The Everything Box (3 page)

“Damn. We are feeling good. Okay, it's waffles all around then.”

Coop made it back to the door, dropped onto the hall floor, and packed up his gear.

Not bad, he thought. A tough job, but he got it done. He felt better than he had in months.

“You know,” said Phil. “It's still a few hours until dawn.”

Coop looked up at the walls. The Bellicoses were out of town at their summer place in whatever milder country the rich had decided to strip-mine this season. He and Phil had the place to themselves. Old masters hung in gilt frames on the walls. Antique Persian carpets covered the floors. Even the bowl holding a pile of wax fruit on a nearby table was gold. He shook his head.

“I was thinking the same thing, but no. The job went all right and now we're leaving.”

“Buck, buck, buck,” said Phil, doing a fairly convincing impression of a Rhode Island Red.

“Pipe down, Phil. I still have some professional pride left.”

“You still think this one job is going to get your rep back?”

“Why not? No one has ever made it in and out of Bellicose Manor alive. Except for a couple of hiccups, things went just like I planned.”

“Uh. No, they didn't.” Phil cleared his throat.

Coop finished packing and looked up from the floor.

Damn.

“My snitch said this place would be empty for the whole week.”

He felt Phil twirl around in his skull like he was looking for an ejection seat.

“Well, I'm gone,” Phil said. “Good luck.”

“Don't you dare.”

Down the hall, a little blond girl in Wonder Woman footie pajamas stood and stared at them. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and squinted when she saw him, like she wasn't sure Coop was real. He froze, hoping that she'd keep one foot in dreamland until he had time to get out.

“Do you really think you're that lucky?” said Phil.

The little girl twitched. Something changed in her eyes. Coop knew it was the “Nope, you're awake” part of her brain finally kicking in. She dropped the glass of water and screamed. Coop stood and put a finger to his lips, hoping the sleepy kid might obey an adult simply out of habit. And she might have, if her face hadn't peeled open like a flesh banana, revealing a snarling red baboonlike mug.

“Oh, crap,” said Coop and Phil.

Not a kid, Coop thought. A guard imp. There weren't supposed to be any left in the house, much less one in little-girl drag.

Coop reached into a pocket on his bloody leg and pulled out a packet the size of a walnut. The imp screamed again, its human disguise falling away completely. As it charged him, Coop threw the packet on the floor. A cloud of white smoke filled the corridor. When the fog cleared, three Coops stood side by side. Two of them took off running in different directions. The real Coop stood as still as a bacon-wrapped rat at a Rottweiler convention. Guard imps weren't known for their brains, and most were attracted to motion. But this imp just stood there.

“Oh, hell,” said Phil. “We got the Stephen Hawking of imps. It's onto us.”

“Shut up and let me think.”

One of the extra Coops came back down the hall, looked around, and sprinted past them down the stairs.

It was too much for the imp. It finally ran after him, screaming like a banshee taking first place in an air-raid-siren sing-along contest.

“See you around, smart guy—”

Something snapped behind Coop and the whole house shook. He turned around just in time to see the dragon swallowing the last of his broken jack.

“The imp woke it!” screamed Phil. “We're double screwed! Do something, numb nuts!”

Coop ducked as the dragon blew a roiling blast of crimson fire over his head. The beast shook its shoulders, rocking the whole house. The wall started to crack as the monster pushed its way through and into the dining room.

“At least it's not a Wendigo,” said Coop.

“You're not funny,” said Phil.

“No, but I'm a good shot.”

Coop took a flat lead conjuring coin from his alchemy kit and flipped it across the room. It spun through the air, striking the nameplate on the front of the painting. The frame dropped like a guillotine onto the dragon's neck, trapping it. It roared and shot out another jet of fire, but Coop was already down the corridor and out the same window he'd come in, shooting away from the house on the zip line he'd set up earlier. Phil whooped and jumped around in his skull.

“Suck on that, you monster assholes!” yelled Phil.

Coop was halfway across the manor grounds, heading for the stone wall that ringed the place, when he felt the zip line sag. He looked back and saw the imp sliding toward him down the line by one of its claws.

“Sorry, man, but those things eat poltergeists, too, and I'm not dressed for an evisceration,” said Phil. “I'm out of here.”

