Scarlett Undercover (8 page)

R
eem must have left for the hospital too early the next morning to rouse me for the
Fajr
prayer, because it was well past dawn when I woke. After I’d scalded myself in the shower, pulled on a mostly clean pair of jeans, and choked down a stale croissant, I snagged our dirty clothes and headed for the Laundromat. It was still cold out. My wrist hurt. My client wasn’t safe from her own brother. And Deck hadn’t responded to the text I’d sent the night before, asking how he could have forgotten to mention that his father was not only alive, but an asshole, to boot. Put that all together, and I was one grouchy ladybug, looking for a fight.

Turned out I didn’t have to look very hard to find one.

I saw my tails before they saw me. Blondie was behind her paper in a new doorway; Shorty fiddled with her phone at one of the little tables outside DiSanti’s. Both were trying hard to look like they didn’t have a care in the world.
Poor things
, I thought,
pining away for a glimpse of little old me
.

It wasn’t enough to break your heart, but a few crocodile tears seemed in order.

I strolled toward the Laundromat, slow enough so there was no way they could miss me. Mook was on his stoop, lit cigarette burning its way toward his fingers. We hadn’t spoken since he’d ticked me off the other day, before Calamus. I still couldn’t figure how he’d known I was about to do something stupid. I still wished I didn’t care.

“Howdy, Mook,” I said.

“As-salaamu alaikum.”

“All right, all right,” I grumbled.
“Wa alaikum as-salaam.”

He dipped his head in a little nod. “That’s better.”

“I’m just checking in,” I said. “Being so responsible and all.”

His sloe-eyed stare stayed on the street. “And where are you going today?”

“To do laundry.”

“And then?”

“City Hall. I’ve got a case to research while the washer runs.”

A corner of his mouth crept up into a knowing half smile.

“This case you’ve taken on… it’s a bit more than you expected, perhaps?”

Dammit
, I thought.
He’s doing it again.

But all I said was, “Nah. Not so much.”

The unsmiling half of his mouth twitched.

“It’s not easy, you know, being your
mu’aqqibat
. And I have a feeling it’s about to become more difficult.”

“I never asked for a guardian angel, Mook. I don’t even believe in them.”

He ignored that. Took a drag and looked across the street toward DiSanti’s.

“Have you spoken with Delilah lately?” he asked.

“Last night. At the Rubicon.”

“She’s a good soul, Delilah, and loyal. Sometimes to a fault.”

“Sure,” I said, doing my best to sidestep whatever
point he was working up to. “I guess I better get this stuff in a washer.”

I started to push open the Laundromat door.

“Akht?”

I stopped.

“Yeah, Mook?”

“Watch your back.”

“I always do.”

He took another drag and blew the smoke out his nose. It was as close as he’d get to a good-bye.

I went inside. Loaded the machine. Went back out.

Mook was gone.

My tails were not.

As I moved down the street, the pair of them followed me tight. They weren’t keen on being seen, but I’d already ditched them twice, and they didn’t look ready to let it happen again. I crossed the street, waited until they’d done the same, then crossed back, just to mess with them.

Three blocks over, I turned into an alley and stepped behind a Dumpster. My blackjack was in my hand by the time Blondie caught up. She looked around, squinting toward the dead-end brick wall ahead.

“Ladies,” I said, stepping out as Shorty joined us.
The gold in their eyes reminded me of toxic sludge. “How can I help you?”

Blondie let out something close to a snarl. Shorty looked insulted. Neither spoke.

“Not sure?” I said. “Then maybe you can tell me who you’re working for and where you learned to do such a crap job running a tail.”

“You little…” Shorty said. Blondie stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.

“You get one warning,” Blondie said in a washed-out, reedy voice. “One. Go back to playing detective with your slum-rat neighbors and leave the real mysteries to us grown-ups.”

“Is that all you were trying to do yesterday morning?” I said. “Offer me some friendly advice?”

Shorty didn’t appreciate my rapier wit. In fact, it hacked her off so bad she came at me.

I dropped low, batted away her fumbling swing with a forearm block. Grabbed her collar with my left hand, hooked my right elbow, and swung up and inward to smash the spot where her jaw met her neck. She dropped like a sack of hot rocks. It shocked the hell out of Blondie; I knew it from the look on her face. And it didn’t sit easy with me, either. Hurting people never did.

