Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(80)
“Carmichael’s place was custom built,” I explained. “And the blueprints on file with the city are fakes. Fortunately, the architecture firm she hired kept backups on their private server, and so did the company that installed her home security system.”
“You’re all very welcome,” Pixie said and marked an imaginary tally point in the air with the tip of her finger.
“We have the main entrance here, and the service entrance on the side, here.” I paused as Ben raised his hand.
“So, uh, what’s that tunnel-looking thing underneath?” he asked. “That’s not a normal cellar.”
“Not a cellar at all,” Pixie told him. “Lauren paid to have an escape tunnel dug out, in case of emergency. Runs from the back stairs, straight under the dining hall, and out to a culvert about two hundred feet behind the house.”
“So can we use that? Looks like an easy way in to me.”
She shook her head. “The entire midsection of the tunnel is lined with infrared beams wired to an alarm system. Short of cutting off the backup generator, which you’d have to already be in the house to do, there’s no chance of getting in that way.”
“Those of you who are going in,” I said, “will be posing as caterers. We’ve found out what company she’s using. Tomorrow morning, we grab one of their trucks.”
“This plan is dumb,” Juliette chirped. “You’re dumb.”
“They’ll see it coming from a mile away,” Justine added.
I smiled and spread my open hands.
“We’re going to do a magic trick. Stage magic. Sleight of hand. Here’s how it works: when you’re looking at my left hand, all the action’s happening in my right. The audience always looks where the magician wants them to look. And if they think they’re the ones in control? That just proves they’ve already been fooled.”
Thirty-Nine
I slept at the Value Lodge, not sure if I should expect a knock on the door or a bullet through the window. The traitor would have told Sullivan everything. By now he knew I’d rooked him, just like he knew he only had two choices: kill me and cut his losses, or play dumb and trade me to Lauren anyway.
I was still breathing when the sun came up, so I guessed he’d made the right choice.
Corman slouched behind the antique cash register at the Scrivener’s Nook, reading a dog-eared copy of a Jack Kerouac novel. He knew what I was there for and gestured to the back door.
“Stockroom’s all yours, kiddo. Found this for you, too.”
He tossed me a silver-edged casino chip. It twirled end over end, cutting a glittering arc through the air and landing in the palm of my hand. The insignia was from the Sands, home of the Rat Pack and a Vegas landmark until it came down back in ’96. I technically didn’t need a chip this special for what I had in mind, but it wouldn’t hurt the spell any.
Past the stockroom door and around a pile of empty crates, the floor was cleared and swept clean. I rummaged through a box and took out six flame-red candles, mounted them on brass candlesticks, and set them out in the shape of a hexagram’s points. I lit them one by one, circling, murmuring a wordless chant, before sitting cross-legged at the heart of the design.
I hadn’t carried proper weapons since my apartment burned down. Time to fix that. As I slipped into a waking trance, my fingers—not part of me, acting on their own now, doing what needed doing—peeled the cellophane from a new deck of poker cards. With slender vials of aromatic oil I marked unseen glyphs on the face of each card, then passed them over a thin plume of sandalwood incense to seal the power in. One by one, one pile of cards dwindled while the other pile grew, the pasteboard and oil glowing in my mind’s eye. Time slipped away and ceased to mean anything. Nothing remained but me, the cards, and the gentle hand of Lady Luck on my shoulder. Steering me home.
I held my hand over the deck and felt an electric flutter in the pit of my stomach. Yes, I thought, and the cards flew upward, riffling against my outstretched fingertips.
? ? ?
“I don’t think I can do this,” Ben said from the backseat of Jennifer’s car. He looked green around the edges, leaning his head out the window like a dog on a hot summer day.
“Yeah, you can,” I said, slouching in my seat and watching the street for movement. We were somewhere on the elbow end of suburbia, parked by the side of the road next to a quiet duplex and a postage-stamp-sized yard of yellow scrub. Jennifer mirrored my pose, leaning back behind the wheel, and Mama Margaux filled out the backseat.
“How can you be so casual about this?” Ben said, looking back over his shoulder and dropping into a terse whisper. “This is a hijacking. It’s…illegal.”
Jennifer shook her head and drawled, “It ain’t a Brinks truck, sugar. It’s a catering van. Unless you’re on a low-carb diet, you ain’t gonna be in a whole lotta danger.”
“What if one of them has a gun? What if two of them have guns?”
“Ours are bigger,” she said.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text message from Nicky. “Van just passed me heading west, you’ve got 2 mins.”
We knew the catering company Lauren had hired. We just needed a matching vehicle. Emma had called in that morning and hired the same company for a last-minute luncheon, giving a fake address guaranteed to lead the unlucky caterers along one particular stretch of road far from busy traffic—this one. We controlled the ground, and we controlled the timing.