The Living End (9 page)

“Is that what you thought?” I said gently. “That Emma was avoiding you because of what she did?”

“She just—” Melanie stammered, her voice breaking. “She just acted so guilty, and I thought—I thought—”

Then the tears came. She fell against me and I put my arms around her, holding her close as she finally found the grief she’d been bottling up since the night her father died. She howled against my chest and I held her, an anchor in her storm.

“I’m
sorry
,” I heard her moan again and again, and I shook my head and stroked her hair.

“Shh,” I whispered. “No, it’s all right. You have done
nothing
to be sorry for. Nothing at all.”

Not like me
, I thought.
Considering I watched Emma murder Ben in cold blood, and now I’m lying to his daughter about it
. I did my best to shove aside my self-loathing for a few minutes and focus on Melanie instead.

Her sobs turned into little choking wheezes, and then they finally faded into silence.

She slowly pulled away from me. Her makeup was caked down her cheeks like an oil slick. It stained my shirt in damp smears. She hiccuped and ran her hand under her nose.

“I bet I look like shit, huh?” she said, trying to smile.

“I’ve seen worse. Bet you feel a little better, though.”

“Yeah,” she said, sniffing. “Little bit.”

“Tell you what. You go get some sleep. I’ll crash here on the couch tonight. If you wake up in the night, you want to talk, you need anything, you come get me. Okay?”

She nodded quickly. “Okay.”

Melanie scurried off to clean her face up and blow her nose. I waited until she was out of earshot and dialed Caitlin’s number. When she answered, I heard the faint murmur of traffic under her voice.

“How’d the meeting go?”

“She’s sitting right next to me,” she said lightly, a veiled warning to watch what I talked about. “I’m taking our new guest out on the town for a bit, showing her the sights.”

“When you’re done, I could use a hand. I found Melanie up in the bar, drinking her troubles away on a bogus driver’s license. I took her home.”

“Wait,” Caitlin said, “she was drinking in
Winter
? Out of all the places she could go, why there?”

“Probably because she wanted to get caught. It was a cry for help. I’m delivering. I’m gonna crash here tonight just to keep an eye on her, but she needs her mom. Any chance you could light a fire under Emma’s ass and get her back here? Don’t tell her about the bar, just…just let her know that I had the talk with Melanie, about what happened to Ben, and I think I smoothed things over a little.”

Melanie had more weight on her shoulders than any seventeen-year-old should ever have to deal with. I knew what that was like. Unlike me, though, she actually had a chance to make something of her life. I wasn’t sure which way she’d lean in the end, which of her parents she’d take after, and I really didn’t care. What mattered to me was that she knew she had choices, and she knew she was loved.

Everybody should have that.

The doorbell rang at six in the morning. I sat up from the couch with a start, rubbed the crust from my eyes, and stumbled toward the door. I thought Emma had come home, my sleep-addled brain not realizing that Emma probably had a key to her own house.

Caitlin stood on the doorstep, draped in black Christian Dior with a floppy-brimmed hat that made me think of Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She gazed at me from behind a pair of dark glasses just a little too large for her face, her body silhouetted in the morning glow.

“You are
way
early for lunch,” I said, “but you look amazing.”

“Emma can’t get back until tonight,” she said, stepping past me into the foyer. “So I took the liberty of making some plans.”

An alarm clock whined from up the hall. Melanie’s bedroom door opened and she trudged out like one of the walking dead, with her blue hair tangled and her body draped in an oversized nightshirt that drooped past her knees. She turned, saw us, and froze.

Caitlin was Prince Sitri’s hound. To his subjects, that meant she was basically judge, jury, and executioner all rolled up in one. It was a bad sign when she showed up on your doorstep unannounced. Melanie’s gaze flicked toward me, with a
what-did-you-tell-her?
look on her face.

“It occurred to me,” Caitlin said, taking her glasses off and staring at Melanie, “that we haven’t been spending enough time together. We’re addressing that. Today.”

Melanie gulped and gestured vaguely toward the bathroom. “I, uh, I have to go to school.”

“Not today, you don’t. You’re home sick with a terrible flu. Might even last two days. Meanwhile, I have plans for you, young lady.”

