Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (14 page)

Stacy shook her head. “I never liked that old fart. Or anybody else in this
stupid
podunk town.”

“Freeze.” Abbie whipped her Glock out and pointed it right at Stacy. After a one-second hesitation, Ruddle did so with his service weapon, which appeared to be a Smith & Wesson. He wasn’t holding
it particularly steadily, but then he probably had much less experience with weird-ass deaths than Abbie had.

In fact, Abbie had had experience with this specific type of weird-ass death, not long after she first met Crane.

“Oh, please.” Stacy rolled her eyes. “Do you really expect that to stop me?”

“Let’s find out.” Abbie squeezed the trigger.

Suddenly, Abbie felt a huge burst of heat that made her stumble backward. She recovered after a second, but a sizzling sound made her look down. Liquid metal was warping and burning the hardwood floor.

Stacy was unharmed.

“I can melt the bullets the same way I combusted old Teddy. Or, of course, I can just make the gunpowder go off in the gun.”

Ruddle suddenly screamed and dropped his gun to the floor, shaking his hand up and down. “Damn, that got hot!”

Abbie heard the report of the weapon firing and then the pistol itself exploded. She threw her hands up to protect her face, and she felt something cut through her right arm. The pain wasn’t too bad, but it made it hard for her to maintain her grip on the Glock.

Ruddle was now kneeling on the ground, his kneecap a bloody mess.

“See, when you heat up the gun itself,” Stacy was saying in the same tone as your average tour guide, “and there’s one in the chamber? It goes off. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

“That’s quite enough of that.” That was Crane, who was now standing behind Stacy while holding the “Brown Bess” rifle.

Stacy turned to face Crane and laughed. “Seriously? First of all, even if that gun was loaded, I think we just established that it can’t hurt me. Secondly, that gun
isn’t
loaded, and hasn’t been since around the War of 1812. So what, exactly, do you think you’re gonna do with that thing?”

“This,” Crane said as he lunged forward and stabbed Stacy right in the chest with the rifle’s bayonet.

A very surprised Stacy collapsed to her knees. “Okay, didn’t see that coming,” she said in a weak voice.

Crane pulled the bayonet out, dropped the rifle, and moved to her side to guide her more gently to the floor on her back.

For her part, Abbie pulled out her cell phone and called 911.

Stacy laughed, but it was a gurgling, pathetic laugh, muffled as it was by all the blood in her mouth. “You really think you can stop us again, Witnesses?”

“You know who we are?” Crane asked.

“Course I do. Have ever since you stopped the mistress’s resurrection on the last blood moon.”

Abbie heard Stacy’s comment just as she hung up with the 911 dispatcher, and then clutched her injured right arm with her left hand. It would be about ten minutes until the ambulance arrived. Stacy and whoever else was involved with this must have been part of the coven of Serilda of Abaddon, the witch Moloch tried to resurrect the previous October.

“Of course,” Crane was saying, having obviously come to the same conclusion. “She killed Mr. Provoncha in the same manner that Serilda murdered poor Mr. Furth.” He looked down at Stacy. “But the security guards at the museums were killed in a far different manner.”

After coughing up some more blood, Stacy said, “We didn’t all follow the mistress’s path. And there are many kinds of magic to study.”

“So why do you need the crosses?” Abbie asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Stacy coughed up some more blood, then her body went limp in Crane’s arms.

“She’s gone.” Crane gently let her down onto the floor and stood up, her blood on his hands.

Abbie shook her head ruefully. “We’re gonna have a fun time explaining this one.”

“Don’t—don’t worry,” came a whispery voice from across the room.

Turning, Abbie saw that Ruddle was about to go
into shock, though he had had the presence of mind to use his coat to apply pressure to the wound on his kneecap. “Paul, it’s okay, the bus is en route.”

