A Plain-Dealing Villain (13 page)

When the waitress returned to take our orders, Caitlin’s smile lit up the room.

“I’ll go clockwise,” Caitlin said, nodding my way. “
He
will start with the buffalo rock shrimp. For the entree, the Wagyu skirt steak with cheese and herb fries and roasted market vegetables on the side. Let’s pair that with a 2009 Cabernet—”

As she continued, moving on to Bentley’s meal, Pixie leaned back in her chair—on the other side of Caitlin—and whispered, “Is she actually ordering for
all
of us?”

“Yes. Yes, she is.”

Pixie arched an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because she can,” I whispered back.

“I kinda had my meal picked out already.”

“My best advice,” I told her, “is to just surrender and let this happen.”

Not much later, Pixie stared wide-eyed at her fork, chewing slowly.

“What is this, again?”

“Hamachi crudo,” Caitlin said. “It’s essentially an Italian take on sushi. Clean and simple. Fresh sliced yellow tail, a sprinkling of cracked black pepper and sea salt, a dash of lime juice, drizzle on some extra-virgin olive oil, and there you go. A delicate dish for a refined palate.”

“I
love
it. I mean, I never would have thought to even try this, but I love it.”

“I knew you would.” Caitlin patted her napkin to her lips, looking smug.

I craned my neck, making sure we had privacy before getting down to business.

“Okay, so the key to this grift is playing on Royce’s paranoia. He has to believe that it isn’t safe to keep the Judas Coin at the club. That if he
doesn’t
move it, we’ll snatch it out from under him.”

“Start simple,” Bentley said, lifting a forkful of salad. “A whisper campaign. We can ‘accidentally’ let it slip that you’re in town to steal the coin, not to win it. You’ll deny everything, of course. Which, if you do it properly, will only make him more certain of your guilt.”

“Dumb question,” Pixie said, “but do demons, um, go online at all? I could whip up some anonymous deep-web traffic mentioning the coin and pretend to be a buyer offering a bounty for it.”

Caitlin wagged her fork at her. “Excellent idea. Royce has an affection for technology. If he doesn’t hear about it himself, one of his worker bees will report it to him.”

“Can you backdate the post so it looks like the bounty went up a few days ago?” I asked.

Pixie gave me a look. “Have you
met
me?”

“If you really want to spook him,” Margaux said, “he needs to hear the story from inside his own house, from someone he trusts.”

“Naavarasi is a Flowers noblewoman, but she’s in Denver,” Caitlin mused. “Wouldn’t want to use her for this, regardless. She’s too valuable an asset. Still,
she
might know someone local who she wouldn’t mind putting to good use…I’ll call her after dinner.”

“At least the knife is secure,” I said. “We’re halfway to setting Coop free.”

Pixie raised her fork. “About that.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re trading the knife and the coin to this Ecko guy to get Coop back, right?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“So,” she said slowly, “how are you going to get the money to his widow from
selling
the knife?”

I shrugged. “The cash will have to come from someplace else. Least of my concerns right now.”

“What if we just kill Ecko?”

I didn’t respond, not right away.

“Think about it,” Pixie said. “If I can locate this place of his with the geotags from the phone, why bother with the coin at all? It can’t be that hard to scrounge up some guns in this city. Let’s go kill him, kill Stanwyck, free Coop, you sell the knife to your original client, and we all go home.”

I tugged the cloth napkin off my lap, loosely folded it, and dropped it next to my plate.

“Pix, may I have a word with you? In private?”

I led her away from the table, over to a vacant corner near the kitchen doors.

“Okay,” I said, standing close and looking her in the eyes. “Out with it.”

“Out with what?”

“Out with the reason why Pixie, radical anarcho-progressive hacktivist for peace, is eagerly calling for the heads of two men she’s never met.” I put my hands on my hips. “This isn’t you. This isn’t the woman who nearly refused to ever speak to me again, after the fallout with Ben and the Redemption Choir, because you were
that
adamant about not letting anyone get killed.”

“People change.”

“In my experience,” I said, “no, they really don’t. Little bits, maybe, superficial things, but Gandhi doesn’t pick up an AK-47, and Pixie doesn’t volunteer to splash blood on her hands. What’s gotten into you?”

She looked away. Her breathing went shallow. I could sense her trying to piece the words together, but she needed a little time. I waited until she was ready.

“Before we came downstairs,” she eventually said, her voice soft, “remember I used your bathroom?”

“Yeah?”

She turned to face me. “While I was in there…I watched the video.”

