We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) by Jeff Somers Page A

into more mutterings, impossible to translate. I held out my hand and he took it, slowly but enthusiastically. Began pumping it. Up and down, up and down.
    The ATM machine began beeping, impatient.
    “Let’s get a drink, old buddy, it’s so good to see you,” I said cheerfully, slipping an arm around him and pushing him gently towards the door. “You can tell me what your PIN number is and we could have a conversation about that. What do you say?”
    On the security cameras, it would look like two old friends meeting by chance.
    “Oh, yes,” he said as I pushed the door open for him. “That sounds nice .”
    He recited his PIN and I glanced at Mags to get the nod. Then I walked him around the block, and he talked to me, a steady hissing escape of breath formed into words. He wasn’t such a bad guy. He told me how disappointing his life had been since he’d left the band, taken the money and the desk job, and started eating candy bars all day, just unwrapping and chewing and unwrapping and chewing, no thought. He would glance in his trash bin before leaving the office and be amazed to find ten or twelve wrappers in there. He kept his arm around me, and I could smell him, and it wasn’t so great: sour deodorant. By the time I got him to the Radio Bar, he was telling me a story about his vacation, a trip on a cruise line to the warmer parts of the world, and he wished I’d been there to hang out with him.
    I suggested he go in, get us some drinks, and I’d be right in to join him. He gave me a look of damp joy at the thought, nodded. I watched him step inside and settle onto a stool at the bar like a zeppelin docking with a tall building, and turned away.
    I was feeling better physically, steadier, though my hand was throbbing again just when the other wounds had calmed down. A heavy depression was pushing down on me. I didn’t know what this guy was like in reality, but under my heavy dose of Charm he was a sad panda, and I felt guilty.
    Mags was on the corner, wide-eyed, looking in the wrong direction, his body language like a poodle who’d been tied to a street sign a little too long. He jumped when I appeared and then smiled, his big body going soft.
    “Two thousand!” he said. “In the account. But five hundred was the limit here!”
    I nodded. “We’ve got at least fifteen minutes. Let’s see what we can do.”
    We are not good people.
    WE SIPHONED THE OTHER fifteen hundred before the card went dead, and we just walked away, the ATM still beeping. It was enough, I thought. Nothing to get excited about, and I’d bled a little too much on the Charm, leaving me gray and staggered, but it was a decent pile to have riding on your hip. Mags yapped around me, happy and energetic. He’d already forgotten we were in trouble. I decided not to remind him.
    He started to recognize the neighborhood we’d wandered into and got even more excited, this week turning out to be one of the best of Mags’s entire fucking life so far, at least for the moment. We’d pulled a grift normally too ambitious for us in terms of bloodletting and dangerous publicity, worked it perfectly, and now we were going to Digory Ketterly’s office.
    KETTERLY USUALLY WENT BY “D.A.” because he disliked the singsongy sound of “Digory Ketterly.” He thought it made him seem weak and poofy. He was right. I didn’t trust most other mages. We were all grifters of one sort or another, and we were all parasites—of others or ourselves. Ketterly I trusted less than most. I’d never heard of Ketterly actively cheating one of his own, but I thought it entirely possible that he would. But I was the walking wounded, exhausted, literally drained. Finding spells wasn’t my specialty in the first place, but when you added in the complication of the runes and their effect on magic, I needed help. I’d surveyed my vast circle of friends and acquaintances and decided I would have to risk putting a little faith in Ketterly, or else I was going to