The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(9)

I held up my hand. “I hear you. So lay it on the table. What’s your guess as to where they’re all going?”

“I don’t know. My skill set is all digital, okay? But my regulars live off the grid. It’s like the city streets just opened and swallowed them up, and I don’t even know where to start. I was hoping you could…do your thing. Look, I can pay you. Just name a figure.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. I felt a headache coming on. Or maybe it was a bad idea disguised as a headache.

“Christ, Pix, I’m not going to charge you money for this. Let’s just call it a favor for a favor, okay?”

She eyed me the same way I’d eyed my new lawyer.

“I’d feel safer just paying you,” she said.

“Favor for a favor, and you can pick the favor. I’m trying to hold out an olive branch. Will you just f*cking take it already?”

Her lips pursed as she weighed a question. Then her eyes went diamond hard.

“What happened to him, Faust?”

“Who?”

“You know who,” she said. “Ben. The guy I helped you set up. A whole lot of you went out into the desert that night we stole that ring from Lauren Carmichael’s house, and not everybody came back again.”

I folded my hands on the table and leaned close.

“Why are you asking me a question you already know the answer to?”





Four



“Because,” Pixie said, “you told me we were the good guys that night. Then I find out that while I was slipping out through the tunnel under Carmichael’s house, there was a slaughter going on in the dining room. Then, what, you dragged Ben out into the desert and put a bullet in his head? I was part of that, damn it! You didn’t tell me anyone was going to get killed. You told me we were doing the right thing.”

“We were doing the right thing,” I said flatly. “And it didn’t go down like that. First of all, don’t be f*cking naive. Lauren and Sullivan went in planning to stab each other in the back. When I exposed their game, what did you think was going to happen? They’d have a big laugh about it and go play checkers? You knew damn well there’d be a fight. All we did was even up the odds and give the Choirboys a fighting chance against Brand’s mannequins. We saved lives. I didn’t hear you protesting at the time.”

“That was before I had time to think—” she said, but I cut her off with a wave of my hand.

“Second, the plan was to let Ben go into exile with his buddies in the Redemption Choir. He pulled a gun instead. That was his choice, not mine.”

Ben had been a dead man walking, and he knew it in the end. Emma took him down when he tried to run. We’d agreed, between her and me and Caitlin, that the truth needed a little creative editing for her daughter’s sake. The new version involved a gun in the room and self-defense, and the killer was me instead of Emma. I had enough real blood staining my hands that I didn’t mind splashing on a little more, if it made things easier between Emma and Melanie.

Pixie stared down at the table. Her jaw slowly unclenched.

“It was easy,” she said slowly, “to go with the flow when we were in the thick of it. I didn’t have time to think. It was only when it was all over and done, and I tried to go back to my old life…”

I reached across the table and rested my hand over hers. She didn’t pull away.

“Your old life wasn’t there anymore,” I said, trying to be gentle. “I know. You can do all the same things, visit all the same places, but it’ll never be the same. It can’t be, now that you know the world isn’t the way you thought it was.”

“I keep thinking about what you told me in the van. About…people like me holding back the dark. So I came back here to try and help. It’s all I can do.”

“And that’s why I’m going to find your missing people for you,” I said.

Me and my big mouth. The look of relief in her eyes told me that I needed to deliver the goods if I didn’t want her heart to break. I just wished I knew where to start.

She gave me everything she had to go on, which amounted to a notebook full of scribbles and a couple of digital snapshots from St. Jude’s Christmas Eve party. It wasn’t much, but in a world where people can vanish off the grid without leaving a trace behind, it was the best lead I was going to get.

? ? ?

I took a cab back to Bentley and Corman’s place. They ran the Scrivener’s Nook, a used and rare bookstore. It looked like Charles Dickens was their interior decorator. A very drunk and disorganized Charles Dickens. Corman, built like a boxer going to seed, with hair the color of faded chestnut varnish, sat on a wooden stool behind the antique cash register and watched a video the size of a postage stamp on his phone. I heard the tinny crack of bat meeting baseball, sending it flying over the digitized roar of the crowd.

“Really?” I said, strolling over. “Surrounded by thousands of books and you’re watching ESPN?”

Corman stretched his arms out, stifling a yawn. “I am as long as Bentley’s out on a grocery run. Gotta rest up and recharge the ol’ batteries after spending that much time outside my own skin. How’d the meeting go?”

“Well, Perkins is…he’s definitely a lawyer, I’ll say that.”