Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7)

by Craig Schaefer

“Might be trouble. I was shootin’ the breeze with Bentley and Corman on the phone, trying to come up with a solution to your present predicament. Bentley had to go take care of a customer. Suddenly the line went dead, and they ain’t picking up.”

  I threw back the covers, wide awake and on my feet in an instant.

  “I’m on my way,” I told her. “I’ll meet you at the bookstore.”

  According to the rules, the chainmen weren’t supposed to involve outsiders in their hunt. According to Emma, the rules were more like guidelines. And if I was hunting me, I knew exactly how I’d bait the line.

  32.

  I pulled into the alley behind the Scrivener’s Nook, tires screeching to a stop, and hit the back door running. They’d left it unlocked. I burst through the stockroom and into the shop, bracing for a battle.

  I’d missed the fight. Corman’s old shotgun lay out on the store counter, and the haze of dirty gunsmoke lingered in the air. The store—dark and with the Closed sign flipped—crackled faintly with the aftermath of spellwork. Bentley and Corman were with Jennifer, looking ruffled but intact.

  “What happened?” I said, rushing across the store to pull Bentley and Corman into a tight hug.

  Corman snorted. “Idiot thought she was gonna strong-arm us into giving you up. Bentley hit her with the ol’ whammy. Then while she was fighting his hex off, I introduced her to both barrels.”

  “It’s going to take forever to clean this up,” Bentley said, wringing his hands.

  I followed his gaze. A man lay dead in the far corner of the shop, sprawled out with his insides spattered across a wall of vintage hardcovers. He was stocky, in his thirties, with black and broken fingernails. One eye, open and glassy, was runny-egg yellow. A cambion. The marks of his demon blood were already fading, his eyes turning blue, reverting back to human form as the last sparks of infernal energy in his veins went cold.

  I squinted at Corman. “You said ‘she.’”

  “Talked like a woman. Not a lady, mind you. Said her name was Belle, and she had a personal score to settle.”

  “Ran into her in Chicago,” I said with a sigh. “The ‘Gruesome Two.’ It was a team act: she was a hijacker, riding around in her cambion partner’s head. I took her partner out, but she got away when the body she was jacking died in a car crash.”

  “You sure?” Jennifer frowned. “A hijacker shouldn’t be able to come back that fast. Usually, once you knock ’em down to hell it takes at least a month or two to build up the juice for another go.”

  “Usually. Nothing about the Order of Chainmen is usual.” I walked over and crouched beside the corpse, wrinkling my nose at the stench of rotten meat. “Anyway, either she found a victim to possess, and he just happened to be demon-blooded, or she was stepping out on her former accomplice. She probably has a string of dopes who think they’re her one-and-only partner in crime, when they’re just vehicles to carry her from hit to hit.”

  “She ain’t gonna stop,” Jennifer said. “We gotta pin this Belle down, exorcise her, and stuff her in a soul-bottle.”

  I rummaged through the dead man’s pockets, looking for ID, a phone, any clues we could use to track Belle down. I opened his wallet, a thick black leather fold, and froze.

  “We’ve got a problem,” I said.

  Corman gave me a gallows smile. “Stating the obvious, kiddo.”

  “No, an immediate problem.”

  I showed them what I’d found. A gold shield.

  “Detective Dorset,” I said. “LAPD. Belle’s backup partner was a cop.”

  “We gotta pull a Houdini on this body,” Jennifer said.

  I nodded and pushed myself to my feet. “As far as human law is concerned, Corman just shot a cop. And they’re not gonna take ‘he was a bounty hunter with a demon in his brain and working for the powers of hell’ as an excuse, not unless you’re looking for an insanity plea. Okay, Bentley, run upstairs and grab all the cleaning supplies from your apartment. All of them. Corman, I need those extra-large Hefty bags from the stockroom and a roll of duct tape. And one of you, please tell me you’ve got a box of latex gloves handy.”

