The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Read online

  It was a perfect problem. We couldn’t get in. He didn’t want to come out. We could go in guns blazing, but that would spark a war with CMC, a war we didn’t want and couldn’t survive. Nobody was crazy enough to pick that fight.

  I looked back to the whiteboard and the original headers I’d marked down before the slate was covered in scribbled notes. Angelo Mancuso. Kirmira. Damien Ecko.

  Then I smiled.

  I waved Jennifer over to the map table, picked up a highlighter, and drew a fat yellow X at three points along South Las Vegas Boulevard.

  “We’re going to need spotters here, here, and here,” I told her. “Let’s put some of Winslow’s guys right here on East Flamingo, near the freeway off-ramp. Lots of little spots where they can pull their bikes off to the side of the road, and come in hot if we need them.”

  Jennifer caught the look in my eyes and grinned. “I hear your gears turnin’. Where are we gonna be?”

  I tapped the middle of the boulevard, halfway up the Strip, with the tip of the highlighter. Dabbing a streak of yellow across the Medici’s man-made lake.

  “In the middle of the action. Where else?”

  Before we left, I took out the falcon amulet, still snug in its nest of tissue, and left it on the map table. For a couple of hours, at least, I needed a little invisibility.

  40.

  Under a rich amber sunset, the fountains of the Medici danced. Pillars of water surged from the glittering lake to the tune of “All That Jazz,” forming spirals and arcs before splashing back down again. Jennifer and I stood at the iron railing, invisible in a herd of tourists and flashing cell-phone cameras.

  The fountains were a good show, and free, a rare combination on the Strip. Still, I only had eyes for the stately resort looming over the lake, and the windows on the top floor. With the Doctor’s phone in hand, I called Angelo Mancuso.

  “Doc?” Angelo said. “Where the hell have you been, man? I haven’t heard from you all day!”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “The Doctor had his license permanently revoked. Medical malpractice.”

  Dead silence on the line. Not even the sound of breathing.

  “You had to know, after what he did to me, what he was going to do to me, he was kind of a priority target. Not like you are, though.”

  “Fuck him,” Angelo said, “the guy was a creep. This doesn’t change anything.”

  “Sure it does. You’re losing men left and right, while you’re sitting up there all cozy in suite thirty-six-oh-eight at the Medici.”

  He let out a cocky laugh. “Yeah. You found me, good for you. You think I don’t know the score? You can’t set foot in this place. None of your pals can either. So y’know, I think I’ll just enjoy some of this room-service caviar while I wait for my backup to get here. I’ll stand at the window and give a big wave while they turn you into swiss cheese.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “No remorse, no compassion for the fallen? You throw your allies away like they don’t mean a thing, don’t you? Just like you did to Damien Ecko. You promised to hand me over to him, and you never intended to follow through.”

  “Hey, an extra big ‘fuck him’ to that guy. I don’t owe that skeevy old bastard a thing. You know what he is? My errand boy. My stupid, weird-ass errand boy. I’m still gonna put two bullets in the back of your head if I get half the chance, and I’m still not gonna tell him a damn thing about it.”

  A faint click echoed on the other end of the line.

  “What…what was that?” Angelo said. “You recording this? What are you gonna do, hand it to the cops? Ain’t admissible in court, genius.”

  “Nope, that was the third party on the line hanging up. Guess he’d heard enough.”

  “He?” Angelo said, his voice uncertain now.

  “Damien Ecko. I called him before I called you. He didn’t believe me at first, but I figured if you casually admitted to stabbing him in the back once, it wouldn’t be too hard to get you to do it twice.”

  Silence. When he spoke again, his bluster couldn’t hide the nervous tension at the edges of his voice.

  “Doesn’t change a thing. We didn’t need his help anyway.”