The video Ecko had sent me. The video of Coop, undead, chained to the floor, tortured. My heart sank.

“Pix…I told you that was nothing you wanted to see.”

Her brow furrowed. “Well, maybe I needed to see it. I just can’t understand…who does something like that, Faust? Why? Coop was a good guy. He didn’t deserve this, any of this.”

“Stanwyck is a gambling addict. He shot Coop and Augie because he needed the money. Ecko…for him, what he’s doing to Coop, it’s leverage to get what he wants. It’s just business, Pix. That’s all.”

“And the fact that you can say that,” Pixie told me with a tremor in her voice, “just that you can
say
it, that something that fucking evil is ‘just business’—”

“I know,” I said.

Her eyes glistened. “No. You don’t. You don’t get it. I’m—I’m in this world now,
your
world, whether I like it or not. But I’m not
in
it, not like you and Caitlin and everybody else. Which means I could be the next one to end up just like Coop. I thought if I—if I toughened up, if I was more like
you
, if I could kill someone and not have it tear me up inside, maybe I’d stand a chance of
surviving
all this.”

Sometimes the consequences of your actions were immediate and obvious. Other times they lurked in the shadows, waiting for the chance to jump out and punch you square in the gut.

“Pix, you actually thought…” I shook my head. “You want to know the reason I can pull a trigger on somebody without flinching? Because I’ve done it too many times. Way too many times. And for some shitty reasons. Hurting people, it…it doesn’t toughen you up. It makes
less
of you. You can’t take a life—good or bad, whether they’ve got it coming or not—you can’t take a life without burning out a little of the light in your heart. And you’ve only got so much light.”

I reached out and took hold of her shoulder. Then I tried to pull her into a hug. She let me. Stiff-armed, quavering, but she let me. I bowed my head so I could whisper in her ear as I stroked her hair.

“I’m too far gone to save,” I told her, “but you’ve still got some light. Cling to it. Cling to it with everything you’ve got, because the last thing you
ever
want to be…is me.”

“I’m just scared,” she whispered back.

“Don’t be. Because you’re family. And every single person at that table would jump in front of a gun to keep you safe. That’s what family is.”

She pulled away slowly and tugged her glasses down. She rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes, smearing her tears.

“And to answer your question back there,” I told her, “we’re not going after Damien Ecko because we don’t even know what he
is
. I’m pretty sure he’s not a demon, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. He might just be a skilled necromancer—which is all kinds of trouble in and of itself—but I’ve got a bad feeling there’s more to him than that. In my line of work, you don’t go gunning for somebody unless you
know
you can kill him.”

“I know what he is. He’s a monster.”

I shrugged. “No argument here.”

“If you
can
kill him,” she said, “will you?”

“Only if you promise me something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Promise me that when I tell you it’s time to go home, you go home, and you leave the rough stuff to me.”

“Okay,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed her.

“You promise?”

She gave me the ghost of a smile. “I promise.”

“Good.” I rubbed her shoulder. “There are too many monsters as it is.”

We got back to the table in time for the main course. My steak was served up exactly the way I like it: warm, dripping red, and bought with somebody else’s money. When dessert and coffee rolled around—Irish coffee, in Bentley and Corman’s case—Caitlin excused herself to make a phone call.

“Mama,” I said, “how’s Jennifer holding up?”

Margaux wagged her hand from side to side. “You ever throw two strange cats into a room together? Know how they snarl and hiss and circle around, waiting for the other one to bite? That’s her and Nicky right now. You ask me,
one
of them is gonna bite, and soon.”

I sighed. “I already told Bentley, the night I get back in town, we’re squashing this beef. Jen and Nicky
are
going to sit down at a table together, whether they like it or not, and neither one of them leaves the room until they come to terms.”

Margaux raised her eyebrows at me and sipped her coffee.

“You’d have better luck with cats.”

Caitlin strolled back to the table, casually running her fingertips across the back of my neck as she sat down. They left a warm tingle in their wake.

“We’re in luck,” she said. “Naavarasi had the perfect candidate. There’s a local, going by the name Scudder, who fancies himself an information broker. He’s on the outs with the Flowers, and with Royce in particular.
Very
eager to earn his way back into his masters’ good graces.”

“Which means if I go to him for intel,” I said, “and let it slip about a plan to steal the coin…”

“He’ll be on his phone to the boss two seconds after you leave.” Corman lifted his mug to me. “From your lips to Royce’s ears. Play it smooth, kiddo.”

