The Killing Floor Blues (25 page)

The Flamenco was one of the older hotels on the Strip, a relic of Old Vegas. They’d remodeled the place a few times over the decades, but you could still imagine Frankie and the Rat Pack strutting through the halls on their way to play the grand showroom.

I walked under the flaming marquee of light, flared and cherry red, shaped to resemble a showgirl’s headdress. The packed bar drew my eye, but the best I could do was grit my teeth as I walked on by. It had been almost a week since the showdown in the desert, which meant five more days before I could finally have a stiff drink. The headaches and nausea were coming less frequently now, but they hadn’t gone away.

Up an escalator, down an access hallway, a meeting room waited behind ivory double doors. It would have fit into a corporate tower anywhere in the world, sporting a long oval table surrounded by high-backed chairs and a crisp hotel notepad and pen placed neatly at each seat. Pixie was already there, wearing bulky headphones and sweeping the room with a gadget that looked like a stage magician’s wand.

“They drafted you too, huh?” she said.

I held up a hand. “Security.”

“Ditto. You think this is gonna work?”

“Maybe. I don’t see an alternative to
trying
, anyway.”

When Jennifer arrived, I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d traded in her usual T-shirt and jeans for a pressed olive pantsuit, her hair coiffed. She always clipped her nails short, but they didn’t usually show the gleam of a fresh manicure.

“This room is certified bug-free,” Pixie announced, giving Jennifer a wave. “I’m gonna get to work on the hallway.”

Jennifer took my hand and gave it a nervous squeeze.

“Thanks for helping out,” she said. “Means the world to me.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t miss it. You feeling confident?”

“Nope.” She grinned. “Public speakin’ ain’t exactly my forte. And there’s all kinds of ways this could go real, real bad.”

“Then we’ll just have to handle it, won’t we?”

The rest of the security team wasn’t far behind her, a handful of Gabriel’s men. They’d traded in their gang colors for rented suits.

“You two,” I said, divvying up the jobs, “I want on the door. You, cover the hallway entrance on the lobby side. Nobody who’s not on the guest list gets past you, and that includes employees. If the hotel staff make a stink about it, send ’em to me. Now who’s got the sharpest eyes in this bunch? You? Okay, you’re on lobby detail. Just watch the hotel entrance and radio ahead when you see our guests show up, or if you spot anything hinky…”

Somehow, with an effort akin to herding cats, I whipped up a reasonable security detail. Soon the guests started to arrive. Gabriel was first on the scene, and the big man gave me a nod in the hallway.

“Thanks for the assist out there,
ese
. Anything you need, you just say it.”

“All I ask is that you hear Jennifer out and try to keep the peace today.”

He laughed. “Hell, I won’t blast any fools if they don’t
make
me blast ’em.”

Winslow came next. He wasn’t inclined to take off his black leather vest, the one with the screaming skeletal eagle on the back, but at least he’d worn a shirt under it for a change. He took my hand in a vice grip.

“Heard from Jake and Westie,” he said. “They’re raisin’ hell down in Tijuana, free and clear. Gotta say, I had my doubts about you, Faust. But you manned up and delivered. Far as I’m concerned, your debt’s wiped. Hey, how’s that Barracuda treating you? She still running right?”

I gritted my teeth.

“The, uh, cops impounded it when they arrested me. And the gun, too.”

Winslow barked out a raspy laugh. “Hell, son, this just hasn’t been your month, has it? If you’re looking for another ride, stop by the garage sometime. I’ll set you up. But I
will
need cash up front this time.”

“Hey,” I said, “did Jake and Westie mention another prisoner who escaped with them? A guy named Buddy?”

He rubbed the gray stubble on his chin, thinking.

“Yeah.” Winslow nodded. “Said they had a guy with ’em, but they parted ways halfway to the border. Said he had someplace important to go.”

