Eventually Grace and Cassie head back to Andrea’s apartment. You can’t just hang around at a coffee shop forever after all. This isn’t Friends. Zoom! Take that Marta Kaufman and David Crane. You may have hundreds of millions of dollars but I burned you good.
The plan, such as it is, consists of speaking to Andrea. Grace assumes that if Dale causes trouble she’ll just smack him around. Actually probably what she would do is just stomp on the foot he was dumb enough to shoot himself in. Cassie hopes that Dale is there and that he does try something because she wants to see Grace kick his ass. But like with magic you know, like Grace does some Infinity Gauntlet shit and turns him to dust because she also wants to see some magic. At this point she doesn’t know what Grace generally just busts people up the old-fashioned way.
It’s not a great plan by any means but the good news is that when they get back to Cassie’s block the plan never swings into action because there are several police cruisers there with the police officers that came in them milling around. That will happen when there’s a big pillar of flame in the middle of the street and then a car accident. And shouting, and gunshots. There are neighborhoods where that might go by under the notice of the authorities but this isn’t one of them.
“Fucking Huddie” Grace remarks as she and Cassie stand at the end of the street intermittently bathed in blue and red lights from the squad car’s flashing lights.
“Who’s Huddie?” Cassie asks as she pulls at her torn leggings.
“A two-hundred-year-old moron.” Grace glances into the intersection where her car is smashed up real nice “Who stole my car and then crashed it.”
Cassie’s snaps her head around in awe “Two hundred years? Do witches live forever?”
“Yes. Maybe. No. I don’t know. He’s not a witch, that’s . . . something else. I think only women can be witches maybe. Look, I need to get out of here, what . . . “
Cassie points to Andrea, who’s being bundled into a car by two officers “Those guys aren’t cops.”
Grace peers into the misty night “What?”
Cassie gestures more urgently “Those aren’t police uniforms, they’re dressed as cops but those aren’t real uniforms.”
Grace frowns “How can you tell, I can barely see them.”
“I work at a costume store, I’m telling you those are fake uniforms! That’s not even a cop car, that’s a Corolla!”
Grace thinks to herself, police detectives drive unmarked cars don’t they? A detective could drive w Corolla. And maybe the guys in uniforms are just putting Andrea into a detective’s car? She thinks that there are probably plenty of other explanations other than a fake cop abduction. But there’s no harm in finding out right? Okay, there’s potentially a lot of harm but since when does that stop Grace?
“What am I supposed to do?” Cassie yells after Grace as she cuts around the corner.
“Call the real cops!”
“They’re already here!” Cassie protests are Grace disappears into the night.
Tailing a Corolla, even through city streets, on foot is not a winning proposition generally. Good thing Grace is magic huh? A finding spell means she knows where the car is even when she can’t see it. She’s gotten pretty good at that. A spell she learned from 42561 makes her quick as a cat and strong as a bigger cat, meaning that she can Run Lola Run herself all across the land. Technically she doesn’t need to keep up with the Corolla because of the other spell I just mentioned but since a woman may have been abducted by two fake police officers she deems itprudent to keep them where she can see them.
Prudence pays off (is that a show on the BBC? Prudence Pays Off? If not, it should be) when the Corolla turns, not into a police station, but into Black Hole Doughnuts. Setting aside any jokes about cops and doughnuts, what really changes the narrative is when one of the guys in maybe fake uniforms pulls Andrea out of the backseat by the arm and is clearly giving her instructions on the fine art of shutting the hell up.
At this point Grace considers doing what she told Cassie to do, calling the real cops, but she worries that in that case she probably won’t figure out what’s going on. And Grace is sick of magic stuff going down and then never finding out what the hell it was about. So she doesn’t call. Does that make her decision selfish and by extension make her a horrible person for potentially endangering Andrea’s life in the pursuit of this knowledge? Perhaps.
Instead, Grace walks up to Black Hole Doughnuts just as the greasy pony-tailed teenager in the Black Hole Doughnuts apron turns the sign to CLOSED and locks the door. Grace tries her malfunction spell on the lock but it doesn’t work because that spell is actually much more effective on complex machines and not so much on a simple deadbolt. What can malfunction on a deadbolt? Not much. She solves that problem by hurling a rock a the glass door like Ken Patera at a McDonald’s restaurant in Waukesha. Rock > Wizard > Muggle
The hurled rock and shattered glass flying through the air send Greasy Apron ducking and coveringlike a frightened lemur, but the guy behind the counter – who is not wearing an apron but rather an ill-fitting suit jacket over a stained white-collar shirt – reaches under the counter for a shotgun without missing a beat. His hands look tiny as the points it at Grace, but she’s not sure if that’s because he really has small hands or because his giant melon of a head makes them seem smaller than they really are. He growls at her to get out.
Grace glances at the cowering kid on the floor “Yeah, I don’t think so. You can shoot me right now without causing yourself some problems. You can’t just shoot people. This isn’t Arizona.”
The man with the Barry Bonds Steroid head seems perplexed by this reaction, as well he might since people don’t generally stare down a gun like it’s no big deal, but after a moment a dim glimmer of recognition comes across his billboard of a face.
“Hey . . . it’s you. You’re her aren’t you? You’re that bitch we stomped at the club.”
Grace nods “Yes, it’s me, that bitch, in the flesh. I’ve decided I want to join your group after all. That’s why I’m here. Where do I sign up?”
Rocket Cat 