I have a few marketable skills. Scaring people is one of them.
“I have to go out for a few hours,” I told Circe. “Stay put, okay? You’ll be safe as long as you stay here.”
She pointed at the screen. “Television.”
“Yeah, just…enjoy the TV. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Normally I wouldn’t recommend that much TV to anybody, but at least it would keep her out of trouble. I’d have to figure out what to do with her long-term, but for now I just had to weather Naavarasi’s wrath.
I cruised over to the Paradise All-Suites. The source of the problem wasn’t hard to spot: a couple of Cinco Calles, their rust-bucket car painted the same shade as their brown-and-yellow bandannas, were parked front and center in the lot with their engine idling. I walked up and politely knocked on the driver-side window.
He fumbled his Big Mac, spilling it across his lap while his buddy yanked a janky revolver from the glove compartment. I stood there and waited patiently while they got their act together.
The window rolled down. “Uh, Mr. Faust. Hola.”
“Hola, amigos,” I said. “I’m guessing Jennifer sent you over, to keep an eye on Malone?”
“That’s right,” the driver told me. “We got it covered, no worries.”
“You’ve been parked right here, directly in front of the stairwell where he’d be coming in and out? So, basically the first thing he’d see?”
His partner nodded. “All day long. He only left twice, once to go to the liquor store up the block, once to the cops. We followed him there and back. We stayed real close on his ass.”
I bit back a sigh. “And I’m guessing you mad-dogged the guy every time he made eye contact.”
“He was eyeballin’ us like a little bitch,” the driver said.
I patted the hood of the car.
“Excellent covert surveillance, guys. Keep up the great work.”
I headed inside, through the stairwell door and up the bare concrete steps, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to chase Malone out the window again. I wasn’t alone in the second-floor hallway. Not a resident, either: the man strolling my way was a prim, tight-lipped gentleman in a pressed gray suit. The suit said detective, but the alligator-skin attaché case swinging in his pale hand said lawyer.
He nodded as we passed. “Good day, sir.”
“Yeah, you too.”
Malone’s door had been fixed since my last visit, if “fixed” meant applying strips of duct tape to the broken lock and fitting a new hinge with mismatched nails instead of screws. Only the best for the denizens of the Paradise All-Suites. I knocked, and the door yawned open under my knuckles.
“Malone?” I said, poking my head in. “It’s me, stay cool—”
I froze, catching an all-too-familiar stench. The rotten-copper smell of spilled blood, lots of it, mingled with gunsmoke.
Bracing for a fight, I eased across the threshold. The filthy room hovered in murky shadow, the lights doused and a sunlight glow pushing against the drawn shades over the window. My eyes adjusted fast. Fast enough to see the torrent of gore—blood and bone and bits of gray matter—spattered across the bedspread.
Malone sprawled on the floor, his back to the bed, with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and a hole in the back of his head big enough to put my fist through. His big toe was hooked around the trigger.
24.
I darted out of the room, racing up the hallway toward the staircase. Nothing fit right about this scene, and the biggest wrong piece was the guy in the three-piece suit. I hadn’t seen him coming out of Malone’s room, but I still wanted a word with him.
Empty stairwell. I took the steps two at a time and burst out into the parking lot. Nobody in sight except for Malone’s minders. I ran to the rust bucket and hammered on the window.
“Easy, ese,” the driver said as it whirred down. “What’s wrong?”
“Guy just came through here, looked like a cop or a lawyer? Had a suit and an alligator-skin case?”
They looked at each other and shrugged. “From the stairwell? Nobody’s been through that door but you.”
“Okay, how about a gunshot? From a shotgun, would have been loud. I’m guessing no more than twenty minutes ago, maybe less.”
The driver shook his head. “You trippin’, man? We woulda heard that. Nobody’s been shooting nothing. Besides, even in this dump, locals would have called the cops if they heard somebody poppin’ off with a shotgun.”
I stepped back from the car, deflated.
“Okay. Thanks.”
I went back inside.
