Redemption Song (Daniel Faust) Read online

“She won’t be so lucky this time,” Lars rumbled. “She was driving the vehicle, the unlicensed firearm is hers—”

  “The gun is mine,” I said reflexively, not even thinking. She would have done the same for me. If we ended up going down on these bullshit charges, she could do the car time and I could do the gun time. That felt fair.

  “Yeah.” Gary nodded. “She said that too, that it was your gun. Said this whole thing was your idea.”

  My eyes narrowed to slits. Rookie technique. Make me think Jennifer was in the other room, rolling on me, so I’d do the same to her. One problem: Jennifer was my sister. Not by blood, people like us don’t mark our family lines by blood, but she was my sister. She’d put a noose around her own neck before she’d put one around mine.

  I looked at Harmony. Harmony looked at Gary. She knew he’d overreached and blown it. So did Lars. Only Gary himself was too dumb to figure it out. I cleared my throat.

  “Agent Black? Maybe you could send this kid back to his mommy and daddy, so we could have an adult conversation?”

  “Sure. Let’s have a conversation,” she said, sliding into a chair across from me. “Let’s talk about Nicky Agnelli.”

  There it was. The real reason for the whole dog and pony show. I wondered if Nicky had forgotten to pay somebody off, or maybe his lucky streak had just run out. You don’t become the biggest racket boss in Las Vegas without making your fair share of enemies. I should know. Technically I was one of those enemies, though Nicky and I had come to an uneasy ceasefire a few weeks back.

  “Nicky?” I said, nonchalant. “He’s an old poker buddy. We don’t see much of each other these days.”

  “But you do have a history together,” Harmony said, opening the folders one by one. Crime scene photos. Police reports. Some were my handiwork, some weren’t, but the hits outnumbered the misses. I studied them, shaking my head.

  “I’m not sure what these are supposed to mean. Some of these things aren’t even crimes. I mean, this guy here, it says he died of a brain embolism. You can’t think I had anything to do with that.”

  “Can’t I?” Harmony asked.

  “The only way I could imagine that being so,” I said slowly, holding her gaze, “is if I used, I don’t know…black magic? And we all know magic doesn’t exist.”

  “Do we?” she said in the same even tone, her face an expressionless mask.

  I offered her my wrists. “Well, if it does, then maybe you’d better arrest me for sorcery in the first degree. Oh, wait. That’s not really a crime, is it?”

  My smugness lasted until she opened the final folder.

  “Oops,” Harmony said, showing me a candid long-lens shot of me and Caitlin eating at an outdoor cafe. “How did this one get in here?”

  I’d made a lot of mistakes in my life, left a lot of wreckage behind me, but Caitlin was the rose in the ruins. We’d walked through fire together. Literally.

  “You want to leave her out of this,” I said, my throat tightening up.

  “Let me be blunt, Mr. Faust. This is a joint multi-jurisdictional task force investigating the Agnelli crime syndicate. That means we’re researching everyone connected to the syndicate’s operations. Everyone.”

  “Your pal Nicky’s going down,” Gary said. “And this time he’s not gonna walk. His days are numbered, get it?”

  Lars held up a finger, looking down at me. “But there is still time to join the side of the angels.”

  Curious wording. I wondered if the bulky Norwegian was the cambion in the room.

  “You want me to rat him out,” I said.

  “We want your cooperation.” Harmony’s fingertips drifted over the photograph of Caitlin and me. “Arrangements for your protection can be made, and needless to say, with the help of your testimony, the bureau would have no need to dig into the lives of your…acquaintances.”

  Carrot. Stick. At least they weren’t being coy about it. Truth was, I didn’t owe Nicky a damn thing. Less than a month ago, he’d sold Caitlin into slavery and tried to have me killed, collateral damage in a political power play. His scheme went down in flames, but he still came out smelling like roses. Seeing Nicky in an orange jumpsuit would suit me just fine.

  Nothing was that simple, though. Half the people I knew worked for Nicky on one level or another, and a lot of them would go down with him. Good people, people I owed loyalty to. Then there was the blowback to think about. I knew the kind of powers he could bring to a fight, because I used to be one of those powers. With Nicky out for payback, I wouldn’t be safe in this world or the next.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, though my mind was already made up.

