The Killing Floor Blues (23 page)

“You’re seeing the violence in the streets,” I told Gary, “everyone fighting to fill the vacuum now that Nicky’s on the run, but you aren’t seeing the hand behind it all. And if you think it’s bad now, just wait a few more days.”

Gary’s frown dropped a couple more notches.

“The Chicago mob,” I said, “is about to make a move on Vegas. That murder that landed me behind bars and sent Nicky running? Frame job, from start to finish. They’ve got a shape-shifter on their payroll. He set the whole thing up.”

“Shape-shifter?” he snorted. “No such thing.”

I leaned back on his couch and tilted my head at him.

“Gary?” I said. “You’ve got demon blood. You know I’m a sorcerer and that magic is real. Are you
really
gonna take the ‘no such thing’ angle with me?”

He glanced down, biting his lip.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Fair point.”

“Their whole plan was to destabilize the Vegas underworld. As you’ve seen, mission accomplished. But that’s just the prelude. The Outfit’s gonna roll in here, guns blazing. In fact, I know they’re sending a delegation to hook up with some of the locals. The Cinco Calles are about to get ripped right down the middle.”

Gary finished his beer. He stared at the bottle for a moment, shaking his head. Then he uncapped another one.

“What are you talking about? Some kind of civil war?”

“A big and messy one,” I said, “and I guarantee there
will
be civilians stuck in the cross fire.”

“What’s your angle in all this?”

“The splinter faction, the one who wants to sign up with the Outfit, has a friend of mine. They’re holding her hostage.”

“So file a police report,” Gary said, “and let Metro handle it. That’s what we do.”

“All due respect, this isn’t a job for the cops. You go in all heavy-footed and she’ll end up dead. This is a job for
my
people. If you help me out, though, I can stop the civil war, and I can help push the Outfit out of Vegas. No civilian casualties. You’ve got my word on that.”

He studied my face like he was trying to read a book in Sanskrit. I could hear his mind turning, weighing his options, deciding how much he believed me.

“What
exactly
would you need from me?” he finally asked.

I set his purloined gun down on the coffee table. It didn’t look like I was going to need it.

“I need to find a high-level Calles banger, a guy named Cesar Gallegos. I figure you work gang crimes, so you might know of him.”

Gary flashed a bitter smile. “Know
of
him? I’ve busted him twice, personally. Guy’s a real piece of work. What are you gonna do when you find him?”

“Resolve the situation.”

“In other words, you’re gonna put a bullet in him.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

“Faust, do you even understand what you’re doing? You’re asking a Metro detective to set up a goddamn assassination. That is so wrong I don’t even know where to start
explaining
how wrong it is.”

“Come on,” I told him, “you were involved in dirtier business than that when you were on the Redemption Choir’s payroll. Besides, you need to look at the end, not the means. Way I see it, there are only two possible outcomes here.”

“Yeah? And those are?”

I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, the Calles turn on each other, with one side playing the welcome wagon for the Chicago Outfit. If you think you’ve got problems now, just wait. We’re looking at a full-on gang war in the streets with military-grade firepower. Two, you help me and I resolve the problem quickly, quietly, and outside the city limits. Nobody gets hurt but the bad guys.”

He paced the floor, half-drained bottle swinging limply in his hand. I let him think it over. He stopped in midstride, then looked my way.

“
No
civilian casualties.” Half question and half command.

“Not one.”

He nodded to himself, slow, and slipped a business card from his pocket. I rose from the couch and took the card from his outstretched hand.

“I’ve got seven guys under me,” Gary said. “Come sunrise, their number-one business is gonna be tracking down Cesar Gallegos. The Calles have hangouts all over the city, but if we spread out, we should get eyes on him pretty quick.”

“You’re making the right call,” I told him.

He watched me as I strolled to his apartment door.

“Faust,” he said.

My hand rested on the doorknob. “Yeah?”

“Something just occurred to me. It’d really suck for you if anybody found out you were still alive, wouldn’t it?”

I shrugged. “Fair to say.”

“It’s just funny.” He let out a little chuckle. “Now I’ve got something to hold over
your
head.”

*     *     *

Back at the Scrivener’s Nook, I laid out the game plan.

