by Jeff Somers
“Lem?”
I turned to look at Mags. He stared at me with simpleminded confusion on his face, and I smiled at him. Dear, stupid Magsie. “Give the nice lady the money,” I said. It was just cash. More where that came from.
Mags squinted at me, as if unsure he’d heard correctly, and I nodded, reassuring him. “Go on.”
I knew I’d been Nuked. I knew I’d been Charmed. Cast on. Something. But I didn’t care. Mags slowly extracted a bulging yellow envelope from his pocket and held it out. Our blond friend stepped over to him. Her bleeder, big and pink and rubbery, followed her with a shuffling sort of walk. His mouth hung open slightly, and he held his arm up in a curious curled pose. I had a vision of Terrance, slow and dumb as a brick, and maybe he was one of those people for whom bleeding for a living was a fucking promotion.
“Thanks,” she said, opening the envelope and flipping through the bills. “Pleasure robbing ya. Like I said, it’s a nice scheme. Next time you’ll know to canvass the place first, right?”
I smiled. “Right!”
She smiled back. It took ten years off her.
HELLER RAISED AN eyebrow. “Lemme guess,” he said. “You don’t have my money. And let me get yer next line ready: You ain’t gonna be able to get my money.”
“Fuck that,” I said, feeling a flush creep up my neck. “I had it today. I’ll have it again tomorrow. Jesus fucked, just wait.”
“I been waiting!” Heller shouted, and the crowd noise died for a moment. “You fucking kid, fuck the wait. You either grease this palm right now or you’re working for me.”
I strained against the spell but couldn’t budge myself out of my chair. I forced myself to relax, breathing deeply and taking a moment. “What does ‘work for you’ mean, exactly?”
Heller glanced up over my shoulder and the invisible weight lifted. He smiled and dropped into the chair he’d placed next to me, leaning in close.
“That’s more like it,” he said, sounding genial again. “Reasonable. I’m a reasonable man, see, and what I like to see in other men is a similar sense of camaraderie, see? We’re all in this shitty boat together, I say, and everyone’s got to take a turn rowing. Why do people haveta always stir shit up?” Without turning, he reached out and grabbed the arm of a waitress as she hurried past us. She was heavyset and breathed through her mouth as she walked, her hair dyed something meant to be red. She stopped with a squawk, rounded on him, and then went quiet when she saw his leer.
“Two drops of brown, sweetheart,” he ordered, then released her and turned back to me. “ ‘Work for me’ means I need a Fixer for a job I’ve got in the can.”
I ran the word around a little. Since I’d hooked up with Hiram and convinced him to make me his apprentice, I’d heard a lot of fucked-up, crazy words used without a hint of embarrassment. Never this one though. “What’s a Fixer?”
“I got something coming through the docks. I got people handling the pickup, handling customs. I need someone who can cast and who can think, to be there and fix anything that goes wrong.”
I hated the sound of this. “Fix.”
“Cast, if necessary. Talk, if it works. Whatever the fuck. Someone sees something they shouldn’t, you fix it. One of my people gets sticky hands, you fix it.” He held up a hand to forestall any more questions. “I’m not what you would call a micromanager, Vonnegan. I don’t give a green turd how you do it. All I know is, my shit gets to me on schedule, in full, with no problems. Anything happens to threaten that, you fix it, you cunt.”
I processed this. “And we’re square?”
He shrugged. “And then we’re square. Only if there are no fucking problems. Think of it this way: You’re responsible for my shipment. It goes south, so do you.”
I leaned back and watched the lumpy waitress return from the bar and drop two thick glass tumblers of whiskey onto the table. I reached out and took mine between my thumb and forefinger. Saw my father, years ago, doing it exactly the same way. As if examining the glass, thinking profound thoughts. I looked around. The place was full of mages, ustari, but it was just like every place my father had dragged me to as a kid. Stale. Stuffy. Strangled.
