The Living End (16 page)

Leroy winced as Doc Savoy helped him onto the table. “Type B? I think.”

“That’s just fine, then. Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll fix you up right as rain.”

Doc Savoy was good people, and just like Jennifer, he was one of the dozens of little reasons I hadn’t thrown Nicky Agnelli under the federal bus. He wasn’t one of Nicky’s guys, not exactly, but every serious heister and professional villain in town had his number on their speed dial. Like most of his patients, he’d go down in Nicky’s wake.

He’d been running his off-the-books fix-up service for longer than most of his clients had been alive. Rumor said that he was old-school Vegas, that he’d cut his teeth with the last of the original mobsters before the feds and the corporations ran them out of town. He had the old-school values down, anyway: he did his job, he did it well, and he’d take a twenty-year stretch before he’d ever whisper a client’s name in a cop’s ear.

That said, the closest he’d ever come to a medical degree was a bachelor’s in veterinary science, but I figured he’d had so much practice over the years that he was basically as good as the real thing.

He pumped Leroy full of enough morphine to knock out an elephant while I used a pair of shears to cut away his shirt around the wound. The fabric was stiff with dried blood, and Leroy’s skin clung to it as I gently peeled it back. Clotted black blood rimmed the bullet hole, and it quivered when he breathed, spitting out a sad scarlet trickle that rolled down his hip. Doc Savoy had Eric hold a steel water bowl and put me on instrument duty. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and got to work.

Eventually there was nothing left to do but wait. Eric bummed a cigarette off of the doc, and he and I went outside to wait for the final verdict. A jumbo jet cruised overhead, coming in for a landing as the late afternoon sky turned to soft violet.

“You can take off if you need to,” I told Eric. I watched as he paced and stress-smoked. His worn-out sneakers crunched on the loose asphalt.

“Nah, I’m good. It’s funny. Barely know the guy. I mean, we just met in that fuckin’ cell. But when you go through something like that, with somebody…I’m not leaving till I know he’s all right.”

“Then what?” I said idly, just killing time. “Heading back down into the tunnels?”

He stared up at the airplane in the distance and thought it over. Then he looked at the stub of cigarette left between his fingers and tossed it down, snuffing it out under his heel.

“I been gone a long time,” he said. “Gone from the world. Didn’t think I really had anything to live for. But after what happened back there? Now I know I sure as fuck don’t wanna die. I don’t know, maybe I could get myself clean. Make it stick this time. Do something different.”

I nodded and gestured to the service entrance. “You’ve got some demons to wrestle. I bet Leroy does too. Maybe you two could help each other out. Easier than going it alone.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe so.”

Doc Savoy came out a little later, rubbing a crumpled paper towel along his freshly washed fingers.

“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.”

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 robe 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.