My sixth sense was screaming now. I felt like I was trying to work a jigsaw puzzle with someone blasting an air horn next to my ear. Had we missed something? The email tap had worked fine for us in the past. That was how we’d gotten a heads-up about Lauren’s dinner party and even manipulated messages between her and her agents to give us the inside edge—
—which she could have figured out, when she finally emerged from the wreckage of her house.
“It’s a trap,” I said, realizing how we’d walked into our own killing box. “She knew we were reading her emails. She was never coming here today.”
“What?” Caitlin said, but I was already standing up fast enough to knock my chair over.
“Everyone!” I shouted, turning every startled face in the almost-empty restaurant. “There’s an emergency. You need to leave, right now!”
They looked at me like I was crazy, not budging from their chairs. The seconds turned into a slow, nauseous crawl as I felt the trap close over our heads. A red plastic fire-alarm box hung on the wall a few tables away. I ran over, grabbed the handle, and yanked it down. That got the civilians on their feet, as a shrill klaxon whined from the ceiling.
The van screeched to a stop on the street outside. The rusted-out side door rattled open, and I had just enough time to register the two men crouched in back, red bandannas tied over their faces and sunlight glinting off the assault rifles in their arms, before they opened fire.
The restaurant windows exploded. I threw myself to the floorboards, landing hard on my shoulder and rolling, just in time to see our waitress catch the first blast. She jolted backward on her feet, dancing a jig of death with her white blouse sprouting tiny scarlet mushroom clouds, and collapsed to the floor in a bloody ruin. Caitlin and Jennifer both flipped their tables onto their sides, crouching low and using them for makeshift shields. I trench-crawled my way to Caitlin as the storm of bullets tore the restaurant into splinters.
I pulled my piece, a Taurus Judge Magnum. It was a big black bull of a gun chambered for .454, and it barked like a Doberman as I snapped off a couple of wild shots. The van’s passenger leaned out his window with a machine pistol, adding a staccato beat to the basso boom of the other two gunmen. I heard an elderly woman screaming from somewhere close to the door, but I didn’t have time to think about the casualties right now. The hitters were pros. As soon as one shooter spent his magazine, his partner laid down fire and gave him a chance to reload. They had us pinned like rats.
Caitlin’s pistol, a sleek little nine millimeter she’d borrowed from Jennifer, clicked on an empty chamber. She cursed under her breath and jumped up, running toward the restaurant wall. I barely had time to react before she snatched one of the antique pickaxes from the wall, spun, and hurled it faster and harder than any human being could dream of. The ax whirled through the air, spinning end over end, and buried itself with a bone-crunching spurt in one of the rifleman’s chests. He fell back, spitting blood, and his partner froze.
I thought it was the opening we needed, but then I saw the surprise the driver had been getting ready on the other side of the van. He stepped into sight, another phantom in a bandanna and shades, with an olive-and-black steel tube slung over one shoulder. It rattled as he leveled it in his gloved hands. He dropped to one knee in a perfect shooter’s stance, priming the weapon.
“RPG!” I screamed, breaking cover. “Out the back, now now now!”
I pulled the trigger as fast as my finger could work it, the Judge’s cylinders spinning and spitting out covering fire while Caitlin and Jennifer ran ahead of me. I turned and hit the swinging door, bursting into the abandoned kitchen. We’d almost made it out the back when the grenade hit.
The world twisted sideways, and I went flat as the kitchen door blasted off its hinges on a gout of fire and roiling black smoke. The shock wave hit me like a giant’s fist, and for a second the entire universe was nothing but white light and the sound of a cannon going off in my ears. A hand pulled me to my feet. Caitlin shouted something, but I couldn’t hear a word of it over the ringing echoes of the aftermath. We stumbled out into the dusty back lot, eyes squinting against the sudden sunlight, the restaurant a roaring inferno at our backs.
My hearing swam back just in time to catch Bentley’s panicked voice over my earpiece.
“—coming around! They’re back in the van and coming around the building! Get out of there now!”
Two
Caitlin and I were empty, and Jennifer had two bullets to her name. We stood side by side in the empty lot, catching our breaths as the van roared around the side of the burning restaurant.
