Trickster (12 page)

He sat down in his squeaky chair and crossed his short little legs, fussing with his overlong black-and-gray hair. He looked at me as he leaned back, dim light glinting on his glasses. He laced his fingers behind his head. “Your boy Mags here is adorable and I like having him pant around my office.
You’re
ugly as hell and boring to boot. So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I smiled. Mags was already trying to guess at the Words of Ketterly’s stupid Cantrip, mouthing them in a hushed voice. This was a doomed effort, but Mags’s face was a mask of somber effort, and I didn’t have the heart to mock him. “I need you to find someone for me.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “My specialty.”

I hesitated. I didn’t trust most other mages. We
were all grifters of one sort or another, and we were all parasites—of others or ourselves. Ketterly I trusted less than most. I’d never heard of Ketterly actively cheating one of his own, but I thought it entirely possible that he would.

“I’m told spells won’t work well on this one.”

He squinted at me. “Why not?”

I pulled a wad of cash, already damp from my own sweaty pocket, and tossed it onto his desk. “That’s three zeros. A retainer.”

He looked down his short torso at the money, wrapped up in a rubber band, and then looked back at me. I willed him to take it, to pick it up and accept the job, but he kept his eyes on me.

“You’re pretty eager to grease me off, Vonnegan,” he said. “And I can’t use a spell, huh?”

I shrugged, failure burning my shoulders. “You
can
use a spell,” I said. “It just probably won’t work.”

He squinted at me, then glanced down at the wad of money, then back at me. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask: Have you been shitting in some other mage’s sandbox?”

I nodded. “Shit everywhere.”

He looked back at the money. “I don’t like getting into fucking
ustari
politics, kid. Always messy.”

I nodded.

Our rules—you didn’t get involved in another magician’s business; you didn’t cast anything big enough to mess with the fundamental underpinnings of the fucking universe—were mostly to keep us from tearing the world apart.

Throughout history, there’s been a number of attempts to break the second rule, and other magicians around the world had gathered together in coalitions to defeat them. It hadn’t been pretty. Half the stories in the Old Testament were foggy histories of
enustari
wars, oceans of blood shed to destroy one of their own declared dangerous to the whole world. It hadn’t been that long ago that four
enustari
had engineered a world war just to settle their own accounts.

Sometimes the overriding opinion was that fighting the crazy bastards caused more harm than good. Hence the first rule: Mind your own business.

“That’s a thousand dollars, cash. You don’t have to touch her, okay? Just find her, let me know where she is, and I’ll take it from there.”

Ketterly scowled, leaning back again for a moment and then lunging forward, pulling open a desk drawer and sweeping the cash into it with his arm. Still hunched over the desk, he scowled up at me. “Fine. If I get shit on my shoes, kid, the bill will come your way, and it’ll probably take more blood than you have in your wasted little frame to pay it. You okay with that? Someone bleeding for you?”

I stared at him. “No,” I said, turning away. “I’ll be outside. Teach him the fucking bird, okay?”

•   •   •

I leaned against the railing and managed to glom a cigarette off a civilian passing by, skinny guy who hadn’t showered in days, his irises like pinpricks.
Didn’t even need any gas for it; I just asked nicely and he handed one over. Most natural thing in the world.

I smoked and fought to keep my eyes open. My stomach was growling, and every single cut on my arms and hands pulsed with burning low-level pain. Even so, I saw the two cops approaching me from half a block away, thinking they were being sneaky. If Mags had been standing right there next to me, if I wasn’t already a pint or so down, I would have asked the Big Indian Bastard to teach them a lesson, but I was too damn tired and I just let them walk up to me.

“Lemuel Vonnegan,” the woman said, declarative, a statement of fact. She held her badge up in front of me for a moment. Not long enough to study, of course.

She was short and slight, Hispanic, curly dark hair that looked rich and healthy and luxurious, like she spent half her paycheck on it. She’d been pretty when she’d been young, but the youth had leached out of her and left behind hard edges, making her handsome instead. She was wearing a warm-looking coat, a turtleneck sweater and a pair of well-cut pants. No perfume; shampoo and cigarettes.

“How’s it going, Vonnegan?” the guy said, grinning.

He was a fat black guy, skin shiny, head shaved and, by all appearances, waxed. His teeth were yellow and I wanted to make him stop grinning. He was big but looked and moved soft. Fleshy. Under a leather overcoat he wore your standard detective costume: suit and tie made for another man entirely, wrinkled and perfunctory.

They liked to use your name. Made you feel like they knew everything about you already, like they’d been watching you, listening in on your phone calls. I’d been hassled plenty by cops. Sometimes you couldn’t get away when a grift fell apart and you didn’t want to be too obvious about bleeding out an escape—nothing like a cop seeing you float up into the air or something like that, scarred for life by the sight, following you around, trying to figure it out.

I nodded, exhaling smoke. “Detectives.”

They glanced at each other. “I’m Marichal and this is Holloway,” the woman said, nodding at her partner. “Let’s take a ride and talk.”

I looked from Holloway to her, dragging deep on my cigarette, which I suspected was about to be taken away from me. I figured at least at the station house they might give me a cup of coffee, something to eat. “What about?”

They looked at each other again. It was annoying. When they looked back at me, it was Holloway who spoke.

“Murder,” he said cheerfully, tugging on my jacket. “And lots of it.”

I
tilted my head back to get the sugary dregs of coffee, so sweet it was almost bitter, and wished I had another cup. I imagined I could feel my body absorbing nutrients directly from the liquid. Even though it was possibly the worst coffee ever created, it was the best coffee I’d ever had.

I was in an interview room. I’d been left alone for twenty minutes so that I would become properly terrified.

