by Ari Marmell
“You got a mouse in your pocket, bo? Maybe you’re soft on Grangullie and want him to be—”
Téimhneach blinked, long and languid, which wouldn’t have been a big deal ’cept the lids on his left lamp snapped shut vertically this time, instead of horizontally.
“Why, you, me, and Officer Peter Staten, of course.”
Think my blood went so thick’n cold it coulda doubled as mortar.
“What?”
I’m surprised I got the word out. Just as surprised I didn’t immediately put the nearest sharp thing through the boggart’s map.
“Yes,” he yapped on, “I think the next full moon’s as good a deadline as any.” His cheeks actually extended to fit his nasty grin. “We’re quite aware of Staten’s unfortunate condition, Oberon. It hasn’t been worth our time to interfere, as we had little to gain, and slaughtering a lycanthrope in the wilds of Elphame is a, ah, tricky proposition.
“But it is quite achievable, with the proper motivation. And we both know you cannot afford not to bring him.”
“If you go anywhere near—”
“Oh, is it threat time now? How tiresome.”
My hand was shaking some. Yeah, that’s a tic we share with you lot. If we get angry enough.
And he was still jabbering on! “Fortunately, such threats are, in addition to meaningless, quite unnecessary. The full moon is still a couple of weeks away. I have every confidence that you’ll have results for us well before then.
“Good day, Mister Oberon, and good hunting.”
That ugly grin got wider, curled back around until the corners of his lips touched in back and he flipped his whole head open.
No, really. Opened his trap wide, and kept on opening it, ’til the top half of his head fell back like it was hinged, leaving his mouth one great big honkin’ hole, a ring of flesh, bone, and crooked teeth.
Then that ring dropped to the floor, his body vanishing through it, and he was gone.
Say it with me, now. Goddamn boggarts.
Still, hinky as it was, even for me, it was probably a good thing he’d pulled his vanishing act instead of just hoofing it outta here. If he’d turned his back on me, I really mighta stabbed him. I knew I hadda calm down when the bulb over my head started to shudder, and somethin’ in the icebox cracked itself open.
He’d picked the right leverage. I was gonna work a lot harder’n faster with Pete in danger, even if I’d never admit that—to Téimhneach or Pete, either. But you do not threaten my people.
I ain’t got many of ’em as it is.
Attacking Téimhneach woulda meant starting a war I couldn’t win, which is why I hadn’t shanked him something good.
But he’d regret today; I got a long memory.
I went back to the office door, flicked the lock, and stuck my noggin into the corridor again.
“Your boss just took a powder,” I snapped.
Grangullie sighed, shot me a look that said “What’re you gonna do?” no matter which side of Chicago you were, and scurried back toward the stairs.
Probably shoulda just let it go at that, but I was too hot under the collar.
“Tell him something for me, Grannie,” I shouted after him.
He froze, his whole back clenched as he tensed, but I wasn’t gonna give him time to get a word in.
“Tell him if he—or you, or any of your jolly mob—hurt Pete, I don’t give a fuck what oaths I’ve sworn to who, or what it costs me. I will end him.”
Even more shoulder work. I think I coulda blunted an axe on his spine in that moment, and it wouldn’ta broken the skin. But it wasn’t anger making him tense up like a piano wire with stage fright.
“Threatened Staten, huh?” He was tryin’ to sound nonchalant, but the surprise in his voice was unmistakable. He hadn’t been expecting that at all—and he wasn’t too thrilled with it.
He was gone, though, before I’d decided if I could risk pressing the issue. Plenty else to worry about, and now I got to add warning Pete and tryin’ to keep him not-dead to the list.
Not that the rest of the list was lookin’ any more fun. Shame the bloodthirsty, mobbed-up redcap wasn’t the scariest conversation I needed to have.
Took an extra few minutes—putting off the inevitable, maybe—to handle a few lingering details. First, a quick call on the horn to warn Pete about his new fans. The tirade that followed proved that my friend had some creative but wildly inaccurate ideas of Fae physiology and sexual practices.
