High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

  Mollie opened a doorway in the back of the bathroom stall door. Its twin opened half a world away. A warm breeze and the scent of hibiscus wafted into the bathroom. She stepped from New Mexico to Punjab.

  The hedge kept her in shadows. That was good, too—it meant her doorway into the casino wouldn’t shine like a beacon if the place was dark. Footsteps, and a pair of voices laughing in a language she didn’t understand, approached from the other side of the hedge. They passed. She waited for a moment to convince herself her arrival had gone unnoticed. Then, very carefully, she created a new doorway in the terrace. This was much smaller than the one in the bathroom, though, more porthole than portal. Its twin opened in the ceiling of a casino in Talas, Kazakhstan.

  It showed her rows of overturned slot machines and stools, illuminated by the erratic flickering of damaged fluorescents. Some of the machines had been smashed until they spewed out coins. A rhythmic metallic crunching and jingling told her somebody was nearby. Mollie leaned left and right, peeking around the edges of the portal, until she glimpsed one of Baba Yaga’s thugs and two of her “hostesses” scooping the loose money into pillowcases. The hookers had to keep pausing to pull up their tops lest they’d spill right out of their clothes when they bent over to scoop up more change.

  Petty cash. Not worth it if Mollie could find a better score. Ffodor had taught her to appreciate the trade-off between time spent and reward gained.

  She moved the Talas end of her transdimensional doorway to another corner of the casino. This time its opening favored her with the stench of rotting food. Mollie glimpsed an overturned buffet table, dented steam trays (one looked like it had stopped a bullet), and snowdrifts of slimy black caviar on the floor. She also saw plenty of smashed and battered furniture including a leather couch stippled with bullet holes.

  There were bodies, too. Including—

  Mollie gasped. Something sour crept up her throat. She coughed twice, trying to force it down.

  —Jamal Norwood lay strewn among the wreckage, half his head caved in from a monstrous punch. One of his eyes was … She’d bolted the second she saw him go down. Put a continent and more between herself and Jamal’s killer. Fuck. He’d been pretty nice to her for a Fed, especially given the attitude she’d shown him. He sure as hell deserved better than to rot abandoned and forgotten in this shithole at the ass-end of the world.

  Mollie swallowed down sour gorge. This was a dangerous train of thought. None of this was her fault. None of it.

  Her third field of view looked over the gaming floor. This had attracted most of the looters, and these guys actually knew what they were doing. Organized bands of mobsters armed with automatics and crowbars worked down the aisles between the tables. She recognized some of them as Baba Yaga’s thugs. They moved in teams from one table to the next. When Franny and Jamal had started evacuating the jokers and the place erupted into pandemonium, the gamblers had abandoned everything as the bullets flew. Unfinished drinks, canapés, even their chips. Those gamblers who had run out of chips had tossed watches, rings, earrings, and other collateral into the mix. The looters took everything they could find. Some of the tables had cash boxes fastened underneath. But it seemed to be slim pickings, though, since most of the money circulating on the gambling floor did so in the form of chips. But that didn’t stop the goons from emptying the pockets, purses, and billfolds of every dead gambler they found. Or making a badly wounded gambler a dead gambler. They even—Jesus—they even checked the mouths of the dead for gold fillings. Mollie only had to watch one example of postmortem dentistry (this using a claw hammer) to know she wanted to stay way the hell away from those sick fuckers. She closed her viewing portal before somebody saw her.

  Her fourth peephole opened on a dark corridor closer to the hostesses’ “lounge.” It was quieter here. She sighed; the tension went out of her shoulders. But then something squeaked and she slammed the portal shut. Several long moments passed while she knelt alongside the terrace, panting like an asthmatic, before she realized it had probably been a mouse. A mouse, and not the squeak of a wheelchair. Of course not.

  A fifth angle, chosen to show her the teller cages, greeted her with the deafening screech of a saw blade on metal and an incandescent fountain of orange sparks. It scared the shit out of her. Mollie flinched, eliminating the portals. She waited again in case the sound of power tools in Kazakhstan drew attention to her hiding spot behind the hedge in India. When nobody came running across the campus to investigate, she reopened the twinned doorways, but this time even smaller.