All I knew about Heller, really, was that he had People. A lot of them were kids, pulled out of school to run his errands. But he also had Bleeders. And others: hangers-on, flunkies. If Heller came after us, what did we have? We had Mags’s angry expressions, the dozen or so spells I’d figured out, and my Disaster Sense, which had been ringing for so long and so loud I’d come to ignore it all the time.
Something gave way inside me. Fuck it.
“All right, I’ll be your Fixer,” I said. “And then we’re square.”
Heller grinned again, like a mouthful of peas. “And then we’re square.”
SOMEONE HAD CUT the fence. One of Heller’s people, wearing a voluminous black raincoat, lifted the chain link and waved us through. The rain was coming down hard, a single gray sheet broken up into tiny bullets that stung and burned. Black Raincoat led us through a maze of ugly trailers that led to a maze of ugly shipping containers stacked three or four high, creating canyons of primary colors. Black Raincoat then led us to a small trailer, up on concrete blocks and wired up for electricity. He pushed the door open and waved us through, then slammed it behind us.
It was a cramped, depressing office. Three metal filing cabinets, an ugly desk that appeared to be made of sheet metal and oversized screws, a watercooler, a coffee machine, and a sense of gloom that was almost a physical thing. Sitting at the desk was a short black man wearing a newsboy cap and smoking a cigarette. He looked at me and smirked. Then he looked at Mags and he frowned.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You’re my minders, huh?”
I looked at Mags. I’d coached him to always look mean, no matter what. We had spent a few hours in the car flipping through the catalog of Mags’s inner world, and we’d settled on hungry for his mean expression. It was working okay, actually. I’d taken the precaution of not feeding him that morning.
I looked back at the black guy. “Minders?”
“Shit, you know, make sure I stick to my end of this shitheel deal I got dumped on me. Make sure I don’t get cold feet. Make sure Mr. Heller Sir’s shit comes through here nice and smooth like a greased turd.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and spat on the floor. “Don’t worry. You got easy duty today. I got the message. Ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong. Have a cup of coffee. Relax.”
I looked around the tiny office. There was nothing about it that hinted at even the slightest bit of relaxation. The walls were clad in a fake wood paneling that had been cribbed from some terrible past crime against style, the floor was soft in a disturbing way that hinted at a sinkhole beneath us, and the lights flickered and rattled and were too white, too clinical. All in all, I made a mental note to come back to this place whenever I was ready to kill myself.
Heller had told me there was one container coming in that would skip customs inspections. He’d made his arrangements, greased the wheels. I had the tracking number of the container for confirmation but no idea what was inside it—and I’d been told to keep it that way. Fair enough. If nothing went wrong, this was the easiest job ever. If something went wrong, I was supposed to simply make it go right again. When I’d asked Heller for some advice on how, exactly, to accomplish that, he’d reminded me that I was one of a small number of people in the world who could conceivably cast a magic spell on a situation, using a tone that had a lot of negative implications concerning my intelligence and gumption.
I looked back at the guy at the desk. “What’s your name, then?”
He didn’t look back up from the pile of pink carbon paper he was sorting through. “Charlie.”
“Well, Charlie, my name’s Lem. This is Pitr.”
He looked up. He pointed his cigarette at Mags. “He tame? He kind of looks like I killed his puppy when we were kids and he’s
just now remembering.”
Mags’s face collapsed into a mask of damp terror. “You killed a puppy?”
For a moment Charlie and I just stared at him.
Used to teaching people how to ignore Mags in social situations, I walked over to the coffeemaker, asking, “What do you make for letting Heller’s shit pass through here?”
He took a moment to answer. “Enough. Heller’s good business.”
The coffee machine was crusty and ancient, the carafe cloudy with coffee sediment from previous decades. There were no extra mugs, so Charlie appeared to have the office to himself. “How long we got to wait?”
He sighed and I heard the rustle of paper. “They’re unloading. Could take an hour, could be here in fifteen minutes.”
“How’s it getting out of here?”
There was a pause. “By fucking truck, how else you get a fucking container off the dock?”
