“I’m going in wearing this,” Bryson informed me sulkily.
“Just go,” I said.
“Wilder,” Bryson said slowly. “Why do you want them to know you’re alive? Shouldn’t we be—I dunno—not rubbing their faces in the fact you survived?”
“We should because I want them to try again,” I said. “Mistakes make people angry. Anger makes people sloppy. If they know I’m laughing at them they’ll be inclined to go after me again and we’ll figure out who’s passing information from the SCS. Simple.”
“Kind of stupid, too,” Bryson muttered.
I locked onto him with my worst stare, guaranteed to make a perp piss himself. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Bryson squeaked. “I’m late.” He scuttled out of the sitting room, and I went to get my wallet and go find some clothes to meet Fagin in.
The After Dark lanes were in the heart of the rot of Waterfront, a loud, noisy, steamy stretch of road and tenement that housed bums, junkies, weres, and combinations of all of the above. Two weres lounging outside the entrance to the lanes scented me, and showed their teeth.
I slowed, my new sneakers scuffing the debris on the sidewalk. “Get within arm’s reach and do that again, flea licker,” I told him.
“Not smart for an Insoli bitch to talk like that,” he told me. He was skinny, with bad skin—he had drugs pumping through him as well as were blood. Once, Waterfront had been Redback territory. Dmitri’s own crumbling kingdom. I didn’t know what pack this guy was from, but I was in no mood.
I jerked my new shirt aside and let him see the butt of my Sig. “Ooh,” he said, waving his hands at me like a cheap stage magician. “Careful. She’s packing heat and looking for trouble.”
“Fuck off,” I said plainly. After a few seconds of staring, he shrugged and nudged his companion. They ambled across the street and took up residence in front of a pawnshop. “Jackasses,” I muttered, pulling the fabric of my shirt back over the gun. I had bought jeans and a purple baseball jersey at the big-box stores near Bryson’s place. The jeans rode too low on my ass and the snug shirt wasn’t designed for someone with actual breasts, but I made do.
After another check of the street to make sure no one had followed me, I pushed open the doors and stepped inside.
The interior of the alley was like something out of Lewis Carroll’s nightmares, a riot of neon and murals painted in reactive colors that glowed under the ministrations of ultraviolet tubes recessed in the ceiling. Giant playing cards grinned at me from the walls, wizards and goblins skulking in the cracks, and grinning Cheshire Cat mouths encircled the end of each lane, devouring balls and pins underneath glittering, pulsating light.
I spotted Fagin standing by the shoe rental desk, looking distinctly twitchy and out of place in his black suit and thin tie. His shirt glowed a serene violet under the black light.
“You look confused,” I said to him over the pulse of remixed disco favorites pumping from substandard speakers.
“As to why I’m here? Yes,” Fagin said. “Did you have the sudden urge to bowl a few frames? And perhaps drop acid while you do it?”
“As a matter of fact …” I said, passing two twenties to the guy behind the desk. “Size eight and a half and size …” I tilted my head at Fagin.
“Twelve,” he sighed, when he saw I couldn’t be swayed.
We got our shoes and I carried them over to a free lane, one lit with green and pink psychedelic flower patterns.
“You don’t fool me, you know,” Fagin said, unlacing his pointy patent-leather shoes and trading them for bright red bowling kicks.
“Oh?” I said, slipping off my overpriced pink sneakers.
“That little act on the phone,” he said. “You’re good. You may have missed your calling. Do any drama at the community college?”
“I hate that you can just press a button and find out everything about me,” I said.
Fagin laughed. “Fair’s fair. You manipulated me into meeting you …”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” I said with a smile, picking up a ball and giving it a heft.
Fagin returned the smile. “I guess I am. Why here remains a mystery.”
“Look at this place,” I said, going to the line and bowling a strike. “Busy, noisy, impossible to listen in on with magick or without it. This is where I feel safe meeting at the moment, so you’re just gonna have to deal with it.”
