Redemption Song (30 page)

Now I was about to reveal my entire plan to that person.

Here was the trick: that was also part of the plan.

“What about Caitlin?” Nicky called out, and caught a dirty look from Emma.

“She’s…not in on this,” I said. “Let me get started. First, I want to thank you all for coming tonight. Every element of the Vegas occult underground is represented here. We have the magical community, the cambion community—”

“Only the mobbed-up ones,” Bentley muttered, then inclined his head to Melanie. “Yourself excluded of course, young lady.”

Nicky snapped his fingers. “Hey, the mob got run out of Vegas ages ago and you know it, old-timer. I’m an independent businessman. A little respect wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“Bentley, Nicky, please. And last but not least, representatives of, er—”

“The Southern Tropics Import/Export Company,” Emma said primly. “Be sure to pick up a brochure on the way out. Most of you are going to end up working for us one way or another, so you might as well get a head start and beat the competition.”

“Your retirement plan sucks,” Jennifer drawled.

“Do
you
have a 401(k) with fully matched contributions?” Ben asked her.

I held up my hands. “Okay, guys, seriously? I know we don’t all get along, but this is about
all
of us. Every one of you has reason to be worried about the Redemption Choir, the Carmichael-Sterling Group, or both. Every one of you is under threat as long as Sullivan and Lauren Carmichael are still out there. If we want any hope of taking them both down, we have to work together. Just for one night. That’s all I’m asking. One night.”

That got their attention, at least. I took a deep breath and continued.

“Tomorrow evening, they’ll be meeting at Lauren’s house. Lauren is desperate to get her hands on a damned soul named Gilles de Rais. He’s an indispensable part of her master plan, but I couldn’t tell you how. What matters is that she needs him, and we have him.”

“Where, exactly?” Emma said, her brow furrowing.

“Somewhere safe. I’ve managed to convince Sullivan that I’ve been possessed by de Rais’s spirit. I’ll be the guest of honor at the banquet.”

And with that, I’d thrown away the con. As soon as this meeting was over and the traitor got to a private phone connection, Sullivan would know the truth. My one chance for survival was to throw a complication into the mix.

“There’s a pretty good chance that Sullivan will see through the ruse before the banquet begins,” I said, as if I didn’t know it was an absolute certainty.

“He’ll kill you!” Jennifer said.

“I don’t think so. Hear me out. See, there’s no love lost between Sullivan and Carmichael. There’s no way he could possibly find the real de Rais before tomorrow night, and if I could successfully fool him, he’ll know I could fool Lauren just as easily.”

“You think he’ll trade you?” Nicky said. “Even if he knows you’re fugazi?”

I nodded. “He will. Because this is his one shot at getting what he needs, and while he’d like to kill me, he’s smart enough to know the difference between short-term pleasure and long-term profit.”

If I was lucky, everything I’d just said would fly straight from the traitor’s lips to Sullivan’s ears, and he’d see the logic in it. If I wasn’t lucky…well, best not to think about that too hard.

“What exactly does he want?” Bentley asked.

Here was where I had to tread lightly. I hated lying to my friends, but I didn’t have much of a choice.

“A ring in Lauren’s possession. It…supposedly has the power, if you know how to use it, to amplify the power of demonic blood. That’s Sullivan’s endgame, you see. He wants to march an army of his cambion followers down into hell and launch a coup, starting with Prince Sitri’s court.”

Nicky gave me a slow nod. He was the only other person in the room who knew the truth about Solomon’s ring, and he wanted its real power kept under wraps as much as I did.

“Sullivan is holding a priest hostage,” I said. “A man named Maximilian Alvarez. Alvarez is the walking definition of in the wrong place at the wrong time. He started translating an obscure book that purportedly maps a secret road between Earth and hell.”

“Hogwash,” Corman said, swirling his glass of scotch. “No such animal.”

“I agree,” I said. “But Sullivan’s a believer. Lauren’s insisting that he brings Father Alvarez—and his half-translated book—to the banquet.”

“Why would she want that?” Melanie asked.

