A Devil's Bargain Read online

  “What’s the plan?” Dick said.

  “Both of you please leave.”

  “Uh, what? I thought you wanted—”

  “Leave me alone and close the cockpit door behind you. I’ll brief you when we’re on the ground again. That’s all.”

  The dismissive note in his voice was practiced to the point of effortlessness. Once they were gone and the cabin door shut, Luther dialed Farah’s desk and put the phone to his ear.

  Farah answered on the second ring.

  “How is your flight, sir?”

  “What did he want, Farah?”

  “What did who want?”

  Luther scowled. She knew damned well who. Of course she knew. Farah knew everything that went on, not just with the Fletcher Group’s affairs, but with Luther’s own. If he was the brain of the organization, she was its central nervous system. Everything that traveled to and from him also passed through her. So why was she feigning ignorance now?

  “Why did my brother call me, Farah?”

  “He needed funds from the family trust.”

  “That was all?”

  “I approved it in your absence and that was the end of it.”

  Luther tried to imagine how this new development might be a hidden stab at him or his interests. Darren drawing funds from the trust was nothing out of the ordinary. He lived primarily off of that inheritance. Whatever laughable pittance he made off his idealistic little legal defense racket was reserved for his bar tab.

  “How much did he need?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  The sum raised no alarms. The Fletcher family trust had been growing steadily since before the American Civil War. It had long since ceased to be a thing that could be considered exhaustible.

  “And that was all? He didn’t try to work in questions about anything else?”

  “He wanted to know why he was dealing with a proxy approval instead of you. I told him you were indisposed. It was a very brief dialogue.”

  He hesitated a moment longer, still unconvinced that the money was all Darren had wanted.

  “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “What was it for? What was the money for?”

  “Was I supposed to ask?”

  Farah’s voice was full of that feigned innocence she’d used on him earlier when asking if it was rude to quote someone back to themselves. It was sarcastic, that specific inflection a woman used when what she really meant to say was, Oh, so now you expect something from me. And here I thought I was just some dumb girl who should stop butting in.

  Luther understood.

  The wastebaskets. He’d told her to empty the wastebaskets in his office. He’d done it as a way to wipe the smug satisfaction off her face. She’d predicted he would want to go to Detroit personally to deal with the issues out there. She’d known he would need actual field operatives to accompany him. She’d selected Carmen Ras and had her prepped to leave before Luther had even known he was going on a trip.

  She’d deserved a moment to enjoy her own superb competence but it had rankled him. Spoiling it for her had been childish. It had been impulsive and, worse, it had been petty.

  “Farah, you know how valuable you are to me,” he said.

  Silence.

  “I depend on you more than anyone else,” he ventured.

  Silence.

  He knew the magic incantation that could resolve the issue. But it was a spell that stood in such direct opposition to his nature and his disposition that he prided himself on only uttering it when there was no other recourse. Farah’s refusal to speak to him any further told him this was such a case.

  Luther squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth and managed to croak the hated sentiment out.

  “Farah, I apologize. I was wrong.”

  She came back to him as soon as the words were spoken, with warmth in her voice and no sign that there had ever in any way been an issue between them.

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to. Your brother sounded extremely stressed. After I approved the withdrawal of funds, he volunteered that a close friend was in custody and that he needed the funds to post her bond. When he offered that much, I asked him what she had been charged with. I made sure to sound concerned, just an easily worried woman instinctively prodding for information.”

  Luther beamed in his cockpit and said, “Of course you did, Farah.”

  “Am I bad? I don’t mean to be bad.”

  Luther felt that familiar rush of blood he always felt when Farah turned teasing. He was seven and a half miles above the earth, piloting a sleek silver ship like some modern day Apollo riding the sun across the heavens. And yet a shift in her disposition, a hint of suggestive intimacy, and he was drawn back to earth.

  He thrilled at her effortless effect on him and despised its grip in equal measure.

  “What did he say?”

  “Murder, Luther. Your brother’s friend is charged with murder.”

  “I don’t...are you sure...?”

  “So I did some hunting after we hung up,” she said, rolling right over his sudden inability to process. “There were two homicides reported in Detroit last night. One was gang-related. The other is an unidentified man who was killed behind a bar called Winkle’s Tavern. I forwarded the link to the news article to your phone.”

  It was as if he were suddenly more acutely attuned to the hermetically sealed environment around him. The cloudless expanse of blue betrayed no signs of passage and the masterful engineering of the plane allowed no vibrations or ambient sound to intrude. He might have been a fixed point, a capsule frozen in an instant and suspended in nothingness.

  In that timeless space, Luther was free to not think or draw the obvious conclusions. He was just a man in a metal bubble, and there was no catastrophe waiting for him out there, anywhere or anywhen.

  It did not last. Farah’s voice shattered the illusion and the obvious, horrible conclusions swept into him as she spoke.

  “Luther?”

