3.
A lone security guard waited for us at the doors to city hall. He locked up behind us and pointed the way down a half-lit corridor without a word. A janitor buffed the gleaming marble with a floor polisher, his eyes down and his ears buried under orange plastic headphones. He bobbed his head to a song I couldn’t make out, just the thrumming traces of a steady bass beat, as we skirted around him. At the end of the hall, white light shone against the pebbled glass of the mayor’s office door.
The glass rattled under my knuckles. “It’s open,” called out a tired voice from the other side.
Mayor Seabrook was at the tail end of a very long day or the beginning of a new one. This far past midnight, it was hard to tell the difference. Either way, she’d been hitting the hard stuff; her fresh-roasted coffee was strong enough to perk me up with the smell alone, no cream or sugar to get in the way of her caffeine fix. Steam curled from an electric kettle on the credenza behind her desk, one foil bag of whole beans crumpled and empty, a second one freshly torn open and ready to serve.
She didn’t offer us any. I didn’t expect her to. She waved us toward the pair of low lemon-colored chairs opposite her desk, then turned her back on us while she poured herself a fresh cup.
“Children,” she said.
“We don’t like it any more than you do,” I told her.
“And yet, you’ve done nothing.”
“There was an ink lab in Albuquerque. Was. Past tense.”
The mayor turned around and stared daggers at me over the rim of her mug. She took a long, slow sip and pointed to the darkness outside her office window.
“Is this Albuquerque?”
“What my associate means is,” Jennifer said, “we’re takin’ steps to address the situation.”
Seabrook took her seat. Shoulders hunched forward, nose wrinkled like a bulldog’s.
“Let me give you a history lesson,” she said. “In the eighties, my office, the FBI, and various civic and corporate interests came together, and we broke the Mafia’s back. It took an enormous expenditure of time and resources, but it was done. And if it was done once, it can be done again.”
“Let’s keep this friendly,” Jennifer said.
“Give me a reason to. I don’t mind playing ball with you people, so long as you toe the line. It’s a simple arrangement: you don’t hurt the tourist trade, no public displays of violence, and you toss us the occasional bust so Commissioner Harding can keep his numbers up. I only had one other request. One simple, tiny request: that you keep this ‘ink’ shit out of my city. Now I have to give a press conference to explain why a dozen teenagers just died from a tainted batch of drugs on my administration’s watch.”
Thirteen, but apparently Gary hadn’t called her yet. I didn’t correct her. I looked her square in the eye and laid my cards down.
“You’ve heard of the Network,” I said.
“I’ve heard of the bogeyman too,” she said, drinking her coffee. “Doesn’t make him real.”
“This particular bogeyman is. The organization exists, it’s nationwide—if not global—and it’s behind the ink pipeline.”
She chewed on that for a minute, face scrunched up like she didn’t enjoy the taste. She washed it down with a swig of black coffee.
“Then bring me proof,” she said. “I’m getting ready to leave for Boulder City in a couple of days. The United Conference of Mayors is holding a special session to address the ink epidemic. We’ll shine a spotlight on them, drag them out of hiding—”
I held up a hand. “No. Bad idea. When people poke around the Network’s business, they end up dead, and they don’t draw lines like we do. Cops, district attorneys, mayors—they’ll bury anyone who looks at them sideways. You shouldn’t even go to this thing. Stay home, and don’t make waves.”
That got her hackles up. “I haven’t held my office this long by not making waves. My constituents expect action. And once people wake up to the morning headlines, you’d better believe they’ll be demanding results.”
“Which is why you need us,” I said. “I’ve seen some of the Network’s playbook. Trust me when I say that the cops and the feds combined can’t handle this fight.”
“But you can.” Her tone made it clear just how much confidence she had in me. A little less than the coffee left in her mug. She pushed her chair back and got up to pour another cup.
Jennifer had her phone out, flipping through her photo gallery like she’d checked out of the discussion entirely. Odd, but I left her to it.
“We have resources the law doesn’t,” I said, “and needless to say, we don’t have the same limitations—”
Seabrook cut me off with an irritated flick of her fingers. “Words. I’m hearing words. Meanwhile I’ve got twelve dead kids on my hands, a designer-drug epidemic, and a contaminated batch out on the streets about to kill more users. Harding warned me that I shouldn’t get into bed with gangsters. I’m not sure you people even qualify for the title.”
“Few months back,” Jennifer drawled, still staring at her phone, “had a dealer on my payroll who decided to cut his supply with baby powder. Stretch it out, make more money with less product, and pocket the surplus behind my back, you know? Only he didn’t know how to do it right. Killed three of his best customers. And instead of coming clean about it, telling me what he did so we could fix the situation, the wet-brained son of a biscuit panicked and sold the rest of the batch to get rid of it. Maybe six people died before we figured out what was what.”
She found the photo she was looking for. Then she stood up, leaned over the mayor’s desk, and turned her phone to give her a good look. Seabrook’s lips slowly parted. The color ran from her face.
“That’s what I did to him,” Jennifer said.
“Why…” the mayor said, her voice a strained whisper. “Why did you take a picture of that?”
Jennifer put her phone away and gave her a smile.
“Simple. Now, when someone new joins my crew, I explain Jennifer’s easy rules for success. And then I show ’em that picture, so they understand what happens when those rules get broken.”
She leaned farther over the desk, closer. The smile never left her face, but her eyes went colder than a Siberian sunset as her voice dropped low.
“That gangster enough for you? Or do I need to show you the rest of my photo collection?”
I watched Seabrook’s throat bulge as she swallowed, hard.