  “It’s a little more of a problem than that, Angelo. Let’s see. You insulted him, you lied to him, you basically stole from him—and he’s got a real hate-on for thieves, trust me on this one—oh, and there’s one other important fact you should take into account.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “He’s the one man in this city crazy enough to pick a fight with CMC Entertainment,” I said. “You’re right. We can’t get you as long as you’re holed up in that suite, not without bringing CMC’s wrath down on us. But Ecko? He’s got a bounty from two demonic courts riding on his head. He’s a dead man walking with nothing to lose, and he knows it. He just doesn’t care. If I were you, I’d get a welcoming committee together. You’re about to have an unfriendly visitor.”

  I hung up.

  Jennifer leaned forward with her hands against the railing, catching a gust of cool spray from the dancing waters. She glanced my way.

  “So,” she said. “Whatcha think happens next?”

  “Depends. Angelo’s personality is ninety percent arrogance, but he’s gotta know Ecko’s heavier than he looks. I’d say it’s a three-way split, even odds: either he packs up and runs before Ecko gets there, he runs when Ecko gets there, or Ecko shows up and slaughters everybody in the room.”

  “I’m fine with any of those,” she said.

  We waited.

  We didn’t have to wait long, though. I was jolted from my thoughts by a tourist’s gasp, a pointing finger drawing my gaze to the fast-darkening sky.

  “What is that?” someone asked off to my left. “Birds?”

  The swarming, churning mass in the sky over the Medici wasn’t made of birds, though. Even from a distance, I knew it as soon as I laid eyes on it.

  Locusts.

  The furious mass swirled in the sky, packing tight like a clenched fist, then flew full-speed at a top-floor window. Cries of surprise went up from the crowd, phones zooming in to capture the moment in grainy pixels, as the locust swarm boiled into the hotel through a chunk of shattered glass.

  A couple of minutes later, Pixie called. “Yeah, your target’s moving. Pretty fast, too. On foot, but running.”

  “I am not surprised. Got a location?”

  “Told you, my data isn’t that fine-tuned. If you’d given me more time…hold on. Okay, got something. The target phone exited the Medici parking garage, turning right onto the boulevard. Faster now, they’re probably in a vehicle.”

  We sprinted for my car while Jennifer made short, fast calls, relaying orders to the troops in a breathless voice.

  “Looks like he turned left onto East Harmon,” Pixie told me.

  I racked my brain, picturing the city on my mental map. “Tell me if he turns right onto Paradise Road.”

  “You called it. He just did.”

  “The airport,” I told Jennifer. “He’s taking side streets to get to McCarran.”

  Angelo was good and scared, just how I wanted him, but I had hoped he’d try escaping town on wheels. Catching up to him and running him off the road would have been easy. Now he’d jump onto the first plane that would have him, jetting off into the night and back to the safety of his father’s mansion. We couldn’t let that happen.

  A text message came in from an anonymous phone number. “Terminal 3. Long-term parking.”

  I drove faster.

  * * *

  Angelo’s footsteps thudded against the faded concrete of the parking garage as he barked into his phone. “No, I don’t—I don’t even care if it’s coach seating. Three tickets on a nonstop flight, why is this so hard to understand?”

  I stepped out from behind a parked van, standing in his path.

  Angelo had Kirmira and his buddy Sal at his side. I supposed his other bodyguards had stayed behind to cover their boss’s retreat. A valiant but pointl
ess sacrifice. The trio stopped short. Angelo hung up his phone. We stood there, facing each other across ten feet of open concrete, fluorescent tubes softly buzzing and popping above our heads. The echo of car engines growled in the distance, the garage acoustics turning them into the muffled rumbles of sleeping monsters.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked.

  “Help from a couple of friends. It’s over, Angelo. You made your bid and you lost. Now it’s time to pay the bill.”

  Angelo glanced to his left, then curled his lip in a cocky sneer.

  “I thought you were a gambling man, Faust. Three against one? Those are lousy odds.”

  “The key to being a good gambler,” I told him, “is doing everything you can to shift the odds in your favor. Case in point? You’re flying out of town, not driving. Can’t take your guns through the security checkpoint, which means you’re totally unarmed right now.”

  My cards leaped from my hip pocket, riffling into my hand.

  “I’m not.”

  Angelo and Sal shared a look, both of them laughing. “Is that right, magic man? You got a bad memory. I don’t need guns to take you out.”

