Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  Linen sighed. “Don’t say spic. It’s low-class.” She shrugged and went back to reading.

  “I told you before,” Arne said, “I didn’t steal your car. I thought I knew who’d done it, and I was right. I took a real risk retrieving it for you.”

  Another one of the interchangeable beefheads came into the room. He held up a DVD inside a paper sleeve. “It was right where you left it.”

  Linen opened a cabinet, revealing a little screen. The beefhead loaded the disc and pressed PLAY.

  Swizzle Stick found the energy to stand and look at the screen. We all watched the video of her and Linen naked and grunting on a white bed in a white room—probably one right upstairs. No one seemed the least bit embarrassed or awkward.

  “I look hot,” Swizzle said.

  Linen sighed again and turned the show off. “Did you see this?” he asked Arne.

  “No, I didn’t.” Arne sounded very casual.

  Linen turned toward me. “You?”

  “No, but maybe if you play more, I’ll recognize it.”

  Arne laughed suddenly. It felt so good to have him smile at me that I almost laughed with him. We had been friends once.

  Linen turned to Potato Face. “Make sure.”

  Wardell grabbed my arms and held me while one of the other men patted me down. Arne got the same treatment. Potato stood watch over us. They found my ghost knife and cellphone, but no one objected when I took them back. No one found any discs, so Potato took Arne’s satchel and dumped it out onto the table.

  “Hey!” Arne shouted. I heard the dangerous tone in his voice, but no one else seemed to care.

  They picked through his things, bending them and ripping the pockets of his bag. Linen opened the French doors, and one of the men pitched Arne’s laptop into the Jacuzzi.

  Arne glowered at them.

  Linen took a checkbook from a little drawer, filled out a check, and gave it to Arne. I noticed a wedding ring on his tanned finger. Swizzle Stick didn’t have one.

  Arne glanced at the check. “What’s this?”

  “That’s your payment,” Linen said. He sounded bored with us, as though we’d stayed too long at his party.

  “Half the price,” Arne said. “That was the deal. I’d get the car back for you, and you would pay me half what it cost.”

  “But did you get that in writing? That disc was valuable; the car … meh. The Bugatti is insured. My marriage isn’t. That check will buy two laptops to replace the one that just took a swim, with a little left over for a lazy day’s work.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Arne asked, his voice quiet. “Are you sure you want to break a deal with me?”

  Linen turned to Potato. “He sounds feisty.”

  Wardell immediately sank a hard right into my midsection, while one of the other men did the same to Arne. It didn’t hurt me; I could barely feel the pressure of it through the protective tattoos Annalise had put on me.

  I threw a quick uppercut at Wardell, but one of the other men tangled my arm with one of his punches, blunting the force.

  I caught another painless shot in the guts, then the men on either side of me drove their knees into the outside of my thighs. The pain was intense, and I fell onto the cool tile floor. The beating continued.

  I didn’t have to take this shit. My ghost knife was in my pocket. All I had to do was cut one of these bruisers with the edge of my spell to take them out of the fight. In less than a minute, I could take control of this room and everyone in it.

  I took the beating anyway. I wasn’t going to use a spell in front of Linen; he might decide to search for magic of his own, and I was sick of the messes that came of that.

  A punch grazed the edge of my chin—nothing serious, just a scrape—and Potato stepped in and backed Wardell off. “Not the face,” he said. “You know better.”

  That was the end of the beating. Arne rolled onto his side, cursing, but he didn’t look too bad. Linen picked the check up and stuffed it into Arne’s shirt pocket. “No need to be feisty anymore, right? Because now you know how lucky you are. Be glad our deal is the only thing I’m breaking. Get out, and tell your car-stealing buddy he was smart to stay away from me.”

  The guards lifted us to our feet. One of them swept Arne’s things into his satchel, being careful to get everything but not being careful in any other way, then hung it around Arne’s neck like a gold medal. We were hustled out of the house and down to the street. I could hear Wardell behind me, laughing.