Magic, I thought, but Heller wasn’t going to bleed people to do something a truck could do for him. “So the container’s on the boat still?” I asked. I had no idea how containers and docks worked. I’d skipped that class since I couldn’t have imagined myself standing here, not in a million years.
“Jesus, yes.”
I turned. “Come on. Take us.”
Charlie squinted at me. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
I shrugged. I owed Heller thirty thousand dollars. To get out from under, I had to make sure he got his delivery without a problem. I wasn’t going to sit in an office and drink charred, cancerous coffee while shit happened two hundred feet away and sank me deeper. Heller hadn’t put this on me out of charity. If all it took was sitting in a fucking office, he didn’t need Tricksters to do it.
“Up,” I said, “or I’ll have my friend here treat you like a chew toy.”
Charlie twisted his lips to the side and glanced at Mags, weighing the possibility that he wasn’t nearly as mean as I’d trained him to look. Then he sighed and stood up, plucking a huge ring of keys from his desk. “Fine. You want to get soaking wet, ain’t gonna argue.” He stepped around the desk to the door, where a blue parka, still damp from the rain, hung. He slipped into it and opened the door. “Come on.”
“I’m already soaking,” Mags whispered unhappily, and I had to swallow a smile of pure love.
We followed him into the gloom and the damp, back into the maze of man-made canyons and the stinging rain. I wondered what was in each of these containers, where it was headed, how much of it had been brought in by mages like Heller—or more powerful than Heller—using a Cantrip here and a Ward there to slip something past everyone. I was slowly coming to understand there were more ustari in the world than I’d ever realized. I’d spent years searching them out. When I’d found Hiram, when I’d stumbled on him stealing pastries and other small things with a pinprick of blood and some whispers, I thought I’d found something rare. But they were everywhere, now that I knew how to look. Like rats, but in disguise.
We emerged into the wide, flat dock area, where a dirty-looking ship roughly the size of Texas and boiling over with the multicolored containers waited. Big cranes swung what looked like complex bridges over to the boat, where they were lowered in slow, graceful increments until they settled on top of a container and clamps snapped into place along the edges. Then they swung gently up and away, lugging it like a brick into the air. A weird-looking truck with dozens of wheels that made it look like an insect sat parallel to the ship, and one of the containers was being lowered precisely onto its back.
Charlie produced a handheld device with a cloudy screen and worked the buttons. “Your Mr. Heller’s container is third in line after this. It’s gonna be a few minutes, like I said.”
I nodded. My hair was soaked and my feet felt damp. But I just stood there and nodded, because I was Lem Vonnegan, tough guy. Who liked to get into poker games with other Tricksters without realizing it; who thought he was the only bright boy in the world who’d ever imagined using simple, dumb tricks to fleece people out of money.
I’d been spending too much time with Mags. I was getting his stupid all over me.
Charlie looked back at me, expecting us to head back to shelter, but I ignored him until he gave up and settled in for the wait.
Watching the containers be unloaded was hypnotic. It was like some huge, real-life video game—the containers monumental blocks, a giant claw trying to snare them from the pile. One, two, more of the big metal boxes were clamped onto by the big crane and gently lowered onto the waiting tractor and motored off. The industry on display, old-fashioned and honest and accomplished without a single cut or drop of blood, was exhausting. I imagined working this hard and didn’t like it. Three saganustari, one cut above Hiram in skill and willingness to bleed people to death, could have unloaded the boat in minutes. And they would have needed nothing more than a few people to bleed dry in order to do it.
I’d once asked Hiram how he found volunteers for the bleeds. He just laughed, so I should have known right then. Four weeks later, I was out of his house.
“Here she comes.”
It looked like every other container. It was yellow with orange edges, as a guide for the crane operator, with black lettering peppered all over it.
“Lem,” Mags whispered.
I glanced at him without moving my head. I was getting to know Mags’s body language a little. He was like the Eskimos in that he had a thousand expressions, all of which meant the same things, like hungry or confused. This one looked more like scared.
“There’s something wrong here,” he said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear.
