I heard sirens. Lots of them. We wheeled up onto the first-level gallery and Harmony hit the brakes, stopping the bike so fast we skidded sideways.
A platoon’s worth of gun barrels aimed our way. A pair of Metro squad cars blocked the exit to the garage, and their strobes washed over us in colors as garish as the pop art on the walls. While most of the cops covered us from behind the safety of their cars, a trio ran over and shouted us off the bike.
Usually, when I was working, the last thing I wanted to see was a cop. Today, I couldn’t complain. Harmony pulled back her blazer with two fingers, nice and slow, letting them see the badge clipped to her belt.
“Special Agent Black,” she said. Her voice was a silk glove lined with iron authority, the tone of a woman who expected to be listened to. “We have a 434-G down on the fourth level. Multiple assailants, all armed and dangerous.”
A cop wearing a sergeant’s bars nodded and jogged us back, safe behind the cordon. “We have another unit covering the emergency stairs. They radioed in, said Detective Kemper just turned up there. He’s not hurt.”
Of course he did, I thought. Good old Gary. Probably broke and ran the second he had the chance.
“What about Lars Jakobsen?” Harmony demanded. “He’s DEA, on my detail. He was down there too.”
The sergeant shook his head, then gave me a hard look. “What about this one?”
“He’s my CI,” Harmony said. “We were helping Detective Kemper set up a drug sting. Somebody tipped off the perps, and they came in guns blazing.”
Confidential informant. In other words, a rat. Still, there were only so many ways I could walk out of this mess, and being called a rat was a lot better than being called a prisoner.
“Look, this is our show,” the sergeant said. “But if you’ve got a guy in trouble down there, you should be riding shotgun. How would you want us to proceed?”
Harmony shook her head. “Total lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out. Call for a hostage negotiator.”
“Agent?” I said. “A word? In private?”
She looked like she wanted more than a word with me. We walked to the edge of the garage and around a pillar, out of sight.
“What the hell happened—” she started to say.
“You cannot pen them in down there. You saw Sullivan, what he really is. If he and his followers feel cornered, they’ll fight their way out, and you’ll have a shit-ton of dead cops on your hands.”
Now I was the one cornered, backed against a wall. Harmony stood nose-to-nose with me. Her voice was a harsh whisper.
“What the fuck,” she said, “happened to Lars?”
“The bottle broke. It went for the easiest target.”
“You’re saying he’s possessed,” she said. “Because of your fuckup, one of my men is possessed by a six-hundred-year-old serial killer. Someone I’m responsible for. Someone whose family sends me a fucking Christmas card every year.”
I held up my empty hands. “Look, it’s fixable. Right now, though, we need to stop this from turning into a bloodbath—”
Harmony grabbed me by the throat and shoved me against the wall. My head slammed against the polished tiles with a jolt of pain I could feel down in my jaw.
“It is already a fucking bloodbath,” she hissed, her hand squeezing as I pushed back against her, trying to pull her grip free. “And it is your fault! You did this, Faust! You!”
I got her hand off and shoved her away. She didn’t make another try. She stood there, seething, barely able to speak. I rubbed my throat.
“We can fix it,” I said, knowing how lame the words sounded. “I can fix it. Trust me.”
Harmony barked out a short, sharp laugh. There wasn’t any humor in it. “Trust you? You’re a goddamn scorpion. You sting everything that comes near you. I don’t think you can even help it. It’s in your nature.”
The radio up her sleeve crackled softly. We both looked, distracted, as she lifted her arm.
“Helloooo,” said a singsong voice on the other end.
“Identify,” Harmony snapped.
“I appear to be Lars Jakobsen,” came the response. His voice was strange, lilting and off-cadence. Like a Norwegian accent had a one-night stand with the French language and wound up with a mutant baby.
“You aren’t Lars,” she growled.
“I said ‘appear to be,’ mon chaton. Appearances are rarely reality, but you know this, yes? You may call me Gilles, if it pleases.”
I leaned closer to the teardrop of plastic taped to Harmony’s wrist.
