Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Don’t seem like a thing I’d be inclined to promote m’self,” Jennifer replied. “A healthy narcotics trade depends on repeat business. Ain’t no money in sending your customers to a rubber room. Where’s this flood of product coming from? If it started on the East Coast, that sounds like some Five Families business, them or the Brighton Beach crowd.”

  Harding snorted with his lips curled in an angry frown. “Nobody knows. All the usual suspects swear their hands are clean. My guys busted a small-time dealer with New Mexico plates yesterday, and he said the whole operation is compartmentalized. Nobody knows any names more than one step up the distribution chain. Highly organized.”

  “A New Mexico dealer, coming here to push product?” I said. “Somebody’s looking to get a foothold.”

  “And they’re going to keep trying,” the mayor said.

  “What if they stopped?” I asked her.

  Her eyes narrowed a little. “Meaning?”

  I nodded toward Harding. “This might be the point in our discussion, Mrs. Mayor, where Commissioner Harding has more important business to attend to. Elsewhere.”

  “Mayor,” he said, looking between us, “you can’t possibly—”

  “Earl.” Seabrook put her fingers to her forehead and closed her eyes. “Please. For both our sakes. Don’t hear anything you don’t need to hear.”

  He grumbled as he shoved himself up from his chair. Then he kept grumbling, all the way out of her office. Seabrook stared at me in expectant silence.

  “We could follow the pipeline,” I said. “Theoretically, we could find the person trying to spread ink in Vegas, and have a little conversation.”

  “A conversation,” she echoed.

  “A come-to-Jesus meeting,” Jennifer said. “In which they’ll acknowledge their mistakes, repent, and sin no more.”

  “I’m not…asking you to…do anything,” Seabrook said, choosing each word as if picturing herself repeating them in court.

  “No, no.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “This is something we’d do entirely on our own, nothing to do with you, no blowback to worry about. Your name would never come into it. It’s just something we’d like to do as a gesture of friendship.”

  “And would this…gesture of friendship have any cost attached?”

  “Never,” I said. Then I held up a finger. “There is something, though, a completely unrelated matter I wanted to bring up. A friend of mine is trying to get a liquor license for his new bar. Now, if that process were to be streamlined, for the sake of speed, well, I think we’d all be very happy.”

  “New businesses are good for the economy,” Jennifer said.

  Seabrook nodded slowly. “I did run on a platform of economic development. So, while of course I’d expect that all laws and codes be obeyed to the letter, I could see myself putting in a phone call to the licensing board on your friend’s behalf.”

  “We’ll be in touch,” I told her.

  Out in the hall, Jennifer punched my arm.

  “That’s for volunteerin’ us,” she said with a smile. “C’mon, call for a sidebar before you sign us up for unpaid labor. You know better.”

  “If we can get that liquor license rushed through, unpaid my ass.”

  “Fair, fair, that’s some long-term thinkin’.” She paused, giving me the side-eye. “You okay, sugar? You’ve been a little weird since we watched that rubber-room video.”

  It stuck with me. Not the psychotic man bouncing off walls and tugging his hair out, but the words he was repeating. Four words. We stepped into the elevator, alone together, and I didn’t speak until the steel doors glided shut.

  “My last run-in with Ms. Fleiss,” I said.

  In my mind I was back in David Gosselin’s private museum of magic. Watching, horrified, as Fleiss’s skull distended and her elongated neck swayed. Her body bloating like a tumor-ridden hippo while her fingernails fell out and her hands sprouted claws of black iron.

  “The man with the Cheshire smile’s errand girl,” Jennifer said. “Yeah, sounded like a bad party.”

  I remembered the rifle kicking against my grip, round after round rattling off as the twins and I gunned her down. The monstrosity staggering back in a fireworks storm of muzzle-flash, spitting blood but refusing to die.

  “When she ran, she…carved a hole in the world, somehow. I’ve never seen magic like that before. It was a rent in space, with this hungry dark void behind it, sucking all the air from the room. And the one thing I remember about it, more than anything else—” I paused and shook my head. “It’s got to be a coincidence, it has to be. It’s just bugging me. Something the mayor’s admin kept repeating.”

