A Plain-Dealing Villain

by Craig Schaefer

  Margaux hmphed, but she couldn’t argue my logic. I turned to Caitlin.

  “Cait, think you can boost me up? I want to check out the roof.”

  “You sometimes forget,” she said, moving behind me and clasping her hands around my waist, “that I’m a tiny bit stronger than you, love.”

  To drive the point home, she hoisted me up like I was a feather pillow. I grabbed the edge of the roof, fingers straining on the hot, rough stone, and hauled myself up and over.

  The flat roof, coated in white pebbles, sported a stovepipe vent, a satellite TV dish…and a skylight, cracked to let a fresh breeze in. I trench-crawled on my belly, easing up to the edge of the skylight, and took a look.

  The skylight overlooked the shop’s back room, a dingy, concrete-floored stockroom cluttered with cardboard boxes and floral supplies. Pretty mundane, if you overlooked the wall rack lined with shiny, well-maintained assault rifles and two suits of heavy riot gear.

  At a table in the corner of the room, a demon in a man’s stolen flesh chowed down on a meatball sandwich, licking driblets of marinara sauce from his fingers while he watched a football game on a grainy portable TV. Nadine’s briefcase sat on the table, inches from the hijacker’s hand.

  I inched away from the skylight and took out my phone.

  “Bentley,” I whispered. “How’s Corman?”

  “Fine, fine, he’s just napping before dinner. That astral jaunt took a lot out of him. Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m on the roof of an evil flower shop, and I don’t want to get shot.”

  “That sort of answer,” he said, “really shouldn’t surprise me anymore.”

  “Feel like doing a little acting gig?”

  “I’m always fond of the limelight. Shakespeare in the park?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Need you to bring some supplies, too. Need at least fifty feet of rope with a good carry-weight, a can of spray-on lubricant for hinges, and a shabby bouquet of flowers. Actually, scratch that, I’ve got rope and a lifetime supply of WD-40 in my car. Just bring flowers.”

  “Can’t you get flowers from the evil flower shop?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, “but then they’d be evil flowers. C’mon, Bentley, try to keep up.”

  “You know that charming tic, Daniel, where you start making jokes in a dangerous situation, and we all pretend we don’t know you’re doing it in order to cover up how nervous you are?”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “I was just asking if you were aware of it.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Come as soon as you can, okay? This is really uncomfortable.”

  32.

  A little over an hour later, I crouched silently on the flower shop roof with Caitlin at my side. We’d texted the details back and forth, to keep from being overheard through the open skylight, and she wordlessly knotted a strand of rope around me. The stout yellow coils slid under and around my thighs, circled my waist, and looped at my shoulders, forming a makeshift harness.

  It wasn’t exactly Mission: Impossible levels of technology, but we made do with what we had. I crawled back to the edge of the skylight, carefully oiling the hinges. I didn’t know if they were squeaky, but we couldn’t afford a single stray sound.

  I gave Caitlin a thumbs-up. She looked back over the edge of the roof and waved. Down below, that would be Bentley’s signal to start the show. I imagined him marching into the flower shop, cradling the shabbiest thing he could find on short notice: a wilting Happy Graduation wreath lined with half-deflated balloons.

  A door between the front of the shop and the back room hung halfway open, and I could hear Bentley’s voice below as he boomed, “This is grotesquely unacceptable, and I demand to speak to your manager at once!”

  I couldn’t hear the response, but an enraged Bentley was a rare thing to behold.

  “Unacceptable! I have been sorely aggrieved by your company’s heinous disregard for basic competence, and I shall not waste my time dealing with some malodorous peon! Perhaps I need to escalate this to the legal authorities and encourage them to search the premises? I’m quite certain you youngsters are injecting the marijuana, or whatever it is you people do instead of an honest day’s work. Why, when I was your age—”

  It was at about this point in the monologue that the demon tossed down his meatball sub, grunted, and shambled out of the back room.

  I ratcheted open the skylight and looked back at Caitlin. She held the rest of the rope in her hands, hooked to the back of my harness, and made a shooing motion. I swung my legs over the edge of the opening and slipped through.