Ruddle nodded. “I know, I—I heard you call ’em. Look, Abbie, we’ve gotta—gotta have a cover story. Say—say Stacy went crazy, set stuff on fire, shot me. Also—you gotta gimme the rifle.”

Frowning, Abbie asked, “Why?”

“So my—my prints’ll be on it.”

“Sir,” Crane said, “I cannot allow you to—”

“Yes, you can,” Ruddle said insistently. “No one’ll question it if it’s me.”

Abbie shook her head. “Yeah, but Crane’s prints will still be on it.”

Ruddle nodded. “Right, he—he took it from me when—when I started—started goin’ into shock. Look, everyone here knows—knows me. No one’ll doubt my word, ’specially after—after being shot.”

Abbie put a hand on Ruddle’s shoulder. “Thanks, Paul, we owe you one.”

“Yeah, well—alternative’s to say a witch burned Teddy to death and your foreign buddy killed her. Don’t think either’a those’d go—go over too good, y’know?” He managed a ragged smile, which Abbie returned.

She turned to Crane, who handed the “Brown Bess” over to Ruddle so he could get his fingerprints all over the stock. “We’ll give our statement, and then get back home.”

“After,” Crane added quickly with a glance at her arm, “you get yourself tended to by the local physicians.”

“Fine,
after
that we’ll head back ASAP. If Serilda’s coven’s still active and stealing George Washington’s magical medals, we gotta figure out why, and fast.”

JANUARY 2014

CRANE THOUGHT THE
day had gotten as bad as it could when he saw one of Serilda of Abaddon’s coven burn an innocent old man alive and cause a life-changing injury to a member of Ticonderoga’s constabulary.

He did not reckon with the slow, painful process of bureaucracy. First he had to report to the emergency medical technicians who treated Investigator Ruddle’s knee and Lieutenant Mills’s arm. The latter, he was relieved to learn, was minor and treated with relative ease.

Then there was the report to Ruddle’s fellow officers in the Ticonderoga Police Department, and then providing the same report to their supervisors, and again to a county prosecutor.

By nightfall, however, Crane and Mills were
permitted to leave, and also told that they might be called back up to testify in a court of law, though the prosecutor who told them that also said it was unlikely. “It looks to me like it was clean.”

Once he and Mills got into the car, Crane said, “There are many adjectives I would use to describe what occurred this morning at the fort, Lieutenant.
Clean
would not be one of them.”

“Yeah.” Mills shook her head. “I also talked with the sergeant in charge, and he told me that they found all kinds of weird stuff in Stacy’s apartment. They’re thinking satanic cult.”

“They would be halfway correct.”

Mills started the vehicle’s motor and proceeded on the roads through Ticonderoga that would take them back to the highway that would lead them back to Sleepy Hollow. “Gotta give you credit, Crane, you kept nicely to the cover story. Wasn’t sure you’d be that good a liar.”

Crane sat up straight in the passenger seat. “Why would you think that?”

“Really?” Mills smiled. “The man who took months to remember
not
to tell total strangers that he fought in the Revolutionary War?”

“I believe I may be excused a certain disorientation upon arrival in your century, Lieutenant. In any event, I was, you will recall, a soldier. The craft of war is one of many falsehoods. Spycraft was developed in order to make fighting a war more efficient, and I’m only a bit proud to say that I was an
excellent spy. In fact, General Washington was one of the greatest mendicants in the colonial army.”

“Which is funny, since one of the stories people tell about him is that he couldn’t tell a lie.”

“Even leaving aside the many falsehoods he had to perpetrate to keep the truth of the daemonic war he and I and others fought alongside the human one from the people, Washington’s strategies were often based on deception. He was far from the greatest tactician the world has ever known, but he made up for it with guile. Often, he would convince the regulars that he was better equipped, better manned, better armed than he actually was. Deception is the heart of war, Lieutenant.”