“Once Gary and his team find Cesar,” I said, “we’ll keep our distance and put him under surveillance. Pixie, can you get some gear together? Maybe a parabolic microphone or something?”

“Done and done.”

“Then what?” Corman asked. “Follow him to wherever he’s keeping Jennifer?”

I shook my head. “Only if we have to. If we get lucky spying on him, maybe we can find out where the meet’s going to be and get there
first
. Then we can set up an ambush. For now, let’s all get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”

Caitlin hooked her arm around mine, steering me toward the door.

“I know you’re welcome on Bentley and Corman’s couch,” she said, “but given you’ve spent the last couple of weeks sleeping on a prison cot, I think you’re entitled to a
real
bed tonight.”

Music to my ears. Back in her penthouse at the Taipei Tower—an expanse of polished hardwood, black leather, and chrome with decor out of an ’80s music video—she led me into the bedroom. She undressed me, slow, her fingers unbuttoning my shirt with feathery grace. Her dress tumbled to the floor in the dark, a pool of shadow around her feet.

We sank under the storm-gray comforter together, sliding across warm satin sheets. I leaned in and brushed my lips across the curve of her bare shoulder.

Her fingernails, five little spear points, rested over my heart.

“Daniel,” she said. “What are you doing?”

I blinked.

“Uh, I thought, I mean…I thought we were going to—”

“You have a concussion.”

I couldn’t quite parse that.

“And?”

“And,” she said, gently pushing me onto my back, “the doctor’s orders were quite clear.
No
unnecessary physical exertion.”

“He didn’t mean sex.”

“I’m quite certain he did.”

“He could not possibly,” I said, “have meant sex.”

She rolled onto her side, facing me, and flipped her hair back with a toss of her head.

“Daniel,” she said. “Are you claiming that having sex with me is
not
physically exerting?”

She had me there.

“I’ve been in
prison
,” I said, trying a different tack. “All those long, lonely nights. I have needs, you know.”

“You were in prison for two weeks, not two years, and
I
need you to
not die
. In ten days, once the doctor says you’re in the clear, we will have a very lovely—and vigorous—evening. Now get some sleep.”

Somehow, I managed. For a fleeting handful of hours, anyway, before the alarm clock flipped to 6:00 a.m. and a shrill electronic whine hit me like a mustang kick to the skull. Aching, coasting on a wave of nausea, I trudged to the bathroom and tried to make myself pass for a functional human being.

Back at the Scrivener’s Nook, Pixie was ready for action and lugging a hard black plastic case about the size of a bowling-ball bag. As I walked in, she passed me a slim Samsung phone.

“Here,” she said, “figured you’d need a fresh burner.”

I did. The first number I called was the one on Detective Kemper’s business card. Gary picked up on the second ring.

“It’s me,” I said. “Any word?”

“My guys are canvassing the streets. This a good number?”

“Good for now,” I told him.

He hung up. We weren’t waiting for long. Maybe fifteen minutes later, the phone buzzed and lit up in my hand.

“Got him,” Gary said. “You know the taqueria on South Decatur? He’s at a table in the back with some of his homeboys. What now?”

“We’re on our way. Hang back, okay? We don’t want to spook him.”

He let out a disgusted-sounding snort. “I’m not
leaving
, if that’s what you want. If you break your word and start shooting up the place, I’ll be on you in two seconds flat.”

I hung up the phone. A minute later he sent me a grainy photo, snapped from under a nearby table in the restaurant. Five guys hung out at a corner booth, laughing, openly flashing Calles ink on their arms and rocking yellow and brown bandannas. “
Gallegos is the skinny one, second from the left
,” read a follow-up text.

“All right,” I said, “we need to keep a low profile for this. Pix, it’s you and me. Everybody else, stay by your phones and be ready to move fast.”

*     *     *

Caitlin lent us the keys to her Audi. Well, she lent Pixie the keys, pointedly telling her not to let me drive.

“He’s had a head injury,” she said.

Pixie gave me a sidelong glance. “That explains
so much
.”

Even with Pixie at the wheel, we broke speed records getting across town. The taqueria was styled like an old Spanish mission on the outside, with white stucco walls and clay shingles the color of fresh salmon. As we cruised by, I spotted Cesar and his boys in the back booth. Spotted Gary Kemper, too, passing for a casual diner with a low-slung ball cap and keeping a sharp eye on the place.

