Mister White
(a Johnny Zero casefile)
Michael McClung
Copyright 2011 Michael McClung
Smashwords edition
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Alfonse Martinez steepled his blunt, manicured fingers in front of his heavy face. He was looking down at the empty acre of his desk. He hadn't acknowledged me since I'd been led into his office. I sat, patiently, waiting.
"They say you hate magic,” he finally said. “Is that true?"
"I have lots of issues," I replied. "Some of them are with magic." I glanced around his office at the top of the Straylight Building. It was furnished in early obscene wealth; heavy furniture made from rare woods, carved in pointlessly intricate detail. Counterpoints were the hideously expensive framed blobs of color. Modern art. Or is it abstract art? Sharkie would've known.
"Issues with magic. And yet you choose to live here in Miracle City, magic's beating heart, as it were."
I considered making a crack about dry climates and doctor's orders, but I was sitting across from the man who'd built Miracle City up from the Nevada desert; replacing sand, sagebrush and shadscale with a metropolis. A modern day Bugsy Siegel, no less crazy and far more dangerous. So I played it straight.
"A man's gotta work, Mister Martinez. And for a man with my talents and inclinations, this city is the only place guaranteed to keep me gainfully employed."
"Yes. About your talent," he said, leaning forward in his throne-like leather chair. "If I'm going to hire you, I will require a demonstration."
"I don't do parlor tricks, Mister Martinez. Doesn't work like that. And no offense, but I don't know if I'm willing to be hired. You haven't even told me what the job is about."
"It's about one million dollars someone stole from me. But first things first, Mister Zero." He reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a pistol, and straight-armed it at my chest. I froze.
This crazy bastard thinks I'm bulletpr-
The impact flung me and my chair back onto the maroon pile carpeting. It knocked the wind right out of me. After a few seconds I managed to work my way up to a kneeling position. Martinez sat like a statue as a golem detached itself from a shadowed corner of the room, righted the chair and dumped me into it, careful not to make contact with my bare flesh. Then it made itself scarce again.
When I'd clawed my breath back, I unbuttoned my shirt with shaking fingers and peeled the deformed slug off my sternum. I tossed it onto his desk. It skittered toward him with a tik-tik sound, and he trapped it with one meaty, pampered hand.
"You owe me a shirt," I said.
"Spelled ammunition. They say no magic can harm you. They say you negate magic. I needed to know if your reputation was bullshit."
"You could have asked."
He continued talking as if I hadn't. "There's a white guy who's rigging the roulette wheel at the Four Queens. He's taken a million dollars in two nights. Nobody knows how he's doing it. It has to be magic, though that shouldn't be possible. I want you to shut him down."
“What does it matter that he's white? I'm white, in case you hadn't noticed.”
“No, you're Caucasian. This guy is white. Not Caucasian, not albino. Sheet-of-paper white.”
“Ok, that's weird.” I rubbed my sternum. There was going to be a bruise. “Are you sure he's cheating? Maybe he's just really lucky.”
Alphonse just gave me a flat stare.
“Right.”
“Go talk to Varger at the Four Queens. And Zero, I don't want word of the casino having to hire you getting out onto the evening news." Martinez was famous for his revulsion of the press. He'd grown up in the bad old days, when witch hunts weren't a figure of speech.
"My fees-"
He waived his hand. Money wasn't something he was going to waste time discussing with the likes of me.
"Submit your bill. Triple it if you get rid of the problem by tomorrow."
"I guess I'd better get to work then," I said.
"See my assistant on the way out. She'll give you a file on what we have."
I recognized a dismissal when I heard one. I stood and started toward the door.
"Mister Zero."
I turned back, and he flicked the deformed slug at me. I plucked it out of the air and dropped it into my pocket.
"Souvenir," he said.
I grunted and walked out of the office of the creator and de facto ruler of the City of Mages, closing the door silently behind me.
The assistant's name was Alice, and she pushed the blue arch-lever file across the desk towards me as if she was feeding meat to an alligator. Considering just how much she looked like a goddess, she was almost certainly deeply invested in glamour. Wouldn't want a stray touch from Johnny Zero to wipe out her makeup.