  Once released, Arne stripped the satchel off his neck and collapsed onto his hands and knees. He puked onto the street. There was no red in it. I picked up his satchel. A few things had fallen out when he’d dropped it, and I examined each as I put them back, hoping I’d find something useful.

  “What’s this?” Wardell said. He was facing a wall of bodies. Potato Face and his men were barring Wardell from returning to the house. One of the men held out a tan sports jacket for Wardell to take, but he wouldn’t accept it.

  “You have the wrong temperament for this work,” Potato said. “You think this is about you. It ain’t. You’re fired. Don’t let me see you again, or you won’t be happy about it.”

  Wardell stared at them, simmering. I hadn’t known him personally in Chino, but everyone had known who he was: a pro athlete who’d done a TV commercial or two. He was used to being the big man in the room, and he didn’t seem to be adjusting to his new life all that well.

  “Come on, Arne,” I said, helping him up. He staggered as he went toward the driver’s door, but I wanted him to move faster. “Let’s get out of here and find a place we can talk.”

  “I don’t think they broke anything,” Arne said. “Jesus, can you believe that guy called me a liar?”

  I glanced back. Wardell was still staring at Potato. Potato stared back. Beefy guy still held his arm extended toward Wardell, jacket in hand. Finally, he got tired of waiting for Wardell to take it, so he tossed it. Wardell was forced to catch it against his chest or let it fall into the street. Potato and his men went back through the gate and shut it with a sharp clang.

  Arne made his key chain chirp and popped the locks on his car. Wardell turned his head toward the sound. Shit.

  Arne got behind the wheel. “I don’t have time to talk to you right now, Ray.”

  “Arne, no. This is too important—”

  “No.” Arne glanced through the windshield at Wardell, who was stalking toward us. “After the job, remember? The job isn’t over until I get paid. Besides, your boyfriend wants to talk to you.”

  “Hey!” Wardell shouted. “Flower!”

  Damn. I hated being called that.

  Arne started his car. He gave me a crooked smile. “Take care of this, would you, Ray? I have work to do.”

  Wardell grabbed my shirt and shoved me against Arne’s car. I tipped back over the hood, my feet coming off the ground. Christ, he was strong.

  I drew my ghost knife from my back pocket.

  Arne’s car began to back down the street, and I slid along the hood of the car until I dropped backward. I heard my shirt tear just a little in Wardell’s grip.

  “You just cost me a job, Flower. A good job that paid okay. There ain’t a lot of places a guy like me can get paid to have my fun. So now you’re going to hire me.”

  Arne backed away down the street. I saw him grimace as he twisted to look through the back window, but he didn’t glance at me at all.

  “Don’t you look at him,” Wardell said. “You look at me now. Just like you paid those barrio motherfuckers to watch your back in Chino, you’re going to pay me to watch your back out here.”

  “I wouldn’t pay you to watch a pot of chili,” I said, and slid the ghost knife through his ribs.

  According to the spell book I’d cast it from, the ghost knife could cut “ghosts, magic, and dead things.” Its edge could split a steel door, destroy the sigils that made spells work, and on living people, it could cut their “ghosts.”

&
nbsp; Whatever that meant. I’d never seen an actual ghost, but trial and error had taught me that the ghost knife took away a person’s anger and hostility, turning them docile and apologetic but without doing them any physical harm. At least, no harm I could see.

  Wardell was no exception. He gasped as the spell passed through him and his eyes went wide like deer eyes. He lifted me to my feet—the spell didn’t take his strength away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said those things.”

  “You’re right. You shouldn’t have.” Arne was long gone. I sighed and turned to Wardell. “Where’s your car?”

  He led me to it. It was just around the corner, parked beneath an old oak. It was an older Nissan Pathfinder, and it had probably been his run-around-town vehicle before he went inside. He asked me if I wanted to drive.

  I did. Traffic was heavy on the way back to the Bigfoot Room. Wardell talked most of the way, mostly about what he was doing now that he was outside and people we’d known inside. An unsurprising number of them had gotten themselves out and gotten themselves thrown right back in again. Wardell was of the opinion that that would happen to him soon, too.