Then, when that lovely conversation was done, I popped on out to the corner and dropped a few coins on a newsrag. (I didn’t see Sealgaire anywhere, but the centipedes in fuzzy slippers playing hopscotch up’n down my spine made me think he was probably somewhere close.) Quick skim told me a whole lotta nothing immediately relevant. People were still celebrating Roosevelt’s election; the Bears were lookin’ like they might go all the way this year; couple of shopkeepers got shot in a robbery spree up on the north side; one of our aldermen slipped in the shower and cracked his conk open on the side of the tub (between him’n Judge Meadors, this hadn’t been a good week for city officials); over a dozen dead in Switzerland after the army opened up on a buncha protestors; a car bomb, which—this being the Windy City—hadn’t even made the front page; lotta different fairs and carnivals were heading our way for the next few months, since nobody expected to be able to compete with the “Century of Progress” exposition come May; unsolved murder this; bank robbery that; and so on, and so forth, and enough already.
Lots and lots of “definitely not.” A handful of headlines that Ramona could’ve been talking about before, sure, but not any I could put my chips on.
Meant there was nothing left but to do it. I think I’d have rather tussled with Herne again.
I shut off the fan, poked the bathroom doorknob with the L&G until the bits and whatsises fell back into place, and carefully cracked the door open.
“Um,” I explained, hoping I didn’t come across near as sheepish as I felt.
Ramona stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed, and glared, fierce enough to make a Gorgon blink first. Hell, maybe to make a Gorgon’s victim blink!
“Uh,” I apologized.
She stormed past me out into the office, managing to brush by—hard—without actually knocking into me. Dunno how she managed that in the bathroom doorway.
It woulda been easier if she’d gotten hysterical, screamed, threw a full on ing-bing. At least then I’d have known how upset—hurt—she was. Instead, she advanced on the desk like it’d called her names and snatched up the newspaper.
“Look, doll,” I tried again, trailing after her. Just one big puppy, me. “You gotta understand—”
“Here.” She stabbed the paper with a finger, hard enough that I winced.
Can’t say I was much surprised that she’d all but punched a hole in the car bomb story. Picture showed the burnt-out wreck of what’d been a real nice (if you go for that sorta thing) Cadillac, with an engine the size of Dearborn Street station. Not my area of expertise, but given the damage to the engine and the front seats, I figured on “dynamite wired to the ignition” even before the article got there.
Considering just how many types of hatchetmen actually use car bombs, I was about equally surprised to read that at least some of the victims were made men. Maybe they all were, but the boys in blue hadn’t IDed ’em all yet. One of the names they had released—hoodlum by the not-at-all-Italian-sounding name of Giancarlo Manetti—was ringing bells in the back of my head, though they were so faint I couldn’t tell if it was Vespers or a streetcar crossing.
After a moment, I said, “All right. What’s it gotta do with you, though?”
She looked at me like she was counting the different varieties of stupid. I wanted to crawl behind the Murphy bed and close it up after me.
“Not wanting to wind up that way, for one.”
“Well, sure, but c’mon. We don’t even know for certain the people you’re mixed up with are Mob. Even i
f they are, the odds that they’re directly linked to this crew—” I tapped the paper “—or the guys who whacked ’em, are pretty damn small, savvy?”
She added another stupid to her tally. “Mick… the various organizations, the… what, Outfit?”
“Yeah.”
“The Outfit, North Side, all of those… It’s all been fairly quiet lately, hasn’t it? Not a lot of warring between them?”
Depends what you mean by quiet. If you count magic…
But, “Yeah, fairly.”
Again she poked at the paper. “So isn’t this rather brazen? For ‘peacetime’?”
Maybe not so much as she thought—the Mob, they don’t tend to go in for subtle—but I hadda admit, she had a point.
I mean, it didn’t have to be the Outfit. Coulda been any sorta smaller criminal endeavor, or something personal. Even wondered for a sec if this mighta been a sign of that violence I was lookin’ for, but a car bomb ain’t really the Unseelie style. Too technological and too impersonal for ’em, especially for redcaps.
