The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  “Cheerful thought,” I said.

  “What do you want, I should blow sunshine up your ass? I respect you too much to lie.”

  I caught sight of Emma across the room, saying her goodbyes and easing her way to the door.

  “Speaking of,” I told him, “need to show some respect of my own. Call me, okay?”

  “I got your number.”

  I crossed the conference room on an intercept course, bracing myself for a discussion I didn’t want to have.

  8.

  I caught up with Emma. Two minutes later, she was tugging me out the door by my sleeve. We caught the elevator and shared the ride down with a couple of tourists who smelled like suntan lotion and cheap cologne.

  “I wasn’t—” I started to say.

  She waved her hand, sharp, like she was thinking of chopping it across my throat. I stopped talking.

  We made our way down to the hotel lounge. Speakers, hidden high behind dangling plastic ferns in brass buckets, played a stream of canned piano music. Not much to see at this hour: a couple of weary travelers bellied up to the bar, one with a carry-on at his feet, and on the far end a plump businessman was trying to make time with a woman five brackets out of his league. Emma guided me over to a high-top table in the corner and pointed to a stool.

  “Sit. I’m calling Caitlin.”

  “I really wasn’t—”

  She made a zzt sound, drew her finger across her lips like a zipper, and got her phone out.

  Caitlin showed up to save the day. I hoped. She cut across the lobby like a shark, dressed for business; her spill of curly scarlet hair fell across one shoulder of her jacket, charcoal black over an ivory silk blouse. A floppy black ribbon dangled at her throat, tying her ensemble up with a bow. She leaned in for a perfunctory kiss—cheek, not lips, which told me I was really in trouble this time.

  “Tell her.” Emma yanked back a stool and sat down. “Tell her what you told me.”

  “You promised not to overreact.”

  Emma tensed her cheeks until her face bent in a ghoulish facsimile of a smile.

  “Daniel, are your intestines where they should be?”

  I patted my belly, just to be sure. “I think so?”

  “Then clearly, I’m not overreacting. You’ll know when I do.”

  Caitlin sat in contemplative silence, a judge on her barstool bench, as I walked her through it: the house party gone wrong and my encounter with the King of Worms, spotting Melanie in the party photos, and hearing her confession at school.

  “My daughter,” Emma added, “was nearly killed last night, and he just now decided to tell me about it.”

  “Maybe because I knew how you’d react.”

  The second I said it, I wished I could claw those words from the air and shove them back into my mouth. Now I had two women giving me the death eye, from both sides of the table. Emma took a slow, deep breath.

  “Caitlin,” she said, “give me five minutes alone with him. Just five minutes.”

  “I dispense the discipline around here.” Caitlin looked my way. “You should have called Emma right away.”

  Know what the worst thing about a two-on-one argument is? When you’re wrong and you know it. I laid my hands on the table and bowed my head in defeat.

  “I know,” I said. “I screwed up, okay? I’m sorry.”

  “Keeping this from me?” Emma snapped. “Talking to Melanie without me, at her school, no less? What were you thinking?”

  “Honestly? I was thinking I needed answers. C’mon, Emma. She’s your kid.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly,” I echoed. “And if you confronted her with that photograph—which, I remind you, just showed a blur with hair like hers, not exactly a smoking gun—she would have denied everything. You know this.”

  Her gaze flicked to one side. “I would have gotten it out of her eventually.”

  “Or I would have,” Caitlin said.

  “Sure, but not as fast as I did, and not without a headache. Look, you’re both authority figures. I’m cool Uncle Dan.” I paused. “I think I’m cool. Point is, I’m not her mom, or the enforcer for a prince of hell for that matter. It’s easy for her to talk to me. And in the process, I did you a favor.”

  Emma gave me a suspicious look. “How do you figure that?”

  “If you had confronted her, what do you think the status quo at your house would look like right now?”

  “Based on our last few spats,” she said, “after loudly informing me that she hates me, Melanie would stomp off to her room, slam the door, and refuse to speak to me until…next Tuesday, most likely.”

