Redemption Song (2 page)

The full picture walked through the interrogation room door about twenty minutes later, in the form of a short, full-figured blond in a tailored suit. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and a man’s paisley necktie. Two men followed her in, a hulking, lantern-faced guy with hair like straw, and a thin, goateed man toting a stack of manila folders under his arm. The one with the goatee shot me a murderous look and slapped the folders down on the desk.

The winds of magic whirled around the room. Motes of violent green light hovered at the corners of my vision, brushing across my mind, seeping through the cinder-block walls like radiation from a leaking reactor. An acidic taste filled my mouth. I knew two things, instantly. One of my visitors was a cambion, the bastard spawn of a human and a demon. One of the others was a trained sorcerer, and a good one. Almost as good as me. With all the sudden energy in the room, I couldn’t get a fix on who was who.

The blond woman flashed her badge.

“Special Agent Harmony Black,” she said, the faint trace of a New England accent lingering at the edges of her clipped words. “FBI. I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time, Mr. Faust.”

That was when things got complicated.

Two

T
here’s no council of wizened wizards overseeing the world of magic, no hidden academies where bright-eyed and precocious youths learn the secrets of the unknown. What we do have is a collective desire, as a community, to keep anyone from fucking up our action. One of the first things any fledgling sorcerer is taught? Keep your mouth shut about magic, or someone
will
shut it for you, probably with a bullet or a corrective curb-stomping. Now that we live in the age of cell phone cameras and worldwide Internet, keeping the hidden world hidden is more important than ever.

It’s no surprise that most working sorcerers are criminals of one stripe or another. The occult underworld and the criminal underworld overlap and mingle in the shadows, far away from the daylight realm of the taxpayers and solid citizens. We do our thing, and they do theirs.

The idea of a sorcerer on the FBI payroll turned my bladder to ice.

Things didn’t get any better from there.

“This is Detective Gary Kemper of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police,” Agent Black said with a gesture to the goateed man. “And this very large gentleman to my left is Agent Lars Jakobsen of the DEA.”

I leaned back in my chair and whistled, trying to keep my nerves from showing.

“You all came down here just for me? It’s not even my birthday.”

Gary Kemper slammed his palms down on the metal table between us, leaning so close I could smell his cheap aftershave.

“Carl Holt was a friend of mine, you son of a bitch,” he snarled.

I didn’t murder Carl Holt, but to be fair, I had been planning on it. My girlfriend got to him first. She snapped his neck and left him dead on his partner’s kitchen floor. I just burned the house down when she was finished. Nobody should have been able to connect me to that mess, though. Nobody.

“Carl Holt,” I mused, fighting to keep the surprise from my voice. “Oh, I remember him from the news. Wasn’t he that corrupt cop who was killed with his buddy, the Satan-worshipping porno director?”

Gary lunged across the table. I leaned back fast, the front legs of my chair lifting off the floor, and he grabbed the air where my throat used to be.

“
Detective
!” Harmony snapped. Gary came to his senses and dropped his hands with a mumbled apology. To her, not to me.

I shook my head. “I think you’ve got the wrong room, folks. I’m here for the reckless driving charges. And I wasn’t even driving. How unfair is that?”

“Also threatening a woman with an unlicensed firearm,” Lars said in a rumbling Norwegian-tinged basso, looking amused. “The public relations officer of Carmichael-Sterling Nevada. They’ve had a bad month, with the arson attack on the Silverlode Hotel.”

Telling me he knew I was in on that, too. Except he was also telling me something even more important: they didn’t have any evidence. If they could pin the Holt/Kaufman murders on me or put me on the scene at the Silverlode, I’d already be arraigned.

“It’s okay,” I told him, “they’ve still got another that hasn’t burned down yet.”

Harmony slid the folders across the table, one by one, laying them out but keeping their covers closed.

“You keep interesting company, Mr. Faust,” she said. “Your traveling companion is a highly successful narcotics dealer.”

I held up a finger. “Point of order. She was arrested for marijuana possession twice, growing it once, and all three times the charges were dropped. She’s never seen the inside of a courtroom.”

Harmony’s lips curled into a pert half-smile. “And that, Mr. Faust, is why I call her ‘successful.’”

