The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  “So what do you want?”

  “Right now?” Elmer hmmed. “Well, mostly I just want to kill you, to be perfectly honest.”

  “Jen,” I shouted. “Flush him out, now!”

  Jennifer leaped out from cover and opened fire, unloading her revolver and splitting the air with flash after flash of white light. Elmer yelped, off-balance, and I saw his shadow lurch from his hiding space. Then a second shadow swooped down like a hawk: Caitlin, who had been creeping her way along the tops of the boilers, biding her time. Her heel lashed out in a snap kick that caught Elmer in the belly, doubling him over and knocking him to the floor.

  I didn’t have time to join in. I sprinted past them, up the corridor he’d been keeping us away from. The tunnel twisted hard left, and thick, boxy AC vents sprouted along the ceiling. I skidded to a stop.

  Elmer’s experiment squatted in the middle of the floor, in the heart of a nest of wiring and vents. His body had swollen, his bent legs disappearing under the spill of his fat, and he only wore an open raincoat over his naked bulk.

  The man turned to me, his eyes so sunken in his face that they looked like tiny black marbles. His stomach rippled and swelled with the outlines of fat roaches crawling in a frenzy under his skin. He opened his mouth, his puffy lips wriggling. No sound came out. It didn’t need to; I knew what he was asking me to do.

  I raised the can of roach spray I’d taken from the janitor’s closet, with a second swinging from my belt, and aimed. Then I flicked my lighter six inches in front of the nozzle and pulled the trigger.

  The stream burst into flame and washed over him. His cheap coat ignited first, then his skin. I moved in, firing short bursts with my improvised flamethrower, and hit him again and again. He toppled over, twitching. I heard the roaches scream. Rents in his skin began to tear open, the passengers struggling to escape the burning ship. A few roaches skittered free and I caught them with gouts of fire. They raced down the concrete tunnel, burning like fireflies.

  More followed, a river of them now, the blazing roaches fleeing in a glistening tide. The dead man’s body deflated like a limp balloon, even his skull flattening out, as if his bones had been replaced by gelatin. The empty can clattered at my feet. I grabbed the backup from my belt and kept firing.

  The last hissing scream faded, and nothing remained but the low crackle of flames. Dead roaches littered the tunnel floor like tea lights, filling the air with the stench of charred flesh and sewage.

  I figured Elmer would be torn to shreds by the time I ran back to the boiler room, but he was holding his own. I saw Caitlin lash out with a bone-breaking punch and he flipped back on his heels, a court-jester cartwheel that pulled him just out of reach. He spun, dropping low and swinging around on the palm of one hand, and Caitlin leaped over his kick.

  The crooked little man was faster, more agile than I imagined. Caitlin couldn’t land a hit on him. He couldn’t land one on her, either. He was still prolonging the game, trying to keep all eyes on him while his “bio-factory” prepared to burst in the next room.

  “Hey, Elmer!” I shouted.

  He looked my way. I used the last burst from the can of roach spray to send a burst of fire into the air, painting him a picture. Then I threw the can and my spent lighter to the ground.

  “Phase two is canceled,” I said.

  His face contorted in sudden, feral rage. I braced myself, expecting him to come at me. Instead, he took a deep breath.

  A cloud of bilious yellow gas burst from between his lips, streaking through the air on a howl of anger. I leaped to the left, diving clear, as it blew past me. Iron turned to pitted, rusted ruin as the cloud washed over it, and the concrete sprouted a carpet of fuzzy black mold in its wake.

  “He’s movin’!” Jennifer shouted. I saw him scramble up a boiler, flipping like an acrobat, and leap clear to the other side.

  By the time we rounded the corner, he was gone.

  Caitlin had a flush in her cheeks and a faint smile on her lips. Not many people could give her a workout. She leaned against me and I slid my arm around her waist.

  “You both okay?” I said.

  Jennifer dangled her empty pistol from her fingertip. “Little embarrassed I didn’t even wing him, but there’s always next time.”

  “The breeder?” Caitlin asked.

  “Dead. A couple of roaches might have gotten loose, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. We have definitely overstayed our welcome.”

  * * *

  Evacuating an entire hotel takes a while, and while it felt like we’d been battling in the basement for an hour—that’s what my aching muscles told me, anyway—we’d barely been down there for fifteen minutes. There were still lines of stragglers making their way to the parking lot, hotel employees scurrying in all directions, enough confusion to cover our escape. A couple of fire trucks had parked right out front, responding to the alarm. At least a hundred civilians were standing outside the hotel, milling around aimlessly or breaking into knots of conversation, and we used the edge of the crowd as a shield.

  “Low profile,” Jennifer muttered in my ear, slinking alongside me. “That cop you punched is out here somewhere.”

  “Probably right next to the cop whose gun you stole.”

  “I’d like to not have to bail either of you out,” Caitlin said, “so step lively and keep your heads down.”

  I caught sight of Teddy, moving fast between a couple of parked limos with his phone to his ear.

  “Grab the car,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

  I circled around, waving to catch my brother’s attention. He blinked. “Gotta go,” he said and hung up his phone.

  “Get Seabrook and Harding out of here, right now,” I told him. “You too. Do not go back inside that hotel.”

  “Dan? What—what are you even doing here? And what happened to your forehead? Did you get hurt?”

  “Listen to me very carefully. You know what I told you, when you asked why I was having a meeting with the mayor?”

  He nodded, wary. “Using a bad guy to catch another bad guy. That fire alarm—”

  “This particular bad guy might still be around. Grab the mayor and the commissioner and leave. Go back to Vegas. Tell Seabrook I said so. She’ll take my word for it.”

  “Okay.” He took that in, and I watched his uncertainty slowly turn to steel. “I’m on it. I’ll call ahead and make sure the Metro escort meets us on the highway, and I’ll ride with the VIPs myself. Don’t worry, they’ll get home safe.”

  “Good thinking. Hey.” I squeezed his shoulder. “You got this.”

  “You know, someday you’re going to have to tell me the whole story here.”

  “Someday,” I said.

  * * *

  We were crossing the Vegas city limits, home again, and I couldn’t unclench. Jennifer leaned forward in the back seat and her hands worked at my shoulders.

  “They’re fine, sugar. We won. I mean, stalemate, Elmer’s still out there, but we gave him one hell of a black eye. It’s over.”

  I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t make it stick in my head. Maybe it was because my brother was involved. Maybe it was because Elmer Donaghy had been a step ahead of us since this sick little game began. We’d taken out two of his fronts, killed his science project, stopped him from infesting the mayors’ conference…so why didn’t I feel like it was time for a victory lap?

  “You’ll feel better with a stiff drink in you,” Jennifer said. “Cait? Come with us? Drinks on the town?”

  “With relish,” she said. “I think we’ve earned a bit of pleasure.”

  Elmer’s plans had all fit the same format so far. The feint, the real plot, and then one last layer. A fail-safe. He always had a fail-safe.

  My phone buzzed. It was Seabrook.

  “Mayor?”

  “We’ve got trouble,” she said. “We’re halfway between Boulder City and Vegas. The Metro escort just left.”

  “Wait.” I hunched forward
in my seat. “Left?”

  “Earl is calling HQ and shouting up a storm, but nobody claims to know anything about it. The entire escort just peeled off onto an exit ramp. We’re all alone out here.”

  “Turn around,” I told Caitlin. She gritted her teeth and swung hard into the left lane, angling for an open divider on the highway.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell your driver to keep moving. We’re coming to meet you, but do not, for any reason, pull off that road. Keep moving.”

  The only answer was a crumpled bang, then dead silence.

  40.

  I knew what we would find before we reached the scene. One limousine pulled off to the side of the highway, with a front tire shredded down to the battered rims. We hooked another U-turn and came up behind it. The back doors hung open, nothing inside but a few tiny spatters of dried blood on the leather bucket seats.

  I opened the driver’s-side door. The chauffeur sat slumped sideways with a forty-five-caliber hole in his face and the back of his head splattered across the privacy divider.

