“Knew you could do it,” I told her, and her smile lit up the lobby.
Not a rent-a-cop in sight. The lobby was a long, wide stretch of deep-gray marble, doors on one end and elevator banks on the other, with a few granite benches taking up space along the walls. A pair of art installations loomed up ahead to the left and right: twisting, turning cyclones of colored glass, each about the size of a small truck, one tinted orange-red and the other icy blue.
“Sun and the Moon,” Tyrone said. “Heard about these. Chihuly designed ’em. Each one’s crafted from fifty interlocking pieces of blown glass.”
He caught my look and shrugged.
“What? I like art. I know things.”
“Paddy, Desi, head up to the ninth floor. You see any guards on patrol, jump ’em and zip-tie them. Make sure to grab their radios, too. Me and Tyrone are going to take control of the security room. Don’t start drilling until we give the all-clear.”
I wasn’t exaggerating when I told Nicky I wanted a week just for recon. The key to any successful heist is information; I don’t like to make my move until I’ve worked every angle and found a solution for any possible emergency. The last thing you want on a job is an unexpected surprise. But that was exactly what we got when we hit the security room door and stormed in. We expected a half-asleep guard, maybe two—not a couple of empty chairs and abandoned video screens.
“This ain’t right,” Tyrone said. “Somebody on a bathroom break?”
I shook my head, running a finger along the control console. “They’d call another guard to relieve them. I’ve read Gold Star’s training manual; they never leave cameras unmanned. Instant firing offense. Hey, you two up on nine yet?”
Paddy’s voice echoed through my earpiece. “Yeah, quiet and clear. I’m working on the card lock now.”
I nodded to Tyrone. “Kill the feeds. I’ll watch the door.”
While he got to work, prying up a corner of the console and snipping wires, I lingered in the doorway with my ears perked. Not a sound. No distant footsteps, no radio crackle.
“Maybe Louie got old info,” Tyrone said. “Hell, it’s an office building, not a bank. They don’t really need around-the-clock security. Maybe building management cut ’em loose.”
“Maybe, but…” I bit the inside of my cheek, frowning. “Desi, Paddy, get back down here. I’m calling it. We’re scrubbing this job. Something doesn’t feel right.”
“Bugger that,” Paddy said. “You leave if you want, but this is like taking a rattle from a baby’s crib. It’s free money.”
Tyrone set the console lid back into place.
“Hey,” he said, “alarm’s cut, no guards, he’s got a point—we already did the hard part. Twenty minutes and we’re out of here a hundred grand richer.”
“Damn it. Okay, fine. Let’s check out the ninth floor and see how it looks.”
It looked like a cubicle farm, an entire floor of fabric walls ringed by private offices for Armitel Equity’s big winners. I took a steadying breath, stretching out my psychic senses. They wriggled forth, invisible to the naked eye, glowing in my second sight like squirming violet sea anemones. Sniffing for threads of magic, for wards or occult traps.
Nothing. Even standing right outside Martin Goreki’s office door, the entire floor was as spiritually dead as the paper-shufflers who worked there.
“Why would you hire a sorcerer for security,” I murmured to myself, “and not use him?”
Paddy didn’t care to speculate. He roughly shouldered past me, shoving open the office door and turning on the light. And froze, staring across Goreki’s mahogany desk.
At the open panel on the opposite wall. And the black iron safe, the door hanging wide, completely empty.
That was when the burglar alarm went off. Squawking like an air horn, blaring across the cubicles. Desi clapped her hands over her ears.
“What the hell?” Paddy shouted at Tyrone. “You said you cut the alarm!”
“I did! Dan, where’s the loot? Who cleaned out the safe?”
I waved them to the elevators, running fast. “It’s a fucking setup. Let’s go! Leave the bags, we gotta move.”
The elevator glided down to the first floor. I could barely hear it chime over the siren’s wail. We burst out the rumbling doors, out onto the polished marble. Running between the tall sculptures of spun and colored glass, the lobby doors in sight.