"Don't worry, doll. That's why I wear the gloves," I said, smiling a little bitterly.
Her luscious mouth got hard and a perfect brow arched. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Skip it." I picked up the file and started to walk away.
"You think this is glamour, Mister Zero?" There was indignation in that cultured voice. I turned back around. I was feeling a little indignant myself.
"Yeah, I think it's glamour, sweetie. Why else would you act like you were passing documents to a leper, unless you thought I was going to wipe away your paint job?"
"Maybe because people who get shot in Mr. Martinez' office don't generally walk out whistling." There was a little color in her cheeks now.
"Happens all the time, does it? Whatever."
"Fine." She thrust out one hand. I considered it a while.
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
"Touch it."
I smiled and took her bare hand in my gloved one. Then I laid a gentle breath of a kiss on the back of it.
"What do you know," I said, looking up into her triumphant gray eyes.
I didn't bother opening the file in the taxi on the way back to the office. That was just asking for a bout of car sickness. Instead, I lay my head back and tried to ignore the ache in my chest.
It didn't work. I pulled the slug out of my pocket, rolled it around on my palm.
If it had been mundane ammunition, I'd have had a hole in my chest. But it had had a spell put on it, and I was Johnny Zero, the guy who'd tied his own magic into knots. Neither fish nor fowl. So instead of being dead, I had a bullet hole in my shirt and a client whose interview process included a Glock. And a date with a goddess named Alice, if I played my cards right.
Just another day in Miracle City.
I smiled to myself and looked out the window at the city my prospective date's boss had built. In the daytime, it looked pretty much like any other city in the Southwest. At least in the business district. Things got a little hairier – sometimes literally – in other parts of town.
The taxi took me down Indio Avenue, past low-rise office buildings, glass and concrete and faux adobe strobing by my unfocussed eyes, a monotonous textured pattern broken eventually by the gaudy, neon-strangled multi-story monolith that is the Miracle City Coach Terminal.
It was getting along towards evening, and the tour buses were starting to fill up and roll out. Some would shuttle back and forth to the suburbs, the strip malls and motels, the tract housing and the golf resorts that encircled Miracle City like a grubby fairy ring. Others would make the long haul to Fresno, to Vegas, Tahoe, and L.A. All would be gone by sundown, by order of King Alfonse.
About the same time McCarthy started waiving around his list of card-carrying wizards, Alfonse Martinez bought up a huge swathe of Nevada desert and started construction on Miracle City. But it wasn't until the internment camps debacle, following hard on the heels of the ill-fated Mage Registration Act, that the big man set Miracle City firmly into Brigadoon mode. Whenever political ill-winds began to blow the city's way, it just disappeared. For weeks, even months at a time. A lot of ugliness had gotten avoided that way.
Over the course of the last half-century the country had come to an accommodation with the mages in its midst, but Martinez had never forgotten the Bad Old Days. And he wanted to make sure nobody else forgot, either, which is why the city ceases to exist for mundanes from sundown till sunup.
The tour buses come and the tour buses go, but they come and go during daylight hours, and virtually all the mundanes with them. A non-mage who decides to stay after hours without permission will get the Cinderella treatment, suddenly finding himself surrounded by sagebrush and salt grass, the city around him having gone poof.
As for me, like I said. I'm neither fish nor fowl. Come night time, the City doesn't vanish around me.
But it sure does change.
Sharkie had a cold. Her sneezes were resonant booms all down the long hallway that led to the office. They rattled the frosted glass of our entry door.
And what a door it is. Painted in gold leaf edged in black was a head-sized null sign with the word 'INVESTIGATIONS' underneath. Underneath that, in small print, it stated "Our hours of operation are irregular. If the door won't open, it means we aren't here. Banging won't help. Call ahead next time. Justice may never rest, but we do. Occasionally."
Classy ain't in it.
The holding pen, or client area as Sharkie prefers I call it, was empty. I closed the door and hollered out "If you bust the door glass again you're paying for it!" She was too busy sneezing her head off to reply, but I could feel malice oozing out from under her door.
