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I’ll come right out and admit it: It was one of the more sullen car rides I’ve been a party to.

It wasn’t just Bradley, although if sullen was a pot-luck nobody could say he hadn’t brought his share. No, it was coming from me, too, and my contribution to the feast was lavish.

I didn’t know who I was madder at, Colby and George, for putting me in this situation, or Bradley, for being Bradley.

I glanced at him, trying to be surreptitious. He was driving with an air of irritated detachment, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. If he’d had a moustache, it would have been quivering with poorly-concealed anger. I was disappointed at that, actually — I mean, his lack of a moustache. It didn’t make sense; except for the absence of facial hair, he was every inch the Perfect Cop. I took it quite personally, his ’stache-lessness. A moustache would have annoyed me, sure, but at least it would have been a simple, direct, external thing to be annoyed about. A lightning rod. Unlike all the other, less visible fault lines of tension that we were dealing with.

Of course, while this was going through my head, he caught me looking at him.

“Something on your mind?”

I shrugged, and went with the elegant simplicity of a lie. “Just running through how I want to handle it when we get to Jackson’s place.”

“Ah,” he said. Non-committal, yeah, but welcome as a step or two up from outright contempt.

He lapsed back into silence, and I wasn’t feeling any too chatty myself. Bradley, to be fair, was clearly making an effort. So was I, and as a result the truce was holding, for now. But we were facing one another across a conversational Salisbury Plain, and it would be much, much too easy for another battle to break out. And deliberate provocation versus snake-based misunderstanding wouldn’t matter at that point.

So, rather than trying to deal with the issue of Bradley’s tragically naked upper lip, I looked out the window and watched the city roll by as we drew ever closer to the home address of Glenn Jackson.

As you can probably already imagine, I had a few thoughts on that subject.

“First –” I said, then stopped, because George had started talking even before I did.

“Detective Colby and I were just discussing that,” he was saying.

And that, that belated moment, when I realized that there was more footwear waiting to hit the floor, is when the first hint of real unease started to creep up and down my spine.

“Officer Martin suggested,” Colby said, “And I agree, that this case has only two leads that aren’t entirely cold. Glenn Jackson is one, the sister is the other.”

I nodded. So far, so not-alarming.

“You think the bank’s a dead end?” That was Bradley, trying to be a part of the decision-making again. This time, at least, he wasn’t being entirely stupid and pig-headed.

“I’m thinking,” George said, “That we’ve gotten everything from the bank that we’re going to for now. If Forensics comes up with something, they know how to reach us.”

Well, that made sense too. I didn’t nod again, but only because I didn’t want to look like a bobble-head.

“So, the idea is that we break up into two teams, work both sides at once. Since time,” he added, with a glance at Bradley, “Is now even more of a factor than usual,”

“Right,” I said brightly, “Let’s split up to cover more ground. You guys check out the haunted amusement park, and I’ll walk down a dark alley with my shirt off.”

All three of them stared at me with, I swear, virtually identical deadpans.

“Because in horror movies, they always split up, right? And…”

I stopped before making an even bigger ass of myself.

But now I knew something was definitely up, because there was no spurking way on Earth or Fairyland that George hadn’t gotten my joke. It had deserved a groan, or at least an off-colour comment about the likely outcome of me taking my shirt off.

“Anyway,” I went on, “Like you said. Time’s short. George, I figure we should handle Glenn Jackson, yeah?”

“Actually, Bobs…” George said, then stopped. He glanced at Colby with an unspoken over-to-you-please all over his face.

“We felt,” Colby said, moving smoothly into the segue, “That since both angles could involve both conventional and magical crimes, that both aspects of the investigation should have police and Borderland Guard involvement.”

Once again, once spurking again, I realized, the jaws of the trap had snapped closed just when it was precisely too late to do anything about it.

“Your partner and I will look into the sister,” Colby continued, “While you and Detective Bradley run down Glenn Jackson.”

George and Colby walked out of the interview room and down the hall towards us. They were talking – quietly enough that I couldn’t hear them, which in retrospect should have set off my warning bells, knowing my partner as I did. Just as they pulled into earshot, George said a final, muttered word and Colby actually laughed. It was the most animation I’d seen him exhibit all day, and maybe that should have alerted me too.

