The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 2

  “Ya oughta grab yerself something, Dan. It’s all on the house tonight!”

  I shrugged and picked up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Champagne for celebrating a clean getaway seemed like the thing to do. All the same, even after we met up at a dive pool hall a quarter-mile away, sequestered in a booth in the back to split up the take and go our separate ways, I left the bottle unopened. Just wasn’t in the mood.

  * * *

  Technically I didn’t go home. I hadn’t had one since my last apartment burned down around my ears. I’d been relying on the kindness and the couches of my extended family ever since, mostly crashing at Bentley and Corman’s cramped garret over the Scrivener’s Nook. They were long asleep by the time I crept inside, cupping my keys tight to keep them from jingling as I padded across the vintage shag carpet and into the kitchen. Legs of a remaindered wooden chair scraped across yellowed tile. Their bedroom door up the hall was closed, so I clicked on the overhead light, put my purloined bottle of bubbly in the fridge, and sat at the cluttered kitchen table to get a little work done.

  Everything was just where I’d left it: a small stack of books from the back-room archives, with moldering covers and names like Studies in Esoteric Wisdom and Myth-Cycles of Preclassical Civilizations. And my slowly growing stack of notes, the papers festooned with circles and lines and sharp, accusing arrows like something out of a paranoid’s fever dream.

  I wasn’t paranoid. There really was somebody out to get me.

  I’d had a vision behind bars, a shamanic nightmare courtesy of some enchanted prison wine. A walk through the burning streets of a ruined world, the Vegas Strip shattered in the aftermath of a brutal war. That’s where I met Cassandra, the old bag lady who called herself a prophet. This wasn’t our Earth, she told me; it was “the world next door.” And the guy who’d burned it all down—sometimes called the man with the Cheshire smile, sometimes just the Enemy—was here in my backyard and getting ready for an encore performance.

  Normally I’d take a hallucination like that with a full shaker of salt, but too many details checked out. Like Buddy, the brain-fried psychic who said he was Cassandra’s twin and knew too many things he shouldn’t have. Then there was Ms. Fleiss. I’d pulled a heist for her back in Chicago, stealing an Aztec dagger from a necromancer named Damien Ecko. Turned out she was working for the Enemy all along, and they buried me behind bars under a bogus conviction and a hell of a powerful curse to keep me there.

  From what I’d pieced together, they needed somebody called “the Thief” dead, and at the same time, they still wanted the guy around for whatever they’d been planning. So they worked some substitutional sorcery, gave me the title of the Thief, then sent assassins to take me out. A symbolic blood sacrifice. What was it all for? If I knew that, I wouldn’t have been up until dawn every night for over a week now, poring through Bentley and Corman’s grimoires and searching for something, anything, to make sense of this mess.

  I knew this much, though, knew it down in my gut: the man with the Cheshire smile was real. He was out there. And whatever he and Fleiss were cooking up, it was bad news for all of us.

  2.

  “Again?” asked the faded, frail voice from the kitchen doorway.

  Bentley stared at me, his aged face etched with sleeplessness, the hem of his cashmere robe wavering around his stockinged feet. I felt like a recovering alcoholic who’d just been caught with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s pressed to his lips.

  “It’s…important,” was all I managed to say after a moment of mental fumbling, gesturing to an open book I was too exhausted to read. “Somewhere in these books, there’s an answer. Or a clue. Something to go on.”

  “Daniel—”

  “That curse he hit me with, distorting everyone’s sense of time, implanting memories of a trial that never happened—he changed my life’s history, Bentley. No magician alive should have been able to pull off a stunt like that. We don’t even know if the Enemy is human, if he’s a demon. We don’t know where he is, what kind of resources he has—”

  “Daniel,” Bentley said, his voice schoolteacher-sharp.

  I fell silent. He walked over and pulled back the other chair, sitting down across from me.

  “You’ve been through a lot,” he said, gentler now. “We all have. And I’m not discounting the threat at hand, but I’m starting to think this is becoming a bad habit. And I’m not sure you’re entirely aware of it.”

