The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Read online

  Chou Yong looked more confident every time I saw him, taking to his new responsibilities in the wake of his boss’s death. Now, though, the big man coughed discreetly into a handkerchief and gave Jennifer a questioning look.

  “It’s all right, sugar,” she told him. “Everybody here is some degree of clued-in.”

  “Not sure I am,” he said. “But that man, Kirmira…he’s a monster. He impersonated Shangguan Jin, our former Red Pole.”

  “Impersonated?” Eddie Stone, dressed like a million bucks even at eight in the morning, looked his way. “Like, he wears disguises?”

  “He…changes his shape. He’s a monster.”

  “Horseshit,” Winslow drawled.

  I spread my hands. “Sorry, it’s true. He’s a shape-shifter.”

  “Oh, I believe you. I’m just saying it’s horseshit that we have to deal with it. I can’t go back to my clubhouse and tell a roomful of hard-ridin’ sons of bitches that we’re going up against something out of a horror movie.”

  “Wait till you hear about the other guy,” Jennifer said.

  Winslow cracked open a bottle of beer and sighed.

  “Look, Faust, we all know the score, right? We know a lot of weird shit goes down in this city. But handling that, that’s what people hire folks like you and Jenny for. So we don’t have to deal with it. Or think about it.”

  “And we’ll handle it,” I told him, “but the bottom line is, these guys are in the mix, like it or not, and we’ve got to be ready for any possibility. Now this other one, Damien Ecko, he’s…really old. And he has, um, some special skills—”

  As I fumbled for a diplomatic way to parse “three-thousand-year-old necromancer” for a roomful of mostly non-magicians, a hammering at the door bought me a momentary respite. A Calles foot soldier hustled in, leaning close to whisper into Gabriel’s ear. His boss shrugged.

  “Huh. Okay, bring him on in.” Gabriel looked to the rest of us. “Seems we got ourselves a special guest.”

  The special guest was Detective Gary Kemper, wearing his gold shield on his belt. He swaggered in like a wolf in a henhouse. From the way the room closed in around him, hard eyes on his badge, he was more like a hen in a den of wolves. I wasn’t sure if his confidence was a calculated show of authority, or if he actually thought he was in charge here.

  I stretched out my senses, psychic tendrils lapping at Gary’s aura, just like I had done for everyone else in the room. A precautionary check to make sure we weren’t facing a rakshasa in disguise. Now that I’d tasted Kirmira’s scent, he wouldn’t get the drop on me again. Gary was the real deal, all right. No jungle fires, no peat-moss aroma, just the barbed-wire twist of a cambion soul. Half human, half demon, and doomed never to fit in either world.

  “Nice shithole you’ve got here,” he said. “I guess crime doesn’t pay after all.”

  “It’s a fixer-upper,” Jennifer told him.

  Gary gazed around the room, locking eyes with each and every one of us.

  “Now this is cute. You’ve got a regular rainbow coalition of scumbags going on here. The only missing face is Little Shawn. Oh, right, I forgot. Him and his entire crew came down with lead poisoning last night.”

  “You here to arrest all of us?” Gabriel asked. “Hope you brought backup, ese.”

  Needles Dominguez, the delegate from the Fine Upstanding Crew, folded his arms and stood in front of the door. “Hope he brought a lot more than that, or this bitch ain’t walking out of here alive.”

  Gary’s eyes narrowed. “Slow your roll, Tony Montana. I’m here to help. In fact, right about now, I’m the only friend you people have.”

  “You’re gonna have to pardon our skepticism,” Jennifer told him.

  “Look,” he said, “pretty sure you already know the word on the street, from the mayor’s office on down: you’re out, Mancuso is in. The brass just wants this fight over, before tourists start getting caught in the crossfire. Angelo’s promising the moon and the stars, claiming he’s already got you people beat.”

  “Think we just proved otherwise,” I said.

  “What you just did,” Gary said, “was kick the hornet’s nest. I’ve got a buddy who works in the Chicago PD, vice unit. One of his confidential informants dropped the dime on some major activity. Angelo called for backup.”