I took a sip of water and pushed back my chair, turning to pass my envelope of cash over to Caitlin.

“This should cover the tab and get everybody rooms for the night. If you’ll all excuse me, I have to go spread some nasty rumors about myself.”

I stood on the edge of a streetlamp’s glow, a silent shadow outside the reach of the light. If Naavarasi’s intel was good, this Scudder guy could be my best way to shake Royce up a little.

If
being the operative word when it came to Naavarasi. The rakshasi queen had a penchant for steering me into traps—half to get what she wanted, and half to satisfy her sick sense of humor. Still, things were a little different now. Caitlin had some things Naavarasi wanted: a potential place at Prince Sitri’s table, the respect that the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers refused to give her, and payback against Prince Malphas for conquering Naavarasi’s little kingdom in hell’s name.

Naavarasi hadn’t crossed the line into open rebellion against Malphas quite yet—she was as cagey as she was smart, biding her time and weighing her options—but I figured it was only a matter of time before she hopped fences and joined the Court of Jade Tears.

Which would basically make her my next-door neighbor, magically speaking. I wasn’t sure if I was happy about that, but at least she’d be someplace we could keep an eye on her.

An “L” train rattled by overhead, showering pumpkin-orange sparks onto the black pavement below. Scudder’s place stood across the street, a hole in the wall with a flickering neon sign in the window that read “Small Appliance Outlet and Repair.” It stood shoulder to shoulder with a Chinese takeout place and a mattress store, both of them already closed for the night.

Tarnished bells hung over the grimy front door, but they didn’t jingle. The only welcome I got was a dry-throated croak from the back of the cluttered shop. “We’re closing in five minutes.”

The store was already the size of a shoebox, and the tightly packed floor-to-ceiling shelves turned Scudder’s place into an experiment in claustrophobia.
So this is where appliances go to die
, I thought, my shoes sticking to linoleum that hadn’t been mopped in at least a decade. Rusted junk packed the shelves, from vivisected vacuum cleaners to microwave ovens with their guts spilling out. It was the crime scene of a mechanical massacre.

I found the perpetrator in back, perched on a stool and taking a screwdriver to the corpse of an innocent toaster. He was old, with thick white whiskers and skin like beef jerky. He looked up at me, scowling, eyes bulbous behind oversized glasses.

“If it’s a repair, I’m backlogged ’til next Thursday. Drop it off and I’ll write you a claim ticket. Gotta pay half up front.”

I got a good look at him, his outline glowing cold and dark in my second sight, and swallowed my anger. Scudder was a hijacker, walking around in skin that didn’t belong to him. I wondered how many years he’d been squatting inside his current victim, keeping the real man locked away in a dark corner of his own mind. I knew exactly what that felt like. It took all my effort to remember I had a role to play and not blast him back to hell as a matter of principle.

Never did meet a hijacker I could stand, with the sole exception of Emma Loomis, one of Caitlin’s coworkers. Even then, I could only tolerate her because Caitlin privately filled me in on where Emma got her human puppet. Let’s just say that the next time you hear about a brain-dead and comatose hospital patient making a “miraculous overnight recovery”…it might not be all that miraculous.

“I’m in the market for something a little more abstract,” I told him. “Information. I hear you’re the man to see.”

He put down the toaster, but he kept the screwdriver handy.

“Yeah? Who told you that?”

“Satisfied customer of yours.”

“This satisfied customer got a name?”

I shook my head. “Not one that I’m comfortable saying out loud.”

“Then you’re not someone I’m comfortable doing business with.” He glanced at the bulky Timex on his wrist. “And your five minutes are up. We’re closed. Goodnight.”

“C’mon,” I said, trying to put a little pleading into my voice, “do you have any idea how hard it is for an out-of-towner to get a leg up around here? The second people find out I’m from out west, they clam up.”

Scudder’s eyebrow twitched.

“How far west?”

“Las Vegas,” I said. “The name’s Faust. Daniel Faust. You might have heard of me.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, but his hunched-up shoulders told me he was lying.

“Suits me better if it doesn’t. I’m in town for a job, an in-and-out kinda deal. I hear you’ve got your finger on the pulse of this town.”

He put the screwdriver down and folded his hands.

“Some people say that.”

“Then you’re the man I need to talk to. My curiosity’s been tickled.”

“Sounds like a personal problem.”

“It is,” I told him. “See, once I get curious about something, I just can’t rest until I’ve found a little satisfaction.”

“And what has you all curious?”

“The Bast Club. Ever been there?”

Scudder’s eyes squinted, just a bit.

