The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(92)

The stitches over its eyes and mouth tore apart as the head woke up.

Payton’s dead eyes blazed with black light, and he bellowed with a voice like thunder, the concentrated entropy desperate to feast.

The mannequins’ wooden shells ignited as they charged through the flames, and they threw themselves onto Lauren like they were trying to hug their long-lost mother. Others ran headlong into the greenery behind her, setting leaves and bushes alight. Her vines lashed through the air, catching one stray mannequin and smashing it to kindling, but she couldn’t shake them all off.

I threw Payton’s head. It sailed across the room, landing at the foot of Lauren’s steel throne, and burst open. A vortex of snarling purple light whipped around her, wilting flowers, melting brambles to rancid goo. The rose in Lauren’s eye socket withered and turned black. She screamed, stumbling backward, thrashing against the burning mannequins.

“Jen?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Now shoot her.”

Jennifer took aim and snapped off five shots. One at the glass window behind Lauren, and four into the burning woman’s chest, pushing her toward it.

The last of the purple light flickered and died. I saw Lauren, just for one split second, in its wake. Not a transformed monster, not consumed by the Garden’s plants, not anything at all. Just a would-be goddess with a shattered throne.

The cracked window gave under the mannequins’ weight, and she fell with them, smoldering and broken, thirty-six floors to the concrete below.

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. We just ran for the fire escape.

We went up, not down, emerging onto the windy rooftop. A cold night breeze whipped through my hair. The helicopter was waiting for us, just as planned, with the twins on pilot duty. I clambered into the back row of seats, and Meadow got in next to me, with Jennifer taking a seat in front. She slammed the door shut behind us.

“Agnelli Airlines, cleared for takeoff!” Juliette chirped as the helicopter lifted from the roof. “Sorry, there will be no movie on this flight.”

As we veered away, I looked out to the blazing building below and the swarm of red and blue lights strobing in the distance. It was finally over. Lauren Carmichael was dead.

The helicopter flew into the dark, away from the lights of Vegas. Out into the desert.

“I’ve been thinking,” Meadow said, breaking the silence. “Witness protection is some bullshit. What am I gonna do, become a florist in Albuquerque? And give up all my money? Forget that. I’m going to Costa Rica. You paid me to work for you until Lauren bit the bullet. She’s done, so I’m done.”

I nodded up at the twins. “Here’s good, I think.”

“What’s good?” Meadow said. Her scar twitched.

I reached under my seat. Under the cushion, my fingers closed on the gun Nicky had planted there for me. I pulled it out and jabbed the barrel into Meadow’s ribs.

“She’s done,” I said. “So you’re done.”

We landed on a lonely outcropping of rock in the middle of nowhere. I pushed Meadow out of the helicopter. Jennifer got out behind me, reloading her revolver.

“Walk,” I said.

We stood in the helicopter’s headlights under a canopy of pitiless stars. Meadow took a few halting steps back, looking around as if there was anywhere to run.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “We had a deal!”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Meadow. We were never going to let you walk away.”

“You’ve got too much of our family’s blood on your hands,” Jennifer said. “We don’t let that go. Ever.”

“That was Lauren! That—that was all her. She gave the orders!”

“And you did the killing,” I said.

She waved a hand in front of her face, like she thought it could stop a bullet. “Just—just hold on a second. What about the confession? I disappear, my lawyer sends it straight to the feds! You’ll go to prison, Faust!”

“Should have checked into that. Those two murders I confessed to? I didn’t commit them. In fact, I have rock-solid alibis for both. That confession is worthless. The only thing it’ll do is waste Agent Black’s precious time.”

“I have money, okay? I have a lot of money. I skimmed more off Lauren than she ever realized. You can have it. Just let me walk away. You’ll never see me again, I swear it!”

I looked at Jennifer. She looked at me.

“That last part,” I said. “That was true.”

When we flew in for the landing, I’d seen lights in the distance. A campfire to cut the cold of the desert night. They must have been hikers, camping far from civilization. I wondered what it sounded like when Jennifer and I raised our guns and emptied them into Meadow Brand’s body, sending her staggering back in a stream of billowing bloody gunshots until she crumpled, glassy-eyed and dead, on the sand-swept rock. Did it sound like distant fireworks? I wondered. Or just the finality of a book slamming shut at the end of the final page?

We left her corpse for the coyotes and the vultures. In a week’s time, nothing but sun-bleached bones would remain.





Forty-Five



I jogged through the glossy halls of the Metropolitan with slot machines jangling at my back. My watch said 11:59 as I swept down an unmarked hallway lined with old vinyl record sleeves, around the corner, and into the little pizza joint that didn’t show up on any of the casino’s maps. The place smelled like hot pepperoni and warm beer, and the tiny counter was thronged with drunks hungry for a late-night snack.