Michael thought about all of that for a second and nodded. “That part I think we arrange. One of the agents in charge of physical security for this office is a mage with a Defense array. He’s technically Homeland Security, not FBI, but I can pull him in on this.”
“It’ll be a big win, sir,” Dread said to him. “We’ll have Kel, we’ll have Fly, and a ton of intel on this Cabal that we never had before.”
“Right,” Michael said. “Right. It will have to do.”
Mickey and I went back into the interrogation room to break the news to Fly that he was going to be vigorously performing his civic duty by wearing a wire during this meeting of his. He was sweating bullets; Lysette had been staring him down constantly while we were gone, and considering the fact that he’d very nearly killed her at the prison… well, let’s just say he actually looked happy to see us.
We filled him in on his part of the fun was that coming later that morning. He looked like he might want to protest, but Lysette’s stare must’ve really gotten to him, because he only made one demand.
“I need her to fix what she did to me,” he said, nodding toward Mickey.
I took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, and once I did, my eyes rolled involuntarily at his stupidity. Here he was, probably facing the death penalty, staring down the rest of his life in federal prison if he was lucky enough to avoid that, and what was he worried about? Being able to say the F-bomb again.
“Are you joking?” I said.
“No, no, seriously, I need it,” Fly said, looking back and forth from me to Mickey. “Kel thinks I went to kill Mickey. I told her that before I did it, I would make her fix me. If I show up and can’t talk the way I used to talk…”
“She’ll know something’s up,” I said. “What do you think, Mickey?”
Mickey shrugged. “I’m not really sure why the effect was permanent in the first place. But I should be able to figure it out.”
“While we’re on the subject of messing with your mind, Fly,” I said, leaning in to stare him eye to eye, “Mickey filled me on that threat she made to you back in her apartment… that whole thing about making you addicted to eating cat shit.”
“That was really messed up,” Fly said.
“Yeah, well, you screw us on this, and I’ll make sure it comes true. You’ll be wearing an ankle monitor along with that wire and I will personally be watching. So if you want your future meals to be shit-free… play ball.”
Fly shook his head and muttered towards his cuffed hands. “You people are awful.”
***
“This thing itches.”
“Stop touching it, Fly,” Dread said, securing the wire to Fly’s chest with a strip of tape. “Hold still.”
“But it itches!”
“So will the scar I’m about to give you, if you don’t quit screwing around.”
“All right, all right, damn, man,” Fly said. “Do we have to do all this in the men’s room?”
“Are you shy all of a sudden?” Cass said.
“No, it’s just that you little ladies might get a bit startled if you see something, you know?” Fly said with a wink and a grin.
“Ha!” Mickey said. “I’ve already seen what you’ve got. You couldn’t startle a rabbit with that.”
“Motherf…” Fly began to say, but Dread pulled him close by the shirt lapels, and the death mage thought better of it.
“Button that shirt up,” Dread said, “and get your jacket back on. You have to look like everything’s normal.”
“How many people from this Cabal are you supposed to be meeting?” Cass said.
“Not sure,” Fly said. “But if I was going to meet up with four motherfuckers, I’d definitely want to bring four motherfuckers of my own, you know what I’m saying?”
“I already regret letting you curse again,” Cass said.
“It’s the ABC’s of me, baby.”
“I’d tell you to stop talking like that,” Cass said, “but I need you to act natural, and your natural state is to act like an asshole, so…”
“No need for this hostility,” Fly said, pulling on his jacket now that his shirt was buttoned up and covering the microphone taped to his chest. “We’re all on the same team now… what, Mickey?”
“You,” Mickey said. “Preening in that suit like a peacock.”
“I like to look good. Not that you’d know anything about that, in your broke-ass pantsuit from JC Penny.”
Mickey looked down at her outfit, her mouth hanging open in shock. “This is not… I got this from….”
“Mickey,” Cass said. “Leave it.”
Mickey wasn’t quite ready to leave it, though. “Hey, you know how we caught you, Fly? That ridiculous nickname. You kept hitting on that poor blonde saleslady… Oh, they call me ‘Fly’ because I’m always dressed so ‘Fly’. Gross.”
“Mickey,” Cass said again.
“We’d been putting that name all over the news, stupid! Ever since the prison, every night on the news, it was ‘Kel and Fly, at large in the city’, and your dim ass uses that same name to try to pick up a girl. She called the FBI, like, right away. Jackass.”
“Mickey!” Cass said. “Enough. We have to take care of that other thing.”
Mickey frowned. “What other thing?”
Cass looked at her. “That precaution I told you to prepare for.”
“Oh, right!” Mickey said, setting her large purse down on a nearby shelf. “Hold on.”
“Mickey, you don’t have to…”
“Why, look, Cass!” Mickey said loudly. “I have dropped my purse! Could you get that for me?”
Cass shook her head. The performance Mickey was about to put on was totally unnecessary, but sometimes, there wasn’t any stopping her, so Cass opened the purse and let Mickey continue her loud and stilted announcement.
“But be careful, please. There are two loaded pistols in there, and as convicted ex-felons, neither you nor Dread should be in possession of that sort of thing.”