The office isn't much. A waiting room with half a dozen chairs, a few lifeless magazines on my side and some silk flower frou-frou on hers. As you walk in, you're confronted with a black door on the left, and a red one on the right. The black one's mine. The colors don't mean a damned thing except we fought each other to a standstill over the interior décor. Her tastes run to Nagel prints and Zen flower arrangements. Mine are more along the lines of water stains and fly specks. Neither one of us can comfortably claim the aesthetic high ground, in my book.
I went into my office, tossed the file on my battered desk, and flung myself into my decrepit swivel chair. Glanced at the water stained, fly specked clock above the door. Less than five minutes before the Change. We definitely wouldn't be getting any more mundane clients today.
"You want a drink?" I shouted.
"Id a bidit," came her muffled reply.
I pulled the bottle out of its drawer, along with a couple tumblers. I didn't bother to pour. She preferred to mix her whisky with a shudder-inducing amount of diet cola, which I refused on principle to do for her, and I wouldn't need to pull my socks up until after the Change.
Sharkie's door opened and she shuffled into my office. She was wearing one of her endless supply of razor-sharp suits and her favorite pink fuzzy bunny slippers. Her eyes were red and her nose was buried in a wad of tissue. The very image of a prime mage – not giving a rat's ass what anybody thought of her. I thought she was a knockout, but there was no way I was ever going to go there.
Sharkie's platinum blond hair was caught up almost randomly in a handful of Hello Kitty clips. Her red-rimmed blue eyes looked more rabbity than sharky at the moment. I wisely did not comment on the fact, having a well-honed sense of self-preservation.
She pulled a sweating can of diet cola out of her suit pocket and plunked it on the desk. Then plunked herself into the client's chair. Sighed. Wiped irritably.
"How'd it go with King Alphonse?"
"All right. Except for the part where he shot me."
A sharp glance at that. "Spill it," she said, cracking open the can and mixing some self-medication.
I did, briefly.
She started to ask something, but I held up a hand. The Change was coming. It always starts with a harmonic hum down in my bones, and my bones were humming. I put my head down on the desk. Then the universe slammed into my puny little consciousness, and I spent the next small eternity hanging onto my sanity while the city stuffed itself down the rabbit hole.
The World, reduced to a monstrous, slowing heartbeat. With each beat, my definition of “reality” changed radically. Every sundown is pretty much the same.
For a mage, the world is never truly silent. It whispers at you constantly, asleep or awake, the power a subtle, unending susurrus. That much I know, a certainty that comes from much deeper down than memory. The pulse of the world is always there, and you only notice it in its absence.
The world has been a silent place for me for a long time. But during the Change, I feel magic’s heartbeat. Twice a day I am reminded of what I gave up.
Well. They say that when you lose one of your senses, the others get sharper.
Three heartbeats, and then the city beat down on my inner eye like it wanted to scour away my very identity.
It is an insane pummeling of sensory overload, too much to ever sort through or take in. When the King of Miracle City pulls the switch, I see it, all of it, the whole city spread out before me, everywhere at once. I see the bones and tendons, the muscles and cartilage and blood and guts of Alfonse's creation. And then I see it turn itself inside out.
Watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat. Now watch me pull a hat out of this rabbit.
But I've gotten better a handling it. For the longest time I'd just curl up into a fetal ball for hours after. Nowadays there's just the loss of consciousness, a touch of twitching, a dash of drooling if I'm unlucky, and then I'm back in the land of the conscious.
But I can still see.
The lying clock said I was out for less than a minute. During the interval, Sharkie had opened the file and was flipping through its contents, absently dabbing at her ruler-straight nose. With shaking hands I poured a stiff one into the tumbler, then shrugged and tipped my head and the bottle back. Shuddered. Did it again.
"You're a class act, Johnny."
I saw no point in acknowledging the obvious, so I leaned back in my chair and panted, eyes closed, hand curled around the bottle of Jack. I needed to build up my intestinal fortitude before I could look at her after dark.
After a while she slid papers back into the file and laid it in her lap. I sighed, girded my metaphorical loins and looked at my partner.
After sundown I can see her in her power, and her glory.
Snakes of raw energy rumbled and twitched around her spare frame, pale blue and icy violet. Intricate glyphs tattooed her hands from the fingertips up, disappearing into her French cuffs, randomly changing positions. An actinic glare had replaced her baby blues, slightly dulled by her physical discomfort.
