Scarlett Undercover

by Jennifer Latham

  He was gone before I could tell him where he could stick his Qadar.

  It was probably a good thing.

  I swore out loud, looked at my backpack on the passenger seat, and took a quick inventory. I had two bottles, both of which were priceless relics, one of which the Children of Iblis thought was a portal to another dimension. Hell, for all I knew, they might even be right; the real Shubaak might open straight into Oz or Narnia or goddamned Middle Earth, for all I knew. I also had two phones, a lock-picking kit, a blackjack, an armed cop on his way to protect Reem, and the best doctor in Las Almas busting her ass to keep Decker alive. What I still needed was to make sure Hashim didn’t kill me before I got to The Parker. I needed to figure out how to keep Gemma alive. I needed to tell Decker that I loved him.

  And there were only six hours left until midnight.

  No problem.

  I had it covered.

  Slick Eddie’s was a pawnshop on the south stretch of Daly where nice people didn’t go. It was small and cramped and filthy and smelled like old fish, but the owner had a reputation for not asking questions or checking IDs. He also had a thing for me.

  “Evening, Eddie,” I hollered. The shop seemed deserted when I walked in, but he was there. Eddie was always there.

  “Is that the lovely Miss Scarlett?”

  His voice came from behind a crowd of naked mannequins wearing Mardi Gras beads and stilettos.

  “It’s me,” I answered.

  Eddie appeared, wearing his usual frayed blue suit. The one covered with stains from God-knew-what that had been there since God-knew-when. His greedy, myopic eyes leered at me from behind glasses thick as bricks.

  “It’s been a long time since I had the pleasure,” he said. “I’ve missed every luscious bit of you.”

  “Quit it, Eddie. You’re making me blush.” I stepped behind a stack of old ammunition boxes, grateful for the foot of space they maintained between the two of us.

  “Yes, yes. Well, what can I do for you tonight?” A pale tongue slithered out to wet his liver-colored lips.

  I flashed him the stack of bills I’d withdrawn from a nearby ATM. It was everything Reem and I kept in our checking account. I hoped it would be enough.

  Eddie’s eyes sharpened behind their lenses. If there was one thing that turned him on more than underage girls, it was working a deal.

  “What are you looking for?” he said.

  I rattled off my shopping list and took it as a good sign that he let me keep talking.

  I shouldn’t have.

  “I won’t sell you a gun,” he said flatly. “I could go to jail for that.”

  “You’d go a lot faster and a lot longer if the cops bothered tracking down where most of your merchandise comes from. This stuff is hotter than lava, Eddie.”

  “I run a clean shop.” He didn’t bother trying to sound indignant.

  “Up front, maybe,” I said. “But what about in the back?”

  He licked his lips again. I fought my gag reflex. Nearly lost.

  “A wise man once wrote that guns are just a fast curtain to a bad second act,” he said. “You looking for a bad second act, Scarlett?”

  “I’m looking for any kind of second act at all, Eddie.”

  Something ugly came into his eyes as they slid over my body, leaving the kind of slime trail you can’t wash off.

  “Maybe…” he said, dragging the word out, “we could work something out in a trade?”

  I pressed my hand against the Shubaak in my bag. Facing whatever waited for me at The Parker with a gun would have been nice, but not nice enough for the kind of deal Eddie was suggesting.

  “Cash, Eddie,” I said. “That’s all I’m offering.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Pity.” He snaked a hand into the deep pocket of his pants. “Then no gun.”

  I kept my eyes on his, refusing to look down. “Fine. Then let’s talk about what my cash will get me.”

  A reptilian smile spread across his face. His hand came out of the pocket, jangling a loop of keys.

  “Right this way, m’dear,” he said with one more flick of his tongue. “Follow me.”

  28

  The doors to Calamus were locked when I got there. It was 7:14 PM. I had less than five hours. There were no corner boys slinging drugs on the stoop nearby. No Nuala. No Jones. “Manny!” I pounded on the heavy wooden doors with my blackjack. The sound smacked at my eardrums and ricocheted down the street.

