The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(77)

“I know what you are,” Lancaster told me. “You and that woman. I know what I saw. You’re sorcerers, ain’t ya?”

I sent out psychic feelers, squirming invisibly across the room, brushing over the skin of Lancaster’s mind. Not a spark of magic there.

The card, though, was another story. It glowed ultraviolet in my second sight, seething with absorbed power like a nugget of enriched uranium.

“You know what that is, right?” He tapped the card. “That’s a golden ticket. A genuine, authentic golden ticket. And you can have it.”

“Unless you’re about to introduce me to Willy Wonka,” I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Something tells me we move in different social circles.”

He waved off the question. “Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is you take that card, call that number, and tell ’em I gave it to you.”

“And then?”

He laughed. “And then you get whatever you want, that’s what! You want money? Girls? Boys? One of those fancy Italian sports cars? They can make it happen. They will make it happen to show their gratitude for you letting bygones be bygones.”

“And who are ‘they,’ exactly?”

“Friends of my family. We go way back. Now, there’s a flip side to all this largesse. You decide to pull that trigger instead, and there’s no place on earth you’ll be able to hide from them. They’ll find you in Timbuktu. And you won’t die easy, or quick. Make the right choice, son. Take the golden ticket.”

I didn’t know if the offer—or the threat—was legit, but I knew one thing: he believed it. Lancaster’s fingers stroked that card like it was a magical talisman that could turn him bulletproof.

“You can promise me the sun and the moon,” I told him, “but right now there’s only one thing I really want. You’re filing the official reports, I assume. Your version of what went down last night.”

“My little contingency plan.” He smirked. “All tracks covered, all hands clean, and we can start the show all over again as soon as the reconstruction’s finished. It’s easy to control the narrative when everybody who knows the truth is locked up or on board. Are…you on board, son?”

He nudged the card an inch closer to my side of the desk.

“That card won’t do me any good if I get caught and sent right back to prison.” I nodded at his computer. “I need you to amend the official story.”

I’d been thinking, long and hard, about Buddy’s last words to me. The message from the voices in his head.

“Well, sure,” Lancaster looked uncertain. “What do you need?”

“Daniel Faust,” I told him, “died in the riot. Confirmed kill, body cremated.”

They say…you’re going to die here, Buddy had told me. They say you have to die here.

It wasn’t a prophecy. It was a plan.

I walked around the desk, keeping the gun on him, to watch over his shoulder as he worked. Lancaster pulled up his reports, the account of the riot and its aftermath, and the lists of the dead.

“Now just so you understand,” he said as he added my name to the list, “I can’t do nothin’ about your fingerprints and such. You’ve got a ViCAP file now. That’s a federal database. So if you ever get arrested again and they run your prints, your boat is sunk. Your mugshot’s on file, too.”

“Then I guess I’d better not get arrested again. You let me worry about that.”

He rattled a few more keys and sat back, resting his hands on the desk.

“All right,” he said, “done is done, and it’s all official. As far as the entire world is concerned, you died last night. Only you and me know different. Don’t you worry, long as we’ve got a truce, I’ll keep your secret.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, okay.”

He relaxed, sinking back in his chair, mirroring my smile.

“But you know the old saying,” I told him.

His brow furrowed. “What old saying?”

“Two people can keep a secret,” I said, “if one of them is dead.”

He barely had time for the shock to register on his face as I grabbed his wrist and yanked up his right hand. I pressed the muzzle to his temple and his hand to the barrel. “No,” he gasped, just before I pulled the trigger and painted his desk cherry red.

I let go. His corpse slumped sideways in the chair. I headed for his kitchen.

I came back with a terrycloth dishrag and wiped down the gun. Then, carefully, I worked it into his limp fingers, making sure to press his fingertips in to leave solid prints. I had put his hand to the barrel as I fired to make sure it’d be covered in plenty of juicy particles in case the coroner ran a gunshot residue test. A world-class CSI would know the blast pattern was all wrong and figure out he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, but prison bosses in blue-collar towns didn’t get world-class CSIs.

On a surface-level examination—which was exactly what Warden Lancaster’s corpse would undergo—he was a textbook suicide.

I opened a text file on his desktop and whipped up a quick note, something for the first responders to find: “I can no longer live with the monstrous things I have done. May God forgive me.” I figured brevity was best.