Ghost Money, page 17
“You look like shit,” I tell him when he comes to.
“You look worse,” he says.
“No I don’t.”
“Fuck, man,” he says, voice thick and slow. “You should see your face. That shitty stitch job you got is tearing open and you’re bleeding all down your shirt.”
“Hey,” I say to one of the gunmen. “Yeah, you. Which of us looks more fucked up? Me or Billy?”
“Uh—” He looks nervously back at the plexiglass at the undertaker, who hides a laugh and gives him a nod. “You do,” he says.
“Pfft. You’re just biased.”
“Mister Carter,” the undertaker says, his voice piping in through a loudspeaker on the wall. He has a slight accent, but it’s barely noticeable. “It’s good to see you awake.”
“It’s good to be awake,” I say. “Nanong Fan, right? Nice place you got here. I assume I got in here because your front gate was trapped and it took me down before I could blow up your boy Gordon back there.”
“You assume correctly.”
“Pretty bold having him standing out there like that. A guy could get ideas.”
“I think you’ll be able to keep your ideas to yourself,” Fan says, gesturing to the nasty-looking men with guns. “I’m sure we wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.”
“God forbid we have a misunderstanding,” I say. “Who knows where that might get us. Hell, we could have an event. Or worse, an incident.”
“Just so,” Fan says. “I understand you wanted to see me.”
I know there are at least the two mages on the other side of the glass. There’s no way to tell if the others are mages, short of them pulling power or letting it loose. I could get a shield up before anyone could pull a trigger, but then I’d have to deal with the mages.
Chow’s easy. One thought and his intestines pop like a balloon animal tied by a schizophrenic clown. But Fan is an unknown quantity.
I could pop to the other side, but in theory I won’t be able to leave the room that way. The sigils on the walls are designed to prevent any ghosts from coming into or leaving this room. As far as those spells are concerned, if I’m on the other side I’m a ghost.
Except that they should be on the other side of the veil. They’re designed to be written over there. And they work on ghosts that have broken through. I learned that in Hong Kong. One of the few bits of luck I had there. I have a feeling things aren’t quite so cut and dried as I thought.
“I think you got that backward,” I say. “Seems pretty clear you wanted to see me more than I wanted to see you. I mean, you went to all this trouble to get me here, and stupid me, I went along with it. How long has Billy been with you guys stringing me along? Since he showed up at my motel room? Or did you get to him after I cut him loose?”
“You’re right about some of that,” Fan says. “I did want to see you. But Billy isn’t one of ours. Not anymore. Hasn’t been for years. And I imagine you wanted to see me about the ghosts that have crossed through the barrier.”
“I’d say it’s more like they’d been yanked across the barrier. And I don’t for a minute believe you about Billy.”
“Would this help convince you?” He nods to one of the men, who pistol whips Billy. Billy lets out a cry and blood pours from a gash in his forehead.
“Look at my face,” I say to Fan. “Does this look like the face of a man who’s going to be impressed with a little pistol whipping?”
Everything on and in my head hurts. I’ve got lumps on the back of my skull. The stitches where Peter dragged the dental pick down my face have popped and crusted over. Every time I talk, little dribbles of blood run down my cheek. I’m still having some trouble focusing one of my eyes because it’s so swollen.
“You’d like to see him punished more?”
“More? Nah. Just convincingly. Cut him up a little. Break a finger. If you’re gonna sell it, then sell it.”
Fan looks irritated. “Would it convince you if we shot him in the head?”
“Oddly enough, probably not. But it would cut down on the number of motherfuckers in this room I’m gonna have to kill.”
“I think you’re bluffing, Mister Carter. I think you care more than you let on.”
“Oh, sure I do,” I say. “I care about lots of things. Doughnuts. I care a lot about doughnuts. I’m a cruller man myself. How about you? I’d tag you as a, hmm, maple bar kinda guy?”
“The fuck is your problem, man?” Billy says, a whine creeping into his voice.
“Hush, Billy,” I say. “Mommy and daddy are having a conversation. And don’t ask me which of us is which, I honestly don’t know. So, Fan. I know why I wanted to talk to you. Why did you want to talk to me?”
“The ghosts in the Walled City,” he says.
“That much I figured out. What about them?”
“When you bound the ghosts in the Walled City, how did you ensure they didn’t go feral when you set them loose?”
Of all the questions he could have asked me, that one wasn’t even on my list. “What’s your shoe size?” or “Hey sailor, wanna dance the hornpipe?” were pretty far down that list, but they were on it.
“Come again?”
“The ghosts you bound into the joss paper. When they were released on our side of the veil they were compliant. Took orders. Killed who we wanted.” The ghosts I bound became servants of whoever let them loose? This is an interesting development. I don’t think I like it one bit.
“I could tell you,” I say, though I have no idea how I did it, or even that I had, but they don’t need to know that. “But why would I?”
“Because we’ll kill your friend if you don’t.”
“And who would that— Oh. You mean Billy. Knock yourself out.”
“We could torture you,” he says. “Do you prefer that?”
