Free The Martian Falcon (Lovecraft & Fort) by Alan K Baker Page A

of voice suggested that he fervently hoped so.
    ‘I guess it does,’ said Fort as Lovecraft handed back the sheet of paper. ‘Capone didn’t create those zombies. Looks like he was on the level with me.’
    ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Dunsby, in a tone which suggested he really didn’t give a damn either way.
    ‘Well,’ said Fort, rising from his chair, ‘thanks for your help Mr Dunsby.’
    ‘Are we even now?’ asked Dunsby as he shook Fort’s hand.
    ‘Yeah, I guess we are.’
    *
    ‘Come on,’ said Fort when they had left the office. ‘Let’s go grab some coffee. I need to think.’
    They went to a small coffee shop on the far side of the building and sat at a table. Fort watched, frowning, as Lovecraft put four spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee.
    ‘Bit of a sweet tooth, huh?’
    Lovecraft nodded, stirring his coffee with agitated little flicks of his spoon. He took a sip, grimaced and added another spoonful. ‘Did the autopsy report confirm your assumptions?’ he asked.
    ‘Pretty much,’ Fort nodded. ‘Æther scanners don’t lie. If those zombies had been created with Enochian Magick, which Capone favours, the psychic residue would have shown up in the readings.’
    ‘So the likeliest explanation remains that Sanguine was responsible for the theft of the Martian Falcon.’
    ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t explain why Sanguine was offed.’
    ‘Some internal problem in his gang?’ suggested Lovecraft.
    Fort shook his head. ‘Pretty unlikely. Sanguine was by far the most powerful amongst his bunch. None of them would have had the moxie to go up against him, even if they’d wanted to.’
    ‘Then surely Capone must be behind it.’
    ‘That doesn’t make sense, either,’ said Fort. ‘Or rather, it would have made sense if he hadn’t brought me in. I mean, why do so if he intended to off Sanguine all along?’
    ‘Perhaps he changed his mind after speaking with you.’
    ‘No,’ said Fort. ‘He wouldn’t have changed his plan so quickly. Something else is going on, Howard. There’s a big piece of the picture which we’re not seeing.’
    ‘You think someone else is involved in this affair? Someone whose identity is unknown to us?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Fort miserably. ‘That’s what I think.’

CHAPTER 9
Father O’Blivion
    The Visitation Rectory stood on Richards Street, in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, an oasis of light in a desert of iniquity – at least that was how Father Cormack O’Malley saw it. He thought of all the Catholic churches in New York that way, and to him it was far more than a metaphor. His ancestors had lived in the wild countryside of County Cork, in the far south of Ireland, and the echoes of that hard and simple life rang through him with every beat of his heart.
    As he descended the stone steps from the Rectory’s front door to the street, O’Malley glanced up at the huge bulk of a skycrawler that had just heaved itself into the air from the docks in Gowanus Bay to the south. Like a fat, misshapen insect, the giant aircraft lumbered through the sky, its Cavorite-coated outer skin glowing an unpleasant and unnatural shade of green even in the bright sunlight of midday. O’Malley shook his head and cursed it silently.
    He mistrusted the strange science that had spawned machines like the skycrawler and raised cities like New York upon the face of God’s Earth; that mistrust was vindicated in the misery, greed and vice he saw in the faces of its inhabitants every day. To probe the mysteries of the universe was to bang unceremoniously on the gates to God’s Kingdom, and the towers of concrete, steel and glass which rose around him were as Towers of Babel striving insolently to reach a Heaven in which they had no place. The price of this temporal impertinence was the spiritual squalor that afflicted the city, weighing down the human soul and sullying it with the dark stain of so-called ‘progress’.
    It was a squalor he had watched infect the heart of more