Redemption Song (8 page)

“Sorry. Just ten minutes, I promise.”

“Okay, okay.” He pushed himself up from his chair and ambled toward the door. I ducked down behind the fabric half-walls and rummaged through his desk drawer. In my mind I was already sinking, falling into a waking trance, as my body moved on autopilot. My hands closed around a pad of yellow sticky notes and a marker. Gray would have been best, but black ink was fine.

The problem with doing magic under pressure is that the pressure drowns out the flow, the rhythm. It’s like trying to play jazz with a gun to your head. I focused on my breathing. The handler and his hellhound made a slow sweep of the room, passing the cubicles one by one, letting the dog get a good sniff. My pen flowed over the sticky notes, drawing sigils of the moon, of silver and silence, flooding them with energy.

I slapped the notes up on the cubicle walls around me, building a cocoon of spiritual darkness. I was silent, shadowed and gone, invisible. My refuge only had three walls, though. I rummaged in the paper sack next to the previous occupant’s breakfast and found a tiny paper packet of salt. Perfect. Crouching low, I drew a hair-thin line of salt across the blue carpet from one side of the cubicle’s opening to the other.

The energy fired down the line like a circuit closing, a loop of power that shrouded the cube in anonymity. Now I just had to hope it was good enough. I sat down and typed gibberish into the open spreadsheet, trying to look like another cog in the machine.

The handler and his dog rounded the corner, working this last row. I fought my instinct to turn and look, distracting myself with a stream of numbers, trusting the impromptu spell to hold. The muscles in my neck tightened as footsteps approached from behind, then paused.

I held my breath.

The footsteps kept walking.

When I finally had to exhale, I dared to peek. The guard was leaving the department the way I came in, leaving me with a clear run at the other door. I tore down the sticky notes and shoved them in my pocket, scuffing the salt with the toe of my shoe on my way out.

The server room wasn’t far. Like Pixie had predicted, it was right next door to the IT department’s lair. I waved my cloned passkey over the magnetic lock, listened to the satisfying click, and let myself in.

I wasn’t expecting the two guys I’d passed in the hallway to be in there, hunched over the exposed guts of a computer along with three of their friends.

“Help you?” one of the IT guys said, glaring. They were clearly having a bad day.

“Oh, uh, hi,” I said. “I’m having a…problem. With my computer. Upstairs.”

“Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. Don’t expect anything before tomorrow afternoon.”

“So you guys are gonna be in here all day, then?”

One of them shot me a withering look. Departmental tribalism, again, and this time I was the barbarian trespassing on sacred land.

“Until we get this box working again,” he said as if explaining something to a five-year-old, “which might take a little while, as you can probably see.”

I apologized and let myself out. I needed a different strategy.

Ten

I
wandered the back hallways, as far as I dared with those hellhounds on patrol, and found the closest emergency exit. I called Pixie.

“You see how the parking lot makes an L-shape? Move the van around the corner, but keep to the far side of the lot. Server room’s occupied.”

“What are you going to do?”

I looked both ways, making sure the hall was clear. Then I pulled the fire alarm.

“That,” I said as sirens squalled.

The IT crew grumbled as they marched out of the server room. I slipped inside behind their backs and let the door swing shut behind me, leaving me alone in the windowless, cold clutter. Entombed behind the heavy server-room door, the fire alarm outside was muted to a dull squawk. Lights glowed green, amber, and red from the brushed-metal faces of a dozen server racks.

“Talk me through it,” I told Pixie, “and fast. In about five minutes there’s going to be nobody left in the building but me and security, and getting caught would be a really, really bad thing right now.”

“Look at the servers. Are they labeled? I’m looking for a serial number.”

I craned my neck, looking on both sides of the closest rack. Each pizza-box-sized machine had a hand-lettered label on the side with a string of numbers.

“Got it. Which one?”

“It’s…one second, have to check my notes—”

“Pix? Time. Not on our side.”

“Here we go,” she said. “398215X.”

I could hear employees shuffling around in the narrow hallway outside the door, dutifully leaving the building. If any of the guards poked their head in to check the server room, I was done for. I pushed the thought out of my mind and focused on checking labels.

