A Plain-Dealing Villain

by Craig Schaefer

  I shrugged. “No argument here.”

  “If you can kill him,” she said, “will you?”

  “Only if you promise me something,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Promise me that when I tell you it’s time to go home, you go home, and you leave the rough stuff to me.”

  “Okay,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed her.

  “You promise?”

  She gave me the ghost of a smile. “I promise.”

  “Good.” I rubbed her shoulder. “There are too many monsters as it is.”

  We got back to the table in time for the main course. My steak was served up exactly the way I like it: warm, dripping red, and bought with somebody else’s money. When dessert and coffee rolled around—Irish coffee, in Bentley and Corman’s case—Caitlin excused herself to make a phone call.

  “Mama,” I said, “how’s Jennifer holding up?”

  Margaux wagged her hand from side to side. “You ever throw two strange cats into a room together? Know how they snarl and hiss and circle around, waiting for the other one to bite? That’s her and Nicky right now. You ask me, one of them is gonna bite, and soon.”

  I sighed. “I already told Bentley, the night I get back in town, we’re squashing this beef. Jen and Nicky are going to sit down at a table together, whether they like it or not, and neither one of them leaves the room until they come to terms.”

  Margaux raised her eyebrows at me and sipped her coffee.

  “You’d have better luck with cats.”

  Caitlin strolled back to the table, casually running her fingertips across the back of my neck as she sat down. They left a warm tingle in their wake.

  “We’re in luck,” she said. “Naavarasi had the perfect candidate. There’s a local, going by the name Scudder, who fancies himself an information broker. He’s on the outs with the Flowers, and with Royce in particular. Very eager to earn his way back into his masters’ good graces.”

  “Which means if I go to him for intel,” I said, “and let it slip about a plan to steal the coin…”

  “He’ll be on his phone to the boss two seconds after you leave.” Corman lifted his mug to me. “From your lips to Royce’s ears. Play it smooth, kiddo.”

  I took a sip of water and pushed back my chair, turning to pass my envelope of cash over to Caitlin.

  “This should cover the tab and get everybody rooms for the night. If you’ll all excuse me, I have to go spread some nasty rumors about myself.”

  25.

  I stood on the edge of a streetlamp’s glow, a silent shadow outside the reach of the light. If Naavarasi’s intel was good, this Scudder guy could be my best way to shake Royce up a little.

  If being the operative word when it came to Naavarasi. The rakshasi queen had a penchant for steering me into traps—half to get what she wanted, and half to satisfy her sick sense of humor. Still, things were a little different now. Caitlin had some things Naavarasi wanted: a potential place at Prince Sitri’s table, the respect that the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers refused to give her, and payback against Prince Malphas for conquering Naavarasi’s little kingdom in hell’s name.

  Naavarasi hadn’t crossed the line into open rebellion against Malphas quite yet—she was as cagey as she was smart, biding her time and weighing her options—but I figured it was only a matter of time before she hopped fences and joined the Court of Jade Tears.

  Which would basically make her my next-door neighbor, magically speaking. I wasn’t sure if I was happy about that, but at least she’d be someplace we could keep an eye on her.

  An “L” train rattled by overhead, showering pumpkin-orange sparks onto the black pavement below. Scudder’s place stood across the street, a hole in the wall with a flickering neon sign in the window that read “Small Appliance Outlet and Repair.” It stood shoulder to shoulder with a Chinese takeout place and a mattress store, both of them already closed for the night.

  Tarnished bells hung over the grimy front door, but they didn’t jingle. The only welcome I got was a dry-throated croak from the back of the cluttered shop. “We’re closing in five minutes.”

  The store was already the size of a shoebox, and the tightly packed floor-to-ceiling shelves turned Scudder’s place into an experiment in claustrophobia. So this is where appliances go to die, I thought, my shoes sticking to linoleum that hadn’t been mopped in at least a decade. Rusted junk packed the shelves, from vivisected vacuum cleaners to microwave ovens with their guts spilling out. It was the crime scene of a mechanical massacre.