  “Aware of what? Bentley, this is a crisis situation.”

  “It is always a crisis. Daniel, ever since you took that job investigating that poor girl’s death in the storm tunnels, you’ve been pinballing from one emergency to another. You’re not stopping to catch your breath, you’re not taking care of yourself, and Cormie and I are getting worried.”

  I shook my head, not getting it.

  “What are you talking about? I’m taking care of myself just fine.”

  His fingers rapped the page of notes between us.

  “As happy as we are to have you here, your current situation says otherwise. You lost your apartment months ago. Have you done anything to try and find a new home for yourself? And pushing yourself to exhaustion every single night and sleeping most of the day isn’t doing your health any favors. I almost wonder…”

  He trailed off. I looked him in the eye.

  “What?”

  “I almost wonder,” he said, “if your new obsession is that important to you, or if living in crisis mode is simply a convenient distraction from having to decide what you want to do with your life.”

  Up until that moment, I’d been going a hundred miles an hour. Now I felt like my transmission had just dropped out, spilling broken metal all over the highway. Jolting to a brick-wall stop.

  Bentley reached out, put his hand over mine, and gently squeezed.

  “That’s…that’s fair,” I said. I was out of words at the moment. That’s fair was the best I could manage as I stood back and took a good hard look at myself.

  “Jennifer told me she offered you a seat on the New Commission.”

  “And I told her I’d work security for them, when they need it, but that’s it.” My brows furrowed. “I spent way too long as an errand boy for Nicky Agnelli. I don’t want to become him. Besides, I figured you’d be happy I wasn’t out there playing gangster.”

  “I think,” he said, “I’d just be happy if you aspired to something more than this.”

  I sighed. Nodded. Picked up my notes and tucked them inside the front cover of a book, stowing them away for the night.

  “I’ll work on it,” I told him. “And I’m not just saying that, all right? Tomorrow I’m going to see Paolo about my new papers. Once that’s squared away, I can start…rebuilding, I guess. I’ll figure it out.”

  His chair squeaked as he pushed it back, and he gave me a patient smile.

  “That’s all we ask. Good night, Daniel.”

  He puttered back to the bedroom, and I clicked off the kitchen lights on my way to the threadbare couch. I glanced back at the refrigerator, suddenly thirsty for a drink, and thought about the bottle of champagne.

  No. That would keep. Call it motivation to do something worth celebrating.

  * * *

  The next morning found me in another winning stretch of town, a street lined with foreclosures and For Rent signs taped to boarded-up windows. That and the big bubbly sign for the Love Connection, emblazoned with hot-pink triple Xs. With my Barracuda impounded by the cops—and it wasn’t like I could ask for it back, seeing as I was dead and all—Corman had rented a car for me in the meantime. It was a tiny two-door Chevy Spark hatchback painted a garish neon green that almost glowed in the dark. As I pulled up to the curb outside the friendly neighborhood porn boutique, I wondered if Corman had chosen it out of frugality or just because he thought it was funny to watch me drive a lime on wheels.

  The wire-rack aisles, laden with DVDs offering every sexual escapade imaginable and a few I’d never heard of, were empty a
s the Nevada desert. Customers weren’t exactly banging down the door to get in, though to be fair, Paolo didn’t do a lot of advertising; the porn gig was just a front for his real career, a thriving backroom business that operated on an appointment basis only. I found him kicking back behind the counter, watching a video on his phone. From the muffled grunts and groans erupting from the tinny speaker, I figured he was sampling his own merchandise.

  “Is that the new Jane Austen adaptation?” I asked, leaning against the counter. “I’ve heard good things.”

  He jumped and fumbled at his phone, killing the sound. He jammed it into his pocket and stood up, red-faced.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Great, uh, great acting. I love the classics. So, you got what I need?”

