The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(7)
Corman snorted and waved his whiskey glass at Margaux. “‘Boy?’ My hair was turning white back when your father was still swinging a machete for Papa Doc.”
“You take that back! You take that back right now.”
Bentley looked at me helplessly, having unwisely chosen to sit between them. I cleared my throat and walked over, pulling up a chair from a nearby table. The four of us had the Garden all to ourselves for the moment, not that it was ever the kind of place with a waiting list.
“Mama Margaux.” I dropped into my chair. “You know Corman’s a ceremonialist, you have to make allowances for professional language. Corman, you know we don’t alk-tay about apa-Pay ock-Day at the table. Bentley, I see you got a haircut. It looks very nice.”
My distraction managed to stop their bickering. Unfortunately, it also turned their guns on me. Three voices with varying degrees of irritation simultaneously demanded to know where I’d been and why I wasn’t answering phone calls. I held up my open palms, trying to get a word in edgewise.
“That floozy walked out on ‘im,” Mama Margaux explained on my behalf, though I wouldn’t have used quite those words.
“Oh, dear. Roxy? She was a sweet girl,” Bentley said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, she was.” I looked over my shoulder and stared right into the buttons of a white chef’s jacket. Amar, the Garden’s one and only employee, had slipped up behind me without making a sound. He balanced a brass-rimmed tray on one palm, deftly serving another round of drinks, including the rum and coke I was just about to ask for.
“Thanks Amar.” I blinked at the glass. “Could we get an—”
“An order of naan,” he said with a nod of his turbaned brow. “Of course.” He flitted off to the kitchen.
We’re not sure whether Amar just works for the Garden or if he’s the owner, and he’s notoriously tight-lipped on any subject other than the menu. Still, you can’t beat the service.
“Sweet’s overrated,” Corman said, and Bentley shot him a look. Gruffness aside, he must have been doing something right. Bentley and Corman had been together for forty years, and they still acted like newlyweds when they thought nobody was looking.
I tossed back a swig from my glass and savored the spreading warmth in my chest. Perfectly mixed, as always.”I don’t want to talk about Roxy,” I said. It wasn’t the truth, but two weeks of heartache and a phone that didn’t ring had drilled one hard truth into my thick head: she wasn’t coming back. “I got a job. Let’s talk about that instead.”
“Daniel?” Bentley arched a wispy eyebrow and cradled his glass of gin. I didn’t need an interpreter to read the concern in his tone. Bentley and Corman were the closest things I had to real fathers. I didn’t talk about the people who raised me; the cigarette burns on my back said enough.
“A legit job. Mostly legit.”
I sketched out the broad strokes, then went into detail once I got to the part about meeting the thing that used to be Stacy Pankow down in the storm drains.
“The ancestors can whip up a fuss,” Mama Margaux mused, “but I’ve never seen anything like that. You sure it was the girl, not somethin’ else pretending to be her? Anything could be festering down there in the dark.”
I shrugged. “I thought of that, but what’s the point? Why would anything capable of doing that kind of damage decide to pose as a random ghost and lurk around in a totally abandoned tunnel?”
“The missing body parts.” Bentley leaned forward. “That detail demands consideration. Apparitions mirror their creators at the time of death, but the papers didn’t say that her actual body was mutilated.”
“No, and neither did the guy living down there, who saw her body get dumped. I think he would have mentioned that.”
“I heard a story once,” Corman said, his expression grave. “Back when I was a professional seer, in the sixties. Supposedly happened to a friend of a friend.” Corman looked spooked, and that wasn’t something I saw often. Bentley lightly touched his wrist, nodding for him to speak.
“Story goes, this guy crossed the wrong people, so they set up a little surprise for him. Like me, astral projection was his specialty. Going into a trance and sending his soul out to snoop around. Well, one night, a couple of disembodied sorcerers were waiting, and they laid some Tibetan whammy on him. Ripped his soul to pieces. Guy died on the spot, cardiac arrest.
“That was that, until a month later. His wife found the ghost of his arm in their bed. Just his arm, and it damn near choked the life out of her. His head showed up in my pal’s closet. Watching him in the night, through a tiny crack, with this insane hatred in his eyes. Then it just vanished into thin air. Next morning, he finds the family dog gutted on the floor, and all the food in the house had rotted overnight.”
Amar emerged from the kitchen just long enough to bring two baskets of fresh-baked flatbread, a plate of creamy chicken curry, and another round of drinks. We all tore away chunks of the puffy bread and dug in.
“What they figured,” Corman said, “was that he didn’t really die. His soul was in pieces, but something kept him from moving on. His mind was dislocated. Fragmented across space and time. The pain would be…inconceivable.”
“Explaining why he attacked people he cared about,” I said, thinking of Stacy’s mad fury. “Like a fox with its leg caught in a bear trap. It doesn’t understand you’re trying to set it free; it’s still going to take a chunk out of any hand that gets close. So how did they fix him?”