I parked my car and went inside. Poor as the parish was, at least they could still afford air-conditioning. Off to one side of the altar, candles and a wreath surrounded the portrait of a smiling, plump-faced priest. I walked up the aisle, past pew after weathered, splintering, and empty pew, to look for a placard or note about who the dead man was. Please don’t tell me Sitri got someone else to do the job…
“Did you know Father Fernando?”
I looked over. Another priest stood near the altar, maybe in his early forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His voice carried the faintest hint of a Spanish accent, like it was something he’d worked hard at unlearning.
“Afraid I didn’t have the pleasure,” I said.
He walked over, standing close and giving the portrait a long stare.
“Good friend of mine. We went to seminary school together.” He looked at me. “Killed by a car, just last week. A hit-and-run, if you can imagine that. Every night I pray that the driver finds it in his heart to turn himself in and seek absolution. Murder is a terrible burden to carry.”
I suspected I knew more on that subject than the good father, but I shook my head and said, “My condolences. Are you Father Alvarez?”
“I am.” He offered me his hand. His grip was firm and warm. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve seen you before. You’re not from our congregation, are you?”
On my way over, I’d thought hard about how to play it. The best lie, as usual, would cut pretty close to the truth.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Your name came up in relation to a case I’m working on. Is there somewhere we could talk? I won’t take up too much of your time, I promise.”
He nodded and gestured toward a side door. “Of course. In my office. If this is about Father Fernando’s estate or the insurance claim, though, you’ll really need to talk to the diocese. I’m just the man who writes the boring sermons and occasionally manages to dispense a little good advice.”
White flowers bloomed in a cheap glass vase on the priest’s desk. Groaning bookshelves lined the walls, piled high with everything from church histories to manuals on child rearing and grief counseling. A window overlooked the empty parking lot. Alvarez took a seat behind his desk, leaning in to sniff the flowers.
“Casablanca lilies,” he said, gesturing toward the chair on the other side. “I grow them in the garden out back. Heavenly scent. So what’s this all about, Mr.…?”
“Faust.”
He smiled, lightly teasing. “Have you read Goethe, Mr. Faust? I do hope you’re coming by your knowledge the honest way.”
I held up my hands. “Don’t worry, no pacts with Mephistopheles. Let me get right to the point. I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but do you know anyone who might want to harm you? Have you had trouble with anyone lately?”
His smile faded. “Harm me? Well, no, of course not! I’m just a parish priest, not John Dillinger! I’m a homebody, really. When I’m not attending to my duties here, my hobby is translating obscure liturgical material. That’s about as wild as my life gets. Why do you think—”
“What about your friend? That hit-and-run, any chance it wasn’t an accident?”
The priest shook his head, looking bewildered.
“I’d barely had a chance to catch up with him,” he said. “I’m a recent transfer, you see. I was looking to make a change, he knew of an opening, and he invited me to join him here at Our Lady. A few days later, he was taken from us. If he feared for his life, he said nothing to me about it. Mr. Faust, I’m going to have to insist on an explanation. Who do you work for? And why on earth would you think someone wants to hurt me?”
The glimmer of movement out the window caught my eye. A pair of BMWs, lean and low and black as midnight, rolled into the lot with military precision. I nodded toward the glass. It was too hot for jackets, so our new arrivals didn’t bother concealing their shoulder holsters. I counted six guns, gleaming chrome in the dying sunlight.
“We could ask them,” I said. “But they don’t look like they’re here to chat.”
A couple of the men had the look I’d come to associate with near-feral cambion, that vaguely lumpy, didn’t-spend-enough-time-in-the-oven look. The others just looked mean as rattlesnakes and angling to raise some hell.
If my guess was right, Sitri wasn’t the only player in the occult underworld who wanted Father Alvarez’s head. The Redemption Choir was here.
Eleven
“What do they want?” the priest said, his eyes wide.