“I guess when you put it that way, sure.” Mills sighed. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t convince the people that run the fort to let us have the cross, but they are hiding it away and reporting it missing. We know Serilda’s minions need one more, and they probably think we have the one that was in the fort. If we can keep the one in Sleepy Hollow away from them, we might be able to keep them from doing whatever the hell it is they’re doing.”

“We can but hope.”

Crane manipulated the levers on the side of the car’s passenger chair that enabled it to recline—a miraculous function that Crane was amazed to see everyone take for granted—and he fell asleep. Though unlike the lieutenant, he had slept through the previous night, he’d found the day’s duties exhausting.
Not so much being forced to inflict bodily harm on another. He regretted being forced into that action, but the witch herself had proven to have no regard for life, and the power to marry that lack of regard to fatal action. He doubted that he, the lieutenant, and the other constable would have survived the encounter had he not taken the drastic action.

No, what fatigued him was the bureaucratic nonsense, which had grown by leaps and bounds in the past two centuries.

He was awakened by the sound of the lieutenant’s cell phone making a noise. At this point, they were only an hour or so from their destination. She took advantage of Crane’s newly wakened state and her desire to see what telephonic communication she’d received to pull into one of the many restaurants that were operated by the McDonald family.

After she stopped the car, Mills stared at her phone. “Czierniewski. Great.” As they went into the restaurant, Mills entered the code that would connect her to the barrister in question. “Hey, Phil. Yes, I
know
the trial’s tomorrow. Yes, I’m out of town today, it’s called police business. You’ll be shocked to learn that I have other things on my plate besides a B-and-E from 2012. Don’t worry, I’ll be there at ten a.m. sharp.” She ended the call as they approached the ordering table. “Bad enough I had to drive to Ticonderoga and back; tomorrow I get to put on my best suit and head to White Plains to testify in the Ippolito case.”

“Ah, yes, part of the trial by jury. I might be interested in viewing this proceeding, to see how jurisprudence has evolved in the past two and a half centuries.”

Mills grinned. “Well, for starters, nobody wears powdered wigs anymore.”

“Thank heaven for that.”

After their repast, they continued down the thoroughfare known as the New York State Thruway until they crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge.

“Someday, Lieutenant, you must inform me who precisely thought it wise to build a bridge across one of the widest expanses of the Hudson River. Might it not have been more sensible to construct it over one of the narrower passages?”

“Had nothing to do with how wide the river is, but where it is. They needed to build a bridge as close to New York City as possible, but it had to be north of the New Jersey border.”

“Whyever for?”

“Politics. Any bridge between New York and New Jersey is controlled by the Port Authority, which is administered by both states. They tried, but they couldn’t get the bridge done, so New York built the Tappan Zee here.”

Crane was disgusted. “During the war, without interstate cooperation, we would never have won. Fort Carillon, to give an example from the location we just left—we would never have taken it were it not for the cooperation of a Massachusetts regiment
and the Green Mountain Boys from Vermont. Yet now, the states of New York and New Jersey cannot cooperate on a simple bridge?”

“Won’t get any argument from me. Though it isn’t ‘now,’ it was sixty years ago.” She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the damn bridge is falling apart.”

Crane found himself squirming in the seat. “Is it safe to traverse it?”

“Not too many alternatives. Going down to the GWB’s a bit much.”

Neither sure what Mills meant by those initials, nor entirely sure he wished to know, he fell silent. They were almost back at Sleepy Hollow in any event.

Both Miss Jenny and Captain Irving were waiting for them at the armory. The latter regarded both of them with concern. “You two look like hell.”

Mills burst out laughing. “You don’t look so hot yourself, there, Captain.”

“Yeah, well, you spend your day filing reports on cop-killings after being up all night.”

Crane took a seat by the computing device. “That is, in fact, a fairly accurate précis of our day’s toils as well, Captain.”

“Though in our case, the cop was just wounded.” Mills sat in the other chair.

The captain folded his arms. “At least you kept the cross out of the bad guys’ hands. But we still don’t know what they need it for.”