Trickster Read online

  “How’s it going, Vonnegan?” the guy said, grinning.

  He was a fat black guy, skin shiny, head shaved and, by all appearances, waxed. His teeth were yellow and I wanted to make him stop grinning. He was big but looked and moved soft. Fleshy. Under a leather overcoat he wore your standard detective costume: suit and tie made for another man entirely, wrinkled and perfunctory.

  They liked to use your name. Made you feel like they knew everything about you already, like they’d been watching you, listening in on your phone calls. I’d been hassled plenty by cops. Sometimes you couldn’t get away when a grift fell apart and you didn’t want to be too obvious about bleeding out an escape—nothing like a cop seeing you float up into the air or something like that, scarred for life by the sight, following you around, trying to figure it out.

  I nodded, exhaling smoke. “Detectives.”

  They glanced at each other. “I’m Marichal and this is Holloway,” the woman said, nodding at her partner. “Let’s take a ride and talk.”

  I looked from Holloway to her, dragging deep on my cigarette, which I suspected was about to be taken away from me. I figured at least at the station house they might give me a cup of coffee, something to eat. “What about?”

  They looked at each other again. It was annoying. When they looked back at me, it was Holloway who spoke.

  “Murder,” he said cheerfully, tugging on my jacket. “And lots of it.”

  9

  I tilted my head back to get the sugary dregs of coffee, so sweet it was almost bitter, and wished I had another cup. I imagined I could feel my body absorbing nutrients directly from the liquid. Even though it was possibly the worst coffee ever created, it was the best coffee I’d ever had.

  I was in an interview room. I’d been left alone for twenty minutes so that I would become properly terrified.

  It was painted a sort of shit green, the sort of shit green you saw when you were well on your way to scurvy. There was no obvious mirrored wall, but there were at least four spots on the ceiling that could have been cameras, peeking in to see if I was crying or writing a confession or being beaten to death. There was a surprisingly small metal table and three plastic chairs that had big chunks missing from them. There was an odd smell in the air I couldn’t place, and an annoying buzzing noise.

  They’d searched me and taken my blade, smiling and polite. I rolled up my sleeve and examined the scabbed wounds, the moist, yellowish gash I’d made just a few hours before. I estimated how much damage I could do with my fingernails, whether I could get a good bleed going. But tearing a wound apart was slow and painful. And messy. And I was exhausted; the Charm on our ATM mark had taken more than was wise. I wasn’t going to do myself any favors by casting something else and passing out right after.

  The door opened with a bang, making me jump a little. The two detectives walked in with files under their arms and cups of coffee in their hands. Holloway had shrunk a bit out of his leather coat, becoming just a flabby guy wearing reading glasses, older than I’d first pegged him. Marichal had suffered, too; outside of her thick coat she had no waist—she went from hips to boobs with no transition.

  She glanced at my arm as they took their seats and said nothing. Seen it all, I supposed.

  “Mr. Vonnegan,” she said, spreading the files in front of her in a busy, distracted way. “I’d like to ask you to look at some photographs and just tell me if you recognize anyone.”

  I rolled my sleeve back down, looking at the top of her head while she fussed over her files. “You’re asking me?”

  “You’re not under arrest,” Holloway said.

  I didn’t look at him. All I knew about cops was that each and every one of them was a bastard looking to clear cases so they could go home. None of them gave a shit about justice. And they fucked with your head when they wanted answers, so the best thing to do was figure out what they wanted you to do and do the opposite.

  In the short term, Holloway wanted me to look at him. So I didn’t. “And if I stand up? Walk to the door?”

  “You might trip.”

  Marichal was extracting photos from each file and making a deck of them. There were dozens.

  “Don’t leave the room again,” I said, finally looking back at him. Being a Trickster was half performance, and I knew a good beat to hit when it swam up under me. “I won’t be here when you get back.”

