“What the hell are they doing?” I said.
Jennifer shrugged. “Near as I can tell, troopers spotted their getaway cars actin’ fishy, tried to pull ’em over, and the bad guys went all Rambo on ’em.”
“This is…no. Running from the cops, crashing the getaway ride? This is sloppy and loud. The Network doesn’t do sloppy and loud. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Are you sure?” asked our new arrival.
He strode through the doorway like he lived here. We’d met once before; he had a bland face and a bland gray suit, his alligator-skin attaché case the only notable thing about his ensemble, but I wasn’t about to forget him.
“It makes sense if they did it on purpose,” I said. “Cait, Jen, this is Mr. Smith. He’s with the Network.”
Smith inclined his head. Jennifer eased back her utility jacket and flashed her holster. Caitlin took one step to the left, keeping a hand light on my shoulder.
“How the hell did you get in here?” Jennifer said.
“Oh, doors and guards don’t inconvenience me much when I’m on the company clock.” He cupped his hand to one side of his mouth, a bit of conspiratorial folksiness. “And I’m always on the company clock.”
Jennifer didn’t pull her piece, not yet. I was itching to draw mine, but I needed answers more than I wanted Smith dead, and he knew it.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” he told me. “We have someone important to you, and we’d like to discuss a trade.”
“Mayor Seabrook. She’s safe?”
“She is, but that’s not the person in question. We have one Theodore…Faust.” Smith flashed a bloodless smile. “It’s funny, we’d barely checked into your family tree. But then you went and told one of our contractors about him. Your brother is safe, for now. Sound, for now.”
Grimes. Damn it. I’d brought up Teddy when we met at the Monaco, while I was trying to flip him over to our side, and even told him how my brother worked in security. He must have passed on the info to his bosses before I killed him.
The biggest threat to my brother’s safety wasn’t the Network or Elmer Donaghy. It was me.
No sense wasting time. “What do you want?”
“A trade. Your brother, in exchange for you, Howard Canton’s wand, and his top hat.”
I’d already returned the hat to its more-or-less rightful owner, but I didn’t say a word. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t getting a damn thing.
“You’ve got the commissioner and the mayor in there, too,” I said, feeling him out. “You want three things, I want three things.”
He shook his head. “Mayor Seabrook dies tonight, that’s nonnegotiable, but you can save your brother’s life. Surrender yourself at the museum with the relics we want, and he’ll be free to go. Frankly, he’s useless to us except as leverage over you. We have no reason to harm him once you’ve been taken off the grid.”
“Is that it?” I asked.
“That’s all, but you’d better decide quickly. Right now, our operatives are holding the police at bay. Eventually Metro will decide to engage a tactical solution, and at that point, well…it’s all over but the shooting. It’s been a pleasure, sir, ladies—good day.”
He turned and headed for the door.
“Hey,” I said, “just one more thing.”
Smith looked back. I drew my pistol and fired. The slug punched through his forehead, blew out the back of his skull, and spattered gray jelly across the eggshell paint. He hit the wall and slumped, slow, all the way to the floor with his eyes wide open and a look of surprise frozen on his face.
“You don’t fuck with my family,” I told him.
The gunshot settled into distant echoes. I nudged Mr. Smith’s corpse with the toe of my shoe.
“Huh,” I said.
“You were expecting something different?” Caitlin asked.
“Actually, yeah. From what we’ve seen of these Network guys so far, I figured he’d explode out of his skin or sprout tentacles or something.” I nudged him again. “Talk about anticlimactic.”
Jennifer stood beside me, frowning down at the body.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why all the hullabaloo? They don’t need to gin up a hostage crisis—if anything, that’s going to make it a lot harder to do a swap.”
I had been thinking about that, and I circled back to one conclusion.
“They’re being efficient. This isn’t about me. You heard the man: Seabrook dies tonight. They want her out of the picture, presumably so they can put their own candidate in office—”
“One with a roach in his gullet,” Jennifer said.
“Exactly. This is Elmer Donaghy’s contingency plan in action. At some point, Metro’s going to roll in hard, and the hostages are going to be ‘accidentally’ shot in the chaos. One public tragedy, made to order. But they’ve got Teddy in there too, which makes this a golden opportunity to put pressure on me.”
Caitlin tapped her chin with a scarlet fingernail, pondering. “One problem. This clearly isn’t a suicide mission, if they’re expecting you to hand over Canton’s wand and hat. How do they plan to leave once they get what they want? The lot is surrounded.”
“That’s not a problem at all if you’ve got an ally who can literally carve holes in the world and walk on through.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Fleiss.”
“She’s got to be there,” I said.
I turned my arm. The crisp linen bulged, just a little, showing the outline of my wand’s spring holster. Fleiss wasn’t the only one who could jump from place to place in a heartbeat. I could work that trick too, when the wand felt like letting me.
“If this doesn’t qualify as saving people from danger, I don’t know what does. If I could get in there, grab a hostage, and teleport out—”
“There’s three hostages,” Jennifer said. “Whose life are you gonna save? You’ll only get one shot.”
“He won’t even get one,” Caitlin replied. “These people aren’t stupid; they won’t let him anywhere near the hostages. And I suspect the first thing Fleiss will do is take his wand away.”
I thought so, too. And that’s when I got an idea.
*
“Don’t make me regret this,” Gary said.
“Look on the bright side,” I murmured as we walked up to the police cordon, “there’s a really good chance I’m going to die tonight. You’d like that, right?”
Squad cars blocked off the street, just behind a line of sawhorses and orange construction cones. Farther back, at the corner, uniformed officers were waving traffic toward a detour. Night had fallen, red and blue strobes flashing in the dark. Off to my left, a ridged wall ringed the open-air lot of the Neon Museum. The police had cut the power; there were no lights beyond the wall, no glimmering signs, just a graveyard maze of cold steel and glass.
“Detective Kemper,” Gary said, flashing his shield at the closest uniform. “Got the hostage negotiator here, straight from the FBI.”
The cop squinted at me. “We didn’t hear anything about a negotiator. Who called the feds in?”
“Were you planning on not negotiating?” Gary shook his head like he’d just heard the dumbest thing in the world. “Look, you can let this guy do his thing, or you can be the one who explains why you, yes, you, personally, kept us waiting while the commish and the mayor were being held at gunpoint. I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, pal, but it’s not a good career move.”
He let us through. In passing, he nodded at my shoulder. “What’s the sack for?”
I patted the canvas mailbag. It trailed behind me, swaying across my back like a beggar’s cloak.
“Pizza,” I said. “Trust me, I’m a negotiator. The bad guys always want pizza.”