  I crossed his palm with a stack of green. It was my entire take from last night’s job plus a little extra. Paolo didn’t work cheap, but this was the very definition of a good investment. He locked up the shop and took me in back, where he’d converted a small, concrete-walled stockroom into his personal studio. Three different printers shared table space with a twenty-seven-inch iMac and an artist’s digital tablet, not far from a stool with a blue canvas backdrop and a digital camera on a tripod, like you might find at a DMV. He rubbed his hands and fired up the computer, gesturing for me to have a seat on the stool.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ve already got a good chunk of your papers lined up. One big question: what’s your new name gonna be?”

  My old alter ego was Peter Greyson, a solid citizen with a bulletproof paper trail and a decent-to-middling credit history. I’d had Greyson’s ID on me when I got busted. That left good old Pete nothing but ashes on the wind now, and I sure couldn’t operate under my real name. I was legally a corpse, but my vitals, my mug shot, and my prints were filed on the federal ViCAP database. One inquiry in the wrong direction and I’d go from “dead and forgotten” to “alive and wanted in the worst way.”

  “Paul Emerson,” I told him. Paul had been my cellmate at Eisenberg Correctional, and Emerson was an undercover Department of Corrections officer who’d needed a helping hand. Neither of them made it out of the Iceberg alive. I figured they’d earned a tip of the hat.

  Paolo double-checked the spelling and fiddled with Photoshop. “That works. What’s he do for a living?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He looked my way, tilting his head.

  “Just make something up. If you weren’t you—if you could be anything you wanted to be—what would it be?”

  I had to think about that. And I kept thinking. A bottomless well of possibilities, and I came up bone-dry.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Paolo said. “I’ll make him an accountant. Nobody wants to talk to an accountant about his job anyway.”

  I watched an imaginary man come to life one piece at a time, born from pixels and laminated paper. Paul Emerson sprouted a high school diploma, then a degree in accounting from a decent midwestern college, pausing to get his driver’s license and social security number on the way. He passed the CPA exam with flying colors, and his business cards—listing a dummy address and the number on my burner phone—sported crisp black type on cream.

  The hours slid by, and Paolo kept working while I ran out to grab us some burgers from the fast-food joint down the street. By the time the sun started to shimmer down a late-afternoon desert sky, he’d finished painting the final strokes on his human canvas. Paul Emerson was respectable, boring, and immediately forgettable: the perfect life to hide my chaos inside, like a nesting doll with fireworks in its belly.

  “You’re gonna have to work on his credit,” Paolo told me while I filled a brand-new wallet with Emerson’s artfully aged papers. “Build it up slow, just like last time. First thing you should do is get him a bank account, and establish an activity trail. Put some cash in, keep it there, and start using his debit card for groceries and such.”

  “I know the drill,” I said, checking the time on my phone. Building a solid cover didn’t end when the printer cooled down. It was going to take months, maybe years to make Emerson’s identity bulletproof, just like I’d already done for Peter Greyson. I was starting from square one, all over again.

  The bank would wait until tomorrow. It was already getting late, and I had an appointment to keep. I said my goodbyes and headed outside. In the gathering dusk, my rental looked even more like a lime on wheels. My disdain wasn’t what stopped me with one hand on the door handle, though; it was the rattle and hiss of a can of spray paint, coming from the alley alongside Paolo’s shop. I didn’t think Paolo would care about somebody tagging his wall, but I figured I should check it out anyway, make sure it was just a kid or a wannabe graffiti artist instead of a gangbanger claiming territory rights.

  It was an artist, all right.

  A painting eight feet high and half as wide adorned the bare brick wall, scarlet and mad. An impression of hooked claws and vast, staring eyes, perfectly round. A flurry of bloody feathers. And beside it, the artist was putting on his finishing touches: a message, painted in screaming, jagged letters.

  THE OWL LIVES.

  The can of spray paint tumbled from the artist’s shaking hand, rolling across the dirty concrete to rattle against four of its empty cousins. The man was in his late forties, almost bald with a ring of tufted hair, and dressed in a three-piece suit with his tie loose and dangling. Sweat plastered his ruddy cheeks as he turned to face me, his lips twitching. He threw up one hand and pointed a finger at his design.

  “Did you see it?” he demanded.