“Why are you talking like that?” Dread said.
“I’m covering my butt!” Mickey whispered. “There’s cameras everywhere in this mall!”
“Not in the bathroom.”
Mickey looked around. “Oh. Yeah. I guess not.”
Cass took the two pistols out of the large purse and handed one of them to Dread. They both brass-checked the chambers on the pistols and then inspected the magazines to insure that they were fully loaded.
“Don’t… drop them or anything, okay?” Mickey said. “They were expensive.”
“We’re somewhat familiar with firearms, Mickey,” Cass said, taking two extra magazines of ammunition out of Mickey’s purse and tucking them into her jacket.
“Hey!” Dread said. “Sharing is caring!”
“I was going to give you one,” Cass said, handing him one of the magazines.
“Unh-hunh. Sure you were. What about you, Mickey?”
“I’ve got my little Smith and Wesson,” Mickey said, opening up her jacket to show Dread where her pistol was holstered on her hip.
“Only as a last resort,” Cass said. “Stick to your Tricks whenever you can. Let Dread and I handle the shooting.”
“Do you really think it’s going to come to that?” Mickey said.
Cass tucked the pistol into the back of her waistband. “Better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it.”
“You’re like a poster child for the NRA,” Dread said, securing his pistol in the same manner as Cass.
Cass ignored him, checking herself in the mirror to make sure her pistol was concealed properly underneath her jacket. The Kevlar vest under her shirt made her torso appear a little unnaturally bulky, but it was unlikely anybody would be looking closely enough at her to notice.
“All right,” she said. “Shifty, Jolly and Lys are already in position. Let’s switch on the wire, test it, and get into position ourselves.”
“Wire’s hot,” Dread
said a moment later. “Try saying something, Fly. Other than ‘motherfucker’.”
“Very funny, moth… very funny, man,” Fly said.
Michael’s voice came to them over their earpieces. “I can hear you fine. All of you. What’s your situation?”
Cass lifted the cuff of her sleeve to her mouth to bring her mike closer. “We’re set. Moving to our position now.”
“And the other three?”
“Already in place. How about the rest of your people?”
“I’ve got six agents seated in the restaurant already. Two sets of three, on opposite sides of the room. More in the parking lot, including that Defense mage I told you about. He’s got a teleport screen blanketing the entire mall. Kel isn’t pulling her disappearing act today.”
Mickey tugged on Dread’s jacket as they filed out of the men’s room, whispering, “The little Secret Service sleeve microphones are so cool. I love it when we use them.”
“Of course you do,” Dread said, pulling the OUT OF ORDER sign off the men’s room door before leading the way down the hallway back into the mall.
They set themselves up in a bookstore across the walkway from the restaurant in question; the magazine rack was high enough to allow them to peek over it while appearing to be doing nothing more than browsing magazines.
Their bookstore and the restaurant across from it were on the second floor of the mall. Most of the second floor was made up of two wide walkways separated by an even wider gap between them with a twenty-foot drop to the first floor below. A waist-high handrail ran the length of the gap, and every hundred yards or so, the walkways on either side of the mall were connected by a flat bridge between them.
Cass had to adjust her position to keep the glare from the nearby skylight out of her eyes. While it reduced her visibility, the sunlight reflecting off the glass in front of them would also hide them from view of anyone looking in from outside the bookstore.
She mentally judged the distance from her position to the restaurant entrance. From the front door of the bookstore, it was perhaps ten yards across the first walkway, then another fifteen to twenty yards of a gap to the far walkway, then another ten yards across the far walkway to the restaurant.
Not a terrible distance to shoot, she figured, but there was a pretty hefty amount of foot traffic, civilians meandering along, window shopping on both sides of the mall. Cass distantly wondered at how many people where shopping at the mall during the middle of a weekday, but Mickey interrupted her thoughts.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
“They’re in the store next door,” Cass said.
Mickey looked in the direction Cass had indicated. “The makeup store? Why couldn’t we have used that one? That’s one of my favorite…”
“Focus,” Dread said. “Focus.”
“Right, right, whatever. Dread, with so many bad guys… should we really be spread out like this?” Mickey asked.
“If we bunch up too much, in too big of a group, we’ll stand out,” Dread said.
Mickey looked all six-foot-six of him up and down. “Yeah. You really blend in.”
Dread searched for a snappy comeback, and couldn’t find one. “Fair enough.”
“It’s almost time,” Cass said. “They should be…”
As if on cue, Michael’s voice cut in over their earpieces. “Be advised. Agents in the parking lot outside the mall say they’ve spotted a corporate officer from Revival Tech entering the mall’s west entrance with several other individuals. It’s Dr. Adjani.”
“Adjani?” Cass said, her lips curling into a savage smile. “Oh, yes! Thank you, sweet baby Jesus, for letting it be him!”
“Who’s Adjani?” Fly asked.
“We have a history with him,” Dread said. “Big-wig over at Revival Tech.”
“Well, there you go,” Fly said. “I told you Revival Tech was a part of all this. See how helpful I am?”
“This is perfect,” Cass said. “We owe that motherfucker, big time, Dread.”
