The Living End (3 page)

“I didn’t—” he said, stumbling over his tongue. “I didn’t see anything.”

“When the cops come,” I said, “all you remember is seeing some strange Mexicans in the restaurant today. And maybe, in the shooting, somebody shouted something about cocaine. You don’t remember too clearly.”

“Mexicans,” he said, “and cocaine. G-got it.”

“Good. Because if you don’t? We’ll have to come back and see you again. And you wouldn’t want that.”

He nodded quickly, his voice caught in his throat. Some sorcerers are big on esoteric forms of thought control. I’m too lazy for that. Why go to that kind of trouble when you can get the exact same result with simple blind terror?

“Well, this was a clusterfuck,” Jennifer said as we walked away.

“Still time for things to get even worse,” I said.

“Yeah? How?”

I tapped my watch. “Meeting with our new lawyer. Let’s go, we’re gonna be late.”

We blew out of town just ahead of the sirens and turned into ghosts on the highway. We blended in with the traffic, leaving the burning wreckage in our rearview mirrors. I clenched the steering wheel, counted my breaths, and waited for the crazy-fear adrenaline rush to ebb away. By the time I saw the sign saying “Las Vegas 75 miles,” my knuckles weren’t bone white anymore.

It’s amazing, the things that start to seem normal once you get used to them.

• • •

The lawyer had smooth hands. Not smooth like talcum powder and baby fat, but smooth like soft plastic on a freshly molded doll. When he held out an open palm, waving it over my arrest report like a magician about to do a trick, I noticed his fingertips didn’t have any whorls.

“Naughty boys,” he said, flashing perfect teeth and grinning like he was about to sell me a used car. “Naughty boys and naughty girls, where would we be without them?”

Perkins’s office was a shabby little walk-up over a mechanic’s shop on Decatur Boulevard. Normally I wouldn’t have given him a second glance—he looked like the kind of guy who chased ambulances on his morning jog—but he came with the highest of recommendations.

“Nowhere fun,” said Caitlin, sitting in a cheap Ikea-knockoff chair to my left. She wore her scarlet hair in a twist at one shoulder and a black silk pantsuit made by a fashion designer whose name I couldn’t even pronounce. We’d made good time on the road back from Chloride, and she’d insisted on stopping to change. Couldn’t blame her for wanting an outfit that wasn’t drenched in blood.

“Right you are, ma’am,” Perkins said. “And may I say what a pleasure it is to be working with you again—”

“Save it,” she said.

“Right, well, let’s start with the good news then. The initial charges—possession of an unlicensed firearm, menacing, reckless driving and endangerment, blah blah blah—these all hinge on a single complainant. Mr. Faust and Ms.…Juniper? Jennifer Juniper? Seriously?”

On my right, Jennifer stared at Perkins over the rims of her blue-tinted Lennon glasses. Her sleeves were rolled up to show off her tattooed arm, an elaborate mosaic from elbow to wrist that featured Elvis Presley as the Gautama Buddha.

“My folks were hippies,” she said, her voice edged with a Kentucky twang.

Perkins shrugged and flipped through the police report. “I’d change it, but whatever floats your boat. I think we can get a lot of this tossed out or reduced out of hand. The gun’s questionable, and there are some strange circumstances surrounding the civilian witness…speaking of which, this ‘Meadow Brand’ person? As your attorney, I recommend killing her. Make it look like a drug overdose, maybe a gang shooting, something nice and unrelated, you know?”

I’m not sure what scared me more: that I barely blinked at his suggestion or that nobody else did either. It goes with the territory when your girlfriend works as muscle for a demon prince. Caitlin had called in a favor with her boss to get Jennifer and me a meeting with Perkins, and she promised us that he’d fight harder to clear our names than any other lawyer in town.

Any
human
lawyer, anyway.

“We’re kinda workin’ on that,” Jennifer told him.

“Good! I love proactive clients! This is a partnership, what we have here, and it means a lot that you’re holding up your side of things. Now, absolute worst-case scenario, you both do a couple of months in county and I get your records expunged after the fact.”

“Perkins,” Caitlin said. She rested a proprietary hand on my shoulder. Her slender fingers curled, nails rasping against the cloth of my oxford shirt.

“Yes, ma’am?” he said, turning his thousand-watt smile in her direction.

