A Plain-Dealing Villain (7 page)

Hearing Bentley’s reedy voice on the phone was a touch of home. I was a stranger in a hostile land, but I still had a compass to get me through.

“Dr. Halima Khoury,” he said. “If anyone can advise you, it’s her. Back in the…well, more years ago than I’d like to say, she helped Cormie and me with a sticky bit of trouble out in California. She moved east about a decade ago and took a position as a conservator with the Field Museum. We still correspond with her occasionally.”

I hadn’t given him all the gory details, just that I was going up against a necromancer with a passion for antiquities. Between Ecko’s creature and the jars with the Egyptian hieroglyphs in his office, I needed some local expertise.

“And she’s clued-in?”

“She’s an accomplished sorceress, yes. You can be frank with her. In fact, I recommend it. She has precious little patience for dissemblers.”

“Thanks, Bentley. Can you give her a call and vouch for me?”

“I’m thumbing through my Rolodex as we speak. Daniel…are you going to be gone long?”

“No, the job’s going down tonight. Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he said quickly. I heard the
but
coming before he said it. “But we saw Jennifer last night. One of her…close business associates, one of Nicky’s men, has gone missing. Allegedly, he’d been seen meeting with Agent Black.”

Nicky
. The memories of my own visit to his kill-house in the suburbs, and the torture session he’d forced me to watch, were still fresh. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

“She should stop looking for him,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“She knows.”

“Nicky’s cleaning house. Black’s stepping up the tempo, trying to scare him. Sounds like it’s working. He’ll go after anyone he remotely thinks might do him wrong.”

Like Jennifer
, I thought. The best thing Bentley and Corman could do was stay as far away from her as possible. I knew this, just like I knew they wouldn’t do it. We protected each other. That’s what families were supposed to do.

“You know Jennifer,” Bentley said. “When she gets her dander up, there’s no talking her down.”

“Just sit tight. I’ll get the job done, take a red-eye to Austin and drop off the package, and then I’ll be on the next flight home. Then I’m going to do what I
should
have done weeks ago: sit the two of them down in a room together, and nobody leaves until they come to terms. Jen and Nicky don’t have any reason to fight, especially not with the feds in town. If they’d just
talk
to each other, they’d figure that out.”

“Shall I sweep up the back room at the shop?” Bentley asked, his tone dry. “Perhaps
two
chairs with handcuffs this time?”

“You know, it’s not a bad idea. Don’t worry, Bentley, I’ll fix this. See you tomorrow.”

*     *     *

The Field Museum reminded me of a Greco-Roman temple, with its sweeping flight of stone steps and towering Ionic columns. Fifty-foot banners draped down from the eaves, advertising a traveling exhibit in bright gold lettering with a picture of a roaring jaguar in midpounce.

The inside wasn’t any less impressive. I pushed through the glass doors and felt cool air-conditioning wash over me as I stood at the edge of a lobby bigger than Grand Central Station. The reconstructed skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex loomed over the ticket counters, large as life, head turned as if sniffing out fresh prey.

“Her name is Sue,” said the woman at my side. She looked to be in her forties, with almond skin and a long, narrow face framed by a pale blue headscarf that matched her eyes. She wore an employee badge clipped to the waist of her ankle-length dress. “One of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered. Our pride and joy.”

I wondered, for a brief instant, what a necromancer like Damien Ecko could do with the skeleton of a T. rex. I shrugged the idea off. Nobody’s
that
good.

“Dr. Khoury,” I said, turning to face her. “I assume Bentley told you I was coming.”

Psychic tendrils snaked through the air, violet and glistening, meeting between us. As they brushed, I tasted what little of her leaked out from the edges of her mental shields. Ink-stained hands and long hours in dark libraries. Sandalwood and ritual.

She read me the same way. I wasn’t sure what she sensed—you never know how you look in someone else’s eyes, much less their second sight—but she gave a faint nod as we reeled back our senses. A magician’s handshake.

“It was good to hear from him,” she said. Now she offered me her physical hand. Her grip was firm and dry. Almost oddly dry—her skin had the texture of wax cloth.

“I need to know about Egypt. Well, I think so, anyway.”