  “Yeah, well, now you don’t have to have that conversation. Tell her that I ratted her out. She’ll be so mad at me, she won’t even think of being mad at you. Meanwhile, you can sit her down, tell her how much you care about her and how worried you are—”

  “Or I can ground her for a month,” Emma said.

  “Also an option,” I said. “Or do both. But I just spared you the entire shouting match. I’m the bad guy for betraying her trust, and you get to be the good guy. You’re welcome.”

  The winter front behind Emma’s eyes defrosted a little. She stuck out her bottom lip and drummed her manicured nails on the table.

  “You…may have a point,” she said.

  “Every once in a while, I’ve been known to stumble onto one.”

  “I’m still miffed. Daniel, you’re a knight of our court now. There are rules. A hierarchy.”

  I was still waiting for somebody to send me a copy of the rulebook. Prince Sitri had knighted me on a whim—that, and to force the rakshasi queen Naavarasi into a bind, torn between losing face or accepting my challenge to duel. Caitlin and I beat the trap she had set for us and got away clean…but a knighthood was forever. Literally. So far I’d sussed out the basics. Namely, that my gun hand was chained to my hip now. As a knight of hell, moving against another court’s minions was an act of war, which meant I had to cancel my plan to punch Naavarasi’s ticket for good.

  Canceled for the moment, anyway. She wrote her own death sentence when she went after Caitlin. Sooner or later, I’d find a way to carry it out.

  “I’m a lousy team player,” I said. “To be fair, Sitri knew this when he knighted me.”

  “Five minutes,” Emma said to Caitlin. “Me and him alone.”

  Caitlin found something interesting to stare at on the ceiling. “If it will make you happy and let us all move on, I’ll punish him myself. Five lashes.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Wait,” I said, “what?”

  “Ten,” Caitlin said.

  “Ten,” Emma fired back, “and I get to do it.”

  “Wait,” I said again, feeling distinctly left out of the negotiation. “Lashes with what?”

  “With my whip, obviously. What else would I use?” Caitlin turned to Emma. “You are not doing it yourself. Twelve lashes.”

  “Fifteen and I get to watch.”

  “I don’t—” I stumbled over my own words. “I don’t think this is a thing you can actually bargain over.”

  They ignored me. Caitlin shook her head. “Twelve. Final offer.”

  “I suppose,” Emma said, “I can accept that as a fair recompense for the insult.”

  “Good. Matter resolved, then. Now shake hands.”

  I blinked, taking Emma’s outstretched hand and feeling like I’d just been sideswiped by a truck.

  “What…what just happened here?” I asked.

  “A learning experience,” Caitlin told me. “Actions have consequences, and infernal society is highly centered around caste and reciprocity. As your senior in the court, Emma is entitled to petition me for redress when she feels slighted. I offered to punish you for it and she accepted my terms, which means she has no reason or excuse to carry a grudge against you going forward. Thus societal balance is restored.”

  “Yeah, but that—that’s an example, right? I mean, this was a hypothetical exercise. You
’re not actually going to do it.”

  She looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. “Daniel, darling, have you ever known me to make an empty threat? You know better. But we can discuss that later; for the moment we should focus on this…what was his name? Todd?”

  The ink dealer. I nodded, suddenly eager for a change of subject.

  “The Network’s gone silent since our last run-in,” I said. “This guy’s the best and only lead we’ve got. And he can tell us why they put a batch of toxic product on the street.”

  “You think it was deliberate,” Emma said.

  “I’d bet money on it. The dealer’s a burnout who shows up at high school parties uninvited—except for this particular party, where he made sure his ink would be passed out like candy. He stayed clear because he knew what was going to happen. The Network wanted those kids dead.”

  Emma’s lips tightened. “Including my daughter. Still, it doesn’t make sense. They’re sabotaging their own business.”

  “It almost feels like an act of terrorism,” Caitlin mused, “but what’s terrorism without an ideology behind it?”

