The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(21)

From the smell of her breath, this wasn’t her first round. I set her glass on the bar and slid it out of her reach.

“That’s what I say,” I told her. “What are you doing here?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Came with some friends.”

“Yeah? Where are they?”

She squinted into the crowd. I waited patiently, or at least as patiently as I could manage.

“They’re here somewhere,” she said.

“Well, now you’re with me. Come on, I’m taking you home.”

I had to give her a tug on the arm to get her walking. Outside on the sidewalk, I took off my blazer and draped it over her shoulders to keep off the night chill. She wore it sullenly all the way to my car.

“This is ridiculous,” she said as I opened the passenger door and ushered her in. “And you’re a f*cking hypocrite.”

I walked around the car, got in, and revved the engine.

“How do you figure?” I said.

“You mean to tell me that when you were my age, you never drank? You never used a fake ID or went somewhere you weren’t allowed?”

I almost laughed. Those were my minor sins.

“There is a special kind of hypocrisy,” I said, “that comes from wisdom born of age. It works like this: I did really stupid shit when I was a kid, and I paid for it. I do not want you to have to pay for your stupid shit, so I intervene, knowing where your chosen road is headed.”

“So you just decided to ruin my night, because you care about me.”

“That sounds about right,” I said.

She didn’t speak to me for rest of the drive. Can’t say I blamed her.

Everything about Emma Loomis’s house screamed ordinary and respectable. That was by design. It was a spacious tan stucco house in a sleepy little cul-de-sac, with a manicured lawn and no reason for anyone to look at it twice. I pulled into the driveway and followed Melanie to the front door.

“Seriously?” she said, looking over her shoulder at me as she jostled her keys in the lock.

“Seriously,” I said. “I’m not leaving until you’re in bed and asleep, to make sure you don’t just leave again the second I’m gone. It’s either that or I can call your mom and let her deal with you.”

“Like she gives a shit.”

Track lighting clicked on, casting glowing circles across polished tile and prim white carpet. The last time I’d been in the Loomises’ living room, it was to assemble the best and brightest of Vegas’s magical and underworld communities for a single purpose: giving Melanie’s dad enough rope to hang himself.

“She really does care, you know,” I said.

Melanie spun to face me, waving at the cold and empty room.

“Yeah? Then where is she, huh? Oh, right. She’s four hundred miles away, renovating a whorehouse, because that’s more important than being with her own daughter right now!”

I didn’t have a good answer for that. I didn’t think there was one. I still had to try.

“Different people handle their pain different ways,” I said. “Your mom…she’s one of those people who has to be working, all the time. She’s got to keep her hands busy and her head full, because she’s probably afraid she’ll crash if she doesn’t.”

“And what about what I need? I don’t even know how she can stand being at that place, after what she…” Melanie shook her head. She fell down onto the sofa and stared at the dead television.

“What?” I said.

When she looked back at me, her eyes were brimming with tears.

“I need you to tell me something. And I need the truth. Swear you’ll tell me the truth.”

I nodded. “Okay. You got it.”

The words took a long time coming, but I already knew what she was going to ask.

“I need to know,” she said, “did my mom kill my dad?”

Only three people were in that room when it all went down. One was dead and two were liars.

This conversation had been a long time coming. Didn’t make me dread it any less. I shook my head.

“No,” I told her. “I did.”





Ten



Melanie’s expression didn’t change. She sat there, frozen. Blue veins pulsed beneath the skin of her face, spreading out in a web that resembled a butterfly’s wings, as the stress drove her demonic blood to the surface.

“We were going to let him go,” I said. “But he pulled a gun. He was going to shoot your mom. If I hadn’t jumped him and done…done what I did, he would have killed her. He didn’t give me any choice.”

Her eyes were like a dam pushing back against a raging flood. Her jaw clenched, like she couldn’t force the words out. I sat down next to her.

“Is that what you thought?” I said gently. “That Emma was avoiding you because of what she did?”

“She just—” Melanie stammered, her voice breaking. “She just acted so guilty, and I thought—I thought—”

Then the tears came. She fell against me and I put my arms around her, holding her close as she finally found the grief she’d been bottling up since the night her father died. She howled against my chest and I held her, an anchor in her storm.