The Killing Floor Blues (10 page)

I stared down at the card in my hand, the three of clubs with my signature scrawled across the face in black Sharpie. The exact same card I’d shuffled into the half deck in Bentley’s hands not one minute earlier.

I was nineteen years old, and I was learning the basics.

“It’s impossible,” I said.

He shook his head with a smile, leaning back against the counter, and fanned the cards in his hands.

“It clearly just happened, so it can’t be impossible,” he said. “The magical arts require a certain shift in vocabulary. The question isn’t, ‘Is this possible?’ The question is, ‘What means can be undertaken to
make
it possible?’”

“I had half of the deck,” I said slowly, puzzling it out, “and you had half of the deck. I saw you shuffle my card into your half. You never
touched
my half. I’ve had it in my hand the entire time. So…wait, was that
real
sorcery? Some kind of, I don’t know, illusion spell?”

“Maybe it was sleight of hand, and maybe it was a spell. Does it matter?” Bentley asked.

I gaped at him. “Of course it matters.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said with the sort of exasperation only a teenager can muster, “one’s just a trick, and one’s…you know…
magic
.”

“And yet, the end result is exactly the same: the signed card ended up in your hands. If I need to dig a hole in the ground, does it matter if I use a shovel or my bare hands, as long as the hole gets dug?”

I relented, almost saying no—then I paused. I eagerly brandished the signed card, certain I’d caught my teacher in an obvious blunder.

“It does. Because it’s not just the outcome that matters; one way is a heck of a lot more work than the other way. Why would anyone dig with their hands when they could use a shovel?”

“Precisely.” His sly smile told me I was the one who had just been outmaneuvered. “Now then, observe and learn.”

He took my cards, set the signed one facedown on the counter, and joined the deck back together. He shuffled, cut, and handed me half of the cards, then made sure I was watching as he slipped the signed card back into his half.

“The magician has two considerations in every challenge.” He flipped his half of the deck over and fanned out the cards one by one, showing them to me. “One: what techniques can achieve your desired end? Two: if multiple approaches would work, which one is the most effective tool for the task?”

My card wasn’t in his hands. He nodded at my half. I flipped the top card and stared down at my own signature. Again.

“Now what’s more likely? That I engineered a spell to warp your perception, or that I simply relied”—he passed his open hand over my half of the deck, and my signed card vanished—“on skilled misdirection?”

Bentley held up his hand and snapped his fingers. As he did, the signed card flipped up from the cup of his palm with a flourish, caught between his thumb and forefinger.

I blinked at him. “Is
that
why you’re making me learn card tricks before you teach me the real stuff? Because it’s easier?”

“Easier, my ass,” Corman grunted, lugging a cardboard box full of books from the back room. “Try doing the oil and water routine one-handed,
without
using real sorcery to help.”

“Which you will be learning how to do eventually,” Bentley told me.

“You know,” I said, looking between them, “I
have
seen
The Karate Kid
. If this is building up to some wax-on, wax-off moment of Zen revelation—”

Bentley tapped one of his temples. “We’re teaching you the most important foundational skill for a sorcerer. How to
think
like one. At its core, all magic—be it the real thing or stage tricks—is about misdirection.”

“In other words,” Corman said, “it’s all bullshit. And so’s ninety-eight percent of everything else in the world. People try to lie to you twenty times a day. Forty times, if you don’t change the channel when commercials come on. Before you can pull a con on somebody else, you’ve gotta be able to spot when a grifter’s pulling one on
you
.”

I walked through Bentley’s card trick in my memory, playing it out step by step. I knew I’d held the half deck tight between my fingers. No chance he’d slipped it in under my thumb without me feeling it. Yet I’d seen him, twice now, take my signed card and shuffle it into his—

I paused. Watching his hand in my mind’s eye smoothly slip the card back into his deck. Facedown.

The corners of Bentley’s eyes wrinkled with amusement as he watched me think it through. “What do I keep telling you, Daniel? Always question your assumptions.”

“Every good con,” Corman said, “feeds on the mark’s assumptions. Let him do the hard work for you.”