“What’d you bring?” My hands rested on the black case on my lap. “A microphone?”

“Even better,” she said.

Pixie pulled the car around the side of the restaurant, squinted, then kept going. We ended up around back, pulling in next to an overstuffed Dumpster.

“Getting a little close there, aren’t you?” I said as the front bumper nearly brushed dirty stucco. “This
is
Caitlin’s car, remember.”

“Limited range. We need to be within ten meters. I think this is just about right.”

I handed her the case. She clicked open the plastic hasps. Inside, another black box rested on a fuzzy felt tray. It was about the size of a claymore mine, and she handled it just as gingerly as she closed the case, set the box upright on the lid, and swiveled up a stubby antenna. A red light flickered on the side, then turned blue.

“Hold this,” she said, handing me the box, “and keep it steady.” Then she reached into the backseat and grabbed her laptop, booting it up.

“What
is
it?”

“That,” she said as a waterfall of luminous blue text flooded her screen, “is called a femtocell. It’s basically a miniature cell phone tower in a box. Short range but very, very nifty. Hand me that burner I gave you.”

She studied my phone for a minute, keying in digits with her right hand while she typed on the laptop with her left.

“Cell phones are designed to connect to the closest tower,” she explained. “Which, for every phone within ten meters, is now
this
one. There’s no permission request, no warning. You can’t even tell it’s happening. Which is fine, assuming the femtocell hasn’t been, say, compromised by a creative hacker.”

“And this one has?” I asked.

By way of response, she handed the phone back to me and tapped on the screen. I had a text message waiting. Well,
I
didn’t.

“
Just stopping to get a bite. Did you call the babysitter about tonight?
”

“Every piece of network traffic that passes through our little cell tower—incoming and outgoing—is now being copied to your phone,” Pixie said. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Hold up,” I said. “So you can take this thing and spy on
anyone’s
cell phone?
Anywhere?
And it’s that easy?”

“Yep. As long as they’re within ten meters, no biggie.”

I peered at the box in my lap. “So this is like, super-secret tech, right? Like some kind of stolen military prototype?”

“Two hundred bucks over the counter, totally legal, no questions asked. Like I said, I’ve done some tinkering with mine, but it wasn’t too hard.”

I watched messages scroll across the screen, fleeting glimpses into the lives of complete strangers.

“Sometimes, Pix,” I told her, “I think you’re scarier than I am.”

Isolating Cesar’s phone amid the digital noise was a problem. Every piece of data that passed through the femtocell had a number attached, but we couldn’t tell which one was his; people didn’t usually sign their names to text messages.

“If we could only
make
him call somebody,” Pixie said.

I grinned as an idea hit me. “We can. Can I make an outgoing call on this thing?”

She rapped a few keys on her laptop.

“Go for it.”

I rang up Detective Kemper. His voice was low, furtive.

“You coming or what?”

“Already there,” I said. “Question for you: you ever rumble these guys? Just throw your weight around a little and let them know you’ve got your eye on them?”

“Sure, all the time. Easiest way to clear ’em off a street corner.”

“I need you to rattle Cesar’s cage. Go over there and tell him Gabriel’s in custody, and that he’s already talking about making a deal.”

“I thought you
didn’t
want me to spook these guys.”

“This is the right kind of spooky,” I said. “Trust me.”

To his credit, he didn’t laugh. I hung up the phone and waited.

Sure enough, barely five minutes had passed before a flurry of text messages hit my screen. All in Spanish, though. I gave Pixie a helpless look.

“I took two years in high school,” she said. “Lemme see. Yep, that’s him! Cesar’s trying to get ahold of Gabriel and find out if he’s really in jail. And…there’s Gabriel, telling him not to be so gullible and—whoa. Those are some words I did
not
learn in class. Hold on, now that we know which phone is his, I’m isolating the feed and digging up his number.”

I tilted my head at her while she typed up a storm. “We have his number,” I said, tapping the phone.

“Not his phone number. Every phone also has an ESN—an electronic serial number—that interfaces with the network. Be quiet a second. I’m busy being awesome.”

