A Plain-Dealing Villain

by Craig Schaefer

  Coop was good as dead. He knew it. I knew it. Only difference was he accepted it. I couldn’t let him go out like that.

  And I couldn’t get the cash to his wife if I was hauled out of here in handcuffs. I had to choose, and choose fast. I could keep him alive, so he could spend the rest of his life in prison—with me sharing a cell right next to him—or I could let him rest easy, knowing his family would be okay.

  “Yeah, Coop,” I told him. “I’ll do it. I promise.”

  I pulled my hands away and let him bleed.

  “The other thing.” He let out a racking, high-pitched cough, wincing. “You find that son of a bitch, Dan. You find him and you send him straight to hell.”

  The swell of police sirens rose in the distance. I looked down at Coop.

  “He’s already dead,” I said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Coop nodded weakly and twitched his fingers at me. “Go on, then. Get.”

  I wanted to stay until the end—it seemed like the thing to do—but I couldn’t argue with him. Couldn’t argue with the sirens either, and they sounded like they were less than a block away. I gave Coop’s hand one last, long squeeze.

  Then I ran.

  Out the door, into the night, and around the corner, ducking into the back alley. I ripped off my mask and my gloves as I ran, holding them close to my chest in a wadded-up ball. The alley kinked on a diagonal, curving behind the building and opening one street up. I froze in the shadows with my back pressed to a cold brick wall as three squad cars roared past, lights blazing against the dark. As soon as they rounded the corner I made my move, breaking from cover and running across the street, diving into another alleyway.

  Distance. The more distance I could put between me and the crime scene, the safer I was. A stairway up to the elevated train tracks looked inviting, but I knew better. There were security cameras on the platforms, and the cops would be pulling all of tonight’s footage to look for suspects. I had to figure they’d canvass the local cabbies too, so that meant hailing a ride was a no-go. I kept moving, alley to alley, backstreet to backstreet, with no direction in mind but “away.”

  About three blocks out, I found an open Dumpster piled high with last week’s trash. I held my breath and shoved the mask and gloves as far under the mounds of moldering plastic bags as I could reach. Unless some eagle-eyed cop got incredibly lucky, they were good as gone.

  Another couple of twists and turns, and I wound up on Michigan Avenue. Even this late at night there was plenty of traffic on the street. I could pass myself off as some faceless middle manager, stuck working late and on his way home.

  Home. I wanted my desert, my neon, my tourist crowds, not this desolate, cold canyon of stone and glass. I wanted to catch the next flight west and leave this horrible night behind me. Couldn’t do that, though. Not now.

  I’m a professional liar, but some promises you just don’t break. I promised Coop his wife would get his share of the score, and I’d be damned if I went back on that. Then there was Stanwyck. Between killing Augie and Coop, and thinking he could bushwhack me and get away with it, I had three good reasons to put a bullet between Stanwyck’s eyes. Getting the knife back made four.

  And he’ll be lucky if I let him die that fast, I thought. He said he found another buyer. It’d have to be someone local and somebody who knew Damien Ecko’s business. That couldn’t be a huge pool of suspects. I gave Halima Khoury a call, got her voicemail, and left a message asking her to call me back right away.

  The sky rumbled. More rain on the way. I took shelter in a tavern called Keefe’s, where St. Patrick’s Day was a year-round sort of celebration. The brick-walled pub felt like a cellar, cool and dark, and the air smelled like beer and fresh-roasted peanuts. There were worse places to wait out a storm. I found an empty table in the back where I could rest my feet for a while. Most of the crowd was up toward the bar, and I didn’t feel too sociable.

  A tired-looking waitress in a short plaid skirt came around, and I ordered a club soda with lime. I wanted hard liquor like a man in the desert wants ice water, but I had a feeling my work tonight was just getting started.

  Sitting still gave me time to think. That was the last thing I needed. I played the night back in my mind, over and over again. If I’d been a little faster, a little sharper, if I’d done this thing or that thing differently, would Coop and Augie still be alive? I ran it down a hundred different ways, and it all ended in a hundred different pulls of the trigger.