If anything, she is more beautiful to my night eyes, and even more out of reach. Oh, and scare-the-piss-out-of-you powerful.
"So. Where are you going to start?" she asked me.
"By reading the file, I guess."
"You haven't even looked at the file yet?"
"I get carsick when I try and read in a moving vehicle."
"My partner, Johnny Zero. Always on the case — unless, of course, his tummy might feel funny."
"My partner, Sharkie Sullivan. Prime mage that can't manage to get rid of a cold."
"It's not a cold. It's hay fever, and you don't kill a gnat with an atom bomb."
“There's no such thing as hay fever in the desert, Sharkie.”
“Tell that to my sinuses.” She stood up. "Call me later, after you, I don't know, actually read the file maybe. I'm going home to lie down."
"Try an antihistamine why don't you?" I said to her retreating back. She fluttered a fistful of tissues at me and was gone.
"Well, hell," I sighed. "Better get to work."
The file contained a lot of bah blah about the casino security measures, the specific antique roulette wheel that was being rigged, the in-house security's analysis of how it should not be possible to rig any game in the Four Queens. Snore inducing cover-your-ass, pad out the report to your boss crap. But there were security photos of Mr. White.
One look at the guy and you knew he was not human.
Oh, he had all the correct limbs and digits, and his face had all the bits and pieces in the right places. I'm even secure enough in my masculinity to admit the guy was seriously handsome. But even in the still image, you got a sense that something was different about him, besides the lack of pigment. Something wrong. Something inhuman.
I studied the photo, a profile shot, head and shoulders. White hair, white skin, classic Roman nose, pouty white lips, sensitive yet brooding eyes. Strong jaw, chiseled chin. Muscled yet somehow esthetically proportioned neck disappearing into the collar of a button-down shirt, under a light-colored jacket.
I stared at it a while and tried to figure out what was so off about Mr. White, besides the lack of color. I mean, you get all types in Miracle City, especially after nightfall, and this guy wasn't screamingly weird like some others. Eventually it hit me. Even in this candid shot, his features were utterly composed. It was as if he had spent his entire life being stared at, and his face had settled into one look. As if, waking or sleeping, he'd look exactly the same.
I shook myself, took another slug of Jack with a breath mint chaser. I changed my shirt and put my sunglasses on to help with the sensory overload, and then went out to catch a cab to the Four Queens.
Varger was a little man with a big chip on his shoulder. He was head of security, and Mister White was making him look bad. He assumed me being called in was making him look worse. I mean, he was right, but that was no reason to take it out on me.
I could see the magic coursing around him, even with my shades on. He didn't hold a candle to Sharkie; but then, who does?
His first words to me were “Take those freaking sunglasses off, punk. Who do you think you are, Corey Hart?” He was hunched behind his desk in a chair that was too big for him. Behind him was a bank of monitors, each displaying a live feed of a different part of the casino. It looked like what I imagine any casino head of security's office would look like, except for the big-ass crystal ball on the edge of the desk, and all the fetishes strung from wires hanging off the drop-ceiling.
I sat down in the visitor's chair of his cramped little office. “Actually I was going more for a Judd Nelson look,” I said.
He stared at me blankly.
“Bender? Breakfast Club? Ring a bell?”
“You look like an asshole. Besides that, casino policy is no sunglasses.”
I stood up again. “They're not a fashion accessory, Varger. I've got a condition. But since I left my doctor's note at home, I guess I'll just let Mister Martinez know I couldn't do the job he hired me for because you wanted to play tin-pot dictator.”
He glared at me, and finally grated out “Sit down, asshole.”
I did. I even managed to keep the smirk off my face.
“You read the report?” he asked
“I tried. You used a lot of big words, though, and didn't say very much. I'm more of a verbal guy anyway.”
“You're really pissing me off, you know that?”
“Then why don't you tell me what I need to know so I can do my job and get out of your hair? Well, what's left of it.”
There was a vein in his forehead. It was throbbing. With what appeared to be a supreme act of will, he turned away from me and pointed to one of the monitors. A close-up of Mister White, sitting impassively at a roulette table.
