Full Metal Magic: An Urban Fantasy Anthology Read online

  “I thought we were going to talk to Jennifer,” he said.

  “You had your chance to talk to Jennifer,” I told him. “Now you’re talking to me.”

  Scrawny as he was, he looked like a cow. Big cow eyes and a droopy cow face with a sad-sack expression. Just bright enough to know he was born for the slaughterhouse. I’d told Jennifer, when we decided what to do about him, that this night had pretty much been inevitable.

  “Where are we going?” he asked me.

  I didn’t answer. Louie the Tramp, one hand on the steering wheel, glanced to the rearview mirror. High beams washed over us from behind, a truck coming up fast on this desolate strip of highway, and the thin slash of glass framed Louie’s bloodshot eyes and his cauliflower nose. He smirked like an imp. He was getting off on the kid’s nervous energy. I was just bored by it.

  “Y’know,” Louie croaked, his voice raspy from fifty years of chain smoking, “those old-school Sicilian mobsters, when they’d take a guy out and go Old Yeller on him? They called it ‘going for a drive in the country.’”

  I stared out the window at nothing in particular.

  “That they did,” I said.

  “Probably still do, y’know, where they got actual countryside. We just got a lot of desert. Sand and rock, rock and sand.”

  “The occasional cactus,” I said.

  “You ever get out to Sicily, Dan?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. My girlfriend wants to visit Scotland, so that’s probably gonna be a thing soon. She’s…not from there, exactly, but I think she’s got some Scottish blood in her.”

  The kid’s head whipsawed between us. “Hey,” he said.

  “Aw, you gotta go to Sicily. Take the lady. She’ll love it, I promise. There’s this place, makes the best goddamn pesto alla trapanese you’ll ever taste.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got pretty high standards for pesto—”

  “Hey,” the kid said again, louder.

  He wanted my attention. So I gave it to him. I turned and looked him in the eye, watching him sink back into his seat like a delinquent student in the principal’s office.

  “We met once,” I said. “Do you remember me?”

  He replied with a timid nod.

  “Say my name.”

  “Faust,” he stammered. “Daniel Faust.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out as a tired sigh.

  “When you came to Vegas, me and Jennifer took you aside and explained how things work. The New Commission runs this town. You know that. If you want to operate in our house, you follow our rules.”

  His head bobbed. “I—I do! I paid out to her, every week! I’m a good earner. She told me so.”

  “You were told the rules. Among said rules, don’t deal within two hundred yards of a school, don’t cut your product with fentanyl, and—now here’s an important one—don’t deal to kids. When people break our few and simple rules, bad things happen.”

  He fumbled for a response. The best he could come up with was a softly murmured, “I’m a good earner.”

  “Bad things happen,” I said, “such as, for example, hypothetically, some street dealer sells fentanyl-cut heroin to a sixteen-year-old varsity athlete, and our budding Olympic star overdoses and dies.”

  “Listen,” he said, “I—”

  I held up my hand to shut him up.

  “Now, hypothetically, this dead track star’s dad happens to be a major-case detective in Metro. The kind of person who can cause very serious problems for all of us. And he finds, in the aforementioned dead track star’s cold and pale hand, a bindle with a local dealer’s personal brand.”

  I reached into my breast pocket and tugged out a tiny plastic square, faint yellow grains still clinging to the inside. The bindle bore a gaudy scarlet logo, a laughing, toothy clown head.

  In the sudden silence, nothing but the purr of the engine and the thrumming of the wheels on the highway, I could hear the kid swallow.

  “A local dealer,” I continued, “who can be tied directly to the Commission. Now that’s a headache.”

  “Big fuckin’ headache,” Louie said.

  “Cop Dad wants justice, and not just the ten years this hypothetical dealer would catch if he went down for the crime. And we want Cop Dad to not come after the Commission with guns blazing. So, Jennifer was put in the unenviable position of deciding what was more valuable: our entire operation, or the life of one dumbshit street dealer who couldn’t follow the rules.”

  I slipped the bindle back into my pocket and looked him in the eye.

  “You know what she chose, right?”