I waited, as patiently as I could, while she did what looked like backward calculus on her laptop.

“Boom,
headshot
,” she suddenly chirped, pumping a fist. “We can turn off the femtocell now. Don’t need it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Cesar’s phone. I cloned that sucker. As far as the network is concerned, your phone
is
his phone. Everything that comes into his phone comes into yours too, and everything that goes
out
from your phone looks like it’s coming from his number. Gets billed to his account, too.”

Before long, a new message pinged across, this time in English.

“
Writing to confirm tonight’s appointment. The Doctor is eager to meet his patient
.”

I squeezed the phone until my knuckles turned white.

“
Seven pm
,” came Cesar’s response.
“Rockahoola.
”

“Rockahoola?” Pixie said. “That’s…not Spanish, I’m pretty sure.”

I glanced at the time. It was five minutes past eleven. We had just under eight hours to save Jennifer’s life.

*     *     *

“Rock-A-Hoola,” Bentley said, leaning against the counter at the Scrivener’s Nook. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Remember, Cormie? It was called Lake Dolores, back in the day.”

“Yep,” Corman said. “Stupidest damn thing I ever saw.”

Bentley looked my way. “It was a water park, just off Interstate 15, between here and Los Angeles.”

“I-15 goes through the Mojave,” I said.

“Correct.”

Pixie squinted at him. “Somebody built a freakin’ water park in the middle of the desert?”

“That’s what I said the first time I saw it,” Corman told her.

“It was first built in the fifties,” Bentley said. “Then it closed. Reopened. Closed again. Last time it shut its doors was…ten years ago, perhaps? It’s just a ruin now, sitting dry in the Mojave.”

“In the middle of nowhere,” I mused. “The perfect place for what they’ve got planned. All right. We’ve got a few hours. Jennifer’s safe until the Outfit’s thugs get there. Which means we need to make sure they
don’t
get there. Pix, you said any call from this phone will look like it’s coming from Cesar?”

“As far as the network is concerned, it
is
coming from him.”

“I think we need to bring in a little backup,” I said.

We didn’t just have the Chicago liaison’s number; thanks to Gary putting a scare into Cesar, we had Gabriel’s number too. He answered his phone with a rapid-fire stream of irritated Spanish.

“Gabriel,” I said, “my name is Daniel Faust. I’m a friend of Jennifer’s. Do not react strongly to anything I say. You may be in danger.”

No answer for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah. Okay.”

“Are you alone?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“We’ve found Jennifer. She’s being held hostage by one of your men. You’ve been betrayed, and it’s possible your own bodyguards are in on it. They’re planning to kill her, and they’re coming for you next.”

A long stretch of silence. I could hear footsteps and faint thumping bass from a distant room.

“Aw, man,” he said as casual as if he were discussing the weather. Still, I could hear his voice tighten. “That…that sucks. Real sorry to hear that.”

“Can we meet, in private? Until this gets sorted out, you can’t trust
anybody
in your crew.”

“Yeah, that’s a—that’s an interesting proposal you got there. I’d like to hear more.”

“Come to Our Lady of Consolation in half an hour,” I said. “I’ll be in a pew on the right-hand side of the church, alone and unarmed.”

“Yeah, a’ight. Sounds good.”

He hung up the phone.

“Alone and unarmed?” Caitlin frowned at me.

“For all he knows, I’m leading him into a trap. He’d be dumb not to be wary.”

“Well,” she said, “he certainly won’t notice the woman sitting by herself in the back of the church, keeping an eye on you. Let’s go.”

*     *     *

I didn’t know why I’d picked Our Lady of Consolation when I needed a spur-of-the-moment meeting spot. It wasn’t odd to hold a low-profile meeting in a church—I’d done it once or twice myself—but that
particular
church had history for me. That was where I’d met a priest named Alvarez, a man hunted by feral half-demons.

Turned out Father Alvarez, who I risked my neck and my home to protect, was a spy working for the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers. I was normally a good judge of character, but that was not one of my shining moments.

Nothing had changed since the last time I set foot inside. Same old weathered and splintered pews, same anemic wreaths and shimmering votive candles in dusty red glass. Desolate, except for an elderly man with a bad comb-over slumped in the last pew, snoring loud as a vacuum cleaner. And Caitlin sitting across from him, waiting patiently, a trapdoor spider.

