The Night's Legacy (9 page)

Lois
jumped to her feet.  “Then why don’t you tell me?  If he’s so wonderful then why isn’t he around?  Why hasn’t he even sent me a lousy birthday card?”

Despite that
Lois was about to cry, Mom remained damnably calm.  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.  I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.  When the time’s right, he’ll tell you.”

“So he’s still alive?”

“Very much so.”

“And you still see him?  Is that why you’re out all night?”

“I have seen him, from time to time.”

“But why can’t I meet him?  Why can’t I even know his name?”

“I wish you could.  It’s just not possible.”

“Why the hell not?  Is he some kind of secret agent?  Is he in witness protection?”

“There’s no point talking about this any further.  He’ll explain it all to you when he’s ready.  Or if something should happen to him, I’ll tell you.”

“That’s real comforting.”

Mom still didn’t get riled; she just put her glasses back on and resumed working.  Lois wanted to tear the papers from her mother’s hands and rip them into tiny pieces, but she knew there was no point.  Mom had had sixteen years to tell Lois about her father and she hadn’t done so all during that time.  There was little chance she’d change that now.

“Fine, don’t tell me.  I’m going to get some air.”

“Lois—”

“It’s all right, Mom.  Keep your dirty fucking secrets.”  She didn’t give Mom a chance to lecture her about her language.  Instead, she stomped out of the office and back to the elevator.  A few minutes roaming the main hall would help her to cool down.

She had just stepped out of the elevator when she heard Stan the security guard’s voice saying, “Sorry, Mr.—”  A sound like a sneeze cut him off.

Lois
sensed right away that something was wrong.  She flattened herself against the wall and then peeked around it.  Right away she saw Stan lying on the floor by the front doors, a pool of blood spreading beneath him.

* * *

Her first thought was to get back on the elevator and go up to the fourth floor.  If she did that, whoever had shot Stan might see the elevator going up to the fourth floor.  She and Mom would be sitting ducks then.  The stairs would be safer.  She could take them up to the second floor and find an emergency phone.

Mom was thorough enough that the door didn’t squeak when she opened it.  She eased the door shut behind her, not wanting to alert whoever had broken in to her presence.  As she began to climb up, she waited to hear the sound of an alarm.  Mom had spent millions on the museum’s security system, with motion detectors, cameras, and pressure-sensitive alarms in addition to the guards.  Yet someone had opened the front door and shot a guard without any alarms going off.  It didn’t make much sense.

She was equally careful in opening and closing the door to the second floor.  Maybe she should try setting off an alarm herself.  That might scare the prowler away.  It might also draw the prowler to her.  She knew he had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Creeping around the corner, she couldn’t resist taking a peek downstairs.  She was kneeling just inches above Jeff the mammoth’s bronzed skeleton, looking down at the great hall.  Right away she could see there was more than one prowler.  At least ten of them that she could see, most of them wearing bulky black armor and ski masks.  These guys were definitely prepared for trouble.  The question was:  what did they want?

None of them seemed to be watching her, so she scurried away, keeping low so that the railing would conceal her.  She would have ran into the gift shop, but Tony had secured the metal mesh curtain for the night.  As a new employee she hadn’t been given a key to that yet.  She wasn’t likely to get one either if these thieves put a bullet in her.

At least she assumed they were thieves.  There was plenty of stuff in a natural history museum worth stealing, especially up here on the second floor.  There were the gemstones for one, some worth millions of dollars.  Some of the old weapons and such could be pawned to private collectors for a healthy profit as well.

She kept scurrying along the railing until she was in the meteor exhibit.  The meteors weren’t all that valuable; most of their value was sentimental for Mom.  She had begun her career at the Thorne Museum as a junior researcher studying meteors.  Space rocks had never interested Lois much; she far more enjoyed the mummies Dr. Johnson studied.

