Incubus Mini-Boss (Rise of an Incubus Overlord Book 2)

by Jack Porter

She offered a shrug. “How else were we going to get down here?” she asked.

  It was a good point.

  Beyond the dead guys at the door, there was a small gathering of gamblers still living, along with a croupier or two, a barman, and even a waitress. Most of the gamblers were older guys, and they looked shocked at what they had seen.

  I waved my gun in their direction. “This place is closed for the foreseeable future,” I said. “Tell your friends. Now, get out of here.”

  They didn’t seem to like the idea of passing me or Piper by, and at least one of them started to gag as they made their way past the bodies. But all of them, including the croupiers and serving staff, scampered quickly enough up the stairs and away.

  So far, we had seen the betting shop and the illegal gambling business, but one thing was missing.

  Fat Tony.

  Or two things, perhaps. Because a place like that ought to have stacks of money lying about.

  Fortunately, this downstairs area seemed more extensive than the betting shop above. It was big enough to include a small bar and a couple of doors which suggested further rooms.

  One of those doors was labeled ‘Restroom.’

  The other was labeled ‘Private.’

  From behind the one labeled private, both Piper and I could clearly hear the muffled sounds of someone whimpering.

  “Fat Tony, are you in there?” I yelled.

  In answer, whoever was behind the door fired a shotgun, blowing a hole in the door that took out part of the sign. It was immediately followed by a string of curses that spoke more of fear than anger.

  Neither Piper nor I had been standing anywhere near close to inline with the shot.

  We looked at each other and waited for the cursing to die down. Then I tried once again.

  “Fat Tony–” I said, then the man behind the door shot two more times in quick succession, and started swearing once more.

  Chapter 35

  All through this job, I had been feeling relaxed. At ease, as if nothing could go wrong. It was a far cry from my usual approach, where I tended to get angry. For some reason, this little job didn’t seem real enough for that.

  It wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t me trying to do my best to survive. It was just an exercise in intimidation, and so far it had gone off without a hitch.

  But I was getting tired of the noise. First the alarm, then the grenade, and now Fat Tony’s repeated attempts to shoot us through the door. Not only that, but I was acutely aware of the fact that we were boxed in. If the tellers upstairs had access to more of Dario’s men, and they could get here quickly enough, we could be in real trouble.

  Bottom line, I didn’t have the patience to smoke Fat Tony out. Nor was he important enough to coddle. He was no more than a steppingstone, a small part in an ongoing plan.

  It was time to start acting as such.

  “Fat Tony, it’s like this. We’re coming in there. I personally don’t give a flying, backward-facing fuck if when we do, the walls are decorated with bits of your skull or not. The truth is, we don’t care if you’re still breathing when we’re done. But if you care, drop your gun out through the holes you’ve made in the door.” I shot Piper a feral grin and said, “You’ve got until the count of three, then we’re dropping another grenade in there with your fat ass.”

  The man behind the door let out such a stream of curses that I thought he was going to make us kill him. But I’d hadn’t even started to count when the shotgun appeared through the hole, hilt first.

  “Drop it,” I said.

  He did, and it clattered on the floor outside the door.

  “Now, open the door. And be warned, if you have another weapon, I guarantee you won’t live long enough to pull the trigger.”

  A heartbeat later, the door slowly opened inward, and Piper and I pointed our weapons at a fat, greasy looking man with a thick moustache and a gold chain around his neck.

  He held his hands up to show they were empty, but glared at us in anger. “Do you dumb folks have any fucking idea who owns this fucking place?” he demanded.

  I grinned at him. “Of course we do. That’s the whole point.”

  It turns out, the little room labeled private was an all-in-one counting room and safe room, as well as a general office for Tony. The sweaty, fat man had closed the safes when he heard the alarm go off upstairs, but a little judicious persuasion convinced him to open them again.

  “You’re out of your fucking minds,” he said as he pulled the safe door open. “Fucking crazy. This is Syndicate money! They know who you are, they’ll come after you with every fucking thing they have.”

  I couldn’t help but admire the stacks of cash on view. “Really?” I asked as if the thought had never occurred to me. “What do you think they’ll do?”

  The fat man jabbered a bit as if he hadn’t expected my question. Finally, he settled on an answer.

  “They got hitmen on their books, you dumb fucks. A fucking army of them. They’ll come after you, you fucking bet on it!”

  I grinned again. “You might find they have far fewer hitmen on their books than you think,” I said. “Put it in a bag.”

  “You’re fucking kidding,” Fat Tony said. “You don’t fucking know what the fucking fuck you are doing.”

  “We know exactly what we’re doing. If I have to lift a finger to touch this money myself, then I have no further use for you. Put it in a bag.”

  Still grumbling and swearing, the greasy, fat little man did as I asked. When he was done, he looked at me, then at my gun, then back to me. I could tell what he was thinking. He was pretty sure I would kill him.

  “Now, this place acts as a kind of hub, does it not?” I asked.

  He eyed me suspiciously. “What the fuck do you mean?”

  “All this cash. It comes from more than just the gambling den and the betting shop.”

