The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(8)
“They didn’t.” Corman tossed back a swig of whiskey. “He just stopped showing up one day, and that’s the end of the story. Either the tangled tatters of his spirit unraveled enough to let him move on, or the poor bastard’s still out there somewhere. Drifting endlessly through the astral. In screaming pieces.”
The table fell silent. We were all well aware of the risks of our profession. Bentley and Corman taught me that the first magician was Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire for humanity and was repaid by having his liver eternally eaten by vultures. It’s a cautionary tale that every modern-day sorcerer knows. Still, it was sobering to be handed a concrete example of what can happen when you screw with the machinery of the universe.
“I’m not letting that happen,” I said, tearing off another chunk of bread. “Whatever Stacy went through, she’s suffered enough. I’m fixing this.”
“We’re with you,” Bentley said with a firm nod. “Where shall we start?”
“Whether it was the cops or her boyfriend or somebody else, Stacy’s drowning was no accident, and it’s got the stink of magic all over it. I’m going after the boyfriend first. Even if his hands are clean, he’ll know better than anyone what she was into before she died. Do me a favor. Put out some feelers, see if anybody is new in town and making waves. Mama Margaux, are you still dating that guy in the coroner’s office?”
“Antoine?” she said, arching her eyebrow. “Antoine needs to grow up and figure out what he wants. When he does that, we’ll talk.”
“Well, if it wouldn’t put you out to ask, I’d love to know if the visitor logs show anybody viewing Stacy’s body except for her grandfather.”
“Done and done,” Margaux said.
We drank another couple of rounds. The hours got blurry and the breadbasket wore down to a few scattered crumbs, and eventually the conversation stalled. I pushed my chair back and stretched.
“That’s it for me,” I said. “I want to get an early jump on this thing tomorrow. I’ll keep you all in the loop.”
Bentley followed me to the vestibule, resting his frail hand on my shoulder.
“Are you all right?” He looked me in the eye. “Really all right?”
I thought about Roxy, and it took me a second to get the words out.
“I thought she was the one. I mean, you always think that, but…I really believed it. Wedding bells, white picket fences, the real deal. Then one night the dream just died on me.” I paused, shaking my head. “I’m sad right now, and that’s okay. If I’m not sad I start getting angry, and I don’t want to be angry at her. I don’t want to twist it around in my head, change what we had into something ugly, you know? I owe her that much.”
He stared at me for a moment, then pulled me into a wordless hug.
Suddenly, I stood in the middle of Fremont Street, with only the haziest memory of saying goodbye and walking out the door. You leave the Tiger’s Garden the same way you arrive: vaguely, a passenger through an odd and liquid space.
It was four in the morning. Most of the taxpayers and solid citizens had gone back to their hotels to sleep off the cheap beer, and the canopy’s neon light show was dead and cold. Fremont was back to its natural state, a litter-strewn wasteland inhabited only by those who had nowhere else to go. A brisk wind ruffled my hair. Fingers of the cold desert night.
I had only walked half a block when I realized I was being followed. Someone clopped along behind me, maybe ten feet back, making a crude attempt to hide in the echo of my footsteps. I casually glanced into the darkened window of a tourist bar, but all the glass showed was a hazy, heavyset blob lurking at my back. Decision time.
A panhandler would have come right up and started talking. This had to be the less pleasant kind of street rat, one dumb or stoned enough to take me for a mark. Probably hoping I’d lead him to my car so he could jack my wallet and my wheels at the same time. I deflated his hopes by stopping in my tracks and whirling around to face him.
With long, stringy hair and cast-off tourist clothes caked with dirt and food stains, my stalker looked like he’d clawed his way out of a shallow grave. His bloodshot eyes widened as he pointed one yellowed, broken fingernail at me.
“I saw you,” he said, sounding like he was having trouble finding his words. “You weren’t there, then you were. Came out of a door, but you didn’t. Poof. Magic.”
I sighed. Like any big city, we have our share of people who end up on the streets because they can’t get a doctor’s help or the drugs they need to function. Schizophrenics occasionally have a knack for spotting wrinkles in the fabric of reality—for example, me, walking out of an Indian restaurant through a door that doesn’t actually exist. Of course, nobody listens to them. I was looking for something soothing to say, thinking I’d slip him a couple of bucks and shoo him off, when he gave me a snaggletoothed smile.
“I hear magicians taste like candy,” he said, his voice dropping into a growl.
He shambled closer, and now I could see that his teeth weren’t just rotten. He had more teeth in his mouth than any human should, crowding each other out and bending jaggedly from diseased roots. Somewhere in the space of a heartbeat, his eyes melted to the color of runny egg yolks.
This was not my night.