“We’ll find the dealer those kids bought from,” I said. “And if any of the bad batch is still around, it’ll disappear without a trace. Just like the dealer.”
* * *
On the other side of the mayor’s office door, I shot Jennifer a dubious look.
“Seriously, you probably shouldn’t carry that picture around on your phone.”
“Can’t prove it’s real. Special effects, a Halloween decoration…” She hip-bumped me as we walked. “Ain’t like they’re ever gonna find his body.”
“True, true. So, were you trying to scare the hell out of her? Because mission accomplished and well done.”
“I was tired of her sass,” she said. “One of Jennifer’s rules for success: Jennifer gives the sass. She does not receive the sass. Seabrook just needed a little reminder of who’s wearing the pants in this particular domestic arrangement. And you weren’t wrong about keeping her away from that conference. I’d rather we had a scared mayor than a dead one.”
“Scared only goes so far. We need some results, to show we’re holding up our end of the bargain. I wasn’t even going to ask her about the liquor license for the American.”
The American was my pet project. A nightclub on the fringes of the Vegas Strip, built from the ground up to be a safe harbor for the city’s underworld. Whether you carried a gun or a wand, no matter what color your blood ran, we’d be waiting with open arms and your favorite poison on tap. Not to mention a high-stakes backroom game or two, with no pesky IRS forms for the winners to fill out, and a secure vault to facilitate the exchange of contraband. I’d convinced every member of the New Commission’s board of directors to kick in some seed money, guaranteeing that each of the city’s biggest crews had a stake in the place and a vested interest in keeping it safe.
All we needed now, once construction wrapped up, was a liquor license. I’d breezed through a forest of red tape with ease, crafting a shell company with reams of fake paper (not to mention the American’s fictional owner, one Mr. Rick Blaine), but the Board of Liquor and Gaming was a tough nut to crack. One phone call from Mayor Seabrook would grease the wheels, but she needed a little encouragement to play along.
I figured she’d cooperate if we made a show of good faith and drove the Network out of Vegas. Fine by me. We were going to do that anyway.
“Y’know, if we have to wait, it’s not the biggest problem in the world,” Jennifer told me. “Yeah, everybody on the Commission wants to see a return on their investment, but now that we’re getting a grip on Nicky’s old rackets, we’re starting to see some real cash rolling in. The American’s a small splash in a big pool.”
Our footsteps echoed off the polished sweep of white marble, echoing down a long and lonely hallway lined with doors of pebbled glass. We traveled in that strange space just before dawn, when the bars and strip clubs had kicked out their last stragglers, the neon went cold, and the city took one slow, deep breath before the party started all over again. At this hour, only sharks kept swimming.
“It’s not the money,” I said. What was it, then? I fumbled for an answer, figuring it out as the words came to me. “I turn forty in a few months.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, I know. Believe me, I’ve been plannin’ your party. We’re going to have black balloons, black candles on the cake…”
“I’ve been thinking about it, is all.”
“Getting older, or just getting old?”
“Both,” I said. “But it’s more like…I’ve ghosted my way through life. I pay cash, I carry fake paper, I don’t leave footprints. And that’s always been fine, that always worked for me.”
“We are career criminals,” Jennifer said. “It kinda goes with the lifestyle.”
“And if I died tomorrow, outside of a few people’s memories, there’d be nothing to show I ever existed at all.” I dug deeper and found the words I was looking for. “I want to build something.”
“Like a legacy,” she said.
“I guess, yeah. I want to put my mark on this city. I want to build something so I can stand back and point to it and say, see that? That’s mine. I made that.”
“Sugar,” Jennifer said, “you’re havin’ a midlife crisis. You know that, right?”
“Maybe.”
We pushed out through the double doors and onto the granite steps. It was a desert night in early November; the bone-dry chill wasn’t taking any prisoners. The bitter wind ruffled my hair and slipped an icy finger along the back of my neck, leaving goose bumps in its wake. A cold and loveless glow touched the mountains in the distance with the shimmer of false dawn.
“I’ll shake a few trees, see if I can figure out an alternative option if Seabrook doesn’t come through.” She stifled a yawn behind her fist. “I’m bushed, gonna hit the sack for a few hours. You oughta do the same. Feels like one of those ‘calm before the storm’ situations.”
I promised myself four hours of shut-eye, but I break promises all the time. I was up and moving in two, blasting my drowsiness away under the spray of an ice-cold shower and knotting a fresh tie around my neck as I headed for the door. I had work to do, and the warning of the King of Worms—that his would-be prince was on the move and gunning for my head—lingered at the back of my thoughts.
So did his offer.
I was used to being on the defensive, but never like this. The Enemy was coming after me, and if that wasn’t bad enough, I’d been sucked into the same cosmic nightmare that spawned him. As far as the universe was concerned, I was the Thief, one of the characters in his endlessly repeating story. And the Thief’s story always ended with a knife in his back. If I didn’t get this curse off my head, and soon, the Enemy wouldn’t have to knock me off; the fabric of reality itself would do it for him.
On the other side, we had the Network, a criminal occult cartel with ambitions we couldn’t begin to decipher and a reach longer than the edges of the world. And Naavarasi, who had her own plans in motion. It felt like everyone wanted to use me, kill me, or both.
Taking the king’s offer would solve all my problems. Attractive, but his pitch smelled as sour as month-old milk. If there was one thing a life of running con games had taught me, it was that when someone offered you the perfect solution, it was usually the perfect lie.
I didn’t need help from the King of Worms. All I needed was a little breathing room. Just enough space to start throwing punches.