  Jennifer and I wrestled Dorset’s body into a pair of fifty-five-gallon contractor bags, the black plastic bulging around his corpse. One down over his head, one up over his legs, and meeting in the middle with spool after spool of duct tape. The end result looked exactly like what it was—a dead body wrapped in trash bags—but if we did our jobs right nobody would see it. She stood watch in the alley while I hauled the body out in a fireman’s carry. I tossed him into the back of the Santa Fe.

  While we struggled with a hundred and seventy-odd pounds of dead weight, Bentley and Corman worked the floor with a pair of mops and a witches’ brew of household cleaners. The sharp tang stung my nose hairs, like an over-chlorinated swimming pool.

  There were right ways and wrong ways to make a corpse disappear. A lot of guys were serving twenty to life for doing it the wrong way. This was more on the “quick and dirty” spectrum. Ideally, we’d be cremating the body then taking all the little bits of teeth and bone—everything that survived the fire and could potentially tell tales under a forensic microscope—and scattering them across a dozen miles of open desert.

  No time for that. But then again, as long as we cleaned the shop spotless, the human authorities wouldn’t have reason to suspect Bentley and Corman of anything. After all, they’d never met the man before. The official story was nice and simple: Dorset came into the shop, said he was on vacation, browsed a little, and left, just like twenty other customers every day. Even if his corpse turned up later, there was zero reason to bring them in for questioning.

  I was more worried about Belle coming back with a fresh body and shooting first next time. I knew Bentley and Corman could take care of themselves. They’d taught me everything I knew, about magic and the art of the con, but I still had to worry. Any trouble on their doorstep was my fault.

  Bentley heard me thinking. He took me aside, his hand gentle on my shoulder, as Jennifer got ready to leave.

  “Two facts,” he said. “One, this isn’t your fault. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Kinda hard not to. She came here looking for me.”

  “And she may return, or others might, in which case I direct you to fact number two: Cormie and I were getting ourselves in and out of worse trouble than this when you were in diapers. Did I ever tell you about the time we escaped a Bolivian jail?”

  “Bolivia?” I tilted my head at him. “No. You did not.”

  “Oh, toe-curling story. You see, the daughter of the governor thought we were vying for her hand, when we were really enraptured by the lovely senorita’s diamond necklace. Things did not go according to plan. So there we were, scheduled to face a firing squad at dawn—”

  “Hate to break this up,” Jennifer said from the stockroom door, “but the sun’s goin’ down and this guy ain’t gonna smell any better than he does right now.”

  The corners of Bentley’s eyes crinkled as he flashed a smile. “The point is, we’ll be fine. Go.”

  We put the neon behind us and drove, winding across the flats under a cold desert sky. Two hours on the highway and then we left the road, bumping and jolting across rough ground, looking for a spot I knew.

  “Here’s good,” I said. I killed the engine and got out, grabbing a pair of shovels from the back of the Santa Fe.

  Jennifer dug the heel of her sneaker into the dirt. “Okay for digging?”

  “Sucks for digging.” I tossed her one of the shovels. “Everywhere out here sucks for digging. That’s why you’re supposed to bring the guy out alive, make him dig the hole before you toss him in it.”

  “Dyin’ in the wrong place, then making us come all the way out here to do hard labor. Some people got no basic courtesy.”

  We dug. It was slow going, carving out a pit six feet long and half as deep, and my lower back was a knot of white-hot pain an hour in. We talked to pass the time, mostly about nothing, the way
old friends do.

  We used up all the small talk and banter, until there wasn’t anything left but honesty.

  “What’s your next play?” she asked me.

  My shovel struck a rock and twisted in my damp grip. Sweat plastered my shirt to my back, running ice-cold in the desert night.

  “Thinking about going on the offense. Taking Naavarasi out.”

  “I thought that wouldn’t stop the contract,” Jennifer said.

  “It won’t,” I said.

  “Make you feel better, though, huh?”

  “It would.”

  Deep enough. We dragged the bagged-up corpse from the back of the car and dumped him in. At least filling in the hole was easier than digging it.