  He also told me that Linen’s real name was Steve Francois, and that he’d inherited his money from some South American paper mills and banks in Texas. Mostly banks. Steve liked having badasses around, and Wardell was an ex-con and ex-NFL, so he was hired.

  I couldn’t even begin to guess why Arne was running errands for a guy like Francois.

  I liked Wardell better when he wasn’t desperate to be alpha male, but not much better. Even with his aggression cut out of him, he was still arrogant enough to think he should dominate the conversation. I was tempted to make him turn himself in to the cops until he said he had a wife at home who was sticking by him—so far. “She wants me to go to anger-management classes,” he said.

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sorry about the buttons on your shirt. Do you want me to ask her to sew them back on? She would, I think.”

  I looked down. He had popped off a button from my shirt, second from my top. “No, thanks,” I said, being polite because of the ghost knife, and I didn’t feel like taking anything else from him. “Do you beat on her?”

  “No! I would never hit my lady.” He sounded honestly surprised that I’d asked.

  “Good. You should take her advice.” I remembered waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. “If your shit isn’t under control, you should get help.”

  I pulled up to the curb at a corner near the Bigfoot Room and climbed out. My legs and back were getting stiff and achy from sitting so long. I was glad Potato and his men had landed most of their punches on my chest and stomach, where I was protected. My car was still where I had left it.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  Wardell climbed into the driver’s seat. He was a big guy, but he was limber enough to make it without knocking the stick shift out of PARK.

  “Thank you,” Wardell said. I shut the door. He hit the turn signal and pulled into traffic.

  I watched him go, wondering what I could do if my own stress got so bad I lost control of it. Not therapy; as soon as I talked about predators, the therapist would think I was delusional. And if the therapist found out about the people I’d killed …

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  Wardell disappeared into traffic, so I crossed the street and entered the Roasted Seal. The sawdust was still on the floor and the rumpled guy was still sitting at the bar, a beer and a cup of coffee beside him.

  And Arne was sitting in the same booth. He was tapping at a different laptop.

  I moved toward him, holding out my hand to block Lenard as I came around the wait station. “Are you going to pat me down again?”

  Lenard slammed a little locker door shut and spun the combination lock. Then he glanced at Arne. Arne shrugged. Lenard backed toward the booth, and his body language told me not to approach.

  “I hope,” Arne said, “you’re not pissed that I took off without telling you what’s what or caring one shit what was going on with you.”

  “Of course not. What kind of petty bastard do you think I am?” And it was true. I wasn’t pissed. In fact, I’d expected him to abandon me somewhere—that’s why I’d held out my hand for the Land Rover keys when Arne asked me to drive it. It’s one thing to be stranded in Bel Air and another to be stranded in the middle of the desert. “Bought yourself a replacement already?”

  “Oh, no. This is my real computer. The other was the one I take on jobs, just in case.”

  “Arne, what happened to Melly? What happened to you?”

  “Just a minute. Busy.” He turned back to the computer and started typing.

  “Busy with what?” My voice sounded sharper than I’d intended. I wanted to say more, but everything I could think of sounded ridiculous.

  “Destroying a man’s life,” he said. “Ray, what do you know about porn on the Internet?”

  “There’s porn on the Internet?”

  Arne laughed loudly, and I could feel some of the tension going out of the room. I needed him on my side, but somehow I’d lost the knack of winning people over.

  “My favorite is where people make their own and put it up online. It’s crazy popular, even if most of the content is videos some dude made with a hooker or revenge postings by the recently dumped. Sometimes it’s even weirder. Check it out.”

  He turned the laptop toward me. A video was playing, and it took me a moment to realize it was the same video I’d seen in Francois’s house. Except that someone had added a timer to it.

  “Why is there a …” Then I saw why. By the time the counter reached 27, Francois had finished.