“Not particularly, but if it’ll make you feel more virile or something you’re welcome to try. How about this—you give me some answers, and I give you some answers.”
“You’re not in a very strong bargaining position, Mister Carter.”
“Oh, I disagree,” I say. “You want what I have more than I want what you have.” I’m starting to think Fan doesn’t have anything I want at all. The sigils on the walls are telling me a lot more than Fan is. The Skid Row ghosts, some shit Billy has said. It’s all pointing me at something, but I’m still missing pieces.
“Is that so? You don’t want to know how to stop the feral ghosts, or what we plan to do with them?”
“Doesn’t really matter,” I say. “Once I kill you it’s kind of a moot point. So, give me answers and I’ll give you answers.”
“All right. Ask your questions.”
“First,” I say, “and most importantly, which one of you fuckers is bathing in Drakkar Noir? Good fucking Christ, can you take it down a notch? Seriously, Fan, how do you let these guys get away with it?”
Fan nods at one of the guards, who slams his pistol into my head. Blood runs down my scalp. “Oh, you really shouldn’t have done that,” I say to the guard. I turn my attention back to Fan. “I’m assuming Billy told you about the trapped ghosts. How’d you get the notes across the barrier?”
Fan looks offended, as though I’ve wounded his professional pride, but whether that’s pride in his abilities at magic or acting, I can’t say. “I’m a necromancer,” he says. “I cross the barrier all the time.”
“No you’re not,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“The sigils you have painted all over the walls,” I say. “They’re not supposed to be here. Sure, they’re supposed to work, and I get the feeling they have so far, but if you were a necromancer, you wouldn’t have painted them here. You’d have crossed over and put them in place there.”
“How do you know I haven’t?” Fan says. He’s trying to sound convincing, but I can see I’ve got him rattled.
“Because a real necromancer wouldn’t put them in both places. They’d cancel each other out. Only an amateur who didn’t know what the hell he was doing would try something like that. You’re not a necromancer.”
“You don’t know anything,” Fan says. “I should just have you killed.”
“Oh, I know a lot,” I say, pieces falling into place. “You tried to reverse engineer the ghost money from the Walled City, figure out how I did it. I know you went to talk to the ghosts on Skid Row to make them cross over to our side, but you couldn’t do it well enough to snag more than a few. But then you got better at it. Figured out how to pull them over and trap them, but you couldn’t get them to do what you wanted.
“But then you figured out a way to train them to feed or not feed. I’ll admit, as a professional, that’s a neat trick. Bravo. Hadn’t seen that one before. Is this the room you did it in? How many bait dogs you go through before you figured out how to do it? Or have you figured it out? I think you still might have some bugs to work through.”
The same guard pistol whips me again, the sharp crack of metal on bone ringing through my ears. For a second I see double. Takes me a moment to find my voice again. It’s thick with blood and ragged breath. I’m getting real tired of being hit in the head.
“Just so you know,” I say to the guard, “you’re not walking out of this room.” He laughs.
Fan’s good at hiding his tells, but Chow’s standing behind him sweating like he’s in a sauna, so even though I know I have gaps and probably have some of the details wrong, I’m not far off.
“Since you’re not actually a necromancer,” I say, “how did you get the joss paper out of the Walled City?” And then it hits me. Fan isn’t a necromancer, he couldn’t have taken the money from the other side of the veil. So how’d he get it? No necromancer in their right mind would share something like that, so he didn’t get it from one. That leaves only one person besides myself who could have grabbed it.
“Oh, fuck me.”
A sigh behind me. “Eric, do you make everything this goddamn difficult?” Billy stands up, the cuffs falling away from his hands. One of the guards hands him a towel. He wipes his face and fake blood and bruise makeup smear off with it.
Billy. The guy who helped me set the trap.
Chapter 19
I knew Billy was lying to me, even if I hadn’t twigged to how, but this blows my mind. Not that he had me fooled, or that he stole the money—I totally buy that—but that he’s in charge of people. Who the hell let that happen? When I knew him he was a two-bit drug dealer who could barely tie his own shoes.
“How much did you take?”
“Couple stacks,” he says, leaning against the table. “Hundred bills a pop. I didn’t know how, but I figured they’d come in handy someday. You know, I figured it out completely by accident. I was out of rolling papers and grabbed the closest thing to hand.”
That sounds like the Billy I remember. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“Fan wasn’t lying about everything.” He finishes wiping fake gore off his face, tosses the towel, holds his hand out for a fresh one. One of his men obliges. “The ghosts you trapped, they’re gentle as lambs. Completely safe. Unless you tell them not to be.”
I think back to the ghosts at Keenan’s house. Everyone could see them for a short time. The Walled City ghosts must appear like that, too, or Billy wouldn’t have known anything had even happened when he’d lit that joss paper.
“You conjured up your own personal hit squad?”
“Oh yeah. And I knew just who to hit, too. By that time I was already in Sun Yee On. I was nobody. Cannon fodder, really. But I took out some competition. Not the guys above me, not at first. The ones at my level, the rising stars. I’d hit them after they pulled a job and take credit for their success. Took a while. Years, in fact, but I got there. And I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“So you’re the Grand Poobah now?”
