Book of Night(38)

He liked the idea of passing on his knowledge to a kid with some natural talent, but he didn’t want her to be better than him. And he definitely didn’t want her as competition.

“You and me, we’re the same,” he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. “We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”

Sometimes after she’d done particularly well on a job, he’d be in a spiteful mood. He’d condescendingly call her “Little Miss Charlatan,” go over every mistake she made, and give her less of the take than she deserved.

But if Charlie’s growing skill frustrated him, he also clearly enjoyed having someone to whom he could complain, or brag, or rant. The natural consequence of criminality was that he had to be discreet about it, and Rand wasn’t a discreet person by nature.

Sometimes he could be fun. He took her with him to the Moose Lodge in Chicopee, where a bunch of old racketeers drank, and let her sit around drinking burnt coffee with lots of cream while they regaled her with stories. She rubbed elbows with fences and forgers. Learned how to count cards from Willie Lead, who told her about Leticia, his late wife and, according to him, the greatest stickup artist ever to knock over a liquor store.

“It was the throat cancer that got her in the end,” he said mournfully. “The cops never even came close.”

The Moose Lodge was where Charlie got her start as a bartender, at fourteen, pouring shots when no one else wanted to do it, making cocktails according to highly idiosyncratic instructions.

“Just wave the vermouth bottle over the gin,” Benny would say. “That’s how to make a martini right.” His game was angling after rich widows, and he always looked sharp doing it, even if his breath was often perfumed with booze.

Willie would disagree vehemently, shouting that vermouth ought to be a full fourth of the drink, and that Benny was a drunk who’d burned away his good taste, if he’d ever had any in the first place.

“So I’m a drunk!” Benny would shout back. “If you can’t trust a drunk about liquor, who can you trust?”

Charlie liked them. She told them about her grandmother and the shotgun, and the detail that her grandfather was sitting in his BarcaLounger when he got executed made them howl with laughter. Willie promised they’d take Charlie up to the North Central Correctional Institute in Gardner to visit the grand dame one day, although they never did.

Hanging around them made Charlie feel like maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with her. It didn’t matter if she didn’t fit in at school, or that her body kept changing on her. It was okay when her best friend’s parents took one look at Charlie and clocked her for trouble. When even Laura herself, who’d known her since she was eight, started acting weird. It was fine that she’d given up hoping her mother would notice there was something strange about Rand taking her on trips all the time. All those people who judged her or couldn’t be bothered with her were marks. She’d have the last laugh.

“You gotta be like a shark in this business,” Benny told her, with his soft voice and his slicked-back hair. “Sniff around for the blood in the water. Greet life teeth first. And no matter what, never stop swimming.”

Charlie took that advice and the money from her last job with Rand and got a tattoo. She’d wanted one, and she’d also wanted to know if she could con a shop into giving her the ink, even though she was three years away from eighteen.

It involved some fast talking and swiping a notary sigil, but she got it done. Her first tattoo. It was still a little bit sore when she moved. Along her inner arm was the word “fearless” in looping cursive letters, except the tattooist had spaced them oddly so that it looked as though it said “fear less.”

It reminded her of what she wanted to be, and that her body belonged to her. She could write all over it if she wanted.



* * *



Over the years, as gloaming emerged into the general consciousness of the world at large, Rand became increasingly fascinated with it. He’d been pulling cons based around the occult for years—like the one where Charlie had to pretend to be a ghost child. While he’d particularly liked how a little sleight of hand could really impress wealthy old ladies, with real magic, he sensed larger opportunities.

Willie wasn’t impressed and let everyone at the Moose Lodge know. “When I was a kid, there was that guy, Uri Geller, who could bend spoons with his mind. Guess what came of that? Nothing. Who needs a bent spoon?”

Benny knew a guy, though. Rand returned from the meeting excited. He told Charlie that this person promised them big money if they’d acquire something for him. “The guy probably doesn’t even know how valuable the book he’s got is. He’s a rich old coot, not a gloamist. We just need the right angle.”

“If the guy who’s hiring us is a real gloamist and the mark isn’t, why doesn’t the gloamist steal it himself?” Charlie asked. “Why doesn’t he send his shadow to get it?”

“Because of the onyx,” Rand said, as though that ought to have been obvious. “It makes the shadows solid, so they can’t slip through cracks or whatever.”

Charlie was skeptical. “If the old coot knows that, he probably knows his book is valuable.”