A Plain-Dealing Villain (9 page)

“Stanwyck,” I breathed. “What the
fuck
.”

“Sorry, guys,” he said. “See, I asked around like you wanted me to, seeing if anybody would come after us for ripping off Ecko. And while I did, I ran into somebody who wanted that cute little knife. They made me a better offer.”

“Let him go,” Coop growled. He took a step closer, skirting the edge of a display case. Stanwyck pressed the barrel of his gun to Augie’s temple.

“Uh-uh. You stay right there, unless you want to pick bits of your nephew’s skull off the carpet. Same goes for you, Faust. I’ve heard you’re tricky. Think you can outsmart a bullet? Best be sure, for little Augie’s sake.”

I kept my hands where he could see them, nice and easy, the knife in full view.

“Stanwyck,” I said, “I’m gonna tell you this once, and once only. Nobody stabs me in the back and gets away with it. Nobody. I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give you one chance: put the gun down and
leave
. You forfeit your cut. That’s your punishment for being a greedy asshole. Walk away, and I won’t go after you.”

“I might,” Coop said through gritted teeth.

“Shut it,” I told him, then looked back at Stanwyck. “
We
won’t go after you. My word on it. Just let the kid go and walk away.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Stanwyck said. “You slide that knife over here, I trade it for Augie, and we
all
walk away. This doesn’t have to get bloody, Faust. I’m not looking to kill anybody. I’m just looking to get paid.”

“Then you should have stuck to the plan.”

I could feel time slipping away. How long before Ecko came home? How long before a patrol car prowled by on the street outside? Every wasted second made it less and less likely that any of us would get out alive.

Stanwyck laughed. “Can you do math? I can. Tell me, what’s bigger: all the money, or one share of a three-way split? Seems like a no-brainer to me. Now slide that knife over here.”

“Take that gun off my goddamn nephew
right now
, you son of a bitch,” Coop snarled. He took another step closer, his hands balled up in leathery fists. Everything was sliding out of control, and all I could hear were the psychic klaxons in my head. The ones taking me back to another job gone bad. Another job I should have walked away from.

“Stay cool, Coop,” I said. “Look, Stanwyck, we don’t have a lot of time—”

Stanwyck nodded. “You’re right. I don’t think everybody appreciates the pressure we’re working under. Let me help with that.”

He smashed the lid of a jewelry case with the butt of his revolver, then pressed the barrel back against Augie’s head before the kid could squirm away. As the glass shattered, my psychic alarms were muffled by a very real one, squalling out as the store security system blazed to life.

“Five seconds. The Chicago PD is getting an emergency call from Polymath Security,” Stanwyck said. “Seven seconds, another operator is calling Damien Ecko and telling him his store’s just been broken into. Are you
getting
this now, Faust?
Give me the damn knife!
”

“Let him go!” Coop shouted, moving up on Stanwyck now, a grizzly bear protecting his sister’s cub. Augie’s eyes bulged with panic, flashing left and right. I laid the knife on the closest counter.

“Fine. You want it? Take the damn thing.”

I slid it over. It spun in razor-edged circles, gliding along the polished glass to rest near Stanwyck’s hand. Stanwyck flicked his gaze away, just for a second. I saw the disaster coming before it happened. Time lurched into a slow molasses drip as Coop saw his chance and lunged at him.

Stanwyck pulled the trigger and shot Augie in the head.

Augie’s body tumbled to the carpet. Specks of gray and scarlet glistened on the jewelry-shop wall. Stanwyck swung the gun around, fired again, and blasted Coop square in the heart from three feet away.

I ducked low as he took two shots at me, blowing out chunks of drywall just over my head. My cards fluttered into my hand, but I didn’t have time to return the favor. Stanwyck snatched up the knife and ducked through the broken doorway, fleeing into the night.

Coop was still breathing, if you could call it that. More of a wet, ragged rattle as he stared up at the ceiling with a confused look in his eyes. I ran over, keeping low, and pulled up his shirt to survey the damage.

Coop tugged off his mask. His face was fishbelly-white and drenched in sweat. I tried to shield him from the security camera, stubbornly pretending it mattered, but he knew better.

“Forget it,” he croaked. “Ain’t exactly a flesh wound. I’m done.”

