Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  “Right.” I throw up my hands. “And I’m the asshole.”

  “Quite. Now stop your bitching and go ring the doorbell.” She points to the front door of Regan’s Vegans, a two-pane glass panel with a CLOSED sign stuck to the midpoint by one of those rubber suction cups that like to lose their grips at inconvenient times. The handle of the door is a slim bar with a one-inch hole drilled into the right-hand edge. The hole allows the owner of the restaurant to use a heavy-duty padlock to bind the door to a thick loop of metal connected to the wooden frame. Above that loop of metal is a small, round button glowing orange in the evening dimness. A doorbell.

  A literal doorbell.

  I stare down at Dynara. “Are you fucking serious?”

  She stares up at me. “What do you think?”

  * * *

  I’ve had a lot of things blow up in my face, the most recent of which was the foundation of my goal to solve murders in memory of my mother. Also known as everything I have worked for in my entire life. So, I am pleasantly surprised that the doorbell on the wall of the restaurant owned by the Columbian mob doesn’t turn out to be the trigger for a bomb embedded in the doorframe that explodes and kills me instantly the second the soft ding-a-ling reaches my eardrums.

  Instead, it turns out to be a regular doorbell, and its chord echoes inside the empty restaurant, reverberates off the walls and unlit ceiling. Half a minute of silence follows, where I stand, hand still outstretched, waiting for the first sign of dangerous intention in any subtle movements in the building. In the faint reflection on the door glass, I see Dynara standing behind me, her back braced against a streetlight pole on the edge of the sidewalk. Casual. As if we aren’t about to walk into the den of a monster willing to rip off heads with the same callousness as DuPont’s killer—

  A door swings open inside the restaurant. With no light to guide my eyes, my best guess, from its position in the main room, is that the door leads to the basement. It’s a black, square hole cut into the pastel blue walls, that descends some unknown number of feet into the earth. From this darkness emerges a single man in a designer-label business suit, who could be mistaken for a lawyer or a highbrow politician if it wasn’t for the clear outline of a handgun underneath his jacket.

  Hands in his pockets, he strolls toward the door, nonchalant, broad, slack shoulders, careless gait screaming feigned indifference. His eyes are narrow and alert, ears trained to track the smallest sounds, and the tightness of the muscles wound around his meaty arms implies that his quick-draw skills are at least as impressive as Murrough’s. He is prepared for any sort of confrontation the people at the door of a vegan restaurant may pose to his boss belowground, even if the ensuing battle will cost him his life. Born and bred to serve to death—a true mob lackey.

  The man comes to a halt two feet on the other side of the door and quickly scans my form. Skinny. Not exceptionally tall. Armed and perhaps a decent shot, but not someone who could outshoot him even on his worst day. Young and (seemingly) naïve, but clothed in federal government wear that hints at a level of training and expertise in some field that could cause some kind of complication to the conclusion of his day. He labels me a potential minor threat, I see, his shoulders tightening half an inch, his scowl unwinding to a frown, his hands slipping out of his pockets, no fists.

  He nods at me and speaks without speaking. What do you want?

  I take two steps to the left, revealing Dynara behind me, still against the light pole. The mobster man blinks in confusion, face tilting sideways as he attempts to place the face of the odd, white-haired woman who looks too young to be anything more than a high school student yet wears an expression of impending chaos that proclaims she is both its cause and solution. And then it hits him—Dynara’s face is not well known, as she hides it from the press, but it makes sense that if she’s had (or still has) dealings with this branch of the mob that at least a few of the gun-toting mooks would have her face burned into their memories.

  He recoils with a jolt and backs into a table, knocking the glass centerpiece filled with fake flowers on its side. Useless water dribbles out of the cracked vase, runs off the table and onto the floor. The man stares at Dynara in terror and raises a shaky wrist to his mouth, lips struggling to form words. All his apathetic confidence evaporates as he speaks into a hidden com sewn to his sleeve. His lips are hard to read, quaking as they are, but I catch Chamberlain and right outside and heavily armed.