I got to my feet. “You. And I’m guessing they’re not here to give confession. This place have a back door?”
“This way.” We slipped out the back just as the church doors slammed open, the old wood splintering under a kick from a steel-toed boot.
“Alvarez!” a voice roared at our backs. “Faust!”
My blood froze. How did they know my name? Why did they know my name? I focused on keeping Alvarez moving, ushering the panicked priest through the gardens and around the building. I held up a hand behind me, waving for him to hold up as I poked my head around the corner. The way looked clear. They’d all gone inside and left the parking lot undefended.
“On three,” I whispered, “we run for my car, and we get out of here. You stop for nothing, understand?”
“Who are those men? Why are they calling for—”
“You stop for nothing,” I hissed.
I counted down and we ran, keeping our heads low and our feet light. I dove into my car, fumbling with my keys in the ignition, and he jumped into the passenger seat.
“Stay down!” I snapped and gunned the engine. I heard a shout as someone poked his head out, and suddenly gunmen boiled out of the church like fire ants from a kicked nest. I whipped the wheel around, tires squealing and then thudding as I jumped the curb. A single gunshot crackled, going wide, punching through a stop sign on the corner as we blew past.
Alvarez fumbled with an old flip phone, his fingers shaking too badly to dial. I slapped it out of his hands.
“No cops.”
“They shot at us!” he said. “We have to call the police!”
“No cops. They can’t help. These guys are…they’re connected.”
The priest stared at me, horrified. “The Mafia?”
“Something like that. Listen, Father, I know I’m asking a lot of you right now, but if you want to get out of this alive, you have to trust me. Believe me when I say that right now, I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
He chewed that over while I drove. We’d left them in the dust two miles back, but I threw in a few false turns and stuck to the back streets just to be safe.
“What now?” he said, his voice softer.
Good question. I needed to stash him someplace safe while I went hunting for answers. The Tiger’s Garden was the safest place I knew, but you couldn’t get in unless you were a magician. Besides, he was already having a bad day, and it was only going to get worse from here. I didn’t want to break his brain any more than I absolutely had to.
“We’re going to my place,” I said.
“They knew you! They knew your name!”
“Yeah,” I said, “but they don’t know where I live. I rent under a fake name, and I pay in cash.”
He stared at me. “You’re not really a private investigator, are you?”
“I’m a problem solver. You’re apparently a problem for a lot of people, and I aim to find out why.”
I lived in a second floor walk-up just off Bermuda Road. It was a motel in the sixties. Then somebody got the bright idea to convert it into apartment space. Most of my furniture was still vintage Holiday Inn. I pulled in and parked next to a painted concrete cactus.
“Mi casa es su casa, Padre,” I said, clicking on the cheap ceramic desk lamp next to the curtained window and waving him inside. “Make yourself comfortable. The television only gets four channels, but they’re good ones, and there’s some leftover pizza in the
mini-fridge.”
“It’s, ah, charming,” he said, taking a dubious look around. “But you can’t expect me to just sit here—”
“That’s exactly what I expect. I’m going to go talk to some people who might lend us a hand. I’m not sure who we can trust right now, though, so you need to stay off the street and out of sight while I sort things out. Keep the curtains closed and don’t answer the door for anybody. No matter what, got it?”
He nodded, uncertain but willing to go along with it for now. “Why are you helping me? Not that I’m ungrateful, but why?”
“Because,” I said, turning to leave, “somebody’s playing us both like puppets. I don’t like it. I take exception to it. Besides, it’s bad for my reputation. Sit tight. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
• • •
Vegas was a mecca for high-class strip clubs. The Gentlemen’s Bet wasn’t one of them. It was a dive in a stretch of town where the tourists didn’t go, with a red carpet made of spray-painted AstroTurf and a scarlet neon sign of a naked woman perched on a pair of rolling dice. The place was jumping tonight. I found a spot in the parking lot between a couple of semi-tractors and went inside.
