The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(5)
The driver aimed straight for Caitlin and me, and gunned the engine. A rattling sound filled the air, like rain pelting a tin roof, and a whirlwind of dark, syrupy blood whipped past us. The whirlwind exploded, coating the van’s windshield in sticky crimson. Suddenly blind, the driver lost his nerve and hauled the wheel around, trying to get away. Tortured metal shrieked as the van smashed head-on into the burning building. Its front end crunched like an accordion against the wall, and the driver launched through the windshield headfirst. The impact snapped his neck and left him wide-eyed and dead in a puddle of broken glass.
Jennifer held out her bleeding wrist, the torn skin already knitting itself back together as she chanted around the razor blade clenched between her teeth.
The second rifleman hauled open the side door, just in time to see Caitlin coming at him with claws bared and a mouth lined with teeth like a great white shark’s. She grabbed him by the throat and dragged him behind the van. I didn’t see what happened next, but I could hear his frenzied screams for about three seconds before they stopped short.
Caitlin stepped back into sight and wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing the blood on her lips all over her cheeks, like some nightmarish war paint. I took a second to catch my breath.
That was when I saw the passenger slip out of the front seat of the van, still clutching his torn shoulder, and stagger away. Jennifer, Caitlin, and I glanced at each other. I flipped one card up in the air and caught it between my fingertips. Jack of spades.
I whipped the card toward him, and it spun like a razor-edged boomerang. The gunman screamed and fell as it sliced through his Achilles tendon and winged its way back to my hand, the card freshly edged in scarlet. He was still trying to crawl away, dragging himself across the dirt, when we walked up to him. I kicked him over onto his back.
“Where’s Lauren Carmichael?” I said.
He shook his head wildly, squirming in the dust, eyes bulging.
“Don’t kill me,” he begged. “Please, don’t kill me. I’ve got a family!”
I held up an open hand. “We’re not going to kill you. Just tell us where Lauren is, and you can walk away.”
Little white lies.
Then he screamed. Not from fear. Pain. He gripped his stomach and howled as it swelled under his clenched fingers, skin buckling and bloating, the buttons of his shirt popping one by one as his belly grew like a woman nine months pregnant. He kept swelling.
His eyes rolled back, and he shrieked like he was being fed into a meat grinder. Red lines blossomed on his stomach, the skin stretched to tearing, and then they burst. I jumped back as a flood of tiny snakes cascaded from the gunman’s body, pouring out onto the stony ground and wriggling in all directions. He stopped screaming. I watched as a single garter snake squirmed out of the dead man’s mouth and slithered back up his nose.
Caitlin, Jennifer, and I strode away without a word. We needed to put as much space between us and this nightmare as possible, and fast. I paused, catching a glint of light in the corner of my eye, from over by the restaurant’s Dumpster.
A kid, maybe seventeen with an acne-cratered face, wore a short-order cook’s apron and crouched just out of sight. He had a phone in his hand, holding it up to record the action. He froze as we closed in on him, but he brandished the camera’s eye like it was some kind of protective talisman.
I snatched the phone out of his trembling hand, tossed it to the ground, and stomped it under my heel until there was nothing left but shards of mangled plastic.
“You didn’t see a goddamn thing,” I told him.
“I didn’t—” he said, stumbling over his tongue. “I didn’t see anything.”
“When the cops come,” I said, “all you remember is seeing some strange Mexicans in the restaurant today. And maybe, in the shooting, somebody shouted something about cocaine. You don’t remember too clearly.”
“Mexicans,” he said, “and cocaine. G-got it.”
“Good. Because if you don’t? We’ll have to come back and see you again. And you wouldn’t want that.”
He nodded quickly, his voice caught in his throat. Some sorcerers are big on esoteric forms of thought control. I’m too lazy for that. Why go to that kind of trouble when you can get the exact same result with simple blind terror?
“Well, this was a clusterf*ck,” Jennifer said as we walked away.
“Still time for things to get even worse,” I said.
“Yeah? How?”
I tapped my watch. “Meeting with our new lawyer. Let’s go, we’re gonna be late.”
We blew out of town just ahead of the sirens and turned into ghosts on the highway. We blended in with the traffic, leaving the burning wreckage in our rearview mirrors. I clenched the steering wheel, counted my breaths, and waited for the crazy-fear adrenaline rush to ebb away. By the time I saw the sign saying “Las Vegas 75 miles,” my knuckles weren’t bone white anymore.
It’s amazing, the things that start to seem normal once you get used to them.
? ? ?
The lawyer had smooth hands. Not smooth like talcum powder and baby fat, but smooth like soft plastic on a freshly molded doll. When he held out an open palm, waving it over my arrest report like a magician about to do a trick, I noticed his fingertips didn’t have any whorls.
“Naughty boys,” he said, flashing perfect teeth and grinning like he was about to sell me a used car. “Naughty boys and naughty girls, where would we be without them?”