  Four goons, more of Baba Yaga’s hired muscle turned entrepreneurial spirits in the burgeoning field of abandoned casino wealth redistribution, were trying to cut their way into the abandoned teller cages. The tellers turned cash into chips and vice versa; the casino’s daily gambling take hadn’t been rotated into the vault when everything went to hell. So the money was just sitting there, unclaimed. Apparently the thugs couldn’t get the keys, or didn’t know where they were stored. Or, more likely, they didn’t want to risk breaking into Baba Yaga’s private rooms to look for the key in the first place. Mollie didn’t blame them.

  She might have waltzed through a portal inside the cage. But the thugs would see her, and they’d get royally pissed off when they saw her emptying the money drawers. Money they’d already decided was rightfully theirs. For one thing, these guys were armed up to the eyebrows. For another, and judging from the way the steel mesh rattled when they kicked it, it wouldn’t be long before they made it inside. And she did not want to be inside the teller cages when those hormone cases broke through, not for a second. She needed to get rid of those assholes.

  Actually, she could solve two problems at once. And it was a fucking awesome way to clear the obstacle, if she did say so herself.

  Be smart. Be safe. Be quick.

  Well, two out of three.

  New portals. She stepped from Chandigarh to New York City. The cops at Fort Freak were too busy, and her entrance too quiet, for anybody to notice right away when she stepped into a corner of the precinct house. The casino evacuation had sent everything into chaos that hadn’t subsided a day later. She gathered they were also trying to figure out where the hell their colleague Franny Black had gone. He wasn’t among the casino dead, though, so he’d get in touch with them soon enough. It wasn’t her problem. But she figured the cops would have Jamal’s family notified and his remains treated properly. So she envisioned the spot in Talas where poor Jamal lay, and opened a doorway under his body. She gently deposited the deceased agent just outside the door to the captain’s office.

  The atmosphere in the precinct went from vigorous turmoil to undistilled mayhem. Which conveniently kept the cops distracted. She tried to be quick so they wouldn’t notice her when she stepped from the precinct house to the teller cages in the casino. But the screech of the power saw gave up the game. The cops noticed her departure at the same moment Baba Yaga’s goons saw her enter the cage.

  People on two continents shouted at her simultaneously. Nobody looked happy to see her. Well, fuck ’em: she was accustomed to that. And about to get much more unhappy, all of them.

  Mollie envisioned the ceiling of the police station halfway around the world, where she’d been an instant earlier. She put a portal roughly over the middle of the cops’ desks. Then, as fast as she could manage, she opened a succession of portals under the thugs’ feet.

  Fwump, fwump, fwump, fwump.

  They fell through the casino floor in rapid succession, plummeting through the ceiling in New York to crash into desks, cops, and each other. The tumbling power saw smashed a coffeemaker, sending up a black geyser. Peering down through the final hole, Mollie got an overhead view as one of the thugs tried to pull his gun only to get tackled by a big furry guy who looked like something from a children’s book. The remaining goons went down under a scrum of uniformed patrol officers, including one who looked like she was half racing hound, and some ass-ugly bug-eyed motherfucker. The shout
ing drew the captain (Mendelberg, according to the door) from her office.

  Mollie closed the transdimensional doorways. It left her conveniently alone with the cash drawers, free to empty them at her leisure. She could hear people elsewhere in the casino, now that the power saw had been silenced. But the hookers were unlikely to bother her.

  The drawers were locked. So she created an opening in the wall and reached through to her parents’ barn in Idaho, where she snagged a crowbar. Within moments tens of thousands of Kazakh tenge and a random assortment of other currencies fluttered onto her bed in North Dakota. It looked like mounds of Monopoly money. Less than five minutes was all she needed to empty the casino of its last day’s take. She didn’t know how much it was worth in real money. Maybe not as much as it looked. The exchange rate probably sucked diseased donkey balls.

