Max Quick: The Bane of the Bondsman (Max Quick Series Book 3)

by Mark Jeffrey

  He removed his hat as he stepped between the twin white marble pillars at the entrance. Anyone who knew Ian would have been stunned to see his hair neatly slicked back, each little strand in a perfect row sliding across to the back of his head — rather than the punk-rock, steel wool, porcupine-looking-do he normally wore.

  He strode across the glassy black marble floor. A giant, gaudy golden V was set into it, marking this bank a Veerspike property beyond any doubt.

  A sign nearby announced that the bank closed at 4:00. Because of this, it was nearly empty of patrons: they had conducted their business earlier and departed long ago. Nevertheless, the guards required Ian to walk through the metal detector. He smiled as he did so, taking his sunglasses and hat, and putting these items into the tray.

  The guard did not smile back.

  But when Ian walked through the detector, it went off immediately with a low jolting buzz like he’d gotten the wrong answer on a game show.

  Ian looked up sheepishly. He tried to figure out what had set it off. His belt? No. Wasn’t metal — leather only. He had no change or jewelry. He looked himself up and down and just couldn’t figure it out.

  “Your ring,” the guard said, annoyed. “It’s your ring.”

  “Huh?” Ian looked dumbly at his hand. Oh. Of course. He cursed under his breath. How come he hadn’t thought of that? How come Enki hadn’t?

  Other than the deep green gem at its core, his bloodmetal ring was made of some strange Niburian alloy — which was certainly metal.

  “Place it in the tray,” the guard said.

  “Oh. Well. Heh. See … I actually can’t take this ring off.”

  The guard’s eyes rolled up. “These are the Bondsman’s rules, not mine. Everyone has to remove any jewelry.”

  “No, sir. You don’t understand. It’s … sort of fused to my finger. Physically … it won’t come off.”

  The guard was not amused. But he wasn’t sure how to handle it. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “Hold out your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Give me your hand. Now!” The guard snatched his ringed finger and tried to pull the Niburian artifact off.

  Ian yelped a warning. He knew the ring would interpret the guard’s action as an attack. But it was already too late. Tentacles of barbed wire snapped out of the ring and drilled themselves directly into the guard’s wrist — and dug deeply into the arm arteries. Deep red coursed through the bloodmetal, drenching it with power.

  The guard went pale in no time flat — and dropped to the ground.

  “Aw hell,” Ian said. The iron tentacles withdrew. But because of the speed and silence with which this had occurred, no one had yet noticed the slumped metal detector guard.

  So Ian calmly adjusted his tie. He stepped along the icy slate floor, footsteps echoing up to the vaulted ceiling.

  “Everyone! Listen! Your undivided attention please! I have an announcement.” Ian snapped his fingers and a scaled, dark shell of bloodmetal rose from his ring digit and covered him except for his face. “This is a stick-up. You know the drill. Everyone down on the floor, no one gets hurt.”

  But no one moved. These people did not know the drill. In the world of the Bondsman, nobody ever robbed a bank. Such a thing was madness: the banks were controlled by the Bondsman. Rob a bank, and you’re effectively robbing the Bondsman himself. There was never a depiction of a bank robbery in the movies or on television, so nobody had ever seen a heist before — they didn’t know how to act.

  Realizing what was happening, Ian said: “Put your hands in the air. Like this!”

  The customers — two men and a woman — complied immediately. The same went for the clerks. At least this part had gone exactly as Enki had predicted: this was a population conditioned to obey. It was ingrained in their very molecules.

  Then two security guards appeared from a door, guns drawn — and faces clearly full of fear, confusion over how to handle this situation.

  Ian let armor cover his face.

  The guards shouted something at him. It didn’t matter to Ian, really, what it was. And when Ian just stood there and didn’t respond, the guards fired. Ian let the bullets bounce off him, raising both metal-plated arms into the air and spreading his fingers to show that he himself was unarmed. Once he had demonstrated these things, he disarmed both guards with a single flick of a barbed-wire tentacle.