Fagin grabbed up a ball as I stepped back and bowled into the gutter. He blew out a sigh of frustration. “This sucks.”
“You sure do,” I said, giving him a nudge as he selected a fresh ball. He took the time to stick a thin cigarette in his mouth and light it.
“Watch it. You may be cute, but there’s a limit to what I can take.” He bowled two more gutter balls.
“Four hundred years and you can’t even bowl straight,” I said. “Tsk, tsk, Agent Fagin.” I was flirting with him to take my mind off of Lucas and how screwed up the whole thing was.
“You actually want to talk, or did you drag me down here to Tackyville to bat your eyes and wiggle your cute ass at me all afternoon?” Will said.
I threw another strike and straightened up. My neck popped where Talon had grabbed me. Fagin was right. I was avoiding the whole sordid mess that I’d made of my career. Assassins, dirty cops, and witches. It really couldn’t be better.
Fagin was watching me. “Well?”
Dammit, Wilder, swallow your pride and admit this is bigger than you can handle. “I need help, Will,” I rushed out. “And I don’t say that a lot. Someone in my unit is passing information to the Thelemites and I have no fucking idea what they’re doing with it, beyond trying to kill me. Hells, I don’t even know why they’re trying to do that.”
“Aside from your charm and winning personality?” Fagin said, and ducked as I swiped at him. “In all seriousness … Thelema is a dodgy business,” he said.
“It’s unpredictable and its acolytes are usually a pack of crazy bastards.” He sat in the conversation pit at the end of the lane and gestured for me to do the same. “I’d be very, very careful messing with them, if I were you.”
I stayed standing, rolling a ball between my palms. I needed to be up, moving. Ever since I’d come home to flame and smoke I’d felt eyes on my back, felt the thin cold finger that told me how lucky I’d been that the arsonists hadn’t checked too hard to be sure I was home. “But you’re not me, and they made this personal,” I said. “So now I’m going to return the favor any way I can.”
Will spread his hands. “Then I’ll help in any way I can, on one condition.”
I tensed. “My answer to your crusade against your psycho ex is the same. No executions. No vendettas.”
“I want to die.” He stood up and took the ball out of my hands, replacing it with his own two palms. They were hard, warm, and strong—fighter’s hands, with scarred knuckles and palms. “I don’t mean crash my car into an abutment or shoot myself in the face. I mean live, age, and die. Like a human being. I was supposed to have that and she took it from me. I want to lift the curse, Luna, and I want to die. If we find her, you let me make her take this magick off of my spirit and I’ll let her go.”
I searched Will’s face for duplicity, the smell of him for deception, but there was nothing except the low, dark scent that clung to him because of the curse, and a hard gleam to his eyes, the driven rage of a man denied.
“Okay,” I said, squeezing his hands and letting go. “You got yourself a deal.”
“Good,” Will said, and he was back to his old self, easy and relaxed in spite of everything. “Now, let’s hear what you’ve got. Information sharing is essential for any law enforcement partnership. Any partnership you’d care to have, actually—”
“There are the fires,” I cut him off. “There’s the heartstone, and there’s a group of Thelemites connected to Grace Hartley. Something I just can’t see yet crouched behind them, just waiting to open its jaws. I don’t like that at all, Wi
ll. It’s the same feeling you probably get when you find out a nut in Nevada has stockpiled five hundred assault rifles in his underground bunker.”
“So what do we know?” Fagin handed me my ball.
“It’s safe to assume the Thelemites got the heartstone to enable them to work a large spell, something their will couldn’t sustain alone,” I said. “But I have no earthly idea what, and I’m really starting to hate that.”
“Bet you good money it has something to do with the fires,” said Fagin. “Smart domestic terrorists always test their devices before the actual attack. Maybe they were just seeing how well the heartstone worked.”
“You really believe that?” I asked.
Fagin sighed. “I don’t pretend to understand witches, Luna.”