“Please understand that a worst-case scenario for them will result in a worst-case scenario for
you
.”

The smile vanished. He coughed politely, picked up a dented paper cup from his desk, and swallowed down a mouthful of cold coffee.

“I’m more concerned,” he said, “about this federal investigation. I looked into the task force that’s pursuing the Agnelli syndicate and hoo-boy, are they bringing in the heavy hitters. Now, theoretically, if Nicky Agnelli were to make a deal and turn state’s evidence, how much could he actually pin on you two?”

Jennifer and I looked at each other.

“It would be good,” I said thoughtfully, “if that didn’t happen.”

“Real good,” Jennifer said.

“Well then, our best bet is to stall the investigation, or toss them some raw meat to chew on for a while. The big blank slate on the team is the FBI representative, this…Special Agent Harmony Black? Any chance you can buy your way into her good graces?”

I would have laughed, if my stomach wasn’t tied in a knot.

“Zero,” I said. “Black makes Joe Friday look bent. She’d cut off her own hand before she’d take a dirty nickel.”

Perkins leaned back in his chair. “Huh. Bad news. Might want to kill her too and hope her replacement is more corrupt. But don’t do that yet! Dead feds are bad for business. Let’s just keep the option in mind for now, okay? Just back-pocket that sucker.”

“The real problem is Lauren Carmichael,” I said. “She pulled strings with Senator Roth to launch the investigation, as payback for Nicky screwing her over.”

“Far too late to stop that ball from rolling now,” Perkins said. “But you should probably think about killing her too.”

“Some days I don’t think about much else,” I told him.

I wasn’t normally a vengeful man, but two of my friends and a lot of innocent people were dead because of Lauren Carmichael and her crew. As of today, she could add five or six retirees and a waitress to her bill. Payment was overdue.

“Alton Roth, though,” Perkins said, thinking. “We might have a shot there. In the metaphorical sense this time. Please do not kill Senator Roth. I voted for him twice. In the same election, in fact.”

I was polite enough not to roll my eyes. Just barely.

“Look,” I said, “just take care of the charges. We’ll worry about the task force. Can you get us off the hook or not?”

“Yes, Perkins.” Caitlin stared coolly across the desk at him. “Can you…or not?”

He looked down at the police reports and swallowed hard.

“Yes. Yes, I can. I’ll get a motion to dismiss underway, start questioning the police procedures, make a few phone calls to a gentleman I know in Vegas Metro’s evidence lockup. And if you could just go ahead and kill Meadow Brand, then that’ll be the frosting on the freedom cupcake. Don’t worry, your Uncle Perkins has got everything under control.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Caitlin said with a feline smile.

“But seriously,” Perkins said. “Friends. Listen. This task force is not going away, not easily. The hammer of the federal government rises slowly, but it falls with a mighty clamor. You either need to get some kind of guarantee of silence out of Nicky Agnelli—the kind that’ll sew his lips shut for life—or start checking into countries that don’t have extradition treaties.”

O
ut in the hallway, standing on cigarette-burned carpet that hadn’t been cleaned since the Carter administration, Jennifer took Caitlin aside.

“I just want you to know I’m grateful,” she said. “I mean, you coulda just gotten a lawyer for Dan. You didn’t have to help me out any.”

“You’re a friend of Daniel’s. That makes you a friend of mine. I like to do nice things for my friends. And assuming Perkins lives up to his usual standards and gets all of these charges dismissed…”

Caitlin stepped into Jennifer’s personal space. Jennifer moved backward on instinct, thumping her shoulders against the peeling plaster on the wall. Standing a few feet away, I almost didn’t hear the next part. Caitlin leaned in and put her lips close to Jennifer’s ear.

“…that means, when I ask, you’ll do something nice for me in return. Isn’t that right?”

Jennifer nodded very quickly. Caitlin smiled and patted her shoulder, then walked over to lock my arm in hers.

“What’s the rest of your day like?” she said. “More apartment hunting?”

“Have to. Bentley and Corman’s couch is murder on my back, and I think I’m putting a dent in their love life. Thin walls.”

I liked my old place, a rehabbed motel room in the shadow of the Vegas strip. Really felt like home—until a psycho half-demon pitched a Molotov cocktail through my window. Now I was hunting for a new home to hang my hat, and my list of requirements was hard to meet. Ideally, I needed quiet neighbors, a landlord who took rent payments in cash and wasn’t picky about background checks, and hardwood floors for chalking down the occasional ritual circle.