“My card,” I said slowly, “couldn’t have been slipped into my half of the deck after you gave it to me. Which means…you did it
before
you gave it to me. I saw you slip
a
card into your half, facedown, and I just assumed it was the one I signed. But you switched the signed card with a different one while you were cutting the deck, didn’t you?”

Bentley gently applauded. “And the student is learning. This is exactly what I mean, Daniel. People build assumptions about the world around them in countless ways, every single day. It’s a form of mental shorthand, and most of the time, it’s a useful survival mechanism. There’s nothing wrong with assuming, say, that gravity will tether you safely to the Earth, or that fire will burn so you shouldn’t touch it. If you stopped to question everything around you, at every moment, you’d be paralyzed.”

“But those same assumptions can bend you over a barrel.” Corman tugged a couple of hardbound books with staid dustcovers from his carton and hunted for an open spot on the overstuffed shelves. “Especially when real sorcery’s in the mix. Eyes open, kiddo.”

“Which brings us back to the question of tools,” Bentley told me. “Any magician worthy of the name knows three ways, at minimum, to accomplish any given effect. Which methods you use, and in what combination, depend on the needs of the moment. Sometimes the best answer really
is
to weave an illusion spell. Or sometimes I can get the exact same result by palming a card and letting your imagination do the work for me. Digging with a shovel versus digging by hand.”

“So,” I asked, “how do I know which to use?”

“Practice. But first…you learn the moves.” Bentley handed me the deck of cards. “Here. Your turn. I’ll show you a few methods of moving a signed card into
my
hand.”

My stomach growled. I eyed the cards dubiously.

“Couldn’t we do this after lunch?”

“We will eat,” he said with a soft chuckle, “once you’ve managed to slip a card past me.”

*     *     *

Five years later, on the morning of my twenty-fourth birthday, I was sitting in a chair.

“Sitting” being relative, considering I was tied to it. And the chair was upside down, dangling by a rope from the sturdy light fixture in the dusty back room of the Scrivener’s Nook. Lengths of chain wound like boa constrictors around my chest, wrists, and ankles, secured by combination padlocks.

“Hey, kiddo,” Corman said, amiably munching on a slice of cake. “How’s it going?”

“Hey, Corman. A little help here?”

He took a long look at me, shrugged, and scooped up another forkful of cake.

“Nope.”

I wriggled against the loops binding my wrists. The motion made the chair slowly turn, twirling on its rope, and the blood rushed to do a dizzy conga in my brain.

“Seriously,” I said, “this is impossible. I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can. Y’know, I saw Harry Blackstone Junior perform in Manhattan once. He did this exact same escape
plus
he was inside a burlap sack. Took him twelve minutes.”

I squirmed, rocking the chair, sending it turning in the other direction.

“Not for nothing,” Corman said, “but your birthday cake is
amazing
. Butter cream and French silk chocolate. That’s the good stuff. You should come down from there and get some before it’s all gone.”

“Oh,
great
idea,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said with a smile.

As the door swung shut behind him, leaving me alone in the gloom, I realized my sarcasm might have misfired.

All right
, I told myself,
first things first. Get a grip
.

I focused on my breathing. Deep and steady. Tuning out my anxiety, my fear of failure, all the distractions I didn’t need. In their wake, new, positive thoughts flooded in to fill the gap. Ideas. Inspirations. My bag of tricks. Five years of learning everything from sleight of hand to eldritch conjurations.

I’ve exorcised a demon
, I reminded myself,
and I’ve spoken to the Mourner of the Red Rocks and lived. Also, I play the meanest three-card monte on Fremont Street, and I can do the oil and water routine with one arm behind my back.

Tied to a chair? I can handle this
.

Like a magic trick, anxiety transformed into excitement. I attacked the problem from a fresh perspective. I wasn’t tied to a chair. Individual
parts
of me were tied to a chair. Escape was a series of steps, a multilayered puzzle to be unraveled.

First, information
, I thought.
Find out what I’m up against
.

I lifted my legs as much as I could, muscles straining. The combination padlock dangled down, giving me a good look at the faceplate.
Master Lock 1533,
I noted, thinking back over everything I’d been taught about how to crack a combination lock and that model in particular.