  Teddy. Mayor Seabrook. Commissioner Harding. Gone. I punched the side of the limo. My knuckles stung as I stomped back to the car.

  “Drive,” I said.

  We headed back to the fortress. Jennifer kept an operations room ready to roll, if we ever needed one. It wasn’t much, just a long and rickety table salvaged from one of the tenement’s abandoned basements and a whiteboard stained with marker-trail ghosts, but it was a convenient place to rally the troops in a hurry. Jennifer stepped out to make a few calls. I paced, mostly. Pacing kept the walls from closing in.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Caitlin told me.

  I stopped in mid-stride. She was leaning against one wall, arms crossed, watching me.

  “This is absolutely my fault,” I said. “We should have stayed with them. We should have rode convoy all the way back to Vegas.”

  “And give the Network a bigger target? And what about when we returned? Would you babysit them for the rest of their lives? Donaghy clearly had a contingency plan in place. If he didn’t strike at the mayor today, he would have done it tomorrow.”

  She was right. I knew she was right, but I was desperate to be furious at someone for losing Teddy and I was the only candidate in sight. I didn’t have anything to say, so I started pacing again. I reached the far wall, turned—and Caitlin was standing in my path. She put her hands on my shoulders, stopped my stride, held me fast.

  “This,” she said, “is not productive.”

  My nervous energy didn’t have anywhere to go. I stood there while it knotted up my stomach.

  “Help me,” I said.

  She pulled me into her arms. It was the best place to be right now.

  Jennifer came back, brandishing her phone. “Y’all need to see this.”

  She’d cued up a news report, a breaking bulletin on KTNV. Helicopter footage swirled across the city streets and hovered over a sprawling lot of vintage casino signs. The dead neon sat out under the afternoon sun, unlit and rusting away, while police lights flashed in the distance.

  “—and gave pursuit,” the anchor said. “One of the suspect vehicles crashed into a lamppost near the Neon Museum, at which point the gunmen in both vans, with three confirmed hostages including Mayor Seabrook, made entry into the museum itself. At least one employee was shot in the attack. Police have cordoned off the surrounding area, and residents are advised to avoid North Las Vegas Boulevard, North Encanto Drive, and East Wilson—”

  “What the hell are they doing?” I said.

  Jennifer shrugged. “Near as I can tell, troopers spotted their getaway cars actin’ fishy, tried to pull ’em over, and the bad guys went all Rambo on ’em.”

  “This is…no. Running from the cops, crashing the getaway ride? This is sloppy and loud. The Network doesn’t do sloppy and loud. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Are you sure?” asked our new arrival.

  He strode through the doorway like he lived here. We’d met once before; he had a bland face and a bland gray suit, his alligator-skin attaché case the only notable thing about his ensemble, but I wasn’t about to forget him.

  “It makes sense if they did it on purpose,” I said. “Cait, Jen, this is Mr. Smith. He’s with the Network.”

  Smith inclined his head. Jennifer eased back her utility jacket and flashed her holster. Caitlin took one step to the left, keeping a hand light on my shoulder.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Jennifer said.

  “Oh, doors and guards don’t inconvenience me much when I’m on the company clock.” He cupped his hand to one side of his mouth, a bit of conspiratorial folksiness. “And I’m always on the company clock.”

  Jennifer didn’t pull her piece, not yet. I was itching to draw mine, but I needed answers more than I wanted Smith dead, and he knew it.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” he told me. “We have someone important to you, and we’d like to discuss a trade.”

  “Mayor Seabrook. She’s safe?”

  “She is, but that’s not the person in question. We have one Theodore…Faust.” Smith flashed a bloodless smile. “It’s funny, we’d barely checked into your family tree. But then you went and told one of our contractors about him. Your brother is safe, for now. Sound, for now.”

  Grimes. Damn it. I’d brought up Teddy when we met at the Monaco, while I was trying to flip him over to our side, and even told him how my brother worked in security. He must have passed on the info to his bosses before I killed him.

  The biggest threat to my brother’s safety wasn’t the Network or Elmer Donaghy. It was me.

