White Hot

Chapter 8

It was morning and my mother made breakfast. Various animals ate from different bowls on the floor, all with the exception of Bunny, who dutifully sat by Matilda’s side and tried his best not to drool at the smell of bacon. As I watched, Matilda quietly dropped a piece on the floor. Bunny wolfed it down and resumed his vigil.

My mother had her patient face on. Catalina cut strawberries on Matilda’s plate. Arabella made odd patterns in her pancake with the tines of her fork. Leon, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enough for me to want to strangle him, shoveled bacon into his mouth. Bern devoured his food in a methodical fashion. One day he would drop all pretense and just divide his plate into a grid. Everyone looked tired. Nobody talked.

Bern had done an audit of our finances. Mad Rogan owned our mortgage. He also owned our car loans and our business line of credit. We’d received paperwork regarding the change in ownership for all those things, but our mortgage had already been sold once, so my mother simply shrugged and filed it. A small college loan Bernard had taken out last year in addition to his scholarship was the only thing Rogan left alone, probably because it came through a federal financial aid program and couldn’t be acquired.

“We can pay off the vehicles,” Grandma Frida said. “I let that girl have the last ATV, so we’ve got two and a burned-out wreck, but the two vehicles are in decent condition with only some damage. They’re state of the art. I have the buyers lined up. We can unload them for about three hundred thousand each.”

“We should keep one,” Mom said. “We may need it the way things are going.”

Grandma Frida made big eyes and tried to inconspicuously point in my direction.

“Keep one,” I said, struggling to swallow my pancake. Overnight the red welts on my neck had matured into a spectacular bruise. My throat hurt. “It doesn’t matter. We still owe a million four hundred thousand on the mortgage.”

I had reached a seething point last night. Eventually my anger boiled over, and now only quiet determination remained. Rogan owned our mortgage. I would just have to work very hard and take it back from him. There was no other way to do it. We were Baylors. We paid our debts, and when life knocked us down, we picked ourselves up and punched it in the teeth. Sometimes that hurt more, but we still did it.

“A million and four hundred thousand? That’s almost the original price of the warehouse,” Arabella said. “We’ve been paying on it for seven years. How is that possible?”

“Interest,” Catalina said with a distant look that manifested when she did complicated math in her head. “With the 4.5 percent interest and finance charges, that’s about right. I can crunch the exact numbers for you.”

“That’s not fair. Buying on credit sucks,” Arabella declared.

“We would have to be attacked about three more times before we can pay the mortgage off,” I said. “We’d need six more ATVs to sell to buy Rogan out.”

Leon speared his strawberry with a fork. “I, for one, welcome our new Mad Rogan Overlord. I’m eager to learn and prove to be a valuable member of his team.”

“Shut up,” Catalina, Bernard, and Arabella said at the same time.

Leon squinted at them. “Maybe he’d let me have a gun, unlike some people.”

“You don’t need a gun,” Mom snapped.

“Do you even know where that overlord line is from?” Bern asked.

“A TV show.”

“No, you idiot, it’s from a movie called the Empire of the Ants. Look it up.” Bern’s phone chirped. He looked at it. “It’s Bug. Okay, so, two things. One, I have the video of the mercenary dude being loaded on the plane to Johannesburg, alive, like Rogan promised. Do you want to see it?”

“No.” Rogan was a controlling overbearing asshole, but when he gave his word, he kept it.

“Two, this morning I made a door in Scorpion’s server and Bug spent the last hour waltzing around in their confidential files. Scorpion was hired through an intermediary and paid by electronic transfer. Rogan’s people found the intermediary. He was paid in cash by an unidentified man.”

“How much?”

“Half a million.”

“We’re expensive, yus!” Arabella said.

“I left Scorpion a little present,” Bern said. “Bug activated it a couple of minutes ago, before hightailing it out of their servers.”

“What’s the present?” I asked.

“When they try to access their confidential files, they will find a marathon of Hello Kitty’s Paradise. All twelve years of it in the original Japanese.”

“I like Hello Kitty,” Matilda said.

Cornelius cleared his throat. “I feel partially responsible for this situation.”