  “She said I was a good earner,” he whispered, looking shell-shocked. “Would it…would it help if I apologized?”

  I stared at him.

  “Louie,” I said, “do you believe this asshole?”

  “No, Dan,” he replied, “my sense of belief is deeply troubled.”

  I leaned back against the headrest. Distant rock formations glided by, painted midnight black by the shadows.

  “First time we met,” I said to the kid, “I told you what would happen if you broke the rules. That I’d be paying you a visit.”

  “Yeah,” he said, almost too soft to hear.

  “You didn’t believe me. Hey, Louie, how are we on time? Have a way to go yet?”

  “Little bit. Fifteen minutes till we get out far enough from the city.” He grinned into the rearview mirror. “Gotta find a good place for digging.”

  “Kid,” I said, “because I’ve got nothing better to do, I’m gonna tell you a little story. A story about me and my pal Louie here, in fact. And when I’m done, I think you might have a better understanding of how you landed in this particular predicament…”

  The day I got the call, I had a woman tied up in my apartment. No, not like that.

  Desi Srivastava—honey skin, dark eyes, and a temper like a keg of compressed TNT—sat in the heart of a pentacle drawn in white chalk, her shoulders shifting as she squirmed inside a hospital-issue straitjacket. Beeswax candles burned at the cardinal points of the pentacle’s star, another propped behind a stone snake idol on my nightstand, positioned to cast the serpent’s shadow across her face.

  “I’m never going to get this,” she grunted.

  I sat on the edge of my motel-remainder bed, shoved against the wall to make room. A stick of sandalwood incense smoldered next to my left foot, sending up trickles of sweet-scented smoke, filling the apartment with a gray haze. The floorboards glittered dark purple all around us, the scattered shavings of a ground-down chunk of amethyst.

  “Stop trying,” I told her.

  She shot me a look that could curdle milk. “Stop trying? That’s your advice? Thanks, Yoda, real cryptic.”

  “How many years did you spend at the circus, working that contortionist act?”

  “Too many.” She showed me her teeth. “The pay sucked.”

  “You’re relying on muscle memory. Trying to use your own skills and training. Don’t.” I pointed to the stone idol. “Every magician walks their own road. Their own path to power. You’ve got the strongest aptitude for working with god-forms I’ve ever seen. You can’t get out of that jacket, but Kadru, Mother of a Thousand Nagas, can. Let her.”

  Desi turned her gaze to the stone. Her breathing slowed, her dark eyes narrowing to slits.

  “You’ve studied her for weeks,” I said. “You know her aspects, her secret truths. Now wear the mask. Become her.”

  She inhaled, impossibly deep. The breath escaped her black-painted lips as a slow, rattling hiss.

  As she slumped to the floor, her spine rippling in ways no human’s should, I felt a glow of pride. Like a father watching his kid take off on her first bike ride, no training wheels. Then my phone buzzed against my hip. Great timing. I slipped off the mattress and padded over to the far corner of the room, cupping my hand over my mouth.

  “Yeah?”

  “Faust,” Louie said, “the boss wants to see you. We got a
job.”

  Not the kind of invitation I could turn down. When Nicky Agnelli talked, Vegas listened. I glanced over, watching Desi squirm, inch by wriggling inch, through the neck of the straitjacket. Her torso compressed to the width of a fist, then expanded, bones crackling and reknitting on the other side.

  “I want to bring my apprentice in on this one,” I said.

  “Dizzy? The goth chick? For real?”

  “She’s ready.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to take that up with the man,” Louie told me. “Not my call. Come on down to Alize, he wants to do lunch.”

  Out on the desert highway, the kid cut me off.

  “Wait. You’re…being metaphorical, right?”

  “That’s an awful big word for a dipshit smack dealer,” I told him.

  “I mean, magic? And you’re saying a woman literally turned into a snake.”

  I shook my head. “No, she took on the god-form of the mother of nagas and translated her spiritual attributes into—you know what? Let me give you a demonstration.”

  I reached into my breast pocket and slipped a playing card into my palm. Queen of hearts.

