Tricks of the Trade (9 page)

With everything else going on, between the two new cases and the underlying worry about where Venec had disappeared to, that thought about lying should have come and gone. Instead it nagged at me. Lou and I went our separate ways on the sidewalk and I—on a whim—decided to walk home rather than taking the subway. It was only a couple of miles, and I felt the need for fresh
air, rather than being packed into rush-hour mass transit. I stopped in the local bodega for a bottle of water and a halvah bar to have for dessert, and started walking.

We had been funded not to hand out judgment but to establish the facts—the where and the who—of a crime, which would lead us to the why and the how. But facts didn't exist in a vacuum, neatly cut and packaged. We had to shake them out of the messier tangle of human emotions and motivations.

Black and white. Truth and lies. The ki-rin hadn't been able to lie, but it had deceived. Aden Stosser, our boss's sister, lied about us and what we did, and thought that it was the truth. Sharon suspected that our newest client was lying about the break-in but he was so good at it, she couldn't tell. Sociopath. Maybe.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott, not Shakespeare. Deception and truth and half truths. It was the reason we did this job; so that nobody could hide behind magic and deny their actions or deeds. And if sometimes we allowed those actions to be buried again, for the greater good…

“It's not our job.”

I swear, I thought I'd said it out loud until I realized that Venec was walking alongside me.

“Motherofgod.” It came out in a hot breath, and I shuddered at how easily he'd managed to come up next to me, without my even noticing. “Also, goddamn it. I thought you said this thing would make us more aware of each other, not less?”

The one time we'd talked about it. God knows what
he'd have discovered by now. I swear, every time I adjusted to this shit, the universe smirked at me.

“I found you,” Venec pointed out, sounding like he was talking about a particularly boring weather report.

Yeah. He had. How? I touched my wall, and was surprised at how thick it was. He found me through that? Hell. I thinned it a little, and the heat of his presence came through, like standing next to a sunlamp. We walked the rest of the block in silence, as I tried to adjust it so that I could tell where he was, but not feel like he was quite so damn close.

Except he was. His arm kept touching the sleeve of my leather jacket, and I would almost swear he was walking close enough that the fabric of my black skirt brushed his thigh more than once, but when I looked down, there was a professional foot-plus between us.

I thought about asking him where the hell he'd disappeared to, this afternoon, but didn't.

“It's not our job,” he said again, finally. “To save the world. It's not even our job to tell the world that they're in danger.”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about now. But he wasn't really talking to me; I knew that even without the Merge. He was working something out in that twisty, very smart brain of his, and I was just the audience. So I just walked, and waited.

“I was followed this afternoon,” he said finally, not so much getting to the point as putting it aside. “Human, but not Talent. He, I'm pretty sure it was a he, or a very butch woman, followed me for almost an hour, always
keeping half a block behind. Didn't do anything, just watched.”

I thought about that for a few steps. “You think it was the Bitch, sending someone?”

I didn't really think that naming Aden Stosser would summon her…exactly. But I wasn't going to take the chance. Big Dog's sister hated us, for reasons only she and Ian and maybe Venec understood, and had tried to shut us down before, first through intimidation and then direct attack.

Ben sighed at my use of the extremely unaffectionate nickname, but he didn't bother scolding us any longer. She had earned it. “Maybe. Ian swears the Council is watching her too closely, after the last dustup. Won't stop her—nothing short of a nuclear blast stops her—but he expects she'll go through the Council now, try to worm her way into influencing votes, keeping us from being recognized, maybe block anyone from aiding us. And that sort of manipulation is Ian's territory, not ours. Thank god.” He shook his head, and I felt the overwhelming need to run my hand through those messy curls, push the dark hair away from his face so that I could see him better.

My fingers stayed locked by my side.

We were two blocks from my apartment, and I was starting to wonder where this was going. If he asked to come in…what was I going to say?

