Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer (2 page)

“All right,” I said. “Let’s cut our losses before someone sobers up and comes back.”

Mags grinned, patting his coat pocket where the cash resided, and then, from behind us, a voice.

“Aw, shit, this was just gettin’ interesting.”

I looked at Mags, whose eyes had bugged out of his head. Fucking useless. Arms the size of tree trunks and I’d seen him use them for real violence, but if you scared him even a little bit he went limp. Not for the first time, I wondered what in hell I was feeding him for.

I turned, and there was a man and a woman in the living room.

She was sitting in the deep easy chair, black leather so soft and dimpled it looked like it was snoring softly there on the deep-pile cream carpet. She was neither old nor young, an in-between face that was tight and lined but not precisely elderly. She wore too much makeup, applied inexpertly, like someone had loaded a shotgun with cosmetics and taken a shot at her. She was wearing what looked like a formal party dress, black and torn, and a smart-looking half jacket. Her yellow hair was piled up on her head in a mass of curls that was either complex or sloppy.

The man was fat, tall, and wearing a gray sweat suit, loose and stained. He was bald, and his head was one single puckered mass of scar tissue. Scars on scars, fat pink lines of cuts, his face so swollen and distorted he looked almost blind. In one slack hand he held a simple folding penknife, poised over his bare forearm.

“He your Bleeder?” She thrust her chin in Mags’s direction. “He’s big enough. But he won’t beat Terrance to the draw.”

I blinked, looked from her horrible face to Terrance, who stood there with all the expression and intelligence of a load-bearing column.

She sighed. “Okes, this was fun. We dummied up invisible when you walked in, wanted to see what you were running. Interesting grift. Like it. But here’s your lesson for the day, kiddo: Always make sure you’re actually alone in a clamshell like this, or someone’s gonna take your pearls. Dig?”

My blade was in my front pants pocket, an old razor attached with electrical tape to a toothbrush. I gave Terrance the slow look. He didn’t seem fast, but he had only one inch of space to cover. Behind me, the front door of the apartment beat at my back like a black wind, and I imagined I could feel all our suckers storming the elevators, their Charms faded, coming with bulls in tow to make us hurt.

“Mags,” I said slowly, “if that little piggie cuts himself, throw him through the window.”

I prayed Mags didn’t look entirely moronic. All I needed was blank-faced and his single angry line of eyebrow would do the rest. I wondered if I’d managed to clean all the cookie dough off his face.

Our interloper looked him over for a long moment, and hope leaped in my heart. She couldn’t be certain, I could see that. Mags was terrifying if you didn’t know him. If he didn’t speak. If nothing startled him. And then sometimes he
was
actually terrifying, almost murdering people by accident. Sometimes I felt like I’d been given a bear fresh from the forest and been told to teach him to dance, without having my arms torn off in the process.

Then she snorted. “Come on, then, hand over the
kosh
and we part friends, okes? Play dumb and I’ll teach you a lesson, you fucking
idimustari
.”

Little magician
. I hated the fucking words.

I pushed my hand into my pocket.

Terrance slashed his arm.

The woman sang out a song of Words.

Literally, a song, melodic, a fucking earworm, her voice light and pretty. I had a feeling I would remember that song for the rest of my life. I had my blade in my hand when the feeling of peace and happiness settled on me, soaking into my skin and filling me with a warm sense of satisfaction.

“Tha’s better,” the blond said with a smirk that was adorably cynical. “Now, laddie, the
kosh
, so we can be on our way.”

“Lem?”

I turned to look at Mags. He stared at me with simpleminded confusion on his face, and I smiled at him. Dear, stupid Magsie. “Give the nice lady the money,” I said. It was just cash. More where that came from.

Mags squinted at me, as if unsure he’d heard correctly, and I nodded, reassuring him. “Go on.”

I knew I’d been Nuked. I knew I’d been Charmed. Cast on. Something. But I didn’t care. Mags slowly extracted a bulging yellow envelope from his pocket and held it out. Our blond friend stepped over to him. Her bleeder, big and pink and rubbery, followed her with a shuffling sort of walk. His mouth hung open slightly, and he held his arm up in a curious curled pose. I had a vision of Terrance, slow and dumb as a brick, and maybe he was one of those people for whom bleeding for a living was a fucking promotion.

