Читать книгу King Of Fools - Amanda Foody - Страница 13

Last night, Jac Mardlin dreamed of his own death.

It started with a bad decision; he jumped into the driver’s seat of the flashiest motorcar he’d ever seen—white leather seats and a black racing stripe streaking across the hood. He hadn’t intended to steal it; all he wanted was to lean back, close his eyes, and fantasize about owning something so luxurious. But suddenly, the locks on the doors bolted, the keys twisted in the ignition, and the car raced forward at a stomach-lurching speed.

He cursed and fought against the steering wheel. The wind rushed at him so fast his eyes watered, and everything he passed became a blur. Even as he slammed his foot on the brakes and tugged the clutch so hard it snapped, the car still sped on.

Until it drove straight off Revolution Bridge.

Many hours later, in the waking world, Jac eyed his hand of cards and chewed his bottom lip, mentally tallying every foggy detail of the dream. The white from the car’s seat leather made him think he should pick an even-numbered card. But there’d been that black racing stripe, and black always symbolized an odd number, a contrast.

He settled on the four of hearts and threw it down. “Better save your luck, Dove, because—”

Lola let out a wild cackle of victory and snatched a switchblade from the pot of weapons. “You muckhead.” She threw down her own pair of fours on the table.

He scowled. “I don’t like Pilfer. It’s a kids’ game.”

“Then deal a game of Tropps. You don’t have much else to lose.” She shrugged and slipped what had once been his best switchblade into the pocket of her jacket. The nightdress she wore underneath, borrowed from Enne, was clearly several sizes too small and made her look bone-skinny and vaguely feral. Jac had encountered stray cats who looked more charming than Lola did in the morning.

She rested her feet on the table, and he crinkled his nose as he yanked the pile of cards out from under them. “I thought Irons were supposed to be good at these sort of games,” she said.

Strictly speaking, Jac wasn’t half lousy at cards. But the sirens that had blared all through the night in search of his best friend had suddenly gone silent. He twitched his leg restlessly. “I’m gonna open a window.”

“It’s hotter outside,” Lola warned. Both of their foreheads dripped with sweat. It was officially a New Reynes summer.

“I need a smoke.” He stood up and slid the window open. Twelve years he’d lived in New Reynes, and he’d never heard Tropps Street so quiet. Not after One-One-Six, a long dead street lord, shot up every last soul in a private auction house. Not after the casket of Sedric’s father, Garth Torren, had been solemnly paraded outside his casino, as though he’d died some kind of saint.

It was hard to scandalize a city built on sin, a city that had seen it all. But today—more than any other day—the city was shaken to its core.

Jac struck a match and watched it burn like a votive candle.

“I can turn on the radio, if you want,” Lola offered. “But Levi’s probably fine.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Afraid you’ll hear your name?”

He inhaled his cigarette deeply. It was no secret that he worked with Levi; that he lived on 125 Genever Street in Olde Town, apartment 4C; that he covered the Wednesday through Saturday shifts at the Hound’s Tooth tavern. The whiteboots had probably already interviewed his boss, already rummaged through his home and what little he had. He tried to imagine what conclusion they could’ve drawn from his possessions. A loner, this one, they’d say. No decorations. No sentimentals. Jac had lived there for two years and still treated his place like it was temporary—a side effect of someone who’d never really had a home.

“I wasn’t in a good place not that long ago, but I have been lately, or at least in a better one,” he explained. He didn’t normally share these details with anyone, even ones so vague. But he needed to unload his thoughts on someone other than Levi, someone who could feel sympathetic without also feeling responsible. “I guess that’s gone now.”

Levi and Enne had made sure of that last night.

He squeezed his hand into a fist. He knew Levi hadn’t wanted to start that shatz investment scheme that got him invited to the Shadow Game. And Levi had looked out for Jac time and time again, so Jac didn’t feel he had a right to be angry. Hell, he was angry at himself for feeling angry.

But Jac also knew Levi and his reckless dreams. And if Levi was safe right now, then Jac would swear some part of his friend was mucking pleased—even if Levi had put everyone around him in danger.

But he didn’t say that. Instead, he bitterly spat out, “I hate this casino.”

Lola pursed her lips, and Jac waited for her to say something about how, while he’d sworn his allegiance to Levi willingly, she’d been forced to give Enne her oath with a knife at her throat. Or how good people did bad things, and bad things happened to good people, and neither they nor their friends could really call themselves good people anyway. She was annoying and wise like that.

But all she said was, “Deal the cards. You’re clearly very vulnerable right now, and I intend to take advantage of that.”

