15: The History of the Great Game, Part III, by Chris Zinn: Deckbearers are usually chosen by one of the deities of their faction, and so you would suppose they are fairly similar people. But that ignores the deep differences on the question of the individual god’s preferences on specific issues. All Nature, Beast, and Plant deities seem to prefer environmentalism, but beyond that, their preferences vary wildly. Garuda, known by other names such as The Great Eagle, is very pro-monogamy, while Vers, the Pack God, is pro-polygamy, even though both are part of the Beast faction. Cheating is a deadly sin to one, and a point of pride to another.

Division within factions isn’t even the weirdest part. Sometimes factions you would think diametrically opposed to one another, such as the Divine and Infernal, come out on the same side of issues as well. While no one knows the opinion of any faction leaders on any specific war, the opinions of certain gods on war in general is well known. Recently, a peace march calling for an end to the war in Greater Chernigov that included the followers of the Archangle Raphael and the Infernal Lord Asmodeus turned violent when followers of Aesthma, the Infernal Lord of Wrath were joined by followers of Gabriel, Archangel of Death in trying to break it up.

***

There was a brief moment of silence in which Wolfe, Shel, and Pearl just glanced around at the room. Melissa carefully lit her cigarette—she needed more than one try—and puffed. Wolfe felt a brief, almost overwhelming desire to ask for one, but pushed it down after a furtive glance at Shel.

There was blood and brain on the wall, blood on the cheap carpet where Melissa had been shot and leaking from the mook’s mouth as well, and bullet holes all through the structure. A window behind Wolfe had a hole in it with a spiderweb crack radiating out from it.

The brief combat had really accentuated the awfulness of the place—the ‘rooms rented by the hour’ signs and all the pictures of half-naked women were terrible if you really thought about it, but splattering everything with blood made the horror immediate and shocking.

The Singh enforcers have their work cut out for them.

Pearl looked green, and gagged once before gathering herself. “Do you think May is going to be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Melissa said. “I’m sorry, I haven’t heard anything.”

Pearl came up to Wolfe, licking her lips and looking up at him. “Wolfe?”

He tried to hold in his sigh—he just knew that someone else was going to ask something of him. “Yeah? What did you want?”

“Umm… if you’re looking for missing girls, can you, maybe, um, keep an eye out for my friend Maybelle?”

“Where is she?” Shel asked. “Did she go missing?”

Pearl nodded. “Yeah. The cops took her to jail on a soliciting charge a month ago, and she hasn’t come back yet.”

“She got thirty days for soliciting?” Wolfe asked, surprised. “Was this a repeat offense?”

Pearl shook her head. “No, first time. She was barely eighteen, fresh in from Northridge. But she didn’t get a conviction. They didn’t take her to court, I’ve been checking every day.”

“That’s illegal,” Shel said. “They have to take her to court within forty-eight hours or let her go, unless a weekend or holiday interferes, and then they can have ninety-six hours. No more.”

“She ain’t been to court,” Pearl said, frowning. “I know that for sure.”

“If we hear something, I’ll let you know,” Wolfe said.

“We’ll make sure we find out, though,” Shel said. “I promise, we’ll find out what happened to Maybelle, and save her if we can.”

Wolfe half growled, but left it. He had literally told Shel that it was her job to save people, and his to take down evil—he could hardly complain that she was following his rules.

Still, whether they saved some whore or not, they needed more information. Wolfe felt like he had ninety percent of the puzzle, and just needed that last ten percent.

His eyes fell on the guy on the ground. He might know something—but I can’t just kill him.

“Shel, please bring the car up. I’m going to grab the mook—we need to question him, find out what the hell they’re doing, exactly. More importantly, how they’re getting away with it all.”

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Shel glanced back at Pearl. “What is Maybelle’s last name?”

“Fontain.”

Shel nodded to Pearl and then took one last gander at the Morning After Inn. She glanced at the blood on the wall, the blood on the ground, the bullet holes in the wall. “Are they going to be able to clean this up?”

Wolfe snorted to hear his thoughts mirrored. “We can discuss the odds of their cleaning crew when we’re on the move with the mook here.”

Shel rolled her eyes but gave Wolfe a nod, heading out the front door to the parking lot.

Wolfe turned to Melissa. “You have a scarf or anything around here? Or a towel I could have?”

"Why?” Melissa asked, but she reached into a different drawer behind the counter and pulled out a thick, pink woolen scarf.

“Because I’m pretty sure that Shel won’t let me kill some thug that surrendered, and I don’t want him knowing who I am. It’ll fix the ‘knowing who I am’ problem.”

Wolfe took the scarf and put it around the head of the mook he had knocked out earlier—it was ridiculous looking, but it did the job.

The action caused the mook to stir and cry out slightly as Wolfe jostled his shattered jaw, however. “Wha’—ow!—‘appened?”

“Shut up,” Wolfe said. “You fucked around, now you found out, with a bonus dose of kicked so hard you forgot the five minutes before I made your dentist rich.”