“Found it!” I opened my briefcase.

“Unscrew the faceplate.”

I was glad she’d packed a Phillips-head screwdriver for me. The metal plate quickly gave way, exposing a snakes’ nest of electronic guts.

“You’re looking for a ribbon cable,” she said, “with a gray box on one end. You’re going to need to hook up the dongle I gave you.”

I was no engineer, but she walked me through it step by step. With the job done and the faceplate back in place, there was nothing left to do but make my escape. I held my breath and stepped out of the server room, not sure what I’d find on the other side.

What I found was an empty hall and a propped-open fire exit. Crowds of employees milled around in the parking lot, cradling coffee cups and chatting, with another pair of dogs making slow, lazy passes around them. A siren heralded the arrival of a pair of fire trucks, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea to make room.

That was my chance. I blended in with the crowd, easing my way through the knot of people and out the other side, staying clear of the dogs. The Wardriver was a short jog away. I hopped in the front seat, and Pixie tossed me the keys.

“You drive,” she said. “I’m working.”

I put Carmichael-Sterling Nevada in the rearview mirror and brought the rickety old van up to a slow cruising speed. I waited an entire thirty seconds before asking if she was done yet. I thought that showed restraint on my part.

“So far, so…good!” She pumped her fist in the air. “Perfect. I’m in. I can’t get any old data, but any email that passes through their network from this point on is going to make a tiny detour to my computer first.”

“You’re a genius, Pix.”

“You’re biased. So what now?”

“Now you watch for anything that has Lauren Carmichael or Meadow Brand’s name on it. Me, I’ve got to go work on my other big problem.”

“Problem?” she said, walking up from the back of the van and slipping into the passenger seat.

“Somebody wants me to do something I don’t want to do, and they’re holding a gun to my head. Same old song and dance.”

Pixie shrugged. “Can’t you, you know, do some magic?”

“Wish it was that easy. Their magic’s bigger than mine.”

We rode in silence for a while. She shifted in her seat. Thoughtful, and not liking her thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry I brought you into all this. I’m sorry I told you the truth.”

“What you told me,” she said, “is that things are bad all over, and we’ve all got to work together to survive in this world. That we’ve got to take care of each other. I knew that when I woke up this morning. All you did was raise the stakes.”

We stopped in the parking lot outside my apartment. I passed her the keys and the steering wheel, and she left me standing alone in the afternoon sun. I didn’t want to go home. No answers there. While I was sorting out my options, my phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Ben, Emma’s husband? Emma gave me your number, I hope it’s okay that I called.”

“Sure,” I said. “But if it’s an accounting problem, I can’t help you.”

He laughed. “No, nothing like that, it’s just…well, I heard about what’s going on. The task the prince gave you. I’m sorry, man, that’s rough. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do in your shoes.”

I paced the lot as I talked, kicking up loose gravel.

“Sitri’s writing wolf tickets,” I said, “and that’s his business, but I’m not buying any. Back down for one bully, you’ll back down for all of them. I’ve known that since I was a kid.”

“What are you going to do, though?”

“I’m thinking about paying the good father a little visit. Sniff around a little, see if anything seems off.”

“Good luck, Dan. If I think of anything that could help, I’ll let you know.”

I hung up the phone. I knew Ben’s hands couldn’t be all that clean. He’d married Emma, after all. Still, I couldn’t help but like the guy. He reminded me a little of Pixie, weirdly enough. A decent person knee-deep in the weird, just doing the best he could.

That was exactly why I’d decided to keep them both at arm’s length. I had a bad feeling about Sitri’s game, a lingering feeling of doom in the pit of my stomach, and I didn’t need any more decent people getting hurt on my account.

Time to go to church
, I thought with a bitter smile.
Hope I don’t spontaneously combust when I walk in the door
.

• • •

Our Lady of Consolation stood on a lonely corner with a vacant lot on one side and a half-dead strip mall on the other. The parking lot sat empty, but just a few blocks away the skyline of the Vegas Strip lit up in preparation for another roaring night on the town. The church couldn’t compete with that kind of action.

