“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Anita,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you.”
Anita nodded. “I have duties to attend to.” Then she walked away with my ghost knife.
The elevator opened and we stepped on. “She’s very conscientious, our Anita. A professional worrier.”
“She’s the head of security?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I hired her myself,” she added, just to make sure I knew how things stood. “Security within the Palace is within the purview of Peer Support. But we’ll get into that later.”
We got off on the third floor. The windows faced west, but they were cloudy and unwashed. I remembered how the building looked from outside—like it had been abandoned—and wondered if it would give the game away if I stood too close to the glass. On the other side of the hall was a series of heavy wooden doors.
Elizabeth led me to a door with a J marked on it, knocked twice, then opened it. “Hello!” She entered first, blocking my view of the room. “Our guest has arrived. Oh, dear, should I send up another urn?”
Annalise touched my elbow. She gave me a hard look that was too full of meaning to read clearly. Don’t let the bastards get you down? Don’t fuck up? Don’t let anything slip that would get us both killed?
Then she moved off down the hall. I followed Elizabeth.
Room J looked like it had been modeled on something in an old British mystery show. There was a round oak table in the center of the room, with high-backed oak chairs. The oak table had a fancy silver coffee server on a silver tray with thin coffee cups banded with silver. The chair cushions matched the color of the felt on the pool table in the back corner. Light came from delicate table lamps set around the room. The air, like everything else, was stuffy.
Before I could turn my attention to the people in the room, one of them said, “We meet again, Lively One.”
Shit. Callin was here.
He sat near me on the right, a crooked grin on his face. I’d half-expected to see him here, but I dreaded it, too. We didn’t have a friendly history.
The society killed people who did the shit I did to him.
Beside him was some dude I’d never seen before. He had a narrow face and slicked-back hair. I didn’t like the way he stared at me.
Next around the table was an older guy with bright blue eyes, white hair, and a long, bushy beard. Considering how long peers lived, I figured fashion had come back around to him instead of the other way around.
Beside him was Csilla Foldes. I hadn’t seen her since she’d murdered someone for no good reason at all. At the moment, she looked almost lucid.
Then, finally, I saw the fifth member of the group, sitting near me on the left. It was Talcott Arnold Pratt.
“Holy shit,” I blurted out. “I thought you were a fucking corpse.”
“Oh, dear!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Mr. Lilly, we don’t use that sort of language with the peers of the society!”
Suddenly, I didn’t like her anymore. “Fine. Hey, Pratt, I thought you were a fucking dead man.”
Before anyone could scold me further, Csilla held up her hand. Elizabeth closed her mouth and took a step backward. The guy with the slicked-back hair spoke up. His voice was low and rough, and his accent was French. “Elizabeth, there is more going on in your department than our meeting, yes? Is it Elias again?”
She took a short, cleansing breath. “Mr. Diding finished up another cartel job, and he seems to have acquired an actual truck loaded up with American cash. He’s insisting on a charter jet out of Colombia, but I’m working with Isser to arrange a more secure means of transportation.”
“Don’t let us keep you.”
Elizabeth could take hints. She left without another glance at me. When the door clicked gently shut behind me, I said, “No, seriously. You were dead.”
Pratt smirked. “We’re harder to kill than you might think,” he said, with an accent close enough to Elizabeth’s that I couldn’t pick out any differences, “and if you think I’m grateful for the role you played in reviving me, then you don’t understand how all this works.”
Oh. Right. I forgot that I hated this guy, too.
“Do you know why you’re here?” Callin asked.
I shrugged. The butterflies in my stomach were in a panic, but I didn’t want to show my fear. Csilla had killed a woman with a touch. Pratt woke from the dead. Callin had, at one point, made a building shake with a single stamp of his foot. These people had power, they were ruthless, and they weren’t half as clever as they thought they were. I might have been on their side, but I couldn’t be sure they were smart enough to be on mine.
“We’ve brought you here, to the First Palace,” Pratt said, “to decide whether or not we should kill you.
After:
“What the fuck are you doing, Ray? Wake up.”
There was no mistaking that voice.
I came out of unconsciousness the way a drunk stumbles out of a bar: arms flailing and off-balance. I wasn’t in the alley anymore. I was in a car.
A nice one, too, with leather seats and a sun roof. Audi? My vision was still blurry, so I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like an Audi. Arne used to like those; they fetched a good price overseas.
Except Annalise was beside me, shaking me awake, and I remembered I wasn’t a car thief anymore. Now I killed people.
“What the hell, boss? Where am I? How long—”
“Fifteen minutes, and in the back of Roman’s car,” she answered. “Do you remember where you are?”
Glancing out the window, I saw white buildings with orange roofs. “Yeah, I remember. Boss, I fucked up. João didn’t show, but I thought he’d sent someone in his place. When I got close, they turned a predator on me.”
I pushed back the sleeve of my jacket to expose my wrist. Where the creature had broken my skin, there was a pale silver piece of crystal slightly smaller than a dime.
“Turn the car around,” Annalise said. Roman glanced at us in the mirror. The expression on his lined, mournful face was unreadable. I heard the turn signal switch on. “Sorry, Ray. We don’t bring predator magic into the First Palace. Not ever.”
