Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Is this…” I started to ask as I tried to figure it out. I nodded my head at the junkie in the back seat. “Is this something I don’t want to be showing off in mixed company?”

  Caitlin arched an eyebrow at me. Her pomegranate-stained lips offered an amused smile.

  “This particular toy isn’t for the bedroom, pet.”

  “I’m never quite sure.”

  “That gift is in the trunk, and I’ll show it to you later tonight,” she said. “This is a spring sheath. The straps buckle around your forearm and hold the opening of the sheath against the bottom of your sleeve. Bentley referred me to a shop in LA where they make custom gear for stage magicians.”

  “For…” I grinned, fingers running along the black leather tube. “My wand. You got me a concealed sheath for my wand.”

  “Well, seeing as you finally stopped wearing that damn top hat in public, I thought you deserved a reward.”

  “I like that hat.”

  “I know,” Caitlin sighed. “I really wish you didn’t.”

  I held the sheath against my forearm and flexed my wrist, getting a feel for the action. “This is fantastic, Cait. I love this.”

  I looked her way. I didn’t say these words often, but now they spilled out on their own, natural as breathing.

  “I love you.”

  Her smile softened. Almost wistful.

  “Love you too,” she said in a faint voice.

  Malone let out a guttural wheeze and twisted on the back seat, the tan leather creaking under his weight. “Guys, c’mon, I really need a hospital.”

  The moment shattered. Caitlin glared into the rearview mirror.

  “I will give you something to whine about.” She turned the wheel, headlights strobing off construction pallets and sawhorses as the Audi’s tires rumbled on loose gravel. “Good. We’re here. Can I torture him now?”

  I took out my phone and dialed Jennifer’s number. “Hopefully that won’t be necessary.”

  She got out, slamming her door, and opened the back. She grabbed Malone by the scruff of his neck.

  “Torture is like a good bottle of wine,” she said. “It’s never necessary, but it’s a fine way to liven up a party and is best savored in the company of friends.”

  5.

  By night the build site was quiet and dark, the cold of the desert night seeping through bare wood and drywall. The wind ruffled the edges of plastic sheeting, the unfinished windows tarped and taped. I turned on a construction light, a single high-powered bulb dangling in an orange plastic cage, and it cast long and shifting shadows across the unfinished floorboards. That sawdust taste still hung thick in the air. The woody aroma mingled with the faint scent of blood.

  We had Malone on the floor, a leash of rope tethering his good arm and his neck to a portable generator. Jennifer showed up fifteen minutes later. She’d dressed down for the night, trading her corporate look for a windbreaker over a concert T-shirt and a ripped-up pair of blue jeans. Her steel-toed boots clunked on the raw flooring as she came over and clasped hands with Caitlin.

  “Welcome home, Cait. How’d la-la land treat you?”

  “I did feel eminently refreshed.” She pointed a baleful finger at Malone. “Then he bled. On my car.”

  Jennifer winced. “Ooh. That’s a hangin’ offense.”

  “Indeed. I just haven’t decided which body part to hang him by.”

  “I don’t even know you people,” he moaned, his face a twist of pained confusion.

  I stood over him and put my hands on my hips.

  “Hi,” I said. “We own Las Vegas. You probably should have found that out before you tried to set up shop here.”

  “Let’s talk about ink,” Jennifer told him.

  Malone shook his head like it was full of marbles and he thought he could force them out one ear.

  “Can’t,” he said. “Can’t talk about that.”

  “Look,” I said, “temporarily putting aside the issue of my girlfriend’s car, we don’t want to get rough with you. But you are gonna talk. And you are gonna tell us what we want to know. This little conversation is only going to get as nasty as you insist we make it, understand? This could end with us driving you to the emergency room and putting a nice wad of cash in your pocket, smiles and good feelings all around, or it could end with us picking an assortment of construction tools and finding out what they can do to a human body. It’s your call.”

  His headshake was a spasm now, a borderline seizure as he thrashed against the rope around his throat.

  “Can’t,” he stammered, “can’t talk ’bout that. Can’t. Can’t.”

