Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End

by Craig Schaefer

  “It’s all good,” he said. “He’s sleeping like a baby. Just make sure he keeps it clean, changes the bandages, and takes antibiotics to stave off infection. I’ll send him off with a little goodie bag.”

  “You’re the best, Doc,” I said and shook his hand. He might have been pushing seventy, but he shook hands like a twenty-year-old prizefighter.

  “Now,” he said, “not to be vulgar, my old friend, but we’ve come to that time-honored part where payment is due for services rendered.”

  “How do you feel about barter today?” I said.

  “I do prefer cash,” he said. “But let’s see if I feel what you’re selling.”

  Eric’s and Leroy’s stolen rifles lay on the backseat of the car. I checked the fence to make sure nobody was watching before taking one out and holding it up for the doc to take a good look. He whistled as he ran his wrinkled hand along the sleek barrel.

  “Hoo,” he said. “Where’d you get this, robbing a spaceship? Tell me the truth now, Dan, you didn’t mug ol’ Buck Rogers, did you?”

  “It’s called a Tavor,” I said. “I’ve got two of them here, and I can’t imagine they’re cheap. Take them over to Winslow at the Sunset Garage. He’ll pay top dollar.”

  Doc Savoy grinned like a kid on Christmas morning as he cradled the rifles in his arms.

  “I do believe we have a deal, old friend, yes I do. Huh. Way this neighborhood’s going, I might just keep one of these for myself.”

  While he took his bounty inside, I offered Eric my hand.

  “Good luck,” I said, “wherever you end up. And listen, if you really want to get cleaned up, go over to St. Jude’s and ask for Pixie. She’s a good person to know.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said, squeezing my hand. “For everything. We’d be dead if you hadn’t shown up, or worse.”

  I got into the car, fired up the engine, and leaned out the window as I put it in reverse.

  “You’ve got your life back,” I said as I rolled on past. “Just remember that it’s worth something.”

  Twenty

  I had smoke on my mind, and not the kind that comes from a cigarette. The smoke-faced men had appeared to me while I was neck-deep in Clark’s zombie powder, and I got the impression they’d been trying to reach out and touch someone for a while now. He can hear us now, they had said when the drug took hold and knocked me senseless.

  I had a pretty good idea of how I could get back in touch with them. Did I want to? That was the trickier question. The faceless men had manipulated Lauren as part of a twenty-year plan to destroy the entire world, and that put them pretty firmly in the “not my friends” column. The enemy of my enemy was still my enemy. Still, if they were willing to dish the dirt on Lauren’s new game, it could be worth hearing them out.

  I made up my mind in the space of a slow red light. They were treacherous bastards, but they were also the only lead I had left. I’d do it tonight. The faster I worked, the faster I could throw a wrench into Lauren’s gears. I dialed up Caitlin on the go, to bring her up to speed and find out how Melanie was doing.

  “Happy jelly,” she said, sounding smug. “Emma came back in time for dinner, and I left them to it. Emma’s…not doing so well. Putting up a brave front, but Ben cut her where it hurt.”

  I’d been there for the final showdown. When Ben told her that he’d hated her for years, his words had hit Emma like a punch to the gut. Even when we knew he was a traitor, none of us realized how deep his loathing ran until he poured it all out in a river of bile. He’d played the loving and dutiful husband card until it was time to pull the rug out from under her in one fell swoop.

  Ben had been paid in full for his betrayal, but that didn’t lessen the sting.

  “Daniel?” Caitlin said, sounding a little deflated. “Could you come over? I’d like to see you tonight.”

  She’d watched the aftermath of her best friend getting stabbed in the back by her human lover. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she wanted a little reassurance tonight. Work could wait. I hooked a U-turn at the next light, stopped at Bentley and Corman’s place for a change of clothes, and headed for the Taipei Tower.

  Caitlin had a penthouse on the top floor with a view of the Strip to kill for. The Southern Tropics Import/Export Company had a great incentive plan for its top employees. The ones at the bottom, not so much. She took my hand at the door and led me inside, across the expanse of black leather, ivory, and chrome. A Duran Duran album played softly on the stereo.