It was painted a sort of shit green, the sort of shit green you saw when you were well on your way to scurvy. There was no obvious mirrored wall, but there were at least four spots on the ceiling that could have been cameras, peeking in to see if I was crying or writing a confession or being beaten to death. There was a surprisingly small metal table and three plastic chairs that had big chunks missing from them. There was an odd smell in the air I couldn’t place, and an annoying buzzing noise.

They’d searched me and taken my blade, smiling
and polite. I rolled up my sleeve and examined the scabbed wounds, the moist, yellowish gash I’d made just a few hours before. I estimated how much damage I could do with my fingernails, whether I could get a good bleed going. But tearing a wound apart was slow and painful. And messy. And I was exhausted; the Charm on our ATM mark had taken more than was wise. I wasn’t going to do myself any favors by casting something else and passing out right after.

The door opened with a bang, making me jump a little. The two detectives walked in with files under their arms and cups of coffee in their hands. Holloway had shrunk a bit out of his leather coat, becoming just a flabby guy wearing reading glasses, older than I’d first pegged him. Marichal had suffered, too; outside of her thick coat she had no waist—she went from hips to boobs with no transition.

She glanced at my arm as they took their seats and said nothing. Seen it all, I supposed.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” she said, spreading the files in front of her in a busy, distracted way. “I’d like to ask you to look at some photographs and just tell me if you recognize anyone.”

I rolled my sleeve back down, looking at the top of her head while she fussed over her files. “You’re asking me?”

“You’re not under arrest,” Holloway said.

I didn’t look at him. All I knew about cops was that each and every one of them was a bastard looking to clear cases so they could go home. None of them gave a
shit about justice. And they fucked with your head when they wanted answers, so the best thing to do was figure out what they
wanted
you to do and do the opposite.

In the short term, Holloway wanted me to look at him. So I didn’t. “And if I stand up? Walk to the door?”

“You might trip.”

Marichal was extracting photos from each file and making a deck of them. There were dozens.

“Don’t leave the room again,” I said, finally looking back at him. Being a Trickster was half performance, and I knew a good beat to hit when it swam up under me. “I won’t be here when you get back.”

Holloway smiled at me. “Lem Vonnegan!” he said suddenly, dramatically slapping his hand on the table. “I can’t fucking believe I got Lem Vonnegan in my interview room.” He leaned back in his chair, making it creak dangerously, and smiled, pointing at me. “You got quite the jacket. You’re the goddamn godfather. Six arrests, one conviction: petty theft, picking pockets on the subway, six years ago. Two nights in the tank for drunk and disorderly, causing a ruckus. Three pips for running out on bar bills—or
trying
to. No convictions; no one showed up to press charges.” He winked. “Yep, I’m writing this day in my
diary
. Gonna put little stars and hearts around the border, too, write your name on the cover a few times:
Mister Lem Vonnegan
.”

Marichal slapped one of the photos in front of me. “Recognize her?”

I looked down. I knew it would be Claire Mannice before I saw it. It looked like a high school yearbook
photo; she looked happy, younger. Like she’d grown six inches in two months and hadn’t figured out what the hell to do with all the extra leg. Her hair was fucking terrifying.

I ran through my odds.

I knew Mika Renar was slaughtering those girls. An
enustari
like her didn’t collect girls on a regular basis because she
wasn’t
going to kill them. If I admitted anything, and the cops leaned on me, I’d be dead. A day or two, time for word to get to Renar that I was going to help send a couple dozen cops her way, and they’d find me miraculously dead in my cell, strangled by an invisible wire. If I clammed up, the cops maybe charged me with something, found a way to hang on to me. But I’d give them the slip eventually.

I decided the slip better come sooner rather than later. These assholes were going to get me turned into a hot pile of ash.

“Nope,” I said. I kept my eyes on the photo for a second. She looked so
happy
. Involuntarily, I thought of the girl in Hiram’s study, all those years ago. I remembered the sharp lines of her collarbones, like someone had cut her open and shoved sticks under her skin. I looked back squarely at Marichal. “Nope.”

She nodded, pulling the photo back. “Funny, we got some witnesses who say otherwise.”

I nodded. “Let me guess: a bunch of assholes who follow Heller around like a swarm of gnats with pinpricks for irises and a bad habit of constantly scratching themselves, right?”

The cops very pointedly didn’t look at each other. Marichal scowled, and now she wasn’t even handsome anymore. She started flicking more photos at me like she was dealing cards.

“We have thirteen missing girls within the last month,” she said steadily. “Same physical type, same MO on the snatch. We were onto something, and then it went cold.”

The Skinny Fuck, I thought. Rest in fucking peace.

I looked down at the photos. All of them young, all brunette, short hair, angular faces. I recognized each of them from my short, awful vacation in the Skinny Fuck’s mind, but they blurred together. The same skin, the same hair, the same pattern over and over again. One after another they landed in front of me. I thought of that house up in Westchester, that mansion that smelled like dust and bones, that mummy sitting in the library, casting immense fucking spells with other people’s lives.

My stomach began to hurt.

Dark hair, tan skin.

Dark hair, tan skin.

In the photos their age varied, but I knew from the Skinny Fuck that they’d been getting younger. I wondered why the physical type mattered. Why he’d been taking them in age order. I didn’t know anything about the big spells, the
biludha.
Maybe it was
Biludha
101: All your victims had to be twinsies in chronological order. I thought about these girls, these women, working their way through their lives, not knowing
that Renar had her dusty old eye on them. There were so
many
. I thought about the sorts of spells you could cast with a few dozen healthy bodies like that, and all the hair on my body stood up like someone was running a current through the room.