I curled my hands into a cup, flexing my arms as much as the chain binding me to the chair would allow. I slowly, sinuously writhed, slipping the bonds down a millimeter at a time, giving me more room to bend my elbows. Finally, the padlock on my wrist chains dropped into my hands. I’d have to crack it backward, by touch alone.

I didn’t escape in twelve minutes. It took closer to three hours.

But that was a damn fine birthday cake.

Joining the ragged, shuffling chow line in the dining hall, I tried to call on that same old confidence. It wasn’t easy, not with a third of the room staring daggers at me—and any number of them carrying
real
daggers hidden under their shirts—but it felt good to have a plan in motion. I needed to figure out my end, but once that fell into place, freedom was just a few risky moves away.

Watching the stone-faced guards along the wall, fingers resting light on their triggers, I realized they might be my way in. According to Paul—and the general behavior from the guards I’d seen since I got here—the Iceberg’s keepers were mired in incompetence and outright corruption. If I could find a guard with a weak spot and apply the right pressure, I wouldn’t have to break into the tower to get those goggles: I could make him do it for me.

Not Emerson, though. I kept thinking back to his strange patrol on the catwalks, how he watched the other guards. Studied them. Something was all kinds of wrong about Emerson, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

As I took a seat at the far end of a table, the other convicts gave me space. Way too much space. Nobody made eye contact, much less casual conversation. Word spread fast. I guessed that by now everybody had heard about the ambush in the showers and how one of the assassins ended up. They didn’t know what I’d done to him or how; they just knew that I’d done
something
. Something they didn’t want any part of.

There was one big problem with using fear as a weapon: terrorize someone whose entire sense of self is invested in being the biggest badass on the block, and it can backfire. Hard. I cast a glance toward the Calles’ table, where Raymundo and his boys were deep in a heated argument. I couldn’t make out the words, but the body language was three degrees south of a full-on brawl.

I looked for too long. Raymundo locked eyes with me. Then he shot to his feet, curling his hands into stony fists. Quick hands tugged him back down, heads shaking wildly, raised voices halfway between appeasement and dread. He shook them off, slammed his palms down on the table, and took a deep breath.

I turned away, but I made sure to keep him in my peripheral vision until I was done eating. Just in case.

I hadn’t seen Brisco or his entourage in the crowded hall, and I found out why soon enough. On my way back to the hive, he fell in beside me and spoke in a low murmur.

“Found your guy.”

“You got him?”

“
Found
him. Cornered him. Little fucker’s got a knife like something out of a Rambo movie. He’s fast, too. Slashed Ray-Ray’s arm open from his elbow to his pinky finger, made us fall back. He’s pinned down, though. He ain’t going anywhere ’til you say so.”

“Where’s he at?”

Brisco jerked his chin upward. “The bathrooms,” he said, “on tier three.”

*     *     *

Stay out of the bathrooms on tier three
, Paul told me on my first day in the Iceberg.
The security camera in there’s been broken for a month, and either nobody’s bothered calling in a repair order or the bean counters don’t want to pay for a new one. The guards only poke their heads in once a day. That place is Grand Central Station when it comes to dirty business
.

Great place for an ambush. Like if Brisco wanted to take another shot at me, for example. How many guys could he throw at me if he felt motivated enough? Five? Six? The second I stepped into that bathroom, I’d have nowhere to run and no hope of rescue.

I tried to never go into a room with only one exit. This whole prison was nothing
but
rooms with only one exit. Too many blind corners and too many ways to die. So I told Brisco I’d meet him up there, then stopped off at my cell.

I reached under my cot and curled my fingers around the hilt of the black carbon steel knife I’d taken off the other hitter. I slipped it under my waistband, the cold blade dangerously close to my hip.

Brisco and three of his hangers-on loitered outside the bathroom door, arms crossed and leaning against the dirty eggshell-white walls. Brisco jerked a meaty thumb toward the entrance.

“He’s right in there.”

As I approached the door, my heart thudded against my chest. I flexed and unflexed my fingers to keep the jitters away. Brisco’s boys were close, too close, and it wouldn’t take more than a moment to follow me inside and jump me from behind.