“Are you two part of the Children of Iblis?” I asked, tapping the blackjack against my palm to hide the shake in my hands. Blondie glanced at it nervously.

“
That
was a mistake,” she said.

“Let’s try again,” I said. “Tell me what you know about the Children of Iblis.”

Her lips curled back. Her eyes darted from the blackjack to Shorty, writhing on the ground.

“I’m not telling
you
anything,” she spat.

Something in her voice, in the way she held her body, let me know I’d gotten to her. My shaking stopped.

“Then I guess we’ll have to do things the hard way,” I said. “Because I’m real good at my job, and real bad at letting things go. Sooner or later, I’ll bust up your little freak show. And when that happens, I guarantee you’re not gonna like it.”

Her laugh was like metal scraping metal. “You’ll be dead soon, you know.”

“We’ll all be dead soon, lady.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea, do you?”

“Not usually, no.”

The gold in her eyes hardened.

“There
is
no death for us, little detective. Once the ring is ours, we’ll live forever.”

“Sure. You go with that,” I said, and walked out of the alley without a backward glance. She didn’t follow me, but at the next intersection, I could have sworn I caught a flash of Mook’s duster, turning past a building to my left.

“Mook?” I called out.

But there was no response, no sign of Mook when I rounded the corner.

Two against one and a death threat on top of that
, I thought.
And my guardian angel just walks away.

The downtown bus I needed pulled into its stop a few blocks up. Even if I ran, I wouldn’t catch it.

“Dumb freakin’ luck,” I said to no one in particular. And started to walk.

The doors to City Hall were still locked when I got there, which left me standing out in the morning wind for ten minutes, cursing Las Almas bureaucrats for not waking up early like the rest of the world. I was cold, I was impatient, and I needed more info on The Parker and George Fagin. That meant digging through the hellish stacks of permits, blueprints, and assorted useless documents they kept on file in the records office.
It was slow, tedious, old-school detective work. And in a twisted sort of way, I liked it.

City Hall was a stoic building, impressive and grand and as stuffy as they came. Back before the stock market crash in the twenties, when millionaires did their best to prove new money could buy class, a bunch of old white guys had built the place and passed it on to future generations of old white guys. I always wore my secondhand biker boots there because they felt so inappropriate. Today, I’d brought along my dark gray fedora to class the joint up even more.

“Hey, Delores. How’s it going?” I said at the records office window. Delores and I went way back. The first time I’d visited, she’d ignored me. When I rang the desk bell in front of her, she’d ignored me even harder. It had not been an auspicious start.

“Whaddaya want?”

Her cherry menthol breath hit my nose. Delores never said hello, never smiled, and always had a lozenge in her yap. She was a sour woman with a perpetual sore throat and an appliquéd sweater for every occasion.

“Permits and blueprints for The Parker, please.”

“Copies? Or you just gonna look?”

“Copies, please.”

“Got cash?”

“Always.”

“Requisition slip?”

I handed her the form, filled out in my neatest print.

“Take a seat,” she said.

“Thanks, Delores. You’re a pal.”

She grunted. I sat in a molded plastic chair and tried not to dwell on how uncomfortable it was. Things in the records office moved slower than glaciers, so the best thing to do was make peace with the awful decor and ponder the string of teddy bears marching across Delores’s doughy bosom.

Forty-five minutes later she called me to her window.

“There’s nothing there,” she said.

“Come again?”

“There’s. Nothing. There. Whole file’s gone.”

“Everything? Every single one of The Parker’s records?”

She gave me a look like salted lemons.

“How could that happen?” I said. “Those files aren’t supposed to leave the archive.”

“Brass probably took ’em out.” She shrugged. “They can do that.”

“Could the file have been stolen?”

She shrugged again.

“Aren’t there duplicates?”

The brown lines penciled in where her eyebrows should have been crept higher on her forehead.

“And it took you forty-five minutes to tell me this?” I said.

Delores smiled and hollered, “Next!”

“Delores?”

The brown lines lifted again.

“You’re a real pip.”

“Have a nice day,” she said. “Come again soon.”

I stomped out of the records office and back across the rotunda, loud enough to make the decrepit old security guard frown. He didn’t like it when I asked for my blackjack back, either, but then, I hadn’t liked giving it to him in the first place. “Thanks for guarding Thumper,” I said.

