Thursday- With Adam & Hazel's help, we make the connection between Vasilev's wife's contact (Alan Flint) and warehouse where there's going to be a ritual Friday night that Hazel's going to attend. Start the wheels turning for a police stakeout at the warehouse and possible raid.
Thursday about 6:00 Kathy gets out of the hospital. I tell her about the warehouse and she wants to go on a stakeout, so I go with her. We're on the roof across the street from the warehouse several hours, until about 1:00 (Friday morning by this time) and don't really see anything interesting. As we're leaving, Kathy gets a call from her brother saying he's been shot and is in the hospital. I drop Kathy off at the hospital and go home.
The next morning-Friday-we learn that there was a robbery at the Art Institute the night before. Among other things, that gold box was stolen. A perp was found unconscious at the museum and taken into custody: Jessie Chiasson.
I talk to Kathy: she says Didier says he was mugged. Kathy's already done a little research on this Jessie Chiasson and tells me she works for Crescent Interlude, the company that owns that warehouse where Hazel's ritual is going to be tonight. I talk to the dicks in Property about the museum theft and why I think there could be a connection. They let me sit in on the interview with Chiasson and ask her a few questions myself. She's not real helpful, but says she went to the museum to protect the box, not to steal it. She doesn't know how she got knocked out. Looked like some kind of concussion blast, like she was knocked back by some force, but there was no damage in the museum. She says she saw a man in the museum and she shot at him but he escaped.
Friday morning I also take Hazel downtown to meet my partner and go over the plan for tonight. She's gonna wear a wire. I take her to the Oriental Institute for a 10:00 meeting and go back to work.
Friday afternoon at 4 Hazel comes downtown and gets her wire and we go over the drill again, then goes home to wait for her friend to pick her up. We follow in observation van.
Friday night all hell breaks loose...(actually Saturday morning by that time)
Hazel has dinner with her friend/cult contact at 8. Later they go into a parking garage about a block from the warehouse. We lose the signal temporarily; apparently there is a tunnel connecting the parking garage to the warehouse. Hazel comes up in the warehouse and we regain her signal without her having gone outside. By now we're parked near the warehouse. We hear Hazel socializing with people and people talking about "moving things to the site." Then a loud grinding noise like something heavy being slid along the ground. Then silence. We've lost the signal again. Why the hell did I wait?
We let about ten minutes go by before sending in the SWAT team. Then I get a call from Kathy, who'd been up on one of the roofs on her own stakeout, reporting strange lights in the sky over Jackson Park. That had to be it. We drove over to the park. Seeing the lights, I radioed for backup. Reports from the SWAT team said they didn't find anything. A fucking secret door the cultists used! No time to wait, the time for the climax of the ritual (when the moon would be exactly half) was fast approaching. We were now getting faint signals from Hazel, and she sounded frantic, desperately whispering "Ray! Ray!" into the mic. She wasn't screaming yet, but something major was going down.
The park was wooded and we had to leave the van in the parking lot. Sprinting in the direction of the lights, my heart sank when I realized the lights were coming from a small island in the lake. Damn, damn, damn!
It didn't look too far; I headed for the paddle boat dock and Adam just jumped in and started swimming. He got to the island just a little ahead of me. But what was he going to do? He was unarmed and soaking wet; I wasn't. We figured out later that Kathy had also swum to the island, carrying her sniper rifle above her head, and was not far away from us in the woods surrounding the site of the ritual.
Piecing things together later, here's what happened: The man who was to be sacrificed was none other than Didier. Hazel had tried to alert me of this as soon as she'd seen him, but the signal wasn't getting through. She was waiting and watching anxiously as the cultists did their chant and the high priestess brought forth the missing gold box from the museum. In her other hand she had the small ornament taken from the Vasilevs' house. She put them together and the ornament fit snugly into a socket on the back of the box, and the box opened: it was a key. Then guards brought Didier forward, not fully conscious but apparently enough so that his eyes were open, and the priestess forced him to look in the box. At that point Hazel gave a judo chop to the priestess, knocking her off balance, but the damage was already done. About this time, the rest of us arrived at the clearing.
The priestess was knocked off balance but the chanting continued, and suddenly there was a great heaving and swelling in the ground in the circle created by the cultists. Something enormous was erupting from the earth.
Affectionately dubbed by Adam "Squidzilla" later, the thing was so horrifying it drove most of us temporarily insane. It was huge, when all of it finally came out of the ground-sky-scraper-size. It may have walked on two legs, but it was horny and scaly like a lizard, had dozens of tentacles, and enormous, interlocking fanged jaws like some kind of predatory insect. With two tentacles it picked up Hazel and Didier, and with several others swept violently at the surrounding cultists. It scooped up half a dozen people and swallowed them whole. Then it started into the water.
By this time, police helicopters were approaching the island. Lord only knows how the pilots managed to keep their sanity enough to fly the damn things. They opened up on the creature but of course it didn't do any good. It walked across the lake, dropping Didier in the water along the way, and headed toward downtown Chicago with Hazel.
Kathy pulled her brother out of the water and Adam and I tried to collect our wits and deal with the remaining cultists. In our panic we had both ended up in the lake, and were now soaked and freezing. Most of the cultists were scattered: some had been knocked back into the trees by sweeping tentacles, some had thrown themselves to the ground screaming. One remained standing, continuing his chant. Adam punched him in the face. I had expended all my ammunition on the creature. I picked up half of the broken staff that the priestess had used and got ready to herd cultists, but they didn't offer any resistance. Kathy reemerged from the woods with her rifle to help keep them in check. I handcuffed one of them and had him show me where the tunnel was that they had used to get to the island.
It's pretty much all clean-up from here. Police boats eventually got to the island and the surviving cultists were arrested. Then, as if it couldn't get any stranger, Adam got a call from Hazel on his cell phone (which somehow still worked, despite getting soaked). She said she had just come to and found herself in the top of the Sears Tower. Aside from the freakiness of the whole thing, she was fine. She told Adam to separate the key from the box. He did so, and tossed one of the cultists' robes over them. Somehow they ended up in my custody when we got back to the park parking lot and met the rest of the force, and in the confusion I neglected to hand them over but rather stowed them in the trunk of Ace's car.
We didn't get home til about 2 or 3 in the morning. Kathy disappeared with Didier and Ace drove Adam, Hazel, and me back to my apartment. I tucked the bundle with the gold box and the key into my closet. We all showered and then tried to get some rest.
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