  Holloway smiled at me. “Lem Vonnegan!” he said suddenly, dramatically slapping his hand on the table. “I can’t fucking believe I got Lem Vonnegan in my interview room.” He leaned back in his chair, making it creak dangerously, and smiled, pointing at me. “You got quite the jacket. You’re the goddamn godfather. Six arrests, one conviction: petty theft, picking pockets on the subway, six years ago. Two nights in the tank for drunk and disorderly, causing a ruckus. Three pips for running out on bar bills—or trying to. No convictions; no one showed up to press charges.” He winked. “Yep, I’m writing this day in my diary. Gonna put little stars and hearts around the border, too, write your name on the cover a few times: Mister Lem Vonnegan.”

  Marichal slapped one of the photos in front of me. “Recognize her?”

  I looked down. I knew it would be Claire Mannice before I saw it. It looked like a high school yearbook photo; she looked happy, younger. Like she’d grown six inches in two months and hadn’t figured out what the hell to do with all the extra leg. Her hair was fucking terrifying.

  I ran through my odds.

  I knew Mika Renar was slaughtering those girls. An enustari like her didn’t collect girls on a regular basis because she wasn’t going to kill them. If I admitted anything, and the cops leaned on me, I’d be dead. A day or two, time for word to get to Renar that I was going to help send a couple dozen cops her way, and they’d find me miraculously dead in my cell, strangled by an invisible wire. If I clammed up, the cops maybe charged me with something, found a way to hang on to me. But I’d give them the slip eventually.

  I decided the slip better come sooner rather than later. These assholes were going to get me turned into a hot pile of ash.

  “Nope,” I said. I kept my eyes on the photo for a second. She looked so happy. Involuntarily, I thought of the girl in Hiram’s study, all those years ago. I remembered the sharp lines of her collarbones, like someone had cut her open and shoved sticks under her skin. I looked back squarely at Marichal. “Nope.”

  She nodded, pulling the photo back. “Funny, we got some witnesses who say otherwise.”

  I nodded. “Let me guess: a bunch of assholes who follow Heller around like a swarm of gnats with pinpricks for irises and a bad habit of constantly scratching themselves, right?”

  The cops very pointedly didn’t look at each other. Marichal scowled, and now she wasn’t even handsome anymore. She started flicking more photos at me like she was dealing cards.

  “We have thirteen missing girls within the last month,” she said steadily. “Same physical type, same MO on the snatch. We were onto something, and then it went cold.”

  The Skinny Fuck, I thought. Rest in fucking peace.

  I looked down at the photos. All of them young, all brunette, short hair, angular faces. I recognized each of them from my short, awful vacation in the Skinny Fuck’s mind, but they blurred together. The same skin, the same hair, the same pattern over and over again. One after another they landed in front of me. I thought of that house up in Westchester, that mansion that smelled like dust and bones, that mummy sitting in the library, casting immense fucking spells with other people’s lives.

  My stomach began to hurt.

  Dark hair, tan skin.

  Dark hair, tan skin.

  In the photos their age varied, but I knew from the Skinny Fuck that they’d been getting younger. I wondered why the physical type mattered. Why he’d been taking them in age order. I didn’t know anything about the big spells, the biludha. Maybe it was Biludha 101: All your victims had to be twinsies in chronological order. I thought about these girls, these
women, working their way through their lives, not knowing that Renar had her dusty old eye on them. There were so many. I thought about the sorts of spells you could cast with a few dozen healthy bodies like that, and all the hair on my body stood up like someone was running a current through the room.

  I’d met Mika Renar. She’d bled someone dry just to threaten me. I didn’t want to think about what she’d do with all this blood.

  Holloway pointed at me again. “You sure you haven’t seen her?”

  I swallowed bile and guilt and imagined what an Archmage could do to me—there were terrible spells out there, biludha that could turn a man inside out or curse him for life. Voices laughing at you for eternity. People hating you, wanting to murder you on sight for no reason. Worse things than a paltry bolt of lightning from the sky or a simple execution.

  “No,” I said, not looking at anyone.

