Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  “We might have another way to find Dana.” This announcement came from Anthony. He’d just emerged from the catacombs with Brother Marshall. Standing in the cathedral, bathed in the light that shined through the stained-glass windows, Anthony Morales looked like an angel come to deliver them.

  “I’m listening,” Charmaine said.

  “Nobody’s importing iron to the area anymore, so it stands to reason that the Paradisos got everything they needed there. Right?” Lincoln ambled over, handing Penny a tablet with a shipping ledger on its screen. “They must not have gotten enough silver yet because there’s been at least two thefts of silver from local medical centers in the last two days. I reckon that when the shifters interrupted the supply chain, the Paradisos needed to get a lot more.”

  “Simple math says that they wouldn’t have gotten enough from two medical centers alone,” Anthony said. “Hell, they wouldn’t get enough from ten. So they’ll need even more.”

  Penny swiped through the pages, and Charmaine leaned around her elbow to look. “That’s a manifest for OPA supplies shipped from Los Angeles,” Charmaine said.

  “They brought lots of silver bullets with them,” Lincoln said. “Ain’t nowhere else they can get silver from, especially since Tormid’s smart enough to have gotten whatever he stole destroyed. This might be the last chance to pick up silver before the region’s daylighted.”

  It was a compelling enough argument for Charmaine, and the truck with the supplies was due to arrive within the hour. “I’m willing to risk ticking off the undersecretary to check on the shipment. Not sure I can get invitations for any Hunting Club members, though.” Even if she could have, she wouldn’t. Not when word was already getting around that she gave them too much favorable treatment.

  Anthony grabbed his hydraulic staking machine from the table by the pulpit. There were a few other weapons there too, many of which were surely illegal and which Charmaine pretended not to see. He grinned as he slung Buffy over his shoulder. “Who said we were going to ask for invitations?”

  Charmaine didn’t roll up to the receiving bay with her sirens screeching, though she was tempted. Las Vegas traffic was nasty. The fourth time she got cut off, she started fantasizing about flipping the switch for the sirens to watch traffic part like the Red Sea.

  “Now’s the time if it ever is,” Anthony said. He’d caught her longing gaze.

  “Vaguely suspected theft of department resources doesn’t qualify as an emergency,” Charmaine said. “I lecture my boys about being irresponsible with the sirens. Have to set a good example.”

  They pulled off the freeway at one of the LVMPD’s office buildings, where they had the biggest loading bay. That was where they received the big equipment. Everything that the OPA needed in order to function in Las Vegas wasn’t individually big, but collectively, the manifests showed that they’d be expecting a dozen semis.

  Daylighting a city wasn’t easy, it turned out.

  “Now, depending on what we find here, we’ll have to be subtle about investigating.” Charmaine rolled down her window, leaned out, and swiped her badge for the gate. “It can’t look like an investigation at all, in fact, or else I’m going to catch shit for bringing you around. Got it?”

  “You’re saying no Buffy, huh?” Anthony asked.

  “No Buffy,” she said.

  There were indeed a dozen semis at shipping and receiving. Charmaine counted them twice through the window just to make sure everything was there.

  The pilot driver was inspecting his drone fleet one at a time, checking off each item on a digital manifest under the supervision of LVMPD officers Charmaine didn’t recognize. It was a laconic day—partly cloudy and warm, but not as hot as Vegas liked to get—and the relaxed weather seemed to translate to relaxed workers. They were chatting. Taking their time with inspections.

  After seeing the victims who’d been killed over iron previously, Charmaine had expected to show up and find the whole place drenched in blood.

  She got out, strolled toward the semis. “Hey!” Charmaine called to the guys, waving over her head.

  She might not have recognized the cops, but they recognized the police chief. All hints of casualness vanished as they snapped to attention. “We didn’t know you’d be here,” said the man on the left, Shearwater.

  “I’m expecting some new targets for the shooting range,” Charmaine said, which was true. What wasn’t true was the next part. “Forgot that today was the day these were gonna show up.” She nodded toward the big black trucks. Like everything that the Office of Preternatural Affairs owned, they were an absolute shade of matte black. “Everything’s intact?”