Back to Malone’s room, where I gave the grimy paper shutter a yank. It whipped upward and flooded the room with dusty light. Now that I could see better, I took a second look at the scene of the crime.
My stomach churned at the stench, but I got close, circling the bedspread and the body. Malone had blown his brains all over the sheets, and the damage was definitely fresh. I folded over a clean part of the top sheet, rubbing at the gore, and it smeared like raspberry preserves. Not even close to dry.
Malone’s minders would have heard the shotgun go off. The desk clerk would have heard it, too, along with everyone else in the building. While I could see a few of the long-time residents turning a deaf ear—the ones with something to lose if cops came searching the place—somebody would have called it in. And the ones with something to lose would be poking around, trying to find out what was going down.
Nobody in the hallway outside. Nobody but me and the bland man in the gray suit.
The shotgun itself, that was another problem. Mainly because Malone didn’t own one. The only gun he’d had when I rousted him the first time was the pocket .32 he’d just bought. Could he have picked up the shotgun since? Possibly, but walking around in public with a longarm—I glanced around, couldn’t see a gun case or a duffel or anything big enough to hide it in—tended to draw attention.
I crouched down next to the corpse and gave it a closer look. Malone had killed himself with a hunting shotgun, a Perazzi MXS Sporter. Smooth wood stock, not a scratch or scuff on it, and a competition-quality trigger. I took out my phone and called my favorite gunrunner.
“Yeah,” Winslow grunted. He must have been at the garage; in the background, I heard the squeal of a buzz saw chopping into metal.
“Need a price check,” I told him. “Perazzi MXS Sporter. Those are expensive, right?”
“Hell yeah. Perazzi’s for high-end game hunting. Sporter’s an entry-level model, and even that’ll set you back almost seven grand. You shoppin’ for something new? Tell ya right now, you don’t need anything that fancy for strong-arm work.”
“Thanks, Winslow.”
I hung up and studied the body one last time.
It didn’t play. No chance Malone had anywhere near seven thousand dollars on him. His bail was only five grand, and his lawyers had gone through a bail bondsman to put the money up.
Lawyers. Like the man in the gray suit, who had managed to vanish into thin air.
Weishaupt and Associates had to be a front for the Network. We already knew they were made of smoke, that they’d been involved in the gladiator fights at Eisenberg Correctional, and now they were representing ink dealers. And cleaning up their tracks. The shotgun blast had been muffled by magic; Malone had either been forced to kill himself, or he was murdered and the scene staged after the fact. His case would go down as a suicide, a man terrified of facing hard prison time and taking the fast way out. What bothered me more were the implications.
They’d killed Malone with a hunter’s gun. The symbolism there was obvious. They could have used a cheap one; instead, they’d thrown away a seven-thousand-dollar weapon, meaning money was no object to these people.
And the man in the gray suit had ways of coming and going without being seen. Except by me. He wanted me to see him.
I walked downstairs, out into the sunshine, breathing deep. The odor of death clung to the back of my nostri
ls and I fought it with lungfuls of fresh air. The sunlight seemed paler than when I first went inside. The autumn desert air a little colder. I relieved Malone’s minders of their duty and walked over to my rented Santa Fe.
The car doors were locked, no sign of a break-in, but somebody had been inside. A business card was neatly tucked into the air-conditioning vent. I plucked it out. Weishaupt and Associates. Mr. Smith, Esquire. I dialed the number on the card.
It rang once. The voice on the other end, crisply enunciating his words, matched the man I’d passed in the hall.
“Mr. Faust,” he said, “I trust we have made our point.”
He hung up.
I dialed again. This time I got three loud, sharp notes in my ear and a canned recording: “We’re sorry, this number is no longer in service.”
This wasn’t the Chicago Outfit, or some penny-ante gang that happened to get lucky and recruit a hired wand or two. The Network was something…different. The Network has a philosophy, Nedry had told us. It’s a holy order. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected they’d flipped the old paradigms. Us, the Outfit, the Five Families, the Cali Cartel—all of our organizations were basically working from the same underworld playbook, same way it had always been done.
