Wisdom's Grave 01 - Sworn to the Night

by Craig Schaefer

  He couldn’t hear her, but there was no mistaking the obscenity she spat at him. He smiled. This was what he wanted. Real prey. A real hunt.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just you wait. You’ll get your turn.”

  Thirteen

  Marie took the subway. She clung to a metal bar, standing room only, packed in like cattle as the train whistled its way across the city. She didn’t notice the people around her. She didn’t take in the stench of unwashed armpits and cheap cologne, or the body heat that sucked the air out of the train car. All she saw was the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Literal light. The train broke out into sunlight and rattled along the tracks. Her phone buzzed against her hip. Tony calling. She almost let it go to voicemail.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Hey, where are you? I stopped by your place, wanted to see if you were up for grabbing lunch or something, but Janine says you took off early.”

  “Going to see a man about Baby Blue,” she told him.

  “What? Marie, we had an agreement. What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not harassing Richard Roth again.”

  “It’s Beau Kates, Tony. The bastard knew. He knew all along. He knows exactly who took her and where she is. And he’s going to tell me.”

  “Marie, wait. Jesus, you’re on admin leave. You don’t have a badge. Nothing you get out of him is gonna be admissible, and you’ll be damned lucky if you don’t get brought up on charges.”

  The anger that had simmered in her veins since her visit with Harlow, had ignited in the open air, kindled by the sun and stoked into a searing fire. Now the train dove and she was back underground, in the belly of a steel serpent, slithering through the veins of the city.

  She was the serpent. Pregnant with venom, and burning to bite.

  “She’s running out of time,” Marie told him and hung up the phone.

  Beau Kates’s “modeling studio” was a hole-in-the-wall, a former dance studio on the third floor of a building that should have been condemned years ago. Marie walked up, her shoes crunching on discarded food wrappers and crumpled carry-out bags, rounding corners fast as she climbed a stairwell painted the color of split-pea soup. She flung the studio door open. A young woman jumped to her feet. The particleboard on her reception desk was rotted, and an oversized whiteboard calendar on the wall hadn’t been updated in months.

  “You can’t go in without an appointment! Ma’am?”

  “Leave,” Marie hissed and kicked open Beau’s office door.

  Grimy windows lined the narrow loft, casting dusty sunlight across uneven floorboards. Standing lights ringed a photographer’s nook, where a camera on a tripod focused on an empty bed fitted with frilled pink sheets. On the other side of the room, Beau—his arms etched with prison ink, his body the kind of skinny you only get from a serious heroin habit—blinked and stirred from his nap on a cracked leather sofa.

  “Detective?” he said, rubbing at one eye as he clambered to his feet. “What are you—”

  She took a running start. She grabbed onto his shirt, swung him around, and threw him into a standing light face-first. It crashed down, the bulb exploding and spitting glass across the floorboards, and he sprawled on top of it. She got her hands around his throat. She pulled him up to his knees, squeezing hard as she yanked him close.

  “Baby Blue. Where is she?”

  “I told you last time, I got no idea—”

  She heaved him to his feet, put a hand on the small of his back, and shoved him straight into the camera tripod. Beau went down with it, careening onto the floor, and the expensive rig shattered under him. He rolled onto his back and clutched his shoulder.

  “You can’t do this,” he groaned. “I got rights!”

  Marie straddled his chest, pinning his spindly arms under her knees. She drew back a fist and raised it high above his face.

  “I’m not a cop today,” she said. “You called Harlow. You told him to leave her at that house. You knew she was going to disappear. You knew. Who took her, Kates? Who are they?”

  “No way.” His eyes bulged with terror. “I tell you that, I’m a dead man.”

  Her fist thundered down, splitting his lip, knocking a front tooth loose. He drooled blood as she dragged him back to his feet. She shoved him backward, bracing her forearm against his chest, and rammed him up against a window. The back of his skull hit hard enough to crack the glass, leaving a smear of scarlet as his head lolled.

  “Who took her?” she roared.

  “I don’t…swear to God, I don’t know,” he said. “These guys, I just knew they were connected. Super connected, okay? Not the kind of guys you say no to.”

