Tricks of the Trade (22 page)

“How could the housekeeper just let it run around like that? If she was so scared of it, why not shut it up somewhere?”

“Seriously? You wanted her to do something about a hound? She was probably afraid to do anything beyond coexist. It was introduced to her, so it knew she was allowed on and off the property, but I doubt she trusted it beyond that,” I said, listening without trying to be obvious for the sound of someone coming down the hallway. “And it wouldn't go beyond the lines of the property, so she didn't have to watch it. That's why they're so in-demand—smarter than any mortal dog, even quarter-bred, and most human guards, too. Plus, they're vicious.”

The door opened, and proof of that viciousness walked in.

I thought I was prepared—Stosser said that the doctor
had to do some serious stitching—but he'd been released, right? So it couldn't have been that bad?

I hadn't thought about the fact that this was Benjamin Venec, and his release was almost certainly AMA—against medical advice.

I think Sharon started to say something; I couldn't hear it. My entire focus was not on the thick white bandage covering his neck, or the arm in a cloth sling, or even the blue-and-purple stippling of bruises on his face that looked like they'd been made by a giant paw, or the tiny stitched scar by his left eye, too painfully close.

My entire awareness was taken up by the look in that eye; pupils pinpointed way too much for the casual over head lighting. He looked at us, blinked, and the pupil remained narrowed.

Benjamin Venec, Mr. Control, was stoned on painkillers. That would explain the utter lack of discomfort I felt coming off him; in fact, he was remarkably muffled. I'd thought it was because he had his wall up again but…nope.

And Ian wanted us to take him out in the field? Oh, hell, no.

“I'm fine, Bonnie.” His voice sounded solid, almost amused, and he moved into the office with his normal graceful prowl. “A lot of stitches, and some lectures on what to look for, infectionwise, and I'll have to go for a follow-up to make sure everything's healing all right. But it was just a bite.”

“It almost tore your throat out,” Sharon said, but in a much calmer voice than I would have managed. I don't
think—even with all the worrying—that had really sunk in, for any of us.

When it did, I needed to be ready for a meltdown. Hopefully somewhere private.

“
Almost
doesn't count,” he said, with a dismissive air that made me want to shake him—or tie him back down to a hospital bed. I did neither. “Where's everyone else?”

“Stosser's got us all off and running. You and I are supposed to go help Nifty close the body-dump case. The break-in gets all our attention, after that.” I decided not to say anything about The Roblin, right now, and hoped Sharon had the same thought.

She did.

“All right.” He sat next to me, maybe just a bit too close, and I should have moved away. I didn't. The smell and the fear of the hospital came back to me, and the urge was to do something totally and wholly inappropriate, especially in the office, with Sharon watching us with far too much lively curiosity.

“All right?” I blinked at him, his words finally making it through my brain.

“You were expecting argument?”

Actually, I was. Even with the muted, mellowed-out feel, this was still Benjamin Venec, hard-ass and Big Dog.

He smiled: barely a lift of his lips, like it hurt too much to use most of his lower face, but a definite smile. “Believe me, I have no desire to tear open these stitches, or do anything likewise idiotic. Nifty will do any required heavy lifting, and you will do the lighter lifting, and I will stand back and glower as required, with these
wounds undoubtedly adding to the impression of a team too tough to tangle with. Ian is annoying but no fool.”

And that, actually, was pretty much what we did. When Nifty came in, we headed out, following up on the name they'd gotten as a possible Person of Interest, one Nico Kaufman, a freelance dockworker who'd had a sketchy alibi for the hours our DB went missing, and—more relevant to our interests—had been working for the same company that stiffed the DB financially.

And if I stayed a little too close to Venec's side, was too aware of his every move, trying very hard not to flinch every time he was jostled by someone, neither he nor Nifty commented on it.

The building—a four-story walk-up down in Alphabet City—was, in a word, dingy. In two words, run-down. The moment we knocked on the door of Kaufman's apartment, I was really glad Nifty and Venec were with me. The info we'd gathered had neglected to mention that our suspect was a minotaur.