We were criminals who used magic. I was getting the feeling that the Network was a pack of magicians who used crime. What they were using it for, what their real goals were, that was the million-dollar question.
A question I’d have to be damn careful asking. They’d sent me a warning. I doubted they would warn me twice.
I was so distracted I almost forgot about the threat from Naavarasi hanging over my head. As it turned out, she didn’t keep me waiting.
* * *
Not far off the Strip, a neon arrow marked the doorway to one of the hottest clubs in town. As early as nine o’clock, with the Vegas skyline blooming hot and shining brighter than the moon, the line behind the blue velvet rope stretched all the way down the block. I wasn’t a big fan of waiting around. The bouncer didn’t have to check his clipboard as I walked to the head of the line; he unhooked the rope for me without saying a word, waving me through while a pack of inhumanly pretty twentysomethings groaned at my back.
“Seriously,” a kid griped, “you’re letting grandpa in?”
Grandpa. God. My fortieth birthday was coming up this year. Might as well top the cake with cyanide frosting.
If I was too old for the first floor of Winter, where dance music played at bone-rattling volume and LED snowflakes rained down electronic wall-panels, I was an infant compared to some of the guests who preferred the basement level. It was an even more exclusive club down an unmarked back corridor, invitation only, and the doorman—a hulk in a black leather apron and a gas mask with opaque lenses—sent most wayward clubgoers stumbling in the opposite direction fast. As I walked up, the bass thudded through the floor and sent a ripple along my spine. The doorman punched a string of numbers into a keypad. The door opened with a metallic chunk and a faint hiss.
“Hold that door,” said a voice at my back.
Nadine strode up the corridor, imperious, her hair in a perfect blond bob and her lips stained cherry-red. She was dressed for the club, in a breezy top and a pleated snow-white miniskirt that used a handkerchief’s worth of fabric, but my eyes weren’t on her legs. I was more focused on my sudden need to be anywhere but here.
“I came as soon as I heard,” she told me. “Took my private jet directly from Saint Louis. You and I need to talk.”
“I’m not sure we do. Have I mentioned I’m meeting Caitlin here?”
She hooked her arm around mine, barely breaking her stride, and tugged me down the steps to the basement. We descended into the dark, the basement a labyrinth of honeycomb rooms with black walls and gold neon piping. As we walked I felt a prickly warmth spreading up my arm where her body touched mine. My anxiety fading, my heartbeat slowing. I remembered how much I liked Nadine, how much I wanted to hear whatever she had to say, hanging on her every word—
I twisted my arm and yanked it away from her, hard.
Nadine looked offended, but she held up her open hands. “I’m just trying to soothe you, that’s all. No tricks. I have bad news, and I thought I’d make it easier to take.”
“You know what I like about my feelings, Nadine? That they’re my feelings. Let’s keep it that way.”
We stood in the antechamber. The music from above faded into a muffled thumping, echoing in time with strained groans of pleasure from deeper in the labyrinth.
“My jet,” she said, “is fueled and ready to go. I’ve spoken to Royce, and our previous offer still stands: we’re ready to induct you into the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, as one of Prince Malphas’s favored human operatives, as soon as we land in Chicago. Royce will be waiting on the tarmac for us. We’ll perform the ceremony on the spot and have it duly recorded—”
“Wait. Hold up. Take a breath. What are you talking about?”
“You broke your pact with Naavarasi,” she said. “Not only that, but you’re holding on to her property and refusing to give it back to her.”
“Yeah, well, she should have told me the ‘property’ in question was a sentient being.”
Nadine rolled her eyes. “Of all the stupid little petty details to get hung up over…Daniel, this is not the hill you want to die on. Do you even understand what you’ve done?”
“Sure,” I said. “She’s gonna complain to Malphas, Malphas will complain to Sitri, then we see who blinks first.”
“You adorable child. No. That’s how civilized aristocrats like myself handle things. Naavarasi, on the other hand, is a primitive masquerading as one of her betters, and doing a poor job of it. The very fact that Malphas conferred a barony on that miscreated creature is a constant insult to the rest of us.”
