A Plain-Dealing Villain (23 page)

I crouched low, scurrying like a trapped rat to the back of the house. Red and blue lights strobed through the shades of the kitchen window, and silhouettes stood sentry at the backyard fence. Front, same deal. They weren’t bluffing.

“
Leave the house now
,” the voice on the bullhorn bellowed. “
Or we will be forced to take action
.”

No last-minute escape. Not this time.

There were only two ways I could play this: their way, or suicide by cop. I looked down at the gun in my hand and tossed it to the floor.

A couple of uniforms blitzed me before I’d taken two steps out the front door, wrestling me to the pavement and wrenching my hands behind my back. They asked if I was alone in the house. They asked if I had any accomplices. They asked why I did it.

I maintained my right to remain silent.

I ended up in an interrogation room, with my pockets empty and my wrists shackled to a stainless-steel table. I didn’t know how long I sat there, waiting in silence. No clocks on the walls. Eventually a couple of plainclothes detectives decided to test my will.

Around the seventy-eighth time in a row I answered their questions with, “I want my lawyer,” they gave up and left me alone to stew a little longer.

When they came back, wheeling in a cart with a cheap television set and a DVD player, they had a guest. Harmony Black.

“Congratulations,” she said, pulling back a chair and dropping a tan folder onto the table. “You’ve been upgraded. Now you’re a
federal
prisoner.”

“Which doesn’t change my right to legal representation. Oh, hey fellas, I see you joined the AV Club. That’s good, extracurriculars are really important. Maybe you’ll get a decent job someday.”

Harmony sent the detectives away. It was just me, her, and the evidence.

“Konstantin Floros,” she said. “Greek expat, here on an expired work visa. Known associate of your friend Jennifer Juniper. At least, I thought she was your friend. I guess you picked sides, huh?”

“Jennifer called me. She was worried about the guy and asked me to check on him. I saw the door hanging open, went inside, and found his body. Next thing I know, I’m center stage at a police convention.”

“You ‘found’ his body. And it’s a sheer coincidence that he was murdered with a single .45 Colt round to the face—the exact kind of ammunition in a Taurus Judge Magnum we found at the scene. A gun with your fingerprints all over it and a registration—a fake one, as it turns out—in your glove compartment.”

I snapped my fingers. “There you go. A gun that hadn’t been fired. Hell, they gave my hands a GSR test when they ran me in here. Check it out. I’m clean. I
couldn’t
have killed the guy.”

She opened the folder and spun it around so I could read the top page.

Residue Test Results: Confirmed. 2000+ particle count w/spheroid GSR.

“That’s
bullshit
,” I snapped, reading it twice. “I haven’t fired a gun in weeks.”

“Really?” Harmony said, arching an eyebrow. “That’s funny, because according to this, you sure did. And your gun
had
been fired. Recently. Just one round. We both know where that round ended up, don’t we? Then we checked your trunk. Thirty thousand dollars in cash, in an envelope—”

“I can explain that.”

“—and we also found these.”

She turned the page and showed me a stack of surveillance photographs. Snaps of Konstantin Floros and his house from all angles.

“Did Nicky Agnelli give you these pictures when he hired you to kill Floros?”

“You found it in my trunk,” I echoed flatly. “Goddamnit, Harmony, this is a setup. This whole thing is a setup.”

She leaned back and smiled.

“Damn, I
hoped
you’d say that. Because then I’d get to see the look on your face when I show you this.”

She turned on the television.

“Floros,” she said, fast-forwarding a grainy black-and-white camera feed, “was a little paranoid about security. Happens a lot with these narcotics types. His whole house was wired.”

When she hit play, Floros was sitting in the chair he died in, flailing his arms as he begged for his life.

I was the one holding him at gunpoint.

“I didn’t
say
anything,” Floros whined. “I wouldn’t
do
that!”

“Nicky Agnelli says otherwise,” I told him. “Know what else he says?”

“Don’t, just don—”

“Bye-bye,” I said and shot him in the face.

My duplicate paused, just for a heartbeat, and looked toward the camera. Harmony froze the frame.

“Agent Black,” I said slowly, “you need to find out if the evidence tech who did my GSR test, and whoever brought my gun in, is still in the building. But I don’t think you’ll find them, because they’re already dead. They’ve been replaced.”

She shook her head at me. “What are you even—”

“Listen. Very. Carefully,” I said, leaning close and whispering so the security camera wouldn’t pick up my voice. “I’m being framed. There is a rakshasa, a shape-shifting hunger spirit, working for the Chicago mob. The only way this fucking GSR test came back positive is if someone tampered with it.
He
tampered with it, after making it look like I shot Floros. This thing is in the precinct, right here, right now.”

Harmony slammed her folder shut and scraped her chair back.

“It’s always something, isn’t it, Faust? You’ve always got a story. Well, I’ve got one for you. It’s called ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ And I’m done listening.”

As she walked to the door, taking my last shred of hope with her, there was only one thing I could do.

Laugh.

Just a giggle, at first, but then I doubled over in my chair, cackling on the edge of hysteria.

“What’s so funny?” she said, looking back at me.

I got it under control, but I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face.

“All this time,” I said, “all this effort…and you finally busted me for the one crime I
didn’t
commit. That’s…that’s some top-notch police work, Agent Black. Kudos, really, kudos.”

“A jury will decide what you did or didn’t do,” she told me. “My job is done here.”

I slouched back in my chair. My manacles rattled.

“Not by a long shot, Agent. Not by a long shot. There’s a war coming. Right here, in the streets of Las Vegas, and the blood is gonna spill. This wasn’t the opening salvo. This was just a hello and a handshake. The Outfit is letting us know they’re ready for battle. I hope you’re ready, too.”