  “I like a good mission of mayhem as much as the next girl,” Jennifer said, panting as she heaved shovelfuls of dirt down onto the body, “but it seems to me that what you need is some breathin’ room. Offense is the right play, you just got the wrong target in mind.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we make you one goddamn expensive bounty,” Jennifer said. “We get all the intel we can on these ‘chainmen,’ and we go after them. All of ’em, anyone stupid enough to say yes to that contract. The ones we catch? They die slow. And we send what’s left of the bodies to their pals. I say we make these guys so afraid of you that they tell Naavarasi to cram her money someplace the sun don’t shine. These bounty hunters are all puffed up because they think they’ve got hell on their side.”

  Her shovel slammed down on the displaced earth, packing it tight.

  “We can teach them a thing or two about hell,” she told me.

  I leaned on my shovel. Catching my breath.

  “I like it,” I said. “Caitlin and her court can’t directly help us, but no reason they can’t slip us some intel under the table. Let’s flip the script and start hunting the hunters.”

  A giggle washed across the desert flats. High-pitched and half-mad.

  I hefted my shovel like a baseball bat, backpedaling. “Car. Now.”

  “The hell is that?” Jennifer scrunched her face up, looking around.

  The cartoon hippo-man bounded from the shadows, twenty feet away and twirling his oversized mallet like it was weightless. He wasn’t alone. On the opposite side, flanking us, he had a friend: another black-and-white apparition, this one a rat with button-down overalls and a wedge-shaped head. The rat’s arms were boneless accordions, rippling in a permanent wave and clutching a butcher knife in each three-fingered hand.

  Jennifer’s back bumped against mine. I turned. A third animation bounced into view on rubbery legs, an inhumanly tall and thin circus clown with his jack-in-the-box head on a wobbling steel spring instead of a neck. He juggled a trio of grapefruit-sized black iron bombs, their cartoon fuses lit and burning down.

  33.

  I threw my shovel. It went winging through the open air and hit the animated rat dead center. The cartoon didn’t even ripple as the shovel passed on through, clattering to the dirt behind it. Apparently these psychic projections were one-way only: we couldn’t touch them, but they could touch us.

  We ran for the Santa Fe. I hammered the remote-unlock, the doors squawked, and we piled in. The engine roared and the headlights flared to life just as the animated rat charged. It burst like a water balloon and splattered the sand with hot mucus. I stomped the gas. The hippo ran up from behind, swinging his mallet like a Major League batter. The car jolted sideways as the barrel-sized head swatted the back bumper, crumpling steel.

  The juggling clown tossed one of his bombs. It landed square in our path and I jerked the wheel hard, veering right. The bomb exploded. My vision whited out, the car rocked and a torrent of heat washed over us.

  “And this asshole,” I shouted as I red-lined the engine, squinting to clear my eyes, “we are hunting in particular. I’m gonna kill him just for being creepy.”

  Jennifer turned in her seat, staring out the back window at the flickering apparitions. They ran behind us for a little while, slowly falling back, then fading into shadow.

  “What the hell was that?” she said.

  “Same thing that jumped me at the airport when I got back. Of course, I knew immediately that it was a tulpa: a sort of psychic projection given life of its own through intense and obsessive concentration. Very rare technique.”

  Jennifer turned back around in her seat, facing front, and folded her arms. “So what you mean is, you were clueless, but you asked Bentley and he told you what it was.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “So how do we put ‘em down permanently?”

  “Good news is, you saw the rat: focused light makes the tulpas go pop. Bad news is, it isn’t a permanent fix. The guy sending them can just make more. We’ve got to track down the source.”

  After the desert dark, the lights of Vegas felt like a welcome-home embrace. We headed for the safest place we could think of: the Tiger’s Garden. I’d been warned that the chainmen had a human magician or two in their ranks, but the outfit was mostly made up of demons, and demons couldn’t even find the Garden’s front door.

  There was also the “no fighting inside” rule. We’d never seen anyone break it, and the quiet air of power that radiated from every shuttered window whispered that it wasn’t to be taken lightly. The door to the Tiger’s Garden was on Fremont Street, but the Garden itself was…elsewhere.

