The Long Way Down (6 page)

T
he Lincoln eased its way through the traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, a white shark in a sea of yellow cabs. The monoliths of the Strip rose up on either side, from skybound twists of crystal and chrome to black art-deco pyramids. Come nightfall they would erupt in a riot of colors and flashing lights, but for now they slept, dusty and quiet, in the afternoon sun.

We pulled into a parking garage halfway down the boulevard. Nicky’s boys flanked me as we walked down the ramp and out onto the street, pushing though a swirl of tourists. A woman dressed for tennis and clutching a digital camera did a double take, looking at the suited thugs and then at me as if wondering if she’d seen me on television.

No, no, they’re not my bodyguards
, I felt like saying.
They’re just here to break my kneecaps if I run. Or maybe break them anyway. We’ll see how the day goes.

The Medici was a slice of old-world class in the heart of the city, standing watch over an artificial lake where the waters danced in a syncopated ballet at the top of every hour. In the lobby, frescoes on scalloped walls depicted the beauty of vintage Italy, and crystal fountains murmured under the electronic clangs of distant slot machines. The thugs marched me across the casino’s zebra-striped marble floor. It was early still, just a few locals and older tourists sitting at the cheap slots, but not much real action in sight.

“Let me guess,” I said to the suit on my left, “Nicky’s one guy short for a game of poker, and he thought of me. He’s a sweetheart, he really is.”

No reaction. Hell, they didn’t even take their shades off indoors. They were the gangster version of the guards at Buckingham Palace. My eyebrows went up when we reached the door to Club Prive, the private salon at the back of the casino. The concierge at the door barely gave us a second glance.

The Club was half casino, half spa—a gallery of private salons in gray velvet and mahogany wood. I smelled some faint, exotic spice in the air, like a warm cologne. It smelled the way old money feels. In Salon Tredici, a cozy little lounge wreathed in a haze of cigar smoke, four men huddled around a table and played mahjong like their souls were hanging in the balance. A small gaggle of onlookers clustered around them, dressed in outfits that probably cost more than I make in a year.

“That’s the game, gents,” Nicky Agnelli said, flipping over a row of intricate ivory tiles on the aquamarine felt. His long fingers trailed over a string of flowers and Chinese characters, like a piano player warming up for a jazz tune. The other players groaned, handing over fistfuls of colored sticks and dumping over their own tiles.

Agnelli looked like he should be sitting someplace a few hours west, in Hollywood, making movie deals over a three-martini lunch. He looked up and gave us a hungry smile. His ice-blue eyes were wolfish behind rimless, titanium Porsche Design glasses.

“Gentlemen, could I have the room please?”

He kept his tone light, but it wasn’t a casual request. The game broke up without a word and the bystanders faded along with my escorts, leaving me alone with Nicky and his girls. They were twins, walking dreams in slinky black cocktail dresses, but I didn’t stare for too long. I knew them too well for that. They went by Juliette and Justine, but those weren’t their real names. I wasn’t sure if dubbing themselves after a pair of novels by the Marquis de Sade was their little joke or Nicky’s.

The door slid shut at my back, leaving me caged in the tiger’s den.

“Daniel Faust,” Nicky said, shaking his head and smiling. “What is this, you don’t call, you don’t write? I’m starting to think you don’t want to be friends anymore.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Thought I answered that question pretty definitively, last time we talked.”

“Ancient history, it’s a brand new day. Sit down, would ya? You’re making me nervous.”

He looked anything but nervous, but I humored him and took a seat on the opposite side of the mahjong table. Juliette glided over to a minibar, stiletto heels clicking, and opened a decanter of whiskey. Justine circled the table and stood behind me. I tried not to jump when she put her hands on my shoulders. She rubbed them, her slender fingers moving in light circles.

“He’s very tense.” Justine’s voice dripped with amusement.