“You came to the right place.” She smiled and gestured for me to follow her across the vast lobby floor. “The ancient Near East is my specialty. Come, let’s walk the exhibit. Maybe you’ll see what you’re looking for.”

We walked through a recreation of an Egyptian tomb, where ancient walls—carved out of the original stone and flown across the ocean—stood on display behind sheets of Plexiglas. Faint traces of pigment still stained the rows of hieroglyphs, worn away by time, and I could only imagine how colorful they must have once been.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this is a blank spot in my education,” I told her. “Everything I know about ancient Egypt comes from old Universal monster movies.”

“The real history is infinitely more interesting. But less Boris Karloff. An unfortunate trade.”

I decided that I liked Halima.

We descended a winding staircase to the exhibit hall below. As we strolled through the dimly lit cases, looking for a spot to talk away from tourists’ ears, one display stopped me in my tracks. It was a sarcophagus, its top carved to resemble a young woman’s face. Her sculpted hair flowed down over the coffin’s husk, which was painted from end to end in ornate imagery. Animal-headed gods stood in procession under unfurled wings, while the young woman’s wide, open eyes looked up at the heavens.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Halima stared into the display case enraptured. “Her name is Chenet-a-a. She lived in the third intermediate period—about three thousand years ago—when elaborate mummifications were more popular than ever before. A good time to die.”

“Why is her coffin so bright, while the tomb walls upstairs barely have any paint on them? Is it a reconstruction?”

“All original. This was an
inner
coffin. It was kept securely inside a larger, plainer wooden sarcophagus. This material is called
cartonnage
. Barely stronger than an eggshell. If we tried to open it, it would crumble to pieces at a touch.” She looked over at me and smiled. “So we let her sleep.”

I saw a couple of pots and jars on the ground around the coffin, but nothing like what I’d glimpsed in Ecko’s office.

“What about sealed jars? Four of them, a little under two feet tall, with animal-head lids. That mean anything to you?”

Halima led me around the corner, past a massive stone sarcophagus, and pointed into another case. They weren’t an exact match, but the jars in the case and the ones I’d seen at Ecko’s were birds of a feather.

“Canopic jars,” she explained. “Used during mummification to store and protect the vital organs of the deceased. Those heads aren’t animals. They represent the four sons of the god Heru, or Horus in the Greek idiom.”

“So they’d put…brains in those things?”

She laughed. “No, the brain was discarded entirely. You ought to know, Mr. Faust: the
heart
is the seat of your power. As for the jars, they stored the liver, intestines, stomach, and lungs. They’d be interred along with a mummy’s sarcophagus, keeping their body pristine and safe for their voyage into the West.”

“So that’s the historic use.” I glanced over my shoulder, making sure nobody was close enough to overhear. “Next question: what could a necromancer do with canopic jars?”

Her smile vanished.

As she spoke, I could feel her probing me again, intently, like a finger poking at my chest. “Before I answer that, you must tell me something. And speak truly.”

“Ask.”

“Chicago, like your own city, I must imagine, has a very insular occult community. All of the influential powers know one another, or at least know
of
one another. And you are here to steal something. I can always smell a thief. Tell me: who is your intended prey?”

I thought of ten different denials and snuffed each one out before they could reach my lips. I remembered what Bentley had told me about her patience. Either I could take a chance and lay my cards on the table or walk. No middle option.

“Damien Ecko,” I said. “That a problem?”

“I have known Damien Ecko for a very long time.” The way she said it, I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Are you in the habit of making powerful enemies, Mr. Faust?”

“I wish I could say I wasn’t.”

“I’d be surprised if you’ve met one more powerful than Damien. He has his fingers in many different shadows.”

“You should have met a lady named Lauren Carmichael,” I said. “Trust me, I’ve been in some tight spots before. Besides, if things go right, he’ll never know it was me. That is…assuming you aren’t going to tell him.”

The faintest ghost of her smile returned. “No. In truth, each of us would be pleased to see the other one gone forever. I am not a violent person by nature, though, and…well, he made an attempt on my life once, many years ago, and he learned a valuable lesson from it: peaceful does not mean weak. Since then, we’ve agreed to keep to our personal corners of the city and stay out of each other’s business.”