Then a whirlwind of sand blew across the lobby, carried on a hot gust of wind, and coalesced into a nightmare. Its form wavered, rippling, never holding together for more than a second or two. I made out a drooling crocodile snout, patches of armored hide, baleful and misty eyes as it towered over Paddy.
A claw curved like a scythe, two feet long, thrust into Paddy’s open mouth and punched out the back of his skull.
He crumpled to the marble in a cloud of blood and powdered bone. My deck of cards leaped from my breast pocket, riffling into my outstretched hand, crackling with raw power. I flicked my fingers and sent two of them flying, slicing the air like screaming hornets. They passed right through the creature and kept on going.
The apparition thundered through the lobby, bearing down on Tyrone. The scythe whipped out and Tyrone collapsed to his knees, howling and coughing up blood, clutching his belly as his guts spilled out around his fingers.
“Desi,” I shouted, “get behind me!”
Desi ripped her ski mask off, black hair flowing and eyes blazing bright as she squared her footing. She hooked her fingers in a ritual gesture, the first part of a warding spell.
“I can do this, Dan. I can do this.”
The apparition turned her way. It snorted a cloud of sand from its crocodile snout. Accepting the challenge.
My mind raced. It wasn’t a demon, and my senses didn’t taste anything that felt like sentient life. A construct of some kind, controlled by an enemy mage. Which meant—
“Desi, get back! That spell won’t even—”
The scythe lashed out. The world went silent, slow motion.
Desi’s head hit the floor a couple of seconds before the rest of her body did. Bouncing, rolling, her big, dark eyes staring up at me.
Couldn’t grieve, couldn’t ache, had to bottle up my screams and fight. A puppet meant a puppeteer. Had to be close, in visual range, somewhere in the lobby—
I gripped a card in each hand. Then I spun, dropped to one knee, and let them fly, powering them with my rage and my pain as they streaked for the glass sculptures. The Sun and the Moon shattered, bursting into a rain of glittering shards that scattered across the marble floor. Exposing the nook where Ivan Koslov had been hiding, waiting for us. His concentration broke, and the creature vanished on a puff of white sand.
Panicked, he whipped out a snub-nosed revolver and opened fire. I dove for cover, keeping low, as wild bullets whistled past me and blasted chunks out of the wall. He raced in the other direction, right out the front door and into the night.
I couldn’t chase him. Tyrone was still alive. Looking bad, but sucking in air through his clenched teeth, lying in a puddle of his own spilled intestines. I crouched beside him, reached into my pocket, and gave him a ballpoint pen to bite down on while I checked him out.
“Hold on, buddy. It’s bad, but you’re gonna get through this. I’m going to get you some help, just—”
Tyrone stopped breathing. No final death rattle or shudder, he was just…gone. Like flicking a light switch. I closed his eyes.
Then I ran.
“Here’s good,” I told Louie.
He pulled off the highway onto an access road. More the suggestion of a road, worn and faint and wobbling across the flats toward the red rocks in the distance, tires slipping and kicking up sand as they struggled to keep hold. He drove for another couple of minutes and killed the engine. The headlights stayed on, twin beacons drawing long strokes of yellow light in the starless dark.
“Out,” I told the kid.
He stood in the headlights’ glare, frozen. “S
o…that’s it? That’s the end of the story?”
I walked around and opened the trunk. Took out a shovel and tossed it his way. He caught it on instinct.
“Just the beginning. While I tell you the rest…start digging.”
Nicky ran his business from the back room of the Gentlemen’s Bet, a dive strip club on the sour side of town. He was conferring with Louie over a couple of glasses of Irish whiskey when I kicked his door in.
“You son of a bitch,” I shouted, not sure which of them I was angrier at. “You are fucking dead—”
The twins were faster than they looked. Stronger, too. Juliette leaped over the desk in a blur, her sister clamping onto my left arm and twisting it behind my back.
“Danny,” Justine growled in my ear, “you’re one of the only people we like. Don’t make us hurt you.”
Nicky pushed his chair back, rising, eyes wide. “Wait, wait, hold on—what’s this about?”
