The Living End (2 page)

“Something about a double murder just kills my appetite,” I murmured.

A voice crackled in my earpiece. “Aw, you’re missin’ out, sugar. These joes are better than the ones I make at home.”

From the far side of the almost-empty restaurant, alone at her own table, Jennifer lifted her half-eaten sandwich and gave a little wave. Like Caitlin, she wore cheap tourist sunglasses, garish and oversized. I’d gone for a pair of gold-rimmed specs with plain glass in the frames and a long scar on my cheek carefully simulated with a bit of mortician’s wax. Old theater trick, but it would do the job.

When dealing with eyewitnesses to a crime—like the pretty Latina waitress in the white linen bodice who took our orders, or the elderly couple talking about bird-watching a couple of tables over—you can usually rely on the fact that people are terrible at remembering faces. Give them something for their minds to seize on, like a prominent scar, an exaggerated limp, a brightly colored hat or pair of glasses, and the finer details will fall to the wayside.

Lauren Carmichael had gone into deep hiding after the battle at her house. We’d hit her where she lived—literally—and stolen her last ace card. We’d been searching for her and her psycho-for-hire buddy Meadow Brand ever since. The trail had gone ice cold until a couple of days ago, when the email server we’d bugged pinged back to life with a flurry of messages from Brand. Apparently Lauren was hiding from her, too.

R U going to keep ducking me?!
one email read.
U owe me mONEY, Lauren. I know u have it. CALL ME.

After two days of badgering, the response finally came through. It was the golden opportunity we’d been searching for.

I’m cutting my losses and liquidating all the corporate assets I can get my hands on. New name and face waiting for me in Paris. Can’t meet you in Las Vegas; too many people hunting for both of us. Drive two hours southeast, small village called Chloride. 11
A.M.
tomorrow at Times Gone By. I will bring $200K USD in cash, which should satisfy my outstanding debt to you. After that, consider our business relationship amicably severed.

ROFL
, Meadow responded.
Just bring the $.

This was our last chance to take a shot at both of them. Payback for the blood on their hands. We had laid out our battle plans over a crumpled AAA road map and a round of stiff drinks.

“There’s going to be witnesses, no way around that,” I had said. “So that means we play it mundane. No magic. Just lead.”

Caitlin wrinkled her nose. “Guns? Ugh. Detestable little trinkets. Give me a good hunting spear any day of the week.”

“You’re on crowd control,” I said. “Lauren and Meadow aren’t going to show up at the same time, so that means taking the first arrival down fast and making sure any civilians stay quiet and contained. We can herd them all into the kitchen if we have to. Margaux, Bentley, Corman, I want you three on overwatch. I want eyes on the approach into town from County Road 125, and both ends of Second Street. No surprises this time.”

“I’m on the kill team,” Jennifer said. It wasn’t a request.

I nodded. “Yeah, you are. Just one thing: I know it’s not the ideal send-off, but we’ve got to do this fast and clean. You know what they’re both capable of, if they smell something funny. Especially Lauren. So no confrontations, no discussions, no last words. We go in, we gun them down, and we leave.”

That was last night. Now my watch said 10:42, and my sandwich was leaking sauce onto my plastic plate, drizzling it out in a bloody trail. I took another sip of ginger ale.

“Something funny on 125.” Margaux’s Haitian accent crackled over our earbuds. Wearing lineman’s overalls, she was up on a termite-gnawed telephone pole. The perfect perch to look out over miles of empty road and desert scrub.

“Whatcha got?” Jennifer said.

“Rust bucket of a panel van with Mexico plates, driving for Chloride. The spirits are fretting and tugging my ear. Bad business in that van, and it’s not the flavor of bad we’re lookin’ for.”

“Cormie’s headed that way,” Bentley said. His astral body was, anyway. Physically, Bentley and Corman were fifty miles away, sitting cross-legged on the worn carpet of a roadside motel room. While Corman flew and spied and spoke in a breathless whisper, Bentley played translator.

Spend enough time in the game and you develop a sixth sense for when a deal’s about to go bad. Think of it as an evolutionary advantage, given that the guys who didn’t develop one were all sleeping on prison cots or six feet under. I tried to tell myself that I was just nervous, that it might not mean anything, but that didn’t make the muscles in my shoulders unclench.

