Roulette, p.19
Roulette, page 19
And then I got a hit.
Turning around, I noticed a cute cottage in white siding with a little railed-in front porch and dark blue shutters. Though it was a pretty house, it wouldn’t have caught my attention if not for the decoration.
The Fosters weren’t the only ones who liked to get into the Christmas spirit just a wee bit early. Staked out in the yard a few feet back from the sidewalk was an inflatable green and red dragon wearing a Santa hat and matching scarf and holding a present. It wobbled in the breeze, about eight feet of off-kilter holiday cheer, and recognition hit me as the conference room returned.
I knew that neighborhood.
Quickly, I sketched the details I remembered, including the dragon, and tried to recall the route that Maya had taken. For the last five years, she’d made it a tradition of renting a van one December evening when the restaurant was closed and inviting her employees and friends for a slow drive around town to look at the lights. To make the evening more—well, possibly less—memorable, she stocked the van with bottles of booze and spiked hot chocolate, and as she drove, she did her best impression of a terrible tour guide. Bad accents came and went. The commentary got rougher as the night passed. By the end of the evening, Maya—sober as a judge but feeding off the energy from the peanut gallery—would pause in front of perfectly nice houses and ask, “What the fuck were they thinking? Icicle lights? You’re not fooling anyone with your weird, drippy décor.”
Those of us in the back would cheer, jeer, and rate the houses we liked and loathed. The tastefully decorated homes could be fun, but the unofficial judges’ awards went to the places that had gone just a little nuts—the ones where the homeowners covered the roof in blue bulbs or built a life-sized Nativity scene in the front yard, or the home of the sweet old lady who sat on her porch and waved at us as we applauded her flock of pink flamingoes in their festive knit scarves. But the previous December, as the night was wrapping up and Maya was making a final pass through the Stadium neighborhood, she’d come to a screeching halt in front of the house with the Christmas dragon. “Oh, my God,” she’d announced from the front. “Oh, sweet baby Jesus, yes. That is perfection!” By then, the rest of us had been having too good a time to do anything but agree with her.
That had to be the same inflatable dragon. The neighborhood I’d seen could easily be Stadium—as in Carytown, the houses tended to sit at one end of narrow lots, offering long backyards with room for sheds and such. Heck, they were our neighbors, separated from Carytown only by the expressway. If Goobers lived in the Stadium area, he could make it to his Kroger hangout in under ten minutes.
Of course, I thought, filling in the details on my sketch, what I’d seen might have been nothing at all, just a blip from my nascent farsight unrelated to our dealer. I couldn’t imagine that he spent the time and money to put up an inflatable like that. Still, the vision was all I had to offer, so I’d pass it along.
I found Gentle Breeze in her office, nursing a cup of coffee the size of a soup bowl. “Any luck?” she asked when I rapped on the doorframe.
Holding up the sketch, I said, “Maybe. I got a flash of a neighborhood, but I didn’t see Goobers.”
“Hmm. Do you know where it is?”
“Eh, roughly. It’s close to my studio, and the area’s not huge…”
“Well, then,” she replied, pushing back from her desk, “maybe we should take a little drive.”
I sent a quick text to Yven so that he wouldn’t worry and hopped in the chief’s Jeep for the trip to Richmond. She triggered her mask just before we came through at Oilville, then smirked at my unease at her sudden transformation. “Not accustomed to it yet, are you?” the unrecognizable blonde behind the wheel asked as she barreled through the woods. “Give it time, kid.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, slumping in my seat.
“Please.” She glanced in my direction once she’d turned onto the paved road. “I’ve dealt with rudeness from elves, sorcerers, fauns…hell, even the occasional gnome. I don’t bruise easily.”
“Still…”
She laughed to herself. “Rose, if I were upset, it wouldn’t be subtle. Breathe.” After switching lanes to avoid an overloaded pickup truck older than I was, she said, “You could make it up to me by buying lunch, eh?”