“Gloves off,” I hissed and holstered my empty gun. My deck of cards leaped from my hip pocket in a spray of red and black, riffling into my outstretched hand.
“Fucking right,” Jennifer said, trading her .357 for the gleaming razor blade that dangled from a chain around her neck. She dodged to one side, using the back wall as cover while she broke into a guttural German chant.
The van rolled into sight. The passenger leaned out his window, machine pistol reloaded and ready, but as he squeezed the trigger I scattered a handful of cards into the air. Three cards caught three bullets, each one falling to the dirt with a crumpled shell buried in its heart. The fourth card sliced through the air and slashed the shooter’s shoulder to the bone. He dropped the pistol, instinctively grabbing his wounded arm, and fell back into the van.
The driver aimed straight for Caitlin and me, and gunned the engine. A rattling sound filled the air, like rain pelting a tin roof, and a whirlwind of dark, syrupy blood whipped past us. The whirlwind exploded, coating the van’s windshield in sticky crimson. Suddenly blind, the driver lost his nerve and hauled the wheel around, trying to get away. Tortured metal shrieked as the van smashed head-on into the burning building. Its front end crunched like an accordion against the wall, and the driver launched through the windshield headfirst. The impact snapped his neck and left him wide-eyed and dead in a puddle of broken glass.
Jennifer held out her bleeding wrist, the torn skin already knitting itself back together as she chanted around the razor blade clenched between her teeth.
The second rifleman hauled open the side door, just in time to see Caitlin coming at him with claws bared and a mouth lined with teeth like a great white shark’s. She grabbed him by the throat and dragged him behind the van. I didn’t see what happened next, but I could hear his frenzied screams for about three seconds before they stopped short.
Caitlin stepped back into sight and wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing the blood on her lips all over her cheeks, like some nightmarish war paint. I took a second to catch my breath.
That was when I saw the passenger slip out of the front seat of the van, still clutching his torn shoulder, and stagger away. Jennifer, Caitlin, and I glanced at each other. I flipped one card up in the air and caught it between my fingertips. Jack of spades.
I whipped the card toward him, and it spun like a razor-edged boomerang. The gunman screamed and fell as it sliced through his Achilles tendon and winged its way back to my hand, the card freshly edged in scarlet. He was still trying to crawl away, dragging himself across the dirt, when we walked up to him. I kicked him over onto his back.
“Where’s Lauren Carmichael?” I said.
He shook his head wildly, squirming in the dust, eyes bulging.
“Don’t kill me,” he begged. “Please, don’t kill me. I’ve got a family!”
I held up an open hand. “We’re not going to kill you. Just tell us where Lauren is, and you can walk away.”
Little white lies.
Then he screamed. Not from fear. Pain. He gripped his stomach and howled as it swelled under his clenched fingers, skin buckling and bloating, the buttons of his shirt popping one by one as his belly grew like a woman nine months pregnant. He kept swelling.
His eyes rolled back, and he shrieked like he was being fed into a meat grinder. Red lines blossomed on his stomach, the skin
stretched to tearing, and then they burst. I jumped back as a flood of tiny snakes cascaded from the gunman’s body, pouring out onto the stony ground and wriggling in all directions. He stopped screaming. I watched as a single garter snake squirmed out of the dead man’s mouth and slithered back up his nose.
Caitlin, Jennifer, and I strode away without a word. We needed to put as much space between us and this nightmare as possible, and fast. I paused, catching a glint of light in the corner of my eye, from over by the restaurant’s Dumpster.
A kid, maybe seventeen with an acne-cratered face, wore a short-order cook’s apron and crouched just out of sight. He had a phone in his hand, holding it up to record the action. He froze as we closed in on him, but he brandished the camera’s eye like it was some kind of protective talisman.
I snatched the phone out of his trembling hand, tossed it to the ground, and stomped it under my heel until there was nothing left but shards of mangled plastic.
“You didn’t see a goddamn thing,” I told him.
“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.”
Three
Out 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?”
Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End Page 2
