Chapter Twenty-One
Tripp moved very stiffly and as if he was in a great deal of pain.
Fitz’s apprentice-crafted protection spells had stopped the bullet from breaking his skin, but his back looked like someone had painted most of it purple, and it must have hurt like hell.
He sat on one of the suitcases, looking like a man who had unexpectedly been handed his life back and wasn’t quite sure what to do with it yet.
Which was appropriate.
It took about five minutes for Estevez to come around.
Emilio sat next to him, shuddering with cold and curled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his knees.
The cultist seemed hollow somehow, as if his skin was deflating, sagging, right in front of my eyes.
Liver spots had begun to appear on his hands.
His hair was going greyer by the moment.
That’s the kind of thing that happens when you cheat time and suddenly have the means of that chicanery brutally extracted from you.
Bear loomed over them both, having recovered both her shield and her club. She hadn’t yet bothered to address the bite wounds she’d received, and looked extremely annoyed.
When Estevez woke up, he looked faintly surprised for a moment.
He took everything in without speaking and then slowly sat up, wincing.
Blood came from his scalp, though not as bad as I’d seen scalp wounds before.
He had a swelling bruise on his head you could see through his hair.
He’d regained some of the use of his left arm and used it to painfully cradle his broken wrist.
“Yeah,” I told him calmly. I sipped from a flask of holy water Tripp, Bear, and I had been passing between us since the fight—just in case. “You’re alive.”
“Why?” Estevez said calmly.
“Because your organization is bigger than just you,” I said. “I’m going to go ahead and assume that you aren’t the only former member of the Brotherhood of St. Giles in it. And that Emilio isn’t the only bruiser you lifted from the Red Court’s service.”
The gangster smiled faintly. “That’s true.”
“I kill you, I’ve got a whole new batch of assholes I have to fight, and I’ve only got so many hours in my day.” I nodded. “So, I’m going to offer you a deal now.”
Estevez tilted his head.
“See, I’ve got ahold of the Lurker,” I told him.
“I’m not fool enough to think I’ve got all of it.
But I’ve got more than enough. Enough that if I really want to, I can send some pretty horrible stuff after every single being it’s in.
Enough that if I get really pissed off, I can outright kill it and every being it inhabits.
Enough that I can gather it all together in one place, lock it up in a cage it can never escape, and make it spend the rest of time regretting its decision to come at me and mine. ”
I nudged Emilio with my boot. “Tell him.”
Emilio didn’t look nearly so confident now. He glanced up at Estevez with wide, frightened eyes, and nodded shortly. He licked his lips and said, “Like he did to the Red Court.”
“Just like that,” I said. “So, here’s the deal.
We’re calling things even right here. We’re taking the money.
We’re taking Tripp. Your business with him is done.
You don’t talk about him to St. Louis. Your reputation in the illicit-gambling community stays solid.
” I nodded. “Neither of us goes to the authorities with any of this. And you and your organization stay the hell out of my town. We’ve got enough action here already. ”
Estevez listened to my terms impassively, eyes narrowed. “If I do not agree to your terms?”
“I end the Lurker,” I said simply. “Take away your supernatural muscle. But not before I use what I have of it to find out all about your organization and tell John Marcone and the White Council exactly where and how to find you.”
Estevez glanced at Emilio again, who nodded in a quick, jerky motion. “He could,” he said, his voice thready. “He could do that now. You know what the White Council would do to us.”
The gangster let out a slow breath. “I know what Marcone would do to us.”
I dropped down to my heels to hunker over Estevez.
“You’re a businessman. Do the math. You can have a bad day and lose ten million and carry on with business far from me.
Or I can see to it you get enough bad days to last you the rest of your life.
Your call.” I chucked him on the shoulder, where I’d shot him, stood up, and said, “Let’s go. ”
And Bear and Tripp and I dragged ten million dollars in cash out of the bird sanctuary.
“Could you really do all that stuff you said?” Tripp asked me.
We were back in the castle, in the infirmary.
Tripp was in the bed next to Fitz’s. His back had tightened up to where he’d had trouble walking as the adrenaline faded.
Dr. Lacalle would be there to see him later in the morning, and in the meantime, Bear had given him one of her personal herbal concoctions for pain that had him looking relaxed and philosophical.
An old paperback copy of The Shadow Riders lay next to him, opened to a few pages in.
“What stuff?” I asked.
“The killing-them-all stuff,” he said quietly.