  “Names. What did they look like?”

  “I don’t remember. I mean, I was pretty fucked up when I made the deal. I was on the ink trip, you know? Baby Blue was getting lippy, a real fuckin’ problem, like she was gonna walk and take half my stable with her. These guys, they came to me and said they wanted a girl. One with spirit. So I…”

  He fell silent, his body trembling. She pulled him almost nose to nose.

  “You what, Kates?”

  He sniffed, his nose running, snot mingling with the trail of blood leaking from his split lip.

  “So I sold her to them.”

  Marie stared into his eyes. Then she grabbed his shirt and threw him back to the floor. “Sold her for what?”

  He flinched, then pointed, waving his outstretched finger toward a filing cabinet by the sofa.

  She pulled open the bottom drawer. Ink. Baggies of the tiny black grains, piled high in a shoebox, just like they’d found at the kill house in Monticello.

  “Drugs,” Marie breathed, her voice hollow. “You traded her for drugs.”

  “Yeah. I…I mean, I had a problem. They had a solution.”

  She turned and loomed over him.

  “She was a human being.”

  Beau shrank back in fear.

  “Look, you’re pissed, I see that. We can work something out! I can get you some good shit—”

  Two of his ribs snapped under Marie’s heel. He rolled onto his side, howling, and clutched his chest. She strode to the open cabinet and grabbed a handful of the plastic baggies. Then she walked back over and planted one knee on his chest, pinning him flat. She dropped the scattering of baggies next to his flailing head and tugged one open while he squirmed under her knee. The black seeds fell into her palm.

  “Open your mouth, Kates.”

  “W-what?” He shook his head, frantic, lips clamping shut.

  Her other hand closed around his lower jaw. He pressed his hands against her, desperate, trying to shove her back.

  “You ever see a man die from an ink overdose, Kates? It’s a bad, bad way to go. Open your fucking mouth.”

  “Marie!” Tony shouted from the doorway. He scrambled across the wasteland of broken equipment and grabbed her wrist. He hauled her off Beau. “Jesus, what are you doing?”

  Beau rolled up onto his knees. He sputtered, rubbing at his throat and spitting blood onto the floorboards. Tony kept shoving Marie back, trying to keep them apart, looking as afraid as he did angry.

  “You bastards,” Beau croaked. “I’m gonna sue the living shit out of you, your department. I’m gonna own your asses—”

  Tony stuck a finger in Marie’s face.

  “Stay. Put.” Then he turned, towering over Beau. “No. You’re not going to say a word to anybody about this.”

  Beau looked up at him, running the back of his hand across his mouth. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because that stash of ink sitting in plain sight? That’s more than enough quantity for a distribution charge.”

  “What? I don’t deal, that’s just for me.”

  “I know. But the law doesn’t give a shit,” Tony told him. “So here’s how it’s going to play if you lodge a beef. We came on a tip about you peddling drugs out of your little studio here. You attacked my partner. We reacted in self-defense and slapped the cuffs
on, just another scumbag dealer taken off the street. We get commendations, you get twelve to twenty. Or, we walk, you keep your mouth shut, and you get to keep your drugs and the rest of your teeth. Pick one.”

  Beau looked away. “Fine,” he said, sullen.

  Tony patted him on the shoulder. “Thought you’d see it my way.”

  He grabbed Marie by the arm and steered her out the door.

  * * *

  They didn’t talk. Tony found a Starbucks. He sat Marie down and let her stew in silence while he went to the counter. He came back with a couple of coffees—iced and decaf for him, black for her—and set them down on the tiny table. His chair rattled on the tile floor.

  “I don’t want to know,” he told her, “but I have to.”

  She met his eyes. Her rage had petered out, leaving her looking tired and lost.

  “What?”

  “Marie,” he said. “Were you going to murder that man?”

  She pulled the lid off her coffee and blew across the brim. Curlicues of steam rose between their faces.

  “I was just trying to scare him.” The words sounded hollow, heavy with exhaustion.