The old Bonnie wouldn't have blinked: a hot guy with good manners, smart and built, and definitely interested? Duh! Only I'd already determined that I wasn't the old Bonnie.

And I couldn't afford to take a tumble with Benjamin Venec. Not because I thought he'd fire me if things went bad. I knew better, now. That wasn't his style. I wasn't even worried that it would make working together uncomfortable, at least, not between the two of us. I knew me, and I knew him. It was the rest of the team. For all that they joked, I had a feeling that they would freak if they knew what was really going on, and Stosser…

Did Ian know? Had Ben told him? My brain couldn't even go there. Anyway, I wasn't going to and he wasn't going to and that had been decided already. And even if they handled it fine, I chose my partners, damn it. I didn't need some mystical matchmaker shoving me.

I could hear J sigh, all the way from Boston.

We walked another block, but he didn't say anything more.

“We need to fine-tune the organ-check spell,” I said, moving the conversation back firmly onto work ground, where we both knew what the hell was going on. “I knew that there was water in the lungs, so our DB definitely drowned, but the body's already been released, which means no way to check what kind of water.” There was an organization that claimed fatae bodies when they ended up in the morgue, and disposed of them either through the breed representative, or on their own. Bad luck for us; this once they weren't backed up. “Anyway, even if I'd thought of it…salt water from fresh? I'm not sure we can do that, the way the cantrip is structured right now.”

You had to be very specific when you were working with forensic magic; we'd learned that the hard way.
Ask a vague question, and you got run over with too much information. Too much information was worse than none, because you couldn't figure out what was important. But finding the right balance meant that it was harder to create a one-spell-fits-all cantrip; everything had to be more specialized than we'd thought.

That was where I excelled; fine-turning the details. But we couldn't spare me from the field, not with two open jobs.

Venec nodded, accepting my assessment. “Do you want to work on it, or should I put it in the fishbowl?”

The fishbowl was exactly that—a glass bowl on a table in the smaller conference room, the windowless one that was best shielded for current-use. If you had an idea, or a problem, you wrote it down and tossed it into the bowl, and whenever someone had spare time and energy, they'd go fishing for a problem to solve.

“Fishbowl, for now, although I'll keep poking at it. The body's already been disposed of, so no way to go back and check.” I'd never asked what the fatae normally did with their dead; I suspected asking would be rude, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know, anyway. J always said that sex and burial traditions were where most cultural misunderstandings happened.

We turned a corner, our steps almost perfectly matching. I wondered if he was aware of that.

“What's your working theory?” he asked.

“On the drowning? It was either a personal grudge—” the most likely explanation when dealing with the fatae, who tended to have short fuses and long memories “—or money.” If it wasn't some personal insult, it was
money. The fatae just didn't get het up about sex the way some humans did—at least far's I'd ever heard. Money, though, they were just as wound up as any spending species. “Why else do you get dumped in the East River?”

“Drugs? There was a nice little trade in heroin a while back, nasty pure stuff that would kill a human in one dose.” Venec went thoughtful again. “The craze seems to have faded, but there could be a new joyjuice on the market. You might want to ask Danny.”

Danny Hendrickson, former NYPD, current P.I., and one of the few human/fatae crossbreeds I knew about. Danny was a good guy, and had helped us out before, so long as it didn't interfere with his own cases. He was also fun to go drinking with, not that we'd had time to do that, much. I nodded. “I'll call him when I get home. He keeps weird hours, I might be able to reach him, or leave a message.”

The fatae, being
of
magic but not
using
magic, could enjoy the benefits of modern technology like laptop computers, cell phones, and answering machines. I tried not to be too jealous.

“Do you think we might have a drug war among the fatae? Christ.” The idea kind of creeped me out. Fatae were scary enough on their own; they didn't need drugs, especially drugs that led to violence, added to the mix.

Venec went from peer voice to Big Dog voice without blinking. “Don't rule anything out until we know it's not a viable theory.”