I bundled up his shirt and pressed it against the guttering hole in his chest with both hands, trying to slow the bleeding. “Hold on, just hold on. All you need to do is last until the cops get here. They can call an ambulance—”

“And then I do a twenty-year stretch. I ain’t got twenty years left in me. Don’t wanna die behind bars. Don’t want that, Dan. I don’t
want
it.”

He tried to push my hands away. He was weak as a kitten. In my mind I was back on my last job for Nicky. Back with my friend Max, alarms screaming and cops on the way, and trying to push his guts back into his stomach.

It was happening all over again, like a nightmare on permanent repeat.

“You gotta live, Coop. You gotta—”

“Not behind bars,” he said. “Dan, hey, you gotta run. You gotta do two things for me. Promise me. You gotta get my share to my old lady. She’s gonna need the cash, with me gone.
Please
. You gotta promise me.”

Coop was good as dead. He knew it. I knew it. Only difference was he accepted it. I couldn’t let him go out like that.

And I couldn’t get the cash to his wife if I was hauled out of here in handcuffs. I had to choose, and choose fast. I could keep him alive, so he could spend the rest of his life in prison—with me sharing a cell right next to him—or I could let him rest easy, knowing his family would be okay.

“Yeah, Coop,” I told him. “I’ll do it. I promise.”

I pulled my hands away and let him bleed.

“The other thing.” He let out a racking, high-pitched cough, wincing. “You find that son of a bitch, Dan. You find him and you send him straight to hell.”

The swell of police sirens rose in the distance. I looked down at Coop.

“He’s already dead,” I said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Coop nodded weakly and twitched his fingers at me. “Go on, then.
Get
.”

I wanted to stay until the end—it seemed like the thing to do—but I couldn’t argue with him. Couldn’t argue with the sirens either, and they sounded like they were less than a block away. I gave Coop’s hand one last, long squeeze.

Then I ran.

Out the door, into the night, and around the corner, ducking into the back alley. I ripped off my mask and my gloves as I ran, holding them close to my chest in a wadded-up ball. The alley kinked on a diagonal, curving behind the building and opening one street up. I froze in the shadows with my back pressed to a cold brick wall as three squad cars roared past, lights blazing against the dark. As soon as they rounded the corner I made my move, breaking from cover and running across the street, diving into another alleyway.

Distance. The more distance I could put between me and the crime scene, the safer I was. A stairway up to the elevated train tracks looked inviting, but I knew better. There were security cameras on the platforms, and the cops would be pulling all of tonight’s footage to look for suspects. I had to figure they’d canvass the local cabbies too, so that meant hailing a ride was a no-go. I kept moving, alley to alley, backstreet to backstreet, with no direction in mind but “away.”

About three blocks out, I found an open Dumpster piled high with last week’s trash. I held my breath and shoved the mask and gloves as far under the mounds of moldering plastic bags as I could reach. Unless some eagle-eyed cop got incredibly lucky, they were good as gone.

Another couple of twists and turns, and I wound up on Michigan Avenue. Even this late at night there was plenty of traffic on the street. I could pass myself off as some faceless middle manager, stuck working late and on his way home.

Home. I wanted my desert, my neon, my tourist crowds, not this desolate, cold canyon of stone and glass. I wanted to catch the next flight west and leave this horrible night behind me. Couldn’t do that, though. Not now.

I’m a professional liar, but some promises you just don’t break. I promised Coop his wife would get his share of the score, and I’d be damned if I went back on that. Then there was Stanwyck. Between killing Augie and Coop, and thinking he could bushwhack me and get away with it, I had three good reasons to put a bullet between Stanwyck’s eyes. Getting the knife back made four.

And he’ll be lucky if I let him die that fast
, I thought. He said he found another buyer. It’d have to be someone local and somebody who knew Damien Ecko’s business. That couldn’t be a huge pool of suspects. I gave Halima Khoury a call, got her voicemail, and left a message asking her to call me back right away.

The sky rumbled. More rain on the way. I took shelter in a tavern called Keefe’s, where St. Patrick’s Day was a year-round sort of celebration. The brick-walled pub felt like a cellar, cool and dark, and the air smelled like beer and fresh-roasted peanuts. There were worse places to wait out a storm. I found an empty table in the back where I could rest my feet for a while. Most of the crowd was up toward the bar, and I didn’t feel too sociable.

