“When I was a kid, back home in Kentucky, one of those big-box stores came to town. Best deals you’d ever seen. Then, slowly, one by one, all the old mom and pop stores—I mean, businesses that’d been staples in that town for five generations—closed up shop. They couldn’t compete. Till finally, one day, the big box was the only store left for twenty miles around.”
Jin’s men murmured softly, casting glances at one another. Jin shook his head. “I don’t see—”
“That was the day all the prices went up.” Jennifer’s eyes went as hard as her voice. “See, they knew what they were doing all along. Suckered us all in with deals that were too good to be true, until the competition was gone. Then they had us where they wanted us, bent right over a barrel. Nowhere to shop but the company store, nowhere to work but the company store. They destroyed that little town and turned a lot of people—good, honest, proud people—into beggars with their hats in their hands.”
Jennifer gave the opposition a long, slow stare, talking as much to Jin’s men as she was to their boss.
“Can’t you see that’s exactly what’s happening here? Sure, the Outfit’s gonna promise you the sun and the moon if it’ll get you in their corner. The war ain’t coming; it’s here. It started this morning. Chicago just wants to keep you out of the way while they mop up anybody they can’t twist. And as soon as they’re done, as soon as the rest of us are dead and gone and you’ve got nobody to back you up, believe me, the prices are gonna go up. Way up. They’ll squeeze you for everything you’ve got, and you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”
More scattered murmurs. The sounds of dissent in the ranks. Jin wrung his liver-spotted hands and took a hobbling step closer.
“Please, Madame Chairman, be reasonable about this. I came to you in confidence because they’re willing to extend the same offer to you. Five percent. A simple five percent tithe. With your influence, you could convince the others. We could end this war before it truly begins.”
Something smelled here, and it wasn’t the earthy odor wafting over the artificial wetlands. I didn’t know Shangguan Jin all that well—we weren’t exactly drinking buddies—but I’d had enough encounters with him to peg his type. He didn’t wear his arrogance on his sleeve so much as bristle with it, like a porcupine made of entitled ego. And one thing he didn’t do was plead with a woman about anything, ever. He’d wasted no time raising a stink about her taking the Commission’s chair.
“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said, staring across the wavering reeds for a moment. “I was just daydreamin’, thinking about the good old days. One night, me and my brothers got all liquored up, filled up some bottles with bootleg hooch and grabbed some rags and matches. And we burned that big-box store straight to the fucking ground. See, that’s my philosophy: if somebody’s dead set on turning you into a slave, you don’t waste time negotiating with them. You just burn ’em down. Ends that nonsense real quick.”
While she talked, I stretched out my senses. Psychic tendrils, like curling tentacles of purple mist in my mind’s eye, wavered over the Triad men and darted in to lick with wet, sucker-lined tongues. Tasting thoughts and emotions, conveying their messages back to me in the form of symbols. Jin glowed darkly and tasted like peat moss. Like jungles, and fire, and fear sweat. I only knew two creatures in the world who resonated like that. And one of them, as far as I knew, was tending her restaurant back in Denver.
“Ms. Juniper,” I said softly, casting a look at Jennifer, “perhaps our honored guest would understand you better if you spoke in his native tongue.”
Our eyes locked, and she caught my meaning. She squared her shoulders, one hand within striking distance of her revolver, and turned to Jin.
“Ce suo zai naer?” she asked.
Jin stared at her. He blinked, lifting his chin ever so slightly. Some of his men chuckled, the others sharing confused glances.
“I don’t—” he stumbled over his words. “Just speak English, your pronunciation is terrible.”
“It’s a simple question,” Jennifer said. “Ce suo zai naer? No reason you shouldn’t be able to answer it.”
“Unless,” I said, “he doesn’t actually know a word of Chinese.”
“Nonsense,” Jin snapped. His jaw clenched, trembling. “You are wasting our time.”
“Answer the question.” I felt the cards in my hip pocket warming in anticipation, like a heating blanket pressed to my thigh. “Or would you prefer we asked it in Hindi…Kirmira?”
With his men at his back, none of them could see not-Jin’s eyes shift from bright bird blue to tiger orange.