“I’ll tear up the fake ID,” Melanie squeaked. “I’ll never do it again!”

Caitlin blinked, then nodded pleasantly.

“Well, yes, you will, but that’s not why I’m here. We have reservations at the Canyon Ranch SpaClub. Shiatsu massage, vitamin infusion facials, sauna, mani-pedi, and of course we’ll get our hair done. How does that sound?”

Melanie gaped. She fumbled for words, eventually coming up with, “That…sounds pretty okay.”

“Well, then, you’d best get showered and changed. Hop to it. Go on.”

Melanie vanished into the bathroom. Caitlin put her dark glasses back on and studied her fingernails.

“I
know
how to make someone relax,” she told me. “She’ll be a puddle of happy jelly by lunchtime.”

“You’re amazing, have I told you that lately?”

“I’m pretty okay,” she said.

“How did things go with our, ah, guest?”

“We spent the night taking each other’s measure,” Caitlin said. “Seduction is a slow dance, not a sprint. She’s definitely eager to be courted, but she doesn’t want to seem
too
eager or give me any opportunity to upset her position with Prince Malphas. She goes back to Denver this morning. We’ll see what comes of it.”

While Caitlin and Melanie prepared for a day of pampering, I had a less glamorous job on my plate. Pixie’s missing-persons problem had kept me tossing and turning all night while I tried to find an angle. The problem, I realized, was that I was doing all the hard work. Why hunt the predators, when I could let them hunt me instead?

Passing for homeless and hungry didn’t take too much work. The people who lined up for food at St. Jude’s didn’t look a whole hell of a lot different from me or my friends. A little more tired. A little more scuffed up and beaten down. It was mostly in the eyes.

I headed back to Bentley and Corman’s place and raided their closet. Corman was a bigger guy than me, and he hung onto clothes until even the moths lost interest. I scored an LA Dodgers T-shirt with a faded pasta sauce stain and a baggy pair of jeans that frayed at the cuffs. In the mirror, I looked like a guy wearing the only hand-me-downs he could find. I hadn’t shaved yet that morning, and my stubble looked more sloppy than stylish. The bags under my eyes? Those were authentic. I really needed to stop couch-surfing.

I grabbed a fifth of Jack Daniels from the liquor cabinet and trundled back into the bathroom. Not every person on the streets has a battle with the bottle, but it’s a popular stereotype. When you’re crafting a disguise, playing on stereotypes goes a long way. I winced as I took a heavy swig from the bottle and gargled, swishing it over my teeth and tongue like it was mouthwash, then spit it into the sink. I gazed longingly at my unused toothbrush on my way out.

I could take my pick of gutters to crawl into, but I needed visibility. That meant the Boulevard. I parked a block off the Strip and blended in with the tourist foot traffic, noticing I was already getting more personal space than usual. Any herd can tell when they’ve got a sick animal in their midst.

Crystals at CityCenter was a monument to ridiculous excess. A shopping mall for the elite and elite wannabes, where Gucci and Armani boutiques rubbed shoulders with Cartier, Prada, and Kiki de Montpernasse. Normally I couldn’t afford to breathe the air in there, but I’d been dragged along on a couple of shopping trips. Kiki de Montpernasse was where Caitlin bought her lingerie.

Panhandlers weren’t a strange sight anywhere on the strip, but they knew to go where the money was. Outside Crystals, on a pedestrian bridge riding over the nightmare tangle of traffic below, a couple of regulars were already camped out with hand-lettered signs on corrugated cardboard and empty coffee cups for collecting change.

I’d done my own sign with a black Sharpie. “Homeless hungry need work. God Bless.” I walked down to the far end of the footbridge, swallowed my pride, and sat down on the dirty concrete with my back to the steel railing and my sign propped up on my lap. In a heartbeat I went from a human being to a statistic, another faceless number in “The Homeless Problem.”

It was amazing how fast I vanished. I’d braced myself for stares of disdain, insults, every bit of humiliation I could imagine, but it was the exact opposite. I just
wasn’t there
. As the sun rose over Las Vegas, making the sweat bead on my scalp, I became a part of the background. The tourists didn’t look at me. They stepped around my sign without seeing me at all. Trying to make eye contact turned into a game—when I managed it, their gazes jerked away so fast it was like they’d touched a hot stove.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. That was exactly how I acted every time I passed the panhandlers on the bridges. I just never realized what it felt like until now.

