California Bones (26 page)

He stopped, the lines in his face like the cracks in a dry lakebed.

“Without water,” he said, “we have no food. Without water, we have no transportation. Without water, we have no industry. The Hierarch murdered your father.”

The shift in topic was so abrupt, Daniel could only laugh. “He really did. Killed him, cleaned him like a fish, and ate him, right in front of me.”

He wondered if men like Mulholland and the Hierarch had fathers. Maybe they were hatched from eggs.

“And you never sought vengeance?”

“Living well is the best revenge.”

Mulholland made a soggy cluck. “And are you, Mr. Blackland? Are you living well?”

“Every minute you don’t kill me is the very best moment of my life, Mr. Mulholland.”

Mulholland’s face darkened.

“I must have water. The Hierarch won’t give it to me. So he must be washed away.”

Daniel shut his eyes. Hadn’t he always known it would come to this? Not because he was the vengeance-obsessed son of a great wizard. He was not. He’d never been. He’d found a different way. Maybe he hadn’t lived a moral life, and he’d never freed himself from the web of power and exploitation he’d been born to, but he’d found a way to survive, and he’d found people he cared about, who, maybe against their own will, loved him back. But somehow he’d always known he’d be used regardless of his intent. Sebastian Blackland had stirred him and sculpted him to be a weapon, and in this kingdom, a weapon was too useful a tool to be left alone.

“If I do this for you, it’s just me, alone,” Daniel said. “I don’t want anyone else involved.”

“You are referring, of course, to your friends.”

Daniel knew what Mulholland was going to say.

“They are already involved,” Mulholland said. “Gabriel Argent took them into custody hours ago. If you successfully complete this job for me, they’ll live. If not … Well.”

Mulholland straightened his jacket and withdrew into his wet jungle.

Argent was waiting for Daniel in the elevator. His face was the color of newsprint, with shadows under his eyes. He didn’t look like he slept much. The doors shut, and the car rose out of the sodden dark.

Something occurred to Daniel. “Argent’s your name? Any relation to Rose Argent?”

“My mom.”

“My father mentioned her once. Haven’t heard the name since.”

“Third Correction.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “That happens.”

“He’s going to kill your friends anyway,” Argent said. “And you, too.”

Daniel already knew that. Mulholland wanted his rival out of the way. Anyone who killed the Hierarch would automatically become his new rival.

The doors opened.

“I can fix this,” Argent said. “We should talk.”

And so they did.

TWENTY-ONE

The Los Angeles Museum of Art sprawled across twenty acres of plazas and landscaped park, less than a mile west of the La Brea Tar Pits. In a black business suit, Daniel got in line at the box office. He clutched a briefcase in his right hand. It contained a rubber ball, some wire, a few rolls of duct tape, a gun, and several plastic souvenir snow globes.

His left hand was wrapped in cloth and elastic bandages. A skiing accident, he was prepared to say, if anyone asked. The throbbing pain of his finger stump still radiated all the way to his collarbone. The aching fatigue of the last few days came in waves. His eyes felt sandblasted and his thoughts came sluggishly. Not good working conditions. So easy to make a mistake.

He smelled hound, and sure enough, stationed around the plaza were half a dozen dogs and handlers. Sint holo was always Daniel’s most reliable magic, but even though Gabriel Argent assured him that very few hounds were trained to detect sint holo, Daniel wasn’t willing to risk it. He couldn’t chance being identified by his osteomancy. He wouldn’t use kraken or firedrake or any other kind of magic. Not until he faced the Hierarch.

He purchased an all-exhibits pass with cash and entered the museum through the Ahmanson Building, which, in addition to the European, Islamic, and modern art collections, housed the People’s Gallery, currently closed for a new installation.

At the front desk, he picked up a museum map.

“Please let me know if I can help direct you,” said a man in a blue blazer, sitting behind the desk. He was regular museum staff. The woman standing behind him, also in a blue blazer, was not. Her penetrating gaze lingered on Daniel’s face, and he resisted the urge to make sure his fake mustache was on straight.

He spent a few hours admiring dance paddles and ancestor figures from Rapa Nui, Turkish dishes and Iranian tile, paintings by Cézanne and Degas, and he memorized the locations of all the cameras tucked in the corners of the galleries behind smoked plastic domes in the ceilings. He sat on benches to rest his feet and watched the comings and goings of art lovers and docents and security guards. It would be different at night, but if anything, security would be lighter then, with the crowds gone. Unfortunately, the patrol posts and patterns would be different, too, and Daniel wouldn’t have a chance to observe them.