  “Did you eat?” she said as I followed her into the kitchen. “I’m just cooking up a little something.”

  A little something, in this case, was a bowl of tortellini mixed with edamame and slices of smoked sausage. We sat together at her glass-topped table with a single white candle and a bottle of Argentinian Malbec. She didn’t open up until her second glass of wine, but I wasn’t trying to push her.

  “When Emma fell in love with Ben,” she said apropos of nothing, “she took a lot of snide comments for it. Relationships like—like theirs—aren’t exactly favored in our society. I mean, it’s generally considered, like…”

  Her voice trailed off. I cracked a smile.

  “You’re trying to find a way of saying something like, ‘It’s like a human marrying their pet dog or their dinner,’ without offending me,” I said. “It’s okay, Cait. I understand we’ve got some cultural issues to work through. And I know you’re not like that.”

  Caitlin poked her food with her fork. “She didn’t see him like that either. There was a lot of, ‘Just wait, it’ll work out. You’ll see.’ I backed her up, of course. Sometimes forcefully.”

  “How forcefully?” I said.

  “You can tell someone to stop saying nasty things about your best friend a hundred times,” she mused over a forkful of pasta. “But you only have to rip their tongue out once.”

  I poured myself another dollop of wine.

  “Now she’s eating crow,” I guessed, “because all the people who told her the relationship was doomed turned out to be right.”

  “She’s lost face in the court, and the shame stings almost as much as what Ben did to her. The only reason she didn’t lose her position is because she helped take down Sullivan. That, and I put a word in my father’s ear.”

  She fell silent after that. I took another bite, chewing into a spicy sliver of sausage, and contemplated my fork.

  “They’re saying the same things about you now, too,” I said.

  She nodded, eying her plate.

  “Not as loudly, of course,” she said, “but the grumblings are there. It’s funny, you know. Emma’s become your biggest fan. If we succeed where she failed, it actually vindicates her in a sense. Proves that the problem was Ben, not the entire concept of a relationship between our species.”

  “Does that mean she’s going to stop flirting with me?”

  “Of course not,” she said, glancing up at me with a light smile on her lips. “We all have to be true to our nature.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to take any flack on my account.”

  I reached for my glass. Her hand met mine halfway, closing over it, gently pressing it down onto the table. In the shifting candlelight, her eyes glimmered with flecks of molten copper.

  “My choices are mine,” she said. “You helped see to that. And I choose you. Anyone who has a problem with that is welcome to challenge me on the plains of Limbo. Every notch on my hunting spear is the end of another fool’s story.”

  After dinner we took small plates of caramel-drizzled cheesecake over to the plush leather couch, cuddling together in the television’s glow. It was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

  • • •

  I woke to sunlight on my face, streaming in through the half-turned venetian blinds in Caitlin’s bedroom. I was alone in the tangle of gray silk sheets, but that didn’t surprise me—Caitlin didn’t sleep much. I found her in the dining nook, draped in a burgundy velvet ro
be and pecking away on her laptop.

  “I’m hunting woodworkers,” she murmured, giving me a tired wave. “Rather pleased to see how many people are keeping the artisan’s craft alive, even if it does make it harder to track down whoever is building Meadow Brand’s puppets. Also, when this is all over, I want to go to a Renaissance fair.”

  “Why?”

  “Nostalgia,” she said, so deadpan I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. “You look like you could use some coffee.”

  “Love some,” I told her, stumbling toward the kitchen.

  “Excellent. You can start a pot, then. I’ll take mine with one sugar, no cream.”

  Once I was properly caffeinated and cleansed, after luxuriating under the pulsing twin heads in Caitlin’s shower and soaking in a bath of white steam, I mussed my hair a little in the mirror and figured I could pass for a functional human being.

  Ironic, considering my plans for the morning.