The meteors served now to hide her.  She crouched behind a black pedestal holding up a rock the size of a beach ball.  Behind the pedestal she found a bright red box containing an emergency phone installed for just this reason.  Mom hadn’t bothered getting rid of the phones even with the popularity of cell phones.  That decision might save both of their lives.

She grunted as she pried open the box.  Then she took the receiver from the box and put it to her ear.  There was no sound of the phone dialing 911, no dial tone, nothing.  The phone was dead.  She resisted the urge to slam the phone down and scream a curse word or two.  Had the thieves cut the lines or was the phone simply dead from age and neglect?

There was no point wasting time trying to find out.  Mom would have a phone up on the fourth floor.  A cell phone if her desk phone didn’t work.  Though since no alarms had gone off yet, maybe the thieves were bright enough to jam the cell phones too. 

She just about slammed right into one of the thieves as she headed back for the stairs.  She skidded to a stop in time to avoid him and then began backpedaling while a scream died in her throat.  For his part the thief stared at her for a moment.  She could only see his brown eyes with the ski mask he wore.  These narrowed at her and then he swung an Uzi up from his hip. 

She didn’t give him the chance to use it.  Her training kicked in and she slapped the weapon from the thief’s hand.  Before he could do anything else, she kicked him in the knee, one of the spots not covered with body armor.  He groaned and dropped onto his good knee.  She kneed him in the face to finish him off.

Before she could congratulate herself on her victory, she heard a metallic click behind her.  “Don’t move, kid,” a harsh voice growled.  “Not unless you want your pretty little brains sprayed all over the carpet.”

“You old flatterer,” she said and put up her hands.  Rough hands began patting her down, probably belonging to another of the thieves.  She could imagine what they were going to do to her now.  They might drag her off to a secluded corner or they might just put a bullet in her right here, depending on how much time they had.  Either way, she was going to wind up a corpse.

She chided herself for her stupidity.  She should have gone straight up to the fourth floor.  Though then she might have led them to Mom’s office.  At least now her mother might be spared, unless she came down to look for Lois.  She hoped Mom’s respect for her privacy won out.  Then at least one of them might survive.

Before the thieves could decide what to do with her,
Lois smelled something that brought tears to her eyes.  She’d spent enough time in alleys to know what a sewer smelled like and this was even more pungent.  The thieves must have smelled it too because one said, “What the hell died in here?”

“You,” a voice hissed. 

Lois threw herself to the floor, sensing that her attackers had something else to worry about.  She heard another coughing sound followed by a thud behind her.  Rolling onto her knees she watched as a man who looked like a film noir detective slit a second thief’s throat.  The man landed in a heap on top of his compatriot.

“You hurt?” the detective asked.

“No.”

“Good,” he said.  When he bent down to offer a grimy hand, she could tell that he was the source of the terrible smell.  Hadn’t he ever heard of soap?  He hefted her to her feet and then pulled her away from the corpses.  She didn’t have time for the shock of this to sink in.

Like the thieves he wore a ski mask to conceal his identity, though his was dark red instead of black.  All she could see of him were brown eyes and a long, pointed nose.  Who was he?  And what was he going to do with her?

The answer to the latter was answered when he stopped in front of the gift shop door.  She was going to tell him that she didn’t have a key, but he was already reaching into one of his coat’s pockets for a ring of keys.  “You have a key to the gift shop?” she asked.

“Never know when you might need it,” he said.  He flipped through the ring until he found a small silver key.  He stuck this into the lock and then gave the mesh screen a tug up.  To her surprise it lifted.

“What—?”  Before she could finish the question, she felt something heavy hit her on the back of the head.  She landed on her back, looking up at the foul-smelling man.  He held a revolver with a silencer in his hand.  That must have been what he’d used to hit her.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I’ll be back for you later.”

She fell asleep to the feeling of being dragged into the gift shop.  She hoped whoever this strange man was, he could save Mom too.