If Harmony really was the other sorcerer in the room—I still couldn’t sort out the signals, too busy focusing on keeping myself out of prison—she probably knew as well as I did how Jennifer always managed to slip the law. She wasn’t just a purveyor of quality weed; she backed up her operations with some weapons-grade witchcraft.

“She won’t be so lucky this time,” Lars rumbled. “She was driving the vehicle, the unlicensed firearm is hers—”

“The gun is mine,” I said reflexively, not even thinking. She would have done the same for me. If we ended up going down on these bullshit charges, she could do the car time and I could do the gun time. That felt fair.

“Yeah.” Gary nodded. “She said that too, that it was your gun. Said this whole thing was your idea.”

My eyes narrowed to slits. Rookie technique. Make me think Jennifer was in the other room, rolling on me, so I’d do the same to her. One problem: Jennifer was my sister. Not by blood, people like us don’t mark our family lines by blood, but she was my sister. She’d put a noose around her own neck before she’d put one around mine.

I looked at Harmony. Harmony looked at Gary. She knew he’d overreached and blown it. So did Lars. Only Gary himself was too dumb to figure it out. I cleared my throat.

“Agent Black? Maybe you could send this kid back to his mommy and daddy, so we could have an adult conversation?”

“Sure. Let’s have a conversation,” she said, sliding into a chair across from me. “Let’s talk about Nicky Agnelli.”

There it was. The real reason for the whole dog and pony show. I wondered if Nicky had forgotten to pay somebody off, or maybe his lucky streak had just run out. You don’t become the biggest racket boss in Las Vegas without making your fair share of enemies. I should know. Technically I was one of those enemies, though Nicky and I had come to an uneasy ceasefire a few weeks back.

“Nicky?” I said, nonchalant. “He’s an old poker buddy. We don’t see much of each other these days.”

“But you do have a history together,” Harmony said, opening the folders one by one. Crime scene photos. Police reports. Some were my handiwork, some weren’t, but the hits outnumbered the misses. I studied them, shaking my head.

“I’m not sure what these are supposed to mean. Some of these things aren’t even crimes. I mean, this guy here, it says he died of a brain embolism. You can’t think I had anything to do with that.”

“Can’t I?” Harmony asked.

“The only way I could imagine that being so,” I said slowly, holding her gaze, “is if I used, I don’t know…black magic? And we all know magic doesn’t exist.”

“Do we?” she said in the same even tone, her face an expressionless mask.

I offered her my wrists. “Well, if it does, then maybe you’d better arrest me for sorcery in the first degree. Oh, wait. That’s not really a crime, is it?”

My smugness lasted until she opened the final folder.

“Oops,” Harmony said, showing me a candid long-lens shot of me and Caitlin eating at an outdoor cafe. “How did this one get in here?”

I’d made a lot of mistakes in my life, left a lot of wreckage behind me, but Caitlin was the rose in the ruins. We’d walked through fire together. Literally.

“You want to leave her out of this,” I said, my throat tightening up.

“Let me be blunt, Mr. Faust. This is a joint multi-jurisdictional task force investigating the Agnelli crime syndicate. That means we’re researching everyone connected to the syndicate’s operations.
Everyone
.”

“Your pal Nicky’s going down,” Gary said. “And this time he’s not gonna walk. His days are numbered, get it?”

Lars held up a finger, looking down at me. “But there is still time to join the side of the angels.”

Curious wording. I wondered if the bulky Norwegian was the cambion in the room.

“You want me to rat him out,” I said.

“We want your cooperation.” Harmony’s fingertips drifted over the photograph of Caitlin and me. “Arrangements for your protection can be made, and needless to say, with the help of your testimony, the bureau would have no need to dig into the lives of your…acquaintances.”

Carrot. Stick. At least they weren’t being coy about it. Truth was, I didn’t owe Nicky a damn thing. Less than a month ago, he’d sold Caitlin into slavery and tried to have me killed, collateral damage in a political power play. His scheme went down in flames, but he still came out smelling like roses. Seeing Nicky in an orange jumpsuit would suit me just fine.