  What the hell, she thought. She went back to the slot machines. She left the thug and hookers to their pillowcases, but there were still dozens of machines that hadn’t yet been broken open. Mollie opened another opening to her family barn and dropped the slot machines through one by one. A whiff of manure entered the casino. Turned out a fully-laden slot machine made a racket to wake the dead when it crashed onto the hard-packed dirt floor of a barn. It frightened the cows, too. They started lowing. Dad and Brent came to investigate the noise while she was working on the fourth slot machine.

  Her dad took all of two seconds to examine the mess in the barn. He shouted at the hole in space. “Mollie! What in the hell are you doing? You’re scaring the cows, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Hi, Daddy. You wanna round up the boys and get to work? Those slot machines are hard to open, but they’re full of cash.”

  Brent squinted at the Cyrillic script on the battered machines. “Uh, where did these things come from?”

  Mollie said, “No place you’ve ever heard of, dumbass.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who are you trying to rob this time? Who you gonna get killed this time? I don’t want to get stabbed again, you know.”

  “Hey! Screw you—”

  “SHUT UP! Both of you,” said their father. He licked his lips. “Brent, go fetch your brothers. Mollie, I see another row of machines behind you that ain’t been touched yet, so keep at it.”

  It wasn’t We love you, it wasn’t We miss you, it wasn’t even Why don’t you come home and help out on the farm for a while. Not that she would ever go back to the farm. But it would be nice to know she was welcome. That she had a home to return to, if she wanted it. She didn’t. But still.

  Gazing into the barn, she glimpsed a length of coiled hose. It gave her an idea. “Hey, Daddy? Do you still have those hydraulic tools you bought at auction?” A couple of years before her card had turned, Mollie’s father had scooped up a lot of machinery in an estate sale.

  “Yeah, it’s around. Why?”

  Because slot machines were petty cash. But real wealth could be found in safes and fireboxes. And she knew where she could find a few. “I think I’ll need them. I’m gonna try to snag a safe or two.”

  The squad room was like many others the Angel had seen in pursuit of her duties. Smaller and shabbier than most and also not as active. The Angel could sense that something was going on and as she exchanged glances with Billy, she knew that he realized it as well.

  This was not a happy place. One or two of the cops were engaged in processing possible felons or were desultorily picking away at their computer keyboards with a couple of fingers. One, a big furry guy frowning with concentration who looked like a cross between an escaped Muppet and a child’s nightmare, used only one finger at a time from his big, clawed paws and even so, in the brief look that Angel got, seemed to spend a lot of time backspacing and retyping.

  This being the Jokertown precinct, there were other unusual-looking cops. But they weren’t working. They were gathered in twos and threes in various corners of the usually busy room and engaged in quiet, almost ominous conversations. Most looked up at the four as they passed through.

  Clearly, Lonnegan felt it, too. She stopped at the door to the corridor that led to the inner offices and turned back to the squad room with a frown.

  “Slow crime day, people?” she asked. She continued to watch as the small groups broke up and people headed back to their desks, the various file cabinets standing against the dull-painted walls, or the coffeemaker. A few donuts were left in the open boxes on the adjacent table. The Angel felt like she could use half a dozen.

  The inner corridor was furnished with vending machines and a few scarred benches. It was in better shape than the outer chambers. It led to a small number of private offices, two of which had names on them. Joan led them to the office labeled CAPTAIN CHAVVAH MENDELBERG and knocked smartly. They entered at the sound of a muffled “Come in.” Stevens and Lonnegan stood near the desk.

  The Angel was a little surprised to see that the neat little office was cleaner, brighter, and had clearly been recently renovated with new and tasteful furniture and accoutrements, like the attractive carpet on the floor. Handmade and foreign, the Angel thought. She didn’t know if that made it more, or less, expensive, but she was inclined to think the former. Captain Mendelberg was behind a neatly kept and recently refinished desk, nice-looking but nothing out of the ordinary, leafing through a report file. She was a young woman, maybe her mid-thirties, the Angel judged, and smart and driven to have already obtained such a high rank in the police force. She’d been touched by the wild card. Her skin was a not unattractive shade of olive, but nothing you’d want for a complexion, and her ears were prominent and frilly, as if she had special-effect alien ears for some kind of science fiction movie. They moved in a disturbing manner, seemingly independent of each other and maybe without control by their owner.