“The title’s Shan Chu,” Billy says. “But that’s about right.”
“Okay, wait a minute. There were thousands of bills on that pallet,” I say. “Why are you trying to make more?”
“Because there still are thousands of bills on that pallet,” he says. “I couldn’t go back and get them. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to find somebody who could. That’s not a secret you share with a lot of people.”
“But you did eventually,” I say.
“A few. Loyalty needs to be rewarded. Fan and Gordon are the only mages I’ve brought into this. Fan’s good, but he can’t step over to get the notes unless there’s a gap he can push through, and he tells me all the holes around the Walled City have sealed themselves up. I remember you being worried about that. That the holes would be permanent. Well, they’re not. I’ll be honest, I’m not happy about that.”
“We all have to live with disappointment,” I say.
Billy says something in Cantonese to the guards, and all but the one who has a hard-on for pistol whipping file out of the room.
“You’re running out of ghosts, aren’t you?” I say. “Your people can’t get them, and even if they could, can you really trust them? Bring a necromancer on board and you’re fucked. They’d be able to do a lot more with those ghosts than turn them into errand boys. Kind of cuts down on your options.”
“Oh, it’s more than that. I’m trying to save lives.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Wait a minute. Making ghost assassins is going to save lives? I can’t wait to hear this one.”
“You saw what those ghosts did inside that house and the garage in Burbank. They didn’t discriminate. They can’t. They went after whoever was closest. Tried to kill everyone who was nearby. Calling them grenades isn’t a far cry from what they are, but that’s not what I want. I need compliant killers, not uncontrollable nightmares. These new L.A. ghosts don’t take orders.”
“But you can train them,” I say. “They can feed or not feed at your command. Some of your handiwork is sitting in a freezer in Gabriela’s warehouse.”
“You call that training?” he says. “I can’t tell them where to go. Who to kill. I can’t say, ‘Eat this, don’t eat that.’ They’re useless to me that way. I need to target the right people at the right time. Those things are like starving sharks.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to save lives by having more accurate assassins.”
“I don’t want the killing to look like an assassination. I want it to look like an accident. Makes limiting collateral damage kind of important.”
“Are you crazy or just stupid? You want assassins, hire some goddamn assassins. That’s gotta be cheaper and easier than this.”
“And if I’d known that at the start, I would have. But I figured it’d be a cakewalk. Fan told me if he could get a good supply of ghosts, ones that were easier than most to get hold of, he could figure out how to pull them across and trap them.”
“So stop,” I say. “Call it a failed experiment. Go home a little wiser.”
“Can’t,” Billy says. “I’ve sunk too much into this. I’m stretched too thin. I don’t make this work, I don’t live very long. The minute I started down this path there was no going back. Research costs, scouting missions. I didn’t even know where I was going to find a large enough supply of ghosts.”
“And lo and behold, Los Angeles beckoned,” I say. “Fan figured that out for you, didn’t he? That there’d be a fuck-ton of them here after the fires and there’d be cracks he could wedge open to pull them through and throw them into more traps. Only he fucked it up and they all came out wrong. Sloppy work, Fan. Very sloppy.” Fan glares at me behind the glass. I don’t think Billy realizes just what he’s gotten himself into with Fan, or how big a problem he has on his hands.
“That’s why I need you,” Billy says. “I knew you wouldn’t just tell me how you made the Walled City ghosts so docile. The plan was to either beat it out of you, or, if that didn’t work, play on your friendship with your old pal, Billy Kwan. Rough me up a little, make it look like the big scary triad thugs were really gonna kill me.”
“That would have been an excellent plan,” I say. “Except for the fact that I don’t like you. I don’t remember if I liked you much in Hong Kong, but after not thinking about you in almost twenty years I can say with absolutely zero doubt that I give a rat’s fart in a high wind what happens to you these days. Come on, Billy. I figured you were dead in a ditch and good riddance.”
“You’ve gotten bitter in your old age, you know that?”
“I’ve always been bitter. Let’s say I give up the secret. What makes you think that the second Fan has that information he wouldn’t make his own little army and take you down with it?”
“I thought of that. Fan, how’s your sister doing?”
“Very well, thank you,” Fan says, his voice strained, tinny over the speakers. “We talk every day.”
“I’m paying for her cancer treatment,” Billy says. “She’s in a state-of-the-art facility somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Even I don’t know where it is. And she’s very, very well protected by some of my most loyal people.”
“I had a sister somebody used against me once,” I say. “I didn’t like it. I killed them and everybody who got in my way. If you think for a moment that Fan is just gonna play the good lapdog and shit where you tell him, you’re in for a big surprise. But you know what, I’m gonna do you a favor, Billy. I’m gonna help an old buddy out. I’m gonna kill you before Fan does, and I’ll do it quick. He’d take his time.”
Billy laughs. “I have two loyal, powerful mages standing there ready to fry your ass the minute you try anything.”
“You sure about that?” I say.
“You mean that ‘bomb’ you put in Gordon’s stomach?” He says it with air quotes and laughs. “If it existed, why haven’t you used it yet?”
