The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

And I have no other way of reaching him. Lives a pretty solitary lifestyle.” I thought about the farm outside the village where he’d taken me to train that summer. The old house, the barn, the muddy fields.

“Can you trust him?” Vega asked.

“The Front implied he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. So, either there really is an Order and he belongs to it, or there isn’t an Order and he thinks he belongs to it. Either way, he should be able to help me sort out what they told me. He’s really powerful, and he knew my grandfather.”

Besides that, he’s the only other member of the Order I know, I thought.

“Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out the pager I had used while consulting for her and placed it in my hand. It still had the iron case that protected the electronics from my aura. “I’ll call if anything important comes up. Let me know if you find anything on your end.”

“Will do.”

“Oh, and if you want your bathrobe back, I pulled it from evidence.”

“Huh?” I squinted at her before remembering the robe of John the Baptist. My bath robe, which Chicory had imbued with a veiling spell, would have been laid bare when Chicory was slain. “Oh, crap.”

“Yeah,” she said, crossing her arms. “The papers had a field day.”

“I’ll be happy to take it off your hands,” I said sheepishly.

“I already stuck it in a package and dropped it in the mail. It should be at your place later today.”

“I owe you,” I said.

“Just keep me in the loop.”

“I will.”

“And Croft,” she said, her eyes as stern as ever, “take care of yourself.”

13

I called James’s number from a payphone and spoke to a young woman named Carla. He wasn’t in, she said, not sounding especially happy about that fact. Probably why she volunteered the name of a bar where I could find him.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of the address, just beyond where the Upper East Side disintegrated into Spanish Harlem. I crossed the graffiti-tagged sidewalk, pulled the door open, and stepped into a drift of smoke. At first glance, the bar looked empty. I then realized everyone was gathered in a room off to the left, where I could hear the sharp clacking of billiard balls. As I entered the pool hall, I realized I should have asked Carla for a description.

In another moment, I realized I didn’t need one.

Everyone was crowded around one table where a young black man in a battered bomber jacket and cowboy hat was cruising around the cushion, stroking in striped ball after striped ball, barely seeming to look at what he was doing. A membrane of silver magic moved around him.

“Eight ball, corner,” he said, nodding at the far pocket.

Murmurs sounded from the audience of twenty or so. I rose onto my tiptoes and saw why. His opponent’s solids were in the way. The shot was impossible. Lips barely moving, James slammed the cue ball into the edge of the eight ball, sending it in a spinning arc from the edge of the table, around the mass of solid balls, and into the pocket he’d indicated, dead center.

He just used an invocation, I thought in alarm.

Straightening, James adjusted his aviator sunglasses and grinned. “Game.”

His opponent, a large man who had been watching with a constipated frown, removed a wad of bills from his pocket and slammed it on the table. As the loser stormed off, James coolly picked up his winnings and bounced it in his hand. Nodding as though he’d just calculated the dollar amount by its weight, he deposited the wad into a jacket pocket and looked around.

“Who’s next?” he asked.

The other patrons peered at one another and gave dubious shakes of their heads.

“I’ll up it to twenty to one,” he said. “Five hundred dollar minimum. I win, I get the five. You win, you walk with ten G’s.” A rubber-banded fold of hundreds appeared in his right hand, and he waggled it back and forth.

The chatter around the table got louder, but still no takers.

“What about you, lanky?”

I didn’t realize he was talking to me until heads turned. The crowd stepped apart, creating a smoky aisle between me and the table. James stood on the table’s other side, cue over one shoulder.

He was younger than he’d looked at first glance, about my height but muscular and with the kind of carved face and lips women loved. Though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-three, twenty-four, I still couldn’t get over the audacity of the guy. A member of the Order using magic to hustle? Then again, his file was thick with infractions.

I cleared my throat. “You’re James Wesson, right?”

“What’s this look like?” he asked. “A meet and greet?”

The crowd laughed, making my face burn with embarrassment.

“I’m actually here on NYPD business,” I said, affecting an official tone. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

“Tough tits, porky. I’m working.”

More laughter broke from the crowd. James chalked his cue and gave it a casual puff.

“This is serious,” I said. “A matter of highest order.”

I emphasized the last word, but if James caught the meaning, he gave no sign. Instead, he looked around as though he’d lost interest in me, just someone taking up space in his world. The crowd shouldered me back.

“Forty to one,” he offered now.

Whistles sounded at what the winner stood to gain.

“I’ll take those odds.”

A riotous cheer went up as the attention turned back to me and enthusiastic hands ushered me toward the pool table. The grin on James’s lips hardened as he sized me up. I’d whispered an invocation before accepting his challenge, hiding my wizard’s aura. I assumed a look of defiance now, someone who had just been humiliated and was determined to get even.

James recovered his grin. “Let’s see the green.”

I pulled out my wallet, which I’d just loaded with cash for my trip, and held it open. He nodded and rolled the cue ball to