The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(79)

The sky turned gold; then it turned black. No stars shone above us. The city ahead, looming large in the dusty bus window, had put them out of business. My Vegas, sacred lady of halogen and neon. The spotlight from the Karnak pyramid touched a white-hot beckoning finger to the sky.

“Think you’re gonna win big?” my seatmate asked.

The bus wheezed as it pulled into the terminal. Hard light flowed in through the window, washing over me like a baptism.

“I’ll give it my best shot,” I told him.

Caitlin waited for me out in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of her snow-white Audi Quattro. She’d traded in her coat and her weapons for a gray silk jersey dress, and she curled her arms around my neck to pull me close.

“I’ve been watching the news all day,” she murmured once our lips parted. “Nicely played. You know, those celebrities…you could have blackmailed them.”

“I know. I decided to be the good guy for a change.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh? Did you like it?”

“Not enough to make a habit out of it. It’s really expensive and kind of exhausting. Have we heard from Pixie?”

“She’s on board.” Caitlin plucked at the shoulder of my oversized jacket. “This needs to be fixed. You look like a vaudeville comedian.”

“I’ll steal clothes from a smaller guy next time I break out of prison.”

“I’m taking you shopping,” she said. “But first, you have a much-overdue doctor’s appointment.”

*

“For a dead man,” Doc Savoy murmured, “you sure are spry.”

I sat on the edge of a cold steel mortuary slab, following the movements of his penlight as he shone it in one eye, then the other, swiveling the light from side to side. The doc’s “office” was the quiet mortuary behind the Rosewood Funeral Home; he’d sometimes joke that if he ever lost a patient, coffin-fitting was just fifty feet away.

He didn’t lose many patients though. Doc was pushing seventy, and his eyes were rheumy behind his wire-rimmed glasses, but everybody in the Vegas underground knew he was the best off-the-books sawbones in the business. If you took a gunshot wound or anything else you didn’t want the authorities asking questions about, he’d patch you up good as new—and more importantly, he’d keep his lips sealed.

I didn’t mind that he was really a veterinarian. Decades of experience had to count for something, right?

Caitlin stood behind him, arms crossed, eyeing my shirtless chest. There was nothing lascivious in her look: my skin was a tapestry of fading blotches, the ugly coat of bruises finally starting to heal. I was getting around all right now—the headaches and nausea notwithstanding—but every once in a while I’d move the wrong way and wince at a sudden muscle twinge.

“I’m just experimenting with being dead as a fashion statement,” I told him.

He snickered at my suit, folded neatly on the slab beside me. “I thought that was a fashion statement.”

“First man to ever escape from Eisenberg Correctional, and I get no respect.”

“Aw, you weren’t even the first,” the Doc said. “Didn’t you hear? Couple of guys on ATVs busted out the day before you did, clear across the desert. You should have hitched a ride with them, would’ve saved you a whole mess of trouble. They had the right idea.”

He checked my eyes once more and took a step back.

“Hm. Well, no doubt about it, you took a hit to the noggin. Good news is, with plenty of rest—I’m gonna say ten days, minimum—you should be right as rain. Go home, go to bed, and stay there.”

I shook my head. “No can do. Can’t you give me some medication or something?”

“For a concussion?” he said. “Sure. Tylenol. It’ll help with the headaches. Past that, there’s no way around it: you’ve got to rest. No physical exertion, no mental exertion, no booze—”

“Wait a second. I just broke out of prison, and I can’t even have a drink to celebrate?”

He beamed, rubbing his hands against his old butcher’s smock. “Sure you can! In ten days. After you come in for a follow-up and I give you a clean bill of health.”

“This isn’t working for me,” I said.

“Does permanent brain damage work for you? ’Cause that’s what you’re risking if you go running around acting crazy out there. You take one more solid hit to that thick head of yours, you could end up with internal bleeding, maybe even second-impact syndrome. Makes your brain swell up ’til there’s no more room in your skull and then, well, that’s all she wrote. Lousy way to die, my friend.”

“He will rest,” Caitlin said, locking eyes with me.

“By the by,” Doc said, “you know my stance on doctor-patient privilege. That’s something I don’t break—”

“Which I appreciate,” I told him.

“—but that said, I can speak in the vaguest of generalities. Something’s brewing out there, Dan, and it sure isn’t good.”

“Brewing how?”

“My business is brisk these last few days. Too brisk.” Doc Savoy nodded toward the door. “I’m selling bandages and caskets like they were going out of style. Lots of street kids coming in all messed up, lots more than just the usual bloody faces and scuffed-up knuckles.”