Not everyone turned away. Every now and then someone would toss a few spare coins into my cup, even a couple of rumpled and sweaty dollar bills. I’d duck my head and mumble a “God bless ya, ma’am” as they quickly moved on, their good deed done for the day.

By noon the heat was as murderous as the growling in my stomach. I’d skipped breakfast, and now I was paying for it. I almost had to laugh. For me, this was playing a part. I could get up right then and there, walk into any restaurant on the Strip, and sit down to a decent meal. Amazing, the things you take for granted.

All right
, I thought,
enough. Either these guys only prey on the homeless at night, they only work the back streets, or maybe they’re just staying home today. Bottom line, the fish aren’t biting. Time to pack up
.

That was when I saw the Missionary.

T
he Missionary. That was what I dubbed the guy when I noticed him chatting up the panhandlers on the far end of the bridge. He had that look: crisp white shirt, gray slacks and polished wing tips, department store eyeglasses, and a save-the-world smile. A tan canvas satchel like a mail carrier’s bag dangled over one shoulder, but I couldn’t read the logo on it. I stopped watching and stared down at the concrete instead, putting all my energy into looking weak and alone.

He came over and stopped in front of me, rummaging in his satchel. I pegged him somewhere in his mid forties, with a military-neat haircut and a lantern jaw.

“You look hungry, buddy,” he said. “Say, what do you like better? Turkey or roast beef?”

I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Beef, I guess.”

“Well then, you, sir, are in luck, because I have just one of those left!”

He offered me a sandwich, sealed in a plastic baggie. The sight of thick, rich beef and lettuce leaves poking out from between slices of fresh bread made my stomach gurgle. I looked from him to the sandwich and back again, pretending to struggle with thinking through an alcoholic haze. It was hard to pull away from his eyes. He had these big baby blues the color of a childhood summertime.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Go on, it’s free! We make them fresh every morning. Turkey’s always harder to give away for some reason, and I always pack a few lettuce and tomato sandwiches for, you know,
vegetarians
, but I knew you were going to be a roast beef man. I can always pick ’em!”

“Nothin’s free,” I mumbled, but I took the sandwich.

“We’re blessed to have generous donors with deep pockets,” the Missionary said. He offered me a business card with his other hand, his fingers cupped to hold it by its edges. “The New Life Project. Have you heard of us?”

I shook my head and took the card. There was something funny about this guy, beyond his zeal to help his fellow man. His patter was too smooth, his moves too slick, like a stage actor playing a well-rehearsed part. I didn’t feel like I needed to be on my guard, though. If anything, the more he talked, the more relaxed I felt around him.

The business card felt funny. Slick on the bottom, like it had gotten damp and left to dry out. I shoved it in my pocket.

“We’re just trying to make things a little better out here,” he told me. I believed him. He had wide, bright eyes younger than his body, like a kid who hadn’t seen enough of the world to be beaten down by it yet. “You should come by our shelter some night. We have food, cots to sleep on—it’s a safe place.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying to move him along. I felt bad taking his time when there were real people he could be helping.

“Just think about it? And I promise, no religious hard sell, no jive, just a roof over your head and a hot meal in your belly. We’re here to help.”

“Yeah, man,” I mumbled. I curled my legs up against me, folding into myself, changing my body language to shut him out. “Thanks for the sandwich.”

He gave me a wave and strolled away, whistling under his breath as he vanished into the crowds. I sat there a minute, perfectly still, not quite sure why I wasn’t getting up.

My fingertips were numb.

I thought back to how he’d offered me the card. Holding it by the edges, not with his thumb and forefingers gripping the middle like most people would. I took it out of my pocket, carefully this time, and gave it a sniff. It was faint, in the swirl of odors from the street, but I could still catch the tang of chemicals.

He fucking dosed me
, I thought, pushing myself to my feet. My legs were wobbly. I would have chalked that up to the last few hours of sitting on the brutally hot concrete, but now I could tell that my reactions were off. Just a little slower than usual, just a little less steady.