  “Don’t think too long,” Harmony said, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s a limited-time offer. You’re either on our ship or on his. One of those ships is sinking.”

  She offered me her business card. No title, no FBI seal, just her name and a phone number in crisp black on cream. I slipped it into my pocket.

  My little interview with Nicky’s would-be executioners didn’t make the other charges disappear. That would have been too easy. A uniform marched me to a holding cell, where I spent an hour shooting the breeze with a couple of tatted-up gangbangers who were there on a breaking and entering rap. Surprisingly mellow guys. Nobody had offered me a phone call, or lunch for that matter, and I was weighing my options when the uniform came back to escort me out.

  Bentley waited for me in the lobby with his old gray fedora tucked under one arm, looking like a frustrated grandfather who’d been called to get his kid from the principal’s office. The analogy wasn’t all that wrong. Bentley and his partner Corman—they’d been together since the seventies and still acted like newlyweds when they thought nobody was watching—took me in when I was a scared, desperate kid on the run. They were the closest thing I’d ever had to a real father. The monster who raised me didn’t qualify for the name.

  I gave the old man a hug and he patted my back, gesturing to the glass doors. “I bailed you both out,” he said. “They processed Jennifer first. She’s outside. Having a bit of a conniption fit.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You can pay me back by explaining what happened this morning. Sophia is—” he caught himself, lowering his reedy voice as we walked through the crowded lobby. “Sophia is dead, Daniel.”

  “Meadow Brand happened,” I said, holding open the door for him. We walked out into the Las Vegas heat. Jennifer paced back and forth in the parking lot, attacking an unfiltered cigarette and muttering to herself. The sunlight caught the metallic sheen of her tattooed arm, glinting off a rose-petal-wreathed image of Elvis as the Gautama Buddha. She saw us coming, snubbed her cigarette out under her bootheel, and stalked toward us like an angry lioness.

  “Sugar, what the fuck just happened back there?” she snapped at me. “I don’t pay Nicky Agnelli three grand a month to butter my biscuits. He’s supposed to make sure I don’t get hauled into interrogation rooms. He sure as hell doesn’t do anything else to make my life easier. ‘Protection,’ my sweet ass.”

  “Perhaps,” Bentley offered, “instead of discussing this in a public parking lot, we could all get into my car now. I’ve no great love of police stations, and I’m sure you share my sentiments on the matter.”

  We piled into Bentley’s old silver Caddy and cranked the air conditioning. I was just happy to breathe free air again. I wondered how much longer I had to enjoy it.

  Three

  “They’re fishing,” I told Jennifer for the fifth time. Bentley’s car cruised through traffic, sleek and anonymous.

  “They know more than they oughta,” she snapped. “And did you catch the smell on ’em?”

  “Yeah. One magician, a good one, and one cambion. I’m pretty sure Agent Black’s one of our breed. She hinted around the edges at it. If she’s not a sorcerer, she’s more clued-in than she has any right to be. Which one did you take as the cambion?”

  “The Norwegian,” she said. “He had that lumpy l
ook, like his bones didn’t grow quite right.”

  Bentley drove in silence. He gripped the wheel hard enough to turn his already pale hands fish-belly white. I suddenly understood why, and I felt like a grade-A bastard. In all the confusion and fear and mess of the morning, I’d lost sight of the real tragedy.

  “We…didn’t know her that well,” I said, not sure if I should even bring Sophia up. I wanted to console him. I didn’t know how.

  He didn’t answer for a couple minutes.

  “She was different,” he finally said. “Twenty years ago. Sophia wasn’t always…sick. I know you’d only seen her at the Garden once or twice, but back in the nineties, she could close the place down. The three of us: me, Corman, and Sophia. Last of the old school. Then her mind began to falter. The hallucinations started, the delusions. We tried to get her help, but she’d never stay on the pills for long.”

  “Bentley—” Jennifer started to say, but he silenced her with a shake of his head.