  “We figured he would,” I said. “We’re hoping to have everything wrapped up before they get here.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  Gary stepped into the heart of the room, slats of light from the boarded windows drawing lines across his face.

  “I’m not talking about another couple of cars, another ten or twelve goons coming our way. He called everybody. Every shooter on his daddy’s payroll, and every thug, throat-cutter, and junkie he could scrape from the bottom of the barrel. The word’s out: it’s open season. And let me assure you, these people don’t care about causing a bloodbath on Flamingo Boulevard if that’s what it takes to get the job done. My bosses made a devil’s pact, getting into bed with Angelo Mancuso, and they’ve got no damn idea what kind of a shitstorm they just unleashed.”

  Winslow leaned back, looking him up and down. “So what’s your angle?”

  “My angle,” Gary told him, “is that I’m a cop. And my job, first and foremost, is protecting the citizens of Las Vegas. There’s one thousand eight hundred and sixty miles between Chicago and Vegas. That’s a twenty-six-hour drive. Which means we’ve got just a little over a day, maybe a day and a half, before Angelo’s army hits town with trunks full of heavy firepower. So consider this a friendly heads-up: you’ve got just about that long to deal with Angelo and make him call off the dogs, or we’re all gonna be in a world of hurt.”

  He approached me, pitching his voice low.

  “I’m hoping that’s enough incentive. In your case, though? Here’s a little something extra: if you don’t put a lid on this situation by the time Angelo’s backup arrives, you’re officially less than useless to me. And my next phone call is to the FBI.”

  He turned and left without another word. Nobody tried to stop him. As the door swung shut in his wake, all eyes were on me.

  My eyes were on the whiteboard. Mancuso. Kirmira. Ecko. Three big problems in search of solutions.

  Or maybe, just maybe, if I could find a wedge to drive between them…one solution to bring them all tumbling down.

  * * *

  We hit the streets. Priority one was finding Angelo Mancuso. Without his shooters backing him up, he was down to a skeleton crew—easy to take out, but harder to find than a saint in a brothel. Using the strategy room at the fortress as a call and coordination center, we dispatched the New Commission’s forces across the city.

  The Blood Eagles did what they were best at: ruling the roads. Packs of Winslow’s bikers roved up and down the Strip, keeping their eyes peeled for cars with Illinois plates. Chou Yong’s boys had the off-Strip betting action locked down; they hit the sports books and the backroom poker games, pumping their contacts for information. Angelo had a taste for the good life, and so did the gentlemen from the Inagawa-kai. The yakuza’s fashion peacocks slipped into the resort scene, haunting poolside cabanas and high-end bars with their ears to the ground. Our street soldiers from the Bishops, Calles, and Crew traded their colors for civilian gear and spread across the city like white blood cells fighting an invading virus.

  Jennifer and I worked the phones back at home base. By two in the afternoon, the whiteboard was a mess of scribbles, and our notes had spilled over to a pair of hastily scrounged yellow legal pads. Everyone on the streets knew somebody who knew something, a hundred leads that led to a hundred dead ends. Angelo was a ghost. All of our people were working under the same orders: observe, follow, report in.

  I should have known Winslow’s people would be the first to break that rule. Still, all things considered, I couldn’t complain.

  When the call came in, I headed over to the Sunset Garage while Jennifer hung back to cover the phones. They’d lan
ded a fish, they said. A fish in the form of a sleek Mercedes parked around back, the sides dented all to hell and half the windows smashed out.

  “My boys got a little rambunctious,” Winslow said. “Took one look at the license plates and forced him off the road. Thankfully it wasn’t some damn tourist, or I’d be making a whole lot of apologies right now. And I hate apologizing.”

  “Who was driving? Angelo?”

  “Nope,” Winslow said, leading me around to the back of the car. He hoisted the trunk lid and showed me their prize.

  Bound and gagged, his suit scuffed and torn, the Doctor glared his angry defiance. Then Angelo’s torture specialist got a look at me, and he deflated like a pinpricked balloon.

  “Excuse me just a second,” I said.

