The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

As I cleared the underpass, I barely avoided bowling over a man who might have been my high school principal. There was no time to check. At an abandoned police precinct, the spell jerked me hard west. I was practically running to keep up now. The conjurer was close.

I saw the trunk first, dirty blue with aluminum binding, then the back of the stringy-haired man dragging it. He was almost two blocks ahead of me and looked to be heading for Roosevelt Park.

“Hey!” I shouted, breaking into a sprint.

He turned his head enough for me to catch the edge of a thick lens, but he didn’t slow. The light changed at the next intersection, and I pulled up, craning my neck to keep him in view through the traffic. The surrounding businesses told me I was where Chinatown was growing into the Lower East Side.

“C’mon, dammit,” I whispered, looking for a break in the cars.

I was too focused on the conjurer to pay much attention to the group of teenagers stepping from a corner store. They were dressed in loose white suits, wife beaters for shirts, their ink black hair slick with something.

“It’s him,” I heard one of them whisper. “That’s the man.”

Shoes scuffed. I wheeled in time to see a collapse of bodies. What the…? An incoming fist opened my lower lip. A second blow rammed my temple, icing half my face. The sidewalk slammed into me next. I got my forearms up as stomps joined the descending fists.

The young men, who remained savagely silent, were enforcers for the White Hand. The suits told me that much. But what in the hell had I done to them? When the toe of a shoe nicked the family jewels, I decided I didn’t care.

“Vigore!” I thundered.

The explosion from my cane threw the attackers in all directions. I gained my feet and rotated, sword and staff in hands. A thug who had eaten a light pole crawled in a crippled circle, blood from his face stippling the sidewalk. But the other four jumped up quickly.

“Stay back,” I warned, summoning a light shield.

Pedestrians gave us a wide berth, eyes averted. As a general rule, the less you saw on the streets, the better. It was why I hadn’t taken a lot of pains to hide my cane after the police sketch went public. Is that what this is about? I wondered now. I hadn’t seen anything in the paper about a money reward.

Beretta pistols appeared from waistbands. With subtle jerks of their heads, the thugs tried to encircle me. Naturally, I’d left my own gun at home. The black bores of their weapons eyed my face. Whatever their motive, the thugs had left the street at my back open. Hearing the traffic slow and then idle for a red light, I snorted.

Amateurs.

I was two steps into my retreat when a head blow reduced my world to a ringing fog. I plummeted like a bag of bottles into someone’s arms, which hefted me through the side door of a van.

The enforcers had transport, evidently, and a driver I hadn’t seen.

I landed on the floor of the van. The thugs piled in after me. A foot forced my face against the gritty metal while sharp knees pinned the length of my body. Not that I had any fight left. I was in Woozyville. As the side door rammed closed and the van jounced from the curb, I found my thoughts fluttering around the conjurer—the key to the demonic summonings—as he drifted farther and farther away.

28

I didn’t lose consciousness but would have preferred it to the jack-hammering in my head. Whoever was driving the van wasn’t helping. He made several nauseating turns and hard brakes before rearing to a final stop.

The thugs lifted me under the arms and dragged me through a dark garage. In an adjoining basement room, they stripped my jacket and dropped me into a scary-looking chair. A thick leather strap went over my lap and one apiece around my chest and throat, the last cinching until I could hardly swallow.

Instead of struggling, I fumbled for my casting prism. It wasn’t there. Brain too bruised.

My wrists and ankles received similar restraining treatment as my torso, the fingers of both hands forced into a pair of metal contraptions attached to the armrests. That couldn’t be good. A muscled thug—the driver, I guessed—twisted a series of knobs until my finger joints were pressed straight. His next twists brought them to the verge of bending backwards. Something told me he’d done this before.

“Hey,” I mumbled as the first throbs started up, “think you could back off a hair?”

The driver lumbered to a shadowy wall to my right.

Guess not.

I eyed my splayed hands, wondering how long I’d be able to hold out. I’d never been tortured before and didn’t think I was going to be very good at it. But who was torturing me, exactly—and why?

“Chin Lau Ping.”

I squinted at where the voice had come from. Its strained quality sounded like that of a girl on the verge of a tantrum. But the figure looming from the shadows ahead of me was too hulking to be a girl.

“Chin Lau Ping,” the high voice repeated. “Why?”

Thick gold rings entered the light first—hands holding the lapels of a velvet smoking jacket. Underneath, a white silk shirt swelled over a loose paunch and the beginnings of man breasts. The emerging head was basketball round, anchored by a double chin and capped with an adolescent spike cut. As the man squinted at me, I wondered if he knew how stupid he looked.

But wait, what was he asking?

“Chin Lau Ping,” he screeched.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And is the screaming really necess—”

“Mr. Ping was my courier, and you murdered him. Why?”

Courier…? Murdered…? Then it clicked. Chin Lau Ping was the Chinatown conjurer. And this man asking after him was his boss: Wang “Bashi” Gang, head of the Chinatown crime syndicate.

I’d found an