  “Looks like it,” said the trucker, heading to the next vehicle in the line.

  “You know, uh…” Shearwater scratched the back of his neck. Looked uncomfortable. “The undersecretary asked us to keep an eye on this. He told us we’re not supposed to let anyone near until his agents arrive.”

  “Sure.” She eyed the manifest over the trucker’s shoulder. He hadn’t gotten to the semi with the silver bullets in it yet.

  “Anyone,” Shearwater said.

  Anyone including the chief of police, who wasn’t Undersecretary Hawke’s favorite person. “I was just heading up to the main building anyway,” Charmaine said. It didn’t look like there was anything worthy of her attention happening. Brother Marshall’s suspicions were just that—suspicions—and Anthony wasn’t going to get to exercise Buffy.

  Charmaine was halfway to her car when she heard the shout of surprise.

  The trucker had rolled open the rear door on his semi. It stood open so that she could see into its depths.

  There was blood inside the truck.

  A lot of it.

  And absolutely no boxes of bullets.

  “I’m not saying that I think it’s your fault,” Undersecretary Cèsar Hawke said. “I just think it’s convenient that you were on site with a Hunting Club associate before anybody knew anything was stolen.”

  “Like I said before, I was expecting a shipment of my own.” Charmaine didn’t like feeling as though she were a suspect getting interrogated. And she really didn’t like how quickly the laconic day had evaporated.

  The OPA agents arrived with another summer thunderstorm on their bumpers. It didn’t smell like rain, which was worrying; in Nevada, lightning had a habit of generating impressive wildfires that even pyrokinetic witches couldn’t control.

  Uncontrollable wildfires, uncontrollable OPA. Seemed about right.

  “Was Mr. Morales expecting a shipment?” Cèsar was wearing mirrored sunglasses that made his mood impossible to read, and he was writing down everything that Charmaine said on a Steno pad.

  “Nope, I wasn’t here for me.” Anthony slung his arm around Charmaine’s shoulders. “We were just stopping here on the way to dinner. That said, I’ve got clearance to go anywhere most cops can. You can check the Hunting Club’s permits in the database.”

  Charmaine tensed. She shot a sideways look at Anthony. Either he didn’t notice her reaction, or he was pretending not to.

  Cèsar clicked his pen, stuck it in the front pocket of his shirt. His eyebrows arched over the frames of his sunglasses. “All righty then. Let’s see if we can’t figure out what happened.”

  Sergeant Fillmore had been supervising the team crawling over the scene. Charmaine would have liked to be in there with gloves and evidence bags, but she knew better than to push her luck. Playing tug-of-war with someone who had more political clout would be a fast track to humiliating herself. Undersecretary Hawke had ultimate authority. She didn’t want to tempt him to use it.

  “The blood is from Eichmann,” reported Sergeant Fillmore.

  Cèsar loosed a string of colorful curse words.

  “Hey, watch the language,” Anthony said. “You know we’ve got a Swear Jar in these parts?”

  He patted down his pockets. “Swear Jar, huh? The wife’s threatened to implement one of those ever since our house go
t filled with the pitter-patter of little feet. She also likes to threaten to scrub my mouth out with soap. Here you go.” He’d managed to find a crumpled five-dollar bill and dropped it into Anthony’s waiting hand before turning back to Sergeant Fillmore. “You’re sure it’s Eichmann?”

  “Yes, but the volume’s low enough that he might not be dead,” Sergeant Fillmore said.

  “Get a search going ASAP.” Cèsar glared into the back of the truck, arms folded across his chest. Witches were collecting the blood to prepare a tracking ritual. “You know, she’d really do it.”

  “Who’d do what?” Charmaine asked.

  “Scrub my mouth out with soap. Wife says I’m a bad influence. I’ve never been good at following rules, especially ones like, ‘Don’t use four-letter words around your crotchfruit,’ and, ‘Keep a close eye on that police chief, she sounds like trouble.’ That second one came from Fritz—the secretary of the OPA—not from my wife. She doesn’t know you exist.”

