Free May Contain Traces of Magic by Tom Holt Page A

buying your stuff.’
    â€˜There’s an ethical code,’ he replied weakly. ‘We’re not allowed—’
    â€˜Is that it, then?’ she said, giving him that never-really-expected-anything-from- you look that he’d grown so tired of over the years. ‘Only I’ve got the Kawaguchiya rep coming in at twelve-thirty - I’m taking him to lunch.’
    Chris managed a smile, somehow or other. ‘That’s about it for this month,’ he said. ‘Apart, of course, from our very latest new line, which I’ve been saving till last because I just know it’s going to blow your socks off. The JWW BB27K—’
    â€˜Oh, that.’ She grinned. ‘Heard all about it from Susie at the Telford branch. She had a customer, she bought one and parked her car in it, came back half an hour later and the car’d gone. Vanished. Called out the AA, finally got the supernatural breakdown service, the bloke told her it’d fallen through the fabric of space/time into a pocket reality and it’d cost nine hundred quid plus VAT to get it out again. And it was only a cruddy old Fiesta, so it wasn’t worth it. No, you can keep them, I’m not having them in my shop.’
    There was, of course, a perfectly rational explanation in that case, and if the customer had read the instructions properly and checked for ley lines, like the booklet said, it wouldn’t have happened. But he didn’t bother telling her. Waste of breath. ‘Well,’ Chris said, ‘if you change your mind you’ve got my number. So, shall we just run through the repeat orders?’
    She nodded. ‘Just the DW6,’ she said. ‘I think we’ll up that from nine dozen to twelve, just in case we get a sudden run. Your delivery people are so slow—’
    Just for a moment he was tempted to ask, but he didn’t. ‘Right-oh,’ he said. ‘Twelve dozen dried waters, what else can I—?’
    â€˜That’s all,’ she said. ‘See you next month, then.’
    It could’ve been worse, he told himself as he walked back to the car. Could’ve had that bloody trainee with me. Small mercies.
    (Angela the trainee had called in sick; or at least, her mother, who happened to be a personal friend of Mr Burnoz - would’ve been nice if Angela had thought to mention that - had rung him at home to say her daughter had come back a nervous wreck and what was that stupid Chris person thinking of, taking her where there could be demons, it was just a wonder she hadn’t been killed or horribly mutilated, and she was really upset about it . . . Sometimes small mercies are very small indeed, and come with a side salad of aggravation.)
    But at least, without her there, he could use the SatNav—Chris stopped dead, his hand on the car door handle. Why would he want to use the SatNav when he could find his way from Kettles to Black Country Esoterica blindfold on a dark night in the fog? He let go of the handle as though there might be something infectious on it, and took a step back, nearly treading on the foot of a passing stranger.
    There was that problem. He’d been warned about it, at the sales conference when they’d launched the product: the JWW Queenie (Quasi-Intelligent Navigational Instrument, Queenie; for which some genius in marketing had been paid good money) was the state of the art, a million per cent more accurate and reliable than the Stone Age non-magic version that ran on some kind of radio signal beamed off an American military satellite, but there was a problem. No bother if a few simple precautions were observed, and they’d tweaked the bugs enough to get it to comply with the latest EU regs, but—
    Actually, Chris thought it was more than a little problem, and when they’d told him he could have one he hadn’t been keen. I know my way round my own patch, thank you very much, he’d told them, I certainly