Redemption Song (16 page)

The sound of a pistol sliding out of a leather shoulder holster makes a distinctive rustle. Once you’ve heard it, you always recognize it. Metal rattled on the other side as he undid the security chain. I waited until the clicking of the deadbolt, and the slow turn of the knob, to pivot on my heel and give the door a vicious kick.

The door swung in, hard, smacking into Gary and sending him stumbling a step backward. He needed a second to recover, and I didn’t let him have it. I barreled into his apartment, sweeping my arm out to knock his gun hand to one side and driving a balled-up fist into his gut. He threw his weight forward, hooking his free arm around my neck and pulling me to the floor with him. We wrestled for the gun on the rough hardwood floor, rolling, kicking at each other. He rabbit-punched me, hard, and I curled an arm in front of me to ward him off. Then I drove my knee up between his legs. He yelped, the pain enough to loosen his grip on the gun.

I grabbed the piece, a blue chrome snub-nosed nine millimeter, and rolled to one side. He was about to launch himself at me when I stuck the barrel in his face. He made like a statue.

“Calm,” I panted. “Down.”

He stared at me wide eyed as we both caught our breath, sitting a few feet apart on his living room floor. The apartment wasn’t as bad inside as it looked on the outside. Shabby-cozy, a one-bedroom nest with a Denver Broncos pennant on the wall over a half-empty liquor cabinet. Given the two empty bottles of Grand Marnier on his kitchen counter and the dirty shot glass sitting on the end table next to his threadbare couch, I had a hunch where a lot of his disposable income went.

Photos over the television caught my eye. Gary at a park with a younger woman and a cherub-faced toddler. A wedding shot, minus the kid. Gary pushing the little girl on a swing. I nodded toward the pictures.

“Gary, I’m going to need an honest answer from you. Is somebody going to walk in on us while we’re talking? Because that’s going to complicate things.”

If looks could kill, the revulsion in his eyes would have stopped my heart cold.

“What, you’re gonna kill my family, too? Bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not here to kill you.”

“Then what are you here for?” Gary sneered. “Because you just assaulted a goddamn Metro cop, in his own home. You know what that means? Do you even understand what you’ve done?”

He was so eager to pin a crime on me, I decided to let him have one.

“Your pal Carl Holt was a homicide cop, too, right up until I arranged a closed-casket funeral for him.” I fixed him with a glare. “Your badge means shit to me. Now answer the question.”

He slumped, putting his back against the wall. “No. Mona and Lindsey aren’t here. They aren’t…in my life anymore.”

“Good. Progress. Now we’re communicating. Let me get right to the point.” I tugged the DVD from my pocket and slid it across the floor. “That’s a copy, for you to watch at your leisure. It’s a video of your little meeting at the Mormon Fort today.”

I could hear the breath catch in his throat.

“How did you—”

“You were talking to one of my people, not Lauren’s. We got the whole thing on video. Crystal-clear audio, unmistakably your face, and all those lovely little incriminating statements. You’re bent, Gary. You’re as bent as your buddy Holt was, but at least he only whored his badge out to one customer. You’re taking cash from Sullivan while working for Lauren Carmichael, and using Agent Black’s task force to do it.”

“It’s not—it’s not like that,” he said, his voice small.

“No? Then tell me what it’s like.”

“Lauren didn’t send me to join the Redemption Choir. I was already a member. I was a beat cop, back in Denver, when I met Sullivan. It was right after my wife walked out on me. See, she didn’t know what I was. Not until she walked in and saw my real face in the bathroom mirror. Five years of marriage, total self-control, never let on, but I slip once…that’s what it’s like for us, Faust. You don’t understand. You can’t. The evil’s always bubbling just under the skin, wanting to come out.

“That was the last time I saw my wife or my daughter. I got my divorce papers by mail. Didn’t contest it. Sullivan trusts me, I think, because the same thing happened to him.”

“Hold it, he’s married?” I said. This was news to me.

Gary shook his head. “Was. Human wife. He was trying to go native, see. He figured she was ready to learn the truth. She wasn’t. She freaked, came at him with a kitchen knife, and he hit her a little too hard trying to defend himself. Snapped her neck.”

Given what I knew about the way Sullivan treated women, I had my doubts that Gary had the whole story. I believed he believed it, though.