“I don’t know what’s what in the underworld,” she concluded. “I don’t want to know. But if things are heating up for whatever reason, and there’s even a chance the people who think I owe them could be caught up in whatever’s about to happen…”
“Ramona, probable as it is, we don’t even know for sure that whoever’s gunning for you are the same mugs your cousin owed.” It was a reflex protest, though. She was right; there were a lotta ifs and maybes, yeah, but they weren’t that far-fetched.
“Mick… Please. I need this. I don’t… want to be alone. And besides,” she added with forced cheer, “you know I’ll just follow you anyway.”
“Oh, for… Fine!” I agreed.
Why the hell did I agree? I knew better than to agree. I didn’t want to agree!
Except, it seemed that I did.
“You stick by me,” I continued. “You do what I say when I say, and you don’t ask questions.”
“I’ll give you the first two.”
Why was I not surprised?
“Whatever. I’ll just hide you back in the bathroom if I need…”
Ding-ding-ding! “Hide.” That was the trigger I’d needed in order to remember where I’d heard of that one guy before.
Manetti’s a smuggler and bootlegger. It was the cat’s specialty, moving illegal or stolen goods into or outta the city. I’d come across his name a few months ago, doing some follow-up digging after the mess with the Ottatis. See, I’d gotten wise that Vince “Bumpy” Scola, a rival of Fino Ottati’s, knew something about magic. Not a lot, maybe barely anything, but he knew it existed and wore a couple charms, just in case. So also just in case, I figured I’d better dig up some more about him. I’d read about Manetti among Scola’s known associates.
Big deal, right? Ain’t like bootleggers are a rare breed around here, and a lotta trouble boys know Scola in one way or another. No reason to guess this meant anything about anything.
Except… Lots of bootleggers, yeah, but not nearly as many who specialize in it. Who make a point of hiring out to multiple crews specifically as a top-notch smuggler.
Now he’d gotten himself zotzed in a big way, right after one of the world’s oldest pieces of contraband had been snuck into Chicago.
Coulda been coincidence, but it felt worth checking out, at least.
“Hold that thought, sweetheart,” I said, even though I’d been the last one jawing. I collected a nickel from a desk drawer and wandered out into the hall.
“Okay, pal. I don’t like you, you don’t like me, so let’s just get this done fast as we can.”
Having said my piece, I picked up the blower, dropped in my nickel, and waited for the operator.
No sure way to reach Pete. I’d been lucky to catch him earlier; by now he was probably out on his rounds, pounding the sidewalk flat. But Keenan… Yeah, they weren’t supposed to give me anything, but I figured I could sweet-talk a little knowledge out of him. I mean, all I wanted was info on a couple mobsters. Shouldn’t be too tough.
When I hung up a few minutes later, my ears burned like I’d been shoving matchsticks in ’em, and, for once, it wasn’t ’cause of the horn itself.
“Guess Keenan takes his orders pretty serious,” I muttered, trudging back to the office. “Impressive vocabulary, too.”
I stepped in, made a quick rummage through my drawer of oddities, and then slung my jacket and flogger off the rack. Ramona, who’d just seated herself in my chair, promptly stood.
I enjoyed watching her more’n I had the boggart, just for the record.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
I didn’t even argue the we anymore. Just didn’t seem worth the energy, and we both knew I didn’t really wanna ditch her.
“If one side of the law won’t talk to me,” I answered, “I’ll just have to talk to the other.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. You’ll see. Do what I say, when—”
“When you say it, yeah.” Ramona collected her purse and coat, a fur-lined thing, awfully nice but with its best days behind it. “You told me already.”
“Wanted to make sure you heard.” I held the door open and she ducked out around me—then stopped.
“Mick?”
“Hmm?”
“You could’ve just told me you needed me to hide in the bathroom. I’d have gone.”
“With or without asking a million questions first?” I asked.
She turned and headed for the stairwell door, but not before I saw the knowing smirk trying to slide its way across her face.
CHAPTER NINE
“Are you nuts?” she hissed.
What it lacked in volume it more’n made up in intensity.
“Hey, I figured this neighborhood would be to your taste.”