Caitlin frowned. “Not without a proper lunch, you aren’t. It’s after three, and you haven’t eaten all day. I’m thinking Korean.”

“I’ll catch up with y’all later,” Jennifer said. “I’ve got a couple of twitchy people on my payroll, thanks to this Nicky nonsense, and they need a firm talkin’-to before they go from twitchy to jumpy.”

At least my crimes—the ones I committed on Nicky’s payroll, that is—were all past tense. Jennifer was still a golden stone in his greedy little pyramid. Agent Black had done a bang-up job of spreading word of the investigation all over town, hoping to scare the roaches at the bottom into giving up the big man at the top.

We parted ways in the parking lot, and I followed Caitlin to her car. She drove a white Audi Quattro with two-tone leather seats. Her business card said she was a regional manager for the Southern Tropics Import/Export Company. That was a nice way of saying she was the troubleshooter, enforcer, and all-around ass-kicker for the Court of Jade Tears, the faction of hell that laid claim to our particular patch of sand.

When she managed something, it stayed managed.

I got in on the passenger side and closed my eyes. The city baked in its own dust under the afternoon sun. It was the kind of heat that weighed on you, drying your sweat and caking it to your skin faster than your pores could flush it out. Caitlin cranked the air-conditioning up to full blast while an Art of Noise album thumped on the sound system.

“I talked to Emma last night,” she said, shooting a glance to her left before pulling the Audi out into traffic.

“Yeah? How’s she holding up?”

“As well as can be expected. She’s burying herself in work to get through it.”

The last time I’d seen Emma was the night she snapped her husband’s neck. Ben was a traitor, selling Caitlin’s court out to a renegade demon with messianic dreams. The demon in question hadn’t fared any better. If anyone went looking for his body, they’d find it buried under twenty tons of rock and a freshly laid parking lot.

It was a pretty rough night for everyone involved.

“How’s Melanie?” I said.

Caitlin shook her head. “Coping. She’s seventeen. There’s no way to make this easier for her, and with Emma practically living out at the Silk Ranch…I’ll make a point of checking in on her more often.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

The monolith of the Enclave Resort and Casino rose up in the distance, a black tower looming over the tail of the Vegas Strip like a cat ready to pounce. Construction was moving faster by the day. Last time I’d been inside, it was just a steel skeleton. Tossing Lauren’s chief architect off the top floor hadn’t put a dent in her stride. We knew just enough to know the Enclave was more than it seemed. That, and it’d be a really good idea to put a bullet in Lauren’s head before she cut the red ribbon on opening night.

We had thought opening night was on permanent hiatus. To finish her plan, Lauren needed the help of a dead serial killer named Gilles de Rais. Thanks to a rare tag-team play between the Vegas occult underground and the feds, de Rais’s soul was rotting in a bottle at the bottom of an evidence box. It wasn’t the hell he deserved, but it was the best we could do.

“She’s got an angle,” I said.

Caitlin arched her eyebrow at me. “Hmm?”

“Lauren. We broke her cult, we stole the Ring of Solomon, we snatched de Rais out from under her—she’s got no cards left to play. She
should
be running. Instead, she muscled up with some hired thugs and came at us today like she’s in her fighting prime. She’s got an angle.”

“Everybody does,” Caitlin said.

My phone vibrated against my hip. I had treated myself to a new model after my last one ended up at the bottom of the aforementioned twenty tons of rock. I tugged it out and gave it a glance. Pixie.

I slid my thumb to take the call. “Hey, Pix, can I call you back later? About to get some lunch—”

“I need your help.”

I frowned. Her voice was usually terse, but this time it had an edge that grabbed my attention and squeezed. Pixie was a mercenary hacker—sorry,
hacktivist
—and she could make anything with a circuit board jump up and dance like Fred Astaire. Usually I was the one who went to her for a helping hand, not the other way around.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how hard it was to say that. But yes, I need your help.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not on the phone. Come to St. Jude’s. Look, I have money. I can pay you, all right?”

I needed the cash. Jennifer’s buddy Winslow had fronted me a car and a gun when my back was against the wall, at rates a loan shark would call steep. Given that Winslow was the top dog in an outlaw biker gang, I figured paying him back should be a priority in my life.