“Yes, we do,” Dread said.
“Oh, I see,” Fly said. “So she gets to say it, but I…”
“Shut up, Fly,” Cass said, forcing herself to keep her voice down to avoid drawing attention from anyone else in the bookstore. “There he is! See him? Adjani… and he’s got three other people with him.”
“See? I told you there would be four of them,” Fly said.
“I know that one guy,” Dread said. “His name is Oswald. He’s registered as a Defense mage.”
When Cass saw he wasn’t going to continue, she said, “Are you going to tell them the rest?”
“What rest?”
“About how you know who he is?”
“Not really important,” Dread said.
“Dread had a bro-off with Oswald a few weeks back,” Cass explained to Mickey. “There’s that whole lawsuit we have going on against Revival Tech for performing illegal experiments on us at the prison…”
“Yeah, how’s that going?” Mickey said.
“Eh,” Cass said. “Lawyers, you know? Anyway, Adjani had to show up in court on the same day as us, and he had that Oswald guy with him. He’s kind of a big guy….”
“He’s not that big,” Dread said.
“…he’s kind of a big guy,” Cass repeated, shooting a look at Dread, “and he and Dread got into a little staring contest nose-to-nose outside the courtroom.”
“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” Dread said.
“You told him you would make him eat his gun.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Oh, that’s right. It was, ‘If you try to pull that gun on me, I’ll shove it so far down your throat you’ll be shitting bullets.’ Was that it?”
Dread thought about it for a second, and then nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“Anyway, after that, we looked him up and found out Oswald was registered as a Defense mage and has been working security for Revival Tech for years. So, okay. We know the identity of Bad Guy Number Two. What about the others?”
Fly looked over the man and woman Cass was asking about. The man was short, well-dressed, with gray streaking his hair and the walk of a man filled with supreme confidence. The woman next to him was auburn-haired, with sharp features, and stayed close to the well-dressed man’s side.
He shook his head. “No idea.”
“Well, between the mall security cameras,” Cass said, “and the cameras that the agents already in the restaurant got into place ahead of time, we should have them on video.”
“And you’ll being giving us the audio,” Dread said to Fly. “Once you meet up with Kel.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Fly said. “Speak of the Devil… here comes that crazy bitch now.”
“You’re right,” Cass said, speaking once again into her sleeve microphone. “Michael, we have eyes on Kel and two other suspects, approaching the restaurant now.”
“Which one is Caleb and which one is Martin?” Dread asked.
“Caleb’s the motherfucker wearing that stupid wanna-be ironic T-shirt,” Fly said. “Martin’s the one with the long-ass hippie hair.”
“All right,” Cass said, thumping Fly on the shoulder. “You’re on.”
Fly smoothed his hands down his suit one last time. “Now, if things get crazy in there…”
“Just remember that I’m watching every move you make, shithead,” Cass said. “You’re wearing an ankle monitor, and if you try anything, I swear, I will chase you down and shoot your little dick off.”
“You people are awful,” Fly said, and with that, he left the bookstore.
Cass watched Fly as he weaved his way through the mall’s foot traffic and over to Kel. He stopped just shy of her and her two companions, meeting them outside the restaurant.
“I’m not too late, am I?” Fly said.
“Oh, look! It’s Flea!” said the mage that Fly had identified as Caleb. They could hear him easily over the wire attached to Fly’s chest.
�
��Kiss my ass, motherfucker,” Fly said.
“It sounds like you got the job done,” Kel said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Fly said. “That little Mentalist bitch is history. I did it…”
“As long as she’s dead,” Kel said. “I don’t care about the details. Let’s go.”
Without another word, she led them into the restaurant. Once they were out of sight, Cass couldn’t shake the feeling that she was losing them completely. She forced herself to take slow breaths, stay cool, not expect anything, only watch and listen and take whatever came to her.
It was a few seconds later that another voice came over Fly’s wire. This voice sounded like it belonged to an older man; it had a certain authority and arrogance to it.
“Hello, Kel,” the voice said. “It’s been too long. And Caleb, Martin… nice to see the two of you again, especially after you both left our company so abruptly. I’m afraid I don’t know the name of your new friend.”
“I’m…” Fly began to say, but Kel’s voice interrupted him.
“Matthias,” she said.
The voice Kel identified as Matthias continued. “You remember Valentine, my second.”
“Matthias?” Dread said. “Valentine? Where do they get these people?”
“Uh, your name is Dread,” Mickey said.
Dread shrugged. “That’s different.”
“Shh,” Cass said.
Matthias’s voice continued. “And of course, you know Dr. Adjani and…”
“I know them,” Kel said. “Enough of the pleasantries.”
“As you like. We came here today to…”
“You came here,” Kel said, “to bend your will to mine.”
“Clearly you haven’t changed. Despite all your setbacks, still you…”
“Setbacks? What setbacks?” Kel said.
Matthias snorted once with laughter. “What setbacks? How about the massacre at the prison? Being on the run for the last four months?”
“What you call a massacre, I call a harvest. What you call being on the run, I call preparing my endgame. Everything is going as I have planned.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 51