  We were two steps inside when Amar swooped over, ushering us to an empty table and passing out the drinks we were about to order. A Jack and Coke for me, a whiskey on the rocks for Jennifer. The restaurant was almost empty. Almost. David Gosselin was drinking alone at a corner table. We locked eyes.

  “Daniel,” he growled.

  “David.”

  “Boys,” Jennifer said. Her tone made it clear she wasn’t putting up with any nonsense tonight.

  I looked away and sipped my drink. “Okay, so a tulpa requires constant, hard-core focus. You have to be obsessive.”

  “And he’s got three of the critters, at least. The hippo with the mallet, the clown with the jack-in-the-box head, and the rat with the butcher knives. They all looked like the same…style, I guess? Like the same guy drew ’em.”

  “And they’re animated like vintage cartoons,” I said. “I think that’s what we’re looking at. This guy found a classic cartoon, watched it a few hundred times—or a few thousand—and used his magic to bring the characters to life. So, why that cartoon in particular?”

  Jennifer tossed back a swig of whiskey and threw one arm over the back of her chair, slouching.

  “Why a cartoon at all?” she asked. “If those critters get seen in public by people who aren’t clued-in, the guy sending ’em is in a heap of trouble. If he could turn any character on TV into a psychic projection, why not conjure, I don’t know, Bruce Lee, maybe? Chuck Norris? Martha Stewart?”

  “I’m thinking it’s some kind of personal connection. Maybe it’s a connection we can trace—like if the guy is related to the original artist or something. We’ve got to find out everything we can about the…” I paused, feeling a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, and lowered my voice. “He’s staring at me, isn’t he?”

  “Oh yeah,” Jennifer said.

  I sighed. I was going to have to deal with this one way or another, and I already had too many targets on my back.

  “Fine,” I said loudly, not looking at him. “David, I will give you your hat back.”

  Silence. Then he replied, “And?”

  I turned in my chair, facing him. “And what?”

  He folded his arms, glowering. “And?”

  I waved my hand, floundering for words. “And…I’m sorry?”

  “For?”

  I couldn’t believe we were actually doing this.

  “For…stealing the aforementioned hat,” I said.

  “And?”

  We stared each other down. Jennifer reached over and patted my arm. “Be the better man, sugar.”
<
br />   “He threw doves at me, Jen.”

  I heard a faint cooing from under David’s table.

  “I am sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath, “for stealing the hat, and that your museum got shot up when a different team of thieves came to steal the hat.”

  “And?”

  I flung my hands in the air. “What ‘and’? There is no ‘and’! That’s all I did to you!”

  “You interrupted my date,” David said. “I didn’t even get those girls’ phone numbers.”

  “Oh. My. God.” I struggled not to bury my face in my palm. “You weren’t on a date, David. The twins were my diversionary tactic. Their job was to get you to shut off the burglar alarms and keep you busy. Did you not know that?”

  He shifted in his chair, his righteous glare fading fast.

  “Of…of course I knew that.”

  “They locked you in a steel milk jug,” I said.

  “I just thought they were kinky.”

  “Oh,” Jennifer said, “take it from me, they are.”

  We both stared at her.

  “What?” She sipped her whiskey. “It was one time. I was real drunk.”

  David coughed into his hand. “I think in the interests of the greater magical community, I can show my generosity and understanding. Return the hat, and all is forgiven.”

  “Gee,” I said, “that’s swell. I’ll drop it off once I’m not being chased by demonic bounty hunters.”

  “By the way, you’re looking for Bad Clarence.”

  I blinked at him. My glass froze halfway to my lips.

  “What’s that now?”

  “The cartoon you were talking about,” David said. “Hippo-man, rat with butcher knives? Was the clown juggling bombs?”

  “That’s right,” Jennifer said.

  “Bad Clarence. It’s not really a vintage cartoon; it was just drawn to look that way. Came out in…’64, ’65, maybe? I’ve got a couple of animation cels on display in my museum.”

  “Your museum’s dedicated to the history of magic,” I said. “What’s the connection?”

  David let out a theatrical sigh and rose from his chair. He cradled his martini glass as he walked over to join us at our table.