Page 14 of Reaper
“Okay, just as long as I’m not going to come home to a deaf cat next week,” I said, sipping Scotch right from the bottle now.I set the glass down on an end table.Kind of a “drink Scotch in case of emergency” backup.“Now what the fuck areyoudoing here?Youownthis place?Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“Because if I told you I owned a nightclub, you would be here every night drinking up my profits.Remember Dublin?”
“Okay, I might have contributed to the downfall of that pub, but don’t you think naming it The Blarney Stone didn’t do you any favors?You were actuallyinIreland.You didn’t have to play up the faux-Irish bullshit.”
“My poor branding does not change the fact that you consumed ten thousand dollars in alcohol in one month.”
“It was a rough month.”
“You did that five months in a row!”
“It was a rough five months,” I said, my defense crumbling in the face of Luke’s accurate recollection of events.I can be excused for not remembering how much I cost him.After all, I was very drunk for about half a year.“But that doesn’t answer the question of how you came to own this bar.”
“I don’t,” he replied, walking over behind the massive desk and sitting in the big bossman chair.He deposited Nameless onto a perch beside the desk, where the cat immediately curled up and started purring.Eventually I was going to have to admit that it was his cat now.But I didn’t want to.I was getting kinda used to being a cat person.Hell, Becks says I’m half-feral anyway.
I turned my attention back to Luke, who was waiting patiently for me to dial back into the conversation.“As I was saying, I don’t ownjustthis bar.I own Camp North End.Through a series of shell corporations, of course, and this nightclub is the only business here that I take a direct operational interest in, other than the gelato stand, but I own the entire complex.I bought the property when it was worthless, and when a developer came to me with an idea to purchase the land from me and turn it into a destination, I agreed.Then I bought the developer.”
My mind whirled.How richwasLuke?I knew he’d been royalty back in the olden days, and I knew he’d invested well, but these were some big-time money moves.“Okay, that all seems pretty smart.But why not tell me?”
“You have been rather occupied the last ten years.Saving the world and all that.”
“You were right there beside me most of that time!How did you even have time to pull something like this off?”
“I have very skilled and trusted employees.But Quincy.”He leaned forward and nailed me with that piercing gaze that made so many people think he was hypnotic.“Why.Are.You.Here?”
Let’s be perfectly clear.Luke cannot mesmerize anyone with his stare.He does not have hypno-eyes, or any other sort of mind control.But he had a massive weight of personality and incredible charisma.He can pressure you into doing whatever he wants, most of the time.
As long as you didn’t grow up around him and build up a century’s worth of resistance to his skills.Which I have.So I didn’t spill my guts because I fell under the powerful spell of Dracula’s mind control.I spilled my guts because he’s my uncle, one of the very few people in the world I trust completely, and because if he owned this place, there was a zero percent chance it wasn’t wired to the gills with top-flight security cameras.“I’m hunting were-rats,” I said.
He leaned back, one perfectly sculpted eyebrow climbing toward the sky.“Would you care to elaborate?”
I told him about the meetup at the bookstore, the fight in the bookstore’s coffee shop, and the lead I’d gotten on the North End Whiskers, who supposedly operated out of this part of town.When I was done, Luke picked up his desk phone and punched in a number.“Thomas?I need to see you,” he said, with no introduction.That’s my uncle, all perfect phone manners.“Now,Thomas.Thank you.Yes, you may bring one second, but I do not intend to harm you, or allow harm to come to you, while you are on my property.”He gave me what I considered a wholly unnecessarily direct glare when he mentioned not allowing harm to come to whoever was on the end of the line.
“Who was that?”I asked when he hung up the phone.
“That was Thomas.He is the de facto leader of the Whiskers, in as much as a loosely affiliated group of rodent lycanthropes can be said to have one.”
“You have the Whiskers’ Alpha on speed dial?”I asked.
“Of course not,” Luke scoffed.“It would be highly irresponsible for me to commit important numbers to anything as vulnerable as a speed dial.Have I taught you nothing about being a criminal?I memorized it.He will be here momentarily.”
There was nothing to say, so I just sent Becks a mental message to join us in the office and drained the rest of the bottle.And Luke wonders why I drink so much.
11
Twenty minutes later, a disheveled, slightly built Asian man in his twenties followed the bouncer into Luke’s office.He looked around, starting a bit when he saw Nameless, and almost jumping out of his skin when he got a good look at me.His head whipped around, looking for an exit that wasn’t blocked by a wall of muscle, and, finding none, turned to Luke.“What’s going on, Mr.Card?We ain’t done nothing outside our agreement.”
I raised an eyebrow at Luke.“Agreement?”
“Thomas and his…family are allowed to commit certain petty crimes on the premises in exchange for serving as an unofficial defense against more serious infractions,” Luke said, his airy tone underlaid with a steel that was definitely noticed by our new rodent arrival.
“And we done that!”Thomas protested.“We pick a few pockets, roll a drunk or two, and maybe boost a car if the owner’s too loaded to drive home.But we always give the car back when we’re done.It might be missing a stereo, or it might not have the fancy rims they left on it, but we give the car back.And we keep the bad stuff from happening.”
“What constitutes ‘bad stuff,’ Tom,” I asked, my voice pleasant.
It didn’t help.The little rat looked like he was going to pass out just being in the same room as me and Luke together.Made sense.There aren’t very many predators more apex than me, and Dracula is one of them.No rat in his right mind would be comfortable staring down both of us.“You know, rapes, stabbings, shootings—the kind of shit happens around every club in the city.But not here.Me and my Whiskers keep the real bad shit out of the Camp, and on account of that, Mr.Card lets us have a little fun.”
“And the drugs?”I asked.Nobody had mentioned drugs, but let’s be real.Where there’s a nightclub, there are drugs.
