The Living End (4 page)

Even so, something told me I was going to be doing this one for free.

“Twenty minutes,” I said and hung up on her.

“No rest for the wicked?” Caitlin asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

“Sorry, hon. Rain check?”

“I’ll settle for dinner. Eight o’clock. I’ll swing by the bookstore.”

“I think,” I said with a smile, “that can be arranged.”

• • •

Back when the Rat Pack was headlining at the Sands, St. Jude’s was a swinging dance hall called the Diesel Room. The old marquee was long gone now, replaced by a dead neon cross, and the vintage parquet floors were scuffed and faded like a worn-out memory. I could find Pixie there most days, spooning out hot meals to the city’s hungry and destitute, the lost souls who had fallen through the cracks in the glitter.

A smell hung in the air, something like damp dirty socks and quiet desperation. The lunchtime crowd was pretty light, and I saw Pixie working the soup line, doing what she could to make sure nobody walked away with an empty stomach.

Pixie had a knack for making me feel like a pretty horrible excuse for a human being. Which I suppose I was, to be fair, but still.

She passed her ladle to another volunteer and waved me off to the side, flashing the
X
marked in black Sharpie on the back of her hand. Pixie was as slight as her nickname, a wisp of a girl with chunky Buddy Holly glasses and scarlet feathered hair, the tips dyed an icy white.

“I didn’t want to call you,” was the first thing she said. I didn’t blame her. She’d been blissfully ignorant just a couple of weeks ago, until I dragged her into my world.

I sat down at one of the picnic-style wooden tables that lined the old dance floor. She swung her leg over the bench opposite me and checked to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Look around. What do you see?”

I shrugged. “Lots of folks down on their luck. This city only loves you as long as you’ve got cash in your pockets.”

“Not enough of them.” She fluttered an anxious hand. “Normally we’d have twenty, thirty more regulars in here. People I know by name, or at least by their faces.”

“Maybe you’ve got competition,” I said. “Consider rebranding your product?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“It started a few days ago,” she said. “Some regulars, people who have been coming around for years, just…not showing up. Then more. Every day there’s fewer people coming around. Now, one or two disappearing? Maybe somebody got a job or found another way out of the system. Maybe they moved out of town, or maybe they ended up behind bars for a night or ODed. But not this many. Not all at once.”

“I wasn’t entirely joking about the competition,” I said. “You’re sure there’s nowhere else they might be going for their daily bread?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been checking other soup kitchens, the shelters, calling hospitals about the handful I have real names for. They’re not there. They’re not
anywhere
.”

“At the risk of sounding morbid, have you called the morgue? Seen if there’s an upswing in John and Jane Does?”

“Of course I did,” she said. “I did that
first
. And no. They’re not dying. They’re disappearing. These are marginalized people, Faust. Do you know what the crime statistics are like among the homeless? Not crimes committed by them, committed
against
them. Compared to other citizens, the rates of hate crimes, beatings, rapes—”

I held up my hand. “I hear you. So lay it on the table. What’s your guess as to where they’re all going?”

“I don’t know. My skill set is all digital, okay? But my regulars live off the grid. It’s like the city streets just opened and swallowed them up, and I don’t even know where to start. I was hoping you could…do your thing. Look, I can pay you. Just name a figure.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. I felt a headache coming on. Or maybe it was a bad idea disguised as a headache.

“Christ, Pix, I’m not going to charge you
money
for this. Let’s just call it a favor for a favor, okay?”

She eyed me the same way I’d eyed my new lawyer.

“I’d feel safer just paying you,” she said.

“Favor for a favor, and you can pick the favor. I’m trying to hold out an olive branch. Will you just fucking take it already?”

Her lips pursed as she weighed a question. Then her eyes went diamond hard.

“What happened to him, Faust?”

“Who?”

“You know who,” she said. “Ben. The guy I helped you set up. A whole lot of you went out into the desert that night we stole that ring from Lauren Carmichael’s house, and not everybody came back again.”

I folded my hands on the table and leaned close.

“Why are you asking me a question you already know the answer to?”