  He knew. With certainty, he knew what it meant.

  “Yes, Farah?” His voice sounded mechanical in his own ears, devoid of human emotion.

  “Gil still hasn’t called in. His phone if off.”

  “Gil’s dead, Farah. I think you just told me that, didn’t you?”

  “We don’t know until we know,” she said, quoting one of his axioms back to him for the second time that day. “But I did go ahead and have one of the boys in IT bring up his GPS logs. The last tower ping was this morning, just after midnight.”

  “You did well, Farah. Thank you.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means someone pulled the battery from Gil’s phone, Farah. That’s what it means.”

  Someone.

  Luther thanked her again and ended the call. He reached out to the GUI panel again and disengaged the autopilot. He needed to have the yoke in his hands. It meant he was in control of the Cessna. He had that much.

  If he was soaring straight into a maelstrom of hazards, which he certainly was, Luther could take some meager comfort in knowing that he would meet it with his eyes wide open and with his own two hands at the wheel.

  * * *

  The teenager behind the Plexiglas barrier looked up from his phone when Issabella appeared. She set a pair of sunglasses down on the counter.

  “That’s fifteen dollars,” he said.

  “I might not be buying them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Still...fifteen? Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pointed out at the road. The convenience store was seven blocks north of Winkle’s Tavern, the nearest business as far as she knew.

  “Is there anywhere around here that sells safety goggles?”
/>   “Like for riding bikes?”

  “What? No. People don’t wear safety goggles for riding bikes.”

  The teenager shrugged and scratched his shaved scalp.

  “Maybe motorcycles they do,” he said. “Keep the bugs out of your eyes.”

  “That’s a fair point.”

  “But I don’t know. I don’t ride motorcycles. You need a helmet, though. I know that.”

  “I don’t care what they’re for, actually. I just need safety goggles.”

  “I’ve never heard of any motorcycle stores anywhere near here.”

  Issabella nodded and pushed the sunglasses forward.

  “Fifteen bucks,” he said.

  She rummaged in her purse for her wallet.

  “Fifteen even? No sales tax?”

  “You want there to be sales tax?”

  She brought out her debit card but he shook his head.

  “Naw. Cash only. There’s a sign in the window.”

  She looked through her wallet again. She pulled out the folded bank note she kept wedged down behind her license for emergencies. She set it on the counter but he shook his head a second time.

  “Can’t break a fifty,” he said.

  “Can’t or won’t? It’s legal tender.”

  “I don’t know about all that, but the owner says nothing bigger than a twenty. Ain’t my rule.”

  She kept her face blank and turned away from him.

  When she returned to the counter, she set down two more pairs of sunglasses and three chocolate bars.

  “See, the candy is two bucks each,” he said. “You’re short a dollar.”

  She felt her face scrunching up. He saw it, too. Slowly, he reached out and took the fifty-dollar bill.

  “You go on and take that. Nobody’s going to miss a candy bar, lady.”

  Issabella forced herself to smile.

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

  “No worries.”

  “Can I have a bag for all this?”

  The teenager winced and said, “Bags are a dollar. Ain’t my rule.”

  “This is a terrible business. You know that, right?”

  “Hey, you won’t see me shopping here. I need something, I walk the extra mile up to that Fuller’s SuperStore they put up last year.”

  “You have a Fuller’s SuperStore a mile from here?”

  “Yeah. Brand new.”

  “I asked you if there was somewhere I could buy goggles.”

  “And I told you. There ain’t a motorcycle store anywhere around here.”

  “Give me back my fifty dollars.”

  He passed the money back to her with an impatient sigh. She pointed at the pile of sunglasses and chocolate.

  “I’m not putting any of this back.”

  “Seriously? Lady, I ain’t allowed to come out there. They put this bulletproof glass in when the last guy who worked here got shot.”

  Issabella groaned.

  And put it all back.

  * * *

  John Krane held the trivia card in his hand, read the question to himself, and thought, who the fuck bothers to remember this kind of thing? He was out on the deck, with Elite Truths, Reggie’s favorite game, opened on the table in front of him. The logo on the box read Trivia for the Nontrivial Mind.

  As far as Krane was concerned, if the people who had assembled the two thousand different questions stamped upon the deck of cards had been bothered with truth in advertising then Elite would have been replaced with Elitist and Truths replaced with Horseshit.

  After an hour and a half of playing the game with Reggie, Krane now knew that some people were convinced Shakespeare’s plays had actually been written by the Earl of Oxford, John Wilkes Booth’s brother had saved Lincoln’s son from getting hit by a train, Roman Gladiators were celebrities with advertising sponsors, the moon might have been created after an asteroid hit the earth and threw a shit ton of iron into space, and there was a big hoopla raging among people with pointy heads about whether or not the Oxford Comma should be thrown out.