  I found the perpetrator in back, perched on a stool and taking a screwdriver to the corpse of an innocent toaster. He was old, with thick white whiskers and skin like beef jerky. He looked up at me, scowling, eyes bulbous behind oversized glasses.

  “If it’s a repair, I’m backlogged ’til next Thursday. Drop it off and I’ll write you a claim ticket. Gotta pay half up front.”

  I got a good look at him, his outline glowing cold and dark in my second sight, and swallowed my anger. Scudder was a hijacker, walking around in skin that didn’t belong to him. I wondered how many years he’d been squatting inside his current victim, keeping the real man locked away in a dark corner of his own mind. I knew exactly what that felt like. It took all my effort to remember I had a role to play and not blast him back to hell as a matter of principle.

  Never did meet a hijacker I could stand, with the sole exception of Emma Loomis, one of Caitlin’s coworkers. Even then, I could only tolerate her because Caitlin privately filled me in on where Emma got her human puppet. Let’s just say that the next time you hear about a brain-dead and comatose hospital patient making a “miraculous overnight recovery”…it might not be all that miraculous.

  “I’m in the market for something a little more abstract,” I told him. “Information. I hear you’re the man to see.”

  He put down the toaster, but he kept the screwdriver handy.

  “Yeah? Who told you that?”

  “Satisfied customer of yours.”

  “This satisfied customer got a name?”

  I shook my head. “Not one that I’m comfortable saying out loud.”

  “Then you’re not someone I’m comfortable doing business with.” He glanced at the bulky Timex on his wrist. “And your five minutes are up. We’re closed. Goodnight.”

  “C’mon,” I said, trying to put a little pleading into my voice, “do you have any idea how hard it is for an out-of-towner to get a leg up around here? The second people find out I’m from out west, they clam up.”

  Scudder’s eyebrow twitched.

  “How far west?”

  “Las Vegas,” I said. “The name’s Faust. Daniel Faust. You might have heard of me.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, but his hunched-up shoulders told me he was lying.

  “Suits me better if it doesn’t. I’m in town for a job, an in-and-out kinda deal. I hear you’ve got your finger on the pulse of this town.”

  He put the screwdriver down and folded his hands.

  “Some people say that.”

  “Then you’re the man I need to talk to. My curiosity’s been tickled.”

  “Sounds like a personal problem.”

  “It is,” I told him. “See, once I get curious about something, I just can’t rest until I’ve found a little satisfaction.”

  “And what has you all curious?”

  “The Bast Club. Ever been there?”

  Scudder’s eyes squinted, just a bit.

  “Now and then,” he said.

  “Big place. Almost a maze, with lots of unmarked rooms and twisty little passages. Makes me wonder if anyone’s ever mapped the place. The whole place.”

  Scudder twisted his lips into a lopsided smile. “What, you looking for official blueprints? You must not have heard: Management didn’t exactly build the place the old-fashioned way. The club just sort of happened.”

  “Sure, sure, but that doesn’t mean some daring Theseus hasn’
t wandered that labyrinth with a ball of thread.”

  Scudder frowned. “What’s a Theseus?”

  “Never mind. Let me bottom-line this for you: I’m in the market for a full dossier on the Bast Club. I want to know about the employees, human and otherwise, with as much documentation on their personal lives as you can piece together. Floor plans. All the ways in, and all the ways out. Can you handle that?”

  “I know this town like the back of my hand,” Scudder said, getting up from his stool. He shuffled over to a battered filing cabinet, its dented sidewalls looking like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. “The question is, can you afford…”

  He paused, looking back at me, one hand frozen on a drawer handle. I could hear the gears grinding inside his skull as he tried to sniff out an advantage.

  He pulled his hand away from the drawer, leaving it closed.

  “I mean, I don’t have everything you need here, but I could get it, if you can handle my going rate.”

  “Money isn’t an issue,” I told him.

  Normally, that’d make someone’s eyes light up, but his expression didn’t budge. He’d already realized something better than money was up for grabs.