  “I could only watch her fall apart for so long. Only spoke to her a handful of times in the past couple of years. Sent her some cash envelopes, anonymously. I failed her as a friend. I admit that. But Sophia was my friend.”

  A thin tear trickled down his weathered cheek. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Why did Brand kill her?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Sophia never did anything to hurt anyone. She couldn’t. She was helpless and alone. Why did she have to kill her?”

  He’d answered his own question. Because she was helpless and alone. Because Meadow Brand was a psychopath, every bit as crazy as Sophia but with the meanness of a rattlesnake and a mind for murder. Because she could. Those were the only reasons we were going to get, and none of them were good enough.

  “The whole thing was a setup,” I said. “From the arrest to the task force showing up. Orchestrated from the start. Don’t forget: when we took down Lauren Carmichael’s operation at the Silverlode, Nicky backed us up. He worked for Lauren, and then he turned on her. I don’t think she’s the kind of person to forgive that, and Meadow Brand is Lauren’s bulldog.”

  “You really think she’s got that kind of pull?” Jennifer said.

  “I know Carmichael-Sterling’s investing a couple hundred million into their Vegas projects. That’s got to buy you a senator or two. Someone with the juice to get the ball rolling on a real investigation, the kind Nicky can’t buy off or scare away. I don’t think Agent Black knows who’s pulling her strings. She came across like a straight shooter. Crusader for justice and all that.”

  “Better for us if she was corrupt.” Jennifer slouched sullenly in the backseat. “I can deal with corrupt. All right, so how much trouble do you think we’re in?”

  “They can’t prove a thing,” I said. “If they could, they’d have charged us and then offered a life preserver. If Nicky goes down, though, and he rolls on everybody to get a better deal for himself, which you know he will…”

  “Maybe it’s time,” Jennifer said slowly, choosing each word with caution, “we did something about our Nicky problem.”

  The three of us rode in silence. Bentley tried to pretend he hadn’t just heard Jennifer call for the head of the most powerful man in Las Vegas. I tried to figure out a way to talk her down from that ledge.

  “We don’t have a Nicky problem,” I said. “We have a Carmichael-Sterling problem. Lauren Carmichael and Meadow Brand are all that’s left of their little cult. It’s why they’re playing games like this, sending the law after us, instead of risking a head-on fight. We need to shut them down. Permanently.”

  “I would like to be involved in that,” Bentley said softly, staring at the road.

  “I hate to raise the issue,” I said, “but Sophia’s house—”

  Bentley nodded. “Corman and I will arrange it.”

  A death in our community means making sure nothing remains to betray our secrets. No grimoires or journals, no cursed relics or magic wands, everything has to vanish. It’s the equivalent of erasing the porn on a dead friend’s computer before his mom sees it, but the stakes are a little higher. Unofficially, it’s a chance for friends to come together, reminisce, and swap stories about the old times while stealing off with the lingering secret remnants of your life.

  We call it a locust job.

  • • •

  Bentley dropped me off at the Taipei Tower’s valet driveway. I stood in the glittering skyscraper’s shadow, checking my watch and taking a deep breath. I was beyond late. Past the automatic glass doors polished to a glossy sheen, I strode across a carpet decorated with crimson chrysanthemums on my way to the elevators.

  Kensho Bistro is on the third floor. Kensho means “an enlightening experience,” and the food arguably qualifies. The restaurant is a span of warm pale browns and sienna, lit by round chandeliers sheathed in white paneling. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Caitlin at a window-table, along with another couple. It looked like they’d barely started eating. Good sign.

  She rose as I scurried over, her scarlet hair in a twist at one pale shoulder, wearing a silk jersey dress that could have come straight from a Paris runway.

  “I am so sorry—” I started to say, but she took my hand and shook her head, moving close.

  “Jennifer called me while she was waiting for them to release you,” she murmured, her voice tinged with a Scottish burr. “We’ll discuss that later. Company now.”

  The woman on the other side of the table looked like a Hollywood actress trying to play the role of a suburban soccer mom. Just a little too perfect, too precise and controlled, to be real. She also glowed like a black diamond in my mind’s eye, the same way Caitlin did. When she took my hand to shake it, her skin was smooth as glass.