  I shook my head, mute.

  “Did you see her?” He clutched his scalp, his bloodshot eyes rolling back. “Did you dream the dream? I did. I dreamed the dream. Last night. It got into my head. It won’t leave, not until I spread the good word.”

  This whole situation had the tang of bad craziness. I took a slow step back, toward the mouth of the alley.

  “There was a wise owl, who flew from her oak,” the man groaned. “Her echoes are hunting, for her and for hers. She’s got a message to deliver. She’s got a promise to keep.”

  “That’s real nice, guy,” I said, holding up my empty hands as I made my exit. “I’m happy for you, really.”

  “The Owl is coming,” he bellowed at my back as I hustled to my car, suddenly thankful for my lime-green sanctuary. “She’s coming, and God’s gonna bleed! God’s gonna bleed!”

  3.

  I drove up a block, pulled over just long enough to shoot a quick text to Paolo—crazy guy in your alley, steer clear—and kept moving. I usually felt like I was armpits-deep in whatever latest madness had descended upon Las Vegas. There was something weirdly reassuring in the knowledge that my city could happily lose its damn mind without it being my fault once in a while. Everybody had their own crazy to deal with.

  Mine, tonight, came in the form of a nondescript door and a small blue neon arrow, just off the Vegas Strip. I walked past the line out front, ignoring the crowd as I made my way toward a bouncer in dark glasses and a black muscle shirt. He gave me one look and unhooked the velvet rope, drawing a chorus of groans from the pretty pack of twentysomethings waiting to get inside.

  Membership has its privileges.

  The bass hit me like a boxer’s fists, hammering my heart and my brain with a machine-gun flurry. Winter was jumping tonight. The nightclub bathed in aquamarine light as ice-white stars tumbled on wall-mounted LED screens in time to the rhythm. The heat stole my breath, the kind of heat you only get from hundreds of bodies packed together and moving to a simmering beat. I was glad I didn’t have to find Caitlin in the mob. We had dinner plans just as soon as she finished a meeting, and the conference room at Winter was carefully hidden from the public eye. As I wound my way through the crowd, I caught a snatch of shouted conversation.

  “Did you see? Taylor Swift is here!”

  “Dude, that wasn’t her. That didn’t even look like her.”

  “It was totally her!”

  I grimace
d, seeing my evening going right off the rails. There were two possibilities, as I saw them. Either a world-famous pop star had decided to pay a visit to a nightclub secretly owned and operated by the powers of hell, or Caitlin had a surprise visitor who, I strongly suspected, got off on being confused for said pop star. And had a thing for wreaking havoc in people’s lives, mine included.

  Down an access corridor lit by pipes of frosty neon, a solid door with a keypad barred the way to Winter’s second level. The door’s guardian stood still and silent, a hulk wearing a gas mask and a black leather apron. The rusty blade of a machete dangled at his hip. As I approached, he turned without a word and keyed in the access code.

  “Hey, is Taylor Swift here?”

  The opaque lenses of the gas mask turned my way, and he uttered something like, “Mwuh?”

  I sighed. “Nadine. Is Nadine here?”

  The big guy shrugged. “Bwuguh.”

  I patted him on the shoulder as the door chunked open, swinging back to reveal a long and shadowy staircase.

  “Thanks for the chat,” I said. “It’s been fun.”

  The blue and white neon turned to gold, set into black octagonal walls that evoked the feeling of a honeycomb. The bass tempo, sealed behind steel and stone, faded to a distant heartbeat that steered my steps through the maze beneath the dance floor. I’d been down here enough times to stop getting lost on my way to the conference room, winding through grottoes and black-walled chambers, past orgiastic piles of hungry flesh, hands grasping, touching, clawing, and tableaux of elaborately orchestrated torment. The moans and the gasps washed over me, a fervent accompaniment to the distant, driving beat. I kept my eyes straight ahead and my feet moving. I wasn’t much of a voyeur, and honestly, getting distracted by seedy, anonymous sex when there might be an ancient lust demon on the premises sounded like the definition of a bad idea.