“We come in?” The way Nifty said it, it wasn't a question, or even a request. The bull-headed fatae glared at him, but took a step back, and made a gesture with his thickly muscled arm that translated into “yeah, whatever.”

The apartment was bare and barren, matching the building, and pretty much the way you'd expect a minotaur to live. There were beautiful photos on the wall, though, of sweeping blue seas and clear skies.

Greece. J and I had been there once, when he was still working on expanding my horizons. I wondered if
this guy was an immigrant, or if he just longed for the ancestral home.

We'd discussed our plan of attack in the cab ride down—with the Big Dog along, injured, we weren't worried about having to justify the expense report—and now it fell into place like we'd had time to rehearse.

“You worked with Aodink,” Nifty said without lead-in or introductions.

“Yeah. What's it to you?”

No accent, beyond the basic stereotypical Noo Yawkah I'd learned to recognize as actually being from Queens. Local boy, then. Dreaming of a better time and place?

He took the only seat in the apartment, a sofa that looked like it had been retrofitted to support his mass. Minotaur weren't actually that large—no bigger than your average pro wrestler—but they massed something fierce. Venec leaned against the wall, as usual. With his arms folded against his chest—the sling having lasted halfway through the cab ride, before he took it off with a muttered swear and shoved it into my kit—and the white bandage stark against his black jeans and sweater, he really did look the part of annoyed and potentially violent hard-ass.

Nifty, to contrast, perched himself on the edge of the wood table and leaned forward to talk to our suspect, his body language going for the big-man-to-big-man thing. I leaned against the now-closed door, my arms loose by my side, and looked at the minotaur, trying to channel Stosser's best “I know something you don't want me to know” expression, which mainly involved a perfectly emotionless face that still managed to smirk. The smirk
was easier than holding my arms loose. Now I understood why Venec crossed his arms when he leaned; it helped you balance.

“He's dead.”

No surprise. No reaction at all. Not that it was easy to tell, on that bull head, but not even his ears twitched.

“You and he had some words. You wanted him to stop bitching about the company that wasn't paying him, Elliot Packing.”

The bull shrugged, and on him the gesture looked less like, in J's words, “an inelegant expression of uselessness,” and more of a threat. “Wasn't just me wanted him to shut up. He opened his mouth, and work dried up. They didn't know one beast from another, so they stopped hiring us all.”

“And you put an end to that.”

“You're the pups, you tell me.”

Interesting. We hadn't identified ourselves. I felt a pulse of interest and—amusement?—coming from Venec, while Nifty frowned. This was changing the plan a little. I reached down and pulled up some extra current, playing the neon-bright strands between my mental fingers, remembering Nicky's cat's cradle, keeping the current cool but limber, ready for anything.

Fatae were magic, could sense magic, they didn't
use
magic. I kept repeating that to myself, even as Nifty picked up the change in direction and ran with it.

“How did you get him into the river?”

The minotaur looked at Nifty like he was insane. “I threw him.”

Venec laughed. “Ask a stupid beast, get a stupid answer.”

That wasn't to the script, either; Ben was trying to rile the minotaur, get it to attack him, so we'd have an excuse to take it down. My guys all had death wishes.

“You're admitting that you killed Aodink?” Nifty asked, pulling the bull's attention back to him.

“I ain't admitting nothing. Threw him in the river, is all.”

“Yeah, well, you're not smart enough to figure out that if you shut Aodink up, the work would start to flow again,” Nifty said. “So who gave you the orders?”

That wasn't going to work; I could tell already. The minotaur wasn't ashamed of being bottom of the brain-pile; that was just the way the breed was; strong but not built for cognitive functions. And it wasn't intimidated by current, either. We weren't going to get an admission of the actual killing, and he wasn't going to attack us, either; he was dumb but not a fool.

“You were used,” I said, totally breaking the plan. I was supposed to watch, not talk. “You were used and then set up to take the fall, just like your ancestor. And for nothing. The jobs aren't coming back, cousin. Elliot Packing has already moved on, hired other people to do their work. Bought machinery that can go 24/7, without being fed, without giving back talk. Machinery that humans will work—legal, licensed humans, not fatae.”