  Caitlin lowered me, one shuddering two-foot drop at a time, down to the concrete floor. I could see the two clerks through the half-open door, now both of them arguing with Bentley.

  And if one of them turns around, even for a heartbeat, I thought, I’m a dead man.

  No pressure or anything.

  I padded over to the table as quietly as I could. The aluminum Samsonite case had a three-digit combination wheel with the numbers scrambled. I could work with that.

  The first combination I tried was 666. You know how some people always set their passwords to “password” or “secret” even though those are terrible choices? In my experience, ask a demon to pick a three-digit number and nine times out of ten, they go with 666. They just can’t help themselves.

  Nadine was smarter than that. The latch didn’t budge. I’d need to crack her code the hard way. And to be fair, given how flimsy most briefcase locks were, it wouldn’t be that difficult—but time wasn’t on my side.

  “Sir,” the hijacker-demon drawled at Bentley, waving a sauce-stained hand, “if you’ll just calm down, we’ll try to resolve your grievance—”

  “Calm down?” Bentley sputtered. “Calm down? Look at this wreath. Look at this writing. Can you read? What does it say?”

  “Happy…graduation, sir?”

  “It was for a funeral! Happy graduation? What’s he graduated to? Worm food?”

  I let them go at it and focused my attention on the case. Coop had taught me this technique a while back. While safes and strongboxes had upgraded over the years, your average briefcase today wasn’t any different from the ones people carried to work in the 1940s. The method for getting one open hadn’t changed either. It was a rare bit of old-school cracksmanship, and all it took was a light touch and a steady nerve.

  At least I could manage the light touch.

  I slid the latch and held it in place with one hand, as my other slowly tested each of the three combination-lock wheels. I needed to find the one with the least give. The middle wheel was tighter than the others, and I set it to 0. The other two wheels still moved easily, so I bumped it up to 1.

  Once I hit 4, the other wheels suddenly felt stiffer. That was it, the rotary lock finding a groove. One number of the combination down, two to go.

  “I’ll tell you what, sir, let me just go into the back and I’ll—”

  “Absolutely not!” Bentley shouted. “You’re going to stand right there until you explain yourself.”

  I glanced at the door as the left-hand wheel clicked under my fingertips. Come on, come on…

  “Wait a second,” the clerk was saying, “this is a receipt from Floral Creations.”

  “And? What of it?”

  “Sir, this is Harvest Bloom. You’re in the wrong store.”

  The latch flicked open. The Judas Coin rested on a bed of gray felt. I let my eyes slip out of focus, sensing something off, and spotted the problem instantly: a baleful witch-eye with a bloody red iris clung to the coin, mucous tendrils wrapped around the ancient silver like some magical parasite.

  Like the one Harmony Black had left on my car bumper, its creator could know where the coin was just by thinking about it. And like the one on my bumper, if I made one mistake trying to detach it, Nadine would know that too.

  Still, it had to go. I took a deep breath, trying to ignore that Bentley was running out of opti
ons fast. I focused my power like a white-hot scalpel at the tip of my finger, slowly slicing through the tendrils, cauterizing as I cut one slender strand at a time.

  “Morty, get this guy out of here. I’ve got work to do in back.”

  “Hold on, now,” Bentley stammered. “I know perfectly well where I ordered this wreath. You’re reading the receipt wrong.”

  “What? Sir, look at this line, right here. It couldn’t be any clearer—”

  The witch-eye slid free with a wet plop. It happily tethered itself to the inside of the briefcase, lolling this way and that as I pocketed the Judas Coin. I shut the case, scrambled the combination wheel, and gave three hard tugs on the rope.

  I swung off my feet as Caitlin started hoisting me up, one heave at a time, inching my way toward the waiting skylight. Through the half-open door, Bentley’s glance flicked toward me. I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he roared before he stormed out the front door, “you will never get my business again!”

  “We never had your business in the first place, you crazy old bastard,” the manager shouted back, then looked to his underling. “Seriously, Morty, don’t bother me again today. My damn lunch is probably cold now.”