“Oh dear,” Juliette answered, giggling, pouring two glasses. She smiled at me. Her eyes glowed yellow, like the edge of a candle’s flame. In private, Nicky and his crew didn’t have to pretend at being human. Their bodies flickered and morphed at the corners of my eye, illusions falling away in bits and pieces only to slide back into place back when I looked directly at them. “Do we make you nervous, Danny?”

Before I could answer, Nicky shook his head and said, “Nah, sweetheart, he’s nervous because he’s flat fuckin’ broke and can’t pay rent on his crappy little apartment. My guys saw you on Fremont last week, Dan. You know what they saw you doing?”

“Their mothers?” I replied.

“Funny,” he said and turned back to Juliette. “This guy, this fuckin’ guy right here, doing a street act on Fremont. Not
real
magic, I mean, he’s got a crowd of tourists around and he’s pulling scarves out of hats and making coins disappear, and they’re pissing themselves, he’s so good. Daniel Faust. Best sorcerer on the West Coast, and he’s busking for spare change.”

“That’s so sad,” Juliette pouted, putting a crystal glass in front of each of us. I left mine untouched. The rich scent of finely aged whiskey mingled with the growing undercurrent of sulfur in the air.

Justine leaned close, her lips inches from my ear, and stage-whispered, “See? Now you made my sister sad. I hope you feel bad about that.”

“Mortified.” I sighed. “Nicky, what the hell do you want?”

He flashed a mouth of fangs that could scare a great white shark and spread his hands wide. “I want to get the band back together, man!”

“No,” I said flatly.

“I want you on my team. I’ve got some work coming up that needs a light touch, real occult power, and hands I can trust. That’s you, buddy. And I’m not talking piecework, temp job garbage. I’m talking you, on my payroll, six figures a year plus perks.”

Juliette walked to stand behind Nicky, her fingers draping across his shoulders, mirroring her sister behind me. “You’ll love the perks,” she said.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. I’d been living hand to mouth for so long that a cash envelope like the one Jud gave me felt like Christmas in springtime. It wasn’t like I had a moral objection to working for a criminal, either. I
am
a criminal. Then I thought about what Nicky called “ancient history” and my stomach clenched.

“I think you’re forgetting something,” I told him. “I think you’re forgetting that you got two of my friends killed. They were ‘on your team’ too, remember?”

“Hey,” he said, his smile irrepressible, “you can blame me all you want if it helps you sleep at night, but it wasn’t me who fucked that job up. I think you know that.”

“We’re done here,” I said and started to rise. Justine held my shoulders with the strength of a bodybuilder and shoved me back into the chair.

“Sleep on it,” Nicky said. “It’s a limited-time offer, but sleep on it. There was one other thing. You met with an old guy the other day, Jud Pankow I think his name was?”

I never knew for sure how he did it, but Nicky was a walking encyclopedia of Vegas gossip. If anyone worthy of a back-page newspaper article had lunch in this town, Nicky knew what they talked about, what they ordered, and how much they tipped on their way out. I figured he had a world-class seer on the payroll keeping astral tabs on people he considered worth watching. Interesting, though, that he only mentioned our lunch meeting and not my visit to Jud’s motel room a couple of hours ago. Even he had his limits.

Even so, I made a mental note to redouble the wards on my bedroom.

“What about him?” I said, knowing it’d be a waste of time to deny meeting with Jud.

“It’s sad, what happened to his grandkid. I feel for the guy. I want to make a donation, cover her funeral costs and get him home safe and sound. Maybe put a little something extra in his pocket. Guy that age should be retired and living it up, not working a farm, you know?”

“That’s really nice of you,” I said, but I knew better. I smelled the hook waiting inside that bait.

“He needs help moving on. And I don’t think it’s right, you know, that people are holding out false hope, keeping him going like that. That poor girl, she was getting high down in the storm tunnels, a flood came in, end of story. Just a terrible accident.”

A low-budget porn director like Artie Kaufman didn’t have the juice to get a couple of corrupt cops to do his dirty work.