Nothing was that simple, though. Half the people I knew worked for Nicky on one level or another, and a lot of them would go down with him. Good people, people I owed loyalty to. Then there was the blowback to think about. I knew the kind of powers he could bring to a fight, because I used to
be
one of those powers. With Nicky out for payback, I wouldn’t be safe in this world or the next.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, though my mind was already made up.

“Don’t think too long,” Harmony said, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s a limited-time offer. You’re either on our ship or on his. One of those ships is sinking.”

She offered me her business card. No title, no FBI seal, just her name and a phone number in crisp black on cream. I slipped it into my pocket.

My little interview with Nicky’s would-be executioners didn’t make the other charges disappear. That would have been too easy. A uniform marched me to a holding cell, where I spent an hour shooting the breeze with a couple of tatted-up gangbangers who were there on a breaking and entering rap. Surprisingly mellow guys. Nobody had offered me a phone call, or lunch for that matter, and I was weighing my options when the uniform came back to escort me out.

Bentley waited for me in the lobby with his old gray fedora tucked under one arm, looking like a frustrated grandfather who’d been called to get his kid from the principal’s office. The analogy wasn’t all that wrong. Bentley and his partner Corman—they’d been together since the seventies and still acted like newlyweds when they thought nobody was watching—took me in when I was a scared, desperate kid on the run. They were the closest thing I’d ever had to a real father. The monster who raised me didn’t qualify for the name.

I gave the old man a hug and he patted my back, gesturing to the glass doors. “I bailed you both out,” he said. “They processed Jennifer first. She’s outside. Having a bit of a conniption fit.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“You can pay me back by explaining what happened this morning. Sophia is—” he caught himself, lowering his reedy voice as we walked through the crowded lobby. “Sophia is
dead
, Daniel.”

“Meadow Brand happened,” I said, holding open the door for him. We walked out into the Las Vegas heat. Jennifer paced back and forth in the parking lot, attacking an unfiltered cigarette and muttering to herself. The sunlight caught the metallic sheen of her tattooed arm, glinting off a rose-petal-wreathed image of Elvis as the Gautama Buddha. She saw us coming, snubbed her cigarette out under her bootheel, and stalked toward us like an angry lioness.

“Sugar, what the fuck just happened back there?” she snapped at me. “I don’t pay Nicky Agnelli three grand a month to butter my biscuits. He’s supposed to make sure I
don’t
get hauled into interrogation rooms. He sure as hell doesn’t do anything else to make my life easier. ‘Protection,’ my sweet ass.”

“Perhaps,” Bentley offered, “instead of discussing this in a public parking lot, we could all get into my car now. I’ve no great love of police stations, and I’m sure you share my sentiments on the matter.”

We piled into Bentley’s old silver Caddy and cranked the air conditioning. I was just happy to breathe free air again. I wondered how much longer I had to enjoy it.

Three

“T
hey’re fishing,” I told Jennifer for the fifth time. Bentley’s car cruised through traffic, sleek and anonymous.

“They know more than they oughta,” she snapped. “And did you catch the smell on ’em?”

“Yeah. One magician, a good one, and one cambion. I’m pretty sure Agent Black’s one of our breed. She hinted around the edges at it. If she’s not a sorcerer, she’s more clued-in than she has any right to be. Which one did you take as the cambion?”

“The Norwegian,” she said. “He had that lumpy look, like his bones didn’t grow quite right.”

Bentley drove in silence. He gripped the wheel hard enough to turn his already pale hands fish-belly white. I suddenly understood why, and I felt like a grade-A bastard. In all the confusion and fear and mess of the morning, I’d lost sight of the real tragedy.

“We…didn’t know her that well,” I said, not sure if I should even bring Sophia up. I wanted to console him. I didn’t know how.

He didn’t answer for a couple minutes.

“She was different,” he finally said. “Twenty years ago. Sophia wasn’t always…sick. I know you’d only seen her at the Garden once or twice, but back in the nineties, she could close the place down. The three of us: me, Corman, and Sophia. Last of the old school. Then her mind began to falter. The hallucinations started, the delusions. We tried to get her help, but she’d never stay on the pills for long.”

“Bentley—” Jennifer started to say, but he silenced her with a shake of his head.