I nodded and looked back at the container. Nothing about it looked unusual at all, but I was filled with a sense of heavy foreboding. As it hovered framed against the gray sky, I tracked it as it rose up and up and then sank down and down, and my heart pounded, my stomach turned. I’d had the same feeling once or twice when I was looking at something with a spell cast on it. Like I could sense the magic but not see it. Hiram had told me it took training to see Runes and Wards and the like; he’d taught me a “witchlight” for the time being, which lit up magical things in an eerie glow like a black light. I remembered being amazed by how much of the world had been marked by magic.
I stared at the container as it hung, suspended in the air.
A moment later a vehicle approached the loading area. It wasn’t the bizarre tractor that had collected the previous containers. This was a full-on tractor trailer, a truck ready for the highways.
“Mr. Heller made arrangements,” Charlie said. “Got a crew and everything. See, they’re standing ready to pull the pins and get it secured to the bed.”
There were four big guys in orange overalls standing ready, smoking cigarettes and talking among themselves. Heller had a fucking empire rolling here. The swelling ball of anxiety in my belly got a little bigger with each breath, but I couldn’t justify it. I watched Heller’s container slowly lower to the truck bed, and as the four men in orange stepped forward to work on it, I started walking. “Mags, with me,” I said.
“Not cool!” Charlie shouted, leaping in front of me and slapping his hand against my chest. “It’s—”
Mags took hold of his arm and with an almost casual yank sent him skidding face-first across the wet concrete. As we walked, Mags stared back at Charlie, his unibrow menacing, and I reflected that there were advantages to having him around. I hadn’t had to exert myself in a long time. As I walked, I tugged at my coat sleeve, blinking rain out of my eyes.
“I’ll do it, Lem,” Mags said, twisting his torso to remove his own jacket.
“The fuck you will,” I snapped. “You bleed one drop and you can go fuck yourself.”
“No, I—”
“We talked about this, Magsie,” I said. “We fucking talked about it.”
“I know, I just thought—”
; “Do me a favor and don’t.”
Mags had been just as horrified as I was at the whores Hiram had hired to bleed. But Mags was as afraid of Hiram as he was afraid of everything, and he’d forgotten most of it by the next day, requiring me to remind him every time: If he cast off someone else’s blood, we were not friends anymore. You could get Mags to do just about anything by simply threatening to not be his friend anymore.
I gritted my teeth, took my little toothbrush razor, and slashed my arm just deep enough. Blood and pain burst out of the wound.
“Back up!” I shouted at the four guys. Three of them stopped to look at me. The fourth guy, who appeared to have eaten a fifth guy earlier in the day, turned to me, his face scummed with beard, his nose flat and crooked from about a dozen punches.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked in a thick accent.
I thought about that for a step. “I’m the Fixer,” I said. I put five Words in my head. They weren’t complex.
Scum Beard hesitated as I walked past him. I didn’t know if Heller had used the word Fixer to him or if it was the sheet of blood coursing down my arm. The gas in the air was easy to sense, a sizzling band of instantly fading energy, there and gone.
“Step the fuck back, buddy.”
I saw Scum Beard in my peripheral vision. Pulling at the gauzy threads of gas like Hiram had taught me, I spat out my five Words, felt the bitter drain of the spell using me as kindling, and didn’t bother to turn and watch him punch backwards with a grunt of pain, hitting the slick concrete and rolling into a ball. I didn’t watch him lay there moaning, either.
I looked at one of the others. “I said: Back up.”
They backed up. I was getting used to that look when people saw magic for the first time. Hiram had repeated the lesson over and over again: We survived by staying in the shadows. Ustari couldn’t survive if the whole world came after us. As powerful as some Archmages were, as easily as we tricked everyone around us, if the whole straight world came after us in force, we’d be plowed under. The old saying: You can’t cast your way past a bullet. I felt exposed. I felt eyes on me, and I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. But I had thirty thousand dollars hanging around my neck. And something was tickling me with the idea that I wasn’t going to be paying off that debt anytime soon.