“Those fires definitely weren’t random, and Milton Manners was killed by something else entirely,” I said. “Casting from a remote location could explain how they didn’t know I hadn’t gotten home yet, how they took out the traffic camera at Corley’s place.”
I pulled my BlackBerry out of my hip pocket. If I called him, it might get back to the rat in the SCS, but if I didn’t, I’d be no better than I was now.
“CSU special branch,” Pete Anderson said into the phone.
“ ‘Special branch’?” I asked him.
“Hey, it worked for the Brits,” he said. “And ‘guardian of all shit freakish and strange’ is too much of a mouthful. What can I do you for, LT?”
“I need to talk to you about the fires,” I said. “Can you bring all of Egan’s findings and meet me?”
“I … suppose,” he said. “There some reason we can’t do this in the office?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Where?”
“The After Dark lanes. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”
A voice burbled on Pete’s end and he said, “No, I don’t have that … it would have been signed back out when we let her go.”
“Pete?”
“Sorry. Detective Kelly’s here.”
“Hang up the phone,” I told Pete. “Don’t say who you were talking to, get the fire investigation jackets, and meet me at the bowling alley, fast as you can.”
“Can I ask what this is about?”
“No,” I said, and pressed the disconnect on my BlackBerry. I did trust Pete—he’d gotten himself arrested and threatened for me once, and he didn’t have the agenda a cop did: close the big cases, get the headlines, get the promotion and the desk job where meth junkies don’t routinely try to stab you. Sure, you may have met some bleeding hearts or bullshit artists who told you they were in it to help people. Ninety percent of them are fucking liars.
CSU, on the other hand, are usually in it for the science, and for the truth in the science. They’re removed from the dirt and the blood on the streets, more objective. Usually. I hoped I hadn’t made the worst mistake of my life trusting Pete. I didn’t want him to be the rat, but what I wanted was getting precious little regard these days.
I returned my bowling shoes and moved into the diner attached to the lanes, ordering a bacon cheeseburger with chili fries. Fagin abstained, taking a black coffee.
“You’re no fun,” I said.
“I’m immortal, but I can still gain weight,” said Fagin. “There were a few years there in the 1940s when I was … shall we say … pleasantly plump. How do you put that stuff away?”
“Were metabolism,” I said around a mouthful of fries. “I burn hot.”
“I bet you do,” Fagin said.
I spotted Pete at the door of the diner when I was halfway through my meal and waved to him. He came over and slid into the booth next to me, taking a stack of folders out of his messenger bag. “This is everything the arson investigator gave me. It looks legit. You think something’s hinky besides the way the fires started?”
“Looking that way,” I said softly. “Tell me everything about fires. Pretend I’m dumb,” I said. I paged through the reports, the photographs of the eviscerated interiors making my stomach turn. I had almost been a blackened, split-open corpse like Corley.
“You have your basic insurance-fraud arsonist, the sick freak who lights fires, and the efficient type who knows that fire can hide a multitude of sins,” Pete said. “I think what we got here is the third type.”
I scattered the photographs on the table in front of me. “Corley sold antiques, right? Magickal artifacts? And Milton Manners was a fence who would have the connections to get a suspect crate into a country. Brad Morgan had a warehouse off the grid, one that Customs wouldn’t come knocking at.”
“It’s a cover-up,” Fagin said before I could go further with my musing, dropping his spoon into his coffee. “They tried to cover up the heartstone coming into the country. Jesus. Who thought it could be so simple?”
“Not that simple,” I said. “They’re still after me. They got rid of everyone who could spill the beans about the heartstone—they burned Corley, they hacked up Milton, they scared Brad Morgan so badly that Annemarie had to shoot him, and they burned the warehouse and probably the person who received the crate with it, since Nick Alaqui is dead. But they’re still coming after me. There’s something else going on here.”
Pete collected the photographs and reports, swishing them back into a neat pile. “Damned if I can see what from the evidence, LT.”