I winced. Okay, I deserved that. “Right. Drugs, or drug-trafficking. Danny. I'm on it.”

And then we were at the stoop of my building, and
I paused, my hand reaching out for the railing. The air around us was the dusky thickness that made it almost impossible to read someone's expression, even if they were right next to you. I could have let down the walls a little more to feel what was going on…but I didn't.

There was a hesitation in the air, like the entire damn city was waiting to see what we'd do.

I wanted him. Every damn cell of my body wanted him, and even knowing that it was one of my worst ideas didn't dull the ache.

“I'll see you tomorrow, then,” he said. “Sleep well.”

And then he was gone, walking down the street like the UPS guy who'd knocked-and-dropped, and was on to his next delivery.

A wave of hurt swept through me, so unexpected that I almost called after him to demand an explanation, an apology.

Instead, I pulled my key from my shoulder bag, and let myself inside.

 

The shiver of unease that passed over the city days before had settled, for the moment, at the edge of Central Park. The usual steady noise of evening traffic on the avenue had been overlaid with a snarling mess of human voices and barking dogs. Two of the ubiquitous food carts that lurked along the perimeter had somehow slammed into each other, causing their contents—roasted nuts, for one, and hot pretzels and soda for the other—to spill all over the walkway, and the two owners to stand over the disaster, screaming at each other in two different languages, neither English, clearly insulting each other's
patrimony, while the two cops called to the scene tried to get someone to tell them, in English, what had happened.

Another vendor, off to the side and out of the direct line of sight, served up sodas to people who were drawn in to see what the fuss was about. The atmosphere had become less bucolic and more like an arena, spectators gathering to watch the blood spill.

“What happened?” one of them, a tall blonde with a small blond dog at the other end of a bright green leash, asked. The dog looked mournfully up at his mistress, who seemed oblivious, so the vendor slipped it half a hot dog that had fallen on the ground earlier.

“Damnedest thing. One minute they were doing bang-up business, you should pardon the expression,” the vendor said, deftly fitting the woman's hot dog onto a bun and handing it to her, “and the next thing there's a crash like you wouldn't believe, and they're going at each other like gangbusters. If the cops hadn't shown up, I bet there would have been blood.”

“You didn't see it?”

“Lady, I got a rule. I don't see nothing if it don't involve me. One guy hits another, somebody steals some lady's purse, your dog snitches one of my hot dogs…”

The blonde looked down just in time to see the last of the purloined sausage disappear into the dog's mouth, and let out a horrified cry. “Damn it, Snooks, you're going to throw it all up tonight, aren't you? Damn it.”

The vendor grinned, as though pleased at the distress in the woman's voice, but when she looked up again, his leathery face was solemn, and his gaze was more on the
still-arguing combatants than his customers. The cops had managed to calm them both down, hauling them to separate corners to get their reports, and, show over, the bystanders had started to move on. “Huh.” The vendor sounded disappointed. “I really thought they'd have done more than yell at each other.”

“It's a good thing the cops were nearby,” another man said, coming to the front of the line. “Pepsi, please.”

“Did you hear about the fight that broke out on the 72 crosstown last month?” his companion asked. “Speaking of cursing. The driver had to pull over and haul them off each other. Man, never ever piss off the little old ladies. They're fierce.”

They accepted their sodas and walked on, leaving the square that, fun over, was rapidly emptying of people. The hot dog vendor cocked his head and pursed his rubbery lips thoughtfully, his nostrils flaring as though scenting something pleasant. “Buses. I hadn't thought of buses. And subways!” The eyes that had seemed sunken and tired before now sparkled with a literal light, a muted dark gold. “Everyone trapped, tired, and anxious… Oh, that will be fun!”

His hand—oddly gnarled and twisted in the wrong direction, if you looked at it carefully—made a flat pass over the top of his cart, and the metal construct—hot dogs, sodas and all—disappeared.