Nicky Agnelli did.

On the other hand, Artie was a sadist with a motive for murder, and Nicky, for all his faults, didn’t go around killing young girls for kicks. He would have been just as sickened by Artie’s movies as I was. One man had the motive, one man had the means, and neither one had any reason to be in the other’s orbit.

Justine massaged my shoulders, but I wasn’t feeling any less tense.

“You want me to drop the job,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“I want you to give the old man some peace of mind.” Nicky’s forehead creased with phony concern. “Tell him that what you found matches the police report, that it was all an accident. Send him home. He’ll grieve, but he’ll move on. Right now, it’s like his granddaughter never died. He can’t put her to rest. That’s not right.”

He apparently didn’t know about the Stacy-thing lurking under the city streets. Did he know what I’d discovered about Artie? What I told Jud before sending him packing? I rolled the dice.

“You and I had the same thought,” I said. “I just told Pankow to get out of town, that there was nothing I could do for him. You can have your guys check it out. He’ll be flying back to Minneapolis tonight.”

The second part was true, if Jud did what I told him. Nicky nodded, leaning back in his chair. He couldn’t keep the relief from showing in his body language, and that was more troubling than anything. Stacy’s murder had him worried. Nicky Agnelli didn’t get worried. Ever.

“I looked into it,” I said, “didn’t find anything but a hinky autopsy report with nothing to back it up. It was a bust, so I sent him home.”

“There you go, see?” Nicky said. “You and me, on the same wavelength. Just like old times.”

“Now I’ve got a question for you,” I said lightly, thinking back to my encounter with the cambion outside the Tiger’s Garden. “What’s ‘the hound’?”

Justine’s nails dug into my shoulders like ten tiny knives.

Eight

N
icky took off his glasses and plucked a gray silk handkerchief from his jacket, polishing the lenses. Not looking at me.

“Where’d you—what do you mean? What hound?”

“Ran into a cambion last night. He told me ‘the hound is gone’ and there aren’t any rules anymore. Apparently that meant it was open season on my crowd.”

“And you think I should know?” Nicky scrubbed his glasses like he was trying to blot out a bloodstain. “What else did he say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I figured you’d know because, well…” I nodded at him and Juliette as if that said it all.

Nicky blurted out a sudden peal of laughter. Justine’s fingernails relaxed, leaving my shoulders stinging.

“Christ, Dan,” he said, grinning at me and putting his glasses back on, “that’s not racist or anything, is it?”

“I figured you’d have your finger on the local community—”

“And if a black guy steals your wallet, do you grab the closest brother and demand to know where it is, because they all must know each other? And all Asians hang out in dojos practicing kung fu, right, just like Bruce Lee?”

He had a point. I would have had the grace to feel ashamed of myself if their reactions hadn’t already given the game away.

“Look,” he said, “me and the ladies, we’re what you might call exemplary specimens of our kind. Do I know of other halfbloods living in the city? Yes. Do we get together for a regular knitting circle and black mass on Tuesday nights? No. Between you and me, buddy, most of those guys are batshit crazy. Not dependable, and not our kind of crowd.”

“Sorry.” I faked an apologetic smile. “You’re right, that was pretty dumb of me. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” Juliette said. She flicked a forked tongue across her pearly white teeth.

Nicky shook his head. “My advice to you is to not worry about it. You probably met some lone crazy out there, flapping his gums about nothing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my mahjong partners are waiting outside, and I haven’t finished taking all their money. Think about my offer and get back to me.”

“Do come back soon,” Justine whispered in my ear.

• • •

The evening light show heralded my return to Fremont Street. The canopy over the pedestrian mall blazed with neon synchronized to a medley of Beatles songs. I hummed along, letting the music move my feet, feeling the street’s energy pulling me—

—and then I was inside the Tiger’s Garden, still moving, brass bells jingling behind me. Bentley and Corman waved from their table.