Authors: Craig Schaefer
“Stay and watch, Danny,” Justine cooed. She moved closer with the drill. “We’re just getting warmed up.”
• • •
I emerged into sunshine and heat like a long-lost cave explorer, slamming the kitchen door behind me. Then I staggered over to the picket fence, doubled over, and threw up on the freshly mowed grass. I leaned against the rough wooden fencepost with one hand until I could catch my breath.
After the basement, the quiet and peaceful suburban street was surreal. Nothing seemed real, nothing but the memory of that burning-flesh stench. I could still taste it in the back of my throat, no matter how many lungfuls of dry, hot air I gulped down.
Nicky knew. I had two encounters with Harmony Black in two days, and suddenly I got a front-row seat at his little torture show? I was a magician, and “coincidence” wasn’t a word in our vocabulary. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t getting too chummy with the enemy. After all, I knew more of his dirty secrets than almost anyone alive. If I wanted to burn him, I could.
And I did. I wanted to burn him to the fucking ground. Problem was, hurting him meant hurting people I cared about, too, people who would get dragged down by his sinking ship. Until I found a way around that, I was still Nicky’s guardian angel.
I called Jennifer from the car and asked for a meet. She hadn’t been too discreet about her unhappiness with Nicky lately, and I was pretty sure that “object lesson” in the basement wasn’t just for my benefit.
I cruised back to Bentley and Corman’s place to grab a shower and a change of clothes. I left the stubble on my cheeks, though. I had a feeling I’d be paying a recon visit to the good folks at the New Life Project in the very near future.
Night fell and the city woke up. I parked the car and walked half a block over to Fremont Street, drawn to the roiling of the drunken crowds and the blare of hard rock from towering speakers that were all volume, no finesse. A band on the open-air stage was ripping their way through a Van Halen tribute set and bouncing around like spandex-wrapped monkeys on crack. I waded through the cheering crowd, feeling underdressed without a plastic beer cup in my hand.
Meditation in motion was an acquired skill. I focused on my breathing and let the thoughts slip from my mind the same way I slipped through the press of bodies, letting my feet carry me along to the tempo of the drums. In the space between two heartbeats, I was nowhere at all.
Then I was in the shabby little foyer of an Indian restaurant, staring at the orange cigarette-burned carpet and inhaling the rich, spicy aroma of fresh tandoori chicken. That was how a visit to the Tiger’s Garden worked: you didn’t find the door, the door found you.
The gang was all there. Bentley and Corman held court over a feast of scarlet-spiced chicken and jasmine rice, and judging from the empty glasses, they’d gotten an early start on the night’s drinking. Mama Margaux sat across from them, nursing a rum hurricane, with her hair done up in an ornate beehive. Her profile made me think of ancient Egyptian queens. Jennifer spotted me first and waved me over to the table, gesturing to an empty chair.
Amar intercepted me halfway there. He was the Garden’s only waiter, possibly the cook and owner too, but he wouldn’t talk about anything that wasn’t on the menu. He held out a polished brass-rimmed tray bearing a single glass.
“Your whiskey and Coke, sir.”
Time worked a little funny inside the Tiger’s Garden. Your order was always placed long before you arrived, and it was always exactly what you wanted. Most of us had stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago.
“There he is,” Corman called out. “Have a seat, kiddo. Soup’s on.”
My stomach gave an involuntary clench at the sight of the food. I couldn’t help but think back to my first run-in with Naavarasi in Denver. She had her own “restaurant,” and to seal a deal I’d eaten…I still didn’t know what, not for sure, and she wouldn’t tell me. That was her game: to keep me up at night, torturing me with the possibilities until I gave her what she wanted in exchange for the truth.
The joke was on her. The idea of learning the truth scared me more than not knowing.
I
did my best to push Naavarasi out of my mind as I sat down at the table and took a sip from my glass. Perfectly mixed, as always, and strong on the Jack. Just what I needed to get my feet back under me. Bentley looked over and frowned.
“Daniel? Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”
I didn’t sugarcoat it. These people were my family. Not by blood, but blood didn’t mean a damn thing next to what we had together.