He pointed a gnarled finger at me, scrunched his eyebrows low, and was just about to learn me but good when my phone rang. “Gotta go,” I said, and scooted outside to answer the call.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was Gemma’s. She didn’t sound good.

“Where are you, kid?”

“In the janitor’s closet at school,” she said in something just north of a whisper.

I sank down onto the steps, sick at myself for not checking in with her earlier that morning. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“For now. But Oliver just came to my class and tried to get Mrs. Thomas to let me leave with him. He said he needed to tell me something personal. If we hadn’t been in the middle of a math test, she’d have let me go. She sent me to the main office after I finished. I came here instead.”

“That was smart, Gemma,” I said. “Really smart.”

“I think he was going to take me.”

“Take you where?”

“Nowhere good.”

I remembered the text Quinn never saw on his phone—the one threatening Sam—and knew she was right.

“Listen, Gemma, I need you to go to the nurse’s office and tell them you just threw up.”

“Okay.” Her voice was tiny.

“You give the nurse my number and say I’m supposed to come get you, that I’m your new nanny.”

“There’s a pickup list,” she said. “If you’re not on it, they won’t let me go with you.”

I stood up and started toward the street.

“All right,” I said. “Then scratch that plan and just
stay put. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t move. Is there a security guard at the door?”

“No. Stokes walks around the halls. There’s a buzzer to the office by the front gate that you have to ring for them to let you in.”

“Fine. I’ll call you when I’m outside. Then you go to the office and tell them you’ve been sick, that you called your nanny from the bathroom because you were scared. I’ll hit the buzzer up front, and you ID me on the security camera. That should get me inside. I’ll take it from there.”

She sniffled.

“Can you do that for me, Gemma?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. You hang tight, kid, and call me if anything happens. I’m coming for you.”

“Okay,” she said. “But, Scarlett?”

“Yeah?” I said, racing a slick-haired, pin-striped lawyer-type to the lone cab parked on the curb. My hat flew off. I didn’t look back.

“Please hurry.”

“I’m coming, kid,” I said, getting into the cab. The suit flipped me off from ten feet back.

“Just hang on.”

F
or my first visit to Chandler Academy, I’d dressed in a blue pleated skirt, joined the crush of bodies pouring in ahead of the first bell, planted my business cards in the bathrooms, and walked right back out. No muss, no fuss. And thanks to the story I’d cooked up with Gemma, getting in the second time around was cake, too.

Smuggling her out was a different matter altogether.

I found her in the office, looking miserable. As soon as she saw me, she ran over and threw herself into my arms.

Again with the affection
, I thought, smiling in spite of myself.

“You’re the Archers’ new nanny?” the secretary asked. According to the nameplate on the desk, her first name was Miss, her last was Pritchard. Cat’s-eye glasses hung from a chain around her neck, and the hairs in her bun were yanked so tight I could hear their follicles weep.

“I am,” I said in my best “yes ma’am” voice. “Gemma called to say she’s been sick.”

“So she tells me.” Pritchard gave my biker boots a hard look. “Nurse McMahon is on his way down.”

She’d barely finished saying so when a man walked in wearing freckled forearms that would have put Popeye’s to shame.

“Well?” He whipped a thermometer out of the pocket of his skull-and-crossbones scrubs. Waggled it at us. “Which one of you just had the reverse breakfast?”

“Miss Archer was ill,” the secretary said with a curt nod toward Gemma.

The nurse gave Gemma a wink, swiped the thermometer across her forehead, and checked the readout.

“No fever,” he said, cupping her cheek in his catcher’s mitt of a hand. “But you’re clammy and you look like a bleached sheet. How’d you feel when you left the house this morning?”

“A little funny, I guess.”

“Anyone else in your family sick?”

“My cousin threw up yesterday. I’ve been helping take care of him.”

Good job, kid
, I thought.

“Then, Miss Pritchard,” McMahon said, “in my highly trained medical opinion, this young lady has a bad case of the cooties and should go home.”

Miss Pritchard settled her glasses onto the bridge of her nose. “Very well, then. I’ll have to contact her parents.…”

“They’re at work,” Gemma said. “Scarlett’s supposed to get me if I’m sick.”

“She’s not on the list.” Miss Pritchard gave me a look like I’d let her down.

McMahon sighed. “Honestly, Victoria, there’s some kind of nasty stomach bug making the rounds right now. The sooner we get Gemma home the better. I don’t want this thing wiping out the whole school.”