  “See, Francois has a wife somewhere—Park Avenue or something—and she is a litigation powerhouse. Her whole clan is. Once word starts to spread about this video, he’s going to have a very expensive divorce on his hands. Plus the twenty-seven-second thing.”

  He turned the laptop toward himself again. There was a jangle of keys, and I noticed that his big key ring was hanging off the side of the machine. Arne pulled at it, unplugging a memory stick, and pocketed it. He must have found the DVD in the Bugatti right away, copied the file during the drive back to the city, and put the disc back.

  But that was his deal. I had other problems.

  “Arne, Melly said you were dead. She said you’d been killed and it was my fault.”

  Arne gave me a steady look. This was it. He was about to break down and give me what I needed. “Well, he was your buddy, wasn’t he?”

  I didn’t have any buddies. Not anymore. “Who?”

  “Wally King.”

  Oh, God. Wally Fucking King.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lenard touched Arne’s shoulder as though he’d just seen something they’d both been waiting for. “Hold that thought,” Arne said.

  I heard a foot scuffle behind me. Arne glanced at the floor behind me. I turned, but there was no one there.

  A heavy metal canister clanged near my feet and let out a wet hiss. A plume of tear gas billowed around my legs.

  I turned to shout a warning to Arne, but he was no longer in his booth. I shut my mouth and clamped my hand over my nose before I caught a whiff, then soccer-kicked it toward the front door. Damn, it was hot already—I could feel the heat of it against my ankle. It struck something on the floor I couldn’t see and skittered sideways toward Rumpled Guy.

  I shut my eyes just as the stinging started. Something moved very close to me, and the gunfire started.

  I dropped flat onto the floor. The tattoos on my chest and the outside of my forearms are bulletproof thanks to a spell called the closed way, but my head, back, legs, and sides were completely exposed. The guns sounded very loud and very close, but nothing hit me.

  I crawled blindly toward the fire exit. Sawdust stuck to my skin, and my chest felt tight. I hadn’t caught a good breath, and my oxygen wa
s running out. Fortunately, the gunfire had already stopped. It takes very little time to empty a magazine.

  I heard the sounds of clips being ejected from pistols and slammed back in. There were two gunmen, at least, and now I was sure they were close. Someone was hacking and choking on the gas, but it didn’t sound like anyone near me. Were the gunmen wearing masks?

  I was sure they could see me—the gas couldn’t have been that thick—and I expected a bullet in the back. I hoped they’d have the decency to shoot at my head; at least it would be quick.

  But I didn’t stop crawling, and the bullet never came. I finally made it to the wall and, reaching to my right, found the doorway. Arne was right about my sense of direction. The door was open, but I was barely across the threshold when it swung shut, slamming against my head and making me gasp.

  I crawled into the alley, gagging on the wisp of tear gas I’d inhaled. I didn’t know if it was heavier than air, but I wanted to be on my feet; I stood and stumbled against a dumpster. Time to live dangerously; I opened my eyes.

  Immediately, they started to burn. Tears flooded my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop coughing.

  Arne and Lenard weren’t there, but Rumpled stumbled through the door just behind me. He was coughing so hard I thought he’d convulse.

  My eyes were burning stronger now, as though the tears were washing the chemicals into my eyes rather than out, but he had it worse. He kept saying: “Ah, God! God!” between retches.

  We were helpless. If the shooters inside the bar came out here, they could have put bullets into us without breaking stride. Of course, they could have done that inside, too.

  I blinked through my tears and saw a short, slender figure knock Rumpled to the ground. A second, larger figure stepped up close to me. “Well, well,” he drawled. “If it ain’t old Ray Lilly himself. Howsdoin’, Raymond?”

  “Bud?” I asked, suddenly recognizing his voice. “Someone just tried to kill Arne. I didn’t see who, though. Is he around?”

  “I don’t see Arne,” Bud answered. “He musta lit out.”

  Again.

  I could almost hear a smile in Bud’s voice. I blinked to clear my vision, and it worked a little. The slender figure moved toward us. “He’s gone,” she said. “We should go, too.” That was Summer, another member of Arne’s crew.