Free Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer by Jeff Somers Page B

from him.
    So anyway: the suit. Black, shiny at the elbows and knees, two mismatched buttons—but it was the first suit I’d ever owned, or worn. Like a sign from fucking god , there had been a matching one that just about fit Mags. Not really fit. You could hear the seams groaning and protesting every time he moved—but close enough. As a man who’d dreamed and then confirmed that magic was real, I was ready and willing to pay attention to signs.
    I didn’t have a cute name for the scheme. A lot of the con artists—the Tricksters, the idimustari, or “little magicians”—that hung around Rue’s had stupid names for every con they pulled. The Hail Mary . The False Friend . The With Two You Get Robbed . Every single con they pulled, they had a playbook for it. Whole conversations, fucking mystifying.
    I hadn’t bothered with the cute name. I was just proud of the mechanics. The same way I’d been proud when I’d put together my first spell, making a pencil float off Hiram’s desk with a pin in my index finger and two Words, just three syllables, and Hiram looking at me with something that was almost respect. Or, if not respect, newfound interest.
    It worked like this: Hit the newspaper want ads and the internet boards, look for house sitting. High end, nice places—but not so nice the owners weren’t nosing around to save themselves some fees and stay away from a service. Show up and nail the interview, maybe a little gas in the air to smooth things out. Or, if you’re hungover, unshaven, and smell a little bit like you’re living in an abandoned car with your oversized platonic companion, bleed out a lot of gas. Then, once you’re living there and the mark is out of the country or wherever, you rent the fucking place. Two months in advance. Cash. From as many people as you can herd in there.
    We’d found our mark easy enough. Four H OUSE S ITTERS W ANTED ads and finally there he was: the Fat Man. Overfed and soft, out of shape, and of the opinion that expensive clothes hid it. Cut as well as clothes could be cut, they did hide his gut through the simple expedient of his jacket hanging like a fucking muumuu, though this also made him seem to glide across the floor as he moved. He had ridiculously tiny feet, too, like little pegs at the end of his legs, which he encased in wasted Italian shoes, beautiful little things that creaked and split under their load. I loved him. He walked into the coffee shop and I sliced my palm, but as I was making him fall in love with me, I was falling in love right back. He had an apartment in Hoboken. Nice place. Two thousand square feet of cherry floors, marble countertops, and polished nickel handles. Six dogs, who needed to be kept alive during the two weeks he would be out of the country. I bled and smiled and Mags hovered, unnoticed, and the Fat Man pursed his slippery lips and considered my grooming and elocution. And then he offered me two thousand dollars for the job, plus, of course, full use of the apartment and the building amenities. Payable when he returned.
    I could have poured the gas on and gotten everything up front. I didn’t want to be greedy, and I didn’t know how much blood I could spare, given my half-starved state.
    Mags didn’t quite understand the idea. For three days he had a frown of Intense Concentration on his face as we waited around town, scarves tight about our necks, hands in our pockets, the fucking suits I’d been so proud of as costuming to impress our marks proving too thin for the winter making me shiver all the time. My shoes were new, at least, the soles thick and the leather shiny, strapped on my feet like they had been made custom, and these gave me hope, made me feel like I had time to figure it all out. Hiram had told me I was going to come crawling back, but my shoes said otherwise.
    I walked Mags through it over and over. But he didn’t quite get how we could rent a place we didn’t actually own. When the day came and we