  “What’s that, sugar?”

  “Roses,” I told her. “It smelled like roses.”

  2.

  We had another appointment scheduled that morning. On our turf, this time.

  Jennifer and I stepped into a cacophony of hammers and whirring band saws, a maze of nailed frames, stacks of drywall, and fat fuzzy rolls of pink insulation. Someday it would be a brand-new bar and lounge. For now, we walked through the wooden ribs with orange hard hats on, looking for a spot away from the noise. The warm, dry air was thick with the smell of fresh sawdust.

  “Startin’ to look like something.” Jennifer surveyed the main floor. The rough wooden flooring bounced a little under our feet, spray-painted lines marking angles and roughing out a design plan.

  “Sure is. Thanks for being a part of this, Jen.”

  “Ain’t even a thing,” she said. “Y’know, I could have kicked more money in.”

  The New Commission, rising in the wake of Nicky Agnelli’s fall, had divvied up the city’s territory and rackets. The Cinco Calles and the Bishops, the 14K and the Inagawa-kai, even the Blood Eagles all sitting down at the same table at the same time and forging an alliance. I’d finally stepped up and taken my seat at the table too, but that left a big question: what exactly did that mean?

  I’d spent my entire career playing the henchman—first as Nicky’s hired wand, then hanging out my shingle as a vengeance-for-hire specialist—or playing the lone wolf. I had a seat at the council table, sure, but what could I really bring to it?

  Then late one night in the haze of a two-bourbon buzz, watching Casablanca with Caitlin, the answer came to me. We were standing in it.

  “I know you could have,” I told Jennifer, “but getting everybody to pay for a share was part of the plan. Once you and Gabriel bought in, Eddie Stone pretty much had to. Then Emma got her pocketbook out—”

  “How many people own a slice of this place?”

  “Caitlin makes a baker’s dozen. But I still hold fifty-one percent. It’s my baby.” I gazed across the work site, taking it all in. Seeing where a bar would stand, the tables and chairs, imagining the mood lighting. “The Tiger’s Garden will always be home, but if you’re not a magician, you can’t even find the door. Club Winter is…Winter. If you don’t have friends in low places, forget about it.”

  “And we can’t exactly rent out Margaritaville again,” Jennifer mused.

  “You got it. And so…” I swept out my arm. “The American. Owned, on paper, by our good and fictional friend Rick Blaine. Neutral ground for the occult and criminal underworlds. Safe harbor with top-shelf drinks. And seeing as the heaviest hitters in Vegas, from racket bosses to hell’s emissaries, all own a stake in the operation, it’ll be the safest place on earth.”

  Jennifer snickered. “Daniel Faust, legitimate businessman. Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Not that legitimate. For starters, that fortified vault I’m having installed? That’s for escrow. If anyone needs to make a deal or hand off hot goods, the American will happily facilitate a safe transaction. For a cut off the top, of course. Also, there’s the backroom poker tables and the sports book. The casinos report winnings to the IRS. We won’t.”

  “Daniel.” Jennifer put her hands to her chest in mock dismay. “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going
on in here. Or will be.”

  The foreman trundled up, pulling me aside for a moment. Another clipboard, another form in triplicate, another material purchase to sign off on. I didn’t know anything about building a business from scratch, but I was getting a quick education. As he walked off, I caught Jennifer staring at me, a little smile on her lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I ain’t seen you this energized in months. Not since the start of that whole Lauren Carmichael mess. Just been one damn thing after another. You took some hits—”

  “We both took some hits.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but here we are. I hope you’re letting yourself soak up some pride. A little, anyhow.”

  “I’ve never trusted feeling too proud or too happy. Always feels like I’m setting myself up for a fall.” I folded my arms. “Anyway, this whole idea could crash and burn. Let’s see how it plays.”

  “It ain’t the succeedin’, sugar. It’s the tryin’. You’re off the sidelines, you got your sleeves rolled up, and you’re going for it. That’s all any of us wanted to see.”

  “Time will tell.” I gave her a sidelong glance. “And there’s still the…other thing.”