  A shot of the storefront came up on the TV behind the bar. My stomach clenched, waiting for a police-artist’s suspect sketch, but none came. All I could make out over the chatter of the crowd was something about “mysterious circumstances” and a dead body found at the scene of the break-in.

  My burner phone buzzed twice against my hip. I should have thrown the damn thing away with my mask and gloves, but in the heat of the moment I’d forgotten I had it.

  It was a text message. Sent from Coop’s phone.

  17.

  For just a second, my heart soared. He’d gotten out somehow. Crawled away from the store before the cops got there, or maybe bribed somebody into taking him to the hospital instead of a prison infirmary. Coop was okay.

  Then I read the message.

  You have something that belongs to me.

  Ecko. He’d gotten there before the cops, most likely. Plucked the burner from Coop’s pocket. I didn’t answer him. Ecko didn’t know me from John Doe; all he had was a number for a throwaway phone, one that was heading for the bottom of a trash can the second I walked out of here. Out of all my problems right now, he was at the rock bottom of the list.

  The waitress brought over my club soda, and I pretended to enjoy it. A few minutes later, another message came in.

  I have something that belongs to you, too.

  And underneath, in a blue bubble of text: File Attachment: friend.avi. Would you like to open it?

  One body, I thought. The news said the cops only found ONE body. My stomach clenched like a fist.

  I cupped my hand over the phone, holding it close, and pressed play.

  The video was taken from Coop’s own phone, grainy and shaky, as the person holding it strolled down a dim corridor walled with cinder blocks. An overhead light hung dead, its bulb burned out, and the person taking the video clicked on a flashlight as he rounded a corner. As the camera slowly swept from left to right, I realized what the openings lining the hallway were: steel cell doors with tiny barred windows.

  The director stopped at a door at the end of the hallway. He held up the camera and the flashlight together, sending a thin, pale beam of light into the cell. Letting me see what waited inside.

  Coop’s eyes were like a pair of white marbles, the pupils gone pale and dead. Mortician’s thread stitched his lips shut, but they could only muffle the mewling animal noises he made as he flinched at the sudden light, throwing up his hands to hide his face. He was naked and sitting cross-legged on the dirty stone floor, one ankle shackled to a ring set into the floor. I could see the black clotting on his chest, blood congealed over the wound that killed him.

  Coop wasn’t dead.

  He wasn’t alive either.

  Call me, the next message read.

  I got up and walked into the men’s room.

  A naked fluorescent light bar crackled softly above the sinks. I stood under the harsh light, took a long look at myself in the grimy mirror, and waited for a drunk washing his hands to finish up and leave. I needed some privacy for this. Ecko picked up on the second ring.

  “Mr. Greyson, I believe. Unless that was the gentleman with the bullet in his head, staining my carpet.”

  “This is Greyson,” I said. No point denying the alias. He’d recognize my voice from the last time I called him. “I want my man back.”

  “And I want my property returned to me. It was a fortuitous thing, you know. Your friend had just breathed his last when I returned to my shop, but his soul hadn’t quite left the
body. I made sure he’d stay that way. And let me answer your unspoken question: he is suffering. He’s suffering the torments of the damned, shackled inside his own dead meat. You should move with haste. Before he starts to rot in earnest.”

  Damn you, Stanwyck. Hell with the money, I’d give the knife back in a heartbeat if it meant setting Coop free.

  “I don’t have it,” I said, “but…I’m working on that. Fine, you want it? It’s yours. Just let him go.”

  Ecko chuckled.

  “Oh, it’s not that simple. There are damages. The violation of my shop, the destruction of my front door, not to mention the mess you made in my home.” He paused. “You know, it’s funny. There was a time when I’d pursue a thief to the ends of the earth to enact my vengeance, but I’ve been in this game for a long, long time. Perhaps I’ve mellowed with age, but I’m honestly more amused than angry. Perhaps I’ll just keep your friend as an ushabti and we can call it even.”

  “Get to the damn point,” I told him. “You’ve got a price in mind for letting him go, so let’s hear it. What do I have to do?”