I didn’t have any reason to go to the First Palace, so I didn’t care about that. “Boss, we gotta put our hands on that couple.”
“We know who he is,” she answered. “He’s been investigated three times in the last year and a half, and we haven’t found anything against him.”
I turned to the driver. Whatever the hell was going on, it must have been big to drag one of the Council into the field. “Roman, did your people look into his wife? He ran. She fought. The predator was in her.”
“We will.” With Roman’s accent, the words came out vee vill. He ran his thumb over his bushy white eyebrow, then made a call.
“Head to their home,” Annalise said. Roman pulled the car into a long parking lot and began to search through his phone.
“We need to track João, too,” I said. “They might have him.”
“Why, because he didn’t show up when he said he would? Ray, he’s Portuguese.”
I showed her João’s text about his friends being in the cafe, then told her about Buddy’s panicky phone call and the way he reacted to my face and João’s name. “Who else knew I’d be there except you and João? I think he’s in trouble.”
Roman spoke up from the front seat. “Which would you like to check out first?” His accent was so thick, I needed a moment to understand what he’d said, but Annalise did not.
“Send an investigator to João’s place. Tell them to be careful. Ana and Luis are for us.”
Tell them to be careful. I looked down at the little mark on my left wrist. Had it grown a little? It was certainly bigger than when I’d passed out.
Ana and Luis were their names? They must have thought I was after them because of the predator, and yet, when I was laid out unconscious in the alley, neither had bothered to kill me. Were they squeamish?
I thought again about Ana’s expres
sion as she unleashed that predator on me. No way was she squeamish. I looked again at the crystal scar on my wrist. She had worse things in mind.
So did my boss. We both knew what happened to people with predators inside them. What had to happen.
A laugh tried to come out of me, but I held it in. I’d crossed the US and the Atlantic Ocean to tell a bunch of assholes how I’d survived so many jobs, only to be killed like a mook in an alley.
I realized Roman was talking, but my head was so full of worries that I hadn’t heard him.
“Eight months ago,” he was saying, “we did our last investigation. Third one. That one also turned up little. There were suspicious behaviors, like sending their children to his mother’s home in Evora, but their neighbors seemed to think they were on verge of divorce. Luis brings whores home when Ana is away, right to his own house. Ana is often out of town.”
When she interrupted, Annalise’s voice was tight. “For fuck’s sake, Roman, sex workers are one of the signs you’re supposed to be looking for. They’re easy targets.”
“Yes, but investigator is very thorough here. Every call girl is recorded, coming and going. Every girl that enters is also allowed to leave.”
I thought about the little mark on my wrist, the one that was growing. “But a different girl every time, right?”
Roman scowled. “Yes. That is slightly unusual. Most men have favorites, but a taste for variety...” He turned his palm upward.
Annalise’s next question suggested she knew what I was thinking. “Did the investigator follow up with any of these women later?”
“He did not. After two months, investigation was closed.” He pulled to the curb. “We are here.”
All day, I’d seen middle-class people in middle-class clothes coming and going from big, blocky apartment buildings. Boxes within ugly boxes. Ana and Luis were apparently having none of that. They had a single home with a yard on the edge of a winding street with a smooth concrete sidewalk. If not for the obligatory white walls and orange roof, it could have been plucked right out of Coldwater Canyon.
After we got out of the car, Roman began going through his messages. “One of our cyber people is assigned to track their phones. Ana and Luis have already purchased tickets for bullet train heading south. Probably to Algarve. Probably to flee by boat.”
“When does the train leave?”
Roman checked his watch. “One minute from now.”
“They move fast,” I said. We reached their front door. With my ghost knife, I sliced the lock.
“Two of our people are in pursuit.”
“And their bank,” I said as I pushed the door in. The house was empty. I could feel it. I stepped inside, ghost knife in hand, just in case.
Roman hadn’t answered me about the bank.
“Boss…”
“Roman, put someone on their bank,” she said. “Right away. And on their kids, too. If the grandmother buys tickets, I want our people waiting for them at their destination.”
Roman took out his phone again. His expression was utterly impassive. “Of course. I will search cellar.”
“Ray, take the upstairs.”
I went. There were three bedrooms. The two in the back of the house were decorated for little kids—Sesame Street blankets and toy trains on the floor—and had a thick coat of dust everywhere. If Ana and Luis sent their kids away to keep them safe from her predator, they did it a long time ago.
The bathroom had nothing in it but white tile, old cleaning products, and curly hairs on the soap.
The main bedroom was a lived-in space. There was no dust on anything, and the two bureaus were covered with clutter—mostly bottles of fancy stink, for both men and women. It made me wonder if the predators gave them BO. At the head of the bed was a pair of pillows embroidered with their names.
Luis Nunes Kiel and Ana Helena Nunes Kiel.
They looked new and made me feel like an invader from planet Earth. Me and Annalise spent our time running down people who harbored predators because they were murderous assholes. I wasn’t sure how to square that with embroidered fucking pillows with little pink hearts at the corners.
The woman who rested her head on that ridiculous pillow had killed me.