  Jennifer stepped up to stand beside me, frowning. “Sugar, something is wrong with this critter. I thought he just had junkie brain, y’know, coming down and getting hungry for a fix, but…”

  “But,” I echoed. I held up my hands. “It’s okay. Hey, buddy. Forget it. We don’t want to ask you about ink. We wanna ask about your favorite football team.”

  The spasms stopped. He blinked, cow-eyed and dull.

  “The…the Broncos?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just think about the Broncos for a minute. We’ll be right back.”

  I waved Caitlin and Jennifer aside, dropping my voice to a murmur. I kept my eyes on him as I spoke. All three eyes. My psychic senses roused, sleepy, stretching out tendrils of concentrated thought that writhed in my second sight like violet sea anemones. A shadow lived inside Malone’s body, wriggling, buried deep with legs like fishhooks.

  “Somebody put a whammy on this guy.”

  “A geas?” Jennifer asked. “Some kinda curse to keep his mouth shut?”

  “That’d do the trick,” I said. “Explains the dealer those hoods from Chicago caught, too. He didn’t talk when they tortured him because he literally couldn’t. And committing suicide by biting his own tongue off? A geas could make somebody do that.”

  “A scary-strong one,” Jennifer whispered, glancing over at Malone.

  “Can you remove it?” Caitlin asked.

  “Tricky,” I said. “A geas is a binding curse. A taboo enforced by spellcraft. It’s designed to protect itself. Trying to pry it out might kill him.”

  Jennifer spread her hands. “We got an alternative?”

  “Point. Okay, I’m gonna run out and grab my ritual kit. Babysit this guy until I get back.” I gave Caitlin an apologetic glance. “Sorry. This was not the five-star evening I planned on treating you to.”

  “I think I know a thing or two about the demands of a busy career,” she said, her voice dry. “And this has the potential to be entertaining. You gather your supplies, and I’ll order some food for the three of us. Indian, Chinese, or pizza?”

  I said, “Indian” at the same time Jennifer said, “Chinese.” Caitlin beamed at us, looking content.

  “Pizza it is, then. Good choice.”

  * * *

  Caitlin chose the toppings, of course, picking up our pie from a gourmet shop over in Summerlin. Neapolitan style, rich and chewy, with San Marzano tomatoes, peppers sliced paper thin, garlic, spinach, and fresh mozzarella. The big, steaming box shared space with a tray of breaded calamari and a black plastic bowl of Caesar salad. A plywood sheet, balanced between a pair of sawhorses, served as a makeshift table.

  “I picked up a nice earthy Sangiovese to go with it,” Caitlin said, turning the wine bottle in her hands and giving the label a critical eye. “The store only had plastic glasses, but needs must. We’ll make do.”

  “You do realize I spent my formative years drinkin’ outta mason jars, right?” Jennifer said. “Plastic is fine. It’s like we’re having a picnic.”

  Malone wasn’t having a picnic. I had him laid out on the floor, his wrists tied to the generator, the rope around his ankles lashed to an eighty-pound bag of concrete mix. I circled him, moving in a crouch as I drew a ring of white chalk upon the rough plywood floorboards. Then another smaller circle inside the first. A scattering of open Tupperware containers sat to one side, the
tools of the trade at my fingertips.

  “What’re you—” he stammered, his voice weak. “What’re you doin’?”

  “Maybe saving your life, so shut up and let me concentrate.”

  Between the rings, my stick of chalk scratched swirling glyphs from memory. Hebrew letters, words of protection and expulsion. The names of forgotten entities some books claimed were angels, some claimed were demons. I didn’t care what they were. I only cared if the spell worked. In my mind’s eye Malone slowly took on a pale scarlet sheen. A neon glow over his body rippled like a bank of morning fog. And buried in the fog, I saw the dark and squirming shadow that had taken up residence behind his rib cage, its tarantula-leg pincers hooked into his heart.

  “I conjure you, o instrument,” I whispered with a quick glance at my watch, “in the hour of Mars, in the day of Mercury. By Dalmaley, by Lameck—”

  “I think I’m gonna throw up,” Malone wheezed.