  “Really? Because it looked to me like you’d just beaten ten shades of hell out of the guy and you were about to kill him. If I had showed up five minutes later, would you be telling me the same story right now?”

  “Late is the point, Tony. There’s a pattern. Each victim is only held for two weeks. Baby Blue is—”

  Tony slapped his palm against the table hard enough to draw looks from across the coffee shop. He fought to keep his voice down.

  “We are not vigilantes, Marie. And contrary to that fantasy crap you fill your head with, we aren’t crusading knights, either. We’re cops. We have rules. And thanks to that stunt you just pulled, everything we might have learned is totally inadmissible in court. Do you want these scumbags to walk?”

  “I want to save her life. I’m not thinking much beyond that.”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe you should.”

  They drank their coffee.

  “You know,” Tony told her, “it’s one thing if you’re a little rough with a perp once in a while. When we busted that chomo who was running a kiddy-porn website, nobody cared that he ‘accidentally’ fell down the stairs on his way to the squad car. Hell, I didn’t even have to cover for you that time. But this? You’ve got to get this shit under control, because it’s getting worse. Maybe you don’t see it, but I do.”

  She didn’t have an explanation for him. She stared into her coffee cup, as if she could divine an answer in the swirling wreath of steam.

  “Sometimes I feel,” she said, “like a roaring flame. A force of nature, burning everything in my path. And there should be…something focusing me. Controlling my fire, channeling it. Like there’s part of me missing. And I don’t know what it is, or where it is. I only know that it’s missing.”

  Tony shook his head.

  “You need therapy. I say this as your partner and your friend. You need professional help. Okay? I’m not putting you down. I care about you and I want you to be okay. But you need the kind of help I can’t give you.”

  “I never asked you to. I never asked anybody for anything.”

  Tony lifted his cup. “I know. I’m asking you. I’m asking you to take care of yourself. For once in your life, Marie, take care of yourself. Not everybody else, like you always do. Put yourself first and get the help you need.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  Tony cracked a smile. “Hell, if you ‘try’ the same way you go at everything else, I guess that’s a guaranteed success.”

  She mirrored the smile, but she didn’t feel it. Her mind was a million miles away. She combed through the half-remembered tatters of her dream and pictured Nessa’s face. And her book, with the image of the dead man’s tattoo.

  Fourteen

  On the other side of the country, stranger dreams were made and ruined every single night. The Las Vegas Strip was a neon-backed dragon in the heart of a desert, inviting all comers to dare to test the odds. Some walked away flush, while most ended up with broken wallets or broken hearts. For others, the outcome wasn’t even the point. They were just in it for the pleasure of the ride. For a bold few, the real action wasn’t found in the resort casinos and gambling parlors.

  If you wanted the real rush and the real money, you had to go underground.

  For a trio of heisters out of Reno, that was all too literal tonight. Las Vegas was built in a natural basin, which was fine except for the one or two times a year that the sky opened up and drenched the deserts with rain. To keep their investment from washing away, the city’s founding fathers had constructed a spiderweb of storm tunnels under the streets. Between the homeless and lost, the black widow spiders, and the chittering tides of roaches, it wasn’t a place anybody went without a damn good reason.

  “This is bullshit,” one of the trio muttered, clutching a briefcase. They’d carefully stuffed it with stacks of newspaper cut in the shape of cash, each stack topped with a real hundred-dollar bill. One of them had seen it done in a movie. The trick hadn’t worked in the movie, but they were confident they could pull it off.

  “Patience.” Mason was their unspoken leader, by virtue of being quicker to throw a punch than the other two. The newspaper thing was his idea.

  “I don’t think these guys are even gonna show up,” said the man on his left. He wore a cheap cotton blazer over his T-shirt, a .45 jammed down the back of his pants.

  Footsteps echoed from the dark. A lean shadow took a slow, easy walk up the dank concrete tunnel, coming their way. Italian loafers splashed through murky puddles of stagnant water.

  “They aren’t,” said the shadow.