I was using everything I'd heard from Danny and Bobo, playing into the worst fears of the fatae underground; of being replaced not with others of their kind, but humans, the majority population, with legal papers and legal standing. I did it, knew I was doing it, hated myself for doing it, and did it, anyway.

“They said…” the minotaur blurted, and then stopped. But Nifty caught whatever it was he wasn't saying.

“They said if you took one for the team, it would all go back to the way it was before? Do this for them, and they'd take care of you? All one team, working for the same goal, and everyone has a specific job….”

“All I had to do was take him down and throw him in,” the minotaur said, like he was complaining. “That was all. Then they'd hire us all back.”

It was so sad I was almost angry. At the fatae for believing, at the humans who had manipulated them, at the world where fatae had to work in the shadows, taking this kind of crap, killing their own just to survive.

“But they didn't,” Nifty said.

“They didn't call. It's been days, and they haven't called.” The minotaur sounded aggrieved.

Venec glanced at me, and I nodded. My ability to run cool with my current was paying off; I had the minotaur's voice down on tape, the small recorder hidden in the leg pocket of my pants. It wouldn't hold up in a Null court of law, but it didn't have to. We were hired to find out the truth of an event, without worrying about right or wrong. It wasn't a perfect system, but it was better than what used to exist, where even if someone asked who-what-why, they couldn't get an answer because too many people were invested in Talent being above the law. Like my dad's killer, still walking around, unpunished.

I had a more-than-suspicion that Stosser's grand plan involved actual courts of enforcement, someday. But that wasn't my headache.

Right now, my headache was in front of me, starting to radiate faint tremors of pain. The drugs were wearing off. We had what we needed; now it was time to go.

*enough* I sent to Nifty, a sense of finality and a tinge of urgency, with the flavoring of Venec. I wasn't sure how much of that he actually picked up, but it was enough.

“Don't go anywhere,” Nifty told the minotaur, standing up, looking down at the fatae. He didn't use current, not even a gleam of a spark, but he managed to project a sense of Official Doom. “If you do, we're going to be really unhappy with you.”

We left the bull sitting on his sofa, moaning about how life wasn't fair, and walked down to the street level in silence—me acutely aware of the fact that Venec's pain meds were starting to fade, and he was holding that injured arm close to his chest. We made it as far as the curb, looking for a cab to flag down, before Nifty put his hand out, asking for the tape recorder.

“Hell, no,” I said. “You touch it, it will go up in sparks.” I took a few steps away from him. “In fact, get the hell away from me.”

Venec shouldered Nifty aside neatly with his good arm, giving me room to walk unmolested.

“Bonnie, the tape?”

Because he asked politely, I pulled the mini-corder out of my pocket and showed it to him, hitting the play button just enough that we could hear the minotaur's voice rumbling, low but intelligible. I really didn't think there was any danger; it took a couple of days of steady core-contact to kill something that low-tech, and we'd managed to get through the confrontation without active use of current. But shit happened, and even dumb tech like a tape recorder could get fried by a sudden defensive twitch.

Fortunately, I ran cool, which meant…

I stopped dead on the corner. “That's it.”

“What?”

“The Roblin. It didn't go after the stronger ones—it went after the weirder ones. I run cool, and Nick—oh, shit, Nick!”

I was surrounded by stronger Talent, and carefully not being active. Nick, on the other hand, was probably nose-forward right this fucking moment into tricky, weird, prone-to-chaos-anyway magic. He'd be like a carnival target to something like The Roblin.

My ping was instinctive: not to Nick, for fear of distracting him at a bad moment, but Stosser, who might be within reach—and had the power and the control to risk getting between a hacker-mage and a mischief imp.

“I need to get back,” Ben said suddenly, a faraway look in his eyes. “Bonnie….”

I felt the same sharp urgency he did, filtered through his connection to Stosser. “We'll take the subway,” I said. “Go.”