  “We’ve got a name and we know where he works,” I said. “Let’s scoop him up and ask him ourselves. And I don’t mean ‘ask nicely.’”

  “If he’s able to speak,” Caitlin said.

  A shiver of revulsion ran down my spine. The last time we got our hands on a bottom-rung Network dealer, we discovered their anti-squealing policy. They used a kind of curse called a geas, basically a taboo enforced by magic. Their people would literally kill themselves, or chew their own tongues off, before giving up the goods.

  They didn’t use the garden-variety version of that spell, either. A Network geas came in the form of a six-inch cockroach, wriggling deep inside their agents’ bodies. If you were lucky, pulling it out would only leave you with the mother of all sore throats. If you weren’t, it’d chew a tunnel through your guts on its way to freedom. And maybe leave eggs behind.

  “I’d say he’s got a fifty-fifty shot at surviving the extraction,” I told them. “I’m good with those odds if you are.”

  Nobody objected. Nothing we could do until the morning, so we called it. Caitlin walked me out, slipping her arm around mine as we crossed the casino lobby. The swath of flamingo-pink and lime carpet was our personal runway, flanked by walls of flashing, trilling slot machines.

  “But just to be sure,” I said, with a glance over my shoulder to make sure Emma was out of earshot, “you’re not going to really do it.”

  “What?” She furrowed her brow. “Oh, your whipping? Of course I am. The law is all that keeps us from savagery, Daniel. I’d never lie about something like that. Breaking the rules carries a cost.”

  “C’mon. Every rule has a loophole.”

  “No, no, quite iron-clad, I’m afraid.” She paused, flashing the tiniest hint of a smile. “Of course, I didn’t say when I was going to carry out your punishment, did I? I suppose I’m obligated to do it sometime between right now and…oh, the heat death of the universe. Sometime in between there.”

  I leaned into her and savored the flood of relief.

  “I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

  She put on an almost-believable face of grave concern. “Well of course I will. Eventually. Probably in the middle of the night, with no warning. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe years from now. When you least expect it…expect it.”

  “You’re clearly taking ‘how to screw with people’s heads’ lessons from your father.”

  “Goodness,” she said, “it’s almost like fear and pain are two of my most essential management tools.”

  I gave an amiable shrug. “Well, you’ve got to go with what you’re good at, that’s what I always say. Any news on the Naavarasi front?”

  We passed through a revolving door and out into the night. A clean, dry chill hung in the air. Tourists queued up in a serpentine line at the taxi stand, one yellow van after another trundling off to join the molasses-sludge traffic on the Strip.

  “She retreated to lick her wounds,” Caitlin said, “quite literally, I expect.”

  “You did stomp the hell out of her.”

  A pleased glimmer shone in her eyes. “That I did. Not nearly as much as I wanted to, but…rules. Now, remember: technically, your knighthood means she can’t come after you—”

  “But technically, she couldn’t go after you either. She just had to bait a trap that left her hands clean.”

  “Precisely,” Caitlin said, “and she’ll likely try to do it again.”

  “At least we know her real stripes now. She tricked us by playing dumb; that won’t work twice. Meanwhile, I’m digging up all the info I can. Jennifer’s pulling the audio from when Naavarasi killed Kirmira at her stash house.”

  “Chicago’s shape-shifter?” Caitlin glanced sidelong at me as we followed the curling ribbon of sidewalk. “She insisted he wasn’t one of her kind.”

  “So she said. According to Naavarasi, she’s the last rakshasi on earth. But Kirmira said something to her, just before she snapped his neck. And I saw the look on his face. The guy knew her, Cait. I’ll admit, it’s a hunch, but…”

  “But your hunches are generally worth following up on.”

  “Maybe she already played her last hand. Maybe her scheme was all about snaring you.” We rounded a pillar ringed with a band of pink and ducked into the clammy gloom of the parking garage. “I don’t buy it, though. Naavarasi’s got bigger plans than that. And I want to know what she’s chasing before she takes her next shot.”