  “The thing about magic is, it’s essentially a lie. A con game. Now, I can lie to you”—I reached behind his ear, flicking the card between my fingers, brandishing it like a throwing knife—“by pretending to pluck this card from your ear.”

  Then I let go. And the card hung, suspended in the air, inches above my open palm.

  “Or I can lie to the universe and make it forget that gravity exists for a minute or two.”

  He blinked, staring at the slowly turning queen. “That’s…that’s a trick, right?”

  “Might be,” I said. “Might be a bit of invisible thread and a blob of wax to hold it in place.”

  I twirled my finger. The card danced, spinning in the air between us, flitting across the car and back again, landing in my palm.

  “Or maybe it’s the real deal.”

  “Hey, kid,” Louie said, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Nobody ever had a little chat with you, told you about the weird stuff?”

  His eyes widened in recognition. In the underworld, “the weird stuff” was sort of a code phrase.

  “Just to stay away from it,” he said. “And…not talk about it. Ever. So why are we talking about it?”

  I smiled. “Who are you gonna tell?”

  He shrank back in his seat, the implication weighing him down.

  “Now,” I said, “if you don’t mind, I’ll continue.”

  The restaurant perched at the top of a casino tower, fifty-six floors above the Vegas Strip. A span of dark leather chairs and ivory tablecloths, where silent waiters with towel-draped arms poured dollops of red wine into waiting glasses. I wore my one good sport coat and a partially loosened tie that hung at an angle. Desi, torn fishnets and a battered army-surplus jacket. We weren’t the usual clientele. Still, a harried-looking host hustled us through the restaurant without a word, toward a big round table in the back.

  Nicky Agnelli sat with his chair against the wall, a wolf on two legs, his eyes gleaming and hungry behind titanium-rimmed Porsche Design glasses. Identical twin blondes took the chairs to his left and his right, scooping gobs of black caviar onto tiny buckwheat crackers.

  “Oh god,” Desi groaned, “not these two.”

  “Be nice,” I whispered.

  “They’re total bitches. Why do I have to be nice?”

  “Because they’re not human,” I told her, “and they kill people for fun. So be nice.”

  Louie the Tramp jumped up from the table, draped in a suit two sizes too big, and pulled out a couple of chairs. He gave Desi a nod and yanked me into a hug, kissing my cheeks.

  “Here he is,” Louie said, “the man, the myth, the legend—”

  “The ‘acutely aware of when I’m being buttered up.’ Hey, Louie. Are we it?”

  “Nah, Tyrone’s on his way. C’mon, sit, sit.”

  “Yes, sit down, Danny.” Justine, one of the twins, shot a withering look at Desi. “You must be tired, carrying that baggage around.”

  Juliette, the other twin, wrinkled her nose. “I think it’s nice that he’s taking care of the underprivileged.”

  Nicky sighed, resting his hands on their shoulders. “Ladies.”

  Juliette looked Desi up and down. “I’m saying you dress like a homeless person.”

  “Yeah.” Desi dropped into the chair beside me, rolling her eyes. “Thanks. I figured that out on my own.”

  “I wasn’t sure. Because you seem dumb. As well as homeless.”

  “Ladies,” Nicky said. “Please. Dan, thanks for coming out. Caviar? Hundred and sixty-five bucks an ounce, you ought to get in on this.”

  “I like my fish fully grown and deep fried,” I said. “You got work for us?”

  “Got work for you,” he replied. “Chill on that a minute, let’s wait until everybody’s here. Louie sounds like he might croak from emphysema any minute now. Don’t want to make him repeat himself.”

  Louie thumped his chest. “Hey, I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “A dead horse, you prick.” Nicky grinned. “Quit smoking already. You’re my best ear on the streets. I don’t need you dying on me.”

  “And when I do, I’ll be a tiny, fluttering angel, taking a piss on your shoulder.”

  Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, a cloud passed over the sun. And Nicky’s eyes turned a cold, baleful yellow.

  “More like you’ll be working for my dad in hell,” he said, flashing a smile with too many teeth. Then the sunlight returned, and his face shifted back to normal. “Ah, here we go. Tyrone, there’s this thing called punctuality. Look it up.”

