Doubletake

low on his hips. I wouldn’t be eating the cobbler here for a while, on Thanksgiving or otherwise. While he was back pulling the inventory, Rapture added up the bill. “Since you are good customer, Cachorro, I will give you discount.” That and the fact that she was having a hard time selling the antitank rocket. Discount or no, it was about half a year’s pay. It was a good thing I’d brought almost all the cash we had on hand, because at this rate we’d be lucky to pay the six-fifty toll on our way to Tilden.

When we left, I was carrying three large bakery bags by white twine handles. Each bag had pink boxes with RAPTURE’S BUNS written in flowing white script. The boxes were cake-size but held C4, detonators, grenades, and a small box of explosive rounds. Niko was carrying the Javelin on his shoulder. It was wrapped in brown paper painted and dried ahead of time with garlic butter. As far as anyone was concerned, he was toting a piece of Italian bread almost four feet long…and close to thirty pounds.

“Grouchy Puppy.” This time Niko did laugh as we walked along the sidewalk waiting for Kalakos to come by. “She labeled you impeccably on your first visit.”

“I wouldn’t push it.” I snorted. “She thinks you’re my ‘hot brother.’ She’s got brand-new boobs ready to try out. I could tell her you’re up for some mountain climbing.”

Before he could get me back, and he would have, his cell rang. It was Promise. Robin’s condo was empty; his phone was gone; nothing appeared out of the ordinary except that our couch was still beside his. Salome and Spartacus weren’t perturbed. What would perturb a dead cat, I didn’t know, but they were batting around an old skull Goodfellow had given them. Yorick. It was their favorite toy. It seemed as if Goodfellow had taken his cell phone and gone. “What about his coat?” I prodded Niko. “He wouldn’t go out without his coat to cover his sword.”

Promise’s answer to that was that he had so many coats that Armani flew him free to Italy every year for the new line, and how could she possibly know if he’d gone on his own with a coat and sword or unwillingly without either.

Shit. Now I was worried. But it was Janus and Grimm prep time. Niko asked Promise to try to find the puck. We needed her help, but Robin might need it more. She said she would do her best. I heard her voice from Niko’s cell. Her best didn’t sound too enthusiastic. Granted, Goodfellow had tried to steal Niko from her, but Niko was straight. She should be over that. He had stolen some jewelry from her, had orgies in her penthouse when he’d been hiding out there on the run from an ancient Arabian death squad. He’d tried to give her two undead mummified cats out of the eleven I’d dumped in his condo. When she turned them down, he’d waited until she was out at dinner with Niko one night and given her three instead. Each had engraved collars: Vlad, Spike, and Elvira.

And they wouldn’t leave. As strong and quick as vampires are, Promise hadn’t been able to catch a single one. She was stuck with them and not a cat person. Every cat person knows that not liking them makes cats like you and enjoy torturing you all the more. I had no sympathy. If you weren’t an undead mummified cat person, there was something wrong with you.

“She sounded pissed,” I said after he disconnected.

“She is—a good deal lately.”

Women, can’t live with them. Can’t screw them without passing on monster-Auphe babies. It wasn’t fair.

“Maybe it’s because the cats line up on her headboard and watch the two of you when you have sex?” I suggested. “Jesus, finally. There’s Kalakos.” I waved him down.

“How did you…” Niko frowned. “I meant, that does not happen.”

I grinned at him. “Mummy cats talk, and I don’t know how, but Salome talks to Goodfellow.” I didn’t think she actually did. It was another trickster lie for the entertainment of it. “He had some tips for the two of you, but I told him if he wanted to keep his head, he might want to forget about that.” I put the bags in the trunk and went around to the passenger seat. Kalakos moved to the back and had the antitank rocket dumped in his lap by Nik. Hard. Who was the grouchy puppy now?

Niko got in the driver’s seat, silent until we were at the Brooklyn Bridge. “That son of a bitch.”

“He did say there was a position called the Seventh Posture from a book called The Perfumed Garden that for the not very skilled would improve—” I ducked and his hand smacked the window glass of the passenger door instead of me.

“One more word and that antitank rocket will be used on you, not Janus,” he threatened. He wasn’t serious, not completely serious. The thought of the puck having eyes and ears in your bedroom, that was worse than a sex tape on the Internet. That might be worse than anything in creation.

“We have an antitank rocket?” Kalakos asked, lifting his hands cautiously off the package that lay across his lap.

“You are definitely not in the union. When this is over, you should retire and go home to roll dice with the old men,” I said lazily, before tossing him one of the dozen cupcakes Rapture had given us. “A rocket is nothing.

“We once had a nuke.”

21

It was about seven when we made it past Rockaway Boulevard, turned left, and found a well-hidden restricted road. Restricted meaning: Park Here, Please. Niko drove around the horizontal metal pole that acted as a gate and his junkmobile disappeared into the tall grass. There was salt water saturating the air, and the sun hung low in a clear violet sky. If you were into nature, it was the place to visit.

Goodfellow hadn’t visited. He hadn’t shown up or called and Promise hadn’t found him yet at any of his usual haunts. Worried as I was, there was nothing we could do. Janus and Grimm would be coming soon. When the sun set would be a good guess. Grimm would think the dark would give him an advantage, but around Janus it wasn’t completely dark, with the red light pouring from its eyes and the cracks between the metal shields that constructed its outer shell.

I checked my phone one more time in case somehow I’d missed a call. Nothing. Shit. We were all, him and us, on our own now. At least he wasn’t going to be around Janus. That was something. A bleak hope but better than none at all. We hoisted the bakery bags and our other equipment and started hiking through the grass. It was taller than waist-high, not good terrain for the type of fighting we planned on. Or Nik and I planned on. Kalakos was protective of Niko now and a damn good sword fighter, but I’d told him before: He was out of his league. He was a babe in the woods with this gear, and babies didn’t need to be touching explosives or things that set them off.

When we reached the Battery Harris East portal we pried open the gates with a crowbar and not a lot of effort. Nothing erodes like salt water. We walked down the middle of the battery corridor and the two metal frames of what had once been working train tracks. My footsteps gritted against the concrete dust. Niko and Kalakos were ghosts. “What was this place?” Kalakos studied the passage and the graffiti on the walls.

“The Battery Harris. A battery for a gun, one of two large ones, during World War Two. The cannons were sixteen-inch bore, something for their time. The east and west batteries are about two hundred feet long, fifty feet tall, and eventually covered in concrete to keep the guns from being used against the country back then.” When Grimm had said Fort Tilden was the place, Niko had researched it until there was nothing he didn’t know about it. “It’s a tourist attraction now during the day.”

I jiggled our bags. “But maybe not after tomorrow.”

“Behave. Don’t bounce the weapons of mass destruction,” Niko said.

“It’s C4,” I complained. “Stable as it comes. More a weapon of minidestruction.” Depending on how much you had. If we weren’t used to keeping our identity hidden and avoiding credit cards, real or fake, like the plague, I’d have said we would’ve maxed them out on what I was hauling. All right, I’d give it to Nik…mass destruction wasn’t totally out of the ballpark.

Coming out into the open between the east and west batteries we kept moving as I said, “This is good. Like you said, Nik. It’s practically a small coliseum. Grimm will eat this up. Lions and Christians, bread and circuses.” The two structures about two hundred or more feet from each other hemmed in either end, and vegetation, thick and tightly intertwined, had grown tall enough to provide a natural wall on each side. It really was the next-best thing to