“Thanks,” she said, opening the envelope and flipping through the bills. “Pleasure robbing ya. Like I said, it’s a nice scheme. Next time you’ll know to canvass the place first, right?”

I smiled. “Right!”

She smiled back. It took ten years off her.

HELLER RAISED AN
eyebrow. “Lemme guess,” he said. “You don’t
have
my money. And let me get yer next line ready: You ain’t gonna be able to
get
my money.”

“Fuck that,” I said, feeling a flush creep up my neck. “I had it today. I’ll have it again tomorrow. Jesus fucked, just
wait
.”

“I
been
waiting!” Heller shouted, and the crowd noise died for a moment. “You fucking kid, fuck the wait. You either grease this palm right now or you’re working for me.”

I strained against the spell but couldn’t budge myself out of my chair. I forced myself to relax, breathing deeply and taking a moment. “What does ‘work for you’ mean, exactly?”

Heller glanced up over my shoulder and the invisible weight lifted. He smiled and dropped into the chair he’d placed next to me, leaning in close.

“That’s more like it,” he said, sounding genial again. “Reasonable. I’m a reasonable man, see, and what I like to see in other men is a similar sense of camaraderie, see? We’re all in this shitty boat together, I say, and everyone’s got to take a turn rowing. Why do people haveta always stir shit up?” Without turning, he reached out and grabbed the arm of a waitress as she hurried past us. She was heavyset and breathed through her mouth as she walked, her hair dyed something meant to be red. She stopped with a squawk, rounded on him, and then went quiet when she saw his leer.

“Two drops of brown, sweetheart,” he ordered, then released her and turned back to me. “ ‘Work for me’ means I need a Fixer for a job I’ve got in the can.”

I ran the word around a little. Since I’d hooked up with Hiram and convinced him to make me his apprentice, I’d heard a lot of fucked-up, crazy words used without a hint of embarrassment. Never this one though. “What’s a Fixer?”

“I got something coming through the docks. I got people handling the pickup, handling customs. I need someone who can cast and who can think, to be there and
fix
anything that goes wrong.”

I hated the sound of this. “Fix.”

“Cast, if necessary. Talk, if it works. Whatever the fuck. Someone sees something they shouldn’t, you fix it. One of my people gets sticky hands, you fix it.” He held up a hand to forestall any more questions. “I’m not what you would call a micromanager, Vonnegan. I don’t give a green turd
how
you do it. All I know is, my shit gets to me on schedule, in full, with no problems. Anything happens to threaten that, you
fix it
, you cunt.”

I processed this. “And we’re square?”

He shrugged. “And then we’re square. Only if there are no fucking
problems
. Think of it this way: You’re responsible for my shipment. It goes south, so do you.”

I leaned back and watched the lumpy waitress return from the bar and drop two thick glass tumblers of whiskey onto the table. I reached out and took mine between my thumb and forefinger. Saw my father, years ago, doing it exactly the same way. As if examining the glass, thinking profound thoughts. I looked around. The place was full of mages,
ustari
, but it was just like every place my father had dragged me to as a kid. Stale. Stuffy. Strangled.

All I knew about Heller, really, was that he had People. A lot of them were kids, pulled out of school to run his errands. But he also had Bleeders. And others: hangers-on, flunkies. If Heller came after us, what did we have? We had Mags’s angry expressions, the dozen or so spells I’d figured out, and my Disaster Sense, which had been ringing for so long and so loud I’d come to ignore it all the time.

Something gave way inside me. Fuck it.

“All right, I’ll be your Fixer,” I said. “And then we’re square.”

Heller grinned again, like a mouthful of peas. “And then we’re square.”

SOMEONE HAD CUT
the fence. One of Heller’s people, wearing a voluminous black raincoat, lifted the chain link and waved us through. The rain was coming down hard, a single gray sheet broken up into tiny bullets that stung and burned. Black Raincoat led us through a maze of ugly trailers that led to a maze of ugly shipping containers stacked three or four high, creating canyons of primary colors. Black Raincoat then led us to a small trailer, up on concrete blocks and wired up for electricity. He pushed the door open and waved us through, then slammed it behind us.