“I changed my mind,” the Outfit’s pet rakshasa ordered. “Kill them. Kill them both.”
A flurry of guns whipped from under black jackets, but nobody fired. Not as my cards leaped from my pocket in a whirlwind, my index finger stirring and guiding them like an orchestra conductor while they circled me and Jennifer in a pasteboard tornado. Some of the gangsters stumbled back, wide-eyed, while a couple fixed their boss with confused gazes and kept their pistols down.
“That’s not Shangguan Jin,” I said, watching them through the shield of cards. “Ask him something. Something personal, something only he would know. He won’t be able to answer.”
The gunman at Kirmira’s shoulder, a big guy with a sweaty brow and a double chin, asked something in Mandarin. Kirmira didn’t even turn his way. He was fixed on us, on me, his fiery glare burning with repressed rage. The gunman asked again, louder. Then he punctuated it by leveling his pistol at the back of Kirmira’s head.
“I said,” the gunman seethed, switching to English as the gun shook in his grip, “what day is my birthday?”
Kirmira let out a deep, resigned sigh.
“With all due respect,” he said in his real voice, soft and tinged with an Indian accent, “fuck your birthday.”
He exploded from the Jin disguise. Clothes ripped, bursting at the seams as his flesh bloated and bubbled and turned scaly green. His mouth stretched, skull snapping and resetting with a sound like crackling chicken bones. His head grew inhumanly wide, froglike, his eyes bulging. A foot-long purple tongue lashed the air as Kirmira squatted on half-human haunches ending in webbed and clawed feet. He leaped from the path, a ten-foot bound on muscles tailored for escape, splashing across the wetland and fleeing north through the preserve. Shots crackled through the air, thudding into the inch-deep water around the glistening abomination and sending a flock of birds winging into the desert sky.
“Stop shooting,” Jennifer shouted. “Stop shooting, dang it! You wanna bring the cops down on us?”
The whirlwind of cards landed in my outstretched hand, coming home. “He’s gone. Forget about it. Who’s second in command here?”
The guy with the double chin thumped his chest. “Chou Yong. White Paper Fan.”
“Looks like you just got promoted,” I said. “When’s the last time you saw your boss, before this morning?”
“Last night.” He stared out across the preserve at the disappearing blot of the leaping creature before it vanished from sight. “Dinner.”
“And today?”
“He called me to pick him up,” Yong said. “It was weird. Normally I come in and get him, hold the door open for him, all that jazz. He told me to wait in the car.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling we’re about to find your real boss.”
9.
The pickup spot was back in town, and we slipped out of the preserve past milling, confused tourist crowds. They’d heard the shots, but nobody expected gunfire in the middle of paradise. It helped that Pixie was proactive; by the time we called her, she’d already scrubbed the last hour’s worth of security camera footage. The most the cops would find, if they even bothered looking once they showed up, was a few spent shell casings floating in shallow marsh water. No body, no blood.
I was pretty sure Kirmira could bleed, though. And I intended to find out.
Yong led the way to Best Foot F
orward, a spa at the edge of a half-empty strip mall. Black magnetic letters on a yellow plastic sign advertised hot rock therapy, whirlpool massage, and pedicures by appointment. The front door, glass made opaque by a sheet of badly cut custom tinting, rattled stubbornly against my hand.
“You got a key?” I asked him. He shook his head.
The glass cracked under my elbow and speckled my sleeve with glittering shards. No time to do this the clean way, and I had a hunch the burglar alarm hadn’t been turned on. I reached through the pit in the broken glass, flipped the latch, and let myself in.
A woman’s body, maybe the receptionist, lay on a stretch of dusty red carpet. She was red, too, red from her neck to her belly with deep, ragged rents, her throat torn out. The aftermath of some savage animal’s attack. Yong put his hand over his mouth, going pale, his other hand trembling as he aimed his gun at shadows. He said something in Mandarin. I didn’t know the words, but I understood the question just fine. So did Jennifer.
“It’s called a rakshasa,” she said, stepping around him. “It can be anything it wants to be, but it mostly likes being a tiger.”