Matilda reached over and petted his arm. “It’s okay, Daddy.”

Everything stopped as all of us collectively struggled with an overload of cute.

“Thank you,” Cornelius told her. “But I’m responsible. I knew what was to come, or at least I suspected, yet I minimized that risk in our initial conversation.”

I sighed. “You didn’t minimize anything. I was aware of the risk when I took the job. The responsibility for everything that happened is on me.”

“Your outrage over Rogan’s actions is well warranted,” Cornelius said, obviously choosing his words carefully. “But the danger of your family being harmed or put under pressure is very real. He isn’t wrong.”

I dropped my napkin on the table. “I know he isn’t wrong in his assessment, Cornelius. I’m upset because he refuses to acknowledge that I’m also right.”

“If he’d come to you with all of it, you would never have agreed to the purchase,” Bernard said.

“Probably not, but at least I would’ve had a choice.”

“What choice?” he said.

“I don’t know.” I got up and went to rinse my plate.

“Are we going to school today?” Leon asked.

“No,” my mother said.

“Great.” Leon smiled. “Then I’m going to go outside and see if I can get a gun. Since my own family won’t let me have one, I’ll have to beg strangers.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Catalina asked.

“Do you think guns are just lying around outside?” Arabella asked. “Or did someone plant a gun tree in our parking lot?”

“Have any of you looked outside?” Leon asked. “Since the sunrise, I mean.”

Bern poked his phone. “He’s right. I think we should look outside.”

I got up and marched down the hallway, through the office, and to the front door, my entire family behind me. I pushed the door open.

An armored transport rolled past us, carefully staying on the other side of a white line someone had painted on the pavement around our property. Across the street, a team of military-looking people installed an M198 Howitzer. A mobile howitzer that resembled a tank roared down the street in the opposite direction. To the right, an observation tower was going up, put together by another military-looking crew. Two severely groomed people in tactical gear double-timed it past us. The one on the left was leading what looked like an abnormally large grizzly on a ridiculously thin leather leash. The grizzly wore a leather harness marked “Sergeant Teddy.”

My mother’s mouth hung open.

Grandma Frida elbowed my mom in the ribs. “Pinch me, Penelope. It’s Fort Sill.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

A trim woman about my age approached the white line and stopped. Her straight dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin was a rich medium brown with an olive tint, her eyes were dark, and her features pointed at both African and possibly Latino heritage. She wore a beige pantsuit.

“Melosa Cordero with a message from Mad Rogan,” she said. “Permission to enter?”

This was ridiculous. “Sure.”

She stepped over the white line.

“The major regrets that his presence makes you uncomfortable; however, he wants me to inform you that Baranovsky’s shindig is tomorrow, so he respectfully suggests that you go shopping. I’m to accompany you. I’m authorized to make purchases on his behalf.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Rogan wouldn’t be paying for anything else of mine if I could help it. “You’re free to go. I’ll buy my own dress, Ms. Cordero.”

“Please call me Mel. He said you would say that. I’m to tell you that—” She cleared her throat and said in a deeper voice, obviously quoting, “This is strictly business. Don’t throw a tantrum, Nevada. It’s not like you.”

A tantrum, huh? I made a heroic effort to keep my mouth shut. I was reasonably sure that if I opened it, I’d breathe fire and melt her face off.

“He said that if you got this look on your face, I’m to tell you that I’m an aegis,” Melosa said. “I’m ranked as Significant and I’m a trained bodyguard. My mission is to shield you and Cornelius. I’m also to remind you that the safety of your client is your first priority.”

I pulled out my phone and texted Rogan.

Thank you so much for providing us with an aegis. So kind of you.

My pleasure. Is there anything else I can do for you?

As a matter of fact there is. Make a fist and hit yourself with it.

Is this the part where I tell you some ridiculously condescending line about how attractive you are when you’re angry?

Do you actually have a death wish?

Are you going to do something about it?

Argh.

“Cornelius?” I asked. “Your agreement with Rogan is terminated once we discover the identity of your wife’s killer?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good.” Because once that contract was over, I would make Rogan eat every single word of this message. I had no idea how I would do it, but it would happen.