So Buddy had made it. He had a shot at delivering his message, at least. And next…well, I didn’t have time to think about next at the moment, not with the guest list filling out by the minute. There was Eddie Stone from the Bishops, looking flashy in a peacock-blue three-piece suit, Little Shawn from the Playboy Killers, even a hard-eyed delegate from the Fine Upstanding Crew. Guys who had no reason to sit down at the same table—and every reason to shoot each other on sight.

Everybody stayed cool, for now. And even though every single one of them had ignored the “no guns” request, the chrome stayed holstered and out of sight.

Pixie sidled up next to me as I patrolled the hall, keeping tabs on five things at once. “Faust, this is getting weird fast.”

“Long as it’s not getting murderous fast, that’s fine by me.”

“That guy in the black silk suit and half a missing pinky finger coming up the hall,” she whispered. “Is he from the freaking
yakuza?
”

“
Inagawa-kai
,” I murmured back. “They’re actually based out of Yokohama, but they’ve got investments in Vegas. And here comes the rep from the Fourteen-K Triad. Smile and be friendly.”

One of the last arrivals wasn’t on the guest list. Emma Loomis came striding up the hall, dressed for business and carrying a crocodile-skin attaché case.

“Emma?” I said. “How did you even—”

“Protecting my prince’s interests. This is more my area of expertise than Caitlin’s.”

“Yeah, but did Jennifer send you an invite?”

“She must have forgotten. An understandable oversight.” Emma leaned close, tiny flashes of copper sparkling in her eyes. “But nobody is denying Prince Sitri a seat at
this
table.”

She had a point. I let her pass.

As the last guest arrived, taking his seat at the oval table, we closed the conference room doors. Jennifer beckoned me to the front of the room to stand at her shoulder. Voices murmured, gazes darting across the table, old enmities smoldering.

“War is coming,” Jennifer’s voice rang out. The murmuring fell silent.

She paused a moment, holding their attention, then spoke again.

“The Chicago Outfit is on the move. They’ve already driven Nicky Agnelli out of town. Spread confusion and dissent. Recruited traitors within our very ranks. And they’re just gettin’ started.”

Eddie Stone flashed a gold-toothed smile. “Seems to me like running Nicky out of town was good news for all of us.”

“Good for now,” I told him, “but divided, at each other’s throats? Chicago is going to
steamroll
this town. And if you didn’t like the old boss, you’re sure as hell not gonna like the new boss.”

Winslow slouched in his chair, one weathered arm on the table. “You got a better idea?”

“Damn straight,” Jennifer told him. “Look, let’s get one thing clear. Nicky’s gone and he ain’t coming back. He held this city together. Mediated between us. Yeah, he threw his weight around a little too much, we can all agree on that, but right now we’re just a bunch of lone targets waitin’ to get picked off.”

The Triad delegate, an elderly man with the sharp blue eyes of a twenty-year-old, waved a hand.

“And you would take his place? Don’t waste our time, girl.”

“Nope. Not take his place. I got something better in mind. What did Nicky really bring to the table? He minded the borders. Kept everybody talking instead of shooting, most of the time anyhow. But Nicky’s job was all done before, and it was all done better.”

She raised her hands, taking in the room.

“I picked this place ’cause it’s got history. Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Moe Dalitz—they all met in this very room. Back in the days of the Commission, people like us knew how to work together without a single strongman at the top.”

“Sure,” Winslow said, “’til the feds ran the mob’s ass out of town and the corporations moved in.”

Jennifer rested her fingers on the table. She smiled.

“But the feds ain’t here now, are they? Like I said, alone, we’re just waiting to get picked off one by one. But think about what we’ve got. Look around this room. I reckon the folks at this table control seventy, seventy-five percent of all the action in this city. We’ve got the rackets. We’ve got the influence. We’ve got our eyes on every truck that comes outta McCarran Airport and our fingers in every heist. When it comes to the streets, we’ve got over two
thousand
hardcore soldiers flying our colors, ready to fight back and kick the Outfit’s ass so hard they’ll wish they’d never
heard
of Las Vegas.”