“Sounds like me and an old business associate of mine,” I said. “Doesn’t always work, though. So Ecko has jars like these in his office. He’s also got this…thing.”

“The abomination, yes.” Her lips pursed tightly. “I’ve seen it. And your observations are not unrelated. There are paths of ancient Egyptian sorcery—
heka
—intended to pervert the rites of holy internment. With such knowledge, a magician could use the trappings of a sacred burial to
prevent
a soul from moving on. To keep it here, binding it in shackles of misery and pain, a slave to the sorcerer’s will.”

“Lovely. So if these jars are keeping that thing on a leash…”

“Breaking them will free its tortured soul. That’s assuming you can even get close enough to try. I assure you, the creature has been ordered to defend those jars, and it will fight like a demon to keep itself in chains. And don’t forget: one isn’t enough. Until
all four
jars are sundered, it will still be under Damien’s control.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “I’m really good at breaking things.”

Halima gave me a small smile, but she looked anything but amused. “I would wish you fortune, but if fortune favored you, you wouldn’t be here. I’ll be praying for your soul tonight.”

I cracked a smile. “You’d be the first.”

“Then guard it well. For it would be better for your soul to fall into the depths of perdition than for it to fall into the hands of Damien Ecko.”

I got back to the motel right around sunset. Stanwyck was out in the parking lot with Coop and Augie, helping to unload canvas sacks from the back of a battered panel van. An animated and smiling cartoon faucet posed on the side of the van next to the words “Drip Bros. Plumbing, Las Vegas, NV, Est. 1978. We Do It All!”

I pitched in, grabbing a sack that weighed at least fifty pounds and clanked when I hauled it over my shoulder, and we all ended up in my motel room with the door dead-bolted and the curtains drawn tight. I turned on my laptop and pulled up the photos I’d taken at the loft—a selectively pruned collection, leaving out the shots of Ecko’s pet monster.

“We’re good on wheels,” Stanwyck said. “I’ve got a place to stash the car, for the switch, and I found a perfect boost just a few blocks from here. A Lincoln with local plates, and the mail piling up says the owners haven’t been around in days. Nobody will report it stolen until we’re long gone.”

“Catch us up,” Coop said. “What are we up against?”

I brought up the shots of the storefront, taken as we cruised past in Stanwyck’s car. “Seismic alarms on the windows, motion detector on the ground floor, and he’s got a contract with Polymath Security. We can’t
get
to the second floor without beating the security in his shop. Second-floor windows are alarmed too, probably on the same circuit.”

Coop whistled. “Well, that’s a pickle. We know anything about his safe?”

I showed him the picture of the upstairs office and the black steel door poking out behind Ecko’s desk. He got closer, leaning in and squinting at the screen.

“Can’t tell the make and model with that. We’ll just have to load for bear and expect the worst. Ain’t met a safe I couldn’t crack, but that assumes we get in and have plenty of time to work uninterrupted. Don’t suppose you got any friends at Polymath?”

“
Nobody
has friends at Polymath,” I said. “They vet their employees harder than the Secret Service. No, our only option is to get in without triggering the alarm at all.”

Augie sat on the edge of the bed, brow furrowed and lips slightly parted, like he was trying to do long division in his head.

“If the alarm box is at the bottom of the window display,” he said slowly, “why not just cut the
top
of the glass away and not touch that part?”

I shook my head. “Like I said,
seismic
alarm. It monitors the tension of the entire sheet of glass. Break it or cut it—anything that gets the glass vibrating too hard—and the alarm goes off.”

I tabbed back to a photo of the storefront. Something was bugging me, something I should have caught. And a slow smile spread across my face as I realized what it was.

“Good job, Augie. Didn’t think to look until you brought it up. See, the windows have seismic alarms,” I said, tapping the screen. “The glass on the door
doesn’t
. The alarm will catch anyone trying to jimmy the lock…so how about we break through the glass and leave the lock untouched?”

“Looks like tempered double-pane.” Coop stroked his goatee while he thought out loud. “Smash-resistant. Not smash-
proof
, though, and I can get us in nice and quiet.”