“A big tiger,” I said and took the lead. We made our way slowly up a narrow corridor, the air thick with the dirty-copper stench of spilled blood. Another body lay slumped over a massage table in a side room, the walls and the flickering overhead lights splashed scarlet. A fat black fly buzzed through the air, landing on his pale cheek and crawling across his earlobe.
Sometimes I hated being right. We found the real Shangguan Jin in back, half of him on one side of his office and the other half on the other. His spine jutted out from his torso like a curling tail of bone, the end splintered and gnawed down to a toothpick. I had to give Yong credit: he was sweating up a storm, his skin like wax paper, but he held his lunch down like a champ.
“I’m gonna guess the Outfit really did make him an offer to defect.” I breathed through my mouth, the rotten-meat and spilled-bile stench shoving me out of the room one stubborn inch at a time. “And I’m gonna guess he said no.”
Jennifer cupped her hand over her mouth and nose, standing in the doorway. “Sounds about right. Then Kirmira decided to improvise.”
“Thankfully, he’s not that good at it. When we met, I got the distinct impression that he’s not leadership material. Angelo Mancuso and his pal treated him like a lackey, even mocked him right to his face, and Kirmira didn’t say jack about it.”
Jennifer frowned. “Think they’ve got something on him?”
I’d had enough of the local sights. I turned my back on Jin—both pieces of him—and led the way up the lightless hallway. Fresh air, even parking lot air and diesel fumes, sounded like a good idea right about then.
“Maybe.” I thought it over. “But how do you blackmail a rakshasa? He can literally be anybody he wants to be.”
“Ask your buddy in Denver, maybe?”
“Naavarasi is not my buddy. And I tried talking to her about Kirmira, back when she visited me in prison. No dice. She doesn’t believe me. According to her, she’s the last of her kind, and that’s that.”
The broken door swung open under my hand. A loose chunk of safety glass tumbled from its frame and jangled on the pavement at my feet. I squinted against the sudden sunlight and took deep, grateful breaths, a wave of nausea ebbing away on a gust of autumn wind.
“Well, I know what I saw,” Jennifer said.
“And I know what I felt. Look, you’ve gotta gather up the rest of your Commission buddies and get them out of town. Have to figure Shangguan Jin was just the first stop on Kirmira’s hit list.”
“I am very confused,” Yong said, standing behind us. He mopped his face with his blue silk handkerchief, looking miserable. We ignored him.
“I know,” Jennifer said, pacing the parking lot. “This critter’s hitting us like a bad flu. Gotta get everybody in quarantine until we figure out our next move. I’ll bring everybody to my place and keep ’em locked down there.”
“Out of town entirely would be safer. And work out a recognition code, some kind of verification phrase only you would know,” I told her. “Kirmira’s great at impersonating people, but he’s sloppy. Doesn’t do his homework.”
“I don’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but I still kinda wish Naavarasi was here. I’m a firm believer in fighting fire with fire.”
“Her help never comes for free,” I said. “I’m already on the hook with her, favor for a favor. I don’t want to owe her two, and I don’t want you owing her a damn thing.”
“That’s my choice to make, Danny.”
I dug out my phone, taking a step back. Then I nodded at Yong. “We’ll talk about it later. I’ve gotta make a quick call. While I’m doing that, talk to this guy before he has an aneurysm, okay?”
I hit the speed-dial. The phone trilled twelve times before anyone bothered to pick up, which didn’t surprise me.
“Southern Tropics Import-Export,” said the nasal voice on the other end of the line. “How may I direct your call?”
“Daniel Faust calling for Emma Loomis, please.”
“Certainly, sir,” said the receptionist from hell. “I can take a message and arrange for her to call you back by next Wednesday at the absolute earliest.”
I watched the traffic rumble by, trucks and delivery vans kicking up clouds of smog, and counted to five under my breath.
“I really don’t have time for the usual banter today,” I told her, “so let me put it this way: I’m calling about one of Emma’s personal investments. If you don’t put me through to her right now, she’s most likely going to lose said investment. If that happens, I’ll be telling her it was your fault.”