Palms pressed to the table, she leaned in, taking a long, slow look across the room. Meeting every gaze with eyes of steel.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jennifer said, “let’s get
organized
.”

The towers of Dubai blazed against the night, a sea of white-hot diamonds on the edge of the Persian Gulf. One of those towers had acquired a parasite.

The man in the black leather bodysuit clung to the skyscraper like a barnacle, scaling his way up one careful inch at a time with suction cups the size of dinner plates strapped to his forearms and calves. The bustling nightlife and tangled traffic were distant blurry lights, over seventy stories below.

Cold wind ruffled his wavy chestnut hair. His eyes, safe behind tempered goggles, narrowed in concentration. His muscles burned like wildfire now, three hours after he’d begun his ascent, but his goal wasn’t far away. Clamped onto a smoky window, he gripped a carbide-wheel glass cutter and got to work.

The restful sound of the wind shattered. A Beach Boys song blared in his left ear, Carl Wilson crooning “Good Vibrations.” With an annoyed grunt, he tapped the earpiece and took the call.

“Little busy right now,” he said, his voice tinged with a French accent.

“Marcel, my friend,” the Smile said. “Where are you?”

“Seventy-two floors up the side of Princess Tower. Where did you
think
I’d be?”

“Hm. Don’t look down.”

“I never look down, and I never look back,” Marcel replied. A circle of glass the size of a manhole cover separated cleanly from the window. Gripping it with another suction-cup handle, he carefully pushed it inward and laid it down on the floor inside.

He pulled himself through the hole, bending like a contortionist, lowering himself onto a polished Italian marble floor.

“Is that your catchphrase?” the Smile asked. “It’s cute. I’m calling with good news: we’ve just gotten the official confirmation. Daniel Faust is dead.”

The room beyond the window was a private art gallery. Rows of glass cases stretched into the darkness, divided by runners of red velvet carpet. Marcel’s gaze went to the corner of the room, where a scarlet light blinked on the gray plastic shell of a motion detector. Keeping his back pressed to the window, just out of its range, he drew a tiny prong-shaped pistol.

A dart streaked out when he pulled the trigger, fired on a puff of air from a pneumatic cylinder. The dart hit the motion detector’s case, cracked it, and let out an electric hiss. The flashing light flickered from red to green.

“Should that name mean something to me?” He threw himself into a roll, dodging beneath an infrared eye, and came up in a crouch.

“Your sacrificial lamb, who nobly gave his life to die in your stead. Congratulations, Marcel. The cycle is broken. You aren’t the Thief anymore.”

Marcel tapped the side of his goggles. They flipped into night-vision mode and turned his world into a wash of green light. Artifacts from around the world filled the glass cases, golden conquistador crosses sitting side by side with jade from the Ming dynasty.

“So this Faust,” Marcel said. “He’s the Thief now?”

“Was. For all of five minutes before he was killed in a prison riot. Just don’t
die
again. Your soul will be pulled right back into the cycle and you’ll ruin all my hard work. Fortunately, seeing as you’re not doomed anymore, that shouldn’t be a problem for you. Do you have eyes on the target?”

Marcel crouched in front of a case, his eyes wide behind his goggles. On the other side of the glass, his prize nestled on a bed of black velvet: a bowl of turquoise, its sides inlaid with swirling Aztec symbols. The basin of the bowl still held a dark stain, the memory of heart’s blood shed centuries ago.

“You held up your end of the bargain,” Marcel replied, “and I’ll hold up mine.”

*     *     *

Half a world away, dingy gray clouds roiled from smokestacks and painted the sky over Gary, Indiana, with oily smears. Angelo Mancuso wrinkled his nose as he stepped out of his sleek white limousine. A long cashmere overcoat draped his athletic frame.

“Does it always stink like this?” He glanced at Sal, his bodyguard. The big man shrugged.