  “Manny!”

  It was a fool’s errand, standing there, yelling, but there weren’t many other ways to reach someone who wouldn’t answer his phone and never left the house. I looked up and down the street, making sure my racket wasn’t drawing any locals. Faces appeared behind windows in buildings that should have been empty, but other than that, I was alone.

  “You’re in there! I know you are!”

  I was just about to give the wood another whack when the sound of a sliding bolt stopped me short. “Hurry up!” I shouted.

  The door swung open on its creaking hinges. I expected to see Manny. I ended up with someone different altogether.

  “As-salaamu alaikum.” Asim’s words were hollow as straw. The man who’d stormed into my apartment, bashed up my wrist, and stolen the decoy Shubaak was gone. In his place was a shell. Even the gold rings in his eyes looked as if they’d been eroded by worry and tears.

  Only grief could carve a man out like that.

  “Wa alaikum as-salaam. Is he alive?” I whispered.

  Asim’s face was stony.

  “He is.”

  “Alhamdulillah,” I said, weak with relief.

  Asim smiled wearily. “Praise to God, indeed. And to your sister, who delivered Allah’s mercy. It seems she has made quite a study of poisons and their treatment. I am in your family’s debt.”

  He stepped back and motioned for me to come inside. It wasn’t quite an apology for the other night, but I never had cared about the little things.

  I told him I needed to see Manny.

  “Of course you do.” Asim turned and led me through the sanctuary, past Mary’s mournful gaze and Eve’s knowing smile. This time, no warmth or welcoming scents met us as we descended the stairs behind the chancel. Calamus smelled like cold stone.

  Manny was waiting.

  “I’m glad to see you, child.” There was weariness in his words.

  “I’m glad I’m still alive to be seen,” I countered. There was no gentleness left in me, but I cracked a smile to smooth my rougher edges.

  “You are aware of everything that has transpired?” Manny asked. Asim sank, heavy as a bucket of sand, into one of the dining room chairs. It looked like it took everything he had not to lay his head down.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I know that Decker’s in the hospital. Nuala’s missing. My sister’s safe for now. Other than that, I’m a little in the dark.”

  “Decker and Nuala were attacked in the hospital garage,” Manny said. “We know that a security guard heard some sort of commotion and ran to the scene. Decker was only conscious long enough to say Nuala’s name. The guard acted quickly, and with the emergency room so close, Reem got to him in time to shut down the poison’s progress. It seems she was able to identify it immediately.”

  “Abbi,” I said. “She knew it because of Abbi.”

  Manny nodded. “Yes, child. That’s right. And now they’re keeping Decker in a coma to give his body the best possible chance to recover. As for my wife…” He closed his eyes. Breathed out heavily. “No one knows what’s become of her.”

  “What about the dog?” I was focused on details. Details were my bread and butter. They were all I had.

  “The guard said something about seeing a man, an indigent, apparently, climbing from the back of a pickup truck with a dog in his arms.”

  Reem’s addict.

  I wondered what he’d seen, why he’d carted Jones away. With any luck my sister’s kindness was b
eing paid forward. Jones, at least, stood a chance.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, I need your help with some other stuff.”

  “Then you shall have it, Abd al-Malik,” Asim said.

  I started to say I’d been called worse, but Manny spoke first.

  “Do you have the true Shubaak, Scarlett?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But what if I still don’t believe all this hocus-pocus?”

  “If that is the case, then tell me, what do you believe, my dear?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said.

  Manny patted my hand. “Good. I wouldn’t trust the Shubaak to anyone unwise enough to assume they had all the answers. Especially not at such a tender age.”

  “Abbi had answers.”

  “Your abbi had faith, and even that he did not come to without a struggle of his own.”

  I chewed on the inside of my lip.

  “Abbi never struggled with anything.”

  “I don’t lie, my dear,” Manny said. “Obfuscate, yes. Lie, never.”

  “There’s a pretty thin line between the two, don’t you think?”

  “Thinner than you know.”

