The 5th Witch Read Free Page B

Jean-Christophe Artisson. Their vehicle caught fire, and all three of them got cremated.”
    “When you say ‘caught fire’…?”
    “Eyewitnesses say that it just went up like the Fourth of July. The poor bastards tried to get out, but for some reason they couldn’t.”
    “They weren’t attacked? Firebombed or anything like that?”
    “There was some woman standing nearby, and apparently she was making gestures at them, but nobody saw exactly what happened.”
    “ Gestures? ”
    “Don’t ask me. That’s all the witness said, gestures.”
    “What about the Zombie? Was he anyplace close? Him or any of his goons?”
    “Unh-hunh. The Zombie was inside the restaurant, ordering the tuna. A couple of his goons were standing outside the door, but they were at least fifty yards away when the car went up.”
    “They couldn’t have planted a timing device?”
    “If they did, nobody saw them do it. But here’s the thing. Speedy Lebrun was inside the restaurant, too, wearing a wire. He was supposed to talk to the Zombie about the Fellini fire—get some kind of confession. When the car went up, he made a run for it, but before he’d even gone a block, he dropped down dead on the sidewalk.”
    “What the hell? Somebody shot him?”
    “Not so far as we can tell. He didn’t have no visible bullet holes in him, and there was no blood on the sidewalk. Maybe it was a heart attack.”
    Dan was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “Okay, Ernie. I’ll meet you down there. Give me five.”
    He tipped back the dregs of his Bloody Mary, folded his sandwich into a napkin, and climbed down from his stool.
    “Hey, Detective!” called the barman. “What time do you want my wife to come around?”
    Dan gave him a dismissive backhanded wave, like Columbo, and walked out of the diner onto the street, taking another bite of his sandwich as he went.

Chapter Three
    Almost at the same time, five men and a woman entered the reception area of Peale, Kravitz, and Wolfe, entertainment lawyers, on the thirty-fourth floor of Century Park East.
    The men were all wide shouldered, with faces that looked as if they had been roughly sandblasted out of reddish-brown granite, but they were all immaculately dressed in tailored suits, colorful silk neckties, and highly polished shoes. The woman was in her mid-thirties, with feathery white-blond hair. She was wearing a balloon-shaped dress of bright yellow satin, very short, and very high platform shoes.
    The reception area was walled with mirrors so that everything was multiplied three times over—the frondy tropical plants in their cube-shaped marble urns, the modern stainless-steel statuettes representing art and music and acting, and the six people making their way to the wide marble reception desk.
    The elegant black receptionist was pecking with inch-long fingernails at her computer keyboard. “If you’d care to wait, gentlemen—ma’am—I’ll be with you in just a second.”
    One of the men leaned forward a little. He hadiron-gray hair tied in a pigtail, a broken nose, and two fistfuls of heavy silver rings. “We do not care to wait,” he told her in a hoarse Russian accent, almost as if he were pretending to be the villain in a James Bond picture. “You will be with us now .”
    The receptionist said, “I’m sorry, sir, I really have to log in this calendar entry.”
    “You do not have to log in anything,” the man replied. He turned to the woman in the yellow dress and said, “Miska!”
    The woman in the yellow dress flapped her hand as if she were throwing something at the receptionist’s PC. There was a sharp crackling sound, and the screen instantly went blank. Baffled, the receptionist rattled at her keyboard, but the PC remained dead.
    “We wish to speak to Mr. Morton Kravitz,” said the man with the pigtail.
    The receptionist was bending under her desk to see if her computer had somehow come unplugged.
    “I said, we wish to speak to Mr. Morton Kravitz, and