The smell of stale beer and the blare of nineties metal washed over me as I pushed through the swinging doors. A bouncer gave me the nod. He knew my face. A gang of twentysomethings were raising a storm around the mirrored stage and hollering their appreciation for a girl who could have been their little sister. I pegged them for a bachelor party, looking for fun on the wrong side of the tracks.
I’d barely gotten five steps through the door when a slender arm snaked around mine, clinging tight. Another arm mirrored it, leaving me pinned between a pair of blond knockouts in little black cocktail dresses. Any other man would have been thrilled by his luck. I knew better.
“Danny!” Justine cooed. “If we knew you were coming, we would have baked a cake.”
“Baking,” Juliette said, “is another thing we’re really, really good at. You can’t bake at all, can you Danny?”
Justine shook her head. “He doesn’t have a kitchen. He lives in a hovel, you know. It’s really quite sad. I bet he can cook, though…”
The twins—not coincidentally named after a pair of books by the Marquis de Sade—were Nicky Agnelli’s bodyguards and personal murder squad. The three of them were a happy twisted little family. They’d be a bundle of trouble even if they weren’t half demon-blooded.
I rolled my eyes. “Evening, ladies. Murder anybody interesting lately?”
Juliette sniffed. “If they were interesting, we wouldn’t murder them, now would we? That’s just silly.”
“I’m here to see Nicky.”
“Aww,” Justine pouted. “Come have a drink with us first. We don’t bite.”
“Yes we dooooo,” Juliette sang in my ear.
“Nicky,” I said. “Now.”
Eventually I convinced them to take me in back, past the bar and down a stubby little hallway with a cigarette-burned carpet. Nicky’s office was a hole-in-the-wall, a clutter of remaindered furniture under harsh fluorescents. You’d never guess that half the dirty deals in Vegas were hatched in that room.
Nicky sat behind his desk, nursing a glass of scotch and flipping through an accounting ledger. He looked up and grinned when the twins walked me through the door, his wolfish eyes sharp behind the titanium rims of his Porsche Design glasses.
“Danny Faust. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Business,” I said, sliding into a chair in front of the desk.
“If this is about the feds, you’re a few hours late to the party. Jennifer already chewed my ear off about it. Don’t worry, I got this. You got nothin’ to worry about.”
“Don’t handle me, Nicky. I’m not here to get a pat on the back and a comforting word.”
Behind me, Justine crossed her arms. “We could give you so much more than that, if you weren’t such a party pooper.”
Nicky sighed. “Ladies, please.”
He finally got them out the door, leaving the two of us alone.
“Swear to Christ, Dan,” he said, rubbing his temples as if warding off a migraine. “If you’d just date the twins for one night, just take ’em out somewhere nice, somewhere far away from here, I’d owe you big-time.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“Hey, I love ’em, but they never stop. It’s like being on a coke bender you never crash from. I just want eight hours of sleep is all.”
“Yeah, well, I’m kinda seeing somebody right now.”
Nicky let out a little chuckle and raised his glass.
“That Caitlin,” he said. “She’s something, huh? Thing is, I hear you two got some problems of your own. The prince ain’t too happy with you right now.”
“What, does everybody know?” I cocked my head. “You guys have your own mailing list or something?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Information is my business. I get paid to know everything about everybody. Thing is, pal, are you sure he’s wrong? You and Cait are all gaga over each other right now, but what happens when something really pushes your limits? Whackin’ a priest isn’t exactly heavy lifting in that crowd. Hell, I was gonna offer to do it for you myself, just as a favor for a friend, but I knew you’d turn me down.”
“My rules are my rules,” I said. “I draw the line where I have to, so I can still look at myself in the mirror every morning. I don’t pull the trigger on anybody who doesn’t have it coming. It’s that simple.”
He sipped his scotch.
“Do you know,” he said, “why they call Caitlin the Wingtaker?”
I shook my head.