“It’s definitely headed your way,” Bentley said, “but it’s not Lauren or Meadow. Cormie senses four people in the van, none of them magicians, but they’ve got Lauren’s…fingerprints on them, I suppose you could say. She’s touched them with her power.”

My sixth sense was screaming now. I felt like I was trying to work a jigsaw puzzle with someone blasting an air horn next to my ear. Had we missed something? The email tap had worked fine for us in the past. That was how we’d gotten a heads-up about Lauren’s dinner party and even manipulated messages between her and her agents to give us the inside edge—

—which she could have figured out, when she finally emerged from the wreckage of her house.

“It’s a trap,” I said, realizing how we’d walked into our own killing box. “She knew we were reading her emails. She was never coming here today.”

“What?” Caitlin said, but I was already standing up fast enough to knock my chair over.

“Everyone!” I shouted, turning every startled face in the almost-empty restaurant. “There’s an emergency. You need to leave, right now!”

They looked at me like I was crazy, not budging from their chairs. The seconds turned into a slow, nauseous crawl as I felt the trap close over our heads. A red plastic fire-alarm box hung on the wall a few tables away. I ran over, grabbed the handle, and yanked it down. That got the civilians on their feet, as a shrill klaxon whined from the ceiling.

The van screeched to a stop on the street outside. The rusted-out side door rattled open, and I had just enough time to register the two men crouched in back, red bandannas tied over their faces and sunlight glinting off the assault rifles in their arms, before they opened fire.

The restaurant windows exploded. I threw myself to the floorboards, landing hard on my shoulder and rolling, just in time to see our waitress catch the first blast. She jolted backward on her feet, dancing a jig of death with her white blouse sprouting tiny scarlet mushroom clouds, and collapsed to the floor in a bloody ruin. Caitlin and Jennifer both flipped their tables onto their sides, crouching low and using them for makeshift shields. I trench-crawled my way to Caitlin as the storm of bullets tore the restaurant into splinters.

I pulled my piece, a Taurus Judge Magnum. It was a big black bull of a gun chambered for .454, and it barked like a Doberman as I snapped off a couple of wild shots. The van’s passenger leaned out his window with a machine pistol, adding a staccato beat to the basso boom of the other two gunmen. I heard an elderly woman screaming from somewhere close to the door, but I didn’t have time to think about the casualties right now. The hitters were pros. As soon as one shooter spent his magazine, his partner laid down fire and gave him a chance to reload. They had us pinned like rats.

Caitlin’s pistol, a sleek little nine millimeter she’d borrowed from Jennifer, clicked on an empty chamber. She cursed under her breath and jumped up, running toward the restaurant wall. I barely had time to react before she snatched one of the antique pickaxes from the wall, spun, and hurled it faster and harder than any human being could dream of. The ax whirled through the air, spinning end over end, and buried itself with a bone-crunching spurt in one of the rifleman’s chests. He fell back, spitting blood, and his partner froze.

I thought it was the opening we needed, but then I saw the surprise the driver had been getting ready on the other side of the van. He stepped into sight, another phantom in a bandanna and shades, with an olive-and-black steel tube slung over one shoulder. It rattled as he leveled it in his gloved hands. He dropped to one knee in a perfect shooter’s stance, priming the weapon.

“
RPG
!” I screamed, breaking cover. “Out the back, now now
now
!”

I pulled the trigger as fast as my finger could work it, the Judge’s cylinders spinning and spitting out covering fire while Caitlin and Jennifer ran ahead of me. I turned and hit the swinging door, bursting into the abandoned kitchen. We’d almost made it out the back when the grenade hit.

The world twisted sideways, and I went flat as the kitchen door blasted off its hinges on a gout of fire and roiling black smoke. The shock wave hit me like a giant’s fist, and for a second the entire universe was nothing but white light and the sound of a cannon going off in my ears. A hand pulled me to my feet. Caitlin shouted something, but I couldn’t hear a word of it over the ringing echoes of the aftermath. We stumbled out into the dusty back lot, eyes squinting against the sudden sunlight, the restaurant a roaring inferno at our backs.

My hearing swam back just in time to catch Bentley’s panicked voice over my earpiece.