  He emerged into sight, stepping into the beam of Mason’s flashlight. He had a flyaway wave of chestnut hair and a cruel slash of a smile. His tailored Brunello Cucinelli suit wasn’t the right attire for slinking around in storm drains, and he wore his wry irritation on his sleeve.

  “Your business partners aren’t coming,” Daniel Faust told them. “They’re dead.”

  One of the trio took a hesitant step back. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re just…hanging out, that’s all.”

  Daniel gave him a dubious glance.

  “When you came to Vegas, you were told the rules,” he said. “Don’t cut your product with fentanyl. Don’t deal to kids. Always—always—kick five percent of your take up to Jennifer. Oh, and a very important one. Don’t. Deal. Ink. We don’t want that shit in our city. As of tonight, you three rubes have managed to break every single one of those simple rules. Seriously, did you think it was a checklist?”

  “We weren’t—” the guy with the gun in his pants stammered. “We weren’t really going to buy their shit. I mean, we were gonna rip ’em off—”

  “Shut it,” Mason snapped, then glowered at the new arrival. “This ain’t any of your business, Faust. Shove off before you get hurt.”

  Daniel chuckled. The sound echoed off the vaulted tunnel walls and wrapped around the three men like the knot of a noose.

  “The Commission has made a decision, gentlemen. I’ve been asked to deliver the message: your Las Vegas privileges have been permanently revoked. Leave town, drive in any direction you like, and never come back. Consider this your one chance to walk away from the table with your winnings intact. What do you say?”

  The thug in the sweat-soaked blazer snaked one hand behind his back. His fingers curled around the grip of his gun. “You talk pretty tough, considering this is three against one.”

  “That’s all this guy is,” Mason sneered. “Talk. Everybody whispering about you, Faust, like you’re some kinda bogeyman. Piss-scared over fairy tales. We don’t scare that easy.”

  Daniel shrugged, nonchalant. “I’ll admit my reputation is a little exaggerated for dramatic effect. When faced with out-of-towner yahoos determined to test our rules, for example, it’s easier to scare them into behaving th
an it is to clean up the mess when they don’t.”

  “You callin’ us yahoos?” Mason said.

  “And I was afraid that might fly over your head. Yes, you three are the yahoos I was referring to. And the mess. To be cleaned up, if you don’t walk away. You see, I was trying to make a subtle point and give you one more chance to…” Daniel shook his head with a sigh. “You know what? Some people just can’t take a hint. Let’s get this over with.”

  He flicked out his left hand. In a riffle of pasteboard, a deck of playing cards leaped from his breast pocket, a serpentine stream that landed in his open palm. His right hand slapped across the deck, lightning fast, and snatched up three cards. He held them up in his fingers—three aces, the backs of the cards engraved with the image of a red dragon—like a spread of throwing knives.

  The briefcase hit the tunnel floor as loud as a gunshot, bouncing, splashing in a puddle of dirty water as Mason and his boys reached for their steel. The thug in the sweaty blazer was the first to clear his piece. He was the first to die, too, as the ace of spades flew across the tunnel like a razor-edged wasp. The playing card bit into his throat hard enough to knock him off his feet. He landed flat on his back, gurgling as his jugular spat blood.

  Mason got off a shot with his automatic, booming loud enough to burst eardrums. The king of hearts soared from the top of Daniel’s deck and met the bullet halfway. The card fell dead with a crumpled slug buried in its royal face. Daniel’s retort whined across the tunnel, two more aces with a killing edge. Mason and his other partner dropped like rag dolls. Their weapons clattered to the concrete alongside their twitching bodies.

  Daniel stood over them for a moment and watched the three men bleed out. Then, with a tired sigh, he held up his empty right hand. The three aces, the cards glistening scarlet, leaped back to his outstretched fingers.

  He left the bodies and the guns and the briefcase behind. What the human scavengers didn’t take, the animals and insects would.

  * * *

  Getting lost in the tunnels, especially this close to an access door, wasn’t something that normally happened to Daniel. And yet, here he was. He navigated by a light clipped to his breast pocket, strobing the beam off faded wall plaques and gossamer spiderwebs. Distant, baleful red eyes watched him from the dark, skittering away from the hated light.