Dragons & Dwarves Read Free Page A

didn’t like it.
    Par for the course.
    One cop broke from the herd and headed in my direction. I started angling toward the guardrail so I could get a good look at what had brought me here.
    “Kline Maxwell,” the cop called out to me. I wasn’t that surprised that he recognized me. I recognized him .
    Thomas O’Malley, SPU police commander. He was thin and dark, with a sharp face that led like the bow of a ship. He looked less like a cop and more like a Mafia stool pigeon, to the point where his voice seemed to carry a hint of New York in it. Despite his name, the only thing Irish about him was the fact that the Democratic political machine—in the guise of Adrian Phillips back when he was Mayor Rayburn’s campaign manager—had got him his job.
    “O’Malley,” I acknowledged him as I reached the guardrail. I tried to lean nonchalantly on the rail, which was hard with the wind blowing the smell of rotting mentholated fish in my face. “Any comments about the floater?”
    I noticed that O’Malley had a greasy trace of white under his nose. I wondered if it was better than Vicks. “What’re you doing here?” he asked.
    “Freedom of the press, hear of it?”
    O’Malley shook his head. The gesture reminded me of a bird of prey tearing a gobbet of flesh from a corpse. “This is a little far from Lakeside, Maxwell—or are you doing an exposé on the city contracts to move the corpse?”
    “So is the Special Paranormal Unit in charge of the investigation?”
    “Did someone say there was an investigation?”
    “Fifteen tons of dragon falls out of the sky. I may be slow, but that is out of the ordinary, isn’t it?”
    “Icky-eff, it happens all the time.”
    “Yeah, right.” I turned to look down at what brought me here.
    God, what a mess.
    “I can’t see you walking the pavement unless some politician’s getting his ox gored.” His voice sounded distant, far away from the enormity below me.
    “Morgan?” he asked.
    I nodded, mute, staring.
    “How is he? I heard they had to keep an eye on him.”
    I tried to swallow, but my throat was tight and dry. I whispered, “ Droll, O’Malley, very droll. ” I don’t even know if he heard me.
    The dragon did not go neatly. I had expected the body to be floating, more or less peacefully, spread-eagled in the river. That was a way too optimistic scenario. Crooked as the Cuyahoga was, it was, in retrospect, pretty damn lucky it hit the river at all.
    Here, under the bridge, the river went mostly northwest for about a mile before it took a hairpin turn due west. The dragon, from the look of the wreckage, had been heading due east, and met the ground about seventy-five feet shy of the river, at the edge of a gravel-mining operation. The impact zone had just missed the loading gantries.
    It was going at a shallow angle, because the body didn’t go splat there and then, though there was gore on the gantries about a couple hundred feet up.
    The body bounced or slid, off of the land, and tore across the cargo ship that had been anchored by the gantries. The deck buckled, machinery twisted and caved in, the great doors to the holds bent inward, everything splattered with black-red gore.
    The dragon had made it almost all the way into the river. Its tail was the only thing left on the cargo ship. Muscular and black, it was caught up and twisted in a pile of wreckage on the starboard side. It looked as if some gigantic monster had taken a bite about midway down the ship, a semicircular area where the deck didn’t exist anymore. It had become a satanic jungle gym of twisted girders, chain, and steel cable.
    About a dozen firefighters and emergency workers were scrambling around the wreckage, and I could see four blue white sparking flares where they were cutting the tail free. Looking at the firemen, the dragon’s tail was put into perspective. It was thicker than a human torso, and the part where it lay flat on the remains of the deck came up to mid-thigh on the