This time the poltergeist meant it, and Coop felt the sudden emptiness in his head that always followed Phil's exit to wherever it was he went when he vanished. He couldn't even feel angry for the guy deserting him. If he could desert himself right now, he would.

He looked back over his shoulder. The imp was close, almost close enough to grab him.

Coop reached into his suit and pulled out the secret weapon he
kept for just such emergencies: a set of nail clippers. While the imp took swipes at his face with its free claw, Coop calmly clipped the tips of the ones holding onto the zip line. The imp, possessing just a little less brainpower than a wedge of cheddar cheese, didn't seem to understand what was happening and why it was slipping. Even when it began to fall it stared at its hand in wonder. Coop thought that he might have seen some kind of realization spread across the imp's face just before it hit the ground, but he was moving too fast to be sure.

When he was past the trees outside the wall, Coop squeezed the hand brake on the grip, which slowed him enough that he could jump off the line and hit the ground running. He headed straight for his car, parked at the end of a nearby cul-de-sac.

I'm gonna make it.

He didn't make it.

The car gave an encouraging beep when he pushed the button on his key ring to unlock the doors. The moment he got the driver's-side door open, though, lights from a semicircle of cars hit him. He had to put a hand up in front of his face to see what was happening. Red and white bars on a few of the cars pulsed like a jailhouse disco. Coop dropped his bag to the ground. Cops. At least a dozen of them.

They've been waiting for me this whole time
.

At least Phil wasn't around to start another round of skull karaoke.

Two men in suits reached him first. They flashed badges, but Coop couldn't read them in the harsh light. He didn't need to. He knew exactly who they were. A couple of Abracadabrats: detectives from LAPD's Criminal Thaumaturgy squad.

The taller of the two shoved him back against the car, reached into the front pocket of Coop's suit, and pulled out the stolen folder.

How did he know what to look for . . . and where?

The detective broke the seal, thumbed through the papers, then showed them to his partner. The second detective looked them over, sighing at what he read. It occurred to Coop that he had no idea, beyond a folder, what he'd been hired to steal.

What the hell did I just give them? Missile launch codes? The formula for Coke? Abe Lincoln's porn stash?
Whatever it was, he knew it was bad.

“Isn't someone supposed to read me my rights somewhere around now?” Coop said.

The shorter detective drew closer, shaking his head. Coop could finally see him when he stood in front of the light and blocked it. He was a squat man, roughly the shape and size of a mailbox, and, from the look on his face, with even less of a sense of humor.

“This is bad, Coop. Real bad,” said the detective.

Oh, good. He even knows my name. This night can't get any better,
thought Coop.

A uniformed Abracadabrat spun Coop around and handcuffed him, spun him around again to face the talking mailbox. The look on the cop's face slipped from utter disgust to amusement as he punched a button on his cell phone.

“Yeah,” said the detective. “He's right here. Put the asshole on.”

The mailbox held the phone up to Coop's ear. Coop didn't hear anything for a few seconds. Then someone started talking.

“Coop? That you? It's me, Morty.”

Morton Ramsey. He'd known Morty since they were both six. Coop didn't have any magical skills at all, but Morty was a natural Flasher—he could open any lock, window, or door he encountered. The problem was, Morty was a lousy crook.

And right now, an even lousier friend.

“Hey. I'm sorry, man,” Morty said. “They picked me up last night. It was my third strike. I had to give them someone. No hard feelings?”

The mailbox took the phone from Coop's ear and hung up. He raised his eyebrows at the thief.

“Anything to say, smart guy?”

“Yeah,” said Coop. “Duck.”

It burst through the trees, hissing and limping, heading straight for them. The detective turned around just in time to get a face full of imp, all teeth and what was left of its claws out, and really, really pissed. One of the uniforms shoved Coop facedown on the hood of
his car, where he spent the next several minutes listening to a small army of L.A.'s finest trying to pull the creature off the screaming detective.

At least I get a floor show,
he thought. Then,
They're going to blame me for this, too
.

Still, as he listened to the mayhem, he couldn't help but smile.

Eighteen months later.

OUT OF GUILT AND BASIC CROOK SOLIDARITY, MORTY
got Coop the best lawyer he could afford, which basically meant he could dress himself and read the charges, but not much else. Coop didn't like Ferthington, the lawyer, the moment he laid eyes on him. The guy smiled when they first shook hands. Coop didn't trust lawyers who smiled too much. “Smiling lawyers are fatalists and you're the fatality,” an old con had once told him. Looking at Ferthington's eyes, Coop felt like shark chum.

