“Yes, and a good thing, too. If the kiss hadn’t worked, my only other option was to increase the positive energy of the spell in a more… extreme way.” I swear she actually blushed as she said that last part.

“Extreme? You mean… sex? You and me?” If I wasn’t such a tough guy, I think I might have been blushing a little myself by that point.

She gave her head a toss. “Well, it was either that or give up on the spell – and, as I said, I had spent a lot of time on it.” She took her time drinking some water, then said, “White magic draws its strength from nature, from the earth itself. And the earth is, as you know, the ultimate life force.”

“I think I read that someplace.”

“Well, that’s why generation of the life force is sometimes called for, especially in healing spells.”

“So, if the kiss hadn’t worked, you were prepared to…?” I let my voice trail off rather than say what I’d been about to, which was “fuck my brains out.” That seemed a bit crude, considering the circumstances – and the company.

“Fuck your brains out?” said Rachel, another mind reader. “I’ll just say that I would have given it serious consideration, and leave it at that. Let’s be glad that it proved unnecessary.”

“I know what you’re saying,” I said, “but I’m having a little trouble being glad about something like that.”

“As far as the Scranton PD is concerned, it might well have raised some ethical issues.” She put her water bottle aside and started gathering up the magical materials from her desk. Without looking at me, she went on, “Not to mention emotional ones, quite possibly.”

That’s the advantage of having a bottle of water in your hands – drinking from it gives you something to do while you’re trying to figure out what to say to something like that. But the best I could come up with was “Yeah, quite possibly.”

“Anyway,” she said, “the spell worked, and you’re feeling more like your old self, which was the object of the exercise. There’s too much weird shit going on right now not to have you at your best.”

“‘Weird shit’ is right. Speaking of which – how’s your research on Slide been coming along?”

“No breakthroughs so far,” she said. “Although I’ve learned quite a bit about its properties, which is a good first step. The work, as they say, continues.”

I finished off my water and put the bottle aside. “Rachel,” I said, “I don’t know how to say ‘Thank you’ for what you did.”

“I’d say you just managed pretty well.”

“Alright, then,” I said, and stood up. I braced myself for the pain that would follow, then remembered that there wouldn’t be any – not any more. “Duty calls.”

I was almost to the door when she said, “Stan…?”

I turned back. “Yeah?”

“You should know that I wouldn’t have used that healing spell on just anyone – at any level of intensity.”

I looked at her. She stared back. Neither of us spoke, but when the silence started getting awkward, I said, “Is this something we should talk about?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But not right now. Go out and bust some bad guys, Stan.”

“Count on it.”

As I sat down at my desk, Karl looked up for the first time since I’d seen him tonight. “Looks like you’re moving around a little better than you were before,” he said.

“Yeah, Rachel worked some magic and made my fucking lump disappear. My head doesn’t hurt at all now.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said, and went back to whatever he’d been doing at his computer.

“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” I asked him.

He looked up again, his face a study in innocence. “Course I would,” he said.

“Really?”

“Sure – you just told me about it, remember? Jeez, Stan, maybe that knock on the head fucked you up worse than you thought.”

I decided to give it up. “Guess there was no call for us while I was downstairs.”

“Nope. Slow night – so far. There is one interesting thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“You see the paper today?”

“No, I haven’t had a chance,” I said. “Why?”

He handed me the front section of the Times-Tribune. I saw that another judge from Luzerne County was being charged with corruption and lying under oath. I’m surprised they even bother to put that stuff on the front page anymore.

“Page three,” Karl said.

I opened the paper and found that the good folks at the Patriot Party hadn’t been letting any grass grow under their feet. They’d taken out another full-page ad, characterized by their usual restraint and statesmanlike approach to the problems facing our city. This one was expressing their sober concern regarding of the recent bombing outside Ricardo’s Ristorante.

“OUTRAGE” was centered at the top of the page in letters that had to be two inches high. The rest was pretty much what I would have expected, even if the print was a little smaller. “Another bomb explodes!” it read, followed by “More human lives snuffed out! More human property damaged!” The worst property damage had been at Ricardo’s, which was owned by a supe – but I guess the Patriot Party wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of a good rant. The ad continued. “How much longer will this go on?”

Further down, there was some text claiming that the bombing represented the latest atrocity in the ongoing supe gang war – I noticed it was “supernatural gang war” and not “vampire gang war”, which would have been more precise. The ad said a gnome was a suspect in the bombing, which caused me to wonder just where the Patriot Party got its information. I hadn’t had the chance to tell anyone what I’d learned from Loquasto, and I doubted that he or anybody else in the Calabrese family was spreading that information around.

The thrust of the ad was the same theme the Patriot Party had been playing for some time now: the city was going to hell, the supes, who were all either gangsters or drug addicts, were responsible, and the city government had been too inept or too corrupt to stop it. Blah, blah, blah.

I folded the paper and put it back on Karl’s desk. “I can’t exactly say I’m surprised. Are you?”

“Not about that shit, no,” he said. “But I got an email from a guy I know who works at the Times-Tribune, and what it said did surprise me a little.”

“And that was…?”

“The text of that ad, all laid out and ready for uploading, was emailed to the T-T at 7.29 pm yesterday. They just made the deadline for the next morning’s edition – the cutoff time for ad copy is 7. 30, he tells me.”

“OK – has this joke got a punch line?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Karl said, “and it’s a doozy. You know what time the bomb went off?”

“No, I didn’t hear the blast. Don’t forget, Mercy Hospital’s on the other side of town from Ricardo’s.”

“I wasn’t sure of the time myself,” Karl said. “So I checked the 911 log. The first call reporting the explosion came in at 7:17.”

After a couple of seconds, I reached over and retrieved the paper from Karl’s desk. I wanted another look at that ad.

There was a lot of text, and most of it was very specific to the bombing at Ricardo’s. This wasn’t a bunch of boilerplate that could be pulled out of a document file and turned into ad copy in no time at all.

I put the paper down and looked at Karl. “Somebody at PP headquarters works pretty fast, don’t they?”

“Maybe too fast.”

“Uh-huh. And there’s something about this mess that I haven’t told you yet. Before I racked out this morning, I called that number that Loquasto gave me.”

“The consigliere.”

“That’s the guy.”

I gave Karl the details of my conversation with the Calabrese Family’s consigliere. When I’d finished, he looked at me as if I’d just told him that the Girl Scouts were going to be selling hash brownies along with their cookies this year.

“That’s just… fucking ridiculous,” he said.