“Just came back from a little face time with Nicky Agnelli,” I said. “Jen, you ever do business with a guy named Clay Boswell?”
“Little bit,” she said. “He runs a B&E crew out of Summerlin. Sometimes he’d snatch my kind of merchandise and I’d take it off his hands for a cut. We’re gonna do lunch next week, why?”
“Cancel your reservations. Clay went looking to make a deal with the feds. Nicky found out and gave him to the twins to play with. I was invited to watch, and by ‘invited’ I mean they stood me right in front of the poor bastard while the twins went to town on him and Nicky made not-so-veiled threats. He wants to make sure we know he’s still the king of the castle.”
“Son of a
bitch
,” Jennifer said. The table thumped under her fist.
“Perhaps it’s time,” Bentley said, “for you both to seriously consider a visit to Agent Black. Lay your cards on the table, and take what she offers.”
Corman nodded. “I know you’re worried about the fallout, kiddo, but me and Bentley can take care of ourselves. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve pulled a vanishing act. Nicky’s goons will never find us.”
“Not happening,” I said. “One good thing came out of this little nightmare: now we know Nicky’s not shopping for a deal of his own. He’s convinced he can ride this out until the task force unravels or Black just gives up and goes home.”
“Can he?” Margaux said.
I shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first racket boss to get taken down in Vegas, not by a long shot, but he’s got access to the kind of resources no human gangster could dream of. Bugsy Siegel didn’t have a direct hotline to hell.”
“Actually,” Bentley started to say, then shook his head and fluttered his hand in the air. “Never mind.”
I looked over at Jennifer. “I know you’re pissed at Nicky, but you need to dial it down some. He’s feeling cornered, and you know what that means. If he thinks you’re going to be any kind of a threat, he’ll shoot first and ask questions never.”
“That
kochon
wouldn’t dare,” Margaux said. The faint crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes tightened. “What about the truce? The rules are the rules. We don’t rob from him, he doesn’t cross us.”
The Vegas occult underground had always had an uneasy peace with Nicky, mostly because of how many of us had worked for him in one way or another. It was professional courtesy backed up by the promise of mutually assured destruction. He could take out any one of us, if he put his back into it, but he knew that would bring every magician in the city down on his head at once. That was one fight nobody would be walking away from.
“Different rules, sugar,” Jennifer drawled. “I pay out to Nicky to keep my business running, not that it’s done me a dog’s lick of good lately. That means he has a certain proprietary interest in what I do and who I talk to. I could put a world of hurt on him if I talked to the feds. Rules or no rules, if he thinks I’m gonna pull that trigger, he’s gonna pull
his
trigger.”
Margaux leaned back in her chair and drank her hurricane, glowering.
“
Chak kochon gen samdi pa-l
,” she said.
“Meaning?” I said.
“Each pig gets its own Saturday,” she said, contemplating her drink. “When I was a little girl, back home in Haiti, Saturday morning is when we’d slaughter the pigs.”
• • •
Mob mentality is like wildfire. It spreads fast and hard, and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by really smart people making really bad decisions. In the middle of a riot or a mass panic, the first thing to do is get the hell out, cool down, and collect your senses. I paid my tab and headed out to taste the night air.
Harmony Black had started a slow-motion avalanche, and I didn’t know how to stop the rocks from raining down. Nicky was getting panicky, so the people under him were getting panicky, which spilled over into my crowd. It wouldn’t take much of a push to get everybody tearing at everybody else’s throats. Pretty soon somebody was going to do something stupid, and the entire Vegas underworld would burn for it. That probably suited Agent Black just fine, but it was my family standing in the cross fire. I needed to shut this thing down before it got completely out of control.
I had twelve calls on my phone in the last hour, all hang-ups from Pixie. She didn’t leave voicemails, as a general rule, because she was afraid of the NSA listening in. There was no chance of talking over the raucous din on Fremont Street, so I waited until I was away from the crowds and in my car before I called her back. She picked up on the first ring.
“Where the hell did you find these guys?” she said, sounding breathless. I heard the clacking of a keyboard in the background, her fingers flying faster than bullets.
“Nice to talk to you too, Pix. Which guys?”