“He wanted somebody closer to the West Coast,” Gary said, “to keep an eye on things for the Choir and lay groundwork for expanding our operations. I was originally supposed to land in Los Angeles, but this was the only place I could get a transfer to.”

“You aren’t Pinfeather,” I mused. I had thought he might be, but the timing was all wrong. According to Caitlin, the Night-Blooming Flowers’ super-agent was a recent arrival. Gary had been working in Vegas for years.

“Who’s that?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. So let me guess: you were out here spinning your wheels, and Carl Holt introduced you to Lauren Carmichael.”

“It’s a complicated story.”

“That’s all right,” I said, holding the gun on him. “I’ve got time.”

Twenty-One

G
ary seemed to be thinking about how he wanted to phrase it, and I didn’t blame him. In his shoes, I’d be nervous too.

“While Carl was, um—”

“Covering up murders for Lauren and her crew.”

He nodded. “He tried to get me on board. I didn’t want anything to do with it. Lauren said she didn’t need me for anything hard-core, just to keep tabs on the local cambion, which I was already doing, and report back to her.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t understand either,” Gary said. “Not at first. Then Sullivan rolled into town with twenty of his best friends and told me I was officially reactivated. Suddenly I had two bosses, and there’s no way I could tell Sullivan I’d been informing on the local cambion. I’d be a traitor. I’ve seen what he does to traitors.”

“Three bosses, once Agent Black came into the picture,” I said.

“Yeah. That was Lauren’s doing. She pulled strings with some senator to get a joint task force rolling after Nicky Agnelli’s gang, and pulled even more strings to put me on it. That’s what she does, Faust. I never wanted any of this, but she just pulled me deeper and deeper…”

I felt for him, I really did. Another time, another place, we could have had a drink together. Right now, though, I didn’t have room for empathy. I needed him scared.

“Save the sob story,” I snapped, lifting the gun a little to remind him it was there. “You made your own bed. Do what I tell you and you might live long enough to climb out of it. Why did Lauren send you to steal Father Alvarez’s manuscript?”

“Change of plans. You’ve seen the Enclave, right?”

“Seen enough to know it’s wrong to the core,” I said. “What is it? Really?”

Gary shrugged. “You think she tells me? I just know it’s going to be something really big, and really bad. In private, she doesn’t call it the Enclave. She calls it the Engine. She needs a guy to help her finish building it. Problem is, he’s in hell.”

“What guy?”

Gary rubbed his temples, straining to remember.

“Gilles something, something French. De Rais, I think? All I know is, Lauren based part of the design on some of his old journals, but there are chunks missing, and even she isn’t a good enough sorceress to fill in the blanks. So she’s looking to snatch this guy out of hell and make him do it for her.”

Her effort to enslave Prince Sitri suddenly made sense in a whole new light. I had assumed she was just after raw power. What if she figured Sitri was a source of get-out-of-hell-free cards? After we burned down the Silverlode and ruined her plans, she’d be looking for a new angle to get what she wanted.

“So what’s Sullivan’s game?”

“Sullivan,” he said with a heavy sigh, “is convinced that Father Alvarez’s manuscript is legit. He’s also convinced that a cambion in this world who bodily enters hell would be just as powerful down there as an incarnate demon is up here. The purity of their human side granting them strength or something like that. He’s gonna hold the priest hostage until he finishes translating the manuscript, then put it to the test.”

“What? That doesn’t even make sense! None of it makes sense.”

“You think I don’t know that? When Sullivan obsesses over an idea, well, that’s it. No arguing. If he decided the moon was purple, you could take him outside at midnight, point to the sky, and he’d still say it was purple. It was never this bad before, but…Faust, I think he’s losing it. I mean, he was always a little nutty, but I think he’s really losing his goddamn mind.”

“What is he planning to do? Lead his followers down into hell and start flipping tables?”

Gary nodded, looking haunted.

“Pretty much that, yeah. He’s got some scores to settle.”

“Even if the manuscript is real, and I don’t imagine how it can be, the entire Redemption Choir would be slaughtered. Sullivan and everyone who stands with him.”

Gary looked up at the ceiling, lightly thumping the back of his head against the wall, and shut his eyes.

