36.
Lately, when I needed to think, I went to the American.
It was starting to look like a club. The drywall was up and wooden floors were down, waiting to receive their coats of paint and tile. Areas had been roughed out: the kidney-shaped curve of the stage, big enough for a live band, and the span of the dance floor. Strips of tape marked where the bar would be installed, where shelves would hold top-grade liquor, where plush leather booths would run along a short stretch of wall. We had built the rough outline of a dream.
Usually, a slow walk around the place picked my spirits up. This was going to be my legacy, my piece of Vegas history. Tonight, it was nothing but an empty nightclub. Of course, I’d just gotten my ass kicked, I had first-degree burns on my throat in the rough shape of a hand, and my ribs were aching, but that wasn’t it. I had a head full of questions and I couldn’t navigate my way to any good answers.
“Got your message,” Caitlin said, standing in the doorway. She held a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other. “Thought you might want a pick-me-up.”
She knew me. Better than anyone. We set the bottle—Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label—on a board stretched between a pair of sawhorses, and I popped the cork while she held out the glasses. I poured for us both. A standing work light shed its low, dusky beam across the floorboards and framed us in the gloom.
“Feels sacrilegious, drinking champagne in here before the grand opening,” I said.
“Oh goodness.” She lifted her eyebrows at me. “Not sacrilege. I can’t be a party to that.”
“Cute.”
She took out her phone and eyed the screen. “By the way, the twins are demanding reimbursement for their missing rifle. Also they want a formal apology from my court and one pound of imported Swiss chocolate as well as, and I quote, ‘four hours of violent angry sex followed by six hours of make-up sex.’”
“With you, or with me?”
“They didn’t specify.” She glanced to the phone again. “Should I ask?”
“Nah, don’t encourage them.”
I clinked my glass against hers, and we drank.
“Also,” she said, “word from Jennifer. She has some people—the ones she can trust to be discreet—combing through the rest of Donaghy Waste Management’s paper trail. She’s hoping to find some kind of lead to another Network front. Now that we know there is one nearby, thanks to the late Officer Santiago.”
“I’d help if I could, just…” I waved my free hand, biting down a wave of frustration. “Little distracted right now, you know? I’ve got to take care of Harry Grimes before Elmer realizes I’m not chasing him and doubles back. I don’t need two assholes trying to kill me at the same time.”
“And, we can presume, Naavarasi.”
My brow furrowed. I stared into the flute of champagne like the bubbles might tell me the future.
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “When I dropped her name to Harry, it bounced right off him. Of course, he could just be good at playing his cards close.”
“Or he doesn’t know who he works for. She can be anyone she wants to be, after all.”
“What I do know is I’m only standing here because Harry’s got one weakness: he’s addicted to the kill. Likes to draw it out.” I leaned against the drywall while my neck and my feet competed to see which could ache harder. “He’s got a résumé, sure, but he’s still an amateur. He could have taken me out with that car bomb if he didn’t love the sound of his own voice so much. Could have killed me tonight, too, but he wanted to play with his food.”
Caitlin folded her arms and cradled her glass. “A weakness like that can be exploited. Let’s find a way.”
“I was thinking, before you came in…I think I mentioned once or twice, I had an apprentice, before we met.”
“Right,” she said. “Desi, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, smiling, distant as the memories flowed back to me. The good ones I could smile at.
“Desi Srivastava. Everybody called her Dizzy. Anyway, one night I was telling her how to handle it if she ever had to fight another magician. Forget duels. Duels are for suckers. The best way to take out a magician, I said, was to come up behind him, jam an ice pick between his ribs, and keep walking. If you’ve got anything to say, say it to his tombstone. You never give your enemy a fair warning or a fair fight.”
“You’ve been thinking about her a lot lately,” Caitlin said.
I guess I had. Not that I ever forgot about her. Normally, though, I only saw her face when the whiskey flowed and my walls cracked around the edges.
“It’s the Melanie thing,” I said. “I’m thinking Bentley might be right. She’s going to find a teacher, one way or another. And there are a lot of shitty teachers out there. At least I’d know, with me, she wouldn’t get pushed in the deep end too fast, or taken advantage of.”
“But,” Caitlin said.
“But…it’s a lot of responsibility. I gave Bentley and Corman a lot of sleepless nights.” I shrugged. “I think I still do. Probably more now than I used to, really.”
“Is that all that’s staying your hand? Just the responsibility?”
I stared at the floor. The work light’s beam cast a line down the dance floor, drawing a fuzzy border between a soft white glow and darkness.
“Desi died on my watch,” I said. “I’ve replayed that moment in my head a thousand times, seeing a thousand ways it could have gone different. One decision here, one second of hesitation there, and she’d still be alive today.”
“Might still be alive,” she said. “You can’t know that.”
“No. All I know is I’m going to carry her with me until the end of time. And I’m not sure I can go through that again.”
Caitlin stepped closer. Our shadows brushed, then our bodies, as she curled her hand around my waist and pulled me in.
“You never told me what happened that night,” she said. “Not the details.”