A tired-looking waitress in a short plaid skirt came around, and I ordered a club soda with lime. I wanted hard liquor like a man in the desert wants ice water, but I had a feeling my work tonight was just getting started.

Sitting still gave me time to think. That was the last thing I needed. I played the night back in my mind, over and over again. If I’d been a little faster, a little sharper, if I’d done this thing or that thing differently, would Coop and Augie still be alive? I ran it down a hundred different ways, and it all ended in a hundred different pulls of the trigger.

A shot of the storefront came up on the TV behind the bar. My stomach clenched, waiting for a police-artist’s suspect sketch, but none came. All I could make out over the chatter of the crowd was something about “mysterious circumstances” and a dead body found at the scene of the break-in.

My burner phone buzzed twice against my hip. I should have thrown the damn thing away with my mask and gloves, but in the heat of the moment I’d forgotten I had it.

It was a text message. Sent from Coop’s phone.

For just a second, my heart soared. He’d gotten out somehow. Crawled away from the store before the cops got there, or maybe bribed somebody into taking him to the hospital instead of a prison infirmary. Coop was okay.

Then I read the message.

You have something that belongs to me
.

Ecko. He’d gotten there before the cops, most likely. Plucked the burner from Coop’s pocket. I didn’t answer him. Ecko didn’t know me from John Doe; all he had was a number for a throwaway phone, one that was heading for the bottom of a trash can the second I walked out of here. Out of all my problems right now, he was at the rock bottom of the list.

The waitress brought over my club soda, and I pretended to enjoy it. A few minutes later, another message came in.

I have something that belongs to you, too
.

And underneath, in a blue bubble of text:
File Attachment: friend.avi. Would you like to open it?

One body
, I thought.
The news said the cops only found ONE body
. My stomach clenched like a fist.

I cupped my hand over the phone, holding it close, and pressed play.

The video was taken from Coop’s own phone, grainy and shaky, as the person holding it strolled down a dim corridor walled with cinder blocks. An overhead light hung dead, its bulb burned out, and the person taking the video clicked on a flashlight as he rounded a corner. As the camera slowly swept from left to right, I realized what the openings lining the hallway were: steel cell doors with tiny barred windows.

The director stopped at a door at the end of the hallway. He held up the camera and the flashlight together, sending a thin, pale beam of light into the cell. Letting me see what waited inside.

Coop’s eyes were like a pair of white marbles, the pupils gone pale and dead. Mortician’s thread stitched his lips shut, but they could only muffle the mewling animal noises he made as he flinched at the sudden light, throwing up his hands to hide his face. He was naked and sitting cross-legged on the dirty stone floor, one ankle shackled to a ring set into the floor. I could see the black clotting on his chest, blood congealed over the wound that killed him.

Coop wasn’t dead.

He wasn’t alive either.

Call me
, the next message read.

I got up and walked into the men’s room.

A naked fluorescent light bar crackled softly above the sinks. I stood under the harsh light, took a long look at myself in the grimy mirror, and waited for a drunk washing his hands to finish up and leave. I needed some privacy for this. Ecko picked up on the second ring.

“Mr. Greyson, I believe. Unless that was the gentleman with the bullet in his head, staining my carpet.”

“This is Greyson,” I said. No point denying the alias. He’d recognize my voice from the last time I called him. “I want my man back.”

“And I want my property returned to me. It was a fortuitous thing, you know. Your friend had just breathed his last when I returned to my shop, but his soul hadn’t quite left the body. I made sure he’d stay that way. And let me answer your unspoken question: he
is
suffering. He’s suffering the torments of the damned, shackled inside his own dead meat. You should move with haste. Before he starts to rot in earnest.”

Damn you, Stanwyck
. Hell with the money, I’d give the knife back in a heartbeat if it meant setting Coop free.

“I don’t have it,” I said, “but…I’m working on that. Fine, you want it? It’s yours. Just let him go.”

Ecko chuckled.

“Oh, it’s not that simple. There are damages. The violation of my shop, the destruction of my front door, not to mention the mess you made in my home.” He paused. “You know, it’s funny. There was a time when I’d pursue a thief to the ends of the earth to enact my vengeance, but I’ve been in this game for a long, long time. Perhaps I’ve mellowed with age, but I’m honestly more amused than angry. Perhaps I’ll just keep your friend as an
ushabti
and we can call it even.”

