The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(74)

“Yes, I’ll keep everyone on task while you’re gone,” she said, purring in my ear. “I’m very good at cracking the whip.”

That was how I ended up back at the airport before dawn, drinking black coffee from a recycled paper cup and listening to the come-play-me chimes from a bank of slot machines in the concourse. Vegas’s farewell to the tourist traffic, suctioning out the last of their pocket change before kicking them back home. Every minute I spent here was a minute lost forever. I blew on my coffee and tried not to pace.

Five hours and five minutes to JFK International. That was 305 minutes for Lauren to get closer to the prize, while I sat crammed into an economy-class seat somewhere over the endless American heartland. All I could get was a window seat, and every bump of turbulence brought back the memory of my dreaming death-dive. They showed a movie on the flight, some romantic comedy I remembered seeing commercials for a few months back and promptly forgetting, and I dozed my way through it. Snatches of canned dialogue and laugh lines washed over the cheap plastic headphones and slipped through my groggy thoughts, none of it making much sense.

We touched down on the tarmac with a heavy thump and a mechanical howl as the jet braked hard and fast. JFK was like a microcosm of New York itself: hard and brusque and impatient, under skies that looked like chunks of broken slate. I skipped the crowds at the baggage claim and headed outside, bracing myself against a sudden gust of cold wind. The weather was somewhere in the mid fifties, with rain on the horizon, and I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket. The air outside tasted like burnt diesel.

I didn’t have to wait long for a cab. I gave the cabbie the address I’d seen in Bob’s dream, and he looked back at me through a sheet of knife-scarred Plexiglas.

“Yonkers, huh?” he said in a thick Jersey accent. “Y’know that’s a seventy, eighty-buck ride, right? Lot cheaper to take the airtrain up to Jamaica Station, then hop the blue line.”

“I’m in a hurry,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he told me and gave the meter box a fat-fingered slap to start it running.

The address turned out to be in Northwest Yonkers, in a long and lonely stretch of decommissioned factories with their dirty noses pressed to the Hudson River. The taxi rumbled over broken train tracks and splashed through mud puddles on the torn-up remnants of old parking lots.

“You, ah, sure you got the right address?” the cabbie asked.

I was sure. It wasn’t what I saw—it was what I felt: an electric tingle in the air that had nothing to do with the black thunderclouds on the horizon. There was magic here, old and rich and powerful, setting my teeth on edge. The numbers that flashed before my dream-eyes hung on a red brick wall, under a concrete plaque reading “MacKenzie and Sons Shipping, Est. 1891.”

“This is the place,” I said. “Right here’s fine.”

He stopped the cab, and I counted off bills from my wallet.

“You know,” he told me, “you can get out here, but coming back’s another story. You ain’t gonna find a cab within a mile of this place, especially after sundown.”

I slipped the fare through a slot in the plastic window, plus an extra twenty.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got an exit strategy,” I told him. I got out, and the cold wind ruffled my hair as the taxi drove away.

A big orange CONDEMNED sticker covered the wire-grid window on the warehouse door. A padlock lay on the broken concrete at my feet, snipped open with a pair of bolt cutters. Bob had let himself in.

I let myself in, too.





Thirty-Six



Klieg lights dangled from the warehouse scaffolding, their power lines running to a portable generator that chugged and coughed like a heavy smoker running a marathon. Harsh white beams rained down on the warehouse floor, casting stark illumination against rusted vats and shelves lined with broken equipment and cobwebs.

Bob Payton had traded his tattered bathrobe for a lab coat and shaved his frosty beard. His cheeks were a mess of uneven stubble and old scars. He looked to the door and waved me over, toward a table where he’d set up a teapot on a hotplate.

“You’re here. Good. Right on time. Here, drink this.”

He sloshed three fingers of pale herbal tea into a dirty coffee mug and held it out to me. It smelled like sweaty socks and mint.

“What is it?” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“Green tea mixed with ground datura seeds.”

I shook my head. “I can’t get messed up right now. No time.”

“A very, very light dosage,” he said. “Please. You’ll need it to see what I’ve done.”

He had a point. I held my nose and gulped it down in two swallows. It had an aftertaste like cold medicine, bitter and filmy on my teeth. Bob flitted away like a bird, jittery and fast, huddling over a workbench.

“Aren’t you going to drink any?” I said.

“What? No. For one thing, taking datura orally is incredibly dangerous. You should never do it. It can wreck your stomach lining.”

“But—I just—”

He looked back and pointed at his dilated eyes. The back of his hand was coated in ink, scrawled with occult glyphs that ran under the sleeve of his coat.

“Second, there’s not enough in there to touch me,” he said. “Like I said, very light dose. I have to ingest very large quantities of hallucinogens to get where I’m going. And I have been. For two days straight. Haven’t slept a wink.”