Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(67)

“And if he’s not lucky?”

I shrugged. She didn’t need the gory details.

“He’ll survive,” I told her. That much was true.

? ? ?

Gary Kemper pulled a Houdini after the gunfight at the parking garage. I looked for him in the sea of stern-faced cops and camera-toting vultures, but he’d vanished like a pro. Probably hiding somewhere, trying to decide which of his four masters he should report to first and what story to tell them.

Me, I eased my way into the foot traffic and went back to my original plan, before the world flipped upside down: I strolled up to the poolside bar and had a drink, sipping a frosty pi?a colada under the shade of a canvas umbrella. I needed some time to think.

Gilles might be eager to get out into the world and taste some fresh blood, but Sullivan would be keeping him on a short leash. When you’ve got a gold bar in your hands, you don’t leave it lying around for somebody else to pick up. Lauren would bargain with him to get what she needed, no doubt, but would she bargain fair? I wouldn’t put it past her or Sullivan to pull a last-minute double cross.

I needed to stop that deal from going down, any way I could. If I could find an angle that they wouldn’t expect—

“Jared?”

I looked up, jolted from my thoughts. The girl standing at the edge of my umbrella was maybe twenty, with perfectly bronzed skin and a bikini the color of Alaskan snow. She peered at me over the rims of her oversized sunglasses, uncertain.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Oh. You’re not him. Sorry, I’m meeting someone here. It’s an Internet thing,” she said, a tinge of embarrassment in her voice. “You look like his picture.”

“Sorry,” I said, giving her a shrug and a smile, “I hope you find him.”

I leaned back in my chair as she walked away. Part of me had been tempted to say, “I’m not him, but I could be.” Another part of me, the smarter and more experienced part, realized how creepy that would have sounded.

I’m not him, but I could be.

I sat bolt upright, eyes wide. I had my angle. And they’d never see it coming.

“Mama,” I said as soon as Margaux picked up the phone. “Those sequined spirit-bottles you get from Haiti. You got any handy?”

Mama Margaux was our local mambo and expert on all things Caribbean. She’d been a key player in our siege of Lauren’s casino stronghold, wrangling a horde of wild spirits to chew through its astral defenses like a school of piranha.

“That depends,” she said, her thick accent booming over the line. “With or without occupant?”

“I’m looking for a vacancy. Have a tenant who’ll be ready to move in shortly. He’s about to get evicted from his old place.”

“Hope he’s not expecting cable TV.”

“Nah,” I said. “The guy’s a deadbeat. Can you drop the bottle off at the Scrivener’s Nook?”

“Sure!” she said. “Soon as you tell me how you’re gonna pay for it. Mambo don’t work for ‘thank you.’”

“Would you take a check?”

Admittedly, it was a stretch, but she didn’t have to laugh quite that loudly. I winced.

“How about I owe you a favor?” I said.

“How about you owe me four?”

“Two.”

“Three, and one of ’em is a dinner someplace fancy. We haven’t had time to catch up since that mess at the Silverlode.”

“How fancy?”

“Fancier than the place Antoine tried to take me last night. Don’t you get me started on that boy,” she said.

“Didn’t you two break up? Again?”

“That,” she said, “was last week.”

I could pore over ancient Latin texts about occult mathematics without breaking a sweat, but mapping out the chaos of Margaux and Antoine’s relationship was beyond my meager powers. I’d never even met the guy. Someday I hoped to, if they actually stayed together for more than a few days in a row.

While I negotiated with Margaux, Gary was somewhere in the wind, doing whatever he had to do to smooth things over and keep his head off the chopping block. As it happened, he didn’t make it back home until half past midnight, trudging up the stairs of his squalid little tenement with all the world’s weight on his shoulders.

Whatever he expected when he stumbled through his apartment door, it probably wasn’t me. It definitely wasn’t me sitting on his couch and drinking a glass of his whiskey.

? ? ?

“Sorry,” I said, holding up the glass. “I’ve been waiting for a couple of hours. You can’t really blame me for making myself at home.”

Gary stood with his back to the door, sliding deadbolts into place with one trembling, fumbling hand.

“You can’t be here,” he stammered. “You have to leave. Right now.”

“Why? One of your buddies from the Redemption Choir coming over? Or maybe one of Lauren’s errand boys? Or somebody from the precinct—hell, it’s hard keeping all your bosses straight these days, isn’t it? I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t.”

“If this is about the garage—”

“Oh,” I said, setting down my glass on the end table and rising to my feet. “You bet your ass it is.”