M. Hanover - Unclean Spirits

“I’m not taking Coin out because of some kind of sick, desperate love for Aubrey. I’m doing it because I think he’d have done it for me. And because Eric was the only one in my whole life who ever really looked out for me. And I’m doing it for myself. Because I can.”

“Don’t,” Ex said. “Don’t try. Be safe.”

I stepped into his open arms and hugged him. His body went stiff with shock, and then softened. He wrapped his arms around me. I felt him sigh deeply, his ribs expanding and falling back. I rested my head on his broad shoulder. Through the dirty window, I saw a sparrow take wing, a brown-gray blur rising into the sky.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, his cheek against my forehead. I squeezed him tight, then stepped back and let him go.

“You should take me home,” I said.

“You’re dropping this,” he said. “You’re walking away.”

“Nope,” I said. “If I go down, I’m going down with my teeth around that fucker Coin’s throat.”

His eyes widened, his face went a shade paler. He looked past me to the crucifix like an actor who needs someone to feed him his next line.

“I know you’re trying to take care of me,” I said. “In your stupid, patriarchal, Neanderthal way, you think this is how you treat your friends. But I’ve already got a daddy, and I walked away from his bullshit too. Now take me home.”

“You don’t understand,” he said as I stepped past him toward the bike.

“I do,” I said. “I just disagree.”

BACK ATthe house, I stood on the porch, sweat cooling on the back of my neck, and watched Ex drive away. I thought maybe he turned and looked over his shoulder at the last moment, but I might have been making that up. I went inside.

Voices came from the living room, Midian and Kim talking over each other. For a second, it sounded like a fight. Then it only sounded like excitement.

When I stepped in the room, all eyes turned to me. Kim and Chogyi Jake were sitting on the floor off to one side, a notebook open between them with designs and symbols that seemed to shift and move when I wasn’t looking straight at them. Midian was sitting on the coffee table, Candace and Aaron on the couch.

“Hey, kid,” Midian croaked. “We were wondering if you were coming back.”

“I live here,” I said.

“How’s the padre?” Midian asked.

I shook my head.

“Yeah, well,” Midian said. “Probably for the best. He got on my nerves.”

“What have we got?” I asked.

Aaron cleared his throat, leaned forward, and started talking. The initial plan to take Coin out close to the convention center had hit some snags. We’d been working under the assumption that Coin would be heading back to his place, but Midian had pointed out that that wasn’t necessarily true. So they’d been working out other strategies.

All the plans made some assumptions. First, that we could draw off the vast majority of Coin’s minions, both by Midian and Chogyi Jake picking the right moment to break cover and get themselves chased and by feeding a little clever misdirection to the fake Ex. All of that was just to get Coin and his bodyguard out where we could take a crack at them.

The best-looking option thus far involved getting two cars, one with Candace at the wheel and Kim in the back, the other with Aaron and me. We could follow Coin when he left the convention center. Once we were sure where he was going, it wouldn’t be hard to get the two cars close to him. Kim would damp out Coin’s powers, Aaron would run him off the road (he’d been trained in that sort of thing and had no lack of confidence in his ability), and then he and I would finish things off with the bullets I’d recovered from our first attempt. Candace and Kim would pick us up, and we’d vanish into the night.

“It’s cleaner than it looks,” Aaron said. “There were three guys that got killed in the last five or so years with the same MO. They were all traffickers. Coin’s a higher tax bracket than those guys were, but the chances are when the Denver cops see this, they’ll assume he was involved and not look at it too hard.”

“Hey,” Midian said, tapping Aaron on the knee with one skeletal hand. “Tell her what they call that. This is great, kid. You know what the cops call it when some mad fuck who needs to die gets aced by a civilian?”

“What do they call it?” I asked.

“Misdemeanor murder,” Aaron said. “It happens. We get someone who everyone knows has been selling crack in the school yard, but we could never prove it. Someone does the obvious thing. There’s just not much point in spending the resources on the investigation.”

“Don’t you just love that there’s a name for that?” Midian cackled. “Renews my faith in mankind.”

Actually, it creeped me out, but I put my reaction aside.

“Are you sure we can make this look like a drug hit?” I asked.

“I’m sure,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow some things from the evidence store back at home. We can drop it in Coin’s car when we leave. Or in the one we’re driving. If it’s on the scene, the guys down here will put it together. They’re not dumb.”

I nodded. It occurred to me for the first time that I had put all my time and concentration into killing Randolph Coin, and none at all into getting away with it. This was going to look like murder, and I couldn’t really tell the judge about riders from the Pleroma unless I was pushing for an insanity plea. Sobering thought.

“But the car that we use to run him off the road,” I said. “That’s an issue, right?”

“Actually,” Candace said, “we can kind of kill two birds with one stone.”

“There’s a place just north of Boulder,” Aaron said. “There’s no business going on there, but we’re all pretty sure it’s a way station. A safe house the bad guys use to move drugs and girls from the West Coast out east. We’ve never had enough to get a warrant, dig into things.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling the word out to three syllables.

“So the second car,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow it from the guy who owns the house. If it’s involved in a homicide in Denver, I’m pretty sure we can shut down everything else the fuckhead’s up to too.”

I laughed and sat down on the hearth.

“We may be a force for good in the world after all,” I said. “What about the Calling Malkuth thing?”

“I think it will work,” Chogyi Jake said. “It isn’t a configuration I’d seen before, but everything that Kim’s showed me fits together well.”

“There is a problem,” Kim said, her head turned to Chogyi and away from me. “Jayné’s protections. I don’t know what this will do.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“It is a consideration,” Chogyi Jake said.

“It really isn’t,” I said. “Are we thinking we’ll have two rifles?”

“One for each of us,” Aaron said, nodding.

“One per bullet,” Midian said. Then, “You know, kid, you aren’t the world’s best shot. And the last time you were looking down a barrel at Coin…”

“That was last time,” I said. “This is point-blank. I can’t miss.” And this time, I was going to pull the trigger.

“So we’re on?” Midian asked.

I hesitated, wondering what Ex would have thought if he’d come in. If he would have been swayed by it. If he would have thought I stood a chance, or been just as certain that I was fooling myself. I couldn’t answer those questions, and they didn’t matter anymore. Ex’s opinion wasn’t as important as mine.

“We’re on,” I said. And then a moment later, “Hey, can you guys ride motorcycles?”

My covert Monday morning coffee run failed. I went out alone in Chogyi Jake’s van, picked up a few bags of food, and headed toward the nearest Starbucks, my mind on a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake, and I almost didn’t see the trap. Two middle-aged women sitting at the entrance, smiling and talking to each other. When I pulled my will into my eyes, their glamour faded, the tattoos on their faces and hands appeared, and I turned the van back out of the parking lot, shaking almost too hard to drive.