  I walked into the garage, rummaging around the workbenches until I found what I was looking for. I came back to the trunk and held up my find. Using my hand with the splinted fingers, just to make a point.

  One pull of the trigger and the cordless drill whirred to life, its diamond-tipped bit gleaming in the sunlight. The Doctor’s eyes went wide.

  “I’m not going to ask you any questions,” I told him. “Yet.”

  39.

  Eventually, I did ask a few questions. And he answered them.

  Angelo, Kirmira, and a trio of bodyguards were holed up nice and cozy at the Medici. Top-floor suite, room 3608, with a view of the artificial lake and the dancing fountains below.

  “I’m coming to pick you up,” I told Jennifer, calling from the car. The Spark’s engine whined as I redlined it, gunning through the late-afternoon traffic.

  “I’ll be ready. What’s the play?”

  “We take a small crew in. We go quiet: magic and sound suppressors. If we can take Angelo alive, great. If not, sucks to be him.”

  Jennifer snickered. “Gonna suck to be him either way, ain’t it?”

  “Hey, he wanted this fight. If he won’t come to the front line, the front line’s coming to him.”

  “How’re we looking on plan B?” she asked.

  “Working on that right now.”

  I hung up and made another call. Not one I was looking forward to, but I was out of options. Besides, I’d always been a proponent of fighting fire with fire.

  “Thank you for calling the Blue Karma,” said the heavily accented voice on the other end of the line. “Will you be placing an order for carryout or delivery?”

  “This is Daniel Faust,” I told him. “I need to talk to Naavarasi.”

  * * *

  We rolled into the lobby of the Medici with a skeleton crew. Me and Jennifer in the front, Gabriel and his three best shooters—nine millimeters fitted with Dead Air silencers under their track jackets—bringing up the rear. Hitting the hotel with an army would have drawn all kinds of bad attention and handed Angelo a golden opportunity to slip away in the chaos. Instead, we’d do this quick, clean, and quiet.

  We strode across the zebra-striped marble floor under the watchful eyes of cherubs in the old-world frescoes adorning the scalloped walls. Past a burbling crystal fountain, slot machines rang out along the casino floor, singing their siren song. The marble gave way to ornate Italian carpet, classy but faded with age, and a straight shot between the gaming tables to the hotel elevators.

  We barely made it fifteen feet.

  I knew the man who stepped into our path, an immovable object bringing our unstoppable force to a dead halt. He had a weasel’s face and a vulture’s eyes, his coal-black hair slicked with grease. His suit was more expensive than mine, but he either didn’t care enough to get it tailored, or his tailor just didn’t like him very much.

  “Greenbriar,” I said. “What a pleasure.”

  “You ain’t doing this here, Dan.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you do.”

  Ever wonder why magicians don’t just go to the casino, cast a luck spell on their dice, and break the Vegas bank? People like Greenbriar, that’s why. Director of “special security” for CMC Entertainment, which owned over half the casinos on the Strip. He didn’t come alone, either. Bruisers in black suits emerged from the tourist crowds, silently looming in a rough circle around our wolf pack. Half of them glinted with magical potential; the rest geared up with protective amulets and high-caliber pistols under their jackets.

  “This doesn’t concern you.”

  The scraggly mustache on Greenbriar’s lip twisted as he smirked. “Doesn’t concern me? Now, don’t get me wrong, but I think you and your pals here are about to murder one of my guests. If you look up the word ‘concern’ in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure there’s a picture of this very situation printed next to it.”

  “You know who that guest is, right?”

  “Yeah. Now ask me if I care. The people who write my paychecks have worked very, very hard over the years to turn Las Vegas into a safe, family-friendly entertainment destination, Dan. You know how we did that? Well, among other things, we don’t let gangsters kick in doors and shoot our guests. That’s high on the list of things we don’t tolerate.”

  “You ought to be worried about what happens when Angelo’s backup rolls into town,” I told him. “We care about collateral damage. They won’t.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Greenbriar stepped closer. His men held their ground, tense, their eyes like chips of flint.

