Courts and Cabals 2 G.S. D'Moore (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📖

of the older woman with gun-metal gray hair, and a serious expression permanently etched into her sun-tanned face. He was an outsider. He was here for a few weeks, and then he was on to the next assignment. He was not a part of the interspecies, multi-national culture of Las Vegas. What he had set on the table in front of her was the equivalent of throwing a nuke into a balance that had been in place for generations. After he left, there was going to be fallout for this judge, the LVPD, the casinos that supported the local economy, and the regular people who lived here. He was going to kick over the apple cart and then leave. For all he knew, bodies would fall in his wake.

“It’s the cabal after all,” he wished for Becky’s comforting presence at his back, but he’d entered the judge’s chambers alone.

The woman scrutinized the document carefully. Word from the locals was that she was a hardass. If an I wasn’t dotted, or a T not crossed, she’d toss an application. However, and more important for Vernon, she was also clean. The judge was a legend. She couldn’t be bought. She was basically a modern-day version of Kevin Costner in the Untouchables. If some uppity syndicate hitman tried to gun her down, she could literally rip their head off, eat it, and shit down their neck. She was a skinwalker, and being in her presence sent a shiver up Vernon’s spine.

Skinwalkers were a mage-shifter hybrid, but completely different than Vernon. Primarily, they were mages – or in this judge’s case, a medicine woman – who could work shifting magic instead of the other way around. It was the way they did it that was creepy as hell. They had to kill a creature and somehow absorb its essence. Then they would remove its hide, run it through a magical ceremony Vernon knew diddly squat about, and then wear the hide to transform. An old skinwalker like the judge might have dozens of hides she could choose from. Currently, she’d swapped her black, judicial robe for a black fur coat of some sort. It wasn’t just something to cut off the chill in the air. He could feel the ambient magic wafting off it.

Silently, she closed the folder he’d provided to her and picked up a SIM card. She popped it into her computer and hit play. It had taken hours of intense review to compile the ten minutes of footage that was at the core of obtaining this warrant.

“And thank the gods I ran into Ms. Layla.” She’d been the key.

It was like the universe finally cut him a break. He’d arrived on the scene, caught the scent of his prey, followed it to the battlefield, and onto Ms. Layla. The rest had just taken patience, attention to detail, and a little luck.

He saw the judge’s face draw the same conclusion. He watched her see the glamour of the tall man with the big nose drop to reveal a novel supernatural, who hadn’t registered per WRA requirements, and was associated with crimes across the country. She saw the EMT’s pull an injured woman from a bathroom that looked like Ms. Layla, while a split screen, complete with timestamp, showed the real Ms. Layla talking with authorities across the conference center. The ambulance carrying fake Layla got out before a proper perimeter was established, but cameras at University Medical Center picked up fake Layla sneaking out of the ambulance and disappearing. However, tall, big-nose man reappeared. The city’s traffic cameras caught glimpses of the man disappearing into an alley behind Caesars Palace an hour later.

If the application had a weak point, that was it. The footage didn’t show the man entering the resort and casino; however, it did show him exiting earlier in the morning. Was he staying there as a guest? Living there? Hiding out? Did the cabal know who he was, or that he was there? Those were all unanswered questions that a thorough investigation would expose; but to get the investigation off the ground, he needed the warrant.

“Come on!” he mentally shouted at the judge.

Like she could hear him, she looked up. “Well, Special Agent Dud, you’ve dropped a real steaming pile of shit in my lap,” she ejected the SIM card and placed it back in its plastic container.

This was all evidence supporting the warrant application, and if things came under scrutiny, which they would with the cabal involved, everything needed to be in order. The last thing anyone needed was a SIM card that suddenly didn’t work because some clerk touched it with jam hands.

Vernon wanted to respond, but it was a rhetorical question. The judge pulled her fur coat tighter around her small body, but there was no evening chill to fight off. It was a comfortable seventy-two in her office. She placed her hands on the warrant for a moment and closed her eyes. He braced himself, but there was no outpouring of magic, just an old woman taking a deep breath and working through the consequences of her actions. That made the wolf inside him sit up.

From her desk drawer, she took out a pen and scribbled her signature on the appropriate line. “You have your warrant, Agent Dud. You may search Caesars Palace for four individuals you described and bring them in on the appropriate charges. May the Great Spirit have mercy on us all,” she let out a breath, and handed over the paper.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” he meant it, but he was out the door once he had the documents in hand. Time was of the essence.

He hurried through the courthouse and out the back into the motor pool . . . where a small army was waiting. Fifty black and whites, a significant portion of the LVPD’s squad cars, and a hundred officers sat mingling around. They