Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(38)

“Two things,” I said. “Can you send him an email so it looks like it came from Lauren?”

“Have you met me? Come on, that’s kid stuff. What else?”

Bentley stood at the end of the aisle, head tilted my way, waiting to leave. I mouthed a silent apology.

“Can you rig things so that anything he emails to Lauren won’t reach her box, and vice versa? I want to cut that cord. Everything either of them sends to each other should come straight to us instead.”

“Give me five minutes and it’ll be a done deal.”

“With no chance of getting caught?” I asked.

“Good luck,” she snorted. “I’m behind seven proxies.”

“Get on it. I need to make some phone calls.”

“What’s the plan?”

I smiled. “You want to bring down Carmichael-Sterling? Well, Detective Kemper’s going to help, whether he likes it or not. We just need to seal the deal.”

? ? ?

The Wardriver rode again, as soon as Pixie got her mysterious friend to give her the keys. She swung by Vons to get me, and then we took a suburban detour, heading out to Silverado Ranch to pick up Jennifer.

“Nice ink,” Pixie said, eying Jennifer’s sleeve as she opened the back doors of the van for her.

“Thanks! You got any?”

Pixie was wearing a camisole top. She turned, showing off the fairy wings tattooed across her shoulder blades. Jennifer whistled.

“We oughta compare notes. I’m thinking of getting some more work done, and my old artist moved out to Berkeley.” She peered in the van. “And what do we have here?”

Pixie rapped her knuckles on the electronic console. “It pretty much does everything. FBI, eat your heart out. It’s not mine, but I built in a lot of the extras.”

“Sweet sunshine, Daniel, where’ve you been hiding this girl?”

I saw where her thoughts were going. Behind Pixie’s back, I gestured so Jennifer made sure to notice the Sharpie-inked X across the back of Pixie’s hand.

No, Jenny, she’s not going to go work for a drug dealer. Put your eyes back in your head.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ve got a fish to catch.”

I’d already slung my hook. Once we sorted out the details, Pixie sent Gary an email “from Lauren,” dictated by me.

“Understood. I’ll keep you safe. Too dangerous to meet in person. Take the manuscript to one of my operatives. She’ll meet you at the Mormon Fort. —Lauren”

The original fort went up in the 1850s, care of, as the name implied, a band of Mormon settlers looking for insurance against Indian attacks. They abandoned the place just two years later, returning to Utah when the Mormons and the feds got into a running gunfight back home. After that, the fort turned into a military garrison, then a private ranch, and finally a state park. The blocky adobe buildings and towering walls weren’t all original—there’d been a lot of reconstruction over the years—but it was still a neat little slice of history. Also, not a bad place for a clandestine meeting.

We parked by a fence made from rough-hewn logs, and Pixie angled the Wardriver’s hidden cameras. Jennifer sat next to her, watching her moves, learning how the system worked. Jennifer was the biggest tech junkie I knew. Nothing on Pixie’s level, but we only had one shot at getting this footage, and I wanted somebody I could trust in the director’s chair. Pixie didn’t count, since her job was outside the van.

Gary knew my face, and Jennifer’s too. There was a good chance, if the task force was really digging into our backgrounds, that he’d be familiar with everybody else in our crew. Pixie, though? An outsider. The perfect actress to play Lauren’s secret agent.

“See? You can sweep the whole area with this knob now that we’ve got the camera lined up,” Pixie was telling Jennifer. “You’re good for sound up to about a hundred feet. Ambient isn’t too bad, but closer’s obviously better.”

“Stay in the parking lot and don’t let him take you into the fort,” I told Pixie. “We need his face, not just his voice.”

“And I’ll keep him facing the camera, yeah. I do know how to do this, Faust. Not my first time.”

A green Mustang rolled into the lot. Same one that had escaped me at Our Lady of Consolation.

“Showtime,” I said, pointing it out on the bank of monitors. Then Gary got out. Pixie leaned close, squinting.

“Fuck,” she hissed. “I know that guy.”

“What? From where?”

“You remember the big EcoFirst protest outside the Enclave construction site last month? Where I got busted?” She pointed at the monitor. “He’s the * who busted me. Nearly twisted my arm out of its socket, too.”

Pixie and Jennifer both looked to me for an answer. I didn’t have one. A month was a long time, and Kemper probably didn’t have a photographic memory for everybody he’d tossed in a wagon, but there was always a chance.

I shook my head. “Pack it in. Too risky. We’ll figure out something else.”

“He probably won’t recognize me,” Pixie said.

“‘Probably’ isn’t good enough. You aren’t a part of this—”

She glared. “Bullshit I’m not a part of this. I’m not your paid errand girl, Faust. I want to see Carmichael-Sterling go down as bad as you do. I just have different reasons. And my reasons are probably better than yours.”