It didn’t matter. I was there to do a job, and I got down to it.
A lot of regular folks—victims—think the way to hide something is to cover it up. Like, they put a box of cash into the bottom of their underwear drawer, hoping a burglar will be all Oh, look at all these unmentionables! Better search someplace else because I’d hate to go through all this private stuff.
But really, thieves love private stuff. It feels good to go where you’re not wanted. It feels powerful. And it’s even more satisfying to fuck those places up.
Since Ana was the one who attacked me, I started with her stuff first. I pulled out every drawer, checked the contents, then dumped them onto the floor. I broke the frames of their family photos and tore the pictures out, searching for hidden documents. After that, I opened every box and bottle on her bureau. I made sure the bottles stank like perfume and the boxes had no secret compartments, then dumped the contents onto the clothes.
I wasn’t wearing gloves because I didn’t have to worry about fingerprints. In fact, it was better for me if I did. The twisted path spell that Annalise put onto my torso worked like a very slight shape-changing spell. A day or so after leaving a fingerprint, it wouldn’t match me any longer. Same with DNA. As for my face, well, after a couple of weeks, someone who didn’t know me well wouldn’t recognize me. They were subtle changes, but they were changes.
Maybe I was more Raymond Rose than Ray Lilly already.
When the inside of the bureau was done, I checked it for spaces that were suspiciously thick, in case the Kiels had a hidey-hole there. Then I smashed the mirror, searching it the same way I’d searched the pictures. Finally, I yanked the bureau away from the wall, dumping it over everything else.
I searched for a long time and didn’t find anything more useful than a Bic pen.
Luis’s shit got the same treatment, with slightly better results. The wooden backing of his mirror had split from the glass, and he’d slid a manila folder into it. For a moment, I thought I’d hit the jackpot, but instead of deeds to mountain cabins, waterfront bungalows, or other hiding spots, it contained a list of women’s names and phone numbers.
I Frisbee-ed it into the hall where it would be clear of the mess I was making and went to work on the closet, checking the pocket of every coat and shirt, then the insides of their shoes, then the miscellaneous bullshit that collects in out-of-the-way places of people’s homes. Then I flipped the mattresses and tore apart the bedside lamps and end tables. I cut the pillows and mattresses open.
In the end, the only things I came away with was that envelope full of names, a box of jewelry, and a stack of Euros—mostly hundreds—that added up to ten grand.
The envelope was for Roman. The jewelry got tossed back into the mess. The cash went into my pocket. The Kiels put a predator in me. I figured they owed me. I went downstairs.
Annalise had torn the kitchen apart. There’s nothing quite like the aftermath of a really good search. People say it looks like a hurricane went through or a bomb went off, but it’s just not the same. Thieves make this shit personal.
The boss had already moved into the living room, tearing the leather couch apart as easily as I’d peel a banana. She was just about done. Roman came out of the basement.
“Nothing below,” he said. I handed him the envelope.
Then, on impulse, I went downstairs.
The basement was a small room, no larger than the kitchen above it. Roman had yanked the tools off a pegboard and thrown them at the foot of a shelving unit. There were open cardboard boxes and rusty bike parts strewn around. The air smelled faintly of chemicals. A plastic Christmas tree stood alone in a corner, cobwebs on its branches.
I stood there for a while, looking around. Something was wrong there,
but I wasn’t sure what it was. I looked at every detail, listened for odd sounds, but nothing came to me.
After a short while, Annalise came down the stairs. “What are you doing, Ray? There’s nothing here, and the fire is ready to go.”
Annalise liked to burn down buildings, just in case she missed some asshole’s spell books.
“Boss, doesn’t this room seem too small?”
She looked at me, then laid her hand on the wall beside the stairs. It was plaster over stone. The other three were particle board. She punched through one, then a second. There was nothing behind the second wall but empty space.
A moment later, she had kicked through the wall into the darkness beyond. I ducked down and followed her in.
It was dark and the air stank like a leaking freezer. I found a light switch and flipped it on, then realized I was standing beside a door. I tried to open it but got no joy. The other side was blocked by the shelving unit, where Roman had thrown the tools.
“Here we go,” Annalise said.
She was standing in front of a large freezer unit that was running so quietly, I could barely hear the pumps, even from a few feet away. The red light above the door was on, and I could feel cold coming off it in waves. It looked like a brushed-steel tomb, ten feet tall and a dozen wide and long.
I pulled the latch. A light switched on inside, illuminating a narrow bed and a squarish composting toilet. The bedsheets were silk, as was the pillow case. There was a top sheet but no blanket. No comforter. No quilt.
No embroidered pillows, either.
Annalise stepped into the doorway. “It’s set for minus sixteen degrees. That’s Celsius, obviously. What do you think?”
Her words seemed to come from far away. The mark on my wrist ached, and the cold washed over my skin like soothing music. It promised dreamless sleep, the deepest, most perfect rest anyone has ever had. I swayed on my feet, almost stumbling inside and falling onto that bed.
Instead, I wrenched myself away. Annalise slammed the door shut, and the urge to dive into unconsciousness passed.
The Twisted Path, a Twenty Palaces Novella Page 3