during Desert Storm."

"Global positioning system," Butters corrected me.

"Whatever. The point is that you need a GPS to find those specific coordinates. They’re accurate to what? Ten or twelve yards?"

"More like ten feet," Butters said.

"Wow. So Bony Tony figures that most wizards wouldn’t have a clue about what a GPS device is-and the ones who do can’t use one because they’re high-tech, and running one even close to a wizard will short it out. It’s his insurance, to make sure that Grevane can’t screw him."

"But Grevane did," Butters said.

"Grevane did," I echoed. "The idiot. He never considered that Bony Tony might have been able to outfox him. So he knows that Bony Tony has got the key to finding The Word of Kemmler on him, but Grevane never even considers that it might be something he can’t access. He just blunders along doing as he pleases, which he’s used to."

"Whereas you," Butters said, "read books at the library."

"And magazines, ’cause they’re free there," I said. "Though I have to give most of the credit to Georgia’s SUV. I might not have thought of this if it hadn’t had the same system."

"Note the past tense on that," Butters said. "Had." He glanced up at me pointedly. "I’m about to turn it on. Do you need to move off?"

I nodded at him and backed off all the way to the car and tried to think technologically friendly thoughts. Butters stood in the headlights for a minute, frowning down at the gadget and then peering up at the sky.