“You don’t sound like a fan,” I said.
“She’s not a demon. She has no business holding a noble title. None. Malphas was just amused by the idea of the last rakshasi being part of his court. Like keeping an exotic and endangered animal in his private zoo. I said if he wanted her for a pet, he should have put her on a leash.”
“Do you ever think,” I said, “maybe people do things just to piss you off sometimes?”
She shook her head, her brow furrowed. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Don’t know. I can’t imagine why, either. I mean, you’re so much fun to be around.”
“Get used to it. You’ll be working directly under me. Now, there will be a slight cultural shift, but I’m sure you’ll acclimate—”
“Nadine,” I said. “I don’t know how many times I have to say this. I am not working for you. Not now, not ever. I’m with Caitlin. It’s kind of a committed relationship.”
She stepped closer. Close enough to touch. Close enough to smell her perfume, a blend of sweet wildflowers.
“Caitlin can’t save you now,” she said. “Only I can. Naavarasi decided she couldn’t be bothered with our traditions and our courtesies. She’s jumped directly to the nuclear option.”
“Which is?”
Nadine carried a slim white leather clutch. She opened it and tugged out a sheet of paper, folded neatly down the center. It looked like it had gone through a vintage manual typewriter with a couple of keys dropped. An imposing scarlet stamp, bearing a jagged glyph ringed by a motto in ancient Latin, sat below the terse block of type.
GRAY LETTER CONTRACT
Target: Daniel Faust (Court of Jade Tears, nonaffiliated associate)
Location: Las Vegas / Nevada / United States
Nature: Human / Mortal / Sorcerer / Contact CHINFO for full dossier
Threat Level: NP
Payment: Accelerated schedule / Contact CHACCT for contract annotations
I folded the page and met Nadine’s cool gaze.
“You broke the laws of the Cold Peace,” she told me. “Naavarasi appealed to the Order of Chainmen. Hell’s bounty hunters. Unless you return her propert
y, by midnight, the contract goes live. They’re not just going to take your life, Daniel. They’ll take your soul.”
25.
The darkness beneath the nightclub floor, lit by streaks of neon gold, felt like it was closing in around me. The muffled thumping louder now, like a drumbeat call to battle.
“Bounty hunters,” I echoed. “How can she do that?”
“By exploiting the law,” Nadine said. “We’re demons, Daniel. The law was made to be exploited by the clever and the wise. She—despite not being one of us, no matter what unearned honors my prince heaps on her head—is just too damn cunning for her own good. You see, she’s alleging that the creature she sent you to retrieve—some sort of animated construct, if I understand correctly—was originally her property.”
“Sure,” I said. “She went out of her way to make my ‘debt’ all formal, a thing between the courts, so she could hold a political gun to Caitlin’s head if I didn’t follow through.”
“That’s the thing. She’s not pursuing the debt angle at all. Instead, she’s alleging that by seizing her property and knowingly refusing to return it, you have essentially stolen from her. Matters of debts and boons are almost always resolved by diplomacy, and they can take centuries to clear up. When a mortal steals from a member of the courts, however, that’s a simple matter of direct action. She has every right to summon the Chainmen without any further discussion. It’s a crass and ham-fisted tactic, and makes her look like the barbarian she is, but you aren’t an official member of any demonic court. You don’t have any rights of appeal, any rights of diplomacy…you’re free game.”
“So if Caitlin got the thumbs-up from Prince Sitri and drafted me into the Jade Tears, that would—”
“Accomplish nothing,” Nadine said. “It’s still a matter of a human stealing from hell’s aristocracy, and making it an intercourt issue just escalates the severity. On the other hand, Naavarasi is with the Night-Blooming Flowers. My court. Bend your knee to me, join us, and Naavarasi becomes your cousin. A dispute like this, between two servants of the same prince, must be resolved by mediation. You’ll both stand before Prince Malphas, he’ll decide on the appropriate distribution of the disputed property, and that’s the end of it.”
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 16
