Songs of Love & Death Read Online Free PDF

effort of will, raised a hand, and swept it in a horizontal arc, snarling, “Forzare!” Unseen force knocked his legs out from beneath him and tossed him into an involuntary pratfall.
    Murphy and I hurried up onto the platform before he could get to his feet and run. We needn’t have bothered. The carnie was apparently a genuine old guy, not some supernatural being in disguise. He lay on the platform moaning in pain. I felt kind of bad for beating up a senior citizen.
    But hey. On the other hand, he did swindle me out of twenty bucks.
    Murphy stood over him, her blue eyes cold, and said, “Where’s the bolt hole?”
    The carnie blinked at her. “What?”
    “The trap door,” she snapped. “The secret cabinet. Where is he?”
    I frowned and walked toward the entranceway.
    “Please,” the carnie said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
    “The hell you don’t,” Murphy said. She leaned down and grabbed the man by the shirt with both hands and leaned closer, a snarl lifting her lip. The carnie blanched.
    Murph could be pretty badass for such a tiny thing. I loved that about her.
    “I can’t,” the carnie said. “I can’t. I get paid not to see anything. She’ll kill me. She’ll kill me.”
    I parted the heavy curtain leading into the entry tunnel and spotted it atonce—a circular hole in the floor about two feet across, the top end of a ladder just visible. A round lid lay rotated to one side, painted as flat black as the rest of the hall. “Here,” I said to Murph. “That’s why we didn’t spot anything. By the time you had your light on, it was already behind us.”
    Murphy scowled down at the carnie and said, “Give me twenty bucks.”
    The man licked his lips. Then he fished my folded twenty out of his shirt pocket and passed it to Murphy.
    She nodded and flashed her badge. “Get out of here before I realize I witnessed you taking a bribe and endangering lives by letting customers use the attraction in an unsafe manner.”
    The carnie bolted.
    Murphy handed me the twenty. I pocketed it, and we climbed down the ladder.
    W E REACHED THE bottom and went silent again. Murphy’s body language isn’t exactly subtle—it can’t be, when you’re her size and working law enforcement. But she could move as quietly as smoke when she needed to. I’m gangly. It was more of an effort for me.
    The ladder took us down to what looked like the interior of a buried railroad car. There were electrical conduits running along the walls. Light came from a doorway at the far end of the car. I moved forward first, shield bracelet at the ready, and Murphy walked a pace behind me and to my right, her Sig in hand.
    The doorway at the end of the railroad car led us into a large workroom, teaming with computers, file cabinets, microscopes, and at least one deluxe chemistry set.
    Maroon sat at one of the computers, his profile in view. “Dammit, Stu,” he snarled. “I told you that you can’t keep coming down here to use the john. You’ll just have to walk to one of the—” He glanced up at us and froze in midsentence, his eyes wide and locked on Murphy’s leveled gun.
    “Stu took the rest of the night off,” I said amiably. “Where’s your boss?”
    A door opened at the far end of the workroom and a young woman of medium height appeared. She wore glasses and a lab coat, and neither of them did anything to make her look less than gorgeous. She looked at us and then at Maroon and said, in a precise, British accent, “You idiot.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Good help is hard to find.”
    The woman in the lab coat looked at me with dark, intense eyes, and I sensed what felt like a phantom pressure against my temples, as if wrigglingtadpoles were slithering along the surface of my skin. It was a straightforward attempt at mental invasion, but I’d been practicing my defenses for a while now, and I wasn’t falling for something that obvious. I pushed the invasive thoughts away with an effort of will