  Asim stood up fast enough to send his chair skidding backward against the tiles. It hit the edge of a rug and tipped, crashing into a coffee table.

  “Enough!” he said. “I can’t listen to this anymore!”

  Asim was angry, shaking with all the same emotions I’d clamped a lid on, deep down inside myself.

  “My son cares for you, Scarlett. Delilah does, too. And, difficult as it is for me to say, I accept that you are the Shubaak’s rightful Abd al-Malik. No woman has served since the Shubaak passed to Solomon’s daughter, never mind a girl. But Manny believes it is your Qadar, and so does my son. Out of respect for them, I will believe as well. Tell us if you have the Shubaak, Abd al-Malik. Tell us what you require. And I will do my best to assist you.”

  It had taken a lot for him to say all that, and I knew it. So I looked at the ground, humble as a monk, and leaned forward on the table before lifting my eyes to his.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got the Shubaak. Now tell me how the damned thing works.”

  29

  Las Almas was the kind of town that never shut down all the way. Club music thumped on Rainey Street from supper to sunrise, greasy spoons and Chinese delivery places ran 24-7, drugstores and bodegas kept their doors open all night. But in the financial district, where the outline of The Parker building loomed over lesser buildings below, quiet hugged the streets like a blanket.

  I parked Sister’s minivan in a loading zone and checked to make sure everything was where it should be. Solomon’s ring was still on Lillian Fagin’s chain around my neck. The Shubaak and its decoy were in my backpack, along with a needle and thread from Manny’s medicine cabinet, and my treasures from Slick Eddie’s. As for Manny and Asim, they were tucked into their beds back at Calamus, convinced that we were going to take down the Children of Iblis after a good night’s sleep and a nice breakfast. It was a lie I’d be glad to atone for later, since dead girls can’t apologize.

  The fence around The Parker’s site was twenty feet high, with a triple strand of razor wire looped over the top for good measure. I walked to the northeast corner of the lot and hunted until I’d found just the right spot to cut with my pawnshop lineman’s pliers. I snipped a neat line along a post, climbed through, clamped the flap back in place. By the time that was done, it was 10:30. I silenced my phone and Quinn’s, tightened my backpack straps, and looked up.

  A hundred yards away, enormous steel skeletons rose out of the dark Las Almas dirt and stretched toward the stars. There were no walls yet, no windows, only an outline of the towers to come. It was a breathtaking thing to see by moonlight. It was a breathtaking thing to see at all.

  I scanned for security guards. Nothing moved.

  Thirty yards to my right, the shifting glow of a TV danced across a construction trailer’s windows. “Stay put,” I whispered to the guard inside, and crept past the trailer, past orange plastic netting strung around The Parker’s bare flanks, and came to what must have been the building’s front entrance. Then I stopped dead.

  Four shapes materialized out of the dark. Two were Rottweilers, black as the sky and ten times scarier. The other two were all muscle and teeth, with flattened ears and tails docked down to nothing. Pit bulls.

  Adrenaline jacked through me, but I held my ground. These were guard dogs, trained to hurt people who ran when they shouldn’t. My best bet was to stay still, give them no reason to charge, and hope I could protect my throat if they attacked.

  Seconds passed. Minutes. Nothing happened. The longer I stood there, the less threatened I felt. One Rottweiler sat on its haunches. A pit did the same. The other two sniffed the air, mellow as old men playing chess in the park.

  Slowly, slowly, I reached toward my chest for Solomon’s ring. The dogs’ eyes followed my hand. I pulled up on the chain, feeling like an idiot for wanting fairy tales to be true. The dogs watched. I lifted the ring as high as the chain would go. Their eyes rolled north. I moved my arm sideways. Four heads followed.

  No. Freakin’. Way.

  My mouth was dry as chalk.

  The ring’s supposed to give you control over humans and jinn, animals and the weather.

  “Sit?” The word came out shaky. Four heads tilted, trying to understand. I tried again.

  They sat.

  “Lie down?”

  Their eyes never left the ring as their bodies settled to the ground.