  Upon this cue, Casey and Sasha entered from the back entrance of Veerspike Regional, the Red Roses and White Roses, respectively, drawn.

  “Your attention once more, if you please,” Ian said, his armor unfolding and compressing itself back into a single ring again. “These two lovely ladies will now be in charge of both your compliance — and safety. Speaking of which, for your own protection, everyone please congregate together over in that far corner and be seated, thank you! Move along, move along, move along!”

  The customers and clerks did as they were told.

  “Ohhhhh, grandfather Time!” Ian called out. “You can come in now!”

  In a huff, Enki entered from the back also. “Don’t call me that!” he growled.

  “You told me not to use real names,” Ian protested.

  “Well, use one other than that one!” Enki bellowed. “Now. Blonde and Brunette, keep things orderly until we get back. Pencil-neck, you’re with me.”

  Grumbling some names of his own, Ian followed.

  DOWN IN THE bank vault, Enki instructed Ian to suit up and tear off the door.

  “Might be a little late to think of this but … won’t that set off an alarm?” Ian asked.

  “No,” Enki said. “It’s not wired to anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Have you seen any security cameras?” Enki retorted. “Any at all?” Ian shook his head. “That is because crime is virtually unknown in the Bondsman’s world. Nobody dares defile the law — the punishment is a sentencing to a hard labor camp, where you do not sleep and starve all the tie and are either freezing cold or mercilessly hot — if you survive! At least, that’s the newspapers back at the Shell said. And that, my dear Ian Keating, is how I know that it is not wired to anything, and that there will be no alarm.”

  Ian nodded, and then, covered in bloodmetal, he tore the round door from its hinges.

  Enki entered the vault, rolling up his sleeves. “Cover me as I do this,” Enki said. “I will be completely vulnerable.” Then Enki removed his shoes and walked barefoot.

  “But … but what do I do if the cops come?” Ian said, feeling a little panicked now.

  “Just don’t let anyone touch me. Now let me be … I have to concentrate and work fast.”

  One by one, Enki took pouches of coins off the wall rack and slit them open. He emptied each onto the floor until he had amassed a large pile, one as high as his chest. Then breathing in, he waded into the pile, pushing through the coins, letting them run over his legs, his feet, his arms and his hands.

  Okay, Enki thought. Come to me. Come to me now.

  Give me my vision!

  Show me Max Quick!

  The coins jangled like bells in his ears, but it was the physical contact with them that had the loudest impact on his psyche. Faces, names, loved ones, scenes, recently eaten meals, smells, half-recalled dreams after recently waking — it was all there in the cacophony that assaulted him now. But his mind was so old, by force of age to retain sanity across the eons, so well organized that his consciousness could achieve something similar to parallel processing. It was like there were hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Enki’s, all sifting and sorting beside one another, examining each single coin for it’s previous owner’s impressions while they held it, and then the previous to the previous and beyond. Sometimes the trail of the coin abruptly ended, and he found himself staring at a coin fresh off the mint, and then it was just metal lying deep in the earth, waiting to be mined.

  Frustration. He did not see single face that looked like that of Max or Marvin Sparkle
. He ripped more coin bags open and began the process again. He liked coins better than paper money; they were denser, they retained more detail. But he would move to paper, if required.

  This time the cacophony yielded something unexpected. It was unrelated to Max, but very surprising nonetheless. He stopped, and all the parallel Enki’s in his mind coalesced, become one again, focused entirely on a single coin. He read each line, each curve, each meticulous ridge like he was scrying a palm. Holographically. This one coin had briefly been in the pocket of someone very curious indeed. Now, he narrowed on this one impression and sought to delve deeper into it.

  He had a face and a memory. He required a name and an address.

  It was fleeting. It was faint, like a whisper, and incomplete, like a blocky low-resolution image. But with some internal psychic image enhancement — basically fiddling with this or that parameter to see if a letter or number could now be read with a guess as to its underlying visual composition — he believed he had both.

  Deftly, he slipped the coin in his pocket, wrapping it in a handkerchief to keep his own impressions from further contaminating the coin as he carried it himself.