  He stared at me with a look of growing horror on his face. “What if it does?”

  I grinned at him. “You’re going to give me a list of where it come from. Drugs, extortion, prostitution, whatever. Who brings it, how it gets here, where it comes from. I want to know everything.”

  I knew Rachel could find out a lot about the Syndicate, but there would always be details hidden from her. I figured as long as we were there, I might as well get what information I could from Fat Tony as well.

  “You’re fucking kidding me right?”

  “Do I look like I’m fucking kidding you?”

  Still grumbling, Fat Tony chose a different option. Instead of writing out a list, he plucked a leather-bound notebook from the top of his desk and looked at it. He swallowed hard, as if he knew what he was doing was going to lead to a heap of trouble later on.

  Then he uttered a sigh and handed it over. “All you need is in there,” he said. It was, I thought, the longest string of words he’d put together without using ‘fuck’ as a kind of glue.

  “Now, as far as you are concerned, this business is closed. Do you understand?”

  “You dumb fucks,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You don’t know what you’re fucking doing.”

  “You keep saying that. But really, we do. So, answer my question. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.” He said it mechanically, as if he’d given up all will to live.

  “And do you understand the consequences of continuing to operate?” I asked.

  Once again, Fat Tony’s eyes drifted to my gun. “Yeah. But what the fucking fuck do you expect me to do? I can’t just not do this fucking stuff anymore. The Syndicate—they’ll send people. Scary fuckers like you wouldn’t fucking believe. What the fuck do I do?”

  I shrugged, not really caring either way. “Go on holiday. Crawl into a hole somewhere. I don’t really care. But tell your staff not to bother coming back to work, or next time, we won’t ask so politely. My friend here is surprisingly good with explosives. You’ll never know what hit you.”

  By the look of Fat Tony’s glare, he was getting the mes
sage.

  I picked up the bag full of cash, a black duffel that a pre-Azrael me would have struggled to lift, and slung it over my back. “We’ll be watching,” I said. “And if you do go for a holiday, keep your phone handy. We’ll be in touch if we need to.”

  With that, and to the tune of Fat Tony cursing behind us, Piper and I made our way back up the stairs and out of the betting shop. I dumped the bag of cash in the trunk of the car and got in behind the wheel next to Piper.

  I grinned at her. “That went well,” I said.

  “Fucking right it did,” she said, smiling back.

  Chapter 36

  The next day, I met Bridget, a quiet woman whose character was completely at odds with her flaming red hair. She knew Sara from the Ascender community forums and was therefore much easier to convince. After enjoying a pleasant couple of hours that resulted in another succubus joining the fold, I prepared to disrupt another part of Dario’s business.

  Rachel had been working overtime, incorporating what she learned from Fat Tony’s notebook into the wider plans. This time, we hit Dario’s distribution network, taking out one of the vans that moved his money about the city.

  It was easy. Dario had his claws into everything, including a legal armored vehicle service. He simply paid that service to move his money, the same as anyone else would do, except he paid a little extra on top so the business owners would look the other way.

  The armored car drivers were supposed to be alert. They were supposed to vary their routes so they were unpredictable. In reality, they were just guys doing a job, which meant that some were less into it than others.

  The car we targeted collected money from several hidden gambling rooms around the city. According to Fat Tony’s notebook, it would turn up like clockwork at two forty-five every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Which meant that the driver followed a regular route.

  Rachel had broken into the city’s network of cameras, and with Sandy’s help had trawled through a week’s worth of footage until she found the ideal spot for an ambush.

  One of the gaming rooms had a small parking lot behind the building. There was only one entrance, and the whole area was bordered by other buildings on all sides.

  Any security driver worth the cost of his license would have avoided the place like a plague, but this driver seemed to see no problem with hanging out in the parking lot smoking a cigarette while his coworkers collected the cash from inside.

  For this job, I didn’t want to use my Mustang. Not only was I now worried about it being recognized if I used it too often, there was a pretty good chance the driver would try to ram it. And as well as the damage that might produce, it might also be effective.

  Those armored cars had weight behind them. The driver could have shoved my poor Mustang right out of the way.

  It was Piper who solved the problem. While I’d been on my date with Bridget, she stole a dump truck, although she was vague as to where she had found it. I could have kissed her.

  Actually, I did kiss her.

  We parked that dump truck in the parking lot entrance, giving the security boys nowhere to go.

  Getting the money from the back wasn’t hard. Piper’s expertise with explosives popped the door, and the guard in the back had his hands raised before the first shot was fired.

  Easy as pie.

  Chapter 37

  We fell into a pattern. Sandy arranged dates for me, often in the morning, while Rachel researched potential targets. In the evening, we would plan our attacks, and the next day we would put them into practice.

  Piper and I hit more than one armored car. We threatened bookies, extortionists, pimps, and more, and closed down more than a few businesses operating as Dario’s personal laundry department. We also took over a couple of brothels and an escort service.

  Nor was that the limit of our activities. Rachel dove into the work with a relish. She looked into Megadeath’s entire life, noting that the house was fully paid for, and that it was owned not by Megadeath himself, but by a corporate entity known (appropriately enough) as Badass Inc.