“There's your man. For the last three nights he's shown up just after dark, walked straight to that particular roulette table, put his money down on zero, and won spin after spin.”
“Of course. Zero always wins.”
Varger gave me another flat stare.
“Because my name is Zero? You get it, right?”
Silence.
“Say, did you have your sense of humor surgically removed or something?”
“Moving on. Everybody else in the house, practically, followed his bets the first night.”
“What about the second night?”
“They got warned off.” He smiled. It was an ugly smile.
“Why not just shut the table down?”
“Oh, we never thought of that. Thank you, Mister Zero, for saving us from bankruptcy. Of course we shut the table down, asshole. Winnings are capped at half a million per day. But that particular wheel is one of the star attractions of the Four Queens.”
“Why that one particularly?”
He stared at me, disgust plain on his face. “You really didn't read the report, did you?”
“Honestly, I tried. But the words were so big, and it was so boring –“
Varger leaned forward on his desk, propped an elbow on its faux-wood top, and propped his lumpy forehead head on the heel of a sweaty palm. “Ok, time for a history lesson, Zero. Try to stay awake.
“In 1873 Joseph Jaggers, along with six assistants, took the Monte Carlo casino for $325,000 – an astronomical wad of cash at the time – by charting thousands of spins. He found a bias in the wheel. In the gambling world, the story is famous. Alphonse found, bought and restored the wheel. He has staked the casino's reputation for fairness, impartiality and invulnerability against cheats on that damned wheel, magical or mundane. We can shut down the table for servicing, but we can't take it off line indefinitely. It would give the casino, and Alphonse, a smack right in the reputation.
“Long story short, to keep you from dozing off: This has turned into a contest of wills, in a way. This guy versus the House. If magic can cheat the casino, we're screwed. Every two-bit grifter and con artist with an ounce of magical ability will descend on the place, and the honest gamblers will go elsewhere. Therefore magic cannot be allowed to cheat the casino. ”
“Well ok then,” I said. “Let's go not allow it. Show me to the table.”
Varger stayed in his den. He had a big beefy guy with a crew cut lead me out to the floor. The guy didn't have much magic, and what he did have was Simple Simon stuff, but what I could see rolling off him all said hurt you bad, more or less. Perfect security type, probably very happy with his work. His high school career counselor must have been justifiably proud. We didn't chat much.
We passed slots and craps tables, Pontoon and Texas Hold 'Em, Pai Gow and Baccarat. I was no expert, but the crowd looked pretty thin. Then we got to the roulette wheels.
They were five deep around the table Mister White was sitting at, alone. Crew cut sort of growled, and the crowd parted like magic. I glanced at the digital rolling results board. It was green zeros all the way down. I looked over at the min/max bet placard. Minimum bet was five dollars. Maximum bet was five dollars. They hadn't shut the table down, but at 35:1 winnings, they were making him get his money the long way around.
They hadn't roped the table off, but they might as well have. I stepped out of the crowd and sat down in the chair on Mister White's left side. Took a good look at him.
Every mage's power manifests itself differently to my sight, but the one thing they all seem to have in common is that it manifests in somewhat general, regular shapes. I saw Sharkie's power as glyphs and ropes. Crew Cut had ugly looking jags around his hands and mouth. Varger's power coiled like steel cables around his balding head, a glowing, gunmetal gray.
Mister White was something different.
There was power in him, but it was diffuse. As if every molecule of his body had been dipped in faint light. I'd never seen anything like it before. I pulled my sunglasses down to get an unfiltered look, and immediately regretted it. I closed my suddenly watering eyes, and his afterimage stood out starkly on my protesting retinas. It took me a few seconds to blink the tears away.
In the interval, the ball dropped, and the croupier announced 'zero' and placed the heavy glass marker atop White's chip on the felt covered table, even though there were no other players. After a few seconds he removed the marker and stacked $175 worth of chips on top of White's original five buck bet. Kabuki Theater in a casino. What will they think of next.
In a mechanical yet oddly graceful manner, White collected his winnings, leaving the original five dollar chip behind. I noticed that the wrist that peeked out beneath the shirt cuff was completely hairless.