  “How soon would you need this information?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Noon at the latest. I’m on a strict timetable. That’s nonnegotiable. In two days, my window of opportunity closes for good.”

  Not coincidentally, in two days, whoever won Royce’s poker tournament would walk away with their new prize. I could tell the timing wasn’t lost on Scudder.

  It wouldn’t be lost on Royce either.

  “Mind if I ask what you’re trying to accomplish? It would help me tailor the package to your specific—”

  “I do mind,” I said. “Just give me all the intel you have, and let me worry about sorting it out.”

  He held up his withered hands. “Fine, fine, the customer is always right. For a full dossier like this, I’d say…two thousand dollars. Cash.”

  “For that much money, this had better be worth it,” I said, knowing he’d never deliver. “Call me tomorrow when it’s ready, and I’ll swing by with your payment.”

  He passed me a whittled-down nub of a golf pencil and a greasy receipt for a pepperoni pizza. I flipped the receipt over and scribbled my cell number on the back, holding it out to him between two fingers.

  “Pleasure doing business,” he said. “Now, unless I can interest you in a slightly used toaster…”

  I glanced down at the pile of mangled parts.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Trying to cut down on carbs. Call me tomorrow.”

  I let myself out. A light mist hung in the air, making the streetlights glisten. I was sure Scudder wouldn’t wait to make a phone call, not to me, but to Royce, trying to worm his way back into the hound’s good graces with a gift of information.

  What Royce did with it, of course, was up to him. That was the tricky part.

  I strolled down the quiet sidewalk, thinking, not in any particular hurry. My thoughts kept drifting back to the airport and what Royce said about Caitlin. Every time they did I kicked them, hard, to the task at hand.

  The timetable couldn’t be tighter. The tournament was the day after tomorrow, which gave us about twenty-four hours to pull this off. I didn’t like short cons: you had to put on the pressure, hard and fast, and people under that kind of stress could get unpredictable. Unpredictable in bad, bloody ways.

  No other option, though. Slow and steady was usually the right play, but not in a race like this one. I couldn’t go to bed without doing a little more to ramp up Royce’s paranoia, making sure I had him where I wanted him. I called Caitlin.

  “Hey,” I said, “so far, so good. Scudder took the bait. Think I’m going to stop by the Bast Club and find out if anybody looks nervous to see me. Care to scope out the local wildlife?”

  “I bought a new dress for the occasion,” she said.

  Caitlin met me at our hotel room door, wearing something short, black, and vaguely scandalous with her red-bottomed Louboutin heels. We almost didn’t make it off the elevator. To our credit, we disentangled before the doors chimed open, but it was a close call.

  I called Halima from the vinyl backseat of a cab, and she gave me instructions to relay to the driver.

  “Have him drop you off at that corner,” she told me. “Wait until he leaves, then walk half a block east. That will take you to the parking lot. Management frowns on bringing cab drivers any closer than that.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Anything else Management frowns on that we should know about?”

  She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Yes. Probably anything and everything you’re planning on doing in Chicago.”

  “Well, good,” I said. “He can get in line with everybody else.”

  26.

  “Corman was right,” Caitlin said, standing beside me in the Bast Club’s sprawling lounge. A veil of burgundy light washed over us, carried on a lilting serenade from a quartet that played over unseen speakers from every corner of the room.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “It looks like Jules Verne built a brothel.”

  “It’s a little excessive, huh?”

  Caitlin blinked, looking around wide-eyed.

  “What? No, I love it,” she said. “They just need to fix the music. The ambiance is screaming for some OMD or Depeche Mode.”

  I didn’t see Trevor Manderley anywhere, and that suited me just fine. Amy was in full effect, though, holding court for a small gaggle of human and cambion onlookers as she demonstrated a ragged-looking poppet from her seemingly bottomless briefcase.

  “That’s Amy Xun,” I said to Caitlin, nodding her way. “Local black marketeer. She wants the Judas Coin, bad, and I gather she’s not confident of her chances in the tournament. She’s looking to buy it outright from whoever wins.”