  He walked right under my dangling feet, headed straight for the bathroom door. As soon as I was clear, Caitlin and I lowered the skylight back to its original gap and hustled to the edge of the roof.

  Back on the ground, we met up with Bentley and Margaux. I showed them my stolen prize.

  “They won’t know the coin is missing until they open the briefcase,” I said. “So probably not until tomorrow morning, maybe not even until the end of the tournament.”

  “So we have the knife and the coin,” Bentley mused. “Mr. Ecko’s blood price. Shall we go trade them for Coop?”

  I’d been thinking about that.

  Obviously, setting Coop’s soul free and ending his torment was priority one. Had to be. We could fix that right now, assuming Ecko didn’t stab us in the back (and that was a huge if). Odds were good that the necromancer had no intention of following through on his end of the trade. On top of that, I had other commitments.

  I’d promised Coop two things. One, I’d get his share of the score to his widow. Two, I’d put Stanwyck in the ground where he belonged. Neither job was done, and giving up the dagger to Ecko meant giving up the cash Cameron Drake would pay me for it.

  “There’s no way to say this that doesn’t sound cold,” I said, “but I think Coop needs to wait one more day before we set him free.”

  “Danny,” Margaux said, “I know about zombies, all right? You don’t understand the kind of suffering he’s going through—”

  “I understand. Just like I understand it’s my fault he’s suffering, because I couldn’t stop Stanwyck from gunning him and his nephew down. So believe me when I say that nobody here wants this less than I do, but he’s got to hang on for just one more day.”

  Caitlin furrowed her brow. “Why? What’s the plan?”

  “Besides setting Coop free, we need to get the cash for his widow, ensure Ecko doesn’t come after us or rat us out to Royce, and we need to send Stanwyck straight to hell. I’ve got an idea, and if we play it right, we can do all four things at once.”

  “And if we play it wrong?” Bentley asked.

  “Then hopefully, it’ll only be me who gets killed.”

  * * *

  Back at the Four Seasons, we gathered the crew in my and Caitlin’s room, and I walked them through the plan. Pixie was the hard sell, demanding we go charging to the rescue before the sun went down, but she came around to my way of thinking once I spelled out what the final act meant for Stanwyck. She tried to hide it, but her taste for payback was as bloody-minded as the rest of us. That’s exactly why I needed to send her home.

  “Taking some big risks, kiddo.” Corman leaned back in his chair, nursing a glass of scotch. “Bentley and me, we’ll do our best when it comes to our parts, but there aren’t any sure things when it comes to poker. There’s a reason it’s called gambling.”

  “What is it you taught me?” I asked. “Poker isn’t about playing the cards. It’s about playing your opponent. Well, right now, I’m playing Royce. I’ve got a pretty good idea of how he’ll react if I show up for the tournament tomorrow, and I think he’ll make all the right mistakes.”

  Caitlin sat on the bed, her legs crossed. “The Bast Club may be neutral territory, Daniel, but tomorrow it’s Royce’s house. He’ll use every trick in the book to keep the tournament under control.”

  “I’ll be counting on it.” I got up and stretched. “We’ll reconvene in the morning, to go over the plan one last time. Right now I need to go meet up with one of our friendly local black-marketeers. I think I’ve got the proverbial deal she can’t refuse.”

  33.

  Amy Xun’s eyes seemed to glitter in the shadows, her glossy lips parted as she stared at the Judas Coin.

  “Can I hold it?”

  I closed my hand, making it disappear.

  “We’ll talk about that,” I told her.

  Her shop was a hole-in-the-wall in Chicago’s Chinatown, a stone’s throw from the bronze and red pagoda-topped gate that straddled Wentworth Avenue. I’d been in bigger walk-in closets, and the precarious piles of clutter on every shelf—most of it porcelain, teak, and old jade—warned me that the slightest misstep could lead to an expensive accident.

  Amy Xun could be an expensive accident, too.

