The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(14)

“I think you’re forgetting something,” I told him. “I think you’re forgetting that you got two of my friends killed. They were ‘on your team’ too, remember?”

“Hey,” he said, his smile irrepressible, “you can blame me all you want if it helps you sleep at night, but it wasn’t me who f*cked that job up. I think you know that.”

“We’re done here,” I said and started to rise. Justine held my shoulders with the strength of a bodybuilder and shoved me back into the chair.

“Sleep on it,” Nicky said. “It’s a limited-time offer, but sleep on it. There was one other thing. You met with an old guy the other day, Jud Pankow I think his name was?”

I never knew for sure how he did it, but Nicky was a walking encyclopedia of Vegas gossip. If anyone worthy of a back-page newspaper article had lunch in this town, Nicky knew what they talked about, what they ordered, and how much they tipped on their way out. I figured he had a world-class seer on the payroll keeping astral tabs on people he considered worth watching. Interesting, though, that he only mentioned our lunch meeting and not my visit to Jud’s motel room a couple of hours ago. Even he had his limits.

Even so, I made a mental note to redouble the wards on my bedroom.

“What about him?” I said, knowing it’d be a waste of time to deny meeting with Jud.

“It’s sad, what happened to his grandkid. I feel for the guy. I want to make a donation, cover her funeral costs and get him home safe and sound. Maybe put a little something extra in his pocket. Guy that age should be retired and living it up, not working a farm, you know?”

“That’s really nice of you,” I said, but I knew better. I smelled the hook waiting inside that bait.

“He needs help moving on. And I don’t think it’s right, you know, that people are holding out false hope, keeping him going like that. That poor girl, she was getting high down in the storm tunnels, a flood came in, end of story. Just a terrible accident.”

A low-budget porn director like Artie Kaufman didn’t have the juice to get a couple of corrupt cops to do his dirty work.

Nicky Agnelli did.

On the other hand, Artie was a sadist with a motive for murder, and Nicky, for all his faults, didn’t go around killing young girls for kicks. He would have been just as sickened by Artie’s movies as I was. One man had the motive, one man had the means, and neither one had any reason to be in the other’s orbit.

Justine massaged my shoulders, but I wasn’t feeling any less tense.

“You want me to drop the job,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“I want you to give the old man some peace of mind.” Nicky’s forehead creased with phony concern. “Tell him that what you found matches the police report, that it was all an accident. Send him home. He’ll grieve, but he’ll move on. Right now, it’s like his granddaughter never died. He can’t put her to rest. That’s not right.”

He apparently didn’t know about the Stacy-thing lurking under the city streets. Did he know what I’d discovered about Artie? What I told Jud before sending him packing? I rolled the dice.

“You and I had the same thought,” I said. “I just told Pankow to get out of town, that there was nothing I could do for him. You can have your guys check it out. He’ll be flying back to Minneapolis tonight.”

The second part was true, if Jud did what I told him. Nicky nodded, leaning back in his chair. He couldn’t keep the relief from showing in his body language, and that was more troubling than anything. Stacy’s murder had him worried. Nicky Agnelli didn’t get worried. Ever.

“I looked into it,” I said, “didn’t find anything but a hinky autopsy report with nothing to back it up. It was a bust, so I sent him home.”

“There you go, see?” Nicky said. “You and me, on the same wavelength. Just like old times.”

“Now I’ve got a question for you,” I said lightly, thinking back to my encounter with the cambion outside the Tiger’s Garden. “What’s ‘the hound’?”

Justine’s nails dug into my shoulders like ten tiny knives.





Eight



Nicky took off his glasses and plucked a gray silk handkerchief from his jacket, polishing the lenses. Not looking at me.

“Where’d you—what do you mean? What hound?”

“Ran into a cambion last night. He told me ‘the hound is gone’ and there aren’t any rules anymore. Apparently that meant it was open season on my crowd.”

“And you think I should know?” Nicky scrubbed his glasses like he was trying to blot out a bloodstain. “What else did he say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I figured you’d know because, well…” I nodded at him and Juliette as if that said it all.

Nicky blurted out a sudden peal of laughter. Justine’s fingernails relaxed, leaving my shoulders stinging.

“Christ, Dan,” he said, grinning at me and putting his glasses back on, “that’s not racist or anything, is it?”

“I figured you’d have your finger on the local community—”

“And if a black guy steals your wallet, do you grab the closest brother and demand to know where it is, because they all must know each other? And all Asians hang out in dojos practicing kung fu, right, just like Bruce Lee?”