“I…thought she was ready. This was back when I was working for Nicky. He’d gotten a line on an easy score. A stack of bearer bonds—untraceable, good as cash—sitting in an investment manager’s office safe. So I put a crew together, and we hit the place. When we broke in, the safe was already open and empty. Then somebody—not us—tripped the alarm.”
Caitlin’s eyes narrowed. Glints of copper swirled in their depths.
“You were set up,” she said.
“And ambushed, on our way out. It was this…construct, a crocodile made of sand. Desi, she…”
The words didn’t come. My throat wouldn’t let them through. Caitlin held me until the blockade opened.
“She was trying to impress me,” I said. “But she didn’t know what she was up against. She thought it was a demon, tried using a banishing spell, and it just…cut her down. Her and everybody else on my crew. I was the only one who made it out alive. If I’d been a better teacher, if I’d trained her better—”
She pulled me closer. Tighter.
“Did you avenge her?” she asked.
Echoes of grief faded, swallowed by colder, harder memories of vengeance. I felt my heartbeat slow, along with my breath.
“Yeah. I did. Nicky’s tipster was in on it, as it turned out. He’d arranged to empty out the safe and frame us for it. His magician was supposed to kill us all, then make the bodies disappear off the face of the earth. When I survived, it wrecked the plan.”
Caitlin tilted her head. Her fingertips played at the nape of my neck.
“They wanted you to disappear, so Nicky would assume you’d betrayed him and absconded with the bearer bonds,” she said.
“Exactly. He’d be hunting ghosts, never realizing his own informant was laughing behind his back. The guy even laid a paper trail to make it look like we’d fled the country with the score. He bought airline tickets in our names, for the day after—”
I froze. My body went rigid, cold stone, as my mind raced.
“Pet?” Caitlin asked.
I pulled away from her, just to arm’s length, and gazed into her eyes.
“The truth has been right in front of us this whole time. Right in my damn face, and I didn’t see it. Elmer Donaghy didn’t expect me to chase him to Paris and fall into another trap. The trap was right here in Vegas all along. He. Never. Left.”
* * *
We were chasing dawn. Good thing I had a bunch of night owls on my crew. Jennifer was first to arrive at the American, stifling a yawn behind her hand, followed by Bentley and Corman. Pixie didn’t even look tired, though the can of Red Bull she plowed through on her way in—and the second one she plucked from her laptop bag half a minute later—might have accounted for that.
“When Elmer ran from the fight at his waste management plant,” I said, “he left the receipt for his flight to Paris behind. Making it look like an accident, an oversight.”
Jennifer nodded and rubbed at one bleary eye. “Right. And then you’d fly to Paris to chase him down, he’d lure you to the company HQ, and kill you on his home turf.”
“The creepy little fucker is still playing chess with us. He wanted us to think we saw through his plan. He also wanted us to think we had some time to kill before he came back to Vegas.”
Bentley shook his head. The wrinkles on his brow got deeper.
“To what end?” he asked. “To arrange another trap?”
“His so-called ‘phase two,’” Caitlin replied. “The project he’s been undertaking for his masters in the Network. He needed time to bring it to fruition.”
“And he got it, courtesy of Harry Grimes,” I said.
Pixie opened up her laptop and cracked a third can of Red Bull. She was starting a row of empties along the sawhorse.
“The guy who’s trying to kill you,” she said. “Wait, so he’s been working for Elmer all along? I thought Elmer had to kill you, to get what he wanted from the King of Worms.”
I pointed her way. “Exactly. And that’s why it didn’t even occur to me that they might be on the same team. The king said that Elmer has to kill me with his own hands. If Harry gets the job done, Elmer’s shit out of luck. Natural enemies, right?”
“Maybe I’m just overthinking it,” Jennifer said, “but lemme take a stab. They’re the same person, wearing a magical disguise. Or they got a surgeon and did a hand transplant.”
“You are…definitely overthinking it,” I said.
“It’s after three in the morning, sugar. You’re lucky I’m even coherent.”
“It’s okay, I was overthinking it too, which is how I missed the obvious. Bottom line? Harry isn’t trying to kill me.”
“He put a bomb under your car,” Corman said.
“Sure. And he gave me plenty of time to pull over, get out, and run out of the blast range before he set it off. He has a gun—I saw the empty case where he’d been holing up—but he’s never even pulled it on me. He beat the hell out of me tonight, but he could have ended me if he had really been trying.”
“So Elmer hired an assassin,” Jennifer said, “and told him not to kill you?”
“Right, because killing me—eventually, on his own terms—is Elmer’s job. Harry’s job was to do exactly what he did: to keep me chasing him all over town, and give his boss some breathing room. Every step of the way, we’ve known we need to go after the Network, but with Elmer supposedly in Paris and Harry Grimes out for blood, I made Harry my top priority. It was a distraction. A big, elaborate distraction, making me spend all my time and energy hunting a phony threat.”
Bentley steepled his fingers, deep in thought. “And in the meantime, Elmer Donaghy has been free to finish his project in peace. For all we know, ‘phase two’ is already underway. So what do we do about it?”
“We set a trap of our own,” I said. “And I’m the bait.”