The Living End (29 page)

I tried to talk. My lips wanted to go the wrong way, and I felt myself drool a little.

“Bob,” I slurred, “what’re you doing?”

“Now the poisoned fruit of what we did has blossomed on the vine. Your sins always come back to haunt you, Mr. Faust. I’ve learned that much. No matter how far or fast you run, your sins
always
come back. So I’m done running. These people have to be stopped, and I will stop them. I told you the truth. I’ve found a way to turn this creature of entropy into a weapon.”

He picked up the hacksaw, staring glassy-eyed as he ran a fingertip over the blade’s jagged teeth.

“To do that, though, the creature needs a stable vessel. That means I need to commit one last sin. I hope you can forgive me.”

My body was numb. I tried to get up again, to at least push back with my feet and squirm away from him, but the best I could do was flop around on the cold concrete floor.

“The process is simple,” he said, “if…unpleasant for the vessel. It’s essentially like an involuntary demonic possession. You are familiar with demonic possession, Mr. Faust?”

A wave of raw panic slapped me across the face and shoved my head under icy water. I felt myself plummet into a black abyss dragging me back to my teenage years. Yeah, I was familiar with demonic possession. The drug coursing through my veins hauling me through flashes of stark memory, forcing me to feel it all over again. Creatures of toxic waste burrowed like maggots in my brain, pissing behind my eyeballs, scratching bone, and carving filthy graffiti inside my skull.

Bob came closer. This time, I managed to kick. I swung my feet out, stomping air, fighting him with everything I had. He stepped back with ease and held up his hands.

“See?” he said. “This is why I had to drug you. I knew you’d try to stop me, but this has to be done. It
has
to. I hope you’re understanding my words. I’m explaining this so that you’ll grasp what’s happening here.”

Bob walked out of sight. I lay there, watching the tornado of smoke.

He came back and crouched before me. Something shone like a diamond in his hand, jangling in front of my eyes.

“Still with me?” he said. “These are the keys to my car. It’s parked around back.”

He set the keys on the tray, next to the other tools. I squinted.

“Why?” I managed to say. “Why’re you tellin’ me?”

He walked toward the binding circle and turned back to face me.

“So that you can get back home, when your part of the work is done,” he said.

Tears glistened in his eyes. They took on halos of light in my confused vision, glimmering like drops of silver.

Now I understood.

“In the end,” Bob said, “we all get what we deserve.”

Then he stepped into the circle.

T
he smoke screamed.

One of the Klieg lights dangling from the rafters exploded, showering glass and sparks onto the concrete below. Bob’s body hung a foot above the ground, mouth wide, eyes bulging, wrapped and bound in tendrils of raw hate. Now he was screaming too, in ear-piercing harmony.

The smoke dove down his throat. The screaming stopped.

The smoke buried itself inside him, pouring in through his mouth, his nostrils, the corners of his eyes, anywhere it could tear open a foothold. As the last wisp of gray entered him, he collapsed to the floor.

Then he sat bolt upright.

His skin bulged and swelled, as if the smoke had been lured inside and now it wanted back out again. The glyphs inked onto his body glistened.

Warding and containment is my specialty
, Bob had said.
I know how to keep my skin intact
. It was his final spell: turning himself into a living trap.

He seemed to move in stop motion. Fast, jittery, jumping from point to point and skipping the spaces in between. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a long, shiny needle and a spool. Sparks of enchantment flew from his fingers as he threaded the black mortician’s thread through the needle’s eye. I could smell the warding spell he’d prepared, taste it, like copper pennies on my tongue.

He slid the needle through his lips.

I watched, frozen and limp, as Bob sealed himself up. He finished his lips, then moved on to his eyelids, stitching them shut in tight little rows of thread.

All the while, the smoke raged inside him. I heard Bob’s ribs crack and splinter as it pounded him from within, saw the blood leaking from under his fingernails and his stitched-shut eyelids. He didn’t make a single sound. He was beyond pain now. Beyond anything but the task at hand.

The color drained from his skin, then the moisture. Bob convulsed, his muscles cramping and seizing. He looked more desiccated with every fevered beat of my heart.