“The New Life Project! Holy crap, Faust, there is some serious craziness going on here. First of all, they’re not a 501(c)3. They’re not a charity at all.”
I shifted in the vinyl seat.
“What are they, then?”
“Nada. They don’t exist. Bogus entity, no papers. Here’s the thing, though: their shelter is legally owned by McMillan Trade Group LLC. McMillan is just a holding company. It doesn’t do or make…well,
anything
. They’re one hundred percent owned by the Nevada Heritage Coalition. The NHC’s a political action committee.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Why would a PAC want to start up a charity and bury it two layers deep?”
“Wait for it. The NHC is basically Senator Alton Roth’s reelection machine. Not only is he their sole beneficiary, they’re playing all kinds of games with the campaign financing rules. Like they fund him up to the legal cap, then they pour even more funding into his street teams and sponsoring voter registration drives in neighborhoods that lean his way. On top of that, they pay for ‘independently funded’ attack ads going after his opponents.”
The name set off alarm bells. Roth was Lauren Carmichael’s bought-and-paid-for man in the Senate. It was his influence that had pointed the feds in Nicky’s direction, Lauren’s little dose of payback for Nicky’s betrayal.
“Is that even legal?” I said.
“Legal-ish. Ready for the good part? I got my hands on their donor list, and it’s uber-shady. Tons of individual contributions, but that’s a smoke screen. Half these names are just pulled off a state census. The money transfers tell the real story: the vast majority of NHC’s funding comes from two sources. The first is Ausar Biomedical.”
I scratched the back of my neck and glanced at my rearview mirror. This wasn’t a great street to be hanging out on, especially after midnight.
“Name rings a bell,” I said.
“You probably remember the media coverage. Back in the early nineties, Ausar was testing a new fertility treatment. Just small trial runs, but the result was…ugh. You remember the thalidomide babies? Like that, but even worse. A lot worse. I’m gonna have nightmares for a week just from the pictures. They got sued into oblivion after that and went into receivership. The company still exists, on paper, but it’s been inactive for a little over twenty years.”
Twenty years. My jaw tightened. Twenty years ago, Lauren Carmichael went to Nepal, and she damn near destroyed the world with the secrets she brought back.
Like I said, I didn’t have much faith in coincidences.
“If Ausar doesn’t have any money,” I said, “how is it making secret donations to Roth’s PAC?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. Literally. It looks like they hid a metric butt-ton of cash from the government, and they’ve spent years slipping it into NHC’s pockets through offshore intermediaries, turning it into crisp clean campaign dollars.”
“Money laundering,” I said.
“That’s a bingo,” Pixie said. “Now guess who their other big corporate donor is?”
I didn’t have to guess. I already knew, down in my gut.
“The Carmichael-Sterling Group,” I said.
“Then we get to the outbound cash, which is where things get even weirder. Not all of it’s going to support Roth.”
“How do you know that?”
She fell silent for a moment, concentrating. I listened to her fingers rattling over the keys.
“Because I’m rooting around inside one of their bank accounts right now,” Pixie said. “Duh. They’ve been making secret payments to a guy named Angus Caine. Former British Special Air Service, now president and owner of Xerxes Security Solutions. They’re a private military contractor based out of the UK, like Blackwater but with an even nastier reputation.”
“Mercenaries,” I said. “Senator Roth’s got mercenaries on his payroll.”
I’d been assuming that Roth’s hands were as clean as your average politician’s—just dirt under the nails, not blood—and that he’d helped Lauren out in exchange for cash under the table. A simple trade of favors. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Pixie said.
I turned the key. The Barracuda’s engine fired to life with a hungry growl.
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I need to get inside that building.”
Fortunately, I’d been handed an invitation.
I
barely slept that night. I tossed and turned on Bentley and Corman’s scratchy couch, nursing a twinge in my back. When I finally drifted off, I dreamed I was standing in the middle of an earthquake on the Vegas Strip, the street ripping open beneath my feet.
The fury of a shattered world turned into the staccato buzzing of my phone, vibrating against the coffee table. I reached over, nearly tumbling off the couch, and pressed it against my ear.
“‘Lo?” I mumbled, head half-buried against the cushion.