I took a seat right up front and waited.

I shifted in the pew. Rapped my fingers on my knee. Checked Cesar’s phone for the fiftieth time. I picked up a hymnal and leafed through it, though I wasn’t sure why. There were beautiful words inside, words of comfort and hope, but they weren’t written for me. I felt like a trespasser, so I closed the book and put it back.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gabriel kneel down, cross himself, and slide into the pew behind me. He was hard to miss, built like a linebacker after a three-steak meal, with a sculpted and pencil-thin goatee.

“I know your name,” he said softly, leaning forward in his seat. His voice didn’t match his girth; it was high-pitched, smooth, almost musical. “JJ’s talked about you.”

“All good things, I hope.”

“Says you’re solid, but I dunno. You talked some crazy shit back there. And why’s my caller ID say you’ve got Cesar’s phone?”

“Magic,” I said. “And Cesar’s the one to watch. He stabbed you in the back. He ambushed Jennifer, and once he gets every last bit of info out of her—her grow houses, her bank account codes—he’s going to kill her. Then he’ll be gunning for
your
head.”

“You got proof?”

I showed him the phone, calling up the texts from the Chicago liaison. Even as I did it, I knew what what his answer would be.

“Pretty flimsy,
ese
. Doesn’t even say her name. That could be about anyone.”

“Look, this guy he’s texting with? He’s representing Chicago. The mob wants to muscle in on Vegas, and they made Cesar an offer. He’s gonna take his boys and jump ship.”

Gabriel folded his thick arms.

“Anybody can tell a story.”

I was losing him. I needed to take a chance. While he watched, I tapped out a new message, directing it at the Chicago contact.

“
After we ice JJ
,” I wrote, “
might need help taking down Gabriel. Can you lend some firepower?
”

The answer came back in thirty seconds.

“
We’ll discuss it at the meet. Not on the phone, please
.”

Storm clouds brewed behind Gabriel’s eyes as he leaned forward in his pew, reading over my shoulder.

“When’s this all supposed to go down?” he asked.

“Tonight at seven.”

“Hold on.”

He took out his own phone and launched into fast Spanish patter, pausing now and again. Asking questions. And from the way his eyes narrowed, he wasn’t liking the answers.

“Well,” he said, hanging up. “What do ya know. I just asked some of the guys if they wanna hang out tonight, around seven. Turns out Cesar has stuff to do. So do about five other guys.
Everybody’s
got stuff to do.”

“They’re meeting in the desert, about two hours along I-15. That means they’ll have to leave by five.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So,” I said, “at a quarter after five, call your
entire
set. Anybody who shows up is still loyal to you.”

“And anybody else,” he muttered, frowning, “anybody out in the desert, like that backstabber Cesar, is gonna get
buried
out there. I think we’re all gonna have to take a nice drive and see what’s what. Drop in on our homies unexpected.”

“Take it easy,” I told him. “They’ve got Jennifer, and if you go in hard, they might kill her.”

“You got a better solution?”

“I might.” I turned the phone over in my palm, weighing it along with my options. “Can we work together on this? Give me a chance to get her out safe before you curb-stomp these guys?”

“Hey, she’s a friend of mine too. If you got any ideas for getting her back in one piece, I’m down. Just say when and where I gotta be.”

He reached his hand over the pew. I half turned, and we shook on it. His grip felt like granite.

“So what about these fools from Chicago?” he added.

“We need to take them out before they get to the meet. Fewer bodies and less guns in the mix that way.”

Gabriel nodded.

“You know where they’re at?” he asked. “If you’ve got an address, let’s ride. I’ll round up some soldiers and we’ll light their asses up.”

Tempting, but brute force didn’t feel like the right play. This was our chance to send a serious message back to the Outfit, letting them know we were ready to dance. Bullet-riddled bodies were a message, all right, but they were also
easy
. There had to be a way to outclass them, to show we had more than guns on our side.

“I’ll take care of that part,” I told Gabriel, an idea forming. “Just one thing…can you get me some pot, real fast?”

He patted his shirt pocket. “Sure, like what, a dime bag?”

“Oh,” I said, “I need a
little
more than that.”