  Angelo snapped his fingers.

  Kirmira buckled to the concrete. His bones creaked and snapped, his jaw elongating into a muzzle, bright orange fur sprouting from flesh stretched to the tearing point. His eyes turned a baleful yellow, glowing, as he shook off the tattered shreds of his clothes and stood tall on four paws.

  “I got a tiger,” Angelo said.

  The five-hundred-pound Bengal, rippling with muscle and seven feet long, let out a rumbling growl.

  “Correction,” I told him. “You had a tiger.”

  Angelo squinted at me. “Huh?”

  The Bengal spun, roaring as it lashed out, raking a razor-clawed paw across Sal’s stomach. Blood sprayed across the concrete and he hit the ground with a high-pitched shriek, thrashing and pressing his hands to his savaged belly as a ropy strand of intestine spilled out between his fingers.

  I shrugged.

  “That’s not your tiger.”

  41.

  Our rout at the Medici hadn’t been a total loss. I figured Kirmira would be prowling around, keeping a quiet watch from the safety of his disguises. When he followed us out of the casino, tailing us all the way back to home base, we couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity.

  We did exactly what he’d hoped we would do. Ignored him, as if we didn’t know he was there, and went about our business.

  It took a while, but eventually a frantic knock sounded at the strategy room door. Jennifer stepped over and let our guest in. One of the Calles foot soldiers, a younger kid in a yellow headband and torn jeans, looking breathless.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “There’s trouble outside. Gunfire. We gotta get you to safety.”

  Jennifer and I shared a nod. We led the way, thundering up a flight of stairs and down a dusty, abandoned corridor, winding our way through the abandoned back rooms of the tenement.

  “Figured the Outfit’s shape-shifter was primed to start some trouble,” Jennifer said, looking back over her shoulder. “Don’t you worry, sugar. We got a plan for that.”

  “I’m in,” the kid said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Through here. Safe room.”

  A door creaked on warped hinges. The room beyond hung in a murky gloom, the windows boarded over and the lights dead. We followed Jennifer inside.

  “It’s a sacrifice play,” she said. “See, first I find a real troublemaker, somebody who’s been flappin’ his jaw about offering his services to Chicago as an inside man. Somebody I won’t miss.”

  “Then what?”

  I shut the door behind us, sealing us in the dark. My hand reached for the light switch.

  “Then we send him outside on guard duty, all on his own, and pull all our other soldiers back. Make him a prime target.”

  I flicked on the light.

  Plastic sheeting covered the floor of the empty room. Painter’s tarp lined the walls, tacked up all around us. As the kid squinted, eyes adjusting to the light, I stepped around to stand beside Jennifer.

  “Then,” I said, “we pretend we don’t know he’s been replaced, and lead Kirmira straight into a kill room. What do you think? Will the plan work?”

  The kid’s eyes flared orange. He chuckled slowly, looking at the two closed doors on opposite sides of the room. Then to the plastic sheeting under our feet. His bones melted and reknitted to change the shape of his face, skin darkening, hair turning raven-black and growing out as he asserted his form.

  “With respect,” Kirmira said, “you have only half of a plan. You seem to have sealed yourself into a room with me and warned me of your intentions. An unwise strategy.”

  I shrugged. “That depends. I figured we’d play this wild-west style. Have a little showdown and see who’s faster on the draw. What do you say? Are you game?”

  His hands melted into tiger’s paws, bristling with orange fur and killing claws.

  “I am very, very fast, sir,” he said.

  Jennifer slid one foot to the left, steadying her stance, and beckoned to him with a curl of her fingertips.

  “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s see what you got, sugar.”

  Kirmira leaped across the room, closing the gap between us in the blink of an eye, one paw raised high to carve out Jennifer’s heart in a single lethal blow. He swooped down, claws glinting—

  —and dangled in the air, letting out a strangled wheeze, as Jennifer caught him by the throat and held him aloft.

  The door on the other side of the room swung wide. Kirmira’s eyes bulged as a second Jennifer—the real one—strolled in and gave him a casual salute.