  He giggled before he answered, a capricious little laugh, and that was when I knew I was in trouble.

  “I want the Judas Coin.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “No,” he said, “I imagine you don’t. That’s what happens when you go to a city where you don’t belong and rob a stranger. Nonetheless, that’s my price. Bring me the dagger and the coin, and you can have your friend back.”

  “If you’ll just tell me—”

  “We don’t have anything else to talk about.” He hung up.

  I stared at the useless lump of plastic in my hands. I wanted to throw it against the wall. I wanted to break something. Instead I shoved it in my pocket, trudged back out into the bar, and drank my damn club soda.

  Halima called me back. “I saw the news,” were the first words out of her mouth.

  “Things didn’t go according to plan.”

  “I warned you,” she said.

  “Ecko wasn’t the problem at the time. Now he’s the problem.”

  I filled her in. She didn’t answer right away, lost in a pensive silence.

  “Ushabti.” She said the word as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of sour milk. “In ancient Egypt, they were figurines. Little statuettes, imbued with funerary magic. The idea being that they would serve you for eternity in the afterlife.”

  “So when he called Coop one…”

  “He’s making it very clear he has your friend’s soul in his power, and he means to keep him.”

  “But if I bring him this coin thing—”

  Halima sighed. “He’s playing with you. The coin isn’t something you can…you know, it’d be easier to show you. Where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”

  I waited outside under the glare of a streetlamp. A cold mist rode on the night wind, prickly and wet. It kept my senses sharp. Halima rattled up in an old brown Datsun with an NPR bumper sticker.

  “I’m not doing this for you,” she said as I got in on the passenger side. “That is to say I am, but…this isn’t the sort of thing I get involved in, you understand? I’m doing this for your friend’s sake.”

  “I’m grateful,” I told her. “Stanwyck—the guy who bushwhacked us—said he got a better offer while he was asking around about Ecko. So it had to be someone local, somebody who deals in hot antiquities. Know anyone like that?”

  “Possibly. What were you sent to steal?”

  “An Aztec dagger. Obsidian blade, and the hilt’s some kind of yellow-green stone with scallops and a lion head on the pommel.”

  “Sacrificial knife? Not good. Does it have magical properties?”

  “For what I’m getting paid, I can’t imagine it doesn’t. My buyer is in Texas, so word about this thing is spreading fast.”

  “Stolen magical antiquities.” She wrinkled her nose. “As it happens, I know a likely suspect, but getting the truth out of him won’t be easy. It never is. Hold on, we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “There” was at the end of a twisty drive through the backstreets, down empty roads lined with construction cones and along narrow alleys littered with chunks of asphalt. A murder of crows watched us from telephone lines and rusty fences, their eyes glittering in the dark.

  “I understand there’s a private club for the occult underground in Las Vegas. Is that right?” She gave the birds a narrow-eyed stare as we rolled past.

  “The Tiger’s Garden,” I said. “It’s picky about who it lets in. Magicians only.”

  “I’ve heard a rumor that there’s a nightclub not far from the Vegas Strip, too. Allegedly operated by one of the courts of hell and exclusively catering to their particular…needs.”

  “I’ve heard that rumor, too.”

  The Datsun turned into a parking lot, pulling into a vacant space between a battered old pickup and what was, unless my eyes deceived me, the sleek fire-orange wedge of a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Lamborghini.

  “It’s important to understand, first and foremost,” Halima explained as she killed the engine, “that in Chicago, the occult community is rather…desegregated.”

  A three-story brownstone, all of its windows boarded over, turned its back to the parking lot. My shoes crunched on loose gravel as I followed Halima over to a battered metal door.

  “There are rules,” she said and ticked them off on her fingers. “Take nothing that does not belong to you. Lay no hand on another, except by their invitation. Speak no true names and tell no secrets, save those which are yours to tell.”

  “Halima, where are we?”

  She rapped four times on the metal door. I glanced up, spotting the eye of a closed-circuit camera set high on the wall. A moment later, the door buzzed and she pulled it open. A gust of warm air washed out over us, carrying the distant, muffled strains of violin music. Halima looked at me, grave.

