The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(90)

I knew she was in there before I even set eyes on her. I didn’t have to see her. I could feel her and the seething cloud of occult energy that hovered over the arcade like a toxic storm cloud. She’d been weaving a spell, maybe for days, feeding her power and her rage into it one drop at a time. It hovered on the edge of climax, a heartbeat from eruption, like the pressure in your sinuses one split second before a sneeze.

I knew exactly what she was waiting for, and what I needed to do.

That’s my girl, I thought when I saw her. They’d bound her by the wrists, a rope looped over a girder pulling her hands taut above her head, leaving her to stand on wobbly tiptoes. There wasn’t one glimmer of fear in Jennifer’s eyes, though. No, I knew that look. It was pure, unadulterated fury.

For a moment, when she saw me step into the room, I thought she might give the game away. I should have known better. The glimmer of relief on her face vanished in a heartbeat, and she turned her scowl on Cesar.

“What’s wrong?” she drawled. “You finally realize you’re not man enough to kill me yourself? Had to bring in some outside help?”

“Oh, we ain’t gonna kill you, chica.” Cesar waved me forward. “Not yet. This guy’s gonna ask you a whole lot of questions first. And you are gonna answer him.”

I scoped the room fast. All the old arcade games, except for a busted and lonely Space Invaders console going to seed in the back corner, had been hauled off or sold for scrap ages ago. The arcade was more or less a concrete box with only one way in or out. They’d set up a card table near Jennifer’s side and a single folding chair.

“Sorry, what was that?” Jennifer asked. “Couldn’t understand you. I don’t speak pencil-dick.”

“You oughta take this seriously.” Cesar’s nostrils flared. “You’re about to be in a whole world of pain, bitch.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes at him. “Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick. I’m in a world of pain every time I gotta look at your ugly-ass face.”

I walked to the table and set down my plastic box. Nestled in my pocket, my phone buzzed twice, then fell silent. Two rings and a hang-up was the signal that Gabriel and the loyal Calles were ready to roll.

Now it was all on me.

“You,” I said to Cesar, “obviously need to stay. As for your friends, I don’t work in front of an audience.”

Cesar locked eyes with me. Trying to read me. He hesitated a moment, then pointed at two of his men.

“You two, guard the door. Everybody else clear out.”

They moved to guard the door, all right. On the inside, flanking the open bay door and standing where they could get a good view of the show. So much for getting Cesar alone.

At least now it was one against three, instead of one against six. Those were almost survivable odds.

“All right.” My fingertips rested lightly on the rough, corrugated face of the plastic box. “What would you like to know first?”

“Her bank account in the Caymans,” Cesar said. “Number and passcode.”

“As you wish.” I unclipped the hasps on the box and looked to Jennifer. “Are you ready to begin?”

She bared her teeth in a feral grin.

“Do your worst.”

My hand reached into the box and closed over a curve of bright orange plastic. As I lifted it, Cesar—standing about five feet away and trying to look over my shoulder—leaned in.

“Hey, what is that?” he asked.

“Flare gun,” I said and swung it toward the thugs by the door. Not at them, between them, toward the open door and angled high. The gun ignited with a crackling whoosh as I pulled the trigger, and the arcade erupted with a flash of blinding light. The flare screamed from the muzzle, firing out into the darkness.

The surprise bought me two seconds. One to toss the empty gun. One for a pair of aces to drop from my sleeves. I caught the cards in my fingertips, whipped my arms up, and sent them flying. One thug took it dead on: he dropped, gurgling, the ace of diamonds buried halfway into his throat. The other card went wide, slicing alongside his buddy’s neck and ripping open his jugular. Blood guttered through his fingers as he slumped against the wall, hands clamped over his torn flesh as if he thought he could press himself back together.

A third ace jumped from my jacket pocket as I dropped low and spun on my heel toward Cesar. The card flew like a hornet, but it barely touched him; instead it winged along his bicep and hit the back wall, leaving a thread-thin trickle of blood no deeper than a paper cut.

Cesar grinned and raised his pistol.

“You missed.”

“Nah, sugar,” Jennifer told him. “Danny just knew I’d wanna kill you myself.”

Then she spat a single word. A long, guttural, twisting word that evoked frozen Germanic winters. The trigger to the spell she’d been weaving for days. The toxic miasma above our heads exploded with a peal of thunder and her spite-fueled power crashed down on Cesar, one man alone in a torrent of death.

The paper cut on his bicep ripped open, as if someone had taken pliers to his skin and given it one brutal, wrenching tug. Blood gushed from the wound as he screamed, flowing faster than it should have, and even faster by the second. He collapsed to his knees, shrieking, and a scarlet torrent blasted from the wound like the spray from a fire hose and splashed across the arcade wall.