It was a cramped, depressing office. Three metal filing cabinets, an ugly desk that appeared to be made of sheet metal and oversized screws, a watercooler, a coffee machine, and a sense of gloom that was almost a physical thing. Sitting at the desk was a short black man wearing a newsboy cap and smoking a cigarette. He looked at me and smirked. Then he looked at Mags and he frowned.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You’re my minders, huh?”

I looked at Mags. I’d coached him to always look mean, no matter what. We had spent a few hours in the car flipping through the catalog of Mags’s inner world, and we’d settled on
hungry
for his mean expression. It was working okay, actually. I’d taken the precaution of not feeding him that morning.

I looked back at the black guy. “Minders?”

“Shit, you know, make sure I stick to my end of this shitheel deal I got dumped on me. Make sure I don’t get cold feet. Make sure Mr. Heller Sir’s shit comes through here nice and smooth like a greased turd.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and spat on the floor. “Don’t worry. You got easy duty today. I got the message. Ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong. Have a cup of coffee. Relax.”

I looked around the tiny office. There was nothing about it that hinted at even the slightest bit of relaxation. The walls were clad in a fake wood paneling that had been cribbed from some terrible past crime against style, the floor was soft in a disturbing way that hinted at a sinkhole beneath us, and the lights flickered and rattled and were too white, too clinical. All in all, I made a mental note to come back to this place whenever I was ready to kill myself.

Heller had told me there was one container coming in that would skip customs inspections. He’d made his arrangements, greased the wheels. I had the tracking number of the container for confirmation but no idea what was inside it—and I’d been told to keep it that way. Fair enough. If nothing went wrong, this was the easiest job ever. If something went wrong, I was supposed to simply make it go right again. When I’d asked Heller for some advice on how, exactly, to accomplish that, he’d reminded me that I was one of a small number of people in the world who could conceivably
cast a magic spell
on a situation, using a tone that had a lot of negative implications concerning my intelligence and gumption.

I looked back at the guy at the desk. “What’s your name, then?”

He didn’t look back up from the pile of pink carbon paper he was sorting through. “Charlie.”

“Well, Charlie, my name’s Lem. This is Pitr.”

He looked up. He pointed his cigarette at Mags. “He tame? He kind of looks like I killed his puppy when we were kids and he’s just now remembering.”

Mags’s face collapsed into a mask of damp terror. “You killed a
puppy
?”

For a moment Charlie and I just stared at him.

Used to teaching people how to ignore Mags in social situations, I walked over to the coffeemaker, asking, “What do you make for letting Heller’s shit pass through here?”

He took a moment to answer. “Enough. Heller’s good business.”

The coffee machine was crusty and ancient, the carafe cloudy with coffee sediment from previous decades. There were no extra mugs, so Charlie appeared to have the office to himself. “How long we got to wait?”

He sighed and I heard the rustle of paper. “They’re unloading. Could take an hour, could be here in fifteen minutes.”

“How’s it getting out of here?”

There was a pause. “By fucking
truck
, how
else
you get a fucking container off the dock?”

Magic
, I thought, but Heller wasn’t going to bleed people to do something a truck could do for him. “So the container’s on the boat still?” I asked. I had no idea how containers and docks worked. I’d skipped that class since I couldn’t have imagined myself standing here, not in a million years.

“Jesus,
yes
.”

I turned. “Come on. Take us.”

Charlie squinted at me. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

I shrugged. I owed Heller thirty thousand dollars. To get out from under, I had to make sure he got his delivery without a problem. I wasn’t going to sit in an office and drink charred, cancerous coffee while shit happened two hundred feet away and sank me deeper. Heller hadn’t put this on me out of charity. If all it took was sitting in a fucking office, he didn’t need Tricksters to do it.

“Up,” I said, “or I’ll have my friend here treat you like a chew toy.”

Charlie twisted his lips to the side and glanced at Mags, weighing the possibility that he wasn’t nearly as mean as I’d trained him to look. Then he sighed and stood up, plucking a huge ring of keys from his desk. “Fine. You want to get soaking wet, ain’t gonna argue.” He stepped around the desk to the door, where a blue parka, still damp from the rain, hung. He slipped into it and opened the door. “Come on.”