  There was a beat of silence, and then Marichal’s voice, softer. “Jim, give me a minute alone here.”

  They’d been partners for a while, I guessed, because he just stood up and exited the room, the metal door banging open and shut. Not a word. No discussion or protest; they knew how each other liked to work.

  She leaned toward me, shampoo and cigarettes. I looked up at her.

  “These girls,” she said softly. “They’re dead. We don’t know that, but we know it. They disappear, they never turn up again. We had a lead on the bastard, but he’s disappeared, too. We don’t know if he killed them right away or not. We don’t know if this girl, Claire”—she pushed the other photos aside and put Claire Mannice back in front of me, tapping one long nail on her face—“is still alive or not. Or maybe a couple of them. We don’t know.”

  She kept tapping on the photo, and I found I couldn’t look away. I remembered her in the tub at Hiram’s. I remembered the open window, and I hoped she’d kept running.

  “You’re not a bad guy,” Marichal said gently. “A low-life, sure, kind of an asshole. But you don’t want this girl hurt. I can tell just by looking at you. You’re scared, okay, I get that. We can help. You help us, we can protect you.”

  A laugh bubbled out of me. I regretted it immediately. Looking up, I found a dark shadow had spread over Marichal’s face. She stood up.

  “Think about it. In fact,” she said, glancing down at her watch as she pushed away and headed for the door, “you got another twenty-one hours to think about it.”

  I kept my eyes on the table, where she’d left her pen, and listened. The moment I heard the door slam shut, I lunged forward and took the pen, flicking the cap off and awkwardly rolling up the sleeve of my jacket. Without hesitation—because hesitation would have allowed me to imagine the pain, the burning and achy pain spiraling up my arm and slamming into my head—I dragged the point along the unhealed scab of the gash, pushing in hard as I did so. The scab tore open and blood welled up again, pouring out in a rush.

  I began whispering the Words.

  The same spell I’d cast on the ATM mark—my Charm spell. Second inversion, a few bits flipped here and there to make it an anti-Charm spell. Clever, I thought. Dangerous, too. Making yourself invisible was difficult and would take the blood of two, three people to fuel, to put enough energy out to bend the light itself around you. This was easier; same spell, but worked backward, made people subconsciously despise you so much they literally didn’t see you. Just edited you out, the most unpleasant thing they’d ever seen. And thus decided they had not seen you.

  I felt the terrible, sagging weakness sweep through me, and I stumbled a bit, my vision going gray. Usually it passed in a few seconds and I was just tired, but although my vision cleared I couldn’t shake the heavy, soaking-wet feeling that hung on me. I leaned over the table with my palms flat on its surface for a moment, my arms shaking, and sawed breath in and out of my lungs.

  Trembling, I moved over toward the door and leaned against the wall.

  Then I waited.

  I looked up and studied the spots where the cameras were hidden; I didn’t know how the spell would work through them. I didn’t know if anyone looking at a monitor would be affected or if the technology would filter everything, deliver my image unchanged. I didn’t think it mattered. No one sat there watching the monitors; they recorded everything and watched it later, if ever.

  The silence had a hum to it. I fought the urge to rest my eyes and blinked endlessly. I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to jolt myself awake. My arm was dry; as always when casting the spell had left it dry and angry, the bleeding stopped. I didn’t know how or why that happened. I hadn’t stayed with Hiram long enough to advance my education.

  Outside, I could hear the muffled bustle of the station. Doors slammed. Phones rang. People shouted.

  The door to the interview room banged open, and Marichal stepped into the room, two cups of coffee in her hands. I blinked awake, startled, and stared at her for a moment. She spun around, eyes everywhere, and looked right at me for a second, a brief expression of disgust twisting her face, and then looked on, cursing under her breath.

  Heart lurching, I slipped through the doorway just before the heavy door banged shut, and pushed myself flat against the wall out in the hallway.

  Around me, the station buzzed and flowed. People walked past me, looked right at me through a series of office windows, but they all just edited me out, preferring, thanks to the power of the spell, not to notice me.