“Wha’ I evah do you? ‘o ah ‘u?” the thug asked.

Wolfe knew he was being a jackass, but the thugs idiot speech made him want to laugh.

Wolfe very lightly slapped the back of the mooks head. “I said, shut up. In case you can’t tell by the blindfold, the less you know, the better your chances of living are. The more I find out from you, also the better your chances. Even a dumb fuck like you ought to be able to process this.”

The thug must have been able to, because he shut up.

A second later, Shel pulled their Suburu up onto the sidewalk of the Morning After Inn and got out, opening the side door. Wolfe grabbed the mook by his upper arm—cuffed behind his back—and stood him. The mook was wobbly, but Wolfe managed to get him to the door.

“Hey, um… thanks!” Pearl called. “Please don’t forget to find Maybelle!”

Wolfe turned around, and Melissa nodded.

“Yeah,” Wolfe said, glancing around one more time at the absolute mess that the front room was. “We’ll do our best. Don’t forget my money.”

“I won’t,” Melissa said.

“Get in the car, you,” Wolfe said, pushing the blindfolded man toward the back of the Suburu. The guy managed to carefully inch in, crying out softly once when his face hit the back cushion.

Wolfe took the moment to go back and get Shel’s pistol, and then, as an afterthought, took the gun Marco dropped when his head exploded, and the one that his mook—Wolfe still didn’t know the guy’s name—had dropped as well.

Both pistols were the heavy, powerful mark nineteen desert eagle forty-fours, with eight shot capacity. Wolfe was unimpressed—the gun was extremely powerful, but felt more like the kind of gun Marco would use—powerful and showy, but it would run out quickly. He assumed that the mook had just copied his boss, but didn’t know.

Wolfe missed his Edge.

He took the guns, walked back to the car, and got in the front driver side. Shel took the passenger side. Wolfe put both guns in the glove compartment

“You know you—” Shel began.

Wolfe waved his hands and silently mouthed, “be quiet.” The he looked her in the eye and said, “I know.”

Shel smiled, a tremulous thing that quickly faded, but she nodded. “Where are you taking him? You can hardly use the warehouse for this one.”

“I had an amusing thought about that.”

***

It wasn’t even noon yet, and Wolfe stood, in full daylight, in the trainyard. Even during the day it was semi-secluded, and so long as Wolfe didn’t actually fire a gun, he was pretty sure no random passerby would see him—and he suspected the Grimm family, and whatever organization they were selling to, had abandoned the site.

Wolfe touched the back of the mook’s head with the pistol he had looted from Marco. He had already emptied the gun of bullets, and shown Shel.

Everything they were doing was illegal, but if the guy lived and walked, Wolfe strongly suspected no one would ever find out, and Shel’s career would be fine.

And morally speaking, Wolfe was pretty sure the guy deserved a lot more than a broken jaw and a solid scare, which was all he would get for being part of shooting someone and a ton of kidnappings and trafficking.

“’us’ ‘ell ‘e wha’ ‘u wan’ ‘ow” the guy said, quickly. Blood had drooled from his mouth down his shirt.

Man, listening to this guy try and talk is gonna be a huge pain. Although probably not as much a pain as talking is for this dumb mook.

“Listen, and answer simply, to save us both the pain of you trying to talk. In fact, just nod yes or no. Got it?”

The mook nodded.

“Do you know how they pick which victims to kidnap?”

The mook shook his head no.

“Do you know how the victims are physically being picked up?”

The mook nodded.

“Explain out loud,” Wolfe said.

“On ‘e’ease ‘um ‘ail,” The man sputtered out.

“On release from jail?” Shel asked. “Like, they’re being picked up right when jail releases them?”

The thug nodded again.

“Who tells you when they are being released?”

The man shrugged.

Wolfe frowned. He couldn’t tell if the mook was lying, but it all seemed consistent to what he knew. The Grimm family hadn’t told all the street level enforcers how the plans were made, or who the sources of information were. They had told them to go guard a pickup at this time on this day. The same principal applied here.

“How did Cherry and the other girl not get picked up then?” Wolfe asked.

“’a’ic,” the man said.

“What?”

“’affic,” the man said, struggling to sound out the word.

“Traffic? You guys were late?” Wolfe asked.

The man nodded.

Wolfe almost laughed. It was surprising how often something simple fucked up a good crime. It was rarely a treacherous insider spilling the beans or something—it was usually some dumbass that drove twenty miles over the speed limit with a hundred thousand dollars of drugs in a car with six outstanding speeding tickets, got pulled over and got his car impounded, and all of a sudden he’s looking at ten years if he stays quiet and two if he talks.

This felt similar to Wolfe. He still wasn’t sure of the truth, but it all felt right to him, consistent with his twenty years of experience.

It still didn’t answer the question of how they were picking who to make victims. Wolfe didn’t have the last ten percent.

But talkative here had given him another string to pull at.

And Pearl had wanted him to check on Maybelle at the jail.