Pritchard pulled something up on her computer and jabbed at the phone keys like they’d insulted her mother. Air whistled through her narrow nostrils. After a while, she hung up and tried again. Gemma looked over at me, eyes huge. I smiled and tried to coax my own pulse back below heart-attack range.

If either of the Archers picked up, things could get hairy.

“Neither parent answers,” Pritchard said.

I snuck a relieved breath.

She hung up, frowned, pounded something new into the keyboard, and picked up the phone to dial again. That time, only three keys felt her wrath.

“Mr. Klein? I believe you have Oliver Archer there in class with you?” She scratched at something on the computer screen with her nail. “Very good. Would you send him down to the office, please? Thank you.”

McMahon gave me a sympathetic wink. Gemma looked ready to crawl under a chair.

“I’m sorry to seem so inflexible,” Miss Pritchard said, “but nothing is more important than student safety here at Chandler Academy. Once Miss Archer’s brother confirms that you’re employed by his family, I’ll be able to let you take her home. I hope you understand.”

I knew she didn’t give a monkey’s behind whether I understood a thing, but I smiled anyway and made nice.

“I’ll just head back to the infirmary, then.” McMahon gave Gemma’s arm a tender little squeeze. “Holler if you need anything else.”

Pritchard smiled vaguely and looked through him into the hallway. “Very good,” she said. “Here’s Mr. Archer now.”

If Gemma had been pale before, the sight of her brother made her go all but translucent. Her chest rose and fell like a hummingbird’s. I stepped closer and took her hand.

“How can I help you, Miss Pritchard?” Oliver sounded like a bad used-car salesman, and Pritchard was in a buying mood.

“Well, Mr. Archer, it seems your sister is ill and needs to be escorted home. If you could just confirm that this young woman is, in fact, Gemma’s nanny, then you may go back to class.”

Oliver pivoted toward us.

“What’s the matter, sis?” His voice was sickly sweet.

“I threw up,” Gemma said softly.

My own voice was strong.

“I should get her home, Oliver. Your parents have too much on their minds as it is. I’d hate to have to bother them with all…
this
.”

I could see his anger, see him thinking through different ways this scene could play out. The last thing he wanted was for his parents to find out about the Children of Iblis, or about his involvement with Quinn
Johnson’s death. For now, at least, our little game of cat and mouse was rigged, and not in his favor.

“You looked fine this morning, sis,” he said through a rigid jaw. “What happened?”

Gemma’s chin trembled. “I just don’t feel good, Oliver. Please let Scarlett take me home.”

Oliver’s eyes narrowed down to ugly slits. I squeezed Gemma’s hand tighter.

“This
is
your sister’s nanny, then, Mr. Archer?” Pritchard had clearly had enough of the Archer family’s traveling road show for one morning.

I looked from Oliver’s eyes to his wrist and back again, letting him know I’d force my hand if I had to. Pritchard cleared her throat.

“Mr. Archer?”

“She”—he spat the words out point first—“works for our family.”

Pritchard nodded. “Thank you. That will be all, Mr. Archer.”

She could have been talking to the wall for all Oliver cared.

“I know you’ll feel better with Scarlett taking care of you, sis,” he said, resting his hand on Gemma’s shoulder as he passed. “But I’ll check in on you. Soon.”

I pulled her toward me. “Don’t worry, Oliver. I’m not about to let anything happen to your sister.”

He gave me a look hard enough to cut diamonds, and stalked out.

“Thank you, Miss Pritchard,” I said after the office door had slammed shut behind him. “I appreciate everything you do to keep Gemma safe.”

The secretary’s lips twitched. Either she was immune to my charms, or I was losing my touch.

Must have been immunity.

“Do notify me if Miss Archer is still ill tomorrow morning,” Pritchard said stiffly.

I pulled Gemma even closer. “Miss Pritchard,” I said, hustling Gemma out, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

By the time Gemma was tucked in safe and sound at her aunt’s, I had just enough time to get to the ass-end of Las Almas before the clock hit one. The other night, I’d threatened Asim with not going to Calamus, but he and I had both known it was a bluff. And a bad one, at that.

“Third and Doyle,” I told the cab driver. He had a
white beard and a tweed hat and his cab smelled like Lysol. I had no problem with Lysol. Especially in cabs.