“If I may,” Melosa said. “We have a saying in this business. Don’t look a gifted aegis in the mouth.”

“What was your last assignment?” my mother asked.

“I was guarding the Argentinian finance minister,” Melosa said. “I was pulled from that detail last night, but I’m in operative condition. Equzol is a hell of a drug.”

“I feel like I missed something. We’re going to Baranovsky’s art gala?” Cornelius asked, his face puzzled.

That’s right. He’d slept through it. I told him that my personal “relationship” with Rogan wouldn’t interfere with this investigation. I would keep my word, no matter what it cost me.

“Come inside,” I told Melosa. “There are pancakes and sausage. Feel free to have some while I bring Cornelius up to speed.”

Briefing Cornelius took a lot longer than I’d anticipated and by the time I was done, my throat was in serious pain. He took it well. He and Melosa watched the video of the overpass incident, and then Cornelius declared he would be coming with us from now on.

Which was how all three of us ended up going to see Ferika Luga together. Cornelius said that his sister frequently shopped there for formal attire, and since I had no idea where to buy a suitable dress, I decided to trust his judgment. I also dipped into my emergency budget. I wouldn’t be wearing a dress Rogan bought me.

Since my Mazda was gone I abandoned all pretense of blending into the traffic and took one of the captured ATVs instead. ATVs weren’t made for comfort or for city traffic. We stood out like a sore thumb, and by the end of the trip, I’d need a butt replacement. The day had started on a high note so far. I couldn’t wait to see how wonderful things would get from now on.

As we drove out of the neighborhood, we passed a crew installing an electric fence along Clay Road.

“Did Rogan move his headquarters somewhere around here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Melosa answered. “It’s not cost effective to protect two different headquarters.”

“Where is it located?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

I finally understood why he was called Mad Rogan. It wasn’t because he was insane. It was because he drove you nuts with sheer frustration.

We had to make a detour into an older neighborhood, where Cornelius disappeared down a narrow street with another mysterious sack.

“What’s in the bag?” Melosa asked.

“He won’t tell me. For some reason I thought it might be body parts, and now I can’t get rid of that thought.”

“It’s not body parts. The bag would be lumpy.”

“That occurred to me as well.”

While we waited for Cornelius, Bug emailed me Forsberg’s autopsy report. No traces of foreign particles had been discovered; however the wounds contained traces of frozen tissue. Someone had frozen Forsberg’s eyes and the brain behind them, turning it into mush. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Sadly there was no way to narrow it down. The Assembly’s visitor logs were handwritten and kept confidential. Even Rogan couldn’t gain access to them.

This mysterious ice mage was really getting on my nerves.

Ferika Luga was a short, plump woman of Native American heritage. Her shop occupied one of the business suites in a high-rise, sandwiched between an accounting firm on the floor below and an Internet start-up on the floor above. Cornelius mentioned that she saw clients by appointment only, so he had called ahead. I don’t know why I had expected a retail space, but there was none. The front of her workspace was a simple open room with a row of chairs at one end, floor-to-ceiling window on the right, and a wall of mirrors on the left.

Ferika looked Melosa and Cornelius up and down and pointed to the chairs. “Wait here. You—come with me.”

I followed her to the back, through a door, into a dressing room with a round platform in the middle. A large mirror occupied one wall. Through the open door on my left, I could see a sewing workshop and rows and rows of dresses in plastic, hanging on a metal rods suspended from the ceiling.

“You’re going to the Baranovsky’s dinner.” Ferika faced me. “What do you want people to see? Don’t think, say the first thing that pops into your head.”

“Professional.”

“Think about it. Picture yourself there.”

I pictured myself on a shiny floor. Rogan would be there in all of his dragon glory. I’d need a spear and a helmet.

“What is it you do?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

“Are you going to hide that thing on your neck?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

The older woman crossed her arms, thinking. “How did you get it?”

“A man tried to kill me.”

“Since you’re standing here, he didn’t succeed.”

“No.”

“Wait here.”

She disappeared between the racks of clothes. I looked around. Nothing caught my eye. The floor was plain chestnut-colored wood. The ceiling had lots of white panels. The mirror offered my reflection—the bruise really was a wonder.

