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

And maybe you’ll return the favor.

“Well, all right,” she said, eyes dark with disappointment. “Oh, your jacket.” She removed it from her shoulders and helped me into it, making me feel like even more of a dipshit.

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” I said, “make sure you got home okay.” I kissed her cheek. As I stepped past Angelus, I shot him a look that said, If you lay a finger on her, so help me God, I will hunt you to the ends of this world and any others you try to hide in and gut you like a goblin.

He responded with a vague nod.

Outside, I paced the front of the building, cursing the timing of Vega’s page. I had just walked out on a first date with Caroline Reid—the woman I’d been pining after for two years—and left her with an immortal. Whatever Vega was calling me to had better be good.

It wasn’t long before a dark blue sedan pulled up. When the driver side window slid down, I groaned. The hefty man with a wreath of tight brown curls was an associate of Vega’s. He had been a little too eager to deliver my pencil for a bite-mark analysis in the fall, I remembered.

“You gonna make me idle here all night?” Hoffman asked in a brusque New York accent.

I dropped into the passenger seat and slammed the door, inhaling a stale fusion of coffee and baked-in cigarette smoke. I kicked around some fast-food bags until I had enough foot room, then buckled in and peered over at Hoffman. “So where are we headed?”

He ignored my question and circled the block. “For the record, I don’t agree with this thing here.” He gestured between us, though I knew he meant the NYPD contracting me as a consultant. “Ask me, you’re a con man, and the worst kind.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“Demons and hocus pocus?” He snorted. “You lifted that straight from television.”

“I read too, you know.”

“Twenty years I’ve been out here, and I haven’t seen anything that couldn’t be explained by common sense and good policing.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re taking orders from a fourth-year detective,” I suggested.

The balls of Hoffman’s greasy cheeks turned red. “And hey, I know that was you who called, trying to get Vega’s address and number. Think I’m stupid?” He was referring to the night in October when I’d tried to warn her about an imminent shrieker attack. “You impersonated a police detective,” he went on. “That shoulda got you five years, right there.”

“Instead, I got the rest of my probation wiped.” I smiled with as many teeth as I could. “Funny how that worked out.”

“Look, I don’t know what kind of swindle you pulled to get Vega on your side, but it’s not gonna fly with me. Try another stunt like that phone call, and I’m putting you in bracelets. We clear?”

“Tell me, Hoffman, are you always such a flirt?”

“Screw you,” he said. “You’re the one who looks like a fruit.”

I followed his glance down at my rented tuxedo, complete with cummerbund. He might have had a point.

Hoffman coughed into a thick fist, as though clearing the final bits of rant from his chest. “All right, so here’s what we’re looking at. Double homicide at Ferguson Towers.”

“That’s where we’re going?” A sprawling housing project between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, Ferguson Towers was notorious for all manner of illicit activities—from sophisticated drug operations to contract killings. To say they had a crime problem was like calling someone with stage four cancer “under the weather.”

“Yeah, don’t know why we’re wasting our time,” Hoffman said. “The stiffs are a pair of junkies. Probably knocked off for getting behind on payments or something. Or maybe another junkie had his eyes on their stash. But Vega don’t like something.”

“What’s that?”

“The pair of them had their necks torn open,” he said.

In post-Crash New York that wasn’t exactly jarring. “Is there a ‘but’ in there?”

Hoffman looked at me sidelong. “There wasn’t enough of a mess.”

“A bloodsucker?”

“Maybe, but that don’t mean a vampire,” he said quickly, eyebrows raised. “Plenty of sickos in this city to go around. Who knows? Maybe one of ’em has a chronic iron deficiency.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. But we weren’t talking about a human.

Ten minutes later, we heaved onto a curb and passed through an open chain-link gate. Ahead, a handful of police vehicles and an ambulance huddled in the gathering night fog, lights strobing. Grim towers took shape around us. Hoffman parked among the vehicles on the project’s central plaza.

“Piece of advice?” he said, killing the engine. “Watch your head when we go in. Just last week an officer had a brick dropped on him from an upper story. We’re not exactly celebrities around here.”

“No catching bricks with my head,” I replied. “Got it.”

“I know you can’t shed your outfit, but you might want to lose the dandy bits. That’s likely to earn you a cinderblock.” He gave a guffaw before radioing to Vega that we’d arrived.

I unknotted my bowtie and stuffed it into a pocket, wishing I’d worn my trench coat. As I leaned forward to unclasp my cummerbund, I examined the forbidding towers. There were six of them, three clustered on one side of the plaza and three on the other, a half-mile of chain-link fencing surrounding them.

Geez, I thought, grabbing my cane. What kind of supernatural would want to mess with this place?

“Stay close,” Hoffman said.

We left the sanctuary of his car, Hoffman hustling toward the nearest tower, sidearm readied. I whispered a Word as I followed. Light from my cane slid into an umbrella-shaped shield. Peering through it, I half expected to see bricks dangling over the sills up and down the steep columns of windows. Instead, I made out silhouetted heads behind security bars. Despite what Hoffman had said, I sensed more fear in their blacked-out gazes than malice.

We stepped into a dingy lobby of