“What it’s about,” I snarled, “is that your intel was shit. The safe was empty, and Goreki’s pet mage was on-site. He ambushed us.”
Louie and Nicky shared a worried glance.
“Wait,” Louie said, “where are the others?”
“Dead. They’re dead, Louie. My entire goddamn crew.”
“That can’t be right. My guy confirmed that Ivan Koslov was at the party, right next to Goreki the entire time. I mean, he was in the room with both of them.”
I shot a look at Nicky. “Did you arrange this? Were you trying to get one of us whacked?”
Nicky straightened his tie, taking a deep breath to keep his temper in check.
“Dan, you’re distraught, and you’re saying some really unwise things. I’m gonna be generous, because we’ve got history, and let that slide. But don’t push it.”
“I want your guy, Louie. Who is he? What’s his name? He was in on this, and I want him.”
“I’ll find him.” Louie looked up to the ceiling, shaking his head. “I’ll track him down, and we’ll go talk to him together, okay? You got my word on it. He’s always been reliable. I’ve known him for years. This has to be some kind of mistake.”
Nicky sighed at the twins. “Ladies? Let Dan go. He’s not gonna do anything stupid. Are you, Dan?”
I stood frozen as they released my arms, adrenaline raging through my veins.
“We’re done, Nicky. You two just got my friend killed. You got my student killed.”
“I didn’t tell you to bring her along. That was your choice. And Tyrone was a big boy, he knew the risks.”
“We’re done, Nicky.”
“We’re done,” he told me, “when I say we’re done.”
Louie leaned back against the car and chuckled.
“Yeah, you and me had a little bad blood for a couple of days, didn’t we?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know you’d gotten played as badly as the rest of us. Not at that point.”
The kid was digging, silent, his shovel chipping away at dense-packed sand.
“How deep?” he asked me, his voice small.
“Six feet long,” I said. “Doesn’t have to be all that deep. Two feet should do it.”
Desi’s apartment was a cramped little studio, a walk-up above a gelato shop. The air in the stairwell smelled faintly of strawberries and limes. I picked the lock on her front door and let myself in, toting an empty gym bag on one shoulder.
We might not be organized in the world of magic, but we have our traditions. When one of us goes down for the big sleep, it’s custom for her friends and family to clean out their lodgings; grimoires, notebooks, occult paraphernalia, and ritual tools, it all has to go. Can’t have people who aren’t clued in stumbling across that stuff. We call it a locust job. Usually easy to find volunteers: on a locust job, you keep what you take.
This one, I had to do on my own.
Secondhand furniture, bought from thrift stores on the cheap. Clothes scattered everywhere, empty pizza boxes piling up on the kitchenette counter. The little apartment was a burst of spontaneous chaos, the wake of Hurricane Desi. I felt her in the stillness now, standing silent in the heart of the storm, hearing traffic grind by on the street outside her dusty window. I imagined her walking out of the bathroom, or through the door at my back, giving me her big-eyed smile.
But Desi was dead, and my memories were the only place I’d ever see her smile again.
I wandered over to a cluttered vanity, the tiny scalloped table filled with jars and brushes, potions and creams. My gaze drifted to the mirror. She’d tucked a photograph into the bottom edge of the frame, just above her hairbrush.
Me and her. My arm around Desi’s shoulders, both of us grinning into the camera, the dancing fountains of the Medici glittering behind us. I remembered that afternoon. She’d made her first real breakthrough, casting a spell of her own without any help from me. I took us out to celebrate.
“Stupid fuckin’ kid,” I muttered. I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a second, and smile.
I kept the picture.
She had an old, battered laptop, the silver clamshell festooned with stickers for bands I’d never heard of. I powered it up while I rummaged through a low, overstuffed bookshelf by the futon, plucking out a few choice titles. One of her folders on the laptop was marked Diary. I looked back at the picture, thinking about our talk at the pool hall.
I erased the diary file without opening it. Her secret thoughts were hers, to take to the grave.