  “A place I do not care to visit very often,” she said. “Welcome to the Bast Club.”

  18.

  “Stay close to me,” Halima warned as we walked down a short hallway lined in burgundy wallpaper. The floor was an elaborate mosaic expertly carved into solid oak, a sea of interlocking puzzle pieces. Sconces under globes of green glass cast pale light, but something about the hall set my nerves on edge.

  Too many shadows, I realized, glancing from the lights to the walls. Shadows without anything casting them.

  The vestibule opened onto a lounge done up in grand Victorian style, baroque wood and brass, with red velvet divans gathered in discreet sitting nooks. Another pair of green glass sconces dangled over antique billiard tables in one corner of the lounge, and a lacquered bar with brass runners curved in an L-shape stood on the opposite side. Lush velvet curtains and lace chintz shrouded the boarded-over windows.

  Raw sensation hit my psychic senses so fast I couldn’t keep up with it. The room was a vortex of strange magic and confused signals. A couple of cambion wearing bikers’ leathers played pool, openly displaying their runny-egg eyes and purple-veined faces. A petite Chinese woman in a tailored black suit held court in one of the conversation nooks, a briefcase at her side. Sitting opposite her, a pair of young women in matching blue hoodies watched intently while she demonstrated items from her case—a tiny brass spinning top, a bell, a pair of bone dice. Sandalwood incense and something musty, like the smell of a library filled with old and rare books, hung in the air.

  If I let my eyes slip out of focus, I could see tangled serpentine snake-trails of glowing fractal runes flitting around us. They whirled and danced and mated, giving birth to impossible mathematics.

  “It’s a bit much at first,” Halima said, unimpressed.

  I nodded toward the bikers at the pool table. “I thought the Flowers had an open-season policy on cambion these days?”

  “Did. From what I understand, a rebel faction called the Redemption Choir stirred up a hornet’s nest. Then their leader disappeared, and things calmed down again.
Cambion still aren’t exactly welcome in Chicago, but violence is forbidden within these walls.”

  Halima confirmed what I’d suspected all along, that the “pogrom” was a feint to force the Redemption Choir west into Prince Sitri’s territory. Didn’t matter now. Their leader didn’t disappear. I knew exactly where he was: buried twenty feet under a parking lot.

  A squeal of delight broke my concentration. The woman steaming toward us had a lopsided mop of curly hair dyed fire-engine red. She wore a gray raw silk halter dress that could have come from Caitlin’s closet, belted with a twist of gunmetal black chain. An envelope-sized purse dangled from the crook of her arm, her hand currently occupied with an oversized martini glass.

  “Lady H, you came out of hibernation!” She stopped, turned, and gave me a curious head-to-toe look. “Hey, who’s your date? Not bad.”

  A faint blush colored Halima’s cheeks. “Not my date, Dances. Just a friend of an old friend. This is Daniel. Daniel, this is Freddie.”

  “Fredrika Vinter.” She offered me her free hand. Her skin was morbidly cold to the touch, like she’d just pulled it from an ice bucket. “My good friends call me Dances. Wanna be good friends?”

  “Daniel’s from Las Vegas,” Halima said. “He’s in town on business, and I thought I’d show him the sights.”

  “I’ve got my sights set on that couch,” she said, eyeing one of the empty conversation nooks, “and another appletini. Come, come, drinks are on me.”

  Halima’s fingernails gently touched my back as we followed her across the lounge. “Dances is a good friend of mine,” she whispered. “You can trust her. Nobody else here, though. And I mean nobody.”

  Freddie draped herself across a red velvet divan, a fresh drink in hand. I ordered a whiskey sour from the bar—at this point in the night, I needed to limber up a little—and Halima asked for a club soda. We sat in high-backed wooden chairs set at an angle to the divan, all clustered around a little round table and a handful of felt-lined coasters.

  Freddie gave Halima a look over the rim of her glass. “Swear to God, when are you going to let me dress you properly? You’re too pretty to have a wardrobe that frumpy. You should look like a model. You should be one of my models.”