  “Follow your instincts. Just be careful. You’re playing for higher stakes now. You know, I have a hunch of my own.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  Her fingertips played like silken petals along the back of my neck, leaving an electric tingle in their wake.

  “I have a hunch you’re coming home with me tonight.”

  As it turned out, we were both right.

  9.

  The next morning I called the Burger Barn on Lake Mead Boulevard, posing as a human-resources flunky doing an employment verification. Had to make sure I was casting my bait into the right pond.

  “His name is Todd…sorry,” I said, “the application got smeared in the photocopier. I always tell them to make sure the ink is dry. Looks like a C or a K maybe—”

  “Could it be an L?” asked the tired voice on the other end of the line.

  “Yes! You’re right, it’s definitely an L.”

  “Todd Long. Yep, he works for us.”

  She didn’t sound too enthused about that fact. She was quick to offer up all the information she could legally provide, with thinly veiled pleasure that some other company was poised to take a slacker off her hands. I relayed the info to Pixie and told her to cross-check it with the Palo Verde High School rolls for the last couple of years. Dig up enough bits and pieces of a person’s life, sooner or later you have enough to draw a complete picture.

  That said, I planned on getting most of what I needed straight from the horse’s mouth. Today was Todd’s last day at the Burger Barn.

  It was a gritty, dry morning. I pulled in at the edge of the parking lot, under the bulbous plastic shell of a burger-shaped sign, and jumped down onto dusty asphalt. The air left a dirty taste in my mouth, like truck exhaust mingled with charred meat and old grease. It was a little after ten, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, and the plate-glass windows looked in on a barren fast-food joint.

  That meant most of the cars belonged to the doomed souls behind the counter. And one, down on the lot’s far end by a stretch of chain-link fence, was a van that matched Melanie’s description. It was a vintage GMC, beige with a ketchup-red swoop. Cheap white curtains hung in a dusty side window. The owner, amazingly enough, had no stickers decorating the rust-spotted bumper. This minor concession to taste was offset by his Playboy-bunny-silhouette mud flaps.

  “Keep it classy,” I muttered as I strolled on by. My gaze went up, prowling along the
dead concrete lampposts and the eaves of the restaurant, hunting for security cameras. Not one glass eye pointed my way. I reached into my breast pocket and tugged out a pair of blue latex disposable gloves, slipping them on. Once I stepped around the side of the van, I was all but invisible. Invisible long enough to get my picks out, teach the cheap lock to roll over and play dead, and let myself inside.

  I breathed deep and smelled a hellish chemical mélange of pine air freshener, Drakkar Noir, and Axe body spray. Underneath that, the musk of stale sweat and furtive sex. I crouched as I stepped into his little love nest. Sheets lay rumpled and storm-tossed on a narrow slab of mattress; the other side of the van sported a long, low counter and some shallow cupboards. He had a hot plate, a half-full box of Honey Smacks next to an empty bowl caked with dried milk, a few scattered muscle-car magazines…and that was most of his worldly belongings. Todd was not living his best life.

  A footlocker near the bed caught my eye. I crouched down, ears perked for anyone approaching the van, and flipped open the hasps. Inside, some mismatched, unwashed socks and wrinkled underwear shared space with more magazines. Porn, mostly, tawdry and tattered. I’d worn the gloves to conceal my fingerprints; now I wished I’d brought a second pair just to add another layer between my hands and Todd’s fantasies.

  I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the locker. A fat sock concealed a fistful of tiny plastic packets, each about the size of a condom wrapper, stuffed with spiky black grains. Ink. I held up one of the packets and took a closer look. The granules glistened like bubbles of oil with hair-fine bristles, ready to be slipped under a user’s tongue or melted down with a lighter and a spoon.

  Ink was America’s new favorite party drug, a guaranteed good time for all. Except when somebody skunked the product and turned a houseful of teenagers into homicidal maniacs. I wondered if this was more of the bad batch or Todd’s personal stash.