  The door to the interview room banged open again, and Marichal hustled out, turning right and heading away from me at a trot. I shut my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to steady my pulse and dredge up some hidden reserve of energy. My limbs felt like they were wrapped in lead. I forced my eyes open and turned to follow Marichal toward the exit. The yellow paint on the walls was peeling and the floor had soft spots that gave under my weight; after a few steps everything seemed to roll and swirl, color oozing off the walls.

  The station was jammed full of people: cops in their terrible cheap shirts and pants, too tight or too big. Their leather holsters the only things that fit them. People handcuffed to random furniture and fixtures, napping, and I wanted to sit down next to them and doze off myself.

  There was no alarm. At first I thought there might be, but then I remembered Marichal and Holloway hadn’t arrested me, and might prefer no one know I’d just walked out on them. They might even be outside, scanning the street for signs of me, and I relaxed a little.

  Walking wasn’t easy. I wasn’t invisible, so I didn’t have the invisible’s problem of being walked into and jostled by people who couldn’t see me; people instinctively avoided me, in fact. But I had to keep my distance anyway. Best not push it.

  Just past the lobby was a break room. A filthy place with a small table, a microwave, a dorm fridge, and Hell’s coffee machine, crusted in dark brown sediment. The history of the place in ancient coffee film. The room smelled like some of the roaches certainly living in the microwave had been accidentally nuked recently, but there was a box of donuts sitting on the table. I stared at them. There were four left. Two jelly with powdered sugar, two cream puff. No fucking chocolate ones, of course.

  My mouth watered on sight. I stepped in and started grabbing them, stuffing them into my pockets. The smell of the donuts was almost suffocating.

  I turned and stopped. A young uniformed cop, his sharp Latino face folded into a frown that appeared to be alien to his open features, stood in the doorway. He stared right at me.

  You, I thought, are a fucking moron. This with powdered sugar on my fingers, the sure sign of the intelligent criminal.

  Moving slowly, I stepped back from the table and tried to get out of his field of vision. I pressed myself up against the wall. Held my breath. Mainly so I wouldn’t have the maddening smell of donuts in my nostrils. After a few seconds he stepped into the room and leaned over the table to inspect the now-empty donut box. Snorted. Turned and left. I counted to five and spun out after him.

  Threading my way through the
lobby, I had to wait for a stream of uniformed officers to walk through the door behind the front desk. I swayed on my feet as each one stepped through, looked right at me, and with a slight wincing expression looked away. I tried to time it so that the final one had passed me by and the door was still hanging open, then followed at the last second.

  A fat, sweating officer was trailing the others, talking cheerfully over his shoulder in a booming voice you could hear in the next fucking state, and I rammed into him, hard. He stumbled back and I stumbled with him like I was caught in his fat-man gravity. We danced, me forward, him backward, and he spun around to see what the hell had just rocketed into him. His eyes skittered off me like everyone else’s for a second, and then he did a double take, and saw me.

  And didn’t like what he saw.

  I pushed back from him and we both found our feet again. I felt hot and stood in the middle of the crowded lobby sweating and breathing hard, my heart still a dried-up marbled rattling around in my chest. Sticky donut jelly bleeding through the fabric of my pockets. The fat cop stared at me, his face twisting into a mask of hatred as the spell worked on him, and around us the room went quiet as everyone else saw me. And everyone else didn’t like what they saw, either.

  Only problem with an anti-Charm spell: If you fucked up and got noticed, you got noticed in a bad way.

  The fat cop’s pudgy hands curled into fists.

  I willed myself to move, but nothing happened. I stood there vibrating, watching him bring his hands up, and behind him, behind me—all around us—I had a sense of movement. I ordered my limbs to move and my limbs just hung at my sides. I had exactly one trick left, and when he swung at me I used it: I gave in to gravity and dropped. His fist sailed through the air and he stumbled forward, tripping over me and crashing to the floor.