  Jennifer texted me with directions to her new place. She’d moved out of Silverado Ranch, trading her anonymous house in the burbs for digs deeper in the city, not far from the airport. The trail led me down roads lined with strip clubs and foreclosures, dirty white concrete and barbed-wire fencing. A terraced three-story tenement squatted at the tail of a dead-end street, and I had enough street smarts to read the graffiti on the walls: this wasn’t friendly territory for a man without a tribe.

  I rumbled up slow in the Barracuda and got flagged down by a teenager with the eyes of a Vietnam vet. He wore yellow and brown, Cinco Calles colors. Just like the two guys loitering by the tenement door, the other one standing watch on the corner, and the three or four playing spotter from balconies and broken windows.

  “What you need, man?” he asked, giving me a nod.

  “Here to see Jennifer.”

  He squinted, sizing me up. “A’ight, you wait right here. Put it in park, okay?”

  I obliged and kept my hands on the wheel so nobody felt antsy. I knew Jen used these guys as runners and occasional muscle, but that didn’t mean they knew me. He walked over to the guys on the door, and one ran inside. I waited.

  A couple of minutes later, he jogged back over. “Okay, you’re cool. Go up to the third floor. Guy there is gonna scope you, make sure you’re not packin’ anything you shouldn’t be. You check out, he’ll tell you what room she’s in today.”

  Today? I glanced up at the tenement and wondered how many apartments she was renting.

  “Park your car right there,” he said, pointing to an open spot between a pair of rusted-out junkers. “I’ll keep an eye out, make sure nobody messes with it.”

  I slipped him a folded twenty. I didn’t have to, he was on Jennifer’s payroll, but it never hurts to make a good impression. Just past the front door, under the wary eyes of the thugs keeping watch, I felt like I’d stepped into a sauna. No air-conditioning in the hallways and most of the windows were broken and boarded over, leaving the tenement to marinate in sweat and decay. The air smelled like liver and onions, and a slow bass beat thumped from behind flimsy wall paneling. I took the stairs up to the top, where another guard was waiting for me with a black plastic wand in his hand.

  I knew the routine and held my arms out in a T position while he ran the wand over me from neck to toe and listened to its popping and squealing. Finally, satisfied, he nodded his head down the hall.

  “Three-oh-five,” he grunted, then went back to sitting on a folding chair and reading a rumpled copy of Car and Driver.

  I could have found my way there by following the music and the sound of raucous laughter. It wasn’t even noon, but Jennifer had a party in full swing. A roomful of people I’d never seen before were shaking it on dirty, splintered floorboards and draped out on threadbare sofas, half of them with their lips either wrapped around a freshly rolled joint or pressed against another partygoer. Jennifer spotted me through the haze of smoke and waved, walking over.

  “My new place!” she shouted over the music. “You like it?”

  “Pretty sure I don’t!” I shouted back with a smile. “Somewhere we can talk?”

  She tugged my sleeve and led me into the kitchen, where we could both hear ourselves think.

  “Why,” I said, “are you throwing a party at ten in the morning?”

  She laughed and waved a hand, giggly. I was feeling a little fuzzy myself just passing through.

  “Aw, sugar, that’s whatcha call the ‘new normal.’ Starts whenever people wake up, ends when the last one drops. After a while, you don’t even notice it. I was gettin’ too hands-off living out in the burbs.”

  “Considering we’re under federal investigation,” I said, “isn’t hands-off a good thing?”

  “Not when I can take the bull by the horns. This building? I own it. I’ve been working with the Cinco Calles for years, but now they’re full partners. Gives ’em something to fight for.”

  “The guards, the lookouts, changing rooms from day to day,” I said, figuring it out. “You turned this place into a fortress.”

  “You always were a quick one, sugar. You know how paranoid Nicky’s being? Well, if he decides to take me out of the picture, he’s gonna have the fight of his life. Not just with the Cincos, neither. Look out there. You see the big guy in the blue and black? He’s with the Bishops. They’re not scrappin’ with the Cincos anymore, not since I sat ’em all down at a table together.”