  Tyrone was a bald string bean, as tall as he was skinny, and he swooped in to hug Desi from behind. “Dizzy! How you been, girl?”

  “Better than ever, at least that’s what everybody tells me.”

  I clasped hands with Tyrone, pulled him in, and we clapped each other on the back. He made his way around the table, shaking hands with Louie.

  “No caviar for this fat fuck,” Louie said, poking at Tyrone’s taut stomach. “He needs to lose a few pounds.”

  Tyrone grinned and took a seat on my left. “Sorry I’m late, but it was easy to find you, Louie. I just followed the smell of cheap-ass cigars and Everclear.”

  “You followed the smell of your mom’s—”

  “Gentlemen,” Nicky said. The table fell silent. When the King of Las Vegas spoke, everyone listened.

  “Wait a second,” the kid said, “who’s this Nicky Agnelli guy? I thought the New Commission ran Vegas. I mean, everybody says it’s Jennifer’s town now.”

  “This was a couple of years ago. There’s been a regime change since. But back in the day, Nicky’s word was law.”

  I still held the queen of hearts in my palm. I showed it to him, running my finger over the glossy, slick pasteboard.

  “See, that’s life, especially when you live in our world. You might be riding high, thinking everything’s going just right. And one second later…”

  I twirled the card in my fingertips. Now it was the ace of spades.

  “…everything changes.”

  I was never a big fan of French cuisine, but lunch in a Michelin-starred restaurant, on Nicky’s dime, wasn’t something to pass up. I ordered filet mignon, coffee-crusted and served up in a cognac cream sauce. Desi went for the Dover sole.

  “Opportunity is knocking,” Nicky said, “and it’s a limited-time offer. Louie, lay it out.”

  Louie nodded, sharp, taking out his phone. He showed us a photograph of a guy with a tailored suit and a bad comb-over.

  “Meet Martin Goreki. Senior partner at Armitel Equity Management. Hedge fund manager, stock trader, paper pusher. Also, on the side, quite the budding cocaine entrepreneur.”

  “A business,” Nicky said, “he’s been running without so much as a courtesy call to yours truly, let alone letting me dip my beak in. I can’t have that.”


  “Gonna break his legs?” Tyrone asked.

  “Gonna break his wallet,” Louie said. “Goreki’s making friends with the Cali Cartel, trying to set up a big buy. The meet hasn’t gone down yet, but a little birdie told me he’s already put the bid price together: a cool hundred Gs in bearer bonds. Fully matured, untraceable, cleaner than cash. And until he gets with his contact and makes the buy, those bearer bonds are sitting snug in a safe, in the man’s office at Armitel.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars makes up for the cut he should have been paying out to me, plus interest.” Nicky glanced over at Tyrone. “I’m also thinking about having his legs broken, but that’s neither here nor there. Best part? He bought the bonds secondhand, with money he embezzled from his clients. We rip him off—and by ‘we’ I mean you—and he can’t even squeal to the cops about it.”

  “There’s a wrinkle,” Louie told me, “which is why we need you on this job.”

  Of course there was a wrinkle. He swiped his screen, bringing up a second picture. Now a man in his fifties stood at Goreki’s shoulder, wearing dark glasses on his narrow, rodent-like face, his long black hair tied in a ponytail. He wore an ivory suit, and his fingers glittered with silver rings.

  “The man has a bodyguard. Ivan Koslov, special security consultant, formerly allied with a certain New York family. The Brighton Beach crowd, if you get my drift. Now he’s freelance and on Goreki’s payroll.”

  “Bodyguard?” Tyrone squinted at the picture. “Doesn’t look too tough to me. What, does he do that krav maga kung fu shit?”

  “He does the weird shit.” Louie looked my way. “He’s one of your crowd, so we need you to make sure he didn’t, you know, put a whammy on the loot or anything.”

  I chewed on a sliver of medium-rare steak, juices bursting between my teeth.

  “What do we know about the building?” I asked him

  Another picture on the screen. This time, an office building under a clean desert sky. Ten stories or so, alternating lines of beige stone and glass the color of aquamarines.