  A moment passes, where the man glances from Dynara to me and back to Dynara, and the person I can’t hear must answer him through the com because he jerks again, mouth opening, and then freezes. It’s close to a minute that he stands there, rigid, indecisive, before he drops his hand to his side and shuffles his way toward the door. When he’s six inches from the pane and about eight from my face, the two of us separated by only a thin pane of glass, he nods to my right and mutters, muffled, “Go around back. Someone will let you in.”

  We follow his instructions and meet two more generic, suit-wearing men waiting at the back door, which leads to a long set of dimly lit stairs descending into darkness. Without conversation, the men wave us on, and we head down the stairs unimpeded. As soon as we cross the threshold, one of the men slams the door shut, plunging us into temporary blindness.

  As my eyes adjust, the details of the room at the bottom of the stairs start to coalesce. Voices, loud and soft, float up the steps toward us. Lights, bright and low, flash on and off in time with incoherent shouts. Shadows, tall and slim, move about the floors and walls, stretching out and shrinking in time with the changing lights. The closer I get to the bottom of the stairs, the more the scope of the room beneath the tiny Regan’s Vegans restaurant awes me:

  It’s the length of two tennis courts, with a vaulted ceiling supported by thick cement pillars. Split by curtains and temporary walls on wheels into various sections, it hosts a wide variety of illegal activities. In one large, square space, a number of men and women, smoking and drinking, gamble over a massive pot of money—if the chip stacks are any indication—presided over by a quick-handed dealer whose careful eyes track the slightest signs of counting cards. In another space, a group of prostitutes lounge in the laps of wealthy businesspeople, whispering rehearsed lines about sex and love into receptive ears that have paid a pound of flesh to hear them. In yet another area, the biggest of them all, eight rows of foldout chairs flank three sides of a wooden stage, where a man who speaks a mile a minute points at people who raise hands and signs with numbers on them.

  An auction.

  A black market auction.

  On the stage next to the auctioneer is a statue from antiquity that must have been stolen from a European museum or snatched right out of an archaeological dig. The wealthy in the foldout chairs, wearing Adams Avenue designer dresses and tuxes scour every inch of the cracked, worn statue, delighted at the thought of owning a piece of the human past that no individual should be allowed to stick in their garden like a cheap fountain piece. But that’s exactly what they’ll do with it, whoever wins—have their servants drag it to a mini-mansion to be added to a private collection for personal and peer appreciation.

  Just another way to show the world they’re better because they have enough money to steal what they want and pay off the law to get away with it.

  I growl under the talkative current, “Rich people.”

  Dynara replies, “Hm? What was that, Adem?”

  “Nothing.”

  We reach the bottom of the stairs, and another man in black—I swear, I’m starting to think they’re all lab-grown clones—gestures for us to follow him across the black market floor toward a set of double doors in the back. We pass behind the auction setup, and as we weave around a group of women in sheer lingerie bringing drinks to the gambling table, I peek over my shoulder at a gap in the stage curtains. To see if I can glimpse what other precious objects are on the smorgasbord for the obscenely amoral wealthy of Washington for the night.

  Three more Gree
k or Roman statues. A couple of classic cars from the most exclusive old world manufacturers. Various pieces of outdated technology from the centuries before the Fall. And…

  Paintings.

  Fourteen paintings.

  Fourteen paintings I recognize from their pictures in a pamphlet.

  No fucking way.

  I can’t be that lucky.

  “Adem, are you coming to help me solve a case, or are you planning to buy a cheap lay instead?”

  I realize I’ve stopped in the middle of the floor, staring at the stage in a way that could be misconstrued as staring at the scantily clad gaggle of prostitutes nearby. Fighting the urge to rush behind the curtains, collect the stolen paintings, and scream, Aha! I got you, thieves!—which would end with my ass getting shot about seventeen times—I turn on my heels, fight down a blush, and trail behind Dynara across the last stretch of the white tile floor before we reach the double doors. The generic mobster man reaches forward and hauls open the heavy doors with all his might. They’re reinforced, bulletproof, I note, as they swing open, soundless, on well-oiled hinges.