I wasn’t going to say no to that, and so I surrendered my credit card at Wendy’s. Four triple cheeseburgers and several packs of fries seemed a small price to pay for goodwill.
Duly provisioned, we headed east into my familiar Carytown territory, and then I guided us into the Stadium neighborhood. Gentle Breeze rounded the stadium itself, which was abandoned that rainy afternoon, then slowed as we headed into the residential blocks. With the light midday traffic, she could take her time making a preliminary sweep, and soon, I spotted the inflatable dragon. “There,” I said, pointing it out. “This is the place. If I did this correctly, he’s around here somewhere.”
“All right.” She pulled over behind a Volvo and turned off the car. “Do you see his vehicle? And don’t worry, the tint’s magically enhanced,” she added as I started to pull down my visor mirror. “Look wherever you like. He’s not going to see us.”
I turned in my seat and peered up and down the road, but there was no sign of the white Accord. “Maybe he’s making a delivery.”
“So then we wait,” she replied, and pulled a cheeseburger from her oversized paper bag. “Ooh…do you like pickles? I should have asked the clerk to leave them off.”
I declined and ate my lunch, being careful to keep the dripping condiments away from my leggings. Not fifteen minutes later, as Gentle Breeze tucked into her final burger, Goobers’s car came rolling up the street. “That’s him,” I said, throwing the remains of my fries back into my bag. “What do we do?”
“We sit here and finish eating,” she replied, grabbing my arm before I could open the door. “And we don’t charge into a house behind a sorcerer without backup. How are you with magic in general?”
I grimaced. “Meh?”
“That’s what I figured. This is recon, girl. Keep your eyes open.”
We watched as he parked two doors down from the dragon, then climbed out of his car, locked it with a fob, and jogged up the three steps to his unremarkable brick house as he hurried in out of the rain. When the door closed behind him, I said, “Give me a minute. I’m going to try to follow him.”
“You’re not sneaking in,” Gentle Breeze insisted.
“Not like that.” Taking up my sketchpad and a pencil, I turned past my page of wavy blue lines and began doodling afresh, drawing the sort of three-dimensional squares that every kid in my fourth-grade class had seemingly learned at once. I worked from the center of the page and continued outward, building cubes into a pyramid as I thought about Goobers’s porch…
…and there I was. Looking to my right, I spotted Gentle Breeze’s black Jeep—the windows really were dark, I mused—then considered the problem of Goobers’s front door. Surely he’d locked it behind him. When I grabbed at the knob to be certain and my hand went right through it, however, I recalled my incorporeal state and decided to make the best of it. Bracing for impact, I ran at the door and landed in an ordinary foyer. He’d placed a rack by the door for dirty shoes and had left an umbrella leaning in a corner, but otherwise, the place was totally mundane: old wooden floors, a cheap rug to keep the grit to a minimum, a short brass-finished lamp hanging unlit over my head.
But there was no time to critique the furnishings. I had to find the bastard…and judging by the sound of creaking in the ceiling, he’d gone upstairs.
Upstairs? The house was a bungalow—I doubted it even had an attic to speak of. Still, if Aunt Lily could magically hide a whole greenhouse, then maybe Goobers had a second floor stuck somewhere between our worlds.
The trick was finding a way in, and I didn’t know how much time I had left before my farsight gave out. I hurriedly checked the den and kitchen, searching for so much as a ladder, then gave up and just sprinted through the walls until I came to what appeared to be a spare bedroom. Tucked into the open closet was a wooden staircase, and I bounded up toward a trapdoor in the ceiling. Noting the small white circle of opaque glass set beside the door—a lock—I passed through and gasped.
The hidden floor wasn’t just larger than the footprint of the house. It was at least twice the size of Aunt Lily’s facility and filled to the walls with bushes, flowering plants, and even potted trees. Instead of the solid roof I’d expected to find, the ceiling seemed to be made of glass—not particularly useful on a rainy day—but Goobers made up for the cloud cover with long grow lamps, which bathed some of the greenery with a purple glow.
