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“Bradley? Bradley!” I called as I looked back and forth.

Nothing. I turned around, and peered into the depths of the outflow pipe. I couldn’t see anything, of course, and I couldn’t hear anything but the water flowing, the city and the lake. I hadn’t seen him go in there. But I hadn’t seen him do anything at all, and now he was nowhere.

Spurk, I thought. Surely not even Bradley would be so arrogant, so chip-on-his-shoulder thick, as to go in there alone, not knowing what he was going to find.

I thought about it again. Oh, spurk.

I slipped my badge into my left hand. Pulled my gun with my right.

And nearly jumped out of my skin as Bradley landed beside the mouth of the pipe.

He saw me standing there, weapon aimed at the darkness, and pulled his own gun. I shook my head.

“It’s okay,” I said, lowering my pistol, “There’s nothing. I just… Where the spurking hell did you go?”

He slid his Glock back into the holster. He looked at me for a moment, then at the pipe.

“You thought…?” he started to ask, and his lip twitched, just a bit, “No,” he said. He held up his left hand; he was holding a Maglite, “I had this idea that you were hinting that we were going in there. So I thought I should go back to the car and get this. Since you were busy on the phone anyway.”

I flushed. I would have loved to have been in a position to lecture the smug bastard about not being forthcoming with his plans.

“Sorry if you got bored while my partner gave me vital information about the perp,” I said, and filled him in on the details.

At the end of it, he looked puzzled, “So why would a tree elf be stuck in the fall?” he asked.

“We don’t know enough to be sure,” I said, “Maybe he’s a Year King who skipped out three-quarters of the way through his term.”

Bradley just looked blank.

“Or maybe,” I went on, “He’s connected to a tree, and it’s the fall where the tree is. Maybe he’s from somewhere in Fairyland where it’s always autumn. Maybe it’s a time-share and he only has the tree between summer and winter,”

Bradley snorted, and I shook my head, “No, for real,” I said, “It’s one possible reason. Of a huge mess of possible reason.”

“And none of them,” he said, “Make any freaking sense.”

“It’s Fairyland,” I told him, “The parts that make sense aren’t logical, and the parts that aren’t logical…”

He looked at me. “Is it always like this, for you guys?”

“Like what?”

“Guessing,” he said, “Improvising.” He gestured towards mouth of the pipe with his flashlight, “Walking blind into the dark,”

It was my turn to snort. “Pretty much,” I said.

We were both silent for a moment.

“I didn’t know,” I told him, “That Jackson was Fae. Until we were already in the room.”

His gaze was as cool as the breeze coming off the lake.

“I thought,” I went on, “That the real Jackson was the one in the apartment. I figured the one in the bank was the Fae, and he’d stolen Jackson’s identity.”

I suddenly understood how it must feel to be sitting across a table from Bradley, answering awkward questions.

“Then, I thought he was just a Puck. A little trickster. That’s who pulls the money-that-changes-back-to-something-else scam, not a spurking giant psychopathic tree spirit. I didn’t want to tip him off, so I kept him talking until I could make him touch cold iron. It broke the glamour – the disguise – and if I’d been right, it would have knocked him on his ass, too. But I was really, really wrong.”

Damn, I’d been wrong about something else, too: Bradley was good.

He looked at me for another long, silent moment. And he smiled.

“Hell, MacAvoy,” he said, “We all screw the pooch in this job once in a while. I like that a lot better than being your pet mushroom.”

I stared at him. He stepped forward, gave me a companionable clap on the shoulder, and turned to look into the mouth of the outflow pipe. “And on the subject of being kept in the dark, now maybe you can explain why we’re going into a sewer.”

To Be Continued