At 5
P.M.
, he had an expensive BLT and a sparkling water in the café.

At 7
P.M.
, an hour before closing, he attached himself to a docent-led tour group and followed them to the second floor. To his right was the German Expressionism gallery. To his left, restrooms and a drinking fountain. And directly in front of him, a desk manned by a pair of guards.

Daniel parted company with the tour and entered the bathroom. He washed his hands and checked his mustache, and when a man at the urinal went away, he stepped into a toilet stall. Forty seconds later, he lay in the crawl space above the ceiling, spread-eagled to distribute his weight. With the way his week had gone, he was pretty sure he’d come crashing down through the ceiling tiles. He waited and listened and tried hard to stay awake and keep his mind off bad thoughts.

At 7:56, he heard the rustle of plastic garbage bags and the slosh of a mop.

He waited until the janitor left.

Nobody else came.

He slid some panels aside and dropped down into the stall.

From his briefcase, he took the rubber ball and a coil of monofilament wire. Reaching as far down the toilet bowl as he could, he pushed the ball in until it was firmly stuck. He flushed and used the monofilament to tie the flush handle in the down position. In less than a minute, water was sloshing over the sides of the bowl and spreading across the floor.

Fuck Mulholland’s water magic.
This
was water magic.

Back up into the crawl space he went.

It took seven minutes before he heard the restroom door. Then, a voice:

“Do I look like a plumber to you?” said a female.

A woman. Dammit, why did it have to be a woman?

“You’re maintenance, right?” answered a second, male voice. “So, get in there and maintain.”

“I thought I was a broom pusher. That’s what you rent-a-cops are always saying.”

“Christ, lady, will you just get in there and fix it, before it floods one of the galleries? Call another broom pusher if you can’t handle it.”

Again, the pneumatic hiss of the door as it closed, followed by muttered cursing and the splash of footfalls across the wet floor.

Daniel was crouching on the toilet when she opened the stall door.

She was not a small woman, and Daniel was not a large man. It would work.

He raised the gun Steven Baker had aimed at him. In his other hand he held a roll of duct tape.

“I promise, you’re going to be fine,” he said. “I just need you to answer some questions about the staff here.”

She blinked at him.

“Also, I’m going to need your shirt.”

*   *   *

In the dark green shirt of museum custodial staff and the black pants that went with his suit, Daniel approached the security desk. The man on duty was distressingly large and well muscled.

“Hey, Chao, what’s up?”

The guard gave him a noncommittal smile. “You guys get that toilet fixed?”

“Yeah, but we need help cleaning up. There’s shitty water spreading toward American Contemporary.”

“What do I look like, a mop?” Chao laughed at his own humor. He was a humorous man.

Daniel chuckled. “A mop, yeah, that’s a good one. No, thing is, the super’s not answering his radio.”

“Why not?”

“Probably forgot it while he was beating off to the Greek statues. I need you to call his office.”

Chao looked from Daniel to the phone on his desk and back to Daniel. “What’s the matter, your hands broke?”

Daniel held up his bandaged hand, which concealed the taped stump of his missing little finger. “Actually, yeah. Skiing accident. And this one,” he said, holding up his right hand, “touched a bunch of toilet water. But if you don’t care about germs, I can manage—”

A family-sized bottle of hand sanitizer stood like a gel-filled tower on Chao’s desk.

“Fine,” Chao grumbled. He lifted the receiver and went to dial. When his hands were visibly away from the alarm button on the underside of his desk, Daniel slipped a Knott’s Berry Farm souvenir snow globe from his pocket.

“This is a bomb,” he said. “Put down the phone and keep your hands where I can see them or you die on fire. Don’t look at the camera, and slide your chair away from your desk.”

Chao froze. “That’s not a bomb.”

“I’m an osteomancer and I’m telling you it’s filled with firedrake saliva, and if I so much as shake it it’s going to be raining the ashes of your ass.”

Actually, if he shook it, little glittery flakes would swirl around and descend on a tiny, plastic frontier town diorama. It was just a snow globe.

Chao cradled the receiver. “What do you want?”