  If Megadeath had owned it under his own name, it would have been difficult to transfer the title to me. But it was much, much simpler for Rachel to add my name to the list of company officers right next to Megadeath’s.

  Effectively, I now owned Megadeath’s house.

  For good measure, she arranged to have the thumbprint lock changed so that we could use our own thumbs instead of Megadeath’s.

  Rachel also did her part working against Dario’s interests directly, tracking down parts of his business that operated online.

  She found an online auction site used to launder money. A fake domain registering site that captured the preferred names people wanted as their domain, and charged a premium to release them. She even tracked down one of those extortion sites that would lock up your system until you paid a certain amount to have it unlocked.

  It occurred to me that in our efforts, we were actually doing the city of El Diablo a favor. We were cleaning up the streets by taking out one of the bigger crime syndicates in the area.

  The thought made me feel all sorts of warm inside, and I wondered what it would be like to be properly legal.

  At the same time, that warm feeling wasn’t enough to stop me from re-implementing all of Dario’s scams when the time came, for my own benefit.

  It felt like a long time ago since I first murdered my roommate, but I could still remember clearly justifying my actions. I’d thought at the time that I wasn’t the bad guy. Just a low status dude trying to make his way in the world.

  But I had been wrong. I was the bad guy. Completely. Without any doubt.

  All the things we did, I reveled in it. I enjoyed the looks of suffering and fear on our victims’ faces, and had no qualms in raising the level of violence to whatever was needed.

  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at this revelation. After all, it was a demon inside my mind I had bonded with. Not an angel.

  Despite this glee, this willingness to do harm to others, and Piper and my actions to actively tear Dario’s business apart, it was actually Sandy who made the biggest difference.

  As well as organizing my dates, she kept in contact with all the girls I awakened. Even those I’d met before Dario tried to kill me.

  Part of me knew that the plan was working. Azrael informed me whenever I gained additional points, from when my conquests found conquests of their own.

  And they all began to report back.

  It wasn’t long at all before Sandy was on the receiving end of a continuous steady stream of information.

  Chapter 38

  It started slowly. By the end of the first week, Sandy reported that we had two people from Dario’s corner of the Syndicate on our side.

  “Low level enforcees,” Sandy said during our evening planning session. “Not much use as far as anything substantial goes, but they could be a good source of general information.”

  I was starting to see the possibilities. And I could feel Azrael’s growing excitement.

  “It is beginning,” he said, and I understood his meaning. Having Rachel, Sandy, and Piper stick to my side was great, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  But the girls who went on to infect others with the seed of my demon could prove invaluable. It felt like there was an epidemic of demonic proportions on the horizon, and we were at the epicenter of it all.

  By the end of the second week, we had half a dozen converts in place.

  “It’s mostly because of Sara,” Sandy said. “She seems… friendly. Three of the new converts are down to her.”

  “Go, Sara!” I said, mostly to myself.

  It was just a pity she couldn’t get next to Dario himself. That would solve all our problems. But Sandy had asked her, and she saw no real way in.

  Dario kept mostly to himself and lived a surprisingly quiet life for a mob boss. And Sara–well, there just didn’t seem to be an easy way to get to him.
/>
  After that, the news really started to flow. Our activities had not gone unnoticed. As was to be expected, Dario Gambetti was said to be increasingly irritated, and many of his men were starting to look over their shoulders. As for the converts, those men and women in Dario’s organization who’d had their demons awakened, they continued to work as they had done before, with nobody noticing any change about them. And they continued to pass whatever snippets of information they had back along the line.

  This additional source of information helped the rest of us plan future attacks, especially once Dario started increasing the guard on targets he thought of as most vulnerable.

  We just worked around them, picking away at his infrastructure as best as we could, using fear and intimidation more than murders and overt violence (yet we didn’t exactly shy away from that, either). I had plans for Dario’s organization, and didn’t really want to leave it too broken.

  Unsurprisingly, we’d also attracted the attention of local law enforcement, and the attacks on area businesses and robberies had made more than a few headlines. Our activities had been rather boisterous, but I didn’t care. Piper and I were having too good a time to dial it down, and what we were doing was necessary. Rachel kept a close eye on reports as best she could, but nothing suggested the police had any idea who was behind the disturbances.

  I knew that my—Chad’s—apartment would have been combed over after Piper and the other hitmen attacked me there, and the police would have found most of my Ascender stuff—the books, the candles, the runes on the floor that were still there from when I’d summoned Azrael.

  But I couldn’t help that. There hadn’t been time to clean the place before we left it. At any rate, the police were probably suspicious of me, and might have even been looking, but my face hadn’t shown up on the nightly news yet, so apparently, I wasn’t a priority.

  I was slightly offended.

  In the middle of all this activity, Sandy brought an interesting piece of news to me. She’d found two Ascenders—best friends—who both wanted to meet me. According to Sandy, the girls were partiers and preferred the thumping music of a club as a meeting place instead of a quiet coffee shop. Sandy told me about them as the two of us were sitting at the expansive dining room table, which we’d set up for our nightly meetings.