  “Could be useful,” Caitlin murmured. “Anyone else I should know about?”

  There was, and she was coming our way holding a tall carrot-tinged Bloody Mary that matched her hair dye.

  “Mr. Vegas,” Freddie said, flashing a smile. “You out-of-towners are multiplying like rabbits. Who’s your lady friend?”

  “Freddie, Caitlin. Caitlin, this is Fredrika Vinter.”

  Caitlin’s eyes got even bigger.

  “As in, House of Vinter?” she asked.

  Freddie beamed. “The one and only, dahling. You’ve heard of me?”

  “Heard of you? Half the clothes in my wardrobe have your label. I stumbled across your work two years ago, when Pierre Foss did that Fashion Week profile on you for Vogue, and I’ve been a fan ever since.”

  “Foss?” Freddie waved her hand in dismissal. “That was a hatchet job. He said I was terminally trapped in the eighties.”

  That, I thought as I looked between them, explains everything.

  Caitlin nodded. “I see you as more…influenced by a keen grasp of important historical trends, yet finding your own aesthetic voice.”

  “Something tells me you two have a lot to talk about,” I said. “Why don’t I leave you to it? I’m going to grab a drink at the bar and poke around a little.”

  Freddie locked her arm around Caitlin’s. “Come right this way. Let’s find someplace to talk where everyone can see how amazing we are, while you tell me which of my designs you like the most and why.”

  I squeezed in at the crowded bar, shoulder to shoulder with a yellow-eyed cambion biker and a rail-thin woman with short-cropped hair and a silver ankh pendant at her throat. I waited to catch the bartender’s attention, lost in a sea of swirling psychic currents. The Tiger’s Garden back home could get loud, on a magical level, but nothing like this place. I suppose it helped when you knew all the minds you were brushing up against.

  Maybe that was why I was taken by surprise when a slender hand clamped down on my forearm like a drowning victim grabbing for a life preserver. I turned to find a goddess at my shoulder. Delicate cheekbones and a curling bo
b of golden hair, lush lips painted cherry red, and eyes so pale blue they made me think of stained glass. I knew I hadn’t seen her before. A face like that, you don’t forget.

  “You have to help me,” the woman said in a breathless whisper.

  “I’m sorry,” I started to say, “I don’t think we’ve—”

  Her hand squeezed harder. “Please. He’s going to kill me if you don’t do something!”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. She tugged my arm, pulling me away from the bar. The woman looked like she was around twenty-one, but that was only skin deep. Now I could see the black-diamond aura pulsing in my second sight. The mark of an incarnate demon.

  Not a cold aura, though. A warm one. Like Caitlin’s.

  “Who?” I said. “Who’s going to kill you?”

  She shot a glance over her shoulder then looked back to me, her eyes wide with terror. “Royce. I shouldn’t even be talking to you, but you have a reputation for being able to help people and I’m just so scared—”

  I took her hand. “It’s all right. Deep breaths, okay? Nobody’s going to hurt you, not while I’m here. Just take some deep breaths, calm down, and tell me everything.”

  She pulled me across the room, leading me to one of the empty conversation nooks. We sat side by side on the plush red velvet divan, and she clung to my hand as she talked.

  “My use-name is Nadine. I’m with the Flowers. I mean, I’m nobody in the court, but…Royce has a human spy, who’s obsessed with me. I rejected his advances, and I just found out he’s, he’s—”

  Her voice hitched. I gently squeezed her hand, trying to reassure her. “It’s okay. Nadine, listen, it’s going to be okay. I’ll protect you.”

  “He’s fabricated evidence,” she told me, her eyes glistening, “tons of it, ‘proving’ I’m a traitor. He’s here, tonight, and he’s given me an hour to change my mind. If I don’t do what he wants, anything he wants, he’ll go straight to Royce, and Royce will believe him. He’ll kill me! Y-you believe me, don’t you?”

  Of course I did. The question was how to stop him? No violence inside the club. I could lure him out, come up with some pretense, then what? Drop him fast, drag the body to one of those Dumpsters around the corner—