  I took a step forward, told the dogs to stay. They did. I took another. And another. The dogs watched, curious but relaxed. “Stay,” I said again. One of the pits scratched its ear.

  From there I crept along, cautious as a cat in mittens, navigating the rutted construction mud underfoot. The dogs never moved, not even when I made it inside the building’s unfinished atrium.

  It was an eerie place. Beams stretched forever overhead. The air was too still. There should have been creaks. Drips. Wind. Anything to break up the silence. Even my footsteps were noiseless as I crossed the atrium, turned down the outline of a hallway, and stopped in front of a construction elevator. I got inside, closed its gate behind me, and hit the down button. An electronic whine bit the silence. Gears turned.

  Six basement levels later, the elevator clanged to a stop, and I got out. Industrial-strength epoxy and paint fumes burned my eyes. My flashlight’s beam swept the cluttered darkness, found a line of bare, metal-backed bulbs strung along the walls. I followed their cord to a switch, flicked it on, and squinted against the glare. I’d been expecting a massive, open skating rink. What I found was closer to a half-built maze of concrete support columns and construction materials. Plenty of hiding places, plenty of cover.

  It was perfect.

  For the next fifteen minutes, I memorized the basement’s layout and hid the tools from my backpack on a ledge made by unevenly stacked drywall panels. With any luck, I wouldn’t need anything but my brains and my charm.

  With any luck, I’d trade a ring for Gemma and walk out of there with the two of us alive.

  With any luck, I wouldn’t have to rely on luck at all.

  The dogs were waiting in a row outside. “Scram,” I whispered. They stood up, trotted back a hundred feet, and sat down. I told them they were good dogs.

  TV light still flickered in the trailer’s window. It was darker now, and clouds had come in thick enough to block the moon and drag the sky low. I kept my flashlight off and stumbled around Porta-Potties and heavy equipment until I found an enormous crane. Its unlocked cab smelled like beef jerky and sweat, but sat high enough to give me a good view of the grounds without anyone getting a good look back.

  Inside, with the door shut tight, I stripped off my jeans and took out the sewing supplies from Manny’s. Goose bumps dotted my legs. My frozen fingers struggled to thread the needle in the dark. I thought about the flashlight again, decided the security guard’s shack was too close t
o risk turning it on. Thankfully, just as I was about to give up, an icy sliver of moonlight punched through the clouds and shone straight into the cab.

  “I owe you one,” I said with a glance skyward. Then I worked quick, racing the clouds, to stitch Solomon’s ring onto the back fabric of my waistband.

  I won.

  Barely.

  Shivering, I pulled the jeans back on, tugged at the ring to make sure it would hold, and slipped the worn signet ring from Slick Eddie’s jewelry case onto my left thumb. It was heavy and gold, and didn’t look nearly enough like Solomon’s to make me comfortable. But it would have to do.

  After that, I waited.

  Twenty minutes later, my ass was numb and my hips were as knotted as a box of old necklaces.

  Ten minutes after that, the dogs gathered under the crane, staring up like they wanted me to come out and play. “Not now,” I whispered. And off they padded to the building’s front entrance.

  11:50.

  Five minutes more.

  I spun the signet ring on my thumb. Even with the heat of my skin underneath, it was too cold. Gave me the willies. I took it off and stuck it in my pocket.

  At 11:55, I put my backpack on, surveyed the dark yard, and swung down out of the cab. Any decent sniper with a nightscope could have picked me off no matter how fast I sprinted to The Parker, but there was no sense dawdling and making anyone’s job easier. I ran, heart in my mouth, Abbi’s bottle bouncing against my spine. The dogs didn’t come out of the building. No snipers fired. I made it to the atrium and crouched low at the door.

  The silence inside was awful.

  Here goes nothing, I thought, standing up with my flashlight raised like a club.

  Halfway across the cold concrete floor, the sound of a single drip shredded the silence.

  I stopped. Turned to look down the outline of the hallway to my left. Something was there, stacked and still as a pile of sandbags.