When he told him about it Morty opened his hands, groping for words. “Maybe it wasn't fatalism. Maybe it was irony.”

“Oh, that's better. Ironic time passes much faster than regular time.”

In the end, Coop didn't get the chair (not that he was going to). But the judge was friends with the Bellicose family and sentenced Coop to ten years' hard time.

Ferthington smiled as the bailiffs led Coop out of the courtroom. It wasn't fatalism or irony. It was the smile of someone not bright enough to know that he'd been as useful in court as a trout with a speech impediment. Coop started to shout something, but one of the bailiffs helpfully jammed a nightstick into his side, doubling him
over and thereby saving him from the extra time the “attack” would have added to his sentence.
Maybe I should have gotten the cop for a lawyer,
he thought as he lay in the back of the prison bus, nursing a bruised kidney.

At least the other soon-to-be inmates were impressed that Coop had already been in a dustup with a guard, so they left him alone.

And while it wasn't the finest moment of his career, at least it covered up how entirely freaked out he was to be back in a bus on the way to jail.

The prison didn't have a name. Just GPS coordinates and a Viking rune that translated roughly as “Seriously, would you take a look at these dumbfucks?”

Inside, the jail was known as Surf City because of how close to the ocean it wasn't. Surf City was in the high desert and most of it was underground. This kept it out of the public and, more important, the press's eye. No need to feed the crackpot industry by letting regular saps get wind that, yes, magical thieves, sasquatches, and succubi were all real and on a bad day just as likely to steal your Prius as suck out your soul.

When Coop got the notice that he was going to be released after serving only eighteen months, it was a mystery to him, and he didn't like mysteries that involved his skin and bones. At first he thought the prison had gotten his file mixed up with some other con's, but when the warden convinced him that no, it was really Coop who was getting out, he kept his mouth shut and his eyes down, which meant a certain amount of banging into things, but better safe than sorry. Still, the whole thing bothered him. Even with good behavior, he should have been a good three years from a parole hearing.

In the two weeks between being told he was getting out and the time of his release, Coop went from puzzled to suspicious, back to puzzled, then even more suspicious, and finally, he settled into a nice long stretch of grim paranoia. Maybe he was a lab rat in a prison psych experiment and when he reached the gate to get out, the warden and all the guards would shout “April Fool's!” and drag him back to his cell.

“Good luck, Coop,” said Rodney, his cellmate, as he was packing up.

“Luck? Why do I need luck? Did you hear something?”

“Relax,” Rodney said. “It's just an expression, like ‘see you around' or ‘take it easy.' It doesn't mean nothing.”

“Right,” said Coop, trying to sound cool or, at least, a dignified level of panicked. “Nothing. But you didn't hear anything, did you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Okay.”

Rodney put out his hand to shake as Coop prepared to leave. Rodney was one of the many things Coop wouldn't miss about prison. It wasn't that Rodney was a bad guy. In fact, he was a fine cellmate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut and he never touched any of Coop's stuff without permission. Beyond that, Coop didn't know exactly what Rodney was and he was too polite to ask. He knew that before jail Rodney had haunted a swamp out by Cienega Grande and he got the feeling that he'd had some kind of drive-in horror-movie run-in with a vanful of idiot city kids over a spring break weekend. What Coop was most acutely aware of was that Rodney smelled like a garbage dump dry-humping a slaughterhouse in the large intestine of a sick elephant.

Coop stood there for a few seconds staring at Rodney's hand, just long enough that it become uncomfortable for both of them. Rodney was withdrawing his perpetually damp mitt when Coop reached out and shook it. Rodney beamed at him with his moss-colored teeth.

“Take care of yourself, Rodney,” said Coop as he walked out of the cell.

He waited until he was at the end of the tier before sniffing his fingers. It was like his hand was made of liverwurst that someone had forgotten under a moldy sofa.

On his way out, Coop made sure to shake hands with every guard in his cell block.

Then, just like that, it was over and he was out. After all his paranoid fantasies, the walk out of jail was almost anticlimactic. He was outside the gate in the same blue suit he'd had on the day he'd been convicted. It was just a little baggier now.