  I grabbed his chin, feeling clammy sweat and stubble under my fingertips. Turning his head toward me, I dipped my free fingers into a pot of white salve. I drew a seal on his forehead, glistening swirls against his pale skin, then let him go.

  “By thrones, powers, and principalities, you are driven forth. You are exiled.” I reached for another plastic tub, scooping up a handful of sea salt. I sprinkled it over Malone’s body, crystals landing in his tangled and greasy hair, catching in his dirty bootlaces. The fog was roiling now, the shadow over his heart twitching like a centipede. The ritual was turning the geas parasite’s formerly cozy home into a very unpleasant place.

  Now to give it an alternative. I waved to grab Jennifer’s attention and pointed at an empty work bucket in the far corner of the room. She ran over, snatched it up, and jogged to my side as I picked up the little treat I’d bought on my way over. A cardboard container, like a Chinese take-out box, lined in plastic. A coppery stench filled the air as I unhooked the flaps.

  When it comes to ritual magic, there’s a time and a place for blood sacrifice. In a pinch, a stop at a late-night butcher’s shop is almost as good. I poured the cow blood into the bucket, thick burgundy rivulets splashing the sides and rolling down. The bucket stood right at the chalk circle’s outer edge, close to Malone’s face. He groaned again and writhed against the ropes.

  “That’s right,” I murmured, watching the shadow begin to crawl up his rib cage. “Got someplace warm and comfy for you. It’s closing time; you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay in there.”

  I’d done this ritual twice in my life. The subject survived once, so I was batting fifty-fifty odds. All the same, I knew the moves and how things would go from here. The curse would gust from his mouth and nose in a wisp of almost-invisible smoke, like the last gasp of a blown-out candle, and fly into the bucket of blood. We’d take the bucket out back, dig a shallow hole in the sand, splash the blood into the hole, and bury it. Easy. Done.

  His chest swelled. The soiled cotton of his tank top rose up as his skin flexed and stretched. Malone’s wrists twisted in the ropes, skinned raw. He let out a strangled cry.

  “That ain’t supposed to—” Jennifer started to say.

  “I know.” I grabbed another handful of salt and splashed him with it, grainy crystals scattering across the circle of chalk.

  Malone bucked against the ropes, seizing. His jaw wrenched wide in a scream that devolved into wet, ragged choking. His throat bulged. Something was inside him, clawing its way out, and it wasn’t a wisp of smoke. I grabbed the bucket and inched it closer, tilting it toward his head. The coppery smell of blood mingled with a new odor rising up from Malone’s open mouth, something like the stench of an open sewer on a hot summer day.

  Four-inch antennae wriggled in the depths of Malone’s throat. I saw the first gleam of a brown chitinous shell as his bloodshot eyes rolled back in his head. My stomach clenched, revolting, as the creature slithered up into his mouth and pushed his cheeks back.

  It was a cockroach. A cockroach over half a foot long.

  I jumped back as the monstrous insect crawled from Malone’s mouth, spilling over his blood-flecked lips and skittering down his chin. It raced down his neck and across the floor, running circles around the bucket. Jennifer’s chromed .357 roared like a cannon as she opened fire, slugs pounding fist-sized chunks in the plywood. Splinters flew and the roach ran in a blind panic. A pair of playing cards leaped from my breast pocket and into my outstretched fingertips. I fired them one at a time, razor-sharp cards carving into the floor like throwing knives, each one landing a fraction of an inch behind the fleeing insect.

  A stiletto heel slammed down. The roach twitched under Caitlin’s foot, speared through the middle and dying in a slowly spreading pool of yellow goo. She glanced over at us, head tilted in curiosity, and took a bite from her slice of pizza.

  “I presume,” she said, chewing thoughtfully, “that’s not how this spell usually goes?”

  6.

  I took the bucket out back, dumped the blood, and washed it out with a hose while Jennifer took a sponge to the circle of chalk. The plastic tub of salad was sacrificed for the cause of occult science: we needed something to keep the dead roach in.

  “Honestly,” Jennifer said, shuddering as she snapped the lid into place, “don’t know why you’re savin’ this thing.”