“Technically,” I told him.
“What do you mean?”
I took a moment to reply. “I could do it. But I’d probably have to pay a serious price to get it done. Use black magic.” He frowned at me, and I clarified. “I’d have to kill people.”
He blinked slowly at me. Then said, “But you wouldn’t do that.”
“No,” I said. “But guys like Estevez and Emilio would, if they could.”
“But you wouldn’t,” he said. “How come they can’t see that?”
“Because they’re like you were last year,” I said. “People who are focused completely on themselves can’t see anything else. Can’t imagine another way to be.”
“You’re bluffing.”
I shrugged. “Not entirely. I probably could find out all about them and leave them vulnerable to interests who would spend a lot of resources to wipe them out. But they can’t see it that way,” I said. “To them, the threat is as real as taxes.”
Tripp mused on that for a long time and flushed a little in the cheeks. “I was stupid for a long time,” he said.
“You’re probably still pretty stupid,” I said. “Most of us are. But it isn’t about that.”
“What’s it about, then?”
“Being a little less stupid than you were yesterday,” I said. “You’re doing that.”
He shifted in the bed slightly and winced. “Maybe it doesn’t feel like that right now.”
I grinned. “Hey, you’re ten million richer than you were before you went out and faced your problems.”
“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “And I got fresh ID and everything. I could just poof, into the wind, with all that money. Spend the rest of my days in Pattaya or someplace. Living large.”
“But,” I prompted him.
“But it would bite me in the ass to do that,” he said. “One way or another. It would still be all about me.” He glowered at me. “It sucks that I know that now.”
I shrugged. “Only from a pretty stupid point of view.”
He grunted. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think God would put a bullet in my head and send me back to the river if I did?”
“God wouldn’t need to get involved,” I said. “You’ve seen the way life goes when you live it like that. You’d get it done all by yourself.”
Tripp barked out a low laugh and then winced again as the movement pained him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I would, wouldn’t I?” He settled his head back on the pillow. “What happens now?”
“We’ll meet with Max tomorrow,” I said. “Start figuring out how to arrange everything aboveboard with the IRS. Assume they’ll get about half of the money before it’s done.”
“Freaking government.” Tripp sighed.
“After that,” I said, “it’s going to be up to you to work with Max and Heloise. They’ll have a lot of rules about the money that aren’t going to make sense to you at first and will be hard to follow. But you’ll need to trust them, that they know what they’re talking about.”
“Yeah,” Tripp said, a little blearily. “Max seems pretty smart.” I thought he’d drifted off, but then he said, “Helping kids. That’s a pretty good thing to do, right?”
“Kids and animals,” I said. “Tough to argue with those.”
“Animals,” he said thoughtfully. “Yeah. I felt bad. All those poor animals that thing was using.”
“One of the ways we know they’re bad guys,” I said.
“Five or six mil is still a lot,” he mused. “Maybe I can help some animals too.”
“One thing at a time, Tripp,” I said. “But you’re thinking in a good direction.”
“Dresden,” he said. “You should take one of those stacks. For helping me.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t be a dope,” he said. “Nobody turns down cash. You worked for it.”
“Wasn’t doing it for the money,” I said.
“Estevez says you need it.”
“There’s a bunch of kids who need it more,” I said. “Wouldn’t feel right. Those stacks already have a purpose.”
“Thought you’d say something like that,” Tripp said. “You talk to Max?”
“Yeah,” I said. I grinned at him. “He says the courts are overloaded enough as it is right now. Abernathy told the State’s Attorney office not to bother, and they’ve already got enough work that they probably won’t.”
“What about the judge freezing the money?” he asked.
“Hathaway’s going to dismiss the request for the restraining order,” I said.
“I guess accusing Max of bribery like that was a hell of a lot more serious than I thought it was, and Hathaway has been pretty slimy in the past. Max told him he could see to it that an ethics investigation happened, and Hathaway wanted no part of tangling with the old man. Looks like he was worried about people rummaging around and finding skeletons in his closets.”
“Man,” Tripp said. “Being a dick can really come back to bite you in the ass.”
“It often does,” I noted.
“You’re just still trying to convince me to be a sucker straight like the rest of you guys,” Tripp said.
I grinned at him. “It’s harder. But it’s a hell of a lot more satisfying when you win.”
“Yeah,” Tripp said wearily. “Yeah. It kinda is, ain’t it.”
He went to sleep smiling faintly.