  Jennifer pursed her lips. “Cheshire.”

  “The Enemy is out there. He isn’t going away, and from what Carolyn Saunders told me, he doesn’t just want me dead, he needs me dead. His old power is locked away in some kind of reliquary, and offing me is one of the keys to popping it open.”

  “Point of order,” Jennifer said, “he’s just gotta off ‘the Thief.’ If you can put that title on somebody else’s head, the way he put it on yours—”

  “Then the Enemy gets stronger. This thing destroys planets for fun, Jen. And if Fleiss wasn’t lying, he’s done it a lot.”

  “Didn’t Carolyn Saunders say this cycle always ends with him facing off against the Paladin?” Jennifer tapped her chin, thinking. “Seems to me, we oughta get proactive. Find this Paladin feller and arm him up. Do everything we can to hand him a winning edge.”

  “Cheat our asses off,” I said.

  “That’s a given.”

  We had a visitor. He stood at the edge of the work site with his black hat in his liver-spotted hands. Big, broad shoulders with a coat too heavy for October in Vegas, but the expression on his face was like that of a kid standing outside the principal’s office, dragging his heels before he went in to get a paddling.

  I greeted him with a smile. “Mr. Petrocelli, I presume.”

  He came over, his polished Italian loafers unsteady on the rough flooring, and shook my hand. His smile was even less genuine than mine.

  “Looks like this is going to be quite a place,” he said, his gruff voice seared by decades of cigar smoke. The odor of a fresh stogie clung to his coat, stronger than the sawdust. “Nightclub?”

  “More of a lounge,” I said. “Piano music, live singers.”

  Now the smile was more genuine. “Ah, classy. Good to hear there’s still a little of that old Vegas charm left. These days it’s all—what do they call it, electronic dance music? That untz-untz-untz garbage the kids like. Anyway, I wanted to come out and speak to you in person, considering…well, considering.”

  “We appreciate that,” Jennifer said.

  He talked right past her, his eyes fixed on me. “I want you to understand that what the Mancusos did—that was not sanctioned or authorized by our people. If they’d even spoken to us about it—which they did not—the Petrocelli and Accardo families would have stood in strong opposition. The very idea that he’d go to the mattresses against you people without provocation, and sully our good name…it’s unprecedented. That’s not how we do business.”

  The Chicago Outfit was closing ranks and running scared. An overnight siege that left the don and twenty-odd wise guys dead tended to have that effect. Maybe he was telling the truth about not being on board with Angelo Mancuso’s doomed crusade; maybe he wasn’t. We’d already made a near-unanimous decision at the Commission table to pretend we believed him.

  “We understand completely,” Jennifer said. “These things happen. You can’t be held responsible for the Mancuso family’s poor decisions.”

  He didn’t even look at her, still focusing on me as if he hadn’t heard her speak. Now he was starting to piss me off.

  “We’re hoping to mend relations,” Petrocelli said. “A clean slate on both sides. Tabula rasa.”

  I knew what he was doing, and I wasn’t having it. He knew perfectly well that Jennifer was the top dog in Vegas, but for an old-school midwestern mob guy, kowtowing to a woman was out of the question. He thought he could make peace the easy way and protect his masculine pride. No dice. I gave him a polite little chuckle and gestured to Jennifer.

  “Hey, good to know, sir,” I said, “but I’m not sure why you keep talking to me. I’m not even on the board. I’m just hired to watch Ms. Juniper’s back. She’s in charge here.”

  Now he looked at her. The smile died on his lips like a wilting flower.

  “Ms.…Juniper,” he said. “Of course.”

  She offered her hand. He took it with all the enthusiasm of someone mucking out a horse stall with his bare fingers.

  “Chairperson of the New Commission,” she said. “I’m surprised nobody told you.”

  Surprised. Right. I struggled to keep a straight face as Petrocelli stammered his lying apology.

  “It’s just been a very, that is, tumultuous time—”

  “And the war is over,” Jennifer told him. “We agree. I’ve spoken to the members of the board, and no one wants to push this matter any further. The offense came from Don Mancuso, and he and his people paid the price. Honor is satisfied.”