  “Because I want to know what it is.”

  “Giant bug,” she said.

  “Giant bug that shouldn’t exist. And this isn’t how geases work. At all.” I looked over at Caitlin, who was starting her third slice of pizza. “What do you think? Demonic?”

  She shrugged and reached for her plastic wineglass.

  “We do grow them big back home. But no. This doesn’t have the right feel. It’s more…”

  I stared at the thing, nestled among a few stray leaves of lettuce under a clear plastic dome. Half expecting it to start moving again.

  “Artificial,” I said. The only word that fit the strangely sterile energy wafting off the roach’s impaled corpse. Caitlin nodded.

  Jennifer put her hands on her hips and sighed, surveying the damage. Bullet holes and gouges littered the floorboards.

  “Gonna have fun explaining this to the construction crew tomorrow,” she said.

  Malone let out a hoarse, racking cough as he came to. He opened his eyes, squinting.

  “Feel better?” I asked him.

  “Feels like I just got my tonsils taken out,” he rasped. “What happened?”

  “Probably for the best that you don’t remember.” I crouched and untied the ropes at his ankles. “I wish I didn’t remember. So. You were about to tell us who you work for.”

  “I can’t—” He paused, then blinked. “I…I can. It’s like I had this…block in my head.”

  “It wasn’t in your head, but close enough. Where’d you get the ink? Who told you to start pushing it in Vegas?”

  “I got jammed up with these guys,” Malone said. “See, I was dealing horse. I got a little problem, just a little sweet tooth, you know?”

  “You were selling to feed your habit,” I said.

  He nodded, weak. I finished untying him. He put his back to the generator, still sitting on the floor, cradling his fractured arm.

  “Problem was, I was selling on a corner I didn’t have a right to be selling on.”

  “And now here you are on our turf,” Jennifer said. “Wow, talk about not learnin’ from your mistakes.”

  “This guy, an OG with the Fourth Street Counts, he said I had a choice. I could pay back all the money I ‘owed’ him from stealing his business, plus interest, or I could work for him. Told me to go to this address, he’d hook me up with his supplier. Pretty simple decision. I could toe the line or lose my toes, you know?”

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  His gaze went distant, confused.

  “I…I don’t know. That’s God’s honest truth, man. It was a blur.”

  “Must be where they put the roach in him,” Jennifer mur
mured.

  Malone gaped at her. “What?”

  “Never mind.” I waved a hand. “Continue.”

  “Next thing I know, it’s two weeks later and I’m driving across the Nevada state line with cash that ain’t mine, in a wallet I don’t remember buying, and two crates of ink in my trunk. There’s these…gaps. I know I was supposed to sling the ink in Vegas, but I don’t know who told me that. I got the product, but I don’t remember where.”

  “How about your lawyers?” I said. “Weishaupt and Associates. How’d you know to call them when you got busted?”

  “Found the card in my wallet.” He shrugged, helpless. “Stab in the dark, you know? Had a phone call coming, and I figured they had to be better than a public defender. I gave ’em my name and they knew exactly who I was. They said to stay put, keep my mouth shut, and they’d take care of everything.”

  I held up one finger. “Sidebar.”

  Off to the side, Jennifer, Caitlin, and I huddled close.

  “Turning drug mules into mind-enslaved drones,” I said. “That’s a new one.”

  Jennifer frowned. “A street gang like the Counts doesn’t have that kind of juice. New Mexico, though, you’re looking at a lot of narcotraficante action down there. Think this is coming in from south of the border? What do we know about these lawyers?”

  I took the card for Weishaupt and Associates from my pocket. Turning it over, running my thumb over the gold embossment.

  “These guys were behind the gladiator fights at Eisenberg Prison, too. Figured they were taking a cut from the gambling action. Looks like we’ve got a new player on the scene, and they don’t have much respect for territory lines.”

  “We need solid intel,” Jennifer said. “Feel like takin’ a trip to New Mexico on behalf of the New Commission?”

  “Do I want to? No. But that’s the job I signed up for, isn’t it?”

  She put her hand on my arm, nodding with mock solemnity.