  “Emma Loomis,” she said with a smile. “So. The mysterious Daniel Faust. Everyone’s been talking about you at the office.”

  “Hopefully nothing too terrible,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know, you look like you could be a dangerous distraction.”

  She held my hand a little too long, until Caitlin discreetly cleared her throat. The man next to her looked as awkward as I felt. He was a stocky guy, maybe in his early forties, with a goatee going silver at the edges.

  “Ben,” he said, offering his hand. If Caitlin and Emma’s auras drenched the room in power like a pair of magical hurricanes, Ben was mild humidity. Still, he had a friendly smile and a firm grip that had me liking him already.

  “Oh,” Caitlin said, “and you also haven’t met Melanie, Emma and Ben’s daughter.”

  I didn’t need a codebook to unravel that message. I had most definitely crossed paths with the blue-haired teenage punk seated across from me. When a pack of feral cambion kidnapped me a few weeks back, she was the voice of reason in the gang and kept me alive long enough for Caitlin to come to the rescue. I gathered that Caitlin had given her a pass, and Melanie’s folks didn’t know about her little walk on the wild side. We gave each other a nod in mutual silent understanding.

  There was a modern family for you. Demon mom, human dad, cambion kid. Just like Caitlin and me, minus the kid and the wedding rings. Wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  “So, you work with Caitlin?” I asked Emma, after taking a quick glance around to make sure there weren’t any other diners seated within earshot.

  “She’s the muscle, I’m the money,” Emma said, drawing a sniff of derision from Caitlin. Emma slid a possessive arm around Ben’s shoulder. “With the help of the world’s greatest accountant, of course.”

  Ben chuckled and sipped from his glass of water. “You keep making it, I’ll keep counting it. How about you, Dan? What do you do for a living?”

  Well, Ben, until recently I was a hired wand for the biggest gang boss in Las Vegas, but we had a falling-out, so mostly I just run short cons and sometimes busk on Fremont Street doing sleight-of-hand tricks for spare change. I guess you could say I’m sort of a criminal bum.

  “I’m between jobs right now,” I told him. “The
economy being what it is.”

  “I hear you, I hear you. Hey, you don’t have any financial background, do you?”

  “I robbed a bank once,” I said, and Caitlin kicked my shin under the table. To their credit, Emma and Ben favored me with polite chuckles. Melanie smirked. I liked the kid.

  “Daniel is too modest,” Caitlin said. “He’s helping me with a side project. Hound business.”

  The courts of hell had been at each other’s throats for centuries, a bottomless nest of backstabbing and intrigue that made the Cold War look like a playground slap fight. Our particular chunk of Earth was claimed by a chess-playing hard case named Prince Sitri. According to Caitlin, he’d been on the throne since Hannibal discovered elephants, and he was so slippery he would orchestrate assassination plots against himself when he got bored, just to keep his wits sharp.

  Caitlin was his hound. In other words, enforcer, sheriff, diplomat, and executioner when she had to be. Thankless job, if you ask me, but she was scary-good at it.

  “Ooh, sounds secret,” Emma teased.

  “Need-to-know basis,” Caitlin said.

  A waiter glided over and set a tray down in front of me. Freshly cooked prawns glistened on a bed of greens and tickled my nose with a rich, spicy swirl of aromas.

  “You were late,” Caitlin said, “so I ordered for you. Tiger prawns in wasabi aioli sauce. Careful, it’s hot.”

  “I hate it when you do that,” I said, though I couldn’t point out a single time when her habit of ordering for me in restaurants had resulted in a bad meal.

  “She did it to us, too,” Melanie muttered.

  Ben studied a forkful of steaming rice. “But it’s really good.”

  “I know what people like,” Caitlin said. “It’s a gift. So, Emma. Where are we on the ranch project?”

  “We’re signing tomorrow. Things couldn’t be running any more smoothly.”

  “Ranch project?” I asked.

  Emma beamed at me. “It’s a coup.”

  Four

  “What kind of coup, exactly?” I asked, though part of me thought I might be happier not knowing. Damn my curiosity.