  Petrocelli’s face softened a little. Maybe it was relief that his house wasn’t going to turn into a shooting gallery like Mancuso’s did. Maybe he’d found something in Jennifer’s manner, the way she carried herself and shot straight, that he could come to respect once he’d given her a chance.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” He crossed his fingers, holding them up. “Y’know, back in the day, Chicago and Vegas were thick as thieves. We built this city.”

  “I’ve got a lot of respect for that,” Jennifer told him, working her diplomacy. “I’m too young to have seen those days firsthand, but I believe they should never be forgotten. Once the Outfit reorganizes, I’d like to extend the hand of friendship.”

  He nodded, slow, a faint twinkle of gratitude in his eyes.

  “Yeah. Yeah, we’d appreciate that. I’ll take your message back home. Thank you, Ms. Juniper.”

  She raised a hand in parting. “Mr. Petrocelli.”

  As he walked away, I caught Jennifer’s eye and mouthed a single word: “Ink.”

  “Oh, Mr. Petrocelli?” she said. “Just one last thing.”

  He turned back, looking her way.

  “We’ve been hearing rumors on the grapevine about what’s happening back east,” she said. “What do you know about ink?”

  He grimaced. “What a headache. One night, it’s nowhere and nobody’s heard of it. One night after that, it’s everywhere. You’d think whoever’s making this junk would come to us. Offer respect, let us dip our beaks. Not one word.”

  “So you don’t know who’s behind it either?” I asked.

  “Nah. My guys nabbed a street dealer last week. Asked him nice where he was getting the stuff. He didn’t wanna be nice, so then they asked him with a blowtorch. We gave him some time alone in a dark room to think about his answer. Maybe he’d wanna start cooperating before my guys got more creative, know what I mean?”

  “What’d he tell you?” Jennifer said.

  “Nothing.” Petrocelli shook his head, disgusted. “He bit off his own tongue. Then he swallowed it and choked himself to death. Damnedest thing you ever saw.”

  “He was that afraid of what you were gonna do to him?”

  “No,” Petrocelli said. “He was that afraid of his supplier. We told him it wasn’t a secret worth dyi
ng over. All he had to do was give us a name. We’d let him walk, even put a little cash in his pocket. My boys started working on him, he’s still too scared to talk. I said, kid, you’re bein’ crazy now. Acting like this supplier is the devil himself.”

  His gaze went distant, thinking back. He gave a humorless little laugh.

  “He said it was the devil.”

  3.

  Petrocelli left. Jennifer punched me in the arm.

  “Ow.” I rubbed my sleeve with exaggerated indignation. “Now what was that one for?”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  She pulled down her tinted glasses, staring at me over the rims. “You think I didn’t catch that? Pretendin’ to be my errand boy, to force him to talk to me.”

  “You’re our chair. He disrespects you, he disrespects all of us.” I shrugged. “Besides, maybe I wanted to see him squirm a little.”

  “Mission accomplished. You think he’s on the level?”

  I glanced to the cluttered floor where he’d been standing a moment ago. A pair of workmen ambled past, hoisting a stack of wooden beams between them.

  “I think so. We didn’t just give the Outfit a black eye; we proved we won’t be shy about dishing out even more punishment if we feel so inclined. They won’t be a problem for a while, at least not until they figure out who’s running the show now that Mancuso and his kid are six feet under. Right now I’m more intrigued by this ink business.”

  “And thinkin’ about our liquor license.”

  I waved a hand, taking in the room. “Even if we finished construction tomorrow, no point opening until we get that license. And we can’t exactly go the conventional route, seeing as we can’t allow a full inspection of the grounds, half our bar inventory is stolen property, and the legal owner only exists on paper. Getting fast-tracked by the mayor would fix everything.”

  “Hmm. We gotta find this ink supplier. On the bright side, he probably ain’t the devil.” She tilted her head. “Could be a devil, though. Commissioner Harding said they just caught a dealer; if he’s still in town, maybe he could help us solve the mystery. Want me to talk to these construction guys, see about borrowing a blowtorch?”