“Um? To steal some art? Stand up. You’re going to walk me down to the first floor and let me into the video room.”

“Or you shake Knott’s Berry Farm?”

“You catch on quick, Chao. Maybe I’ll bring you on as my apprentice. Let’s go. We’ll take the stairs.”

Daniel followed him to the stairwell on the opposite side of the lobby. Chao took the steps gingerly, as if he was afraid to step on a mine.

“You made me leave my desk without checking in first,” Chao said. “My friend in the video room will know something’s wrong.”

“That might be true, except everyone knows you’ve got a thing for Sanchez, who stands watch in Modern, and you can’t go twenty minutes without stepping over to flirt with her.”

Chao looked over his shoulder at Daniel. “Who’s your inside man?”

“Right now, you are. Keep walking.”

On the first floor, Daniel guided him to a room with a door marked
STAFF ONLY
.

“Inside.”

“I gotta be buzzed in,” Chao said, somewhat smugly.

“I’m going to coach you, then.” He told Chao what he wanted him to say. “And here’s your pep talk. Firedrake saliva is really evil magic. And it’s sensitive. Shake it hard enough, and it will go off. And by go off, I mean flames. But it burns in firedrake-subjective time.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means you’ll be ash in seconds, but it will seem to you like it’s taking an entire week. So, think about that while you’re talking to whoever’s behind that door.”

Chao swallowed and thumbed the intercom button on the wall.

“What do you want?” came a fuzzy voice through the speaker box.

“Let me in.”

“Why?”

“I’m out of hand sanitizer.”

“Man, you’re not supposed to drink that stuff. Seriously, what do you want, and who’s that with you?”

“You don’t know Guice? From maintenance? Everyone knows Guice. How long you been working here?”

Daniel smiled and gave a little salute for the benefit of the camera that was no doubt trained on him now.

“I don’t know Guice,” said the fuzzy voice.

“He’s here to fix the toilet upstairs,” Chao said.

“Yeah, I saw the water coming under the door. What’s he doing down here if the busted can’s upstairs?”

“I think there might be water leaking into Modern,” Daniel said, too loudly, like someone unaccustomed to speaking into a microphone.

“So, what are you bothering me for?”

“You know the regs, Parvis,” Chao barked, sounding authentically irked. “He can’t go in there without a work order. He just wants to check your monitors to see if there’s water coming in.”

“I don’t see anything in Modern,” Parvis said. “Except that hottie, Sanchez. Hoo boy, can she stuff a guard uniform—”

“Parvis, if you don’t shut your cake and let me in—”

“Okay, okay, a guy can’t even have fun on the graveyard shift?”

The door buzzed, and Chao pushed it open with the fervor of a bull hoping to gore a matador.

Parvis turned out to be a pasty white man with a hand of solitaire cards spread out before him, along with a half-empty pizza box and a two-liter of Orange Crush. A dozen TV monitors loomed over his desk. Behind him, video recorders buzzed and hummed in a rack.

“You gotta get a sense of humor, Chao,” he said, taking up a slice of mushroom and black olives. “It’s called camaraderie. Esprit de corps. It’s being a team player, and, oh, man, Sanchez just bent over! Will you look at her—”

“This guy’s got a bomb and he’s going to blow us all up instantly, only it’ll take forever. It’s both instant and forever, and painful both ways, so do whatever he says.”

“Thank you, Chao.” Daniel held up the Knott’s Berry Farm snow globe. Very carefully, he set a second snow globe, this one from Disneyland, on Parvis’s desk.

Parvis looked like he’d just seen a turtle wearing tap shoes.

“You’re going to blow shit up with Snow White’s Castle?”

“It’s dragon spit,” Chao said, helpfully.

“Take this,” Daniel said, handing his duct tape roll to Chao. “Bind his ankles together and tape his hands to the arms of his chair.”

“They are so going to fire you for this,” Parvis said when Chao completed the job.

Again, gingerly, Daniel picked up the Disneyland globe. “Open your mouth, please.”

Parvis refused to comply. For a guy who looked like captain of the AV club, he was pretty cheeky. Daniel was actually developing a fondness for these guards. They weren’t Fenmont Szu. They weren’t storm troopers. They weren’t henchmen. They were just guys, probably underpaid, hired for the boring task of making sure nobody stole stuff they themselves couldn’t afford in five lifetimes.