“Now and then,” he said.

“Big place. Almost a maze, with lots of unmarked rooms and twisty little passages. Makes me wonder if anyone’s ever mapped the place. The
whole
place.”

Scudder twisted his lips into a lopsided smile. “What, you looking for official blueprints? You must not have heard: Management didn’t exactly build the place the old-fashioned way. The club just sort of
happened
.”

“Sure, sure, but that doesn’t mean some daring Theseus hasn’t wandered that labyrinth with a ball of thread.”

Scudder frowned. “What’s a Theseus?”

“Never mind. Let me bottom-line this for you: I’m in the market for a full dossier on the Bast Club. I want to know about the employees, human and otherwise, with as much documentation on their personal lives as you can piece together. Floor plans. All the ways in, and all the ways out. Can you handle that?”

“I know this town like the back of my hand,” Scudder said, getting up from his stool. He shuffled over to a battered filing cabinet, its dented sidewalls looking like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. “The question is, can you afford…”

He paused, looking back at me, one hand frozen on a drawer handle. I could hear the gears grinding inside his skull as he tried to sniff out an advantage.

He pulled his hand away from the drawer, leaving it closed.

“I mean, I don’t have everything you need here, but I could
get
it, if you can handle my going rate.”

“Money isn’t an issue,” I told him.

Normally, that’d make someone’s eyes light up, but his expression didn’t budge. He’d already realized something better than money was up for grabs.

“How soon would you need this information?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Noon at the latest. I’m on a strict timetable. That’s nonnegotiable. In two days, my window of opportunity closes for good.”

Not coincidentally, in two days, whoever won Royce’s poker tournament would walk away with their new prize. I could tell the timing wasn’t lost on Scudder.

It wouldn’t be lost on Royce either.

“Mind if I ask what you’re trying to accomplish? It would help me tailor the package to your specific—”

“I do mind,” I said. “Just give me all the intel you have, and let me worry about sorting it out.”

He held up his withered hands. “Fine, fine, the customer is always right. For a full dossier like this, I’d say…two thousand dollars. Cash.”

“For that much money, this had better be worth it,” I said, knowing he’d never deliver. “Call me tomorrow when it’s ready, and I’ll swing by with your payment.”

He passed me a whittled-down nub of a golf pencil and a greasy receipt for a pepperoni pizza. I flipped the receipt over and scribbled my cell number on the back, holding it out to him between two fingers.

“Pleasure doing business,” he said. “Now, unless I can interest you in a slightly used toaster…”

I glanced down at the pile of mangled parts.

“I’m good,” I said. “Trying to cut down on carbs. Call me tomorrow.”

I let myself out. A light mist hung in the air, making the streetlights glisten. I was sure Scudder wouldn’t wait to make a phone call, not to me, but to Royce, trying to worm his way back into the hound’s good graces with a gift of information.

What Royce did with it, of course, was up to him. That was the tricky part.

I strolled down the quiet sidewalk, thinking, not in any particular hurry. My thoughts kept drifting back to the airport and what Royce said about Caitlin. Every time they did I kicked them, hard, to the task at hand.

The timetable couldn’t be tighter. The tournament was the day after tomorrow, which gave us about twenty-four hours to pull this off. I didn’t like short cons: you had to put on the pressure, hard and fast, and people under that kind of stress could get unpredictable. Unpredictable in bad, bloody ways.

No other option, though. Slow and steady was usually the right play, but not in a race like this one. I couldn’t go to bed without doing a little more to ramp up Royce’s paranoia, making sure I had him where I wanted him. I called Caitlin.

“Hey,” I said, “so far, so good. Scudder took the bait. Think I’m going to stop by the Bast Club and find out if anybody looks nervous to see me. Care to scope out the local wildlife?”

“I bought a new dress for the occasion,” she said.

Caitlin met me at our hotel room door, wearing something short, black, and vaguely scandalous with her red-bottomed Louboutin heels. We almost didn’t make it off the elevator. To our credit, we disentangled before the doors chimed open, but it was a close call.

I called Halima from the vinyl backseat of a cab, and she gave me instructions to relay to the driver.

“Have him drop you off at that corner,” she told me. “Wait until he leaves, then walk half a block east. That will take you to the parking lot. Management frowns on bringing cab drivers any closer than that.”

“Got it,” I said. “Anything else Management frowns on that we should know about?”

She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Yes. Probably anything and everything you’re planning on doing in Chicago.”

“Well, good,” I said. “He can get in line with everybody else.”