“You sure about that?” He looked at me in his rearview, dubious.

“Unfortunately, I am,” I said, pulling out my phone. There was a message from Deck waiting.

I ignored it. Not hearing from him the night before had sat about as well as bad sushi. He must have known Delilah was going to drop the Asim-is-Decker’s-dad thing on me like two tons of bricks, and as much as my heart wanted me to talk to him, my head wanted him to suffer. So I texted Gemma instead.

A smiley face with a stuck-out tongue came back fast. I sent her one with a wink. Then I contemplated checking in with Reem, decided it would be overkill. Turning into a good girl overnight would set off my sister’s BS detector and very possibly wreck the freedom Delilah’s little performance at the Rubicon had bought me.

“You
really
sure?” the driver said as the buildings started going postapocalyptic.

“Yep,” I said. “And by the way, thanks for coming
out this far. A lot of guys would have dumped me off four blocks back.”

He tipped his hat and smiled. “That’s my job. You pay, I drive.”

I thought about how that would look on my business card.
Scarlett: You pay, I snoop
. It had a nice ring to it. Hopefully things really would be that simple after I put this case to bed, and I could go back to tracking down stray boyfriends and runaways.

Hopefully I wasn’t hoping for too much.

“Here’s fine,” I told the driver when Third ran into Doyle. Compared to the last time I’d visited, the place was hopping. Two drug slingers were shooting dice on a stoop five doors down from Calamus. The one-eyed dog was there, too. She sat, still as a statue, watching my cab roll to a stop. Across the street, an old woman with a grocery cart waved her arms and shook her fist at the sky, arguing with someone nobody else could see. And, of course, there was the creep in the doorway, still covered from head to toe in filthy rags, still swaying.

“You know them?” the driver asked. I could tell he didn’t like the look of the corner boys, but they were the least of my worries.

“I’ll be fine. Thanks.” I paid my fare plus a big tip
and stood on the curb until he was gone. The stoop boys looked me over. They were interested. I slipped my blackjack out of my bag, tapped it against my thigh. They went back to their dice. Turned out they weren’t so interested after all.

Next, I walked up to the swaying creep and looked him straight in the spot where his eyes must have been.

“Afternoon,” I said.

He stopped swaying. Didn’t hiss. Didn’t move.

“So,” I said, “I was hoping you could explain exactly to whom or what you were referring the other night. That I should stay away from, I mean.”

There was no movement, but I felt his energy shift. A gloved hand reached up abruptly and bumped the scarf just far enough to expose a pair of gold-ringed green eyes.

“Oh, for hell’s sake!”

The scarf came down completely. The hat came off. And he wasn’t a he.

He was a she.

Quick as a fourth-grade kiss, the woman grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward Calamus, muttering so quickly and quietly I could only catch snippets like, “no
bloody fear,” “no respect,” and “dreadful country.” She dragged me up the church’s old stone steps, through the front door, past the beaded doorway, and into the sanctuary. Just inside sat an odd assortment of mismatched chairs, metal cabinets, and a wheeled stainless steel table holding a tattoo gun. An enormous Persian carpet covered the stone floor. The rest of the space was pure church.

“Stay here,” she said. “Don’t move.” She disappeared behind the chancel, leaving me face-to-face with a statue of a mournful Virgin Mary cradling Jesus’s crumpled body.
Enough with the dead sons, already
, I thought, and looked around for something cheerier.

Four stained glass windows stretched across the back wall of the building, safe from street-side vandals. My mother had been a devout Muslim who hated ignorance as much as sin. She’d dragged Reem and me to all kinds of temples and churches, telling us we needed to understand other faiths to appreciate our own. So I knew all about the apostles and saints going about their business in the glass. But the far-left pane was what really caught my eye. It showed a naked Eve with long, conveniently arranged red hair, offering an apple to Adam. Adam looked dull and hungry.

Eventually, the tattoo guy came out from behind the chancel.

“
As-salaamu alaikum
,” I said.

“Wa alaikum as-salaam.”
He offered me his hand, which was a surprise. A lot of Muslim men wouldn’t do that for a woman. I slipped off the blackjack strap and shook his hand. His grip was firm. Mine was, too.

“So,” I said, “how about that tattoo?”

He studied me with bottomless eyes, then laughed, loud and full.

“Come with me, child. And welcome to my home.”

He didn’t have to ask twice.