“How long?”

“Five minutes buys us a hole we can wriggle through. What about that motion detector?”

“Hold up,” Stanwyck said. “You want to bust through a jewelry-shop door in full view on a busy street? Totally exposed for at least five minutes? First cop to cruise by is gonna make us, and that’s assuming some helpful citizen doesn’t call it in first.”

The first rule of camouflage is to conform to local expectations. What looks natural in the wilderness sticks out like a sore thumb in a city, and vice versa. I thought back to when I first arrived in Chicago, walking the streets, taking in the local color.

“Construction.” I snapped my fingers. “Lot of street construction going on, right?”

Stanwyck snorted. “Always. Always too much and always too slow. They stretch the jobs out until winter comes, then start all over again in the spring. I spent most of the day driving different routes, marking all the construction spots so they don’t trip us up on the way out.”

“Any of that work get done at night? Third shift?”

“Sure. Some.”

“And if a local sees a couple of guys in reflector-tape vests hanging around a work site and taking a coffee break, do they think, ‘Looks like a burglary in progress’?”

“Nope,” Stanwyck said. He shook his head and smiled, catching my angle. “They don’t even think twice.”

I rifled the drawers until I found a flimsy notepad branded with the motel logo and a ballpoint pen. I sketched it out as I talked, working the problem.

“We get a city truck and park it right here, directly opposite the door. Construction sawhorses here and here, cutting off the sidewalk. Best if we can get the kind with the blinking amber lights. They’re disorienting in the dark, and anyone who looks our way will focus on the lights instead of what’s happening behind them. Coop and I slice the glass. Stanwyck, you and Augie stand guard, and if anyone comes close, warn ’em off.”

“That could work,” Stanwyck said, “but where do we get the gear?”

“You already found it. Like you said, you drove around all day noting where the construction sites were. We hit the closest spots, find the ones that don’t have an overnight crew, and grab what we need. They won’t even notice anything’s missing until tomorrow morning, and we’ll be back in Nevada by then.”

“What about the second floor?” Coop said. “Any other security up there?”

My gaze flicked to the screen. I kept seeing the other photos, the ones I couldn’t show them, fresh in my mind’s eye.

“Yeah. But that’s my job. Weird stuff.”

“Weird stuff?” Augie asked.

“Kid,” Coop told him, “something you gotta learn about livin’ the life. Every once in a while, on certain special jobs, a guy like Dan here will say the words ‘weird stuff.’ It’s…sort of a secret code. You know what you do when you hear those words?”

Augie tilted his head. “What?”

“You stand aside, you let him go in first and do what he’s gotta do, and you don’t ask questions. Trust me, your life will be a lot happier that way.”

*     *     *

Pulling a heist is like going on vacation: you’re never ready when you think you are, there’s always one last thing to pack, and there’s always something you forgot. If you’re lucky, you remember it at the last minute. If not…well, you’re either in for a bad vacation, or you’re going to jail.

We used more of my cash envelope for a quick shopping run, buying bits and pieces from stores all over the suburbs. Thin leather driving gloves for me and Coop and sturdier workman’s gloves for Stanwyck and Augie since they didn’t have to do any delicate work. Next, masks. Ski masks might be traditional attire for a burglary, but buying four of them when there was no snow on the ground was a great way to stand out like a sore thumb. Believe it or not, cops follow up on that kind of thing, and cashiers remember it.

Fortunately, we were cruising into autumn and Halloween wasn’t too far away. Seasonal party suppliers had already sprouted up like weeds in vacant strip malls, renting out empty stores for a few months before they would vanish again. We split our purchase between three different shops, picking up a few latex monster masks. Coop and Augie were zombies, and Stanwyck wanted to be a werewolf.

I considered my mask carefully, knowing Ecko would eventually see it on the playback from his security cameras. I ended up going with the Mummy.

We picked up prepaid phones for everybody. We used my burner as the master phone, punching its number into the other three. If we got separated for any reason during the getaway, it’d be my job to change the plan up and set a new rendezvous point on the fly. Of course, that meant something had gone horribly wrong, so hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

Our shopping spree ended at a Home Depot, where I picked up the last tools we’d need: some construction vests lined with reflective tape, orange hard hats, and duct tape. A
lot
of duct tape.