  Reggie was a pig in slop the whole while. He didn’t just know all the answers, he had commentary to go along with each one of them. People thought it was the Earl of Oxford because whoever wrote the plays knew far too much about the peculiarities of life as a nobleman to have been written by a commoner like Shakespeare. Booth’s brother had been a superstar Broadway actor and, by the way, Reggie thought Robert DeNiro had missed a great opportunity by not playing him in a movie when he was still young, because there was a resemblance. Not all gladiators were slaves. That was a modern misconception. The moon thing made sense since the moon had more iron in its core than it should and the earth had less than it should. He wanted to keep the Oxford Comma.

  “For clarity,” he’d explained before disappearing inside to get himself a third helping of pot roast. “I used to lecture that. Err on the side of clarity. Nobody cared.”

  “Lectured? Who the hell did you lecture? Ranted, more like.”

  Reggie only smiled slyly before going for his pot roast.

  Krane stared at the question printed on the card he held.

  Charles Dodgson’s relationship with the young Ms. Liddell was the inspiration for the work for which he is best known today. What is this work and under what name did he issue it?

  I don’t care, Krane thought. I don’t care and he’ll know the answer before I’ve read the entire question out loud.

  Reggie’s unsettling monotone rang out through the open slider door.

  “I’ve got to poop. Don’t put the game away, okay?”

  Krane set the card face down on the table and got up.

  There was a copper pipe rising out of the grass several feet away from the one-room cottage where he was keeping his man. The pipe was capped with a gate-valve and threaded to allow the connection of a garden hose.

  Krane walked over to it and opened the gate valve. He picked up the running hose and walked over to the cottage. He used the key to get in.

  The big lump of fat-covered muscle was still bound in the corner.

  Krane pointed the hose at the man and held his thumb over the opening so the water jetted out in a wide spray. Like that, he showered his hostage. The man didn’t stir. His eyes were closed and remained closed. He did not flinch under the sudden jet of cold water, though Krane could see the man was breathing. His big hairy chest rose and fell, but the breathing was shallow and silent. Either he was truly hurt and his breathing was shallow because of some unseen injury, or he was wide awake and trying his best to appear unconscious.

  Krane didn’t care. Very soon, the man would no longer be his problem.

  He kept the hose aimed on the man until that corner of the floor was flooded with standing water. The interior of the cottage was filled with the humid stink of his prisoner, and Krane thought it was very much akin to the stench of a wet dog. He cinched the hose and cut off the stream.

  “Well, drink up,” he said. “You’re taking a trip today, friend. You and me are done fucking around.”

  One eye opened and stared at Krane. At first he thought he was seeing things, but then a mocking grin slowly spread the man’s lips apart. He was awake. Had been awake, Krane knew. Not for the first time, he felt an awful admiration for his captive’s grit. He knew he had been right: this was one of those singular souls who would break before he ever bent.

  “And here I thought we were an item,” the man croaked. “You sure we don’t have time for a little quickie? I won’t tell nobody if you don’t, hot stuff.”

  Krane sneered. He put his thumb back over the end of the hose and fired the jetting water straight into the man’s face. As he held it like that, Krane slowly walked forward, until he was directly over his captive.

 
“Like I said, drink up. Have all you want.”

  The man twisted his big bulk around and managed to turn his head away. Krane heard him choking and sputtering.

  “Anything else to say?”

  The man hacked like a cat clearing a hairball. When the choking noises subsided, he turned his head around again and stared defiantly up at Krane. His eyes were bloodshot and quivering with hatred. But he didn’t speak, and that was enough of a victory for Krane.

  He pinched the hose off, walked out, and locked the door behind him.

  A quick glance in the distance told him Reggie wasn’t back yet. He was turning the gate valve back off when his phone rang in his pocket. The screen said BLOCKED.

  “Hello,” he said.

  A man’s voice answered him.

  “There will be three of us. Two men and a woman. We will arrive a little more than two hours from now. We expect both items to be ready for travel when we arrive. Is this understood?”

  Krane looked at the little cottage and said, “Explain what ready to travel means.”

  “Dressed and conscious for the one. For the other, unplug everything from the drive, turn it off, and have it ready to be handed over. How large is it? Can one man carry it?”

  “Yes. It’s bulky but I can manage it.”

  “How many people are at the property?”

  “I’m here. The one that’s going with you is here...”

  “I know about the person you’re paid to oversee.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Are there any more than that?”

  “No. But you won’t be meeting him. Just me and the one that goes with you.”

  “That’s fine. Two hours. And Mister Krane?”

  He felt a thrill of apprehension at hearing his name spoken by the stranger. How much did these people know about him and about Reggie? He was in the dark, utterly. After making contact with the Senator’s people and briefing them, he’d only been told that the entire matter was to be handed over to experts.

  “Yes?” he answered.

  “I understand you’re a military man,” the voice said, calm and agreeable. Krane thought that he sounded like a bureaucrat or a low-pressure salesman.