“They figured it out a few days ago. I was at work, like you said. I was casual and relaxed, making tips and laying low. Pierre came in. I didn’t think nothing of it. He’s been in before, you know?”
I did know. Pierre Charon was the “personal assistant” to Scott Wyld, hotelier extraordinaire. He was a former enforcer on the local minor league hockey team who found work much more in line with his calling in life after a career-ending fight took him off the ice. He was also well known at the higher end of the local strip club spectrum. I know because we used to go together. We were together at one of those clubs the night I first met Raven.
I’d been hired to work the smaller room in one of Wyld’s casinos. It wasn’t a bad gig and I was mostly filling 250 seats a night, six nights a week. I’d been working with a girl called Catherine, blond and pretty, and she knew how to jiggle when I needed her to distract the audience. But there was nothing there. She was passable as an assistant, but she was a lousy actress. No one bought it when she looked at me lovingly. I was surprised when the audience thought she even liked me. I was a job and nothing more. When she asked for a week off, I gladly let her go. Charon suggested we get Raven to fill in for her. He had a thing for the exotic-looking stripper, and since he worked for my boss, I took his suggestion with a little more seriousness than maybe I should have. He went with me when I asked her to be my assistant.
“Really? I’ve never done that before. I don’t know if I’d be any good.”
“Sure you would, sweetie, it’s easy. Anyone can do it,” explained Pierre.
That wasn’t exactly true, but the reality wasn’t far off. It took looks, the ability to move and smile and point in the right direction at the right time — this was the heart of helping out a magician. Sure, there were others, partners, who did more, who knew more, but what I was asking this girl to do was climb in a box and wiggle her toes at the right time. It wasn’t brain surgery. She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and smiled my approval.
“Yeah, I think you’d be perfect,” I said. She never looked at Pierre again.
We met up the next day to rehearse. After an hour I knew she’d be able to handle the gig. After two I left a message on Catherine’s machine telling her not to come back. Raven and I played it big. Her looks and my magic had us turning ’em away at the door.
Eventually, though, things went the way they’ve always gone with me. I found myself spending a little too much of my paycheck on the tables before I could get out the door. Then it was more than my paycheck and I found myself doing odd jobs for Wyld himself, paying him back by using sleight-of-hand skills honed in years of practice to fuck with big casino winners or illusions to make people believe things which couldn’t possibly be true. And through it all Pierre was there, protecting his boss’s interest. Evidently, those interests included going to see Raven at the club the night before last.
Raven was still talking, still putting the whole story together for me. I guess she thought she owed me that much. “So he comes in and I see him and smile, right? Like always. I was hustling a little bit, over by the bar. I figured I’d wait a few songs and then go say hi. When I looked back, though, he’d been taken to a table in the back, away from the stage.”
I shook my head. “He always likes to be close to the action.”
“That’s what I thought. But Cinnamon took him to the back table and then she came over and whispered in my ear that he really wants to see me. The way she said it, I knew he meant now. So I went over.”
“Those are dark tables. Anything can happen back there.”
Raven smiled. She’d been part and party to a few of those anythings.
My first thought, however, was anything but sexy. Those back tables were the strip club equivalent of a dark alley. You never knew what was waiting for you. Usually you had the bouncers to watch your back, but when those guys worked for the guy who wanted to see you, you had no outs.
And yet she was here, walking and talking.
“I went up to him. I could barely see him, sitting all the way back in the booth. He asked me what I was doing there, now that I was rich.”
I would have expected that. It wasn’t in his nature to waste time. She continued her story. I stopped listening to generalities. I just wanted to know the details. Charon knew about the diamonds. He took her out the back door of the club, cutting her shift short. She ended up in the rear of a van, sucking on a .45 while good ol’ Pierre told her they knew she was in on it. They knew she wasn’t alone, that she couldn’t have done it alone. She was hurt at the insinuation but couldn’t refute it. He never explained how they had pinched her and she never told them it was me.
According to her, my name was on a laundry list of possible masterminds, all minor operators and petty thieves, and she didn’t give up anyone. There was only one other name on that list, besides mine, that was of any concern. I figured that name was the reason I was still alive. Paul Robbins was a thief, and a damn good one. He worked all sorts of odd jobs. I only met him once and he stuck me for the bill. I didn’t think he knew Raven, but then, I wasn’t sure who she knew. All his name told me was they didn’t know for sure I was in on it and there was no profitability in taking out one of your best on a hunch.
“How did you get away?”
“He threw me out the back of the van.”
“Just like that?”
She paused. “He fucked me first, gun still in my mouth.”
That also sounded like him.
“While he did it, he said he was going to do the same thing to whoever helped me.”
I thought about it. I had to ask the question. “And you decided to come to me? They already think I’m guilty, why put me in the thick?”
“They don’t think you’re guilty. They think it was Paul. They just threw your name in to scare me. Pierre never liked you.”
“He liked me fine.”
“Not after we started working together.”
“That why he fucked you?”
“That’s why he didn’t like you.”
I let it sink in. According to her, I was in the clear. I could keep working like nothing ever happened. “So what do you need from me?”
“I told you, I need you to make me disappear. Just because they let me go doesn’t make me free.”
She had a point.
“You make me vanish and I’m gone for good. No one’s the wiser.”
I turned around.
“Remy?”
I could hear the shake in her voice, the need.
“Remy, please.”
“Not here.” I started walking away. I could feel her scamper up behind me. “The warehouse.”
The warehouse was in an industrial area about a quarter-mile from Sunset Park. We shared a block with a custom furniture place, a photographer, and an Internet porn company. I opened the plain front door and let Raven in first. She turned on the lights. I locked the door behind us.
After David Copperfield built Butchy’s Lingerie, the false storefront to mask his warehouse, all the magicians in town wanted to do the same. Unfortunately, we didn’t have Copperfield’s money. I shared the warehouse with two other magicians, both of whom used it primarily as a storage facility. It helped pay the rent. The front office at our place looked like a fabric shop, but that was because it was where we did all the sewing. No hidden doors or electrified toilet seats here. We had the front office, complete with conference/cutting table, a ratty green couch along the wall, and a mini-fridge that was almost never stocked with anything Raven wanted. She looked anyway.
“Still drinking that crap, I see.”