And it didn’t take a DPP-trained expert to identify Goobers’s primary crop. The place stank with the distinctively earthy odor of the thousands of marijuana plants lining the far wall. As I watched, thin pipes in the ceiling began to mist the crops with water. Examining the nearest plants, I couldn’t miss the distinctive purple veins of Miri Special.
Goobers himself was standing over a wooden bench near the trapdoor. He’d set up a trio of induction cooktops, two of which held bubbling pots. The third pot seemed to have cooled, and Goobers was decanting its contents into an ordinary spray bottle. The liquid he poured into the plastic funnel in the bottle’s neck was slightly cloudy, like bathwater after the bubbles have popped, and considering the yellow rubber gloves and plastic goggles he’d donned, Goobers was taking pains to keep from making contact with it.
Roulette. It had to be.
A shove on my shoulder sent me flying back into my body, and I cried out until I recognized the Jeep and the comforting odor of fries. “Rose? Rose,” Gentle Breeze demanded, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Wake up, come on. You’re scaring me—”
“I’m okay,” I mumbled, pushing her hand away, and caught my breath. “Whew. Shit.”
“Did you…”
“I was in there.”
“You looked catatonic. You just stopped moving all of a sudden, and then I couldn’t wake you…”
She sounded surprisingly concerned, and I was touched. “I’m fine, really. But holy shit, he’s not just a dealer.”
One eyebrow arched. “No?”
“Nope. He’s got a greenhouse that puts Aunt Lily’s to shame, and he’s brewing as we speak.”
“Brewing what, exactly?” I stared at her in disbelief, and she held up her hands to ward me off. “Right, yes, dumb question. Can you describe the potion?”
I did so as I drew Goobers’s hidden second floor, then added a floorplan for the main level to show the access point. “I think he’s got a lock of some sort on the trapdoor,” I explained to Gentle Breeze, adding the milky piece of glass to my sketch. “It looked like a smaller version of the locks on the quarantine wing, but I don’t really know…”
She examined my work and nodded curtly. “No, your instincts are good. We’ll need a locksmith tonight to get up there.”
“Tonight?”
“We’ll roll out at sundown,” she said, and started the engine. “Write the address, will you? I don’t want to hunt for this place in the dark.”
“I’m pretty sure I can get you back here, and the dragon lights up at night—”
A low chuckle interrupted me. “Uh, no. This is a matter for Interdiction, and I’ll be calling in backup from Laws. The Regulatory squad won’t even go in until we’ve cleared the area.”
“I can help,” I protested as she headed for the Interstate.
“Yeah, by staying out of the line of fire.”
“But—”
“Would you send a twenty-something half elf with no formal instruction in magic to fight a sorcerer who has to know he’s facing serious incarceration if we bring him in?”
That took the wind out of my sails. “I mean, when you put it like that…”
Gentle Breeze reached over and patted my knee. “Pateme didn’t make me a chief for my beauty alone,” she said, and drove hard for the portal.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
Thus benched in favor of the professionals—which, after fuller consideration, I decided wasn’t a terrible idea—I returned to quarantine to share the good news. “So Goobers is definitely a sorcerer,” I explained, standing between the rows of beds in my protective bubble as the others gathered around. “And I don’t want to think about how much money he’s got in plants, but at the very least, he’s got weed for days.”
I turned at the sound of tapping on the glass behind me and found Yven scribbling a message on a piece of paper. Sound from within the quarantine area was piped out, but it was a pain to try to yell through the wall. Finished, he slapped the paper against the barrier: Can’t determine value of weed. Never been released for sale.
“Can you estimate based on my drawing of his greenhouse?” I asked.
He made a face, then raised a hand and rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb to emphasize the value.