  “This is a stick-up,” a new voice barked in the room. “That is a very old term, and I do not expect you to reck its import, but in short it means place your hands in the air, and surrender.”

  Casey inhaled a sharp breath. This was a voice she knew all too well — burned in the depths of her soul literally from birth.

  Her gun hands quivered as she held onto the Red Roses for dear life, for continued sanity. Even Sasha turned pale, and was momentarily frozen, electrified to the spot.

  Johnny Siren entered the room, wielding a Tommy gun.

  How —?

  Impossible!

  But there he was. Two men flanked him, similarly armed. All three were dressed impeccably, but anachronistically — like something out of a 1930’s gangster movie.

  He must be the Siren of this timeline, Casey realized. Of course. This was not ‘her’ Johnny Siren; this was an alternate version, a new one that had been created by the fork in time back in 1912.

  Siren’s intelligent eyes scanned the scene, mild surprise registering on them as he spotted Casey and Sasha, both armed and ready to shoot.

  “Well,” he said in his characteristic accent from everywhere and nowhere at once. “This is most unexpected. Two most charming ladies, with guns. It seems they have beaten us to the proverbial punch, hmmm?” His men laughed.

  Casey weighed her options. The Tommy guns were already pointed at her and Sasha; their own guns were pointed at their hostages. They would have to swing their aim around before Siren and his men could press the trigger of their repeating weapons. And they had machine guns, she reminded herself — while she and Sasha had mere single-shot revolvers, however eldritch. And she knew nothing of her opponent’s speed or accuracy. She had never witnessed Siren — her father — shoot a gun. But she reasoned that he would probably be very good with it, given his age — and dark determination.

  He would certainly not hesitate to kill.

  The mild amusement on his mottled and cracked face ran away.

  “The Bondsman has outlawed weapons, young ladies. Don’t you know that? You should put them on the ground right now, and we’ll let you live, and will refrain from reporting you to Fell Simon. I say to you that you are common thieves, no more. But we —”

  “Johnny Siren,” Casey said, relishing the surprise that clearly registered on his face. She pressed it. “Jonathan Roseblood Cyranus. Born five hundred years ago near Florence. I wouldn’t assume anything about us.”

  That got him.

  Even his men looked slightly worried now.

  Now!

  Pressing the moment of his confusion, her split second of advantage, she spun on one heel. And fired both weapons.

  Siren dodged left immediately. But the man to his right wasn’t as quick; he dropped.

  Sasha was a split-second behind Casey, but not by much. Hot lead and blue flame poured from her irons in ferocious gouts.

  Then the remaining two Tommy guns exploded with a wild hail of bullets. But both were untrained, Casey saw that immediately. This Tommy gun was an inelegant weapon, a uncontrolled frenzy of panic. If it hit anything, it was by sheer volume alone, not because of any skill or deep connection with the weapon and the patience — the spiritual self control — involved in the art of firing it.

  Logan White-Cloud would have been appalled by the very existence of such a thing.

  Enraged, but focused by the stakes of both fighting Johnny Siren — Siren! — And the need to vindicate Logan White-Cloud’s extensive investment of training in her, and the mysterious gift of the Red Roses themselves, Casey became the very picture of poise and precision.

  Her shots grazed Siren as he ran behind a column. The last one, right before he ducked behind it, hit him in the shoulder. He yelped in surprise.

  Meanwhile, realizing that Casey would surely shoot for Siren, Sasha had concentrated on eliminating the remaining goon. But his Tommy gun was just too ferocious: it snapped and snarled and spat bullets like a speeding fog of death. Sasha was forced to duck behind the banking counter in retreat.

  Casey had taken up refuge behind a desk out on the floor. But as soon as Sasha was effectively out of the way for the moment, the goon focused his firepower on Casey. The wood of the desk she hid behind splintered and snapped with a froth of sawdust. Soon, it would be a pile of kindling and she would be exposed.

  Then there was a new sound — two single shots. This had come from a different gun, a new gun in the mix, Casey was sure of that. She had a trained ear when it came to ballistics now — this was as distinctly different as a new chord suddenly being played in a musical piece.

