The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(30)

“I called in a favor and fast-tracked that chemical analysis,” Harmony said. “You were right. The sandwich was dosed with the same chemicals as the business card. Now you need to tell me exactly what this is about.”

“What was the drug?”

“Where did you get this, Faust? Is somebody actually handing this stuff out on the street? This is serious.”

“You first,” I said.

I might have been half-asleep, but I could still hear her teeth grind on the other end of the line.

“It’s a custom mix,” she finally said. “A blend of tetrodotoxin and datura stramonium.”

“I know those words,” I muttered. I pushed against the cushions, forcing myself to sit up, and ran my fingers through my tangled hair. “Why do I know those words?”

“What do you know about zombies?”

“Shooting them in the head doesn’t work,” I said. “You’ve got to completely dismember them or they’ll just keep coming.”

“Not movie zombies, Faust. I mean real Haitian zombies.”

“Right,” I said. “Movies. That’s totally what I was talking about.”

Agent Black was a competent magician, bless her noble heart, but she was a little less worldly than I was. I tried to keep her that way.

“‘Zombie powder’ is a drug,” she said. “Induces a temporary coma, hallucinatory trance, sometimes even long-term brain damage. It’s mind control, old-school style. You dose some poor victim, bury him and dig him up again, and convince him he’s an undead slave who’s powerless to disobey you. Presto, you’ve got a zombie.”

“And this is the same stuff?” I said.

“Very close, but much less concentrated. A dose this light won’t be putting anyone in a coma, but it will cause a sense of passiveness and heightened suggestibility. Maybe even a waking trance state, if your victim’s susceptible enough.”

“So if you get the right dosage,” I said, “and a friendly-looking guy says, ‘Hey, you should come with me,’ especially if he backs it up with a little magical nudge—”

“You’ll do exactly what you’re told,” she said, finishing my thought for me. “Your turn. Who are these people? And what are they doing with this stuff?”

“Snatching homeless people. The ‘why’ part, I’m still working on.”

“Not your job,” Harmony said. “The drugged business card is enough probable cause to buy me a search warrant. We’ll raid their offices and sort this out.”

“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t do that. Let me check it out first, my way. New Life is connected to Senator Roth and to Lauren Carmichael.”

“Can you prove that?”

“I can, but you can’t. My source of information isn’t exactly legal. Give me a chance to find something that’ll stick, something that’ll let you hit them both with kidnapping charges, before you go in guns blazing and scare off our only lead.”

It was one of those sneaky little half-truths. If she got a chance to arrest Roth, more power to her. I’d never met the guy, but everybody likes seeing a politician in handcuffs. What I wanted was a line on where Carmichael was hiding so I could track her down before Harmony did.

Agent Black wanted to put Lauren Carmichael in a ten-by-ten prison cell. I had a better idea: a hole out in the desert, three feet wide and six feet deep.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours,” she said and hung up on me.

I stumbled to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and rubbed a hand across my bristly cheeks. Two days without shaving and my face was firmly in the “too long for roguish stubble, too short for a beard” category. I mussed my hair and changed into my panhandling outfit.

Corman was in the kitchen, wearing his ragged old gray robe and boxers, pouring himself a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He watched me come down the hall. One of his bushy eyebrows rose like a flag.

“Are those my clothes?” he said.

“Just borrowing,” I told him. “I’m on a job, needed to whip up a little disguise.”

“What are you disguising yourself as, a Dodgers fan?”

I just nodded. It seemed the prudent thing to do.

“Well,” he said, “just bring everything back in one piece. I like that shirt.”

I parked the car in a side lot about two blocks from New Life, tipped the attendant an extra twenty to keep an eye on it, and walked the rest of the way. The address led me to a run-down industrial park where half the doors had big For Lease signs. It looked like those signs had been hanging there for a while.

The New Life Project’s welcome sign was shiny and new, though, standing out in front of a refurbished warehouse painted battleship gray. The place was big enough to be a homeless shelter, no doubt, but the lack of windows didn’t give me a lot of optimism. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire ran around the back of the building, cutting off the Dumpsters and the back door from casual access.

“All are welcome,” the sign said. Time to put that to the test.

I’d left my wallet and phone back in the car, in case they searched me going in. My gun stayed securely in the trunk for the same reason. I still had my deck of cards, though. Being a sorcerer means you’re never unarmed.