Craig Schaefer Daniel Faust The Living End

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.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.”FiveAn 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?”“Like you’re ready to take the deal and turn state’s evidence,” she said.“You called me, Faust.Don’t tell me I came all the way across town for the burgers.”I shoved the brown paper bag to the middle of the table.“Try the Cajun fries,” I told her.“Look at that,” she said.“Another thing you won’t get to eat in prison.”“I need a favor.”She reached up, pulled her glasses down to the tip of her pert nose, and stared at me over the lenses.“Excuse me?” she said.“I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear that correctly.”“The soul bottle.I need it back.Just for a day or two.”Harmony leaned back against the hard booth.She didn’t answer right away.“You want me to give you a bottle containing the spirit of a psychopath who murdered a hundred children.In what conceivable universe, Faust, would I have any reason to do that? What—please tell me, because I really want to know—what would possibly be my motivation to do that?”It was more like five hundred children, but correcting her history wasn’t going to help my argument.I bit into my burger while I worked out how much to tell her.“I have some indication that Lauren doesn’t need de Rais’s help anymore.You see the construction crews working day and night? The Enclave’s still going up.She’s shifting gears, finding a new approach.”“All the more reason to keep de Rais locked away forever.She might not need him, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him.”“Except,” I said, “he knows what she’s up to.De Rais can tell us Lauren’s entire scheme, because whatever the Enclave really is, we know it’s based on something he started to invent centuries ago.”Harmony plucked a fry from the bag.She nibbled on it, thoughtful, then shook her head.“So what’s your plan? Let him possess someone, then interrogate him?”“Yes,” I said.“Then put him back in the bottle for good.”To give her credit, she actually thought about it while she ate another fry.“No,” she said.“Too dangerous.If anything went wrong, if he escaped, the fallout would be on my head.I can’t live with that.Find another way.”“The host will be chained to a chair.There’ll be armed guards—”Harmony leaned forward a little.“I said no.Possessions can go wrong with no warning.In case you forgot, you let that bastard get into my partner’s skin.You can’t tell me, after that, that you can guarantee anyone’s safety.”“So, what, we just let Lauren go?”“I’m already running my own investigation on Carmichael, off the books, with no help needed from you and your little friends.For that matter, there’s no way I’m putting a monster like Gilles de Rais in the hands of a pack of gangsters.Now, if you were to reconsider my offer and come inside…maybe, maybe you and I could come to an agreement.You know, once I felt reassured that you were on the side of the angels.”I tried not to laugh in her face.“That’s funny,” I said.“Never seen an angel that looked like a rat.”She reached for another fry.Her pink fingernails pincered it as she held it up between us like the sword in the stone.“These,” she said, “really are tasty.When you get home, you should look up what you’ll be eating in Ely Prison for the next thirty years.Food for thought, if you’ll pardon the pun.”She popped the fry in her mouth, smiled, and winked.Then she got up and walked out the door.• • •I drove around for a while, not aimless so much as restless, trying to come up with a new plan of attack.A heist wasn’t in the cards.Harmony had stashed de Rais’s bottled soul in an unmarked evidence box at the FBI’s Vegas field office.A bank would be easier to crack.Besides, I already had enough heat from the feds to deal with.The sun leaned down behind the city [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne