Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(5)
Bentley waited for me in the lobby with his old gray fedora tucked under one arm, looking like a frustrated grandfather who’d been called to get his kid from the principal’s office. The analogy wasn’t all that wrong. Bentley and his partner Corman—they’d been together since the seventies and still acted like newlyweds when they thought nobody was watching—took me in when I was a scared, desperate kid on the run. They were the closest thing I’d ever had to a real father. The monster who raised me didn’t qualify for the name.
I gave the old man a hug and he patted my back, gesturing to the glass doors. “I bailed you both out,” he said. “They processed Jennifer first. She’s outside. Having a bit of a conniption fit.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“You can pay me back by explaining what happened this morning. Sophia is—” he caught himself, lowering his reedy voice as we walked through the crowded lobby. “Sophia is dead, Daniel.”
“Meadow Brand happened,” I said, holding open the door for him. We walked out into the Las Vegas heat. Jennifer paced back and forth in the parking lot, attacking an unfiltered cigarette and muttering to herself. The sunlight caught the metallic sheen of her tattooed arm, glinting off a rose-petal-wreathed image of Elvis as the Gautama Buddha. She saw us coming, snubbed her cigarette out under her bootheel, and stalked toward us like an angry lioness.
“Sugar, what the f*ck just happened back there?” she snapped at me. “I don’t pay Nicky Agnelli three grand a month to butter my biscuits. He’s supposed to make sure I don’t get hauled into interrogation rooms. He sure as hell doesn’t do anything else to make my life easier. ‘Protection,’ my sweet ass.”
“Perhaps,” Bentley offered, “instead of discussing this in a public parking lot, we could all get into my car now. I’ve no great love of police stations, and I’m sure you share my sentiments on the matter.”
We piled into Bentley’s old silver Caddy and cranked the air conditioning. I was just happy to breathe free air again. I wondered how much longer I had to enjoy it.
Three
“They’re fishing,” I told Jennifer for the fifth time. Bentley’s car cruised through traffic, sleek and anonymous.
“They know more than they oughta,” she snapped. “And did you catch the smell on ’em?”
“Yeah. One magician, a good one, and one cambion. I’m pretty sure Agent Black’s one of our breed. She hinted around the edges at it. If she’s not a sorcerer, she’s more clued-in than she has any right to be. Which one did you take as the cambion?”
“The Norwegian,” she said. “He had that lumpy look, like his bones didn’t grow quite right.”
Bentley drove in silence. He gripped the wheel hard enough to turn his already pale hands fish-belly white. I suddenly understood why, and I felt like a grade-A bastard. In all the confusion and fear and mess of the morning, I’d lost sight of the real tragedy.
“We…didn’t know her that well,” I said, not sure if I should even bring Sophia up. I wanted to console him. I didn’t know how.
He didn’t answer for a couple minutes.
“She was different,” he finally said. “Twenty years ago. Sophia wasn’t always…sick. I know you’d only seen her at the Garden once or twice, but back in the nineties, she could close the place down. The three of us: me, Corman, and Sophia. Last of the old school. Then her mind began to falter. The hallucinations started, the delusions. We tried to get her help, but she’d never stay on the pills for long.”
“Bentley—” Jennifer started to say, but he silenced her with a shake of his head.
“I could only watch her fall apart for so long. Only spoke to her a handful of times in the past couple of years. Sent her some cash envelopes, anonymously. I failed her as a friend. I admit that. But Sophia was my friend.”
A thin tear trickled down his weathered cheek. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“Why did Brand kill her?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Sophia never did anything to hurt anyone. She couldn’t. She was helpless and alone. Why did she have to kill her?”
He’d answered his own question. Because she was helpless and alone. Because Meadow Brand was a psychopath, every bit as crazy as Sophia but with the meanness of a rattlesnake and a mind for murder. Because she could. Those were the only reasons we were going to get, and none of them were good enough.
“The whole thing was a setup,” I said. “From the arrest to the task force showing up. Orchestrated from the start. Don’t forget: when we took down Lauren Carmichael’s operation at the Silverlode, Nicky backed us up. He worked for Lauren, and then he turned on her. I don’t think she’s the kind of person to forgive that, and Meadow Brand is Lauren’s bulldog.”
“You really think she’s got that kind of pull?” Jennifer said.
“I know Carmichael-Sterling’s investing a couple hundred million into their Vegas projects. That’s got to buy you a senator or two. Someone with the juice to get the ball rolling on a real investigation, the kind Nicky can’t buy off or scare away. I don’t think Agent Black knows who’s pulling her strings. She came across like a straight shooter. Crusader for justice and all that.”