“How long have you worked for Rogan?” Cornelius asked.

The wall, apparently, was paper thin, because he hadn’t raised his voice, but I heard him clearly.

“A long time,” Melosa said. “You might say I’m one of the original employees he hired after separating from the military.”

“In your experience, does he often become infatuated?”

Where was he going with that?

Melosa cleared her throat. “I’m not at liberty to discuss my employer’s personal life. And even if I was, I wouldn’t. The major has earned my loyalty. I would take a bullet with his name on it. He is entitled to his privacy and I’ll safeguard it, so I suggest you choose a different line of questioning.”

Well, she’d shut him down fast.

Ferika returned, accompanied by a younger woman carrying a black dress. “Put this on.”

I stripped and slid into it as she watched. It was surprisingly heavy. Ferika’s helper zipped the back, held out her hand, and helped me step back onto the platform. I looked into the mirror and held still.

The silhouette was timeless: two thin straps supporting a sweetheart cleavage that left my neck and most of my chest bare, close fitted waist, and a skirt gracefully falling into a train, not long enough to become cumbersome and allowing me to move fast if I had to. The fabric of the dress, black silk tulle, would’ve been completely sheer if it wasn’t for the thousands of black sequins embroidered into it. The complicated pattern curved around and over my breasts, lined my ribs and hugged my hips, finally fracturing into individual whorls just below mid-thigh. They slid down the sheer tulle skirt like tongues of black flame, melting into nothing near the hem. The dress didn’t look embroidered; it looked chiseled out of obsidian, like some fantasy bodice of a Valkyrie. It looked like armor.

“How much is it?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“I know,” Ferika said. “You can rent it for one night for ten percent of the cost. The shoes and clutch will be complimentary.”

Fifteen hundred dollars for one night and I wouldn’t even own it. Technically this was a necessary expense and I would bill Cornelius for it, but just because I had the ability to bill things didn’t give me the license to be careless with my client’s money.

The look on Rogan’s face when he saw it would be worth it.

“Shoes,” Ferika said.

The assistant placed a pair of black pumps in front of me. I stepped into them. They fit perfectly.

“Hair.”

The assistant moved behind me, released my hair from the ponytail, rolled it into a crown around my head, and expertly pinned it in place.

Ferika held out her hand. I took it and stepped off the raised platform, and she led me out into the open space.

Cornelius blinked. Melosa’s eyebrows crept up.

“It’s fifteen hundred for a night,” I said. “Yes, no?”

“Yes,” Cornelius and Melosa said in one voice.

It was Friday evening. I sat in my office, trying to get some peace and quiet while staring at the pictures of magical heavyweights likely to be at Baranovsky’s party. Augustine had emailed them to me segregated into two helpful categories: will kill you and can kill you. This was going to be one hell of a soiree.

The doorbell chimed. I tapped my laptop to bring the view of the front camera. Bug’s face greeted me. He stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, and waved his laptop at me.

I got up and opened the door. “What, you’re not going to ask me if you can enter my territory?”

“Pardon me, Your Divine Princess Majesty.” Bug executed a surprisingly elegant bow with a hand flourish and began backing away, bowing. “Pardon this lowly wretch, pardon . . .”

“Get into my office,” I growled.

“What the hell, Nevada? No, I’m not going to ask permission.” Bug came in and landed in my client chair. “Nice digs.”

“Thanks,” I sat in my chair. “What’s up?”

He opened his laptop, tapped a key, and pushed it toward me across the table. “Any of these assholes look familiar?”

I stared at the row of faces, all men ranging from about fifteen to sixty. “Ice mages?”

“Mhm.”

I scrutinized them one by one. “No.”

Bug sighed and took his laptop back. “Are you sure of what you saw?”

“Yes. I’d recognize the smile for sure. He showed me his teeth before icing the road.” I showed him Augustine’s list. “He isn’t on there either.”

“Shit,” Bug said, his face sour. “It’s that thing again. We’ve been dealing with it since Pierce. You think you have a lead and then poof”—he made a puffing motion with his fingers—“it melts into nothing and all you have is frustration and the fart noise your face makes when you hit your desk with it.”