  “Listen,” he said, “I like you. And I owe you one for helping me out with that…situation over at the Monaco. But this ain’t happening. Not here, not today, not ever. No violence on CMC Entertainment property, you dig me? Now, if you can get him off the casino grounds, hey, happy hunting. I hope you nail the bastard. But you don’t wanna break this little, ah, détente we got here. You think the Chicago Mafia is bad news? CMC is worldwide, man, and they got a hundred million dollars in a bank account labeled ‘payback.’”

  He was right. I hated to admit it, but he was right.

  Vegas was an ecosystem. A precariously balanced one at the best of times, but one constant helped to keep the peace more than anything else: my crowd didn’t mess with the casinos, and the casinos didn’t mess with us. Greenbriar and his crew were just there to keep everybody honest. If push ever came to shove, his corporate paymasters could snuff us all as easily as writing a check. Our deaths would be an afterthought, a line item scribbled out before an afternoon round of golf.

  I held his gaze, as if I could stare him down, make him buckle by sheer force of will, but it was like throwing confetti at a wall of iron. I nodded. “Fine. Okay. You win. We’ll wait until he leaves.”

  Greenbriar’s face lit up. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sheaf of glossy white slips.

  “See? I knew we’d come to terms. And these are discount coupons for our world-famous buffet. Five dollars off your purchase, not valid during lunch and dinner rushes. It’s on me, guys. Enjoy.”

  I took the coupons. I’ve got my pride, but the buffet at the Medici really was fantastic.

  Besides, I was a little distracted. As I led my disheartened followers back through the lobby, through the automatic glass revolving doors and out into the sunlight, I noticed we’d sprouted a tail. A middle-aged woman, in an “I Heart Las Vegas” T-shirt and tacky, oversized plastic sunglasses. That’s what she looked like anyway. My psychic tendrils, invisibly snapping at the air above her head, came away with a different picture entirely.

  “Don’t look back,” I murmured to Jennifer, “but Kirmira’s following us.”

  She cracked her knuckles. “Oh, good. Time for plan B?”

  “Time for plan B.”

  * * *

  Dealing with the Outfit’s pet shape-shifter was one thing. Getting Angelo out of that suite and onto the street where we could take a shot at him without starting a feud with CMC was another problem altogether. Back at the fortress, I paced around the card table to work off my nervous energy.

  “Angelo knows he’s prote
cted up there,” I said. “He’s got no reason to set one foot outside that room.”

  Jennifer leaned against the dirty wall, arms and ankles crossed, deep in thought.

  “I’d say we pull some kinda switch, maybe disguise ourselves as room service, but Greenbriar and his critters are onto us now. We’ll never get close.”

  “No, we’ve got to flush him out. Then we’ve got to track him, so he doesn’t give us the slip.” I held up my finger, stopping short. “That part we can do.”

  The Doctor was buried in a shallow hole in the scraggly, hard-packed ground behind the Sunset Garage. I’d kept his cell phone. His contact list was a who’s who of the Chicago Outfit, including Angelo’s personal line. A number simply marked “Ecko,” too. Nothing I had any particular use for at the moment—I didn’t need to call Damien; he knew exactly where to find me thanks to the amulet in my pocket—but I figured I’d hold on to the info just in case. I set the phone down on the map table and called Pixie on my burner.

  “Little busy here, Faust. Make it snappy.”

  “Hey, Pix. If you have somebody’s cell phone number, can you track their location?”

  “On short notice?”

  “Pretty short, yeah.”

  She sighed. “Sort of. Your phone automatically pings off cell towers when you come in range. If your target is on the move, I can use those pings to get a general direction and use the time between towers to extrapolate velocity.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “That’s a ‘sort of.’ I can get a rough location. If you want me to nail his location down to a five-foot radius, I need to get access to his GPS traffic. That’s a little harder. Also more expensive. For you.”

  A rough location would be fine. We had people on the ground who could do the rest. I gave her Angelo’s phone number. She gave me a price. We halfheartedly haggled for thirty seconds, agreed to the amount she knew we’d end up at in the first place, and hung up.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said. “We got the means to find him. Now we just gotta smoke him out.”