  She heard a groan, and a body drop.

  “Drop it!” shouted a new voice — and Casey was shocked to realize, yet another one she recognized immediately in the depths of her soul. Despite herself, her heart jumped.

  Cody Chance.

  Cautiously, she rose from behind the desk for a look.

  Johnny Siren had his hands up as he stepped out from behind the column. Blood dripped from one shoulder, and that hand shook visibly as he held in the air. His Tommy gun lay on the floor. His face registered no emotion other than mild amusement once again. Cody stood there in his motorcycle gear with a pistol trained on Siren.

  “Going after the Veerspikes?” Cody said to him. “I figured when I saw you walk in here.”

  Siren shrugged and rolled his eyes. “It is as you say, Officer. So dreadfully simple, I am afraid. No panache at all, and that I am truly ashamed of. They took from me; so now I take from them.”

  “Cody,” Casey called out, pointing one of the Red Roses at him. “Camden. Whatever.”

  He looked away from Siren briefly. His eyes widened when he saw her.

  “Ah. So you remember me this time,” Casey said. “Well, that’s a step up, at least. Drop your gun, Camden.”

  He returned his gaze to Siren and tightened his grip, evidently weighing his options. Sasha rose and complicated them for him. Her White Roses were aimed squarely on his forehead.

  “Women,” Siren mused, cocking an eyebrow. “They really do like to meddle, don’t they? Looks like you and I have the same problem, Officer.”

  Cody’s eyes darted between his hostage and the girls furtively. Then he said, “Ladies. I am an Officer of the Bondsman. You will drop your weapons on the floor.”

  “Not going to happen,” Sasha said.

  “I have backup coming. They’ll be here any minute. And they won’t use … sirens,” he mumbled, momentarily irritated by his unintentional pun. “They’ll just shoot. They won’t give you a chance to surrender like I am.”

  “This is quite the puzzle,” Siren said, smiling now. “Not even I know how it will turn out. How fascinating, how new! But I put it to you that these two ladies are not alone. No. Certainly, they have confederates, Officer. Whatever you do next,
you ought to think on that.”

  Cody’s eyes met Siren’s. He gave a very subtle nod: Siren understood. Quick as a flash, he snapped his thin body in half, bending down to retrieve his Tommy gun …

  … And within nanoseconds, Sasha Fwa and Casey Cyranus were in a gunfight with Cody Chance and Johnny Siren.

  That son of a bitch! Casey thought as she squeezed off several rounds sloppily. She wasn’t even sure which of them she had just sworn at — her father, or the man she loved.

  Both were attacking her.

  Freud would have a field day with this.

  Her emotions were running too high and getting the better of her — and that was potentially lethal, she knew that, she knew that! God, Logan! I know!

  She ran across the room and dove behind the Teller counter with Sasha, who covered her as she ran.

  “Dammit!” Casey said. “Where the hell are Enki and Ian?” She looked furtively towards the door that led downstairs to the vault but there was no sign of them. Casey realized she had to reload — and did so, hands shaking.

  Quick steps now, coming closer. Cody and Siren were repositioning.

  Knowing it was a risk — but one she had to take — Sasha moved down the counter a ways and raised her head. Siren was rushing Casey’s position — or rather where she had just been — his Tommy gun pointed like a bludgeon, snarl on his face.

  She did not see Cody.

  But there was no time; she raised a White Rose — and fired.

  Red mist popped out of Siren’s remaining good shoulder. He howled and spun, spraying a wild ragged haze of bullets at Sasha. She ducked and tumbled to the edge of the counter.

  Dammit! Where was Cody?

  Casey moved along the floor to the opposite end of the counter from Sasha. She peeked around the corner: now Siren was gone, as well as Cody.

  The bank seemed deserted.

  The gold leaf intaglio along the barrel of the Red Roses spun and stretched hungrily. The weight of them in her hands felt good. Like Blackthorne before her, she realized that her arms did not end in hands. They ended in guns. These guns, a part of her, as much as her own flesh.