“Don’t get too comfortable in that body,” I said. “I’ve exorcised major-league demons before. You? You’re nothing but a dead man with a rap sheet. The second you come upstairs, I’m putting you back in a bottle.”
“No, I don’t think that you are,” Gilles said.
“Yeah? How do you figure?”
“Because I will be coming upstairs with my new patron. Regrettably, none of his friends survived the battle, but he has others. When I do come up, you will greet me as Lars Jakobsen, and allow me and my ‘prisoner’ to leave unmolested.”
“Guess again,” Harmony said. “It’s not just cops and guns you’re going to have to walk past. There are two magicians waiting for you, and we’ve had time to prepare.”
Gilles chuckled genially. “What will you do? Reveal your magic to the world, for all to see? No. Even if you could defeat us, you’d be hunted by every sorcerer alive.”
I hated it, but he was right. Unless we could get them somewhere away from the cops and the crowds and the cameras, we couldn’t do a damn thing to them. And they knew it, too, which is why they’d make sure we never got the chance.
“I will take my ‘prisoner,’” Gilles said, “and vanish. No fuss, no worry, none of your noble colleagues coming to a grisly end. Not unless you force our hands.”
Harmony shut off the radio. She pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.
“We need to—” I said, and she waved a hand to cut me off.
“Shut the fuck up. I’m thinking.”
She took two deep breaths and turned the radio back on.
“Okay,” was all she said.
She strode to the police cordon. I followed her.
“Hold fire!” she shouted. “Agent coming up with a prisoner in custody!”
The garage went silent. Footsteps echoed below. Soon enough, Lars’s hulking form loomed around the corner, the possessed man leading Sullivan in handcuffs.
“The others are dead,” Gilles-in-Lars announced. “This one’s the ringleader. Found him trying to hide, but he didn’t escape us.”
A few of the cops broke out in applause. One wolf-whistled as Gilles perp-walked his glaring “prisoner” through the cordon. They approached Harmony and me. My fists curled at my sides.
“And to think,” Sullivan deadpanned, looking directly at me, “I almost got away with it. All of my plans, ruined, just like that.”
He couldn’t help but smile, the smug son of a bitch.
Gilles looked expectantly at Harmony. She had her own role to play in this farce. She knew what was at stake and the consequences if she flashed her spellcraft in front of an audience. Now it was time for her to decide: let them walk, or roll the dice?
Her eyes dropped. She stared at the ground as she mumbled her lines.
“Take him into custody, Agent Jakobsen. I’ll finish up at the crime scene here and meet you later.”
“Very good,” Gilles said. “This one’s a handful, but I’m sure I’ll have no problems.”
He kept a hand clamped on Sullivan’s shoulder, walking him away. Behind their backs, Harmony looked upward again, her eyes burning with fresh ferocity.
“Agent,” she said, her voice sharp enough to stop them in their tracks. Gilles looked back at her.
“I will,” she said, “be seeing you again. Soon.”
He smiled. “I won’t be far, mon chaton. So much to do and see. So many fond memories to relive.”
“After all,” he said, “there are no children in hell.”
Thirty-Three
That was it, then. My entire plan, my secret deal with Prince Sitri, hinged on keeping that bottle safe. Everything I’d done, everything I’d risked, crashed and burned for nothing.
Just when you think you’ve hit bottom, you can always find more room to fall.
“I’ll tell you how this is going to go down,” I said to Harmony, but I had a hunch she already knew it. “Right now, Sullivan’s calling up more of his Choirboys and arranging a ride. You’re going to find Lars’s car a couple of miles from here, abandoned. They’ll make it look like a struggle, like Sullivan got loose and overpowered him, took him hostage. Then they’ll disappear.”
Harmony didn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixed on the parking garage ramp, watching Sullivan vanish with her possessed partner. Maybe she couldn’t look at me. Maybe she just didn’t want to.
“Then what?” she said.
“Then Sullivan’s going to get on the phone with Lauren Carmichael and offer a trade. She’s got something he needs.”