I parked my car and went inside. Poor as the parish was, at least they could still afford air-conditioning. Off to one side of the altar, candles and a wreath surrounded the portrait of a smiling, plump-faced priest. I walked up the aisle, past pew after weathered, splintering, and empty pew, to look for a placard or note about who the dead man was.
Please don’t tell me Sitri got someone else to do the job
…

“Did you know Father Fernando?”

I looked over. Another priest stood near the altar, maybe in his early forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His voice carried the faintest hint of a Spanish accent, like it was something he’d worked hard at unlearning.

“Afraid I didn’t have the pleasure,” I said.

He walked over, standing close and giving the portrait a long stare.

“Good friend of mine. We went to seminary school together.” He looked at me. “Killed by a car, just last week. A hit-and-run, if you can imagine that. Every night I pray that the driver finds it in his heart to turn himself in and seek absolution. Murder is a terrible burden to carry.”

I suspected I knew more on that subject than the good father, but I shook my head and said, “My condolences. Are you Father Alvarez?”

“I am.” He offered me his hand. His grip was firm and warm. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve seen you before. You’re not from our congregation, are you?”

On my way over, I’d thought hard about how to play it. The best lie, as usual, would cut pretty close to the truth.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Your name came up in relation to a case I’m working on. Is there somewhere we could talk? I won’t take up too much of your time, I promise.”

He nodded and gestured toward a side door. “Of course. In my office. If this is about Father Fernando’s estate or the insurance claim, though, you’ll really need to talk to the diocese. I’m just the man who writes the boring sermons and occasionally manages to dispense a little good advice.”

White flowers bloomed in a cheap glass vase on the priest’s desk. Groaning bookshelves lined the walls, piled high with everything from church histories to manuals on child rearing and grief counseling. A window overlooked the empty parking lot. Alvarez took a seat behind his desk, leaning in to sniff the flowers.

“Casablanca lilies,” he said, gesturing toward the chair on the other side. “I grow them in the garden out back. Heavenly scent. So what’s this all about, Mr.…?”

“Faust.”

He smiled, lightly teasing. “Have you read Goethe, Mr. Faust? I do hope you’re coming by your knowledge the honest way.”

I held up my hands. “Don’t worry, no pacts with Mephistopheles. Let me get right to the point. I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but do you know anyone who might want to harm you? Have you had trouble with anyone lately?”

His smile faded. “Harm me? Well, no, of course not! I’m just a parish priest, not John Dillinger! I’m a homebody, really. When I’m not attending to my duties here, my hobby is translating obscure liturgical material. That’s about as wild as my life gets. Why do you think—”

“What about your friend? That hit-and-run, any chance it wasn’t an accident?”

The priest shook his head, looking bewildered.

“I’d barely had a chance to catch up with him,” he said. “I’m a recent transfer, you see. I was looking to make a change, he knew of an opening, and he invited me to join him here at Our Lady. A few days later, he was taken from us. If he feared for his life, he said nothing to me about it. Mr. Faust, I’m going to have to insist on an explanation. Who do you work for? And why on earth would you think someone wants to hurt me?”

The glimmer of movement out the window caught my eye. A pair of BMWs, lean and low and black as midnight, rolled into the lot with military precision. I nodded toward the glass. It was too hot for jackets, so our new arrivals didn’t bother concealing their shoulder holsters. I counted six guns, gleaming chrome in the dying sunlight.

“We could ask them,” I said. “But they don’t look like they’re here to chat.”

A couple of the men had the look I’d come to associate with near-feral cambion, that vaguely lumpy, didn’t-spend-enough-time-in-the-oven look. The others just looked mean as rattlesnakes and angling to raise some hell.

If my guess was right, Sitri wasn’t the only player in the occult underworld who wanted Father Alvarez’s head. The Redemption Choir was here.

Eleven

“W
hat do they want?” the priest said, his eyes wide.

I got to my feet. “You. And I’m guessing they’re not here to give confession. This place have a back door?”