  No sense wasting time. “What do you want?”

  “A trade. Your brother, in exchange for you, Howard Canton’s wand, and his top hat.”

  I’d already returned the hat to its more-or-less rightful owner, but I didn’t say a word. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t getting a damn thing.

  “You’ve got the commissioner and the mayor in there, too,” I said, feeling him out. “You want three things, I want three things.”

  He shook his head. “Mayor Seabrook dies tonight, that’s nonnegotiable, but you can save your brother’s life. Surrender yourself at the museum with the relics we want, and he’ll be free to go. Frankly, he’s useless to us except as leverage over you. We have no reason to harm him once you’ve been taken off the grid.”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “That’s all, but you’d better decide quickly. Right now, our operatives are holding the police at bay. Eventually Metro will decide to engage a tactical solution, and at that point, well…it’s all over but the shooting. It’s been a pleasure, sir, ladies—good day.”

  He turned and headed for the door.

  “Hey,” I said, “just one more thing.”

  Smith looked back. I drew my pistol and fired. The slug punched through his forehead, blew out the back of his skull, and spattered gray jelly across the eggshell paint. He hit the wall and slumped, slow, all the way to the floor with his eyes wide open and a look of surprise frozen on his face.

  “You don’t fuck with my family,” I told him.

  The gunshot settled into distant echoes. I nudged Mr. Smith’s corpse with the toe of my shoe.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “You were expecting something different?” Caitlin asked.

  “Actually, yeah. From what we’ve seen of these Network guys so far, I figured he’d explode out of his skin or sprout tentacles or something.” I nudged him again. “Talk about anticlimactic.”

  Jennifer stood beside me, frowning down at the body.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why all the hullabaloo? They don’t need to gin up a hostage crisis—if anything, that’s going to make it a lot harder to do a swap.”

  I had been thinking about that, and I circled back to one conclusion.

  “They’re being efficient. This isn’t about me. You heard the man: Seabrook dies tonight. They want her out of the picture, pr
esumably so they can put their own candidate in office—”

  “One with a roach in his gullet,” Jennifer said.

  “Exactly. This is Elmer Donaghy’s contingency plan in action. At some point, Metro’s going to roll in hard, and the hostages are going to be ‘accidentally’ shot in the chaos. One public tragedy, made to order. But they’ve got Teddy in there too, which makes this a golden opportunity to put pressure on me.”

  Caitlin tapped her chin with a scarlet fingernail, pondering. “One problem. This clearly isn’t a suicide mission, if they’re expecting you to hand over Canton’s wand and hat. How do they plan to leave once they get what they want? The lot is surrounded.”

  “That’s not a problem at all if you’ve got an ally who can literally carve holes in the world and walk on through.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Fleiss.”

  “She’s got to be there,” I said.

  I turned my arm. The crisp linen bulged, just a little, showing the outline of my wand’s spring holster. Fleiss wasn’t the only one who could jump from place to place in a heartbeat. I could work that trick too, when the wand felt like letting me.

  “If this doesn’t qualify as saving people from danger, I don’t know what does. If I could get in there, grab a hostage, and teleport out—”

  “There’s three hostages,” Jennifer said. “Whose life are you gonna save? You’ll only get one shot.”

  “He won’t even get one,” Caitlin replied. “These people aren’t stupid; they won’t let him anywhere near the hostages. And I suspect the first thing Fleiss will do is take his wand away.”

  I thought so, too. And that’s when I got an idea.

  * * *

  “Don’t make me regret this,” Gary said.

  “Look on the bright side,” I murmured as we walked up to the police cordon, “there’s a really good chance I’m going to die tonight. You’d like that, right?”

  Squad cars blocked off the street, just behind a line of sawhorses and orange construction cones. Farther back, at the corner, uniformed officers were waving traffic toward a detour. Night had fallen, red and blue strobes flashing in the dark. Off to my left, a ridged wall ringed the open-air lot of the Neon Museum. The police had cut the power; there were no lights beyond the wall, no glimmering signs, just a graveyard maze of cold steel and glass.