The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes) (18 page)

They say Michelangelo
was an Artificer just like me, they say he’s the greatest stoneworker ever.  Well . . . he can have it.  Can’t mold stone . . . can’t make stone flow or form.  You try it and the stone just snaps on you, crumbles away.  The way to work stone is to take away from it.  As Plutarch told me once, ‘
creation through subtraction
.’

My hand ran over the stone of the wall.  Rough stuff.  Thick all the way through.  No tootsie-roll center here.  This w
all wanted to take on a tank, win, and teabag the tank’s corpse.

I tapped at it with a finger.  Stone connected to the earth still ha
s geo-anima running through it, especially if you’re talking mountain connected, but here there was only dead silence.  Don’t tell the hippies, they’ll get upset that man is ‘
killing
’ something else.

“Why couldn’t you be steel reinforced?” I muttered, tapping
a second time.  Steel bars, those would’ve made for some nice handholds.  I could work with steel bars . . .

“Going to try to fuck me over?” I asked the wa
ll.  “Or you going to be a good boy?  Let me shave out some footholds without cracking on me?  Who’s going to be a good boy?  Yes you are . . .”

Yes, I doggy-talked
a stone wall.

Mostly to calm my nerves, but some just because it never hurts to suck up to your inanimate materials.  You never know where you’re going to find an anima concentration closing in
on corporeal.

“You want those holes, don’t you?”  I moved a hand low and another high, about as far apart as I could get them.  “Want them right here.  Got holes in you and maybe some nice bird will come along and keep you company with a nest.  Maybe it will peck off some of that nasty ivy trying to break you down.”

I released my pool, breaking the anima in half and channeling it out my hands.  It didn’t break clean, more like a wishbone with one side bigger than the other.  There was leakage, always leakage.  This time it came at my feet, throwing up dirt into the air around me.  But I had my two pieces and I pushed against the wall, anima bubbling out and grinding away at the stone.

Fine bits of stone dust poured out, anima dissipating as I pushed inward.  I ignored an urge to cough as the dust from my top hand pour
ed on top of me.  I kept pushing, moving my hand back and forth, layer by layer.  Might not be a mountain, but I did cut down that wall with the edge of my hand.

With almost no geo-anima left, I pulled my hands ba
ck, leaving a pair of wide, four-inch deep grooves where they’d been.  “Now that is some nice bit of Mancy-work, King Henry Price, you badass motherfucker . . .”

There was gray dust all over the place and over me as well.  I smacked it off my mancer coat and my jeans, tried to smack it out of my hair and wipe it from my face as well.  Probably had it in my lung
s, only my lungs if I’m lucky.  More likely I’d be shitting stone dust for a week.

Gra
y shit . . . that’s my future.

T-Bone
joined me a couple minutes later, looking nervous enough for the pair of us.  “If anyone is watching us we’re so screwed!”

“Black guy and a white guy in a wealthy neighborhood hanging out by a wall?  What’s suspicious about that?” I went rhetorical on him.

“Right . . .
that
and it being broad daylight and my car just sitting there by itself.”

“I wouldn’t
worry; no one would want to actually steal a Nissan Leaf.”

T-Bone
ignored the jab at his ride, reaching out to study my work on the wall.  He touched the bottom step, then pushed up on his toes to take in the second with his eyes.  “How did you do this?” he asked.

“There’s some technical term for it, but I’ve always called it
geo-grinder
.  Works on rock and hard dirts.”

“Yeah
. . .” He shaded his eyes like that would change the view, then let his hand slide back down.  “But how did you manage two?”

Right
.  I guessed I should start teaching some of my hard earned tricks to him.  “I split the pool.”

T-Bone
shifted to study my face instead.  “That’s impossible.”

“Ever tried it?”

“No . . .” he realized, “You did it with the guns at your shop, didn’t you?”

I nodded.  “The Asylum lies about a ton of shit.  You can split pools
. . . hurts like a sore tooth and the leakage is some messy shit, but you can do it.  You can pool for longer than five minutes too . . .”

T-Bone
kept up the nervous act, checking to make sure no nosy neighbor had spotted us.  A pair of trees blocked the house behind us, in front was the wall, and to our right was the road.  Leaning in the shade, we weren’t obvious.  I wasn’t worried much, it being morning, and most people driving being half asleep at the wheel.

“That sounds dangerous,” he said about large pools.

“Could be.” I shrugged.  “Not saying I do it all the time, but . . . it’s possible.  Asylum might never say it’s impossible, but the teachers sure as shit encouraged us to think so.  That, splitting pools, few comments Ceinwyn has made . . . I’m beginning to be doubtful as to the breadth of our education curriculum.”

“Maybe it’s just an Artificer thing.”

“You’d have to try it,” I pointed out.  “Stormcaller can do it . . . then we can all do it . . .
then
, guess we got to figure out why we’re being lied to, and what else we’re being lied to about.”

T-Bone
thought for a bit.  He’s a man with a face fitting for such things.  Me . . . me and my dirty eyes and dirty hair and dirty clothes waited in silence for a deliveryman.

[CLICK]

“This has to be him,”
T-Bone said.

I didn’t even have to get vocal with my agr
eement.  Not many vans labeled
Lon Ga
out at that time in the morning.  Especially on Van Ness I’m guessing.  But what do I know?  Maybe some rich man likes him some Vietnamese food for breakfast and can’t do without some
Lon Ga
.

“You have a pool, right?”

“Five-minute.”

“Aww.”

T-Bone grimaced.  “Not the time for experimentation.”

“Why not?” I glanced around us, at the houses, at me, a
t him, and the wall.  Absurdity on high display.  “This kind of situation is always when I figure something out.”