“—coming around! They’re back in the van and coming around the building! Get out of there
now
!”

C
aitlin and I were empty, and Jennifer had two bullets to her name. We stood side by side in the empty lot, catching our breaths as the van roared around the side of the burning restaurant.

“Gloves
off
,” I hissed and holstered my empty gun. My deck of cards leaped from my hip pocket in a spray of red and black, riffling into my outstretched hand.

“Fucking right,” Jennifer said, trading her .357 for the gleaming razor blade that dangled from a chain around her neck. She dodged to one side, using the back wall as cover while she broke into a guttural German chant.

The van rolled into sight. The passenger leaned out his window, machine pistol reloaded and ready, but as he squeezed the trigger I scattered a handful of cards into the air. Three cards caught three bullets, each one falling to the dirt with a crumpled shell buried in its heart. The fourth card sliced through the air and slashed the shooter’s shoulder to the bone. He dropped the pistol, instinctively grabbing his wounded arm, and fell back into the van.

The driver aimed straight for Caitlin and me, and gunned the engine. A rattling sound filled the air, like rain pelting a tin roof, and a whirlwind of dark, syrupy blood whipped past us. The whirlwind exploded, coating the van’s windshield in sticky crimson. Suddenly blind, the driver lost his nerve and hauled the wheel around, trying to get away. Tortured metal shrieked as the van smashed head-on into the burning building. Its front end crunched like an accordion against the wall, and the driver launched through the windshield headfirst. The impact snapped his neck and left him wide-eyed and dead in a puddle of broken glass.

Jennifer held out her bleeding wrist, the torn skin already knitting itself back together as she chanted around the razor blade clenched between her teeth.

The second rifleman hauled open the side door, just in time to see Caitlin coming at him with claws bared and a mouth lined with teeth like a great white shark’s. She grabbed him by the throat and dragged him behind the van. I didn’t see what happened next, but I could hear his frenzied screams for about three seconds before they stopped short.

Caitlin stepped back into sight and wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing the blood on her lips all over her cheeks, like some nightmarish war paint. I took a second to catch my breath.

That was when I saw the passenger slip out of the front seat of the van, still clutching his torn shoulder, and stagger away. Jennifer, Caitlin, and I glanced at each other. I flipped one card up in the air and caught it between my fingertips. Jack of spades.

I whipped the card toward him, and it spun like a razor-edged boomerang. The gunman screamed and fell as it sliced through his Achilles tendon and winged its way back to my hand, the card freshly edged in scarlet. He was still trying to crawl away, dragging himself across the dirt, when we walked up to him. I kicked him over onto his back.

“Where’s Lauren Carmichael?” I said.

He shook his head wildly, squirming in the dust, eyes bulging.

“Don’t kill me,” he begged. “Please, don’t kill me. I’ve got a family!”

I held up an open hand. “We’re not going to kill you. Just tell us where Lauren is, and you can walk away.”

Little white lies.

Then he screamed. Not from fear. Pain. He gripped his stomach and howled as it swelled under his clenched fingers, skin buckling and bloating, the buttons of his shirt popping one by one as his belly grew like a woman nine months pregnant. He kept swelling.

His eyes rolled back, and he shrieked like he was being fed into a meat grinder. Red lines blossomed on his stomach, the skin stretched to tearing, and then they burst. I jumped back as a flood of tiny snakes cascaded from the gunman’s body, pouring out onto the stony ground and wriggling in all directions. He stopped screaming. I watched as a single garter snake squirmed out of the dead man’s mouth and slithered back up his nose.

Caitlin, Jennifer, and I strode away without a word. We needed to put as much space between us and this nightmare as possible, and fast. I paused, catching a glint of light in the corner of my eye, from over by the restaurant’s Dumpster.

A kid, maybe seventeen with an acne-cratered face, wore a short-order cook’s apron and crouched just out of sight. He had a phone in his hand, holding it up to record the action. He froze as we closed in on him, but he brandished the camera’s eye like it was some kind of protective talisman.

I snatched the phone out of his trembling hand, tossed it to the ground, and stomped it under my heel until there was nothing left but shards of mangled plastic.

“You didn’t see a goddamn thing,” I told him.