Fart . . . what? “We’ll find him. As long as we keep investigating, he’ll show himself sooner or later.”

Bug looked behind him, leaning to get the better view of the hallway. “Got something else to show you.”

He came around the desk, leaned on it next to me, and tapped his laptop. The security video from last night’s shooting came on, complete with Leon’s awesome voice-over.

I grimaced. “Yeah, I know. My cousin got excited. Look, he is fifteen. He thinks he’s immortal.”

“No.” Bug’s face was completely serious for once. “Watch.”

The recording zoomed in on an older mercenary. “I’m a veteran badass,” Leon’s voice said. “I’ve seen bad shit. I’ve done bad shit. I’ve survived five months in a jungle eating pinecones and killing terrorists with a pair of old chopsticks . . .”

“Where was he while this was happening?” Bug asked.

“In the Hut of Evil. I mean, in the computer room.”

“. . . Oh shit, my head just exploded.”

The camera panned to the right to a woman crouching by the oak.

“I’m death. I’m a ghost. I’ll find you. You can run, you can hide, you can beg, but none of it will help you. I’ll come for you in the darkness like a lithe panther with velvet paws and steel claws and . . . wait, brains, wait, where are you going?”

I sighed.

“Oh no, look—my feet are twitching. That’s so undignified.”

Maybe there was something wrong with Leon. I should give him more work to do. That would keep him from being bored and trying to get guns. “Whatever it is you want me to notice, I don’t see it,” I told Bug.

“How does he know who will die next?” Bug asked. “He pans the camera to them in the exact sequence they are killed.”

That couldn’t be right. I rewound the recording. Older male mercenary, an athletic female mercenary, bodybuilder mercenary, thin mercenary, a large female mercenary . . . Five targets in the precise order they were killed. In each case the camera panned to the victim and Leon started his narration before the shot ever rang out.

Oh crap. I put my hand over my mouth.

“If your mother called out the shots, it would make sense,” Bug said. “But two of these were popped by our guys. At first I thought he was a precog.” He rewound the video to just after the first female mercenary died. “Look, you see here he swings the shot to the left first?”

I followed the camera as it tilted to the left, focusing for a second on the lamppost as if Leon was waiting for something. The camera tilted up, catching a glimpse of the window in the building across the street and moved to the bodybuilder mercenary.

“He didn’t do it in any of the other cases, so I went to talk to our guys.” Bug typed on the laptop. The image of the street filled the screen.

“We had a guy here.” He tapped the window with his finger.

“Is that the window in the video?”

He nodded. “The skinny guy that got killed after the bigger dude is here.” Bug pointed at the spot by a warehouse, shielded from the view by the low stone wall. “The guy in that window didn’t have a direct shot at the thin guy. So for shits and giggles, we put a dummy in the spot where the skinny guy was.” He clicked a key and the screen showed the street from a different angle with a mannequin crouching by the wall, a canvas bag on his head.

“Why did you put the bag on his head?”

“You’ll see in a minute. This is the view from the sniper’s window.” The screen split in a half. “No shot.”

“Yep.”

The sniper sighted the spot on the lamppost, where Leon had zoomed in before, and fired. The bag on the mannequin’s head tore and a thin trickle of sand spilled out.

“Ricochet,” I whispered. Leon wasn’t a precog. He’d evaluated the potential targets and positions of the shooters, calculated the trajectory of the bullet, and waited for it to happen. When it didn’t, he moved on to the next most likely target. And he did all this in a split second.

“I don’t know what this is,” Bug said. “It’s some sort of wonderful whatthefuckery I’ve never seen before. But I thought I should tell you.”

Leon would never have a normal life. There was only one path open to his kind of magic.

I looked at him. “Please, don’t tell Rogan.”

“I’ll have to tell him if he asks me about it,” Bug said. “But I won’t volunteer. Does Leon know?”

I shook my head.

“It’s your call,” Bug said, picking up his laptop. “But a word of advice. From personal experience. When you keep people from doing things they are destined to do, they go crazy. Don’t let him go crazy, Nevada.”