“What?”
“That’s my business,” I said. “Bottom line is, your partner’s safe. Nobody’s going to hurt one hair on his head.”
“What about the thing inside him?”
I took a deep breath.
When I was a stupid kid, on the run between a bad past and a rough future, I fell in with a cult of neo-hippie angel worshippers. It wasn’t angels they were conjuring, though.
I’d been possessed over thirty times. Caitlin told me that was a record; most people would be dead or a vegetable after twelve. It left me with a soul made of gristle and scar tissue and a fear that didn’t fade with time.
“If he’s lucky,” I said, trying to be gentle, “Lars is sound asleep inside his own head. Once we get him free, this whole thing will be nothing but a bad dream to him.”
“And if he’s not lucky?”
I shrugged. She didn’t need the gory details.
“He’ll survive,” I told her. That much was true.
• • •
Gary Kemper pulled a Houdini after the gunfight at the parking garage. I looked for him in the sea of stern-faced cops and camera-toting vultures, but he’d vanished like a pro. Probably hiding somewhere, trying to decide which of his four masters he should report to first and what story to tell them.
Me, I eased my way into the foot traffic and went back to my original plan, before the world flipped upside down: I strolled up to the poolside bar and had a drink, sipping a frosty piña colada under the shade of a canvas umbrella. I needed some time to think.
Gilles might be eager to get out into the world and taste some fresh blood, but Sullivan would be keeping him on a short leash. When you’ve got a gold bar in your hands, you don’t leave it lying around for somebody else to pick up. Lauren would bargain with him to get what she needed, no doubt, but would she bargain fair? I wouldn’t put it past her or Sullivan to pull a last-minute double cross.
I needed to stop that deal from going down, any way I could. If I could find an angle that they wouldn’t expect—
“Jared?”
I looked up, jolted from my thoughts. The girl standing at the edge of my umbrella was maybe twenty, with perfectly bronzed skin and a bikini the color of Alaskan snow. She peered at me over the rims of her oversized sunglasses, uncertain.
“Pardon?” I said.
“Oh. You’re not him. Sorry, I’m meeting someone here. It’s an Internet thing,” she said, a tinge of embarrassment in her voice. “You look like his picture.”
“Sorry,” I said, giving her a shrug and a smile, “I hope you find him.”
I leaned back in my chair as she walked away. Part of me had been tempted to say, “I’m not him, but I could be.” Another part of me, the smarter and more experienced part, realized how creepy that would have sounded.
I’m not him, but I could be.
I sat bolt upright, eyes wide. I had my angle. And they’d never see it coming.
“Mama,” I said as soon as Margaux picked up the phone. “Those sequined spirit-bottles you get from Haiti. You got any handy?”
Mama Margaux was our local mambo and expert on all things Caribbean. She’d been a key player in our siege of Lauren’s casino stronghold, wrangling a horde of wild spirits to chew through its astral defenses like a school of piranha.
“That depends,” she said, her thick accent booming over the line. “With or without occupant?”
“I’m looking for a vacancy. Have a tenant who’ll be ready to move in shortly. He’s about to get evicted from his old place.”
“Hope he’s not expecting cable TV.”
“Nah,” I said. “The guy’s a deadbeat. Can you drop the bottle off at the Scrivener’s Nook?”
“Sure!” she said. “Soon as you tell me how you’re gonna pay for it. Mambo don’t work for ‘thank you.’”
“Would you take a check?”
Admittedly, it was a stretch, but she didn’t have to laugh quite that loudly. I winced.
“How about I owe you a favor?” I said.
“How about you owe me four?”
“Two.”
“Three, and one of ’em is a dinner someplace fancy. We haven’t had time to catch up since that mess at the Silverlode.”
“How fancy?”
“Fancier than the place Antoine tried to take me last night. Don’t you get me started on that boy,” she said.
“Didn’t you two break up? Again?”
“That,” she said, “was last week.”