But no, poor naïve fool that I am, I took the two of them getting along like a house afire as a sign that we’d cleared away the obstructions and misunderstandings, that we could actually go after the spurk who was responsible for this mess. As a good sign, in other words. And of course, that was true. But there was a bit more to it than that.

Meanwhile, in my innocence, I was actually thinking about something else entirely as they approached. I was thinking about words, and how they have power. Trite, yes. But also true.

“You’re under arrest.” Those words have power. “I love you,” that has power too, of maybe a different kind. And then there’s magic. Magic, that I watch for and ward against every day, that haunts my dreams every night, that has taken friends from me and that I will probably never truly understand – and that is, at its heart, the unleashed power of the word.

I walked up the hall to meet George and Colby with some enthusiasm. Bradley followed, but without the enthusiasm, because we both thought that we knew what was coming. We knew that we were about to witness – to be part of – the unleashed power of words, of a kind of magic.

George winked at me, glanced at Colby and stood a little taller, trying for a degree of formality as he uttered the ritualized, but potent, words of power.

“Given that this investigation shows clear evidence of magical and/or other supernatural and/or unauthorized local-Fairyland trans-border activities, and in accordance with relevant federal, provincial and municipal laws, the Canadian Borderland Guard hereby take responsibility as the primary investigative body from this point forward.”

I like to think of it as bureaucratic alchemy, transforming base iron into the purest gold.

I waited for Colby to say the words that would finish the working. “We acknowledge that the Borderland Guard has primary jurisdiction in this matter.”

I almost missed it, then realized that amidst the familiar and routine words, there’d been one that I hadn’t expected.

Primary jurisdiction, not exclusive. That meant that –

“You’re going to keep working the case?” I asked.

“Your partner,” Colby said, “Agreed with me that we should continue to be involved, with you as the leads of course. There may still be elements of the case that fall within our purview.”

Spurking George. He’d gone behind my back, made some sort of arrangement with Colby, and sprung it on me. Knowing all the while that it was so perfectly reasonable that I couldn’t say word one against the idea.

“Okay,” said Bradley, and he sounded even less happy about the news than I was. I think he’d been looking forward to seeing the last of us. Or rather, me.

“Okay,” he said again, and drew himself up as he added, “So. It’s your show now. How are you going to run it?”

I cooled my heels in the hallway, waiting for George and Colby to get back. Across the way, Bradley waited too, his highly trained investigative eyes trained on his shoes.

George had suggested — and it was, unfortunately, hard to argue with him — that after all the recent… drama, that it would probably be a good idea for him and Colby to let Jenny know that she was free to go, thank-you-very-much-for-your-cooperation-ma’am-we’ll-be-in-touch.

I would have loved to be there to see her face, and more importantly, Bradley’s. But now that we’d finally made some spurking progress, there was no reason other than the sheer joy of it to tick off our colleagues in what we prefer to call the “conventional” police.

So instead I just glanced at Bradley, and basked in the cozy afterglow of his humiliation.

#

I’ve mentioned before, I think, the tendency of some Iron Badges – and George is one of them – to sometimes model their behaviour on TV cop shows. So why, you’re probably wondering, did Bradley get my nose so out of joint by doing exactly the same thing?

And, uh, that’s a really good question, come to think of it.

It could be that I cut George and the other guys – it’s usually the guys – some slack, because I know that all too often, we have to operate far outside of the bounds of normal. We deal every day with things right out of mythology, and it helps to have your own mythology to draw on, to help you cope. And you could do a lot worse in finding a mythology to inspire you than the secular, pop-culture myth of the heroic cop… provided, of course, that you pick the right cop to emulate.

That’s another thing that bothered me about Bradley, I guess. He so obviously took so much delight in a particular kind of detective work: picking at people’s stories until they fell apart. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that just because something doesn’t make perfect logical sense doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I’ve seen that work on TV. You know, where catching a guy in a lie about what colour shirt he was wearing upsets the whole applecart and he confesses to sixteen counts of murder.

And maybe that even works in the ordinary world, with ordinary people who commit ordinary crimes. But there’s nothing ordinary about Fairyland, and the regular rules don’t apply there. Not at all. I learned that a long time ago. Now it was Bradley’s turn.