“One moment, sir,” she said quickly. “Patching you through now.”
“Thank y—” Too late, she was already gone, the line ringing to a new extension. I’d have to remember that trick.
“Daniel?” Emma asked. “I’m hearing rumblings of discord on the streets today. What’s going on?”
“The Outfit’s on the move, and the leader of the Fourteen-K is splattered all over his office. Looks like their pet shape-shifter has a list of targets. And seeing as you invited yourself to join the New Commission—”
“By right, as a representative of Prince Sitri’s financial interests. I’m still offended that Jennifer didn’t reach out to me.”
“Yeah, well, that means you’re on the hit list, too, so maybe work on mending that fence, okay? Look, I’m calling because these guys don’t care about collateral damage. Hell, they’re hoping for it. If you’re a target, so is Melanie. Can you get her out of town for a while, maybe send her to see some relatives out of state or something?”
“Nonsense,” she said. “The safest place for Melanie is right at my side. I won’t let her out of my sight.”
“Emma, these guys did a drive-by on a corner bar this morning. The civilians they didn’t kill with bullets, they lit up with a Molotov. And those people weren’t even connected to their target. It was just wrong place, wrong time. If they’ll do that to innocent bystanders, think about—”
She cut me off, her voice sharp as a fillet knife.
“And if they come for us, thinking us easy prey, it’ll be a delight to educate them. Melanie could use the experience.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy connecting the dots, reading Emma’s message loud and clear.
“You want her to get in a fight,” I said.
“She’s about to turn eighteen and hasn’t even been blooded yet. That’s fine, by average cambion standards, but Melanie is bound for greater things. She needs to learn to embrace her heritage.”
Back when Melanie’s dad was still alive, I’d had a front-row seat for his arguments with Emma. Ben wanted to raise her as a normal kid, human to the bone. Emma wanted to bring up their daughter the same way she’d been raised, even if only half of Melanie’s blood was demonic.
Melanie’s dad was dead now. Emma snapped his neck while he begged for his
life. I had a front-row seat for that, too. To be fair, he had it coming.
“Maybe she needs room to make her own choices,” I said. “She’s been through a lot in the last few months. That’s more weight than she should have to carry.”
“I have a wonderful idea,” Emma told me. “How about you mind your own business, and let me worry about how I raise my daughter. Sound good?”
I bit my tongue to keep a flurry of comebacks, each one more acid than the last, from escaping my lips. I hung up on her instead. Didn’t have time for this right now. On the other side of the parking lot, Jennifer and Yong were having a walk-and-talk. He looked a little more grounded, the color back in his flabby cheeks. I joined them.
“Sorry,” I said. “I had to try and be helpful.”
“How’d that work out for you?” Jennifer asked.
“Not great.”
“I’m gonna round up all the bosses and take a road trip,” she said. “Can you ride shotgun? And I mean that literally. I’ll loan you my shotgun. Once we get everybody squirreled away safe, we can plan our next move.”
“Your next move is staying in hiding with the others. Look, it’s not just the rakshasa. The Outfit’s in town and they’ve got professional hitters, they’ve got firepower—”
Jennifer crossed her arms and glared at me. “So do we. More than they brought with ’em, I double-goddamn-guarantee that.”
“Which means nothing if we don’t know where they’re hiding. They’re an insurgency fighting a standing army; until we figure out where they’re holed up, they can hit wherever they want, whenever they want. They’re setting the rules of engagement.”
“So what do you suggest we do about it, then?”
I’d been thinking about that. Thinking about any possible way to avoid volunteering myself for active duty in an army I wasn’t a part of, too. And not finding a solution. It all came back to Gary Kemper. This wasn’t my fight, wasn’t my mess, but he’d decided it was. And as long as he could dime me out with a single phone call, putting me right back in the FBI’s gunsights and making me a fugitive all over again, I had to keep him happy. That meant ending the war and cooling things down on the street. No more dead barflies, no more collateral damage. Once I managed that, it’d buy me a little breathing room, and time to work on a permanent solution to my Gary Kemper problem.
The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 6