“B
ecause,” Pixie said, “you told me we were the good guys that night. Then I find out that while I was slipping out through the tunnel under Carmichael’s house, there was a
slaughter
going on in the dining room. Then, what, you dragged Ben out into the desert and put a bullet in his head? I was part of that, damn it! You didn’t tell me anyone was going to get killed. You told me we were doing the right thing.”

“We
were
doing the right thing,” I said flatly. “And it didn’t go down like that. First of all, don’t be fucking naive. Lauren and Sullivan went in planning to stab each other in the back. When I exposed their game, what did you think was going to happen? They’d have a big laugh about it and go play checkers? You knew damn well there’d be a fight. All we did was even up the odds and give the Choirboys a fighting chance against Brand’s mannequins. We
saved lives
. I didn’t hear you protesting at the time.”

“That was before I had time to think—” she said, but I cut her off with a wave of my hand.

“Second, the plan was to let Ben go into exile with his buddies in the Redemption Choir. He pulled a gun instead. That was his choice, not mine.”

Ben had been a dead man walking, and he knew it in the end. Emma took him down when he tried to run. We’d agreed, between her and me and Caitlin, that the truth needed a little creative editing for her daughter’s sake. The new version involved a gun in the room and self-defense, and the killer was me instead of Emma. I had enough real blood staining my hands that I didn’t mind splashing on a little more, if it made things easier between Emma and Melanie.

Pixie stared down at the table. Her jaw slowly unclenched.

“It was easy,” she said slowly, “to go with the flow when we were in the thick of it. I didn’t have time to think. It was only when it was all over and done, and I tried to go back to my old life…”

I reached across the table and rested my hand over hers. She didn’t pull away.

“Your old life wasn’t there anymore,” I said, trying to be gentle. “I know. You can do all the same things, visit all the same places, but it’ll never be the same. It can’t be, now that you know the world isn’t the way you thought it was.”

“I keep thinking about what you told me in the van. About…people like me holding back the dark. So I came back here to try and help. It’s all I can do.”

“And that’s why I’m going to find your missing people for you,” I said.

Me and my big mouth. The look of relief in her eyes told me that I needed to deliver the goods if I didn’t want her heart to break. I just wished I knew where to start.

She gave me everything she had to go on, which amounted to a notebook full of scribbles and a couple of digital snapshots from St. Jude’s Christmas Eve party. It wasn’t much, but in a world where people can vanish off the grid without leaving a trace behind, it was the best lead I was going to get.

• • •

I took a cab back to Bentley and Corman’s place. They ran the Scrivener’s Nook, a used and rare bookstore. It looked like Charles Dickens was their interior decorator. A very drunk and disorganized Charles Dickens. Corman, built like a boxer going to seed, with hair the color of faded chestnut varnish, sat on a wooden stool behind the antique cash register and watched a video the size of a postage stamp on his phone. I heard the tinny crack of bat meeting baseball, sending it flying over the digitized roar of the crowd.

“Really?” I said, strolling over. “Surrounded by thousands of books and you’re watching ESPN?”

Corman stretched his arms out, stifling a yawn. “I am as long as Bentley’s out on a grocery run. Gotta rest up and recharge the ol’ batteries after spending that much time outside my own skin. How’d the meeting go?”

“Well, Perkins is…he’s definitely a lawyer, I’ll say that.”

“That good or bad?”

“He’s pretty sure he can squash the lesser charges,” I said. “That just leaves us with the feds to deal with.”

“Don’t worry, kiddo. We’ll figure something out. We always do.” He jerked a thumb towards a stack of envelopes at the edge of the counter. “Somebody called for you about half an hour ago. I wrote their number down and put it with the mail.”

Weird. I couldn’t think of anyone who would be looking for me. I wandered over and flipped through the pile. Gas bill for the building, electric bill, new copy of
Publishers Weekly
, Stash Tea catalog for Bentley—then I found Corman’s scribbled note at the bottom of the stack, written on the back of a greasy pizza receipt, and I furrowed my brow.

Napa Hospital call re: Dr. Plank.

I dialed the number he’d jotted down. They picked up on the second ring.