“Get to the damn point,” I told him. “You’ve got a price in mind for letting him go, so let’s hear it. What do I have to do?”

He giggled before he answered, a capricious little laugh, and that was when I knew I was in trouble.

“I want the Judas Coin.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“No,” he said, “I imagine you don’t. That’s what happens when you go to a city where you don’t belong and rob a stranger. Nonetheless, that’s my price. Bring me the dagger and the coin, and you can have your friend back.”

“If you’ll just tell me—”

“We don’t have anything else to talk about.” He hung up.

I stared at the useless lump of plastic in my hands. I wanted to throw it against the wall. I wanted to break something. Instead I shoved it in my pocket, trudged back out into the bar, and drank my damn club soda.

Halima called me back. “I saw the news,” were the first words out of her mouth.

“Things didn’t go according to plan.”

“I warned you,” she said.

“Ecko wasn’t the problem at the time.
Now
he’s the problem.”

I filled her in. She didn’t answer right away, lost in a pensive silence.

“
Ushabti
.” She said the word as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of sour milk. “In ancient Egypt, they were figurines. Little statuettes, imbued with funerary magic. The idea being that they would serve you for eternity in the afterlife.”

“So when he called Coop one…”

“He’s making it very clear he has your friend’s soul in his power, and he means to keep him.”

“But if I bring him this coin thing—”

Halima sighed. “He’s playing with you. The coin isn’t something you can…you know, it’d be easier to show you. Where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”

I waited outside under the glare of a streetlamp. A cold mist rode on the night wind, prickly and wet. It kept my senses sharp. Halima rattled up in an old brown Datsun with an NPR bumper sticker.

“I’m not doing this for you,” she said as I got in on the passenger side. “That is to say I am, but…this isn’t the sort of thing I get involved in, you understand? I’m doing this for your friend’s sake.”

“I’m grateful,” I told her. “Stanwyck—the guy who bushwhacked us—said he got a better offer while he was asking around about Ecko. So it had to be someone local, somebody who deals in hot antiquities. Know anyone like that?”

“Possibly. What were you sent to steal?”

“An Aztec dagger. Obsidian blade, and the hilt’s some kind of yellow-green stone with scallops and a lion head on the pommel.”

“Sacrificial knife? Not good. Does it have magical properties?”

“For what I’m getting paid, I can’t imagine it doesn’t. My buyer is in Texas, so word about this thing is spreading fast.”

“Stolen magical antiquities.” She wrinkled her nose. “As it happens, I know a likely suspect, but getting the truth out of him won’t be easy. It never is. Hold on, we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“There” was at the end of a twisty drive through the backstreets, down empty roads lined with construction cones and along narrow alleys littered with chunks of asphalt. A murder of crows watched us from telephone lines and rusty fences, their eyes glittering in the dark.

“I understand there’s a private club for the occult underground in Las Vegas. Is that right?” She gave the birds a narrow-eyed stare as we rolled past.

“The Tiger’s Garden,” I said. “It’s picky about who it lets in. Magicians only.”

“I’ve heard a rumor that there’s a nightclub not far from the Vegas Strip, too. Allegedly operated by one of the courts of hell and exclusively catering to
their
particular…needs.”

“I’ve heard that rumor, too.”

The Datsun turned into a parking lot, pulling into a vacant space between a battered old pickup and what was, unless my eyes deceived me, the sleek fire-orange wedge of a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Lamborghini.

“It’s important to understand, first and foremost,” Halima explained as she killed the engine, “that in Chicago, the occult community is rather…desegregated.”

A three-story brownstone, all of its windows boarded over, turned its back to the parking lot. My shoes crunched on loose gravel as I followed Halima over to a battered metal door.

“There are rules,” she said and ticked them off on her fingers. “Take nothing that does not belong to you. Lay no hand on another, except by their invitation. Speak no true names and tell no secrets, save those which are yours to tell.”

“Halima, where
are
we?”

She rapped four times on the metal door. I glanced up, spotting the eye of a closed-circuit camera set high on the wall. A moment later, the door buzzed and she pulled it open. A gust of warm air washed out over us, carrying the distant, muffled strains of violin music. Halima looked at me, grave.

“A place I do not care to visit very often,” she said. “Welcome to the Bast Club.”