  “Well.” She set her papers down and looked up. Her expression was more prim than neutral, the Angel thought, and she was more than annoyed at their presence but hadn’t entirely decided how to respond. “To what do I owe the honor of a visit by federal agents, Mr. Ray?”

  “Kidnapping across state lines,” Ray replied, pleasantly enough.

  Mendelberg frowned. “I don’t undertand.”

  “Kazakhstan is not on Long Island, Captain,” Ray informed her pleasantly, and her olive complexion deepened.

  “I’m missing an agent, Captain,” Ray said with a degree of calmness that meant he was getting ready to blow. “He took off for Kazakhstan with one of your boys. Neither of them is back, but I did hear that a boatload of jokers ended up here last night—”

  Mendelberg’s eyes snapped upon Stevens and Lonnegan, standing together. Her mouth clicked shut and she said coldly, “That incident is still under investigation.”

  Ray opened his mouth to say something angry and, probably, the Angel thought, regrettable, but she grabbed his arm and hissed, “Listen!”

  There were sounds coming from the squad room. Strange, mixed sounds of heavy objects hitting the floor, raised voices, barely discernible, some possibly not shouting in English, and then, finally, gunfire.

  “What the hell?” Ray asked, whirled, and headed for the door.

  But Stevens was closest. He threw it open and rushed out into the corridor, but before he could take more than a step, he tripped over something in the doorway and fell flat in the hall. The Angel, right behind Ray, looked over her husband’s shoulder, an expression of horror on her face.

  “Jamal!” the Angel cried out.

  “I’m afraid so,” Ray said. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Jamal Norwood’s battered corpse had been laid out before the door to the captain’s office. There was no doubt that he was dead. His face had been smashed by either some object or a brutally powerful fist and one eye was hanging from its broken socket. The other was staring blankly. Ray hunkered down before the body, put his fingers on Norwood’s cheek as Lonnegan and Mendelberg joined them at the doorway. Stevens had scuttled back to his feet and was looking at Norwood’s corpse in horror.

  “Sorry??
?didn’t see him, not at all—”

  His voice stumbled to a halt as Ray looked around.

  “He’s cold. Been dead for a while.”

  His words were punctuated by gunshots. Louder now that they were out in the hall, and much more numerous.

  “Nothing we can do for him,” Ray clipped.

  He stepped over the body into the hall.

  “Come on,” he said, and went down the hall. The Angel and Lonnegan on his heels, Stevens right behind.

  It took only moments to reach the chaotic squad room. The Angel blinked. It couldn’t have been any different than it’d been the moment they’d left it. Armed thugs were squared off with knots of cops. Another suddenly fell from the ceiling and crashed onto facing desks, feetfirst. He staggered, dropping a bag, and coins fell tinkling to the floor, scattering everywhere. The newcomer rose reaching for a gun and before he knew it Billy Ray was on him. He had five inches and fifty pounds on Ray, but it did him no good. Ray took care of him while the Angel looked to the ceiling. There was a hole in it, as round and smooth as if it had been bored out by a corkscrew, and a head was looking down at the chaotic scene below.

  Tesseract! The name flashed into the Angel’s mind. The American Hero ace who had already racked up an unsavory reputation as a thief, but had never yet been caught red-handed or even arrested. Had she killed Jamal?

  The Angel ran forward three steps and called her wings to her and surged up into the sky, but the startled young ace snapped shut the portal before the Angel could reach her. Frustrated, the Angel did a snap roll and caught one of the gunmen from behind. He screamed as she lifted him up from the floor and threw him hard against a wall. Plaster cracked and rained down upon the donuts sitting naked in their boxes. A sharp burst of gunfire destroyed the coffeemaker and hot liquid spewed over that quarter of the room, sending combatants scurrying for safety from the boiling coffee. An scruffy-looking one-eared tomcat sat under a nearby desk and yowled, his tail blown up to the size of a bathroom brush.