* * *

In his long history as a criminal, Rahnasto had never robbed a museum before.  He hadn’t seen any reason to start, but his mysterious contact claimed there was something in this museum that could get rid of the Silver Seraph.  Such a possibility was too intriguing for him to pass up.

That it was the Thorne Museum also persuaded him.  Ten years ago, when the museum was raising money for a new wing, he had offered to donate a few million to use as a tax write-off for one of his front corporations.  That bitch of a director had had the nerve to turn him down.  He had gone to meet with her personally after the initial brush-off.  She sat beside her desk and glared at him with such disdain that he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  “This museum does not take funds from criminal enterprises,” she said.  “Good day, Mr. Rahnasto.”

He would take great pleasure in looting the wing she had built without his help.  So much that he had come along with his soldiers—and the mysterious contact.  Like the rest of them, the man was wearing a ski mask to cover his face.  Unlike the others, he was wearing night vision goggles so that not even his eyes were visible and Rahnasto was fairly certain the man had some kind of voice-changing device as well.  This man wasn’t taking any chances.

The contact had gone in first.  He had shot one security guard, captured the rest, and disabled the museum’s security systems far quicker than Rahnasto thought possible.  This man was a professional too.  Rahnasto’s soldiers went in next to secure the building and begin taking some of the most valuable objects.  Only then did Rahnasto step inside, accompanied by Kamensky.

They wandered around the great hall, Rahnasto staring up at the giant elephant skeleton and the blue whale overhead.  Those would certainly make great trophies if he were into hunting, which he wasn’t.  He lit a cigarette and then looked around the darkened hall.  “Where did our man go?”

Kamensky barked a few Russian words into a walkie-talkie and then answered, “The Egypt exhibit.  Over here.”

Through a set of double doors they found two soldiers breaking open glass display cases of gold necklaces and bracelets.  They stuffed these into bags for melting down and reselling later.  Those would make a good profit, though not as much as a boatload of coke or guns.

The contact was at the end of the hall, standing before a half-naked mannequin wearing a skirt and sandals.  The mannequin wore a strange headdress that looked like a black dog wearing a golden helmet.  The dog-man clutched a golden staff with a head shaped like a dog as well.  The contact turned to Rahnasto and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Rahnasto shrugged.  “The staff and helmet might net a few thousand.”

“All you care about is money, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely.  You promised me the do-gooder.”

“And you’ll have her.  Very soon.”  With that the contact smashed the mannequin’s glass case open.  He reached inside to pry the staff loose from its plastic hand.  “This is what we need.”

“A gold stick?”

“You have no vision.  That is why you haven’t killed either of them yet.”

Kamensky brought up his gun.  “Don’t talk like that to the boss.”

The man brought up the gold stick.  Rahnasto watched as the eyes of the dog’s head began glowing red.  Lightning leaped from its eyes and mouth, through Kamensky’s body armor.  Kamensky dropped to the floor, the smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air.  Rahnasto shook his head and reached into his jacket for a roll of Tums.  “Now I need another lieutenant.”

“You still don’t see, do you?”

“That was a nice trick.”

“We’re only getting started.”

Rahnasto heard gunshots coming from upstairs.  He motioned for his two soldiers in the room to drop their loot and check it out.  “Sounds like she’s here,” he said.

“That’s not her,” the contact said.  “It’s the other one.”

“Maybe you can go use your stick on him.”

“Not yet.”  The man raised the staff to bash open the rest of the case.  Keeping the staff tucked under his arm, he took the headdress from off the mannequin.  “You’d better go too,” the man said.  “She’s almost here.”

Rahnasto thought about arguing, but he could still smell Kamensky roasting.  It would be best to find somewhere safe before the woman showed up.  He hurried out of the exhibit, back into the great hall.  He was about to down a couple more Tums when he looked up at the elephant again.  Only now there was a silver shape dropping from off of its head, her arms spread wide and cape billowing.