“Funny story. See, there’s this place where all worlds connect, the Big Empty. Just an endless desert plain where nothing grows and the skies are always on the edge of a storm that never comes.”
“Limbo,” I said.
“Call it what you want. It’s the Big Empty. Now, nobody’d seen an angel in at least a thousand years. Not here, not there, not anywhere. The way I heard it, one day, out on those empty plains…they spot one. A real, genuine angel. Supposedly, it was confused, lost, like a robot with its wiring all messed up. Still, y’know, an authentic handmade warrior of God. Nothing to fuck with.”
I didn’t like where the story was going, but I had to hear it out. “What happened?”
“Well, everybody lost their shit is what happened. Running around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming about the sky falling, scared out of their damn minds. So Caitlin—remember, this is just what I was told, this was all way before my time—she says, ‘I’ll handle this,’ picks up a spear, and goes hunting the thing! Not only does she fight it, all by herself, she ruined it.”
“Caitlin,” I said flatly, “killed an angel.”
Nicky snorted. He rolled the scotch in his glass, letting it catch the light. Then he waved his other hand.
“I didn’t say she killed it, Danny. I said she ruined it. It’s still alive.”
Twelve
A chill prickled the back of my neck, and I knew it wasn’t the air-conditioning.
“The things she did to that poor bastard,” Nicky said. “I don’t even wanna think about it. When she was finally done, she sliced its wings off as a souvenir. Word is? It begged her to do it. Then she put it on a leash and gave it to Prince Sitri as a pet. And that, buddy, is the story of how Caitlin became the apple of Sitri’s eye. Think about that the next time you two are cuddling and making kissy-face, if there is a next time.”
I wanted to tell myself it was just a story, some typical Nicky Agnelli line of bullshit, but I try not to lie to myself too often. Yeah, I thought, picturing Caitlin’s face in my mind, I believe it.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Nicky shrugged. “Because, even if you don’t feel too keen about me these days, you’re still a friend of mine, and I don’t see you and her going anywhere good together. Maybe it’s better to cut your losses and walk away b
efore you really get hurt, huh?”
“Thanks for the friendly advice,” I told him, “but Caitlin is worth fighting for. And don’t tell me I can’t fight the prince. You tried.”
He’d almost succeeded, too, plotting with Lauren Carmichael to spark an infernal coup. He’d lucked out, had the right information at the right time, and he walked away from the whole mess with transactional immunity. Charges never stuck to Nicky, not here, or in any other world for that matter.
“Yeah, but when it comes to dealing with hell’s politics, I’m on the friends and family plan,” he said.
“You’ve also got a reason to help me out. I think our troubles are all connected.”
“How do you figure?”
“Meadow Brand set us up,” I said, “killing Sophia and leading Jennifer and me into a police snare. All of a sudden the feds show up, armed with information they could only have gotten from Lauren Carmichael. One of the leaders of that little legal dream team is a cambion. Obviously not from around here, or they wouldn’t dare step against you on your own turf. They’d know better. So I’m thinking a recent transplant. A recent transplant who has a personal motive to fuck you over.”
“Redemption Choir,” Nicky said. “You think this is linked to the purge back east.”
“This priest who Sitri wants dead? I went to talk to him. Then a bunch of cambion with guns showed up, and they knew my name. Somebody sent them to waste both of us. Or to kill me and take the priest. I’m not sure. If Sitri wants this guy silenced, it makes sense that the Choir would want a word with him too, if only to find out what he knows.”
Nicky leaned his head back and sighed. “Lauren’s gotta be working with the Redemption Choir. She feeds ’em info about us, they do her dirty work.”
“It fits. Caitlin told me there’s some agent from a foreign court out here, calls himself Pinfeather. She thinks his entire job is to whip up trouble and give Sitri a black eye. If he made contact with Lauren, he could be working as a go-between.”
Nicky took a long, slow sip of scotch, thinking it through.
Redemption Song (Daniel Faust) Page 7