“The neighborhood is!” Ramona snapped back. “The neighbors aren’t!”
See, thing is, I hadn’t let on exactly where we were going. We took the L south, hopped out somewhere in the mid 60s-eth streets, and hoofed it on up Calumet. Nice area, here, especially for the far-south side. Not too swanky, but the grass was still mostly green, the windows glinted despite the overcast skies, and the red-brick houses were more’n big enough for comfort. Pedestrians ankled on by, friendly enough. The cans chugging past in the street were kept well enough that the exhaust was only almost enough to choke a goat. Ramona’d been in pretty good cheer over it all, especially for someone with the curse on her, until I told her who we were calling on.
(Uh, I guess I oughta clarify, I don’t mean a literal curse, I mean someone’d put out a contract on her. Metaphor and slang and all that. Given where we were headed, and what happened here a few months ago, figured I better lay it out clear.)
“How do you know these aren’t the people who are after me?” she demanded.
“’Cause I know ’em, Ramona. He ain’t gonna take home any awards for kindness, and people who cross him occasionally seem to walk in front of really tiny, really fast-moving objects. But he don’t hurt people without good cause, and he owes me. Big. Hell, if I did have to muster up some guys to protect you, I could probably count on his more’n most of the cops.
“Plus, his wife’s real friendly.”
Considering that she spent the rest of the walk up to the door grumbling about the idiocy of bringing her to a gangster’s home, I’m gonna go out on a limb and suppose she didn’t buy the reassurance. I tried not to take it personal, and mostly succeeded.
Raised some knuckles to knock, and froze. Always did, just for a blink or two, even though I’d been here something like five times since it all went down. No matter how much I knew Maldera’s wards were long gone, I couldn’t forget the burning, the sickness. Approaching that house, stepping across that threshold, was an act of will every damn time.
Suck it up, Oberon.
If I hadn’t already been wise to the birds watching us through various windows, the door opening about a second and a half after I kno
cked woulda told me. Lug tryin’ to stare me down wasn’t one of the boys I’d met before, but he definitely came off the same assembly line. Big, not real sharp-looking, and draped in a suit that did bupkis to hide the heater he was packing at his left shoulder.
I was sure he could have it in his meathooks in a heartbeat if he decided he didn’t care for me.
“Yeah?” he said.
I couldn’t help it. “Would you kindly tell the lady of the house that the representative from Credne Household Device Repair—and his, uh, assistant—would be grateful for a moment of her time?”
He blinked, and the already limited intelligence shining in his peepers dimmed another notch. It was like the shadow of a cloud passing in front of a slightly whiter cloud.
“Look, pal, this household don’t need any kinda—”
“Hey! Jerry!” This from a guy inside who was basically a conceptual twin to the doorman (Jerry, apparently). He, though, was a crew soldier I had met on a couple prior visits. “Let the man in already! He’s right with the boss.”
Jerry’s forehead and cheeks turned into wrinkles. Guess he didn’t enjoy being showed up.
“What about the dame? You didn’t say nothin’ ’bout her!”
Ramona reddened. “I beg your—!”
I shook my head, and she sullenly bit her lip.
The other guy sighed, tossed me a halfway apologetic look.
“So check her before you let her in, you gavone!”
The doorman turned back with a leer, and I decided I was done playing nice. I was just about to slip in behind his forehead and dance an impromptu samba in his noggin. Turned out I didn’t need to.
“I want you to think really hard,” Ramona said—nah, growled—“about what’s going to happen if a friend of the boss complains to him about wandering mitts.”
Jerry might be dumb, but he wasn’t that dumb. He nodded so hard I think it slung the smile off, and proceeded to pat Ramona down—politely and professionally. I figured it’d ruin her performance if I applauded, so I held off.
As I figured, I hadda force myself to pass through the door, and also as I figured, it was the memory of Maldera’s magics, not the new ones, that did it. The Ottatis got their own wards up, now, but they’d worked in a free pass for me. Not that it made no nevermind anyway. The new wards wouldn’t keep out a determined pixie. Pretty clear the talent for witchcraft didn’t run in the family.