  She watched me in the washed-out, cherry-colored light glowing from an electric candelabra on the counter, right next to a big-bellied laughing Buddha with a bowl of cheap incense cradled in his lap. The glass case between us was stocked with waving-cat statuettes, plastic tourist trinkets, and packs of dubious-looking gum.

  “The coin. How did you get it?”

  “Magic.” I took a look around. “I don’t get this place. You’ve got genuine Chinese antiques sitting next to garage-sale crap. Who’s your target audience?”

  “I have something for everyone who walks through my door. If they leave without making a purchase, I’m very disappointed in myself. What can I sell you today, Mr. Faust?”

  “Call me Daniel. And it’s more about what I’m here to sell you.”

  Amy put her hand to her chin, tapping her cheek with a fingertip, deep in thought.

  “The coin, yes, but it doesn’t belong to you, and I normally avoid dealing in stolen goods. At least, traceable stolen goods.”

  “What if I could make it not stolen?”

  “And how would you do that?” she asked.

  “By winning it fair and square.”

  “You aim to win it,” she said, “even though you’ve already stolen it.”

  I rested the coin on the display case, balanced on its edge. She watched hungrily as I rolled it from side to side with my fingertips.

  “Something along those lines. If you could have the Judas Coin, free and clear, one-hundred-percent legit, would you be interested?”

  “‘Have’? Nothing is free.”

  “Nope,” I said, “and neither is this. I’ll need your help. It’s low risk—for you, that is.”

  “Low risk is still a risk, and the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers is not an enemy I can afford to make. No risk, on the other hand, would be calling Royce to report the theft. He’ll punish you and reward me. A superior risk-to-reward ratio.”

  I waved my palm over the coin. Now she looked down at an empty counter.

  “Sure,” I said, “he’ll reward you with a handshake and a cash envelope, maybe, but not with this. You know your odds of winning the tournament are lousy. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been offering to buy the prize outright from everyone at the Bast Club. More likely than not, come tomorrow night, the coin slips out of your grasp forever. My offer is better. Play the odds.”

  She thought about it, still staring down at the smudged glass where the coin had just sat. I gave her all the time she needed.

/>   “What would I have to do?” she asked.

  I walked her through the plan.

  “All right.” Her jaw moved silently, like she was chewing her words before she spoke them. “We have a deal. I’ll see you tomorrow at the tournament.”

  “Pleasure doing business,” I said and turned toward the door. She cleared her throat. I glanced back and she gave me an expectant look, her fingers gliding to rest on the curve of her cash register.

  “Fine,” I said, digging out my wallet. “How much for a pack of gum?”

  * * *

  I left Amy’s store toting a glossy plastic bag with four packs of gum, a painted ceramic waving-cat statuette, an antique wooden teacup, and a pamphlet explaining how to pronounce two dozen essential tourist phrases in Cantonese.

  I had no idea how that happened.

  I was standing on a corner, trying to figure out the best place to look for a cab, when a sleek black limousine pulled up to the curb. The back door opened and a smiling man in a cheap polyester jacket clambered out. He was big, with a belly that protruded against his tucked-in polo shirt, and a nose that had been broken one too many times.

  “Hey, pal,” he said, “your ride’s here. Get in.”

  “Think you’ve got me confused with someone else,” I said. The look on his face told me he hadn’t. His smile stayed plastered on, but his eyes were cold enough to put a chill into a polar bear’s spine.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning close. “Let’s not make a scene, okay? My boss wants a word with you. Just a word. So please, get in the fuckin’ car.”

  I saw a few ways this situation could go, and most of them ended badly for me. I got in the car.

  I recognized one of the two men inside, sitting on the opposite-facing bench in the back of the plush limo. The one I didn’t recognize had a face like a ferret and a five-hundred-dollar haircut. He stank of unearned money and frat-boy arrogance.

  The other was the short Indian man I’d seen coming out of Nicky Agnelli’s office back in Vegas. The “liquor distributor” who had all the markings of a rakshasa. Rakshasi? As far as I knew, the right word depended on their sex—but how can you tell, with a shapeshifter?