Nothing incriminating in her email, nothing that could tie her to the occult underground. I was just doing some housekeeping when the laptop pinged, a fresh alert coming in: “This is a reminder for your Spirit Airlines 7:30 flight. Make sure to check in now!”
I squinted at the screen. Desi hadn’t told me about any plans for a trip. As I was puzzling it out, my phone buzzed against my hip, an incoming text message. “This is a reminder for your Spirit Airlines 7:30 flight. Make sure to check in now!”
I called the airline. Twenty minutes of arguing, low-level social engineering, and borderline bribery got me the answers I needed. We weren’t the only two people with tickets we’d never ordered: someone had made reservations for Tyrone and Paddy, too, putting us all on the same flight to New York City.
The empty safe, the lack of wards and guards, the ambush in the lobby, and a paper trail. All the pieces clicked together.
The desert night carried a chill that cut to the bone. The kid was sweating, though, standing in a tiny trench as he dug his own grave.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“It was an inside job,” I told him. “Ivan Koslov and Louie’s inside man conspired to rip Goreki off. Ivan cleared out the safe—as his security specialist, he’d have the combination—and the inside man fed Louie a line about this amazing, easy score.”
“We all make mistakes,” Louie said with a shrug.
“So Ivan grabbed the bonds and waited for us to show. The idea was to kill all four of us, hide the bodies, and make it look like we’d fled to New York with the loot. Nicky and Goreki would both be chasing ghosts, while Ivan and his pal laughed all the way to the bank. They didn’t count on one of us surviving the ambush.”
“So did you find him?” the kid asked. “The inside man?”
“Sure. But I found Ivan first.”
Nicky sent me a peace offering. His personal seer, a psychic with a knack for remote viewing, tracked Ivan down. He was on his way out of town, bags packed, his own ticket in hand, but he stopped off for lunch first. The Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop on Cheyenne, quick and casual. He ordered a turkey sub and a bottle of water, sitting toward the back with his roll-on suitcase at his side.
He bit into his sandwich. Then he winced, spitting the chewed mouthful into his napkin. Pulling back the bread, he stared down at the thin white layer of sand on top of the sliced turkey.
He had about two seconds to get the message. That was all I gave him before I came up behind him and drove an ice pick through the back of his neck. The spi
ke tore through skin, muscle, and cartilage, spearing out from his throat. I wrenched the pick free, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and kept walking, stashing it inside my hip pocket all in one smooth movement. I was halfway out the door before anyone noticed he was dead.
Louie called me. His voice was faint, labored, desperate.
“Found…found the fucker. He shot me. He shot me, Dan.”
“Where are you? I’m coming right now.”
He wheezed out an address, a high-rise condo about two blocks from the Strip. I barreled up the stairs to the third floor, looking for 305. The door hung wide open. In a stylish, modern living room, the air-conditioning on full blast, Siberia-cold, I found two bodies. One was still breathing. Louie sat propped against the wall, one hand still clutching his silenced .22, the other clamped to the wound in his side. Blood spread like spilled wine across his Italian silk shirt, and his hair was plastered to his scalp with cold sweat.
The other man, I didn’t know. He had two bullets in his heart and a long-barreled .357 in his outstretched hand, his corpse sprawled out on a storm-gray rug.
“I shoulda waited for you,” Louie gasped. “I wanted to make good, you know? Make it up to you. So I confronted the bastard. He got the drop on me. I got him, though. Got him good.”
“Stop talking.” I put my arm around him, standing on his good side and hoisting him to his feet. “Save your strength. C’mon, let’s get you out of here.”
I took him to Doc Savoy, Vegas’s number one fix-up man for problems you couldn’t bring to a real hospital. Real hospitals kept records and had to report gunshot wounds. The Doc only took cash, no insurance, but he didn’t talk to cops. Once Louie was all patched up, he filled me in: the dead man, Fields, was a long-time informant and matchmaker who had been reliable for years. Solid as a rock.
Full Metal Magic: An Urban Fantasy Anthology Page 28