  Charmaine couldn’t decide if he was joking or not. She decided the safest reaction was to laugh uneasily.

  “How did you know this would get stolen, Chief Villanueva?” Cèsar asked.

  “It was a hunch,” she said. “Someone in the area has been stealing illegal metals for months.”

  “Uh-huh. Sounds like a pretty good ‘hunch.’ You got a hunch where that stuff might have ended up?”

  “Yes, but our type of hunches don’t suffice as probable cause in front of a judge, especially when one’s hunches leads you straight to the baddest vampire in the ‘hood,” Anthony said. Charmaine appreciated the fact he didn’t say Mohinder’s name. She could deal with being viewed as biased in favor of the Hunting Club, but throw in bias against the local vampires, and she’d be jobless in minutes.

  Cèsar nodded his understanding. “You know I can’t do anything without evidence, no matter how much I want to.” But the way the undersecretary was glaring at the bloody truck made her think that he really, really wanted to break more rules. “I shouldn’t have sent Eichmann alone. He was a good guy. Smart.” He sighed. “Fuck this job.”

  “Swear Jar,” Anthony said.

  Cèsar gave him another five.

  They followed him to talk to the trucker.

  “I swear to the gods, I’ve got no clue how that could have happened,” the trucker was saying to the detective who interviewed him. “Check the footage. Check the data! Nothing happened!”

  “Clearly something did happen.” Cèsar dismissed Detective Reyes, then shook the trucker’s hand. “Undersecretary Hawke. I’m with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. You’d be surprised how many unbelievable thefts I’ve seen. It’s amazing what magic can do! Wipe camera footage, slip a whole lot of MacBook Pros out of a store without anyone at the Genius Bar noticing… Not that I’ve got experience with that.”

  “Seems like you need a much firmer hand than one holding soap,” Anthony muttered.

  “It’s just not possible,” the trucker said. “Spells that tamper with stuff like that take time. I mean, in order for someone to have stolen our shipment—that specific part of the shipment, not even the whole thing—without any of us noticing… Even magic’s not that good. I’d know. My sisters are witches.”

  “Could have been careful telekinesis,” Anthony said.

  “Yeah, the X-Men definitely could have stolen my stuff.” The trucker was obviously joking. Anthony was not. Charmaine had a file on Mohinder that was inches thick, and one of the items on the first page specified that he was telekinetic.

  “Where there’s a will…” Cèsar scratched his chin, leaning around to sniff the air by the truck. “Yeah, I don’t think it was magic. You’re good to go for now. Stick around town in case we have more questions.”

  With the trucker dismissed and an experienced team of OPA agents combing the scene, Charmaine felt disjointed, disconnected.

  Even the undersecretary’s attention was soon diverted. He was more interested in his tablet than her. He was looking over the footage. Despite his friendly tone, Charmaine doubted that he’d appreciate having her looking at it, too.

  After all, he was supposed to keep a close eye on her.

  “We need to talk, Undersecretary Hawke,” Charmaine said.

  “No titles, remember?” he asked. “And go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I understand that my department colors outside the lines sometimes, and I understand that it puts you in a difficult place. But I can be an asset on this case. The OPA’s vampire experts still don’t have as much experience as the average guy in my office, and you won’t get volunteers to offer that expertise if you don’t give us some slack.”

  He didn’t look up from the tablet. “You mean give you some slack.”

  “I can tell you whom to talk to in the department. Give you guidance.”

  “I’d appreciate that, but it doesn’t change the fact I have to keep you at arm’s length from this. You’re under investigation. Nothing personal, Chief.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t want my help on this investigation,” Charmaine said, just to make sure she understood.

  “Not directly,” Cèsar said. “In case I’m not being clear, you are expressly prohibited from investigating this theft. I need you to take two weeks’ paid leave, in fact. Stay in town, but maybe visit a spa?”

