Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer by Jeff Somers

Author:Jeff Somers
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Pocket Star
Published: 2014-03-23T23:00:00+00:00

FOR ONCE, IT worked. Mags was no fucking help. But it worked. And I lived up to my title. I Fixed it.

It was expensive.

First, I had to bleed on a fresh Charm for Scum Beard and his buddies. Made their eyes roll back in their heads and come out smiling and happy, agreeable. Then, on top of that, because I’d found that layering spells on top of each other made both spells more effective, I gassed up six singles from my hollow and cobwebbed wallet so they looked like crisp hundred-dollar bills. This left Mags and me with seven dollars in the Disaster Fund, which meant we would all just have to hope against hope that whatever disaster we faced would involve dollar tacos at the joint on Sixteenth Street.

Scum Beard and his friends were happy to accept a bit each in exchange for rigging the back of the container and loaning us one of their cars. They finished securing the container to the truck while we watched, and then offered me loopy thumbs-up gestures as they climbed into the cab and fired her up.

I walked Mags back to Charlie’s office in the rain, feeling half-dead from blood loss, asleep on my feet. We found Charlie back at his desk, exactly as we’d first seen him. He looked up as we stepped inside, dripping and shivering.

“We good?” he asked. “I figured it might be best the less I saw. In case I was asked to describe the scene later on.”

“We’re good.”

“I’ll handle the gate myself, then,” Charlie said in a distracted, competent way, “so there won’t be any record when they drive out. Clean. No records anywhere, and Mr. Heller can rest easy. You tell him I was helpful, huh?”

I nodded. “Sure, sure. We’re taking a car out, too, right behind the truck.”

Charlie hesitated for one still moment. “Okay.”

We had reached the Event Horizon of Charlie’s curiosity on the matter. I nodded again. Nudged Mags and we went outside, to stand in the rain rather than smell the burnt-coffee stink and exchange stares with Charlie. I had a feeling Charlie had been here long before Heller and the rest of us Tricksters had found him, and would be here long after we’d all been bled dry and buried in lime pits somewhere, gas for some enustari’s Ritual.

We stood in the rain and I reviewed my lessons from Hiram. Few and far between, but there had been lessons. At the pace he’d been teaching me I would have expected to achieve the rank of ustari by about age seventy-five, likely followed by a massive coronary and Mags, old and withered, weeping by my grave. Hiram had taught me all about perception. What people believed to be true was true, at least when backed by a little gas. Even mages. My head was sizzling with weariness, and I wobbled a little on my feet. Mags reached out and steadied me, silently, with a hand on my shoulder.

I was just a con artist. The realization bled into me, slow and cold.

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