The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(15)

He had a point. I would have had the grace to feel ashamed of myself if their reactions hadn’t already given the game