Coop walked to the bus stop under the blasting desert sun and sat on the bench with a plastic bag that held all his worldly possessions. No one had told him how often the bus came by, but he wasn't going to move his ass until it did. He wished he'd been able to eat breakfast. Or dinner. But his stomach had been too jumpy and the last thing he wanted was to be sick on release day. Still, sitting there in his too-loose clothes, state-issued sneakers, and prison haircut, he'd never felt more like a loser con in his life.

A black Corvette sped up the two-lane road in front of the prison and squealed to a stop, leaving twin streaks of rubber on the asphalt. Half the body was Bondo-painted black in an attempt to match the rest of the car, which just made it look like it was slowly turning into an alligator.

“Hey, jailbird!” yelled the driver.

Coop lowered his head to see who was inside. The driver pushed a button and rolled down one of the side windows.

It was Morty. He was only a few years older than Coop, but already starting to go gray. He wore a red corporate-style pullover, chinos, and loafers. Coop thought he looked like the assistant manager at an Orange County Burger King. Morty beamed at Coop as he leaned over and opened the passenger door.

“Hop inside. I'll drive you to town, Jesse James.”

Coop sat there for a minute before getting up. He started for the passenger door, stopped, and went around to the driver's side. Morty got out and opened his arms to hug him. The two men embraced. Coop moved them around a little so that Morty's back was to the prison, shielding him from anyone who happened to be watching from inside. When he was sure he was safe, Coop kneed Morty in the balls. Not hard enough to double him up. That would attract too much attention. Coop tagged him just hard enough that Morty dropped back down on the driver's seat seeing stars and trying to catch his breath. Coop went back around the car and got on the bus, which was just pulling up. As Morty watched him go, all he managed to say was “Urgh . . .”

It was four hours back to L.A. The bus was empty except for Coop and a couple of cons he didn't recognize. Tough guys from one of the prison werewolf gangs, by the look of them. Coop stared out the window, watching the complete lack of scenery roll by, conspicuously not looking at the wolf crew, hoping they noticed his extreme inattention.

The bus dropped them on Seventh Street near Pershing Square. As it rumbled off, a blue Ford SUV pulled up, blasting black metal on the sound system. Coop didn't know what band, but he recognized the style because it sounded like a gorilla stuck in a clothes dryer. Between the shaggy, headbanger lycan driver, the haze of weed rolling out the side door, and the broken side window, the SUV could not possibly have looked more stolen. Coop had to admire the wolves' complete lack of giving a shit when he noticed that they'd noticed him noticing them. One of the gang who'd been on the bus stuck his butt out of the side door and dropped his pants, waving his human ass as the rest of the gang gave Coop the finger. The van sped off trailing a thick ganja fog, taking the gangsters away to party with friends, while Coop knew all he had going was a date with a single bed in a one-star hotel room, with overfriendly roaches and a TV stuck on the Weather Channel.

He heard a car honk from up the street. When he turned, Coop saw Morty in the Corvette about half a block behind him. He got out of the car and waited on the sidewalk, but didn't get any closer. As Coop walked over, Morty took a step back.

“Don't go getting all Rowdy Roddy Piper again,” Morty said. “Who do you think got you out of jail early?”

“You got me in in the first place.”

“And I got you out.”

“How? You don't know anybody. I don't know anybody and you know even less people than me.”

“That's because you're antisocial. You should get out more.”

“I don't want to know people. They get you arrested.”

Morty ignored the remark and looked around.

“Not the people I know. They get you unarrested.”

Coop shook his head and turned to go.

“I don't want to hear it.”

“You kind of have to,” said Morty.

Coop stopped.

“Why?”

“That's how I got you out. I told him you were good for the job.”

“You know what I'm good for right now?”

“What?”

“Not talking to you.”

Coop jaywalked through traffic to a bus stop across the street. Digging in the plastic bag, he came up with enough change for the fare. When he turned around, Morty was right beside him.

“You just said it yourself, you don't know anybody. Where you going to go?”

“Away from you and your shifty friends.”

A bus arrived and Coop started onto it, then stepped down.

“You have a cigarette?”

“Sure,” said Morty. “Here. Keep the pack.”

“Gee, the whole pack?” said Coop. “I guess this makes up for everything.”

The door closed and the bus rumbled away with Coop on it.