“It’s from the steel mill.”

Angelo looked around, taking in the run-down street, the broken windows shrouded by tacked-up bedsheets. He knocked on the driver’s window. His chauffeur rolled it down and poked his head out.

“Yeah, boss?”

“We’ll be out in ten minutes,” Angelo said. “Do me a favor. If anybody comes near the car who ain’t us? Just shoot ’em. I don’t think the locals are gonna mind.”

Sal put his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “I don’t think the locals are gonna
notice
.”

The tenement awaited, the stagnant halls reeking of rotting trash and sweat. Angelo’s wing tips crunched on broken glass, disturbing the uncanny silence.

Sal glanced over his shoulder, one hand buried inside his jacket pocket. “You sure we got the right place?”

A sigil adorned the door at the end of the hall, painted in rust red. It resembled the Egyptian Eye of Horus, with a ragged
X
daubed over the pupil.

“Yeah,” Angelo said, sounding as wary as Sal looked. “This is definitely him.”

The door swung open at a touch. The apartment beyond, lights doused and the windows plastered over with sheets of brown butcher paper, was a forest of dangling bones.
Tiny bones
, Angelo thought,
birds and squirrels
. The dirty bone mobiles hung bound together by strips of twine, configured into stars and cubes and strange spiral ladders. He dodged around them as they stepped inside, his shoulder bumping one ornate design and making it spin in the stifling, humid air.

“Boss,” Sal whispered and nudged his back. Angelo followed his gaze. A naked corpse lay upon the kitchen table, butchered almost beyond recognition. Mason jars piled up in a miniature pyramid at its side, each one filled with a few inches of congealed blood.

A tired voice sounded from the open bedroom doorway.

“There was an instrument once, the Black Eye, forged by a cult of silence. They say that if you wore it, the gods themselves were blinded to your presence. My version is…impermanent. Needs cambion blood to feed the sigil. Caught a cambion, but as you can see, I used him up.”

Sal gave Angelo a leery glance. Angelo cleared his throat and turned to face the doorway.

“My name is Angelo Mancuso. I represent a very distinguished organization based out of Chicago—”

“I know who you are.”

A ragged shadow moved in the dark, shambling closer.

“We’re about to embark on a business project,” Angelo said. “And I’m looking for recruits. I need…skilled hands. Specialists.”

As the figure stepped into sight, his funeral suit hanging loose on his malnourished frame, he reached up to adjust his dusty bow tie.

“I believe you mean,” Damien Ecko hissed, “
freaks
.”

Angelo held up his hands, pinned by Ecko’s mad gaze.

“I mean no disrespect.”

Ecko’s lips pulled back in a death’s-head grin.

“
Disrespect?
” he said. “And how could I, surrounded by such luxury, living such a life of grand indulgence, possibly feel disrespected by anyone? I am simply on top of the world. The butler should be around shortly, with caviar for everyone.”

“I heard a little about what happened,” Angelo said. “Pack of crooks from Vegas hit your house, right? They didn’t just rob you; they burned you down. Didn’t leave you with a pot to piss in.”

Ecko chuckled, a rasping sound that sent a chill down Angelo’s spine.

“Oh, they did far worse than that. I’m a hunted man. But as long as I stay behind my sigils, they can’t find me. You…don’t have any cambion blood, do you?”

“Come work for me,” Angelo said. “We’re taking a little road trip, and we’re gonna hit Vegas
hard
. You want payback against the people who stuck you in this shithole? Sign up with me, I guarantee you’ll get it.”

Ecko wavered on his feet, eyes gleaming. He let out a tittering laugh.

“
Faust
,” he whispered. He grinned at Angelo. “Yes. I would be delighted to aid your…amusing little dreams of conquest. I’ll merely need one thing from you first.”

“Name it.”

“Access to a city morgue,” Ecko replied. “If we’re taking a road trip, I want to bring
lots
of new friends along.”