Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(3)
As far as the charges went, what could they get us on? Reckless driving? Brandishing a firearm? Worst-case scenario, I’d do maybe two months in a county jail. Not a vacation at Club Med, but not the end of the world either. As far as I could tell, Meadow Brand had murdered someone and set up an elaborate snare for the sake of a mean little prank. While I wouldn’t have put that past her, that nagging itch at the back of my brain told me I wasn’t seeing the full picture.
The full picture walked through the interrogation room door about twenty minutes later, in the form of a short, full-figured blond in a tailored suit. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and a man’s paisley necktie. Two men followed her in, a hulking, lantern-faced guy with hair like straw, and a thin, goateed man toting a stack of manila folders under his arm. The one with the goatee shot me a murderous look and slapped the folders down on the desk.
The winds of magic whirled around the room. Motes of violent green light hovered at the corners of my vision, brushing across my mind, seeping through the cinder-block walls like radiation from a leaking reactor. An acidic taste filled my mouth. I knew two things, instantly. One of my visitors was a cambion, the bastard spawn of a human and a demon. One of the others was a trained sorcerer, and a good one. Almost as good as me. With all the sudden energy in the room, I couldn’t get a fix on who was who.
The blond woman flashed her badge.
“Special Agent Harmony Black,” she said, the faint trace of a New England accent lingering at the edges of her clipped words. “FBI. I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time, Mr. Faust.”
That was when things got complicated.
Two
There’s no council of wizened wizards overseeing the world of magic, no hidden academies where bright-eyed and precocious youths learn the secrets of the unknown. What we do have is a collective desire, as a community, to keep anyone from f*cking up our action. One of the first things any fledgling sorcerer is taught? Keep your mouth shut about magic, or someone will shut it for you, probably with a bullet or a corrective curb-stomping. Now that we live in the age of cell phone cameras and worldwide Internet, keeping the hidden world hidden is more important than ever.
It’s no surprise that most working sorcerers are criminals of one stripe or another. The occult underworld and the criminal underworld overlap and mingle in the shadows, far away from the daylight realm of the taxpayers and solid citizens. We do our thing, and they do theirs.
The idea of a sorcerer on the FBI payroll turned my bladder to ice.
Things didn’t get any better from there.
“This is Detective Gary Kemper of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police,” Agent Black said with a gesture to the goateed man. “And this very large gentleman to my left is Agent Lars Jakobsen of the DEA.”
I leaned back in my chair and whistled, trying to keep my nerves from showing.
“You all came down here just for me? It’s not even my birthday.”
Gary Kemper slammed his palms down on the metal table between us, leaning so close I could smell his cheap aftershave.
“Carl Holt was a friend of mine, you son of a bitch,” he snarled.
I didn’t murder Carl Holt, but to be fair, I had been planning on it. My girlfriend got to him first. She snapped his neck and left him dead on his partner’s kitchen floor. I just burned the house down when she was finished. Nobody should have been able to connect me to that mess, though. Nobody.
“Carl Holt,” I mused, fighting to keep the surprise from my voice. “Oh, I remember him from the news. Wasn’t he that corrupt cop who was killed with his buddy, the Satan-worshipping porno director?”
Gary lunged across the table. I leaned back fast, the front legs of my chair lifting off the floor, and he grabbed the air where my throat used to be.
“Detective!” Harmony snapped. Gary came to his senses and dropped his hands with a mumbled apology. To her, not to me.
I shook my head. “I think you’ve got the wrong room, folks. I’m here for the reckless driving charges. And I wasn’t even driving. How unfair is that?”
“Also threatening a woman with an unlicensed firearm,” Lars said in a rumbling Norwegian-tinged basso, looking amused. “The public relations officer of Carmichael-Sterling Nevada. They’ve had a bad month, with the arson attack on the Silverlode Hotel.”
Telling me he knew I was in on that, too. Except he was also telling me something even more important: they didn’t have any evidence. If they could pin the Holt/Kaufman murders on me or put me on the scene at the Silverlode, I’d already be arraigned.
“It’s okay,” I told him, “they’ve still got another that hasn’t burned down yet.”
Harmony slid the folders across the table, one by one, laying them out but keeping their covers closed.
“You keep interesting company, Mr. Faust,” she said. “Your traveling companion is a highly successful narcotics dealer.”
I held up a finger. “Point of order. She was arrested for marijuana possession twice, growing it once, and all three times the charges were dropped. She’s never seen the inside of a courtroom.”
Harmony’s lips curled into a pert half-smile. “And that, Mr. Faust, is why I call her ‘successful.’”
If Harmony really was the other sorcerer in the room—I still couldn’t sort out the signals, too busy focusing on keeping myself out of prison—she probably knew as well as I did how Jennifer always managed to slip the law. She wasn’t just a purveyor of quality weed; she backed up her operations with some weapons-grade witchcraft.