  Something about that nagged at the back of my brain, and I scoured my memory until a bulb lit up.

  “The Bishops? Don’t they guard some of Nicky’s warehouses?”

  “Sure do,” Jennifer said with a sly smile. “For now, anyway.”

  Twenty-One

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. Jennifer, you are not going to war with Nicky Agnelli.”

  She had the grace to pretend to be hurt, but not enough to keep from smiling.

  “What? Little ol’ me? Thought never even crossed my mind. All I’m saying is if he wants to come at me, I won’t make it easy for him. And when he tries, he might find out he doesn’t have as many friends as he thinks he does.”

  I knew that tone of voice, and I knew I wasn’t going to budge her. The best I could do was shake my head and say, “Just…be careful, okay? Don’t push for a fight if you don’t have to.”

  “Oh, I never push. I’m all about freedom of choice. So what brings you around?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I need to get high,” I told her. “I mean, really high.”

  She blinked. “This early in the morning? Like you don’t have work to do? I can’t be the responsible one in this friendship, Danny. I just won’t do it.”

  “No, it’s not like that. Listen, you remember when I told you about the smoke-faced men? Well, I was checking out a lead, trying to track down Lauren. I got dosed with some nasty shit that put me out of my head for a while, and they showed up. I’m getting the idea that you can only see them if you don’t have both feet firmly on the floor of reality. I need something that’ll really mess me up, but only for a little while.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Come with me. I’ve got just the thing.”

  We left the party behind, walking down to a seemingly random door on the second floor. “This one’s the real McCoy,” she said, jiggling her key in the lock. The room beyond was a cramped but clean apartment, furnished with Amish wood and gingham print, most of it furniture from her old place. A window unit rattled on full blast, filling the room with cool air, and the ceiling subdued the music from upstairs into a faint, almost hypnotic thumping.

  She took me into her bedroom and clicked on a table lamp. “Take your shoes off and lay down,” she said as she rummaged through a lacquered wooden jewelry box on her dresser. She held up a small baggie filled with tiny dried lumps and weighed it in her hand, glancing back at me and frowning.

  “About two grams, I’m thinking.”

  “What are those?” I said. “Mushrooms?”<
br />
  “Good ol’ psilocybin, nature’s gift to the shaman. Here, take these and don’t just gulp them down. Chew ’em. They don’t taste great, but they’ll work faster that way.”

  I took the dried pieces dubiously and popped them into my mouth. They had an earthy, pungent flavor, like a mouthful of sour dirt. I started to have second thoughts about this plan the moment I swallowed. Just in time for the train to leave the station.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be your sitter. Gonna be right here the whole time.”

  I lay there for what felt like twenty minutes, just staring at the flowered wallpaper, before I shook my head.

  “Are you sure you got the real stuff? I don’t feel different at all.”

  That was when the room started to vibrate.

  It was subtle at first. A tremor under the bed like a low-wattage earthquake, spurring images of great gears churning a hundred miles below Jennifer’s bed. The room turned slowly, and the corners where the walls met the ceiling left neon trails in their wake.

  Jennifer wouldn’t stay still. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Then she was by the door. Then she was over by the dresser—and suddenly I realized that I was only looking at life-sized photographs that someone had cut out of a fashion magazine.

  “That’s right,” I mumbled. “Jennifer is modeling in Spain and sent her pictures back to watch me. It all makes sense now.”

  “The rain in Spain falls mainly in your brain,” buzzed the smoke-faced man in the mortarboard and smock, perching on Jennifer’s dresser.

  “We’ve replaced this sorcerer’s illusion with conditions of stark and terrible reality!” said his suited companion, now standing at my bedside. “Let’s see if he notices.”

  “This isn’t reality,” I said.

  Then we were in Nepal.

  “We were not in the tomb,” the professor said softly, almost fearfully, as we walked through the steaming jungle under the light of a hot-pink sun. “We did not give her the ring.”