“You gotta understand, Faust. I lost everything because of what I am, because I was born this way. Sullivan found me when I was down and out, and he showed me a different path. I never went in for his quasi-religious revolutionary jive. But when I worked with him, I’d meet other people like me, people who had problems like me. And sometimes I could help them out. That made everything a little easier to take.”

I listened in silence, letting him get it off his chest.

“When he started talking about war and brimstone, I wanted out. But I made a lot of friends in the Choir, and they hung on every word he said. Leaving the Choir meant leaving them behind, and I couldn’t do that. So I stayed in, as close to the fringes as I could, just toeing the line and watching as it all got crazier and crazier. When he assigned me to come out here, I thought I was finally safe.”

“Instead, he came looking for you,” I said. “And he’s about to pull a Jim Jones.”

“He’s been scoping Lauren Carmichael from a distance. See, there’s this old fairy tale. You ever hear of the Ring of Solomon?”

I wore my best poker face, even as my stomach clenched.

“Rings a bell,” I said.

“Well, there’s a rumor going around that she’s got it. The real thing, no myth. I think that’s bullshit, but Sullivan isn’t so sure, and he’s thinking he wants that ring on his finger when he leads the charge into hell.”

The ring only worked for humans. I didn’t think even halfbloods could harness its magic, which was the only reason Nicky Agnelli didn’t move heaven and earth to get his hands on it. Good idea to keep that part of the story secret, I figured. Just in case.

“So what’s he going to do about it?” I asked.

“He’s thinking about a trade. He offers to dive down into hell and snatch this Gilles guy for Lauren, and she gives him the ring. Everybody’s happy. He’s still feeling her out, though, trying to find out if it’d be worth his time.”

I rested the gun butt on one bent knee, thinking things over.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s how this is going to go down. You’ve got a fourth boss now. Me. And I’m the only one who counts. Keep doing exactly what you’re doing, don’t draw suspicion, but if Lauren or Sullivan so much as sneeze funny, I want to know about it. That goes double for Agent Black, if you think the task force is gearing up to make arrests instead of just shaking trees.”

He glanced anxiously toward the DVD near his leg, like it might spring from its plastic case and bite him.

“Oh,” I added, “in case you’re thinking about bushwhacking me? Don’t. My friends made at least three copies. I vanish, I die, I develop a bad flu, copies go to Agent Black by overnight mail. My friends are under instructions not to tell me where they’re hiding them, so you can’t get the information out of me, no matter what.”

“You’re a real son of a bitch, Faust. I’m in a twenty-foot-deep hole and you’re shoveling dirt on my head.”

I pushed myself to my feet, still holding the gun on him.

“You’re the one with the shovel. I’m just trying to put things right. Do what I tell you, when I tell you, and there’s a chance—not a promise, but a chance—you’ll live long enough for this whole mess to fade into a bad memory.”

I ejected the magazine from his gun and pocketed it. Then I tossed him the empty piece. He caught it, still glowering at me.

“Don’t be a stranger,” I said and let myself out.

• • •

Bentley and Corman’s loan had left me with enough cash for cab fare. I booked it over to the Scrivener’s Nook, wanting to get some research done before the name slipped my mind.

“Gilles de Rais?” Bentley said, cleaning off their antique cash register with a feather duster. “The name’s familiar. Rode with Joan of Arc, if I recall. Fairly certain he was burned as a heretic.”

Corman ambled up one of the narrow aisles, straightening shelves as he went. It was a lost cause. The Nook was in a perpetual state of slightly organized chaos, like it had been hit by a tornado followed by a slightly mad librarian with bold new ideas about the Dewey decimal system.

“Deserved it, too,” Corman said. “He had an appetite for little boys. Killed them when he was finished.”

I blinked at him. “And I thought Lauren was scraping the bottom of the barrel when she hired Meadow Brand. What does she need from a psycho like that?”

Corman jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the door to the stockroom. “Check the private shelves. Should be something in the
Pandaemonium
.”

The Nook’s stockroom was a maze of teetering, piled boxes and cobwebs. Secreted away in a back corner, in the shadow of an empty, rusting filing cabinet, was Bentley and Corman’s private reserve. These black varnished shelves held the books they didn’t put out for the general public, sold only by special request.