One hand drifted toward my hip. I worked a plan on the fly, the best one I could come up with.
First one to follow me inside gets cut
, I thought.
Five quick stabs, don’t aim, don’t stop to check your work, just stab until he goes down. Second one should be surprised, at least for a couple of seconds. That one, go for the vitals
.

They didn’t follow me in, though, and the swinging door groaned shut at my back.

The bathroom was a janitor’s nightmare, smeared with grime and human waste. Mirrors made from sheets of stainless steel stood hammered with dents, throwing off distorted funhouse reflections. One light was smashed; the other gave off a dim, flickering yellow glow and a hum that filled the room like droning flies.

Three toilet stalls. No doors on any of them. And no signs of life.

I slipped the knife from my waistband.

“I’m not looking for a fight,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.”

The only reply was the electric hum.

I inched forward, craning my neck to check the first stall. Empty. Sodden toilet paper clogged the filthy bowl, lapping over one side of the seat.

“We can still work this out.”

Second stall. Empty.

I turned the knife in my grip and bent my knees, keeping limber. I wasn’t any kind of a knife fighter, not like a real pro, but I knew the basics. It took a special kind of reptilian cold to work with a blade. Anybody could pull a trigger, killing from across the room or across the street, but getting in close and personal—embracing the bile and the blood like a natural-born butcher—was a kind of violence I never wanted to get too comfortable with.

Even I had my limits. Problem was, the guy I was maybe about to fight with—he didn’t. And the most dangerous opponent in the world was the one backed into a corner.

I stopped just shy of the third stall and risked a quick glance to my right, toward the battered steel mirror. I was a distorted blur in the reflection—and so was he, standing a heartbeat away on the other side of the plastic partition.

“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Love or money?”

“Meaning?” he replied. Only one word, but it dripped with loathing.

“You’re no punk with a zip gun. You’re the real thing. An operator. So. Do you get paid for your skills, or is this a passion project?”

He paused a moment.

“I charge ten thousand dollars per hit,” he said. “Plus expenses.”

“Good. You’re a businessman. So am I. See, if you were doing this out of some…fanatic devotion to your boss, or maybe you just get off on it—well, we wouldn’t be able to have a rational conversation, now would we? But we can. And we are.”

He didn’t reply. His blurry reflection crouched a little lower. I tightened the grip on my blade.

“I know you’re good,” I said, “real good. But I also know one of your arms is fractured. You’ve been running yourself ragged, hiding out, haven’t had anything to eat…you’ve gotta be coasting on fumes by now. So if it comes down to dancing, you’ve got to know our odds are pretty even. I don’t want to die tonight. Do you?”

“No,” he said after he took a little while to think about it.

“Good. I like talking face-to-face, so I’m going to come a little closer. I’m not dropping my knife, and I don’t expect you to drop yours. Let’s just maybe not kill each other until we’ve run out of better ideas, okay?”

He fell silent.

I edged closer. He leaned back against the inner wall of the third stall, one arm cradled protectively to his chest, the other clutching my knife’s twin. He eyed me like a rabid dog, but he didn’t bite.

“I’m Daniel Faust,” I said, “but I’m figuring you knew that, since you were sent to kill me. You got a name?”

“Kim,” he spat.

“What’s your first name?”

“
Mister
.”

“Okay.” I held up my open hand, keeping my distance. “I’d like to say it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mister Kim, but I think this day’s been pretty shitty for both of us.”

“What did you do to my partner?” The words sounded more like an accusation than a question.

“Whatever I had to, to survive. I’d apologize, but let’s face it, you were both trying to carve me up like a turkey. Fleiss didn’t warn you about what I was capable of, did she?”

One of his eyelids twitched.

“That’s right,” I said. “I know who sent you. What I don’t know—and what I’m really interested in finding out—is why. Because last I checked, she and I were on amicable terms. That, and she had every chance to kill me a couple of days ago, but she didn’t even try. Why the change of heart?”

“I,” he seethed, “will tell you
nothing
.”

I glanced down at the knife in his hand and felt the weight of mine, the black steel cold against my palm.

“You wanted to know,” I said, “about that thing I did to your partner. What is it, do you think? What could do that to a man, without leaving a mark on his skin? What could make him scream like that?”

I looked him dead in the eye.

“Because I can arrange a demonstration.”