There was only one thing left to do. We needed an empty building, which meant we needed Ecko gone.

I called his shop. He picked up on the third ring.

“Ecko and Company,” said a sonorous, cultured voice. I couldn’t place the accent. South African? “How may I help you today?”

“Damien Ecko, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Ecko, call me Greyson. I’m new in the city, and some friends told me you’re the man to see about certain short-term financial services.”

“I’m not certain I know what you mean.” He kept his tone polite and even, carefully enunciating every word. “I’m a jeweler. Who are these…friends of yours, please?”

“I’m hesitant to speak their names over the phone, but I can say they recently left a piece of collateral with you. An obsidian Aztec knife.”

He didn’t answer right away. I could hear the wheels in his head turning as he tried to decide if I was a cop.

“We can meet,” he said. “But not at my shop. There’s an all-night diner on LaSalle Street. Be there tonight, at ten sharp.”

“I’ll be—” I started to say, but he’d already hung up.

The store closed at seven. I figured he wanted the extra time to call his current clients and ask if they’d sent any new business his way. That could go one of two ways: either they had and he’d assume that was who he was going to meet, or they hadn’t and he’d assume I was an undercover cop trying to set him up—in which case he’d want to make this look like a big misunderstanding and plead his ignorance. Either way he’d show for the meet, and while he was waiting at the diner we’d be cracking his castle walls. I had one more call to make before we left.

“Hey, Cait.”

“Daniel.” She sounded tired but pleased. “Are you back already?”

“Tonight. We’re about to head out and get things done.”

“Have everything you need?”

“It’s a good crew,” I said. “They know their jobs.”

“And yet.”

She always could read me like a book.

“The occult security,” I admitted, “is a little tougher than I’d bargained for.”

“You can still back out.”

“No, I can’t. You take a job, you do the job.”

“I’m making preparations for my trip,” she said. “Leaving Emma in charge while I’m gone. She should be able to keep the wolves at bay for a few days.”

“Can’t you stay home and send Emma instead?”

“I am my prince’s hound. As you so aptly noted, you take a job, you do the job. Even when the job is to stand beside his throne at a gala and look vaguely menacing.”

“You’re good at that,” I said.

“Yes, but the specific and targeted sort of menacing is much more fun.”

“On that note,” I said, “I ran into my old buddies Mack and Zeke at the airport. Gave ’em the slip, but they know I’m in town. Do I need to be worried? Not about those two, I mean, but Chicago is Night-Blooming Flowers territory.”

“Probably not. A move against you is tantamount to a move against
me
, and after their failure with Pinfeather and the Redemption Choir, they’re not eager to earn another spanking so quickly. Don’t be surprised if they watch you from a safe distance, but as soon as they understand you’re not in town on hell’s business, I expect they’ll lose interest. Just to be safe, I’ll give Naavarasi a call and ask her to keep an ear out. She’s eager to be helpful.”

Never for free
, I thought.

“All right,” I said, “time to gear up and get this over with. I’ll call you as soon as I touch down in Vegas.”

A familiar feeling sank its claws into me, like a vulture perched on my shoulder. A current of tension ran down my spine and brought back old memories. The last time I’d felt like this was a couple of nights ago, on the edge of the Laramie Brothers parking lot. Just before the feds swooped in.

The time before that had been the night of the last job I ever pulled for Nicky Agnelli.

False positive
, I told myself.
You’re rebounding from a bad break, you’re rusty, and you’re working in a strange city. Of course you’re nervous. You’d be stupid not to be
.

There were nerves, and there were
nerves
. This felt like my sixth sense twitching its nose, catching the scent of a thunderstorm in the air, but all I could see was a cloudless blue sky. I knew I should walk away, right then and there, before things had a chance to go bad.

And then what?
I thought.
Then you get a little uneasy and walk away from the next job, and the one after that? If you don’t get back on that horse tonight, you might as well turn in your riding boots
.

There are three key ingredients to any crime: means, motive, and opportunity.

I had all three.

I bundled up my gear and headed out to the parking lot. Time to go to work.