“That’s nice and specific, Yven. Thank you for that.”
Though he rolled his eyes, he smiled when he caught my wink.
With the quarantined restless and eager for answers, Yven took me up to a break room on his floor to wait. “The food in the machine isn’t great,” he said apologetically as he held his hand to the scanner, “but the pasta is surprisingly mediocre if you add hot sauce. Can I interest you in dinner?”
“I mean, it’s a little early,” I replied, settling in on a couch while he bought a bag of chips, “but with a recommendation like that, I might just take you up on the pasta tonight.”
He joined me, though he took the adjacent overstuffed chair instead of the free spot on the couch. “Speaking of dinner…”
My stomach tightened. “Yeah?”
Digging into his snack, he said, “Should I ever get the crazy idea to go out to dinner with Vul again, do me a favor and remind me that she’s insufferable, will you?”
The strange vise within me that had been clenching since Monday afternoon began to relax. “Did it not go well?”
“Depends on what you mean,” Yven replied. “She’s absolutely not my type, and I was ready to go before our drinks arrived, so that was miserable. On the other hand, I think I gave her enough fake information to shore up your cover story. If she sees us together again, she should believe we’re colleagues.”
“I mean, that’s great, but why go to the trouble?” I asked, crossing my legs. “You could have just told her that our project is wrapping up.”
“I could have,” he said with a little grin, “but after you went to Pars’s house on Monday, I got called up to the director’s office. He wanted me to tell you that you’ve been given permission to come over for further instruction.”
“In magic?” I guessed.
Yven nodded. “Especially the areas where I’m not so strong. He said he’d find a tutor who could work with you on defense, for starters. With that in mind, I thought it would be prudent to give Vul a reason to expect to see the two of us together…that is, if you’re willing.”
I laughed aloud. “Uh…yeah. That would be amazing.”
“All done very quietly, of course,” he murmured. “The director said he can’t acknowledge you, but DPP owes you at least an education, if for no other reason than what you did for us last spring. If this works out tonight with Goobers…” He whistled. “Let’s just say that DPP will owe you more than basic training. I’m serious, if half of what you described is accurate, this is huge.”
I sat up a little straighter on the couch. “Yeah?”
“Absolutely. Look, Liliol has a large operation. If this guy’s running an unregulated greenhouse twice the size of hers, and brewing without a license…”
“So much paperwork?”
“So much,” he concurred, “but maybe Syvin will give it to someone else.”
Smiling, I reached for his chips, and he let me steal a few. “Does Pars know that I’m going to be training here? I don’t want to overstay my welcome…”
“I haven’t mentioned it yet,” said Yven, “but I was thinking, you know…would you be opposed to camping at my place?”
“No, I wouldn’t mind,” I replied, surprised, “but aren’t you worried about your neighbors?”
“Not really, and if we get paranoid, a bit of masking practice wouldn’t hurt, would it?”
I chuckled. “What, if some little old lady gets nosy, you’re going to try to pass me off as your girlfriend?”
He popped a chip into his mouth. “Better you than Vul.”
“I’m touched. You’re a regular romantic, ti’Ansha.”
“The best,” he said solemnly, and passed me the chip bag.
Around nine that night, Yven shook me awake with a quiet, “Rosie, they’re back. They got him.”
It took me a moment to process that information. My night of drugged sleep at Aunt Lily’s hadn’t exactly fixed my growing deficit, and the break room couch was decently comfortable, especially as I’d snuggled beneath a blanket borrowed from one of Yven’s cubicle neighbors. Warm, worn out, and full of the Pactlands’ version of ramen, I’d crashed soon after an early dinner while we hung around the building, waiting for news.
The hulking shadow behind Yven that blotted out the overhead lights quickly resolved into Pars’s form. He sported black field gear and a wide smile, and he pulled me to my feet with one hand. “And there’s the lady of the hour,” he said, beaming. “Chief wants you upstairs.”