“Napa State Hospital, how may I direct your call?”

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Daniel Faust. I got a message asking me to call about a patient there. Eugene Planck?”

The line went quiet for so long I would have thought I’d been disconnected if it wasn’t for the faint clatter of equipment in the background and the occasional garbled PA announcement.

“Yes,” the voice on the other end finally said. “Dr. Planck listed you as his emergency contact. I have some bad news. I’m afraid…I’m afraid he’s dead. It happened this morning, around eleven o’clock.”

While we were walking into a trap down in Chloride
, I thought. I gripped the edge of the counter, holding on tight as the world slid out from under my feet.

“How?” I said.

“It looks like a heart attack. It was very quick. He didn’t suffer.”

Yes, he did
, I thought, because I knew what really killed him. Lauren. While we were chasing her shadow two states away, she was in California, tying up loose ends. I knew she had a soft spot for her old professor, and she’d spared his life once before. I’d thought that meant he was safe from her.

So there was one more victim I couldn’t save. One more name for the list of the dead, chiseled on an granite slab and dragging me down.

“Thank you,” I said. The voice started talking about burial costs and Planck’s family in Virginia and did I know—and I just hung up.

Corman read the look on my face. He put down his phone.

“What’s what, kiddo?”

“Eugene,” I said. “The guy who helped me and Caitlin track down the Etruscan Box. He’s dead.”

“Natural causes?” he said, but I could tell from his tone that he knew better.

“Classic one-two punch. While we were chasing our tails and getting shot at in Arizona, Lauren was out in California dishing out some payback. I think she hoped she’d kill us all off at the same time.”

“We’re still here,” Corman said.

I slammed my fist against the counter. A jolt of pain lanced up my arm and left my wrist throbbing.

“He spent twenty years in a mental hospital,” I said, seething, “because Lauren locked a curse around his neck and
put
him there. Twenty goddamn years in purgatory. All I had to do, the
one thing
I had to do, was kill Lauren and he would have died a free man. I couldn’t save Stacy Pankow or Amber Vance or any of the other people her cult murdered. She ordered Meadow Brand to torture Spengler and kill him right in front of me. We got to Sophia’s house just in time to find
her
dead body. Corman, I—”

My eyes squeezed shut. A weak and rotten dam against the tears I didn’t want to let flow. I’d been pushing everything down, bottling it up so I could keep fighting, but Eugene’s death was that one straw too many. I couldn’t keep carrying that weight on my shoulders.

“You’re afraid we’re going to lose,” Corman said.

I opened my eyes, took a deep breath to steady myself, and nodded.

“The only game you can lose,” Corman said, “is a fair game. That’s fine for baseball and poker night, but when all your chips are on the table? That’s when you do what Bentley and I taught you. Cheat. Rig the game. Do whatever you gotta do to come out a winner.”

“What if Lauren cheats better than us?” I said.

Corman snorted and shook his head.

“Son,” he said, “
nobody
cheats better than us. Now stop worrying about could-bes and what-ifs, because could-bes and what-ifs aren’t worth a damn. You’re burning daylight. Get out there, do what you do best, and find a new angle. Lauren Carmichael’s just one more in a long line of people who thought they were immortal until they suddenly weren’t. Time we proved that to her.”

A
n hour later, I was sitting in a booth at the Five Guys on Eastern Avenue, noshing on a big, soggy bacon burger and dipping into a greasy brown paper bag stuffed with Cajun fries. I’d rather have gone for Korean with Caitlin, but the fast food quelled the gnawing in my gut. The hunger pangs, anyway. It didn’t do much for the sense of dread that only got stronger when Harmony Black walked in the door.

I’d figured out an angle, all right, but I couldn’t do it alone.

Harmony was a short, full-figured blonde with wire-rimmed glasses and a penchant for men’s neckties. Today’s was forest green. She also had a penchant for putting guys like me behind bars. She gave the clientele a quick frisking with her eyes, making sure I didn’t invite her into an ambush, then slid into the seat across from me.

“Tell me something I want to hear,” she said. Her words were clipped, edged with a faint New England accent.

“Such as?”