Tricks of the Trade Read Free

stuff to his partner. Since Venec was better at that anyway I hadn’t thought much about it. But Nick was right; Ian had been least-in-sight, recently.
    â€œI’ll worry about Ian,” Venec said, his voice more of a growl than usual, reminding me why we called him Big Dog, other than the obvious PUPI pun. “You focus on what we pay you for. Two jobs. First’s a break-in, up in Fieldston. Sharon, you and Nick take that one.” He slid a plain brown folder across the table, and Sharon took it.
    Ah, paperwork. Magic—current, in the modern parlance—runs in every human, but only a very small percentage of humans can actually manipulate it. They—we—are called Talent, and the ones who can’t use it are, rather condescendingly, called Nulls. Magic makes a lot of things easier, yeah. One of the prices we pay for Talent, though, is that we don’t interact well with things that run on current’s kissing cousin, electricity. You find a Talent who carries a cell phone or a PDA, and doesn’t have to replace it every other month, and I’ll show you a Talent who can’t use current worth a damn.
    Okay, unfair. But even those of us who don’t use current every day found anything more sophisticated than a debit card got fritzed pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to carry an MP3 player since I was fourteen.
    I’ve spent most of my life in openly Talented society, but some days I watch people using netbooks or smartphones, while we have to juggle paper and pen and memory, and I wonder if we really got the better part of the deal, after all.
    â€œWhere the hell is Fieldston?” Sharon asked, scanning the paperwork. “I swear, if we have to lug out to Long Island again…”
    â€œEnd of the 1 line, up in the Bronx,” Nifty told her, capping the one-upmanship for the moment.
    â€œOh. Okay.” She wasn’t happy about heading all the way out there, but apparently so long as it didn’t involve having to leave the city, she could deal with it. Shar was our only born-and-bred New Yorker—I didn’t count, having spent most of my teens in Boston—and sometimes that just shone through.
    â€œClient’s a Null, he owns a house up there, it got tossed last night and he thinks it was a Retriever. No idea why he thinks that, but if it is…”
    I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting. “Venec, when was the last time someone actually pinned anything on an active Retriever?”
    Retrievers were the cat burglars of the Cosa Nostradamus, Talent who naturally went invisible, like Pietr, only they controlled it, used it to get away with everything short of murder. If this guy’d been burgled by a Retriever, odds were that even if we could prove it, nobody would ever get the stuff back.
    Those dark, irritated eyes glared at me, but I didn’t feel any actual irritation coming off him, just annoyance. “If the client thinks it was a Retriever, then that’s his call. You will determine the facts and find out who is responsible. And, if possible, get back the stolen items. Yeah,” he said when Sharon would have protested, “I know, you’re not the lost-and-found. If this guy did get hit by a Retriever, think about the egoboo, to hit back.”
    There was that.
    â€œBonnie, you and Pietr get a floater on the East Side, off 14th.”
    â€œOh, maaaaaaan,” Pietr said, in an uncanny imitation of Nick, while I took the file with a grimace. Yeah, Venec was still pissed about the blue hair-dye job.
    Lou and Nifty, for a change, looked relieved to be stuck in the office. Nobody wanted a floater. Ever.
    Everyone else filtered out, but I stayed in my chair, looking at the folder.
    â€œYou guys make it look so easy.”
    I twisted in my chair and looked at Lou, who had left, and then come back, standing in the doorway. “What?”
    â€œEasy.” She made a gesture with one hand at some