  The man says, “The Madame will see you now,” and ushers us inside a room that is twice as large as the black market floor yet contains a fraction of the occupants. Plus an atmosphere three times as dark and deadly. Despite its bright walls and rich, red carpeting and furniture imported from the farthest reaches of the Earth. Despite the well-dressed men and women lounging on soft cushions, sipping brightly colored alcoholic beverages and smoking cherry-flavored joints. Despite the casual conversations carried on soft-toned voices that would lull a person into ease in any other scenario.

  And it is so dark and deadly because of the woman sitting cross-legged, alone, on a large sofa at the head of the circle of furniture in the center of the room. A woman wearing a silky red dress that hugs a form so unnaturally flawless that she must have spent more than Regina Williams modding herself to fit a mannequin’s measurements. A woman with bronzed skin, blood-colored hair that curls to a mid-waist stop, and eyes with irises the color of burning coals.

  The double doors clank shut behind us, and Madame Celeste Herrera, the Crimson Snake, Captain of the Columbian mob, heiress of heroin (and other drugs), thief and killer of thieves and other killers, welcomes us to her humble abode with a series of claps, a red-lipped smirk, and a soft, sensuous voice that says, “Ms. Chamberlain, what a pleasure to see you again. I do hope you’ve come around for another high-stakes game of poker, seeing as you seem to have brought along with you”—she looks at me—“a lovely, lovely offering.”

  * * *

  Celeste Herrera is Washington’s most infamous personality. Known by every federal agency to rule the mob with an iron fist, she has never been arrested, never been interrogated, never been deemed a person of interest by any law enforcement agency. Locked behind an army of lawyers inherited from her late father, a (legitimate) pharmaceutical lord, she is, at best, shielded in steel. But with the sheer might of her strategic, calculating mind and her vast network of social and political connections, Herrera has built around herself a wall of foot-thick glass. The outside world can see her and everything she does, but not a soul can scratch her skin, smudge her makeup, futz her hair.

  Untouchable.

  The Crimson Snake walks around in broad daylight with the shadows of her wrongs trailing behind her, and there’s not a damn thing even a president could do to shut her down, to even make her stumble. This is a known fact, Herrera’s unshakeable throne, that has gone unchallenged for almost two decades by cops and federal agents who’ve long learned better than to risk their necks to chase a phantom who hides in plain sight.

  So imagine my surprise when the stonehearted woman I’ve seen on countless cover stories of high-society events struggles to maintain a confident smirk in the face of Dynara Chamberlain. A mild twitch assaults the corner of her lips every time she opens her mouth to speak, and a subtle shift in posture, a rising tension, shows that even the Snake herself may cower (in private) at the threat level posed by the head of Chamberlain Corporation. Even when said corporation head is neck deep in mob territory, an armed guard in every corner ready to strike.

  What has Dynara done in view of the Snake, I wonder, to shake the overbearing arrogance of such a woman?

  I wonder, too, if Dynara would tell me of these exploits, if I asked her after this showdown tonight.

  And then I answer myself—because the answer is an obvious no. Dynara reveals her tricks only when it benefits her to do so. There is no benefit to filling me in on the past horrors she has wrought; I’ve seen some of them firsthand already. I know “enough.”

  Herrera gestures to an empty couch opposite her own. “Please, Ms. Chamberlain and guest, do sit down.” She tears her narrow red gaze from Dynara and lets her eyes rove over me. They stick, again and again, to the hair atop my head. And I belatedly realize, in the den of a mob boss, in the face of a killer who’d have no problem offing me at a moment’s notice, that Dynara brought me here not for experience, not for my skills…but because my hair distracts Herrera, who is obsessed with a single color. (Three guesses.)

  Dynara makes no move toward the designated sofa. She stands, hand on a clipped holster on her thigh, and examines the four armed guards in the room, each with their own corner station. “I don’t have the inclination to play games with you today, I’m afraid, Ms. Herrera. Though I’m sure we’d have a good deal of fun hiding cards up our sleeves and bargaining for stock worth more than downtown Washington realty. Alas, I’m here on business.”

  Herrera picks up a pink-tinted drink in a wine glass and takes two sips. “So I can see from that…interesting getup.” She giggles. “It’s the sort of thing you see in cheesy spy movies, those skin-tight stealth suits.”