  Charmaine had no patience for his patronizing bullshit. Stay home? Go to a spa? She was the chief of police, for fuck’s sake. “I’ll write up a report for you from home.”

  He finally lowered the tablet to smile at her. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” Cèsar was still shockingly attractive. This was the first time she’d seen him standing in direct sunlight, too. Las Vegas’s thin atmosphere and harsh lighting was doing favors for his skin. He seemed to sparkle.

  She excused herself. Anthony took a moment longer to say goodbye; he seemed eager to shoot the shit with Cèsar before they left. She was already in the driver’s seat of her car by the time he finished patting the undersecretary on the back and laughing.

  But when Anthony climbed into her passenger’s seat, he rolled his eyes and said, “Fucking fairy.”

  She lifted her eyebrows at him. She’d never heard un-ironic homophobia from Hunting Club associates before. “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t see it? The guy’s got sidhe blood,” Anthony said. “Come on, pull out of here before he realizes what I did.”

  Her heart leaped again, this time with something more similar to excitement than dread. “What did you do?” She paced herself on the way to the gate. Speeding would make them look guilty.

  Anthony pulled a laptop out of the duffel bag he’d brought along with Buffy, and he showed a chip to Charmaine before plugging it in to the port on his laptop. “I might have duplicated the footage and data from the drone fleet.”

  “That’s illegal tech,” she said.

  “Illegal, unethical—such negative words.” He grinned at her. “I prefer to call it creative tech.”

  Letting him get away with that behavior was the exact kind of thing that had gotten her department seized by the OPA. She felt seven kinds of queasy.

  Charmaine suppressed the urge to clap Anthony in cuffs instantly.

  She loved justice. You didn’t get far in a career as a law enforcement officer if you didn’t. But sometimes the system got so busy following the rules that bad guys slipped through the cracks, and it took people like Anthony Morales to bring them to justice.

  If she wasn’t going to be a police chief, she might as well still save her city.

  Dana would have liked it that way.

  “Where are we going?” Charmaine asked as Anthony skimmed the footage.

  “Give me a second to figure out what happened.” He typed rapidly. “Or have Dionne figure it out. She’s on right now, and that girl has a great set of eyes for picking up aberrations in security footage. For now, let’s head to the Lodge.”

  Charmaine gunned it onto the freeway. “Thanks for trying to cover for me
back there.”

  “Hey, I didn’t give you a choice but to let me tag along,” he said. “It’s the least I could do.”

  “The way I remember it was that I asked you to work more with the department. So it’s all on me.” This was Charmaine’s fault. She was the one with bad conduct, she was the one who was going to be punished by Cèsar, and she was responsible for Anthony’s behavior.

  “We can play the blame game later. Dionne already spotted something.” He pressed a button, and Charmaine risked a glance at the laptop screen. It didn’t look like footage pulled off of the undersecretary’s tablet.

  “Is that traffic camera footage? You guys aren’t supposed to have that.”

  “Then no, it’s definitely not traffic-camera footage. But Dionne saw a pickup chasing the OPA’s drone fleet when it came into town on the not-traffic cameras, and it peeled away with one more warm body than it had approached with. See?”

  Anthony showed her the footage. It was the kind of traffic footage with biometric screening that could count people in the car. It was usually utilized for issuing tickets to people who tried to use the carpool lane without carpooling.

  He was right. One minute, there were two people in the vehicle. Then there were three.

  “Is that pickup big enough for everything that was stolen from the semi?” Charmaine asked.

  He checked the manifest. “All the silver bullets. Bet you’ll find everything else flung around the desert later, discarded. Trying to obfuscate what they were really stealing.”

  “Where’d the pickup go?”

  Anthony’s fingers flew across the keyboard again. “You’re not going to be surprised by the answer.”

  “Judex?”

  “Vampire Vegas,” he said grimly. “And it’s opening night.”

  11

  Halfway across town, in an air-conditioned and windowless basement club, an OPA agent spilled to the floor at Nissa Royal’s feet. “What’s this?” she asked, nudging him with a toe.