  The Jennifer beside me wasn’t Jennifer anymore. Legs and arms growing longer, more muscled, her shoulders broadening as her fingers sprouted jade-tipped claws. Her skull elongated, lips becoming a muzzle, cheeks bristling with five-inch whiskers and golden fur as her eyes glowed a vicious neon orange.

  I’d seen statues of ancient Egyptian deities, goddesses with the body of a woman and the head of a lioness. Now I was standing next to one. The breath caught in my throat as Naavarasi lifted her struggling prey in the air with a single clenched hand. Kirmira kicked and squirmed, tugging at her forearm, struggling to breathe.

  “To think,” Naavarasi rumbled, “you actually believed this pathetic creature was one of my kin.”

  With his last breath, Kirmira croaked something. In Hindi, maybe. I couldn’t understand the words. It sounded like a question. From the desperate, horrified look on his face, from the intensity in his dying voice, it sounded like the only question in the universe worth asking.

  Naavarasi answered with a brutal twist of her hand. Kirmira’s neck snapped. She tossed his lifeless body to the plastic sheets.

  Seconds after hitting the floor, Kirmira’s corpse began to change. His features melted like candle wax, the color draining from his skin, his bones settling and going flat as if they’d turned to cartilage, then to jelly. All that remained of the shape-shifter, nestled inside his abandoned clothes, was a frail and slug-belly-white lump of burbling tissue.

  “Burn that,” Naavarasi said, her tone imperious. She’d told me once that in her prime, before her realm was annexed by hell in a war that made her the last of her kind, people worshiped her as a deity. In that moment, I could understand why.

  Then she shrank, the fur and fangs slipping away, her eyes fading to a gentle brown as she took on a human guise. A perfect duplicate of Kirmira stood before me now, indistinguishable from the real thing.

  “This,” the rakshasi queen said in Kirmira’s voice, “makes two boons you owe me.”

  “I’m aware,” I told her. “Thanks for the assist.”

  “I look forward to collecting.”

  She gathered up his clothes, leaving the flesh lump where it fell, and checked his pockets.

  “I’ll appraise you of their movements,” Naavarasi said, “at least as mu
ch as I can without drawing suspicion. I suggest you find another means of tracking your prey once you flush them out, just in case. Or you could simply allow me to eliminate your enemies for you.”

  “So that’s Angelo, his buddy Sal, and two or three more bodyguards. What’s the going rate for a kill like that?”

  She smiled with Kirmira’s lips. “One boon for each life, of course. In addition to the two already owed.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that price is a little on the steep side. We’ll handle that part ourselves.”

  “You’re going to serve me eventually, Daniel. Why wait?”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me what your game is. You’ve had heavier hitters than me on your payroll, and your position in Prince Malphas’s court means you could snap your fingers and recruit a dozen more. Why are you so dead set on snaring me?”

  Naavarasi chuckled. “A lady is entitled to her secrets. Very well. I’ll play my part, as requested. Don’t keep me waiting. I’m liable to get…hungry.”

  * * *

  While Sal bled out on the parking garage floor, shrieking and clutching his guts, Angelo turned and ran. He got about ten feet before headlights pinned him down, a pack of Blood Eagles rolling around the bend on tooled-up Harleys.

  He ran the other way, back toward me. Toward me, Naavarasi in her Bengal tiger form, and Jennifer, who stepped out from behind the rows of parked cars with half a dozen pistol-toting Calles at her back.

  I saw it all, written on his face. The five stages of grief, except he was the dead man. Denial, anger, bargaining.

  “We can—we can make a deal,” he stammered.

  “No,” I said, “we can’t.”

  Naavarasi took hold of Sal’s throat in her mighty jaws and tore it out with one lurch of her shaggy head. She chewed the torn meat and swallowed, stepping over the corpse, her muzzle bloody.

  Depression. Angelo fell to his knees on the concrete as we closed in around him. His shoulders shook and he squeezed his eyes shut.

  Then acceptance.

  He opened his eyes. Looked at me, like he was seeing clearly for the first time.