I put down some money for my food and stood. “Let’s go back to your office. Lucas was right—Grace Hartley isn’t at the top of the Thelemites and we need to figure out who is.”
“Lucas told you this? The jerkwad who shot me? There’s a source,” Will snorted.
“It’s not just him; it’s common sense. Magick users insulate themselves like the mob. You don’t see the big boss out in the open because it makes them vulnerable.”
“If you cut off the head of the snake, the body is pretty well fucked,” Fagin acceded. “All right, you can have a look at ATF’s data banks, but I can’t have you hiding out in my cubicle like some low-rent version of The Fugitive.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “After today, I have a feeling it won’t matter much where I go.”
Nineteen
Fagin’s co-workers barely glanced at me when I came in. One of the clerical staff, a petite woman with a sharp pinup-girl bob, gave me a dirty look, but that was about it.
“I get the feeling I’m not the first woman you’ve brought to the office,” I told Fagin.
He pulled up an extra chair for me. “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Chivalry is alive and well in you,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“That, and being with a federal agent gets some women hot,” he said, lacing his fingers behind his head like he expected a cookie for his cleverness.
“I’m not one of them,” I informed him. I rolled his chair out of the way with my foot and pulled up to his computer. Fagin grunted as his chair hit the cubicle wall.
“You’re a wee bit of a bring-down, you know that, Luna? Most women like it when I flirt.”
“I don’t,” I said flatly. “It’s artificial and condescending, and backs women into a corner, and if the twits you usually hang around with giggle and blush when you pull out the cowboy routine, that’s not my problem.”
Fagin grinned at me. “You are so smart. Feisty, too.”
“Probably too smart for you,” I said. “Now you want me out of here fast? Shut up and let me work.”
“Me-ow,” he said, and then yelped when I reached out and clipped him in the side of the head with my knuckles.
“Enough,” I said. “I know you’re not really this big of an asshole. The act doesn’t suit you.”
“It becomes a habit after a few hundred years,” Fagin muttered, but I pretended not to hear him.
Grace Hartley had all the right pedigrees on paper—she donated to charity; she belonged to the Boosters and the Rotary; she had one dead husband and one divorce in her past, the daughter, Sophia, attending an East Coast school, and no fin
ancial hanky-panky.
“She’s so clean she squeaks,” I said, and fought off the urge to hit the keyboard.
“You know what that means,” Fagin said, sitting forward with interest lighting his eyes.
“That I want to drive to her house and smack her all over again?” I said.
“She’s faking it,” said Fagin. “Number-one mistake of false identities—making them too nice. You want someone to leave you alone, throw in a few DUIs or a gambling problem.”
“I guess you’d know,” I said. “How many names have you had? Is this your real name?”
“No, it isn’t,” Fagin said, and didn’t elaborate. He took the mouse and ran a search. “Here it is—Grace Hartley, born November 1973.”
“Damn,” I said. “And here I thought she looked good for her age.”
“Died January 1974,” said Fagin. “She got a new birth certificate in her twenties, looks like. Anyone’s guess who she was before that.”
“She lied,” I said, feeling ridiculously vindicated. “She lied about everything.” Something fell into place in my head. “But she bailed Milton Manners out when he got busted.”
“So?” said Fagin.
“So, someone who’s trying so desperately to lead a clean life doesn’t get involved with the legal system unless she has to,” I said. “How much you want to bet me Manners knew her before she got a whole new life? ‘Friend of the family,’ my ass.”
Fagin leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I love the way your big brain thinks, woman.”
I pulled back, just a reflex when someone gets too close. Fagin’s mouth turned down. “I get it. Sorry.” He turned back to the computer as if nothing had happened.
“Aha,” he said after a moment. “Look at this.”
Birth records for Macon County, Georgia, stared back at me. Milton Manners was a Gemini, born in 1947.
His sister was an Aquarius, and four years younger.
“Hex me,” I said. “She’s his sister.”
Witch Craft Page 16