The croupier got the wheel up to speed again, said 'place your bets' in a terminally bored fashion, released the little white marble, waited maybe fifteen seconds, then waved his hands over the table, saying 'no more bets'. White ignored me. His attention was on the ball.
I watched process repeat itself.
On the third iteration I said “Don't you find this a bit dull?”
He turned to me, fractionally, and said “I don’t really get bored.”
“God, I do. I think they called it Attention Deficit Disorder, but I wasn't really listening.”
White had nothing to say to that, so he didn't.
“You gonna do this all night?”
“I have nothing better to do.”
“So you are bored. This is your way of killing time.”
He smiled a little, but I could tell it wasn't at me. “Time is not killable. Even after the heat death of the universe, time will carry on.”
“Not that it would matter if there's nobody to watch the clock,” I said, and shrugged. “Too existential for me, friend. I'm just here to ask you to stop messing with the game.”
“What do you mean, Mister --?”
“Zero. Johnny Zero. And I mean there are some people who aren't very happy with you. I don't like to use harsh language, but there is a rumor going around that you might be cheating, just a little bit.”
He arched one white brow. “Is it cheating to use one's natural advantages in pursuit of one's goals?”
“I'm going to pretend I understood that sentence and say that if you are influencing a game of chance so that the results are no longer random, then yeah, that's one of the classic definitions of cheating.”
“Oh. Well I guess I'm cheating, then.” He turned back to collect another $175.
“Then I'm going to have to ask you to stop. The whole cheating thing, I mean.”
“Why?”
“Why do I have to ask you, or why stop cheating?”
He shrugged. “Either.”
“I have to ask you because the man who owns this casino hired me to make you stop. The simplest way for that to happen is for me to ask, and you to agree.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you'll stop?” I actually got a little hopeful.
“Yes, that would be the simplest way. No, I'm not going to stop.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven't got what I want yet.” I waited for him to continue, but he didn't.
“Ok, I'll bite. What do you want?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I asked, didn't I?”
“Very well, I'll tell you. I want that little white marble that keeps spinning around the big wheel with all the numbers on it.”
I gave him the look that Varger had given me, back in his office. “That's it?” I finally managed.
“I asked for it the first night I came here, but the gentleman who spins the wheel said it wasn't for sale. I asked him how much money it would take to change the owner's mind about selling it, and he said 'Anything from this wheel? Maybe millions.' Apparently this is a special wheel.”
“Don't remind me,” I muttered.
“So I began to earn the millions required to purchase the ball. It all went rather quickly at first. Though now that they've changed the amount it's permissible to bet, it may take some time.”
I rubbed my face. “Can I ask why you want the ball, Mister --?”
“David.”
“Mister David--”
“No, just David.”
“Fine, Just David, why do you want the freaking roulette ball?”
“It is from the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara.”
“The what in the where?”
“The Fantiscritti marble quarry in Carrara, Italy.”
“How do you even know that?”
“Like calls to like. You suspect I am using magic to influence the outcome of this game, Mister Zero, but it's not as simple as that. I was not born with magic. I was born of magic, at the hands of a master. There, spinning round and round, is a tiny piece of the same stuff as me, chiseled off the block my maker selected at Fantiscritti. How it ended up here, I'll never know. It doesn't matter. The person who hired you may own it, but it belongs to me. It is the flesh of my flesh, if flesh I had.”
I reached out and touched his hand then, gloves off. It was cold and hard as marble. He flexed his fingers, and, that hardness, without softening, gained a suppleness and a pliability that is difficult to describe. I sucked in a breath, stunned, though not about that.
My magic-nullifying magic had no effect whatsoever on him.
That wasn't possible.
I'm considered a sport, a freak by many mages. I creep them out. Now I knew exactly how they felt, because I was feeling it about this guy.
“A mage created you?”
“A maestro created me.”
“Same thing.”
“Yes,” he said, pulling in another $175 to add to the stack, “and no.”
“What was your maestro's name?”
“Michelangelo di Lodovici Buonarroti Simoni.”
“So how old are you, Just David?”
“Six hundred years, more or less.”
“I'm guessing I've seen pictures of your big brother.”
“It's likely.”
