The Long Way Down (13 page)

I didn’t want to go back into the kitchen, but I had no other option. Holding my breath and reeling at the stench, trying not to look at the corner of the room, I rummaged through the cabinet under the sink for a plastic bucket and an assortment of cleaners. A pour of this and a dollop of that resulted in a witch’s brew straight out of
The Anarchist Cookbook
.

I splashed the concoction across baseboards and dribbled it in a trail along carpets, spreading the nostril-searing slop in every room I’d visited except for the kitchen. I wanted those bodies found and identified. I used the last of the bucket’s contents to soak my old clothes, piled close to the door, and watched the blue flames rise at a touch of my lighter. The arson would be obvious, but that was the point. It’s a lot easier to leave a crime scene in hopeless confusion than it is to make it pristine.

Flames licked the windows, mirroring the glow from the rising sun, as I hopped into the Mustang and rolled out of the driveway. Once I got two blocks away, I paused at a stop sign and used my burner phone to call 911 and report the fire, hanging up when they asked my name. My next call was to Jud.

“Is this—” he started to say, and I cut him off fast.

“Don’t talk. Just listen. The job’s done. Watch the news tonight. Now lose this number and never contact me again.”

I opened the back of the phone, pulled out its SIM card, and dropped it on the asphalt. I jumped out of the car and ground it to broken fragments under my heel. The rest of the phone wound up in a Dumpster half a mile away. I dropped off the Mustang at the rental place, signing off on it as Peter Greyson, and took a cab to a convenience store a few blocks from my apartment. All direct connections between me and the two dead men, and most of the indirect ones, were sliced away clean.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have congratulated myself on a job well done. Jud Pankow had hired me for payback, and he’d gotten it in spades. Carl and Artie’s deaths were no great loss to the world, and nobody got hurt in the crossfire. Still, I didn’t feel like celebrating. I’d lied to Jud. The job wasn’t done, not by a long shot.

Stacy’s half-formed wraith still wailed under the city streets. I’d have liked to think that taking down her killer would set her free to move on, but she wasn’t that kind of ghost. Artie had done something beyond mere murder: in the kitchen he’d babbled about a “special kill” and a “special spell.”

It was my brother’s idea
, he’d whined. The same brother, I assumed, as the one who read him the riot act over the phone about letting Carl have as much time with Caitlin as he wanted. His brother needed seeing-to.

Then there was Nicky Agnelli. He had a hand in this grim mess, and I still didn’t know why. If my paranoia held true and he’d been keeping magical tabs on me, he’d know what I had done by now. Taking off the Black Eye in the middle of Artie’s house, exposing me to Nicky’s pet seer, made sure of that. Nothing I could do about it now. I’d just have to hope I was wrong, that Jud was the one he was watching, or that I’d lucked out and nobody was looking my way. If not, things were about to get a lot more complicated.

And then there was Caitlin. Maybe she’d gone back to hell. Maybe she hadn’t. I wasn’t sure what to think about Caitlin, only that I couldn’t stop seeing her every time I closed my eyes.

I went home, put Kaufman’s clothes in a trash bag, and fell back on my bedspread. I’d long since burned through the last of my adrenaline, moving on nothing but momentum and survival instinct. I didn’t have the strength left to do anything but sleep.

• • •

Orange light washed against my curtains as the hammering of a woodpecker dragged me from a fitful sleep. No, not a woodpecker, it was my main cell phone vibrating against my end table. I pushed myself up, groaning, and reached for it. Four missed calls. Wonderful.

“I’m here,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Daniel.” Bentley’s voice was a mixture of reproach and fear. “What did you do?”

News had spread fast. Naked, I ambled over to the desk and turned on my laptop, stifling a yawn.

“I, ah…things got complicated.”

“Did you kill those men?”

The
Las Vegas Sun
’s website showed a picture of Artie’s house, the front window smashed out and his doorframe licked by fire. The headline screamed, “Double Murder, Arson in Henderson.”

