The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(36)

“So,” I asked, “how do I know which to use?”

“Practice. But first…you learn the moves.” Bentley handed me the deck of cards. “Here. Your turn. I’ll show you a few methods of moving a signed card into my hand.”

My stomach growled. I eyed the cards dubiously.

“Couldn’t we do this after lunch?”

“We will eat,” he said with a soft chuckle, “once you’ve managed to slip a card past me.”

*

Five years later, on the morning of my twenty-fourth birthday, I was sitting in a chair.

“Sitting” being relative, considering I was tied to it. And the chair was upside down, dangling by a rope from the sturdy light fixture in the dusty back room of the Scrivener’s Nook. Lengths of chain wound like boa constrictors around my chest, wrists, and ankles, secured by combination padlocks.

“Hey, kiddo,” Corman said, amiably munching on a slice of cake. “How’s it going?”

“Hey, Corman. A little help here?”

He took a long look at me, shrugged, and scooped up another forkful of cake.

“Nope.”

I wriggled against the loops binding my wrists. The motion made the chair slowly turn, twirling on its rope, and the blood rushed to do a dizzy conga in my brain.

“Seriously,” I said, “this is impossible. I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can. Y’know, I saw Harry Blackstone Junior perform in Manhattan once. He did this exact same escape plus he was inside a burlap sack. Took him twelve minutes.”

I squirmed, rocking the chair, sending it turning in the other direction.

“Not for nothing,” Corman said, “but your birthday cake is amazing. Butter cream and French silk chocolate. That’s the good stuff. You should come down from there and get some before it’s all gone.”

“Oh, great idea,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said with a smile.

As the door swung shut behind him, leaving me alone in the gloom, I realized my sarcasm might have misfired.

All right, I told myself, first things first. Get a grip.

I focused on my breathing. Deep and steady. Tuning out my anxiety, my fear of failure, all the distractions I didn’t need. In their wake, new, positive thoughts flooded in to fill the gap. Ideas. Inspirations. My bag of tricks. Five years of learning everything from sleight of hand to eldritch conjurations.

I’ve exorcised a demon, I reminded myself, and I’ve spoken to the Mourner of the Red Rocks and lived. Also, I play the meanest three-card monte on Fremont Street, and I can do the oil and water routine with one arm behind my back.

Tied to a chair? I can handle this.

Like a magic trick, anxiety transformed into excitement. I attacked the problem from a fresh perspective. I wasn’t tied to a chair. Individual parts of me were tied to a chair. Escape was a series of steps, a multilayered puzzle to be unraveled.

First, information, I thought. Find out what I’m up against.

I lifted my legs as much as I could, muscles straining. The combination padlock dangled down, giving me a good look at the faceplate. Master Lock 1533, I noted, thinking back over everything I’d been taught about how to crack a combination lock and that model in particular.

I curled my hands into a cup, flexing my arms as much as the chain binding me to the chair would allow. I slowly, sinuously writhed, slipping the bonds down a millimeter at a time, giving me more room to bend my elbows. Finally, the padlock on my wrist chains dropped into my hands. I’d have to crack it backward, by touch alone.

I didn’t escape in twelve minutes. It took closer to three hours.

But that was a damn fine birthday cake.





19.




Joining the ragged, shuffling chow line in the dining hall, I tried to call on that same old confidence. It wasn’t easy, not with a third of the room staring daggers at me—and any number of them carrying real daggers hidden under their shirts—but it felt good to have a plan in motion. I needed to figure out my end, but once that fell into place, freedom was just a few risky moves away.

Watching the stone-faced guards along the wall, fingers resting light on their triggers, I realized they might be my way in. According to Paul—and the general behavior from the guards I’d seen since I got here—the Iceberg’s keepers were mired in incompetence and outright corruption. If I could find a guard with a weak spot and apply the right pressure, I wouldn’t have to break into the tower to get those goggles: I could make him do it for me.

Not Emerson, though. I kept thinking back to his strange patrol on the catwalks, how he watched the other guards. Studied them. Something was all kinds of wrong about Emerson, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

As I took a seat at the far end of a table, the other convicts gave me space. Way too much space. Nobody made eye contact, much less casual conversation. Word spread fast. I guessed that by now everybody had heard about the ambush in the showers and how one of the assassins ended up. They didn’t know what I’d done to him or how; they just knew that I’d done something. Something they didn’t want any part of.

There was one big problem with using fear as a weapon: terrorize someone whose entire sense of self is invested in being the biggest badass on the block, and it can backfire. Hard. I cast a glance toward the Calles’ table, where Raymundo and his boys were deep in a heated argument. I couldn’t make out the words, but the body language was three degrees south of a full-on brawl.