Jennifer leaned sideways in her chair and answered for me. “To hedge her bets, is why. Lauren’s no dummy, and she always sticks at least two irons into every fire. She wants to see for herself if Alvarez’s book is the real deal. She has to get her hands on this de Rais fella, or her entire plan’s nothin’ but a stalled train on an uphill track. So if she thinks there’s any chance she’s not getting the real thing at this trade—”

“Which she isn’t,” I said, “because she’ll be getting me instead.”

“—then she’s gonna need some other way of diving into hell and finding her guy.”

I didn’t add that Lauren’s emails to Meadow Brand had spelled this out, albeit in more graphic terms. Brand was under strict instructions to keep Alvarez alive while orchestrating the murders of Sullivan’s men. The impending ambush was one tidbit of information I did
not
want getting back to the Choir.

“And that’s the key to the plan,” I said. “We’re going to get in there, extract the good father, and steal that book.”

“What for?” Corman said. “The thing’s got to be a pile of bunk, I’m telling you.”

“Doesn’t matter. Sullivan believes in it. So we snatch it away from him. Between the book and de Rais’s soul, that leaves us holding the key ingredients to
both
of their plots.”

“Meaning they’ll dance to our tune,” Nicky mused. “Like maybe if we force ’em to break their little truce and fight each other for it…”

“Las Vegas Thunderdome,” I said. “Two psychos enter, one psycho leaves. If we play our cards right, we can make them do the hard work of killing each other off, leaving one weak and weary survivor for all of us to gang up on. And we’ll be fresh and ready for the fight.”

Bentley rubbed his chin. “Risky. But it could work. What about the ring? Should we steal that too?”

“Not worth the trouble,” I said. “The ring will be under heavy lock and key before the handoff—this is Lauren’s house, remember, she’s got home-team advantage—and it’s useless without the book to go with it.”

I flipped a broad piece of poster board on the easel. Blueprints of Lauren’s house emblazoned the glossy board, with pathways marked out in bright yellow highlighter.

“Carmichael’s place was custom built,” I explained. “And the blueprints on file with the city are fakes. Fortunately, the architecture firm she hired kept backups on their private server, and so did the company that installed her home security system.”

“You’re all very welcome,” Pixie said and marked an imaginary tally point in the air with the tip of her finger.

“We have the main entrance here, and the service entrance on the side, here.” I paused as Ben raised his hand.

“So, uh, what’s that tunnel-looking thing underneath?” he asked. “That’s not a normal cellar.”

“Not a cellar at all,” Pixie told him. “Lauren paid to have an escape tunnel dug out, in case of emergency. Runs from the back stairs, straight under the dining hall, and out to a culvert about two hundred feet behind the house.”

“So can we use that? Looks like an easy way in to me.”

She shook her head. “The entire midsection of the tunnel is lined with infrared beams wired to an alarm system. Short of cutting off the backup generator, which you’d have to already be in the house to do, there’s no chance of getting in that way.”

“Those of you who are going in,” I said, “will be posing as caterers. We’ve found out what company she’s using. Tomorrow morning, we grab one of their trucks.”

“This plan is dumb,” Juliette chirped. “You’re dumb.”

“They’ll see it coming from a mile away,” Justine added.

I smiled and spread my open hands.

“We’re going to do a magic trick. Stage magic. Sleight of hand. Here’s how it works: when you’re looking at my left hand, all the action’s happening in my right. The audience always looks where the magician
wants
them to look. And if they think they’re the ones in control? That just proves they’ve already been fooled.”

Thirty-Nine

I
slept at the Value Lodge, not sure if I should expect a knock on the door or a bullet through the window. The traitor would have told Sullivan everything. By now he knew I’d rooked him, just like he knew he only had two choices: kill me and cut his losses, or play dumb and trade me to Lauren anyway.

I was still breathing when the sun came up, so I guessed he’d made the right choice.

Corman slouched behind the antique cash register at the Scrivener’s Nook, reading a dog-eared copy of a Jack Kerouac novel. He knew what I was there for and gestured to the back door.

“Stockroom’s all yours, kiddo. Found this for you, too.”

He tossed me a silver-edged casino chip. It twirled end over end, cutting a glittering arc through the air and landing in the palm of my hand. The insignia was from the Sands, home of the Rat Pack and a Vegas landmark until it came down back in ’96. I technically didn’t need a chip this special for what I had in mind, but it wouldn’t hurt the spell any.

Past the stockroom door and around a pile of empty crates, the floor was cleared and swept clean. I rummaged through a box and took out six flame-red candles, mounted them on brass candlesticks, and set them out in the shape of a hexagram’s points. I lit them one by one, circling, murmuring a wordless chant, before sitting cross-legged at the heart of the design.

I hadn’t carried proper weapons since my apartment burned down. Time to fix that. As I slipped into a waking trance, my fingers—not part of me, acting on their own now, doing what needed doing—peeled the cellophane from a new deck of poker cards. With slender vials of aromatic oil I marked unseen glyphs on the face of each card, then passed them over a thin plume of sandalwood incense to seal the power in. One by one, one pile of cards dwindled while the other pile grew, the pasteboard and oil glowing in my mind’s eye. Time slipped away and ceased to mean anything. Nothing remained but me, the cards, and the gentle hand of Lady Luck on my shoulder. Steering me home.

I held my hand over the deck and felt an electric flutter in the pit of my stomach.
Yes
, I thought, and the cards flew upward, riffling against my outstretched fingertips.

• • •

“I don’t think I can do this,” Ben said from the backseat of Jennifer’s car. He looked green around the edges, leaning his head out the window like a dog on a hot summer day.

“Yeah, you can,” I said, slouching in my seat and watching the street for movement. We were somewhere on the elbow end of suburbia, parked by the side of the road next to a quiet duplex and a postage-stamp-sized yard of yellow scrub. Jennifer mirrored my pose, leaning back behind the wheel, and Mama Margaux filled out the backseat.

“How can you be so casual about this?” Ben said, looking back over his shoulder and dropping into a terse whisper. “This is a hijacking. It’s…
illegal
.”

Jennifer shook her head and drawled, “It ain’t a Brinks truck, sugar. It’s a catering van. Unless you’re on a low-carb diet, you ain’t gonna be in a whole lotta danger.”

“What if one of them has a gun? What if two of them have guns?”

“Ours are bigger,” she said.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text message from Nicky. “Van just passed me heading west, you’ve got 2 mins.”

We knew the catering company Lauren had hired. We just needed a matching vehicle. Emma had called in that morning and hired the same company for a last-minute luncheon, giving a fake address guaranteed to lead the unlucky caterers along one particular stretch of road far from busy traffic—this one. We controlled the ground, and we controlled the timing.

“Here we go,” I said. “Mask up.”

The four of us tugged on black ski masks, and I cradled my gun as Jennifer fired up the engine.

I looked back at Ben. “Stay behind me and Jen. No names, no unnecessary talking. Voice lineups are bullshit, but it doesn’t mean the cops don’t try. Mama, you good?”

She
humphed
at me from behind the mask, and held up a fistful of long plastic cable ties.

“Long as Mr. Accountant here don’t toss up his lunch again,” she said.

“I apologized for that,” Ben said, slipping a finger under his mask to scratch his cheek.

The catering van trundled into sight, growing larger in the rearview mirror. Jennifer counted under her breath, slow and steady, marking the pace—then stomped on the gas and whipped the car out of its parking spot, turning sideways and screeching to a sudden, bone-jolting stop to block the road. The van hit the brakes, stopping just in time to avoid a crash. I was already out of the car. I ran up on the driver of the van and stuck my gun in his face through the open window.

“
Kill the ignition
!” I roared. “
Turn it off right fucking now
!”

Jennifer hit the back doors of the van, hauling one open and jumping inside, pistol first. I heard her rampaging in the back, screaming for the caterers to get down on their knees.

“We don’t have any money!” the driver blubbered, gripping the wheel with white knuckles. “I don’t have anything to give you!”

I hauled him out by the wrist and shoved him up against the side of the van. Margaux grabbed him, snaking a cable tie around his wrists and yanking it tight. Ben just stood there, eyes wide, wavering on his feet.

“Hood!” I shouted, but Ben was frozen. I yanked the black burlap from his hands and did it myself, bagging the driver’s head. Another two caterers were in the back, and we got them cuffed and bagged before they knew what hit them.

Another van screamed up, this one an anonymous blue Nissan with Nicky at the wheel. The side door rumbled open, and Emma jumped out with a heavy canvas bag slung over one shoulder. She helped us load the caterers into Nicky’s cargo van, the entire operation going off without another word.