“No,” I said, clicking the article, “but I was there when they died.”

“…home of porn director Arthur James Kaufman, who successfully won out against obscenity charges in Georgia in 2011. One victim has been confirmed as Detective Carl Holt, a thirteen-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division. Holt was decorated last year for valorous…”

Memories of last night hit me like a fist. It had been easy not to think during the cleanup. Making sure I didn’t leave a trail for the cops was a more pressing concern than thinking about how Kaufman screamed until his throat gave out, or remembering the smell when Caitlin peeled open his—

I dropped the phone and ran to the bathroom, falling on my knees in front of the toilet, heaving until nothing came up but a trickle of bile.

Bentley was still on the line when I stumbled back to my desk. “It’s complicated,” I told him.

“…robbery may be a motive, but first responders reported seeing what they described as a ‘satanic shrine’ hidden in Kaufman’s bedroom…”

“What happened to it, Daniel?” Bentley demanded.

“It?”

Her
.

“Kaufman’s demon,” he said. “It got loose, didn’t it?”

I dug in my mini-fridge, looking for something to get the taste out of my mouth. I took out a small bottle of ginger ale, cracked it open, and chugged half of it.

“I think she left.”

“Left?”

“Went back to hell,” I said. “Sounded like she had some serious fun and games planned for those two. Listen, can we discuss this later? I’m not up for it now.”

“We’ll need to discuss it. I’m not sure if you understand how serious—”

“Serious as a heart attack,” I told him. “Believe me. But right now I’m trying to keep my stomach from climbing up my throat, so I’d be grateful for a change of subject.”

“Fine. I’ll bring you up to date. We had our little research party last night, trying to learn anything we could about this ‘hound’ that the cambion ranted about.”

“And?”

“Nothing,” Bentley said. “Found plenty of material on hellhounds, gloomhounds and the Hounds of Gnar’peth, none of which you’d want to encounter in a dark alley, but nothing that could ride herd over an entire community of half-demons. Spengler even brought over some of the rarer volumes from his personal collection, but we came up empty. Either it was merely a quirk of this cambion’s insane mind, or someone is using ‘hound’ as a title or a pseudonym.”

“It was worth checking.”

“We had an unfortunate confirmation that this wasn’t a one-time affair. Jennifer was attacked outside her home. Don’t worry, she’s fine. It turns out cambion aren’t immune to military-strength pepper spray. It was your friend from the other night—”

“The toe-eater?” I said, remembering his odd fixation.

“—the very one, along with a woman in rags. He’s made allies.”

“Just what we need, more problems. Hey, you and Corman don’t own a camcorder or anything like that, do you?” I picked up the lozenge of black plastic, turning it in my fingertips. “I’ve got a ‘duo pro’ memory card here and I need to see what’s on it.”

“We still have our Handycam from our anniversary vacation last year, but I’m not sure what it uses. You’re welcome to take a look at it.”

“Perfect, I have to bring back the Black Eye anyway. Hopefully I’ll never have to wear the damn thing again.”

The answer to the secret of Stacy’s death, and her tormented half-life, lay on that card. I didn’t want to watch it. God, I didn’t want to watch it. If I was going to put things right, though, the only way forward was down.

Sixteen

T
hree hours later I came back home with a Sony camcorder in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. Bentley and Corman had laid down nearly a thousand bucks for the thing and used it exactly once, on a trip to Niagara Falls. The bag held a Chinese takeout dinner and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’d been drinking too much lately, but no fucking way was I watching this thing sober.

I poured three fingers of Jack into a plastic cup and broke out the chopsticks, digging into my sweet-and-sour pork while reading the camera manual. It looked like I could just load the memory card into the camera, then use a cable to transfer its contents onto my laptop. Simple enough.

I rigged the cables and moved the file, a movie clip with a string of random numbers for a title, onto my laptop. The icon sat there, anonymous and innocent, waiting for me to click it. Two more drinks and I was almost ready. Seemed funny how I’d just seen a man torn to pieces right next to me but this seemed so much worse. Maybe because one of them deserved it, and one was a dumb, innocent kid from Minnesota who never asked to go out like this.