“I’m not you,”
T-Bone reminded me.

There’
s some truth.  Probably good he wasn’t me too.  Google maps, I’d have never thought of that.  On my own I would have wasted a pool on the gates and waited to see what came out of the mansion to get me.  There’d have been a brawl in the yard for all the richies to see.  Detective Ribera would have been pleased to have me back for another chat so soon.  Ceinwyn would have worked overtime . . .

Good thing to have a partner of sorts around. 
T-Bone might not have Annie B’s spectacular tits, or her conversational skills, but he was a much more calming influence.  Some Yin and Yang thing between us.  Me and Annie B had been all Yang . . . or Yin . . . whichever one is the black-going-to-blow-shit-up-and-punch-faces one.

“There he goes.”

“At the gate?”

I listened, heard an Asian accent on some English and knew our time had ar
rived.  “You first in case I need to push your fat ass up.”

“
Insulting,
” T-Bone mumbled as he put his foot in the first step.  “
Little punk isn’t even going to reach this.
”

Two steps w
here none had been, but that didn’t make it easy.  T-Bone found that out quick when he pushed up and had nothing to hold.  I’d have laughed but from where he waited at the front door the
Lon Ga
guy might have heard.

“Need instructions?” I whispered.

“Touch my fat ass and I’ll shock yours,” T-Bone warned, trying to hang on for dear life to smooth stone and only managing to drop back to the ground.

“Foot in hole one,” I pointed out, still a
t a whisper.  He glowered but followed directions.  “Push up and arms all the way extended so you grab the edge of the wall.” Some grunting as he barely managed.  T-Bone was right, my little punk ass would be doing some ninja jumping to reach step two.  “Pull with your arms and bring up your next foot.”  How he didn’t fall backwards, I don’t know, but he managed it.  “Swing the other leg over and drop to the other side.”

A
soft thud as he hit the ground.

But
no screaming women or gunshots, so . . . victory.

I
went over the wall myself, minus the ninja moves, but I did have to drop my pooling.  Which is a shame.  Large pools:  possible.  Splitting a pool:  possible.  But once you stop . . . you can’t start adding to it again.  You can hold on, waiting for the right moment to release and this takes its own bit of skill, but you can’t build.

I went over the wall and into the unknown of
Casa de Vega
with a ten-minute-pool.  Ten-minute-pool, SDR times two, a SEM-DEW, barely charged aero-fan, cold cuffs times two, and my fists.  Versus the Mancy knows how many werecoyotes. 
You always get the best odds, you pugnacious bastard
.

T-Bone
was right on with his Google-fu.  We dropped down into a small space between the wall and the guesthouse.  Wasn’t no one to see us but the bushes and they weren’t talking without a floromancer present.

“What are we destroying anyway?”
T-Bone asked, again at a whisper. “You never said.”

Best to assume unless told otherwise that this whole bit of sneaking around was done in whispers.  Trust me, it wasn’t professional at all.  It’s a miracle we weren’t found out and shot.  If the
Coyotes in
Casa de Vega
hadn’t been so distracted we probably would have been . . . but they had other shit to deal with,
Lon Ga
the least of it.

“Huh?”

“We’re supposed to crack some pipes or something, remember?”

“Oh
. . .”

That’s probably when
T-Bone started to get suspicious about my motives.  “What about the basketball court?  You can snap the poles and I’ll sizzle the nets.”

N
o punching in this plan, so it was a very bad plan.  “Let’s look around a bit first.”

The guesthouse was unoccupied, by people or mangy canines, even by drugs or sex slaves.  I didn’t actually know what shady shit
Vega was involved in, but drugs were a good bet.  Protection, racketeering, gun running . . . all likely.

There are tons of normal gangs in Fresno, plenty for the police and reporters to focus on, but no one ever thought there could actually be a kingpin type running it all.  Only it didn’t stop at Fresno
. . . the Coyote Nation had sway over ninety-nine percent of California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico . . . that’s a lot of fucking territory.  It stopped at the border; Jaguar Nation had held Mexico since before there was a Mexico . . . since before Columbus.

How much did
Vega control?  What’s he worth?  How many werecoyotes could he call upon?

Looking around that mansion’s backyard I realized really quick that this wasn’t the home of a king.  Lawyer or doctor?  Sure.  But a
king
?  Probably worth a few million.  Any woman would have given oral sex for life and anal on weekends if their husband bought it . . . but basketball courts?  A dinky regular swimming pool?  No security cameras.  No armed guards.  No Totem.  No sign of a coyote at all.

We were in the wrong place for finding Horatio
Vega.

Shit
.

“Basketball court
is still the best target,” T-Bone said, nodding at one of the metal poles.

What would Horatio
Vega do when he saw we’d broken the basketball court at one of his houses?  Bet he’d laugh.  I’d laugh too.  Want to laugh about it right now.  Some pathetic shit.  Not that I’d ever planned on breaking a piece of property as my actual move . . . but not having Vega here, that was a disappointment.

So who
was
here?

Maybe I’d get lucky and it would be JoJo.

I shook my head at T-Bone.  “Not enough.”

“What else are we going to do?  You said you weren’t going to do anything serious!” he hissed at me, gesturing with both arms and shoulders to make up for his lack of volume.

We stood next to the pool, against a wall by a ground floor window.  Dumbasses maybe, but smart enough not to be arguing in the middle of the yard.  “I’m going to see if anyone is in the house.”

“
King Henry!  Don’t be stupid!
”

“You don’t have to follow me,” I said, giving him one of my special
I-don’t-give-a-shit
shrugs.  “But if you don’t follow me . . . you’re going to have to explain to Ceinwyn why.”