I could pore over ancient Latin texts about occult mathematics without breaking a sweat, but mapping out the chaos of Margaux and Antoine’s relationship was beyond my meager powers. I’d never even met the guy. Someday I hoped to, if they actually stayed together for more than a few days in a row.
While I negotiated with Margaux, Gary was somewhere in the wind, doing whatever he had to do to smooth things over and keep his head off the chopping block. As it happened, he didn’t make it back home until half past midnight, trudging up the stairs of his squalid little tenement with all the world’s weight on his shoulders.
Whatever he expected when he stumbled through his apartment door, it probably wasn’t me. It definitely wasn’t me sitting on his couch and drinking a glass of his whiskey.
• • •
“Sorry,” I said, holding up the glass. “I’ve been waiting for a couple of hours. You can’t really blame me for making myself at home.”
Gary stood with his back to the door, sliding deadbolts into place with one trembling, fumbling hand.
“You can’t be here,” he stammered. “You have to leave. Right now.”
“Why? One of your buddies from the Redemption Choir coming over? Or maybe one of Lauren’s errand boys? Or somebody from the precinct—hell, it’s hard keeping all your bosses straight these days, isn’t it? I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t.”
“If this is about the garage—”
“Oh,” I said, setting down my glass on the end table and rising to my feet. “You bet your ass it is.”
He held up his open hands and stepped to the right, edging his way around the cluttered living room. I mirrored him, stalking slow like a panther.
“I didn’t know!” he said. “I had no idea Sullivan was going to be there! How could I? Harmony asked Lars and me to act as backup for your meeting, and she didn’t even know what you wanted to meet with her about. How could I have tipped off Sullivan if I didn’t know anything in the first place?”
“You did know there was going to be a meet-up. Maybe that was enough.”
He shook his head. “No way. Not with Harmony in the line of fire. I’m a cop, Faust. I would never do that to another badge.”
Thing was, I believed him. I remembered the surprise on his face, the look of panic as he ran up on
Sullivan and his boys in the parking garage. He hadn’t planned for company.
No, he wasn’t the one who betrayed me. I had a pretty good idea who did, but I had a special plan for settling that particular score. It’d keep, for now.
“Let’s pretend I believe you,” I said, keeping him on the defensive. “You’ve been a ghost since this morning, and I bet you weren’t filling out paperwork at the precinct. What’s going down in Redemption land?”
“Sullivan’s got Lars, and Lars has a creepy dead guy in his brain.”
“I was there for that part. Now tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sullivan left town,” Gary said. “See, he’s been bringing the Choir over in tiny numbers, one or two at a time. Big clumps of cambion moving together are like a magnet for trouble. The Night-Blooming Flowers pick up on it from a hundred miles away. Small and slow is safer for everybody. After the massacre this morning, though, he can’t afford to wait. Lost too many good hands in that garage. He’s got a bus. He’s bringing everybody to Vegas.”
“How many is everybody?”
“Another fifteen guys, maybe. Most of them good with a piece. A couple of magicians, maybe another couple of bomb-throwers. These are the old guard, Faust. The Redemption Choir’s one percent. Hard as fuckin’ nails, ready and willing to die for the cause.”
Bad news. I answered him with a careless shrug, playing it stoic, but the idea of that many whacked-out halfbloods in my town spelled trouble for everybody.
“They might get their chance,” I said. “So what’s the plan? He’s just going to drive across the Midwest, loading up his big happy bus?”
Gary shook his head. “Word went out through the underground. Everybody’s gathering in Denver. Sullivan’s going to swing in, scoop everyone up, and roll back here at top speed.”
“What if the Flowers get in the way?”
“Let ’em try. Sullivan’s not stopping for anything or anyone. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t have to be subtle anymore. Vegas is the Choir’s new home.”
I thought back to the discussion I’d had with Caitlin about “Pinfeather,” the Flowers’ supposed elite operative. So far, the dominoes were falling just like Pinfeather would have wanted. Sullivan was pulling out all the stops, rolling his elite guard right into Prince Sitri’s haven.
Redemption Song (Daniel Faust) Page 20