I launched the movie.

Instead of his usual handheld style, Artie had put the camera on a tripod for Stacy’s final performance. She stood in the same grimy bathroom where he’d shot their other movies, staring into the lens, sniffling.

“I want to go home,” she said in a halting whisper.

“We talked about this,” his voice echoed from behind the camera. He sounded distracted, an edge of tension in his voice I hadn’t heard before.

“I don’t care. I just want to go home. Please let me go home.”

“One more,” he said. “Do one more for me, and you can go home. I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

Her eyes, red from crying, widened. “You mean it?”

“I promise. We can go to the airport as soon as we’re done here, if you do a good job for me. You can be with your granddad for dinner tonight. Wouldn’t you like that?”

She caught a tear as it rolled down her cheek, brushing it away with the back of her hand. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Do you love me, Stacy?”

“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Good. Now take off your clothes.”

She undressed, her hands shaking, and he stepped out from behind the camera. My stomach muscles tightened, bracing for a punch that never came. Instead he held her, almost gently, and whispered in her ear as he stroked her hair. She nodded, sinking to her knees before him on the dirty tile floor, and he used her one last time.

Then he drowned her in the toilet.

My fingers flinched against the keyboard, wanting to skip this, to fast forward through her death spasms as she kicked and thrashed, but I held back. My teeth clenched. I hoped she’d somehow fight him off, escape, even though I already knew how this movie ended. He held her head down until her body finally went limp, standing motionless over her like a clockwork executioner.

Then Artie hauled her up by her hair, dropping Stacy to the floor and rolling her onto her back with his shoe. Open eyes stared towards the camera, stared at me, a plea for help that never came.

He walked out of the camera’s sight and came back with a leather pouch in his fist. He straddled Stacy’s corpse and crouched down, chanting in a sibilant whisper. I cranked the laptop’s speakers until my room filled with a static hum. The words were foreign, Eastern-sounding. Chinese? I couldn’t be sure. His burly shoulder blocked part of the view, but he waved the bag slowly over Stacy’s face before putting the opening to her lips.

A faint glimmer of light, like a silver mist, drifted from her bloodless lips to the pouch. He tugged the drawstring taut, still chanting, rising and walking off camera as a few final driblets of light leaked from her mouth and boiled away like water vapor.

“A soul-trap,” I said to the screen, “but you screwed it up, you impatient amateur bastard. You stole half of what she is, and the rest is stumbling around in the dark like a wounded animal. Where did you put the pouch? Show me where you put it.”

He wandered in and out of frame, ignoring the dead girl at his feet, his phone to his ear.

“Hey, bro, it’s done,” he said. “What? I don’t know. It doesn’t…it doesn’t feel like anything. I don’t know, I just expected it’d be…cooler. Just feel kinda numb, I guess. Maybe I need to do it again.”

You’ll never get that chance
, I thought.
The one thing I did right.

“Yeah, I did it just like you told me. I’ll bring you the bag. So am I in?” He stopped, grinned, and did a little fist-pump. “All right, awesome! Totally worth it, bro. We’re gonna be
kings
. Yeah, all right, tell Mom I said hi.”

Hanging up the phone, he looked toward the camera, as if realizing it was still recording. Something flickered across his face. A moment of doubt? Guilt? He reached out and turned the camera off.

In the darkness of my apartment, I stared at my reflection in the black void of my laptop screen. I drank my whiskey in silence.

I’d heard of soul-traps, knew the theory, but I’d never seen one in action before tonight. This was the realm of truly hardcore black magic, the kind that takes decades to master. Unlike Artie, his brother knew what he was doing. But why was he doing it at all? Stacy’s murder wasn’t some random thrill killing; it was part of a plan, and any plan that would make a slug like Artie into a “king” had bad news written all over it.