“And if I get you that marble, you'll leave the casino alone?”
“I'm not much of a gambler, truth be told, though I do like a challenge.”
“I'll be right back.”
I could have just taken the ball and passed to him. Varger might have complained, but screw Varger. Alphonse wanted his million back. Just David wanted to buy it. I made the arrangements and everybody who mattered was happy.
Well, except for Sharkie. She bitched me out later for forgetting to call her before going down to the casino. Wanted to see an original Michelangelo with her own eyes. When I asked her if she knew Michelangelo had been a mage, her reply was 'you don't have to do magic to be a magician’, which was pretty wise even if it didn't answer the question.
I didn't really care about that. Just David wasn't a piece of art as far as I was concerned, whatever his origins, and not just because he was sentient.
I had touched him with my bare flesh. Nothing had happened, though he was suffused with magic.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
That wasn't even supposed to be possible.
The Gordian knot I had tied in my own magic was supposed to be permanent, irreversible.
Just David showed me that knot contained a loophole. And I didn't know whether to be elated or terrified. Mostly I just didn't want to think about it, what it could mean. I hate history, especially my own.
When I went to pick up my check from King Alphonse, the bonus was nice. The goddess who guarded his office door, however, had been replaced by a crone.
“What happened to Alice?” I asked her. She just shrugged.
I figured she'd gotten cold feet when she saw my appointment in Alphonse's planner and took a powder to avoid any embarrassment. The familiar feeling of bitterness settled on me like an old scratchy sweater – comfortable yet irksome at the same time.
She ushered me into The Presence.
Besides a change of clothes, it looked like he hadn't moved since I last saw him. He looked up at me from a report on his desk and gestured to a chair. I sat.
“You owe me an antique roulette ball, Mister Zero.”
“Well you owe me an off the rack button-down shirt, Mister Martinez. Can we call it even?”
“I suppose.” He looked at me with those scary dark eyes of his, scary because they never showed an ounce of emotion, or a hint of what he was thinking.
“You know, I've run into all types in my life, Zero. Even yours.”
“What's my type, Mister Martinez?”
“The type that makes things hard on himself on purpose.”
“I've been assured by those who would know that I've got a broad streak of lazy running right down the middle of me. The hard way doesn't appeal to me, honest.”
“Is that why you turned your own magic in on itself? Because it was the easy way?”
I looked at him for a while. I wanted to be angry, could feel the impulse to tell him to fuck off rise to my lips. But it was just a rote response.
“You want to know the truth, Alphonse?”
“I do.”
“The truth is, what I did to my magic wasn't supposed to turn me into some null void, some guy who can erase magic. It was supposed to erase me. But things didn't quite go according to plan.”
He grunted. Then he slid open a desk drawer and took out a check. It was for considerably more than triple my fee.
“I'll call you again when I have work for you.”
I put the check in my pocket and stood up. “I'll be happy to oblige you, Mister Martinez, as long as you go easier on my wardrobe.”
I considered the check as I rode the elevator down. Sharkie would be happy – we split everything 50/50, neither of us having patience for filling out time sheets or haggling over workloads. For myself, I was feeling curiously empty and dissatisfied. I told myself firmly that it had nothing to do with disappointment over a grey-eyed goddess named Alice.
When the doors opened, I strode across the lobby towards the taxi stand, feeling grim and a little sorry for myself, despite the comforting number of digits on the check in my pocket.
“Better watch out, Mister Zero,” said a voice ahead of me. “Looking like that that, people will think Zero is only half your name.”
Alice stood by the big revolving door, and the afternoon sun struck sparks of copper fire from her hair.
“Oh yeah? What's my full name, then?”
“Zero fun? Zero humor? Something like that, anyway.”
“What are you doing down here, Miss Alice? Shouldn't you be upstairs guarding the lion in his den?”
“He gave me the day off.”
“For what?”
“Bad behavior.”
“What did you do?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. He said I should. And as I happened to know you had a little dough coming your way today, I thought you might like to help me out with that.”
I smiled and stuck out an elbow, and she slipped her arm through.
“That sounds like a fine idea, Miss Alice. A fine idea indeed.”
From the author
Dear Reader,
I hope you have enjoyed this free short story. If you’d like to read more Johnny Zero casefiles, rest assured they’re on the way. The next one, ‘Zero Shades of Gray,’ will be available soon (you can take a sneak peek on the next page).
If you’d like to throw some change into the hat, maybe you could purchase the short story collection The Sorcerer’s Lament by yours truly, or the epic fantasy The Thief Who Spat In Luck’s Good Eye. But only if you want to, and only if you can afford it.
Thanks again for reading,
Zero Shades of Gray
Her name was Candy, of course. Candy Apple Gray. Seventeen or eighteen, pretty heavily tattooed and better looking than I had any right to be noticing, she’d been waiting outside the office when I’d arrived that day. I led her through the holding pen, past my partner Sharkie’s door, and into the pit I call an office.
“Candy Apple Gray, huh? So your parents were Hüsker Dü fans?” I asked her after she introduced herself and as she was sitting down across the desk from me. She just stared at me blankly.
“Skip it,” I told her. “How can I help you today, Miss Gray?”
“Just call me Candy.”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“Whatever. There’s been a murder,” she said. “Several, actually.” She didn’t seem all that upset about it. Calm, almost disinterested.
“First, that’s what the cops are for. Second, who got murdered?”
“The cops aren’t interested, because the people who got murdered were all me.”
It was my turn to stare blankly. Then I shook my head, opened the ‘special’ desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of Jack and a relatively clean glass. Oh, don’t judge. It was after lunch, and besides, you try being a private detective in Miracle City. A problem with the sauce is the least of my problems.
“Would you like a Coke or something, Miss Gray?” I asked her.
She shook her head and said “Do you always booze it up at work?”
“Only when a prospective client comes to me to solve the multiple murder of herself,” I replied. “Maybe you should back up and tell it to me from the beginning.”
“Ok. I work at the Cat’s Miao. You know where that is?”
“Yeah.” It was a strip joint out on Butterfield. If she was working there, that meant she was at least eighteen. I felt a little less pervy about noticing her, uh, femininity. “You dance there?”
“No. I’m a cocktail waitress.”
“Ok.”
“This morning there were four bachelor parties turned up at the same time, no reservations. The place was packed with mundanes.” Non-mages, or mundanes, could only come into Miracle City during daylight hours, so places like the Cat’s Miao might be slammed with tourists first thing in the morning. I nodded.
“One of the bartenders was off sick, and three of the dancers never showed up, so two of the other waitresses went into dance rotation. They do that sometimes,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Anyway, when one of the beer kegs went dry the bartender asked me to go down and tap another one. The kegs are in the basement. When I went down there, I heard a noise coming from the boiler room. It sounded like crying. I went to look. When I opened the door I saw three of me lying on the floor. It looked like they’d been stabbed. There was a lot of blood on the floor. One of me was still moving a little, and crying, but she died or passed out just after I opened the door.”
“What happened then?”
“I flipped my shit and ran out of there. I went to the cops, but nobody wanted to listen to me. The guy at the desk said I should talk to a detective. I waited for an hour at the station to talk to a detective and nobody even looked at me. So I left. I looked in the phone book under detective, and there was just you.”
I wasn’t surprised she’d found me in the phone book. In Miracle City, the miracles don’t extend to the internet. Or mobile phones. Or cable television. King Alphonse doesn’t like them, and it’s difficult to string fiber-optic cables to a place that disappears at night anyway. Oh, there are ways to connect to the modern world, but they’re expensive and … unorthodox.
“Ok,” I said. “Now I’m going to ask you a few questions. They might sound stupid and they might sound insulting, but just humor me and answer them anyway.”
“Sure.”
“Are you on drugs?”
“Fuck you, man.”
“So that’s a no. Do you have any twin sisters?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“What sort of magic do you normally work?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a mage, right? That means you have magic. Everybody has their predilection, what they’re good at, what feels natural. What’s your predilection?”
“I—I don’t know.” A troubled look crossed her sensual, if dispassionate features.
“Where do you live?”
“Constantine Apartments, unit 03-27.” That one she said with confidence.
The only problem was that the Constantine Apartments had been torn down almost a year before, to make way for a shopping mall.