  “I work in efficiency. I play in excess. I don’t mix the two, Ms. Herrera.” Dynara moves forward, barely an inch, but it’s enough to make the guards drop their hands toward their suit jackets, where each stows an identical handgun bearing identical scratched marks where the serial numbers were removed. “And I know well that you don’t either. I see I’ve interrupted you during a party hour“—Intentionally, to draw your ire, she doesn’t say—“and for that, I apologize. But my business is urgent, and the sooner we conclude it, the sooner you can return to your drinking and gossiping and bargaining for control of things you really shouldn’t have a hand in.”

  Herrera smiles. Her canines have been thinned and elongated. Like snake fangs. “Ah, I see: who am I, lowly society girl, to deny Dynara Chamberlain’s wants and needs? Is that right?” A pout so fake it hurts to see. “You can be a bit overbearing, you know? And rather rude, Ms. Chamberlain. You haven’t even introduced your partner there.” The pout is replaced by a skewed grin. “Is he a replacement for your old model? That burly man with the perpetual scowl, built like a tank in form and personality? If so, you have better taste than I thought. Natural reds are a prize worth keeping, even if they are a tad skinny.”

  She winks at me.

  I try not to vomit, but the taste of bile still rises in my throat.

  Dynara lifts her hand from her gun and crosses her arms. “I don’t introduce him. He’s perfectly capable of speaking for himself.”

  “Oh? Really?” Herrera brings a finger to the corner of her mouth. “That’s also an improvement on your old model.”

  Dynara’s gloved fingertips bite into her jacket, and though I know she won’t crack—this situation isn’t pressure to her, just a mild skin irritant, if that—my pulse starts to pick up at the budding signs this conversation is going downhill. And in a room with four armed enemies inside, a dozen more outside, no windows, and limited hiding places (expensive furniture is fragile), I foresee this confrontation morphing into a deadly shootout sometime in the next ten minutes.

  So I take Dynara’s cue: “Yes, I can speak for myself, Ms. Herrera.”

  Her burning ember eyes land on me. “Ah. There it is. A smooth tenor voice. So melodic.” She swirls he
r drink in the glass. “Pretty hair. Pretty voice. Passable face. You could use a mod or two, you know, especially on the nose. Easy fix though. I could set you up with a good doctor.”

  “I appreciate the thought, Ms. Herrera, but no thank you. I like my face as is.”

  “Oh, confident! Another good trait.” She drains the rest of her alcohol. “What else do you have going for you, boy, to earn the right to stand beside a Chamberlain?”

  I glance at Dynara, who tosses me a nod imperceptible to anyone more than a foot away from us. A deep breath through my nose, the smell of harsh perfume and diluted alcohol, tinged with the sweat from the guards in all corners, and then I let out the air before a rush of words:

  “The middle-aged banker in the blue pinstripe suit, sitting at the poker table in the outer room, was swiping chips from the woman in the sheer orange dress sitting to his right. One from the top of her pile every time she leaned her head just far enough to the side to glimpse the hand of the careless man smoking a cigar. The dealer, who should have been paying attention to the table and appeared to be at first glance, was actually ogling the bare asses of the male and female prostitutes walking around in thongs and not much else.

  “Meanwhile, at the auction area, six people in the back row, all dressed in white, were jotting down the details of each artifact on the stage as it came and went, instead of actually bidding on anything. One of them was discreetly taking pictures with her Ocom. Considering she had an RC tattoo on her wrist, obscured by a shoddy makeup job, I’d hazard a guess the six are actually spies from the Rembrandt Clan, your biggest rivals, determined to steal your auction items either in transit to their final owners or once they arrive at private residences. You might want to handle them before the night is over.”

  I run my tongue across my dry lips.

  Herrera sits her glass down, lips parted in a way that drools overwhelming lust. All the other mobsters in the room, guards and guests over the left edge of tipsy, have ceased their idle gossip hour and redirected their attention to the young man with the big claims and fiery red head, who seems so sure of his observations that wrong does not, cannot exist within his sphere of influence.