When the rite was done, the thing that remained on the floor, curled into a fetal position at the heart of the binding circle, looked like an unwrapped mummy.

I think I passed out. Wasn’t sure. The drugs in my system turned time into a question with no answers. All I remembered was the pounding headache and the dry cottony feeling in my mouth when I could finally move again. My vision was still a little blurry, but the trails of light were gone.

I pushed myself up and used the edge of a bench for support, getting my legs back. Once I was good to walk, I hobbled over to the circle. The hacksaw and blowtorch waited on the rolling cart. I knew what my part of the job was now.

Bob had also left a pair of plastic water bottles, along with a yellow sticky note that read “Drink me.” I cracked them open and guzzled them down one after the other, fighting off the dehydration. I had dirty, thirsty work ahead.

An hour later I was on the move, pulling away from the abandoned laboratory in Bob’s little yellow hatchback. It was a rental, but I didn’t bother returning it. Didn’t want to risk being seen driving it, especially not on a security camera. Bob Payton was on his way to becoming a missing person in some police station’s database.

He would be missing forever.

I made one stop on my way back to JFK, a FedEx store where I arranged overnight delivery for a package to a Vegas mail drop. Then it was straight to the airport and onto the first nonstop flight I could book. Back to the West, away from the thundering slate sky and into a world of trouble.

• • •

The Wardriver sat in a parking garage two blocks off the Strip, just another hunk of junk rusting in the dark. Someone would have to get close to notice the faint green light leaking from the tinted windows, or pick up the muffled hum of the modified engine running in stealth mode as it fed power from the battery to the electronics suite in the back.

“I took all the recordings we could get,” Pixie said, “from the phone call with Roth and what I could pick up inside the house. I was missing a few phonemes, but that’s the nice thing about government stooges. They’re always on television, running their mouths. Lots of raw sound to work with.”

I leaned in behind her while she demonstrated the program running on the biggest screen.

“Soundboard,” Pixie explained. “You click it, he says it.”

She scrolled her mouse over a bubble of text and clicked. From tinny speakers mounted over the console, Alton Roth’s voice said, “Meadow?”

“Pitch is the problem,” Pixie said. “People don’t talk in monotones. A statement can turn into a question, and vice versa, with just a lift or a drop in your voice. I’ve played with these clips as much as I can, but at the end of the day, that’s all you’ve got: clips. The longer you push it, the more obvious it’s going to be. Don’t get into a conversation with her. Get in and get out.”

“No worries there,” I said.

“I went through and pieced together a bunch of clips I think you’ll need. I cleaned them up as best as I could and played with the pitch. I’ll feed some static into the line, so he’ll be hard to hear. That’ll help.”

I nodded. “And it’ll look like the call’s coming from Roth?”

“Sure, assuming you copied his number down right when you checked out his phone. You…can handle writing down ten digits in a row, right?”

“Dunno,” I said. “I’m pretty bad at math. Guess we’ll find out.”

I took her chair, and she handed me a headset. She sat down in the chair next to me, fiddling with dials and mixers with a consternated look on her face.

“Okay,” she said, “the sound mix is as good as I can get it. You ready to do this?”

I gave her a thumbs-up. I wished I felt as confident as I looked. Our best and probably last chance at getting a noose around Meadow Brand’s throat, and it was basically a high-tech version of a prank call on a wacky morning radio show. I didn’t like our odds.

“Dialing,” Pixie said. I scanned the words on the monitor, reading fast and trying to memorize the lay of the land. When Meadow spoke, I’d have seconds to react, picking the right response from a list of dozens. With no guarantee that there
was
a right response.

Meadow’s voice echoed over my headset. My hand clenched the mouse, a reflex spasm of hate.

“What?” she said, irritated.

I clicked fast.

“Meadow,” Roth’s voice said, then a short pause. “It’s Alton Roth.”

“Yeah, I know. I have caller ID just like everyone else on the planet, chucklehead. What are you doing, calling from inside a wind tunnel? I can barely hear you. What do you want?”

