The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(10)
I hoped that the cambion’s “we” existed only in his head, that he was acting alone and I’d scared him into taking a permanent hike. Still, I wasn’t going to risk my friends’ lives without making damn sure of it. Now I had to deal with an unsolved murder, a soul-shattered ghost, and at least one rogue half-demon who wanted to eat me for dinner because apparently magicians’ toes taste like candy. At least I couldn’t complain about being bored.
I watched my back all the way home and took a lot of unnecessary turns. Even still, in bed with the door locked and deadbolt latched, I kept my feet tucked under the covers.
? ? ?
The fingers of the desert sun stabbed around the edges of my curtains, shaking hands with my hangover. I pushed myself out of bed around nine. I grabbed a bottle of water and a half-empty pack of convenience store donuts from the mini-fridge, chasing them with three aspirins.
“Breakfast of champions,” I muttered, trudging off to the bathroom to shower and make myself look presentable. The steam and spray woke me up, made me feel human again. My first priority was checking out Artie Kaufman. He’d gotten Jud’s granddaughter into the porn game, transformed her from Stacy Pankow to “Stacie Velour.” Didn’t necessarily mean he’d coerced her—plenty of sex workers do what they do out of personal choice—but something about the situation didn’t sit right with me.
Fortunately, I had an expert guide in the wilderness. I drove out to the Love Connection, a hot pink storefront squeezed between a dance-aerobics studio and a boarded-up restaurant with a For Lease sign on the door. Foreclosures swallowed the street like a slow-spreading plague, leaving more shuttered shops than open ones.
Still, Paolo was doing all right. You’ll never go broke selling sex. I found him with his feet up behind the counter, nursing a two-day growth of stubble and paging through a skin magazine like a law student poring over a textbook. I eased past a standing display of rainbow-colored vibrators and leaned against the counter.
“You forgot the first rule of dealing.” I grinned as he jumped and dropped the magazine next to the vintage cash register. “Never get high on your own supply.”
“Market research! Gotta know what’s trending,” he said, running his fingers through his tangled mop of hair. I glanced down at the cover.
“Nuns in leather? Hey, I’m nobody to judge. How are the wards holding up?”
Paolo ran a backroom paper operation peddling fake IDs to the underage spring break crowd. Seventy bucks and one hour could unlock all the pleasures of Vegas, and he would be happy to sell you all the party favors you wanted on the side. We met through a friend of a friend, and he turned into a semi-regular client.
“Like Fort Knox,” he said. “Had a couple of cops in here last week, after some punk got caught with one of my licenses and tried to roll on me to stop them from calling his mommy and daddy. They didn’t even look at the door to the back room, like they couldn’t see it. They just poked around a little, apologized for wasting my time, and took off.”
I looked to the back of the store, letting my vision slip slightly out of focus and narrowing my eyes. Honeycombs of ice-blue light glowed against the walls, the “don’t notice me” spell still holding strong.
“When did I last reinforce it?” I asked. “Three months? Looks like it’s due for some patch-up work. Don’t want to risk it failing on you.”
It’s a tiny grift, as grifts go. Wards like that don’t really decay—I’ve seen enchantments from the eighteenth century that were still chugging along, years after their creators were dust and bones—but Paolo doesn’t know that, so he slips me a hundred bucks every few months to wave my arms and chant in doggerel Latin for a couple of minutes.
“We can talk about that later, though,” I said. “I’m actually here to shop today. I’m looking for anything directed by Daddy Warbucks, especially anything with this one girl in it. She went by the name Stacie Velour.”
Paolo tilted his head. “Whoa. Seriously, man? That’s some hardcore sick shit. You always struck me as more of a Playboy kind of guy.”
“Research material, not for my personal amusement. I’m trying to find out anything I can about Warbucks for a job I’m working.”
Paolo came out from behind the counter and led me down the narrow rows of DVDs, a thousand glossy covers offering me a peek at every kind of sex I could imagine and a few that hadn’t occurred to me. I’ve got nothing against porn, but the sheer amount of it on display, the rote titles and assembly-line feel, was numbing.
“You wanna stay away from that guy,” Paolo said, working his way down the stacks as he hunted for a title. “I met him once. He’s got a screw loose.”
“Yeah? When was that?”
“Last year. I occasionally get some minor-league talent in here. They sign autographs, bring out some fans; I sell a lot of DVDs. It’s a win-win for me and the studio. Last summer, he comes out with a couple of his girls and we get to talking. You know, just passing the time. I think the guy’s movies are crap, but I don’t let it show, because business is business. I guess he started thinking we were some kinda kindred spirits, because he starts asking me about my store inventory, then about my personal collection.”
“Like he wanted to see what you were into?”
“Yeah,” Paolo said, “so I told him what I thought he wanted to hear. He’s asking me about ‘special orders’, like under-the-counter stuff, and I’m thinking he’s a pedo, right? Like he’s about to ask if I could hook him up with some kiddie porn. Then he tells me what he’s really looking for.”