The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(8)

We had thought opening night was on permanent hiatus. To finish her plan, Lauren needed the help of a dead serial killer named Gilles de Rais. Thanks to a rare tag-team play between the Vegas occult underground and the feds, de Rais’s soul was rotting in a bottle at the bottom of an evidence box. It wasn’t the hell he deserved, but it was the best we could do.

“She’s got an angle,” I said.

Caitlin arched her eyebrow at me. “Hmm?”

“Lauren. We broke her cult, we stole the Ring of Solomon, we snatched de Rais out from under her—she’s got no cards left to play. She should be running. Instead, she muscled up with some hired thugs and came at us today like she’s in her fighting prime. She’s got an angle.”

“Everybody does,” Caitlin said.

My phone vibrated against my hip. I had treated myself to a new model after my last one ended up at the bottom of the aforementioned twenty tons of rock. I tugged it out and gave it a glance. Pixie.

I slid my thumb to take the call. “Hey, Pix, can I call you back later? About to get some lunch—”

“I need your help.”

I frowned. Her voice was usually terse, but this time it had an edge that grabbed my attention and squeezed. Pixie was a mercenary hacker—sorry, hacktivist—and she could make anything with a circuit board jump up and dance like Fred Astaire. Usually I was the one who went to her for a helping hand, not the other way around.

“You have no idea,” she said, “how hard it was to say that. But yes, I need your help.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not on the phone. Come to St. Jude’s. Look, I have money. I can pay you, all right?”

I needed the cash. Jennifer’s buddy Winslow had fronted me a car and a gun when my back was against the wall, at rates a loan shark would call steep. Given that Winslow was the top dog in an outlaw biker gang, I figured paying him back should be a priority in my life.

Even so, something told me I was going to be doing this one for free.

“Twenty minutes,” I said and hung up on her.

“No rest for the wicked?” Caitlin asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

“Sorry, hon. Rain check?”

“I’ll settle for dinner. Eight o’clock. I’ll swing by the bookstore.”

“I think,” I said with a smile, “that can be arranged.”

? ? ?

Back when the Rat Pack was headlining at the Sands, St. Jude’s was a swinging dance hall called the Diesel Room. The old marquee was long gone now, replaced by a dead neon cross, and the vintage parquet floors were scuffed and faded like a worn-out memory. I could find Pixie there most days, spooning out hot meals to the city’s hungry and destitute, the lost souls who had fallen through the cracks in the glitter.

A smell hung in the air, something like damp dirty socks and quiet desperation. The lunchtime crowd was pretty light, and I saw Pixie working the soup line, doing what she could to make sure nobody walked away with an empty stomach.

Pixie had a knack for making me feel like a pretty horrible excuse for a human being. Which I suppose I was, to be fair, but still.

She passed her ladle to another volunteer and waved me off to the side, flashing the X marked in black Sharpie on the back of her hand. Pixie was as slight as her nickname, a wisp of a girl with chunky Buddy Holly glasses and scarlet feathered hair, the tips dyed an icy white.

“I didn’t want to call you,” was the first thing she said. I didn’t blame her. She’d been blissfully ignorant just a couple of weeks ago, until I dragged her into my world.

I sat down at one of the picnic-style wooden tables that lined the old dance floor. She swung her leg over the bench opposite me and checked to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Look around. What do you see?”

I shrugged. “Lots of folks down on their luck. This city only loves you as long as you’ve got cash in your pockets.”

“Not enough of them.” She fluttered an anxious hand. “Normally we’d have twenty, thirty more regulars in here. People I know by name, or at least by their faces.”

“Maybe you’ve got competition,” I said. “Consider rebranding your product?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“It started a few days ago,” she said. “Some regulars, people who have been coming around for years, just…not showing up. Then more. Every day there’s fewer people coming around. Now, one or two disappearing? Maybe somebody got a job or found another way out of the system. Maybe they moved out of town, or maybe they ended up behind bars for a night or ODed. But not this many. Not all at once.”

“I wasn’t entirely joking about the competition,” I said. “You’re sure there’s nowhere else they might be going for their daily bread?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been checking other soup kitchens, the shelters, calling hospitals about the handful I have real names for. They’re not there. They’re not anywhere.”

“At the risk of sounding morbid, have you called the morgue? Seen if there’s an upswing in John and Jane Does?”

“Of course I did,” she said. “I did that first. And no. They’re not dying. They’re disappearing. These are marginalized people, Faust. Do you know what the crime statistics are like among the homeless? Not crimes committed by them, committed against them. Compared to other citizens, the rates of hate crimes, beatings, rapes—”