“Lauren’s a traitor,” Roth said. Pixie had taken the original question Roth had asked me and pitch-shifted it, turning it into a flat accusation.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Meadow’s voice sounded more angry than surprised. After the fight at Lauren’s house, I think she was long past any lingering feelings of loyalty to her mistress.

“Lauren’s trying to kill me. After all I’ve done for her!” Roth said. I fumbled, nearly missing the next click. “You’re next.”

Meadow whistled, long and low.

“Gotta say I saw that coming,” she said. “I figured she was going to do it at the ceremony, though. You know, stab us both in the back right before killing herself with this stupid plan of hers. I was just holding out for one last paycheck before I blew town. Well, that’s it for me then! I’m packing my shit and heading for Costa Rica. You should probably do the same thing.”

“Meet with me.”

“Huh?” Meadow said. “Why would I wanna do that?”

I blanked.

Scanning the screen, I searched for something that would answer her question. Pixie cranked up the static, then leaned in and tapped her finger frantically on the glass. I clicked where she pointed.

“Money,” Roth said at the tail end of the static burst.

Meadow thought it over.

“All right, fine, I can’t hear shit on this line anyway. You get five minutes of my time. Not tonight. I’m busy making travel arrangements. Tomorrow morning, on my way out of town. Where at?”

“Uh, 14082 Sauk Trail, room six,” Roth said, parroting the address I’d “accidentally” given him when we talked over the tapped line. “It’s a motel off I-15, about ten miles outside Vegas. I’ll come alone!”

“You’d better,” she said. “I’ll be there at nine. If I don’t like what you have to say, I’ll be gone at 9:01.”

“Thank you,” Roth told her.

“Yeah, whatever,” Meadow muttered. “Freak.”

She hung up. I leaned back in my chair and let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

“Nice save,” I said.

Pixie looked as exhausted as I suddenly felt. “You’re welcome. So, uh…you think she fell for it?”

“I think maybe, just maybe, things are going right for a change.”

“Then why aren’t you smiling?” Pixie said.

“I get nervous when things are going right,” I said.

I should have felt good. We had a way in, we had a weapon, and if she showed up to the meeting, we’d have Meadow Brand too. That was three more cards than I’d expected to have up my sleeve.

Even still, every passing minute felt like the countdown to doomsday. Roth’s comments about Lauren left me rattled. What had she done to herself? How close was she to taking the final leap, bridging two worlds and crushing both of them between her greedy fingers?

Was it even possible to stop her now?

That night, I dreamed about Bob Payton. He perched on the edge of Bentley and Corman’s couch, looming over me like a mummified bird and trying to talk through stitched-shut lips.

I woke up a couple of hours before dawn. I didn’t want to go back to sleep, but I didn’t want to get up just yet. I felt bad enough that Bentley and Corman were letting me crash at their place—I didn’t need to wake them up early too. I lay in the gloom and stared at the ceiling, listening to the occasional rumble of a lonely truck on the street outside.

We all get what we deserve
, Bob had told me.

What did I deserve?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t care. He was wrong, anyway. Life was a lot of things, but “fair” and “just” weren’t on that list. Every single day good men got kicked in the teeth, while the evil bought mansions in Malibu and slept like babies in their feather beds. I’d learned early on that the only real law was the law of the jungle. Protect your own with everything you’ve got, wake up every morning ready for a fight, and never expect anyone to hand you anything for free. That included justice.

Lauren Carmichael had skated a long time on money and power. Justice wasn’t something she lost any sleep worrying about. She knew the law of the jungle too, and she thought she was the hungriest beast around. Only she’d forgotten one thing: there was always somebody hungrier. Always.

I made a promise to myself in the dark. No matter what it took, even if I had to lay my life on the line, Lauren was finally going to pay for all the wreckage she’d left in her wake.

If I was bound for hell, I’d drag her down with me.

T
he SandVue Motel was a relic of the sixties, an oasis of aquamarine-painted concrete and white lattice rails out on a hot stretch of empty desert highway. Big magnetic letters on the roadside sign read “Welc me convention-goers we h ve cable TV swimming pool.” Every room had a window, and every window had a chintz curtain pulled tight across it. This was the kind of place people went when they didn’t want anyone knowing their business.