She opened the interrogation-room door, lingering on the threshold. She looked back at me.

“A war, huh? Well, you won’t be around to see it. Premeditated murder, conspiracy, racketeering…you’re looking at life behind bars. And that’s my wish for you, Daniel Faust. A long,
long
healthy life.”

The door clicked shut behind her, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my nightmares.

It was funny, though, feeling your back pressed to the wall had a wonderful way of clearing up your priorities. You realized, very fast, what really mattered most in life.

Right now, what mattered most was breathing free air. No matter what I had to do, no matter how many bodies I had to climb over,
nobody
was going to keep me in a cage. One way or another, I was getting out of here.

My second priority? It came to me as I pictured Angelo Mancuso’s smirking face. Him, his pet rakshasa, his entire crew of gangsters, and Damien Ecko too. It was so simple I could sum it up in a single word.

Payback.

Back in the late nineties, Eastern Pines Ranch had played host to a country-western star for a few years. He’d made a few renovations throughout the grounds, not the least being the addition of a small recording studio in the basement.

The new owners had made some renovations, too.

In what used to be the old “live room” for the band, behind a wall of glass, Cameron Drake danced barefoot on a sheet of polished metal. It was a strange, shuffling hop, and his brow scrunched in concentration as he mouthed every memorized step.
Left to right to heel to—

He screamed as a torrent of electricity flooded through the metal sheet, sending him crashing to the ground in a twitching heap. A thin trickle of blood leaked from his nose.

Out in the mixing booth, on the other side of the glass, Fleiss watched impassively behind a bank of modified controls. She clicked on the intercom and leaned toward a standing microphone. Her voice echoed through the studio.

“No. Two steps left, not one. Begin again.”

To her side, a fat, leather-bound book lay open on the console, thick with dense calligraphy. She glanced toward it, then again a moment later, as if she expected to see something different.

“Why?” Cameron asked, his voice weak. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because you bought the winning ticket.”

“You keep saying that, but it’s not an
answer
.”

“The answer,” Fleiss said, “will give you no comfort.”

“
Please
.”

Fleiss sighed, curling her lip. “
Ordo ad chaos
.”

Cameron pushed himself up to his knees, staring through the glass.

“What? I don’t even know what that—”

“From order, chaos. The subjugation and corruption of old societal infrastructures in order to further our aims. A work of quantum magic—a Great Work—that has literally never been attempted and never will be again.”

“I…I don’t understand,” he said, shoulders sagging.

“I told you that you wouldn’t.”

Fleiss glanced over at the book, her exasperation fading into a faint smile. She traced her fingertip over the spidery text.

The Year King: I…I don’t understand.

Mater Tantibus: I told you that you wouldn’t.

“We must all play our part,” Fleiss said into the microphone. “And you must learn your part of the ritual, flawlessly. Now stand up and begin. Or I’ll activate the floor again.”

As Drake pushed himself to his feet, Fleiss turned the page. A woodcut caught her eye: the image of a blank-faced man, dragged backward in chains by a pair of towering demons.

Her cell phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Dear one,” the Smile’s syrupy voice oozed over the line. “Was the knife retrieved as I requested?”

Fleiss sat bolt upright, clutching the phone as her eyes went wide.

“Flawlessly, my lord. It is an honor to serve you.”

“Yes. I know. And Faust?”

She glanced at the book.

“I’m watching to see. There’s always a chance of rejection, but we did our best to contaminate his—”

The breath caught in her throat. A pinpoint of flame rose from the brittle page, tracing its way across the woodcut. It vanished, snuffed out, but now the picture was different.

Now, the man in chains had the face of Daniel Faust.

Act Five, Scene One
, read the text beneath the image.
The Thief is taken away to face torment and death at the hands of the False Warden
.

“The Play has spoken, my lord.” Fleiss’s fingers trembled as she touched the book. “Faust has been absorbed into the pattern. He belongs to us now.”

There’s always more trouble to go around, isn’t there? While the Enclave Job storyline wrapped up in
The Living End
, now we stand on the threshold of the Battle of Las Vegas. Daniel will be along shortly, just as soon as he deals with that little incarceration problem. And as for the shadowy man with the Cheshire smile, well…you’ll see.

Providing more questions than answers is part and parcel of a new story arc. All I can do is assure you that yes, there is a road map. I have a serious dislike for stories where the creators don’t know the answers to any of their own mysteries and make it all up as they go along (looking at
you
, X-Files, Battlestar Galactica and Lost), and honestly one of my biggest kicks is setting up little bits of plot that pay off much further down the line. As a reader, I love that “so
that’s
what that was all about!” feeling of revelation when it’s done well, so as a writer I try to deliver the same when I can.

Of course, I don’t do it alone. Thanks as always to my awesome team: Kira Rubenthaler on editing (any good bits are hers, any lingering mistakes are mine), James T. Egan on cover design (I am not worthy), and Maggie Faid on PR (and keeping me on-task, never an easy feat).

Want to get the advance scoop on new books and projects? Head over to www.craigschaeferbooks.com and hop on my mailing list. You can also reach me on Facebook at facebook.com/CraigSchaeferBooks, on Twitter at @craig_schaefer, or just email me directly at [email protected]. Always happy to hear from my readers. Even if I screwed something up. Which I probably did.

One last thing! If you liked the book (which I hope you did!), would you mind taking a minute and posting a short review wherever you purchased it? Reviews are a huge help in spreading word of mouth and attracting new readers to the series, and the more readers I have, the more books I can write. See? Everybody wins.

Meanwhile, stay braced for the next installment, in which Daniel swears off his criminal ways for good and quietly does his time behind bars, realizing he must pay his debt to society.

Just kidding.