Jac snorted and tapped his cigarette ashes into the rim of a teacup as he slid back into his seat.

“Enne will hate that, you know,” Lola told him. The teacup was porcelain, covered in some floral design that Enne would find pretty. Jac realized Enne, who’d only lived here for ten days, probably didn’t possess much she could call her own, so he retrieved his cigarette guiltily and pushed the cup away.

Lola leaned over and slid it back toward him. “But fuck them.” The corner of her lips slid into a smile.

Jac barked out a surprised laugh, and the knots in his shoulders loosened. Over the next ten minutes of Tropps, the teacup’s bottom steadily grew coated in ash.

Then the apartment’s front door swung open, and Enne marched inside wearing an outrageous floppy hat, a floor-length jacket she definitely didn’t have on when she left, and at least a dozen bags hanging off of each arm. “I’m back,” she chirped. She set the bags down in a heap by the couch.

“Why are you dressed like you’ve suddenly become a rich widow?” Lola asked.

“I went shopping. Levi doesn’t exactly own anything anymore, does he?” she huffed, collapsing into an armchair as though she’d just finished back to back gloves-off matches in the ring.

Jac raised an eyebrow. “Dressing him now, are you?”

Enne ignored him and gestured aimlessly to all the bags. “I also bought him some medication, since he looked terrible last night. There’s stuff for you, too, Jac. I guessed at your measurements.”

Jac stood up and examined the pile skeptically. “I’m almost afraid to look. What do gentlemen wear in Bellamy? White ribbon boater hats and daisy cufflinks?”

“As if that soiled newsboy cap you wear every day is such a deliberate fashion choice?” Enne countered. Jac cleared his throat, prepared to defend his beloved, patched-up hat to his grave, when Enne furrowed her eyebrows and sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”

“Jac’s been using one of your prized teacups as an ashtray,” Lola said quickly.

Jac glared at her and muttered, “You traitor.”

Enne waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t care. And I didn’t just go shopping. There’s something I want to talk to you both about.” She reached into the closest bag and pulled out a copy of today’s The Crimes & The Times. She tossed it at Jac, who caught and unfurled it. He squinted at the headline for a moment, untangling the words he recognized, but he didn’t need to read them to understand the significance of the two wanted posters on the front.

Lola’s chair screeched as she stood up. She studied the paper from over Jac’s shoulder.

“Three thousand volts,” Lola read under Levi’s sketch. Instantly, all Jac’s resentment from earlier vanished like a puff of cigarette smoke.

His best friend was a dead man walking.

“I’m getting out of here,” Jac breathed. It was still several hours before Levi had asked to meet, but he didn’t care. If Levi was in danger, then Jac would find a way to save him.

Because that was what they did for each other. There was no line they wouldn’t cross. Not even a line of fire.

“Wait,” Enne said sharply. “Turn the page.”

He did, though a part of him already knew what he would find.

“One thousand volts,” Lola murmured, reading his own bounty.

Jac stared at his face with the feeling like there’d been some terrible mistake. Levi was hardly a notorious political assassin, and Jac was barely a second-string bouncer at a third-rate pub. Not that long ago, the two of them had sat on street corners in the Casino District, goading passersby with games of coins and cards in the hopes of conning at least enough for a meal.

“Vianca said there could be a repeat of the Great Street War,” Enne told him, which was the last thing she could’ve said to make him feel better. He supposed she wasn’t trying to comfort him. The clothes she’d bought weren’t gifts—they were necessities. And if daisy cufflinks were what it took to make him unrecognizable now, then he’d happily strut around town like a dandy. “If you want a motorcar to Olde Town, I can call you one.”

Enne’s voice was level, calm, all practicality. For the first time, Jac wasn’t at all surprised that he was looking into the eyes of the person who’d killed Sedric Torren. If she was afraid, she was damn good at hiding it.

“How did you pay for all this?” he asked her, eyeing the shopping bags with suspicion.

“Vianca gave me the voltage.”

“And you took it?” It was Vianca’s fault that they were in this scramble to begin with. And if they all hanged for it tomorrow, the donna would hardly deign to host their funerals.

Enne stood up and held out two more of the bags. “Of course I did. Just like you’re going to take these.”

He hesitated. He wanted nothing to do with Vianca, but that was impossible. So long as he was friends with Levi, so long as Levi was infatuated with Enne and they were both prisoners of the donna’s omertas... They would all be in bed with Vianca Augustine.

