Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(71)
He paused, poised above me and ready to cut.
“What you said back there, about needing an army to take you on?”
“Oui?”
Scarlet lights strobed across the curtains, and sirens wailed like banshees in the dark. Squad cars flooded the parking lot, rolling in one after another. I heard doors rattle and slam as the local population of roaches tried to cut and run, charging headlong into the dragnet of a full-on police raid.
“I brought one,” I told him.
Gilles blinked and looked stupidly over his shoulder, trying to parse what was happening. That was when the door burst in and Harmony stood on the threshold, flanked by a pair of Metro cops in uniform.
“You caught him!” Harmony said, giving Gilles an approving nod. “Good job, Agent Jakobsen. This scumbag isn’t getting away again.”
“Wait,” Gilles said. “What…what is…?”
One of the uniforms hoisted me to my feet and tugged my hands behind me. Cold steel ratcheted shut around my wrists, tight enough to squeeze. Harmony plucked my gun from the mattress. A cacophony of shouts and stampeding feet echoed from outside the motel room. I saw a rail-thin junkie with a swastika tattoo on his neck streak past the doorway, only to meet the wrong end of a Taser and go down in a twitching heap.
“You’re Agent Lars Jakobsen of the DEA,” Harmony said to Gilles with a cold smile. “And you just masterminded a major drug bust. I bet this perp over here is the leader of the whole meth ring.”
Gilles leaned close to Harmony, looming over her.
“What are you playing at, woman?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Remember that little stunt at the parking garage?” she whispered back. “Now it’s your turn. You can play along, or you can show all these heavily armed officers what you really are. Your choice.”
He straightened, looking from me to her with narrowed eyes. He knew he’d been set up, but he couldn’t figure out the how or the why.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “You can take him in. I have…paperwork. Police paperwork.”
“Nonsense,” Harmony said. “This is your collar, your interrogation. I’ll be right there to help, of course, but you should really see this through to the end.”
That was how Harmony, me, and the spirit of Gilles de Rais ended up in an unmarked police car, with a clueless uniformed rookie riding along for support.
The night was just getting started.
Thirty-Five
The raid hadn’t been subtle. I counted four patrol cars riding convoy with us, and every one had at least two ragged-looking skells in the backseat. Eventually we arrived at the nearest precinct house, an imposing block of weathered granite behind a barbed-wire fence. I ducked my head as Harmony hauled me out of the car.
Past the concrete crash barriers and the reinforced Plexiglas doors, the seal of the State of Nevada adorned the dirty and scuffed tile floor. The room was a human zoo. The takings from the raid on the Honeydew only added to a chaotic whirlwind of surly, handcuffed perps, frantic public defenders, and a handful of third-shift cops just trying to keep their heads above water. Harmony walked me past the front desk and over to a side door, pausing to flash her badge at an attendant.
“Federal prisoner here,” she told him. “Can we use one of your interrogation rooms?”
He checked a clipboard and nodded. “Four should be open. Down on the end, left side.”
We paused at a hard plastic box set into the wall. Harmony drew her gun and turned her back to us. I heard the box rattle and clank. She looked expectantly at Gilles.
“What?” he said.
“You know the rules, agent,” she said. “No weapons in the squad room. Stow your piece.”
He nodded slowly, shouldering past her and stashing his gun in the secure box. It rattled and clanked once more, and Harmony nodded for him to lead the way inside.
“So now I don’t have a cannon,” he muttered at her. “Neither do you. A feeble woman and a shackled man against a Marshal of France. That was your grand plan?”
Harmony half smiled. “Do you have a problem with women in authority, Gilles? I thought you fought under Joan of Arc.”
He grumbled something in French. I didn’t understand a word of it, but the tone came across loud and clear.
We walked past cluttered desks and a broken coffee machine, turning left down a cinder-block hallway. The door to interrogation room four hung open. The empty room looked just like the last one I’d been in: steel table, steel chairs, cold and sterile behind a one-way mirror.
I walked in first, standing off to one side. Gilles came next, smirking as Harmony pulled the door closed.
“I see,” he said. “A soundproof box. Cunning. Now which of you shall I murder firs—”
I lashed out my fist, whipping him across the eyes with the steel handcuffs I suddenly wasn’t wearing anymore. His hands flew up to protect his face. Harmony gave him a vicious kick to the back of his knee. His leg buckled and he crashed to the concrete floor. He reared back, roaring with anger and surprise, and I stuck a gun in his face.
“You forgot to search your prisoner,” I breathed. “That’s bad police technique.”
Harmony slapped cuffs on his wrists, bound by a sturdy chain in the middle that ran through a bolt riveted to the floor. These were the heavy-duty shackles, the kind for hard-core violent felons. In three quick breaths she had him trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey.