Dragons & Dwarves Read Free Page B

tallest of the emergency crew.
    In the river floated the rest of the body. The current was dragging the corpse north, but the tail anchored it firmly so that it pointed at an angle toward the center of the river. The wings had been shredded by impact, and were splayed out over the water like a tattered oil slick. The body seemed little more than a ragged leather sack, black mostly, but in several places there were brief glistening flashes of white where fractured bone had torn free of muscle and skin.
    The neck, near a third of its length, had been twisted so far as to nearly decapitate the body. In places it was held on by strips of muscle and sinew thinner than a human arm. The head floated on its side, and it was hard to believe that the open golden eye was not looking right at me.
    “The worst icky-eff since that griffin in Hunting Valley,” O’Malley told me. I wondered how long it took to cultivate that blasé attitude. I couldn’t manage it. I looked at O’Malley and decided that all it took was not giving a crap. “At least this time,” he continued, “no one was hurt.”
    “Except the dragon.”
    O’Malley shrugged, and pulled at my shoulder. “Okay, long enough.”
    I resisted the pull, more out of orneriness than an actual desire to remain there to watch the carnage. “Any witnesses?”
    “Witnesses?” He snorted. “Every West-Sider who was awake and outside at three-thirty in the morning. This isn’t something you miss, Maxwell.”
    “Did anyone see what happened?”
    “What happened?” O’Malley pulled me away from the guardrail and shook his head. “A dragon took a nosedive into the Flats, Sherlock. I know you aren’t up on your forensic pathology from working City Hall so long, but maybe I can explain multiple blunt trauma to you as I walk you off the bridge.”
    I shrugged out of his grasp and kept looking over the water. There was a Coast Guard ship down there, holding position downstream from the head. Around the base of the ship the normally mud-brown waters of the river had turned a sickly rainbow-shimmered shade of black—a slick of the dragon’s blood.
    As I watched, a figure broke the surface near the base of the cutter. His wet suit was almost as black as the water he swam in.
    Whatever they pay that guy, it isn’t enough.
    He gave a thumbs up to the people on the ship and a pair of winches in the back began reeling up cable. The cables slid out of the water behind the ship, gradually growing taut between the rear of the ship and the shoulder blades of the dragon.
    “What’re they doing?”
    “Come on.” He was more insistent, grabbing me this time. “Nesmith is going to give a briefing. You can ask her all the questions you want.”
    I kept thinking of the frogmen who had to anchor those cables.
    “You’ve seen enough.”
    I pretty much had, but O’Malley was a little more agitated than he should have been. I wondered why.
    “Look, they’re going to tow it to Lake Erie and sink it. The carcass is a public health hazard. Now let’s move it, Maxwell, before I cite you for interfering with police business.”
    I risked on glance back at the Coast Guard ship as O’Malley led me away. A glance whose significance flew right by me at the time.
    The irony was, if I wasn’t so used to the taxonomy of public officials in Cuyahoga County, if I was anyone else—say Morgan, who should have been reporting this mess—it would have hit me immediately that Adrian Phillips was out of place on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter dragging a corpse out of the river. Forget who, or what, the corpse was. But whereas O’Malley had managed to cultivate a blasé attitude about blood and carnage, the sight of major public officials had ceased to make much impression on me unless I was expecting some sort of wrongdoing.
    To extend the irony, I was probably the only person on the staff of the Press who could have identified Phillips at that distance while he was hiding behind an elaborate gas