“I’m really, really sorry, Jac.” Enne said it like she meant it. Then she shoved the bags into his hands. “But don’t be thick.”

Jac took them with a weary sigh.

“I’m going to call you a motorcar,” she told him. It wasn’t a suggestion. She walked to the other room to find the telephone, leaving him alone with Lola.

“Bossy,” he grumbled.

“No, she’s just the boss.” Lola clicked her tongue. “I guess I wasn’t deserving enough to be showered with expensive gifts.”

Jac reached into one of the bags and fished out the first thing he noticed—a scrap of yellow silk with polka dots. “Here. Take this...”

“Cravat,” Lola finished for him. “And I think I’ll leave that for you. It’ll match your wanted poster. They made you look very dapper, for some reason. Doesn’t suit that terrible scrape you’ve given yourself across your eyebrow.”

Jac sheepishly brushed his finger over the stitches on his browbone, a souvenir from a boxing match he’d lost the other night at Dead at Dawn. His skin was still swollen and tender.

Lola instead pulled out a black felt case and opened it to reveal a leather wristwatch. “Excellent.” She tossed the box on the armchair and buckled the watch around her bony wrist. It hung ridiculously.

“I actually like that one,” he muttered.

“Keep the cravat, Polka Dots.”

Enne returned from the other room. “Jac, the car is waiting for you downstairs. It’ll take you straight to Zula’s. When you get there, can you tell Levi...” She flushed, and Jac had half a mind to crack a very lewd joke, but the other half of him wanted to roll his eyes and stalk out. They might’ve had the good sense not to let anything more happen between them, but he didn’t know why they made things so dramatic for themselves. “Tell him if he so much as opens a window before all of this has died down, I will personally turn him in and collect his bounty. Which, please remind him, is five hundred volts less than mine.”

Jac had braced himself for something sweet and nauseating, so he wound up laughing so hard he wheezed. “With pleasure.”

Then, without warning, Enne wrapped her arms around him in a fierce hug. “Be careful,” she told him.

“Always am,” he managed. But Enne still looked skeptical.

“No, you’re not.”

He shot Lola a smile. “Now’s your chance, Dove.”

“I don’t do hugs,” she said flatly. “Just don’t die.”

“Words I’ll cherish forever.”

After Enne let him go, he grabbed the bags, exchanged goodbyes, and left. He found his driver waiting for him in the alley out back. Before climbing in the car, Jac took a deep gulp of air—his first full breath since he’d entered St. Morse Casino the night before. It didn’t matter how many gifts he received or how much protection he was given; he could never bring himself to think of Vianca Augustine as anything less than despicable.

“I’d like to make a detour,” Jac told the driver, and he gave him the address to his apartment.

Olde Town, much like the Casino District, was quiet and still. Jac peeked from behind his window screen at the streets they passed, at the barred windows and chipped paint. The sunlight came and went as they drove, disappearing behind spires and church towers and reappearing for fleeting moments in the too-narrow alleys.

Jac lived on a large residential street. His building was too old to have central heating or electricity, and on a day like this, he would shove his bed close to the window, drenched in sweat, and listen to his neighbors fighting down the hall while he waited for his shift to start. It wasn’t a great place, but it was far better than his last. There were no bad memories there.

Now, his entire block was cut off with bright yellow signs, informing Olde Town residents that Genever Street was a crime scene. The car came to a slow halt, and Jac stared at the whiteboots standing outside his front steps, speaking to a neighbor of his whom he only dimly recognized. They held wanted posters in their hands.

Have you seen this man before? they probably asked.

Jac fiddled with his necklace. It was a Creed, a symbol of the old Faith. Jac was more superstitious than he was reverent, but it was nice, now and again, to pray for something.

When a priest had first taught Jac to pray, he told him the prayers of a sinful conscience would go unanswered. Jac thought of the volts he’d helped Levi scam—both from the rich and from the Irons. He thought of the wounds he’d left on Chez Phillips to save Levi’s life. He thought of his own anger and resentment and desires, and the ashes left in the bottom of Enne’s teacup.

He tried very hard to feel sorry.

But as he stared at those yellow signs, at what all of this had led up to, he knew he wouldn’t pray for forgiveness. They could all pray for forgiveness when they escaped to a place far, far away from here, where there were no bounties on their heads, where no one knew their faces at all. A place he doubted Levi would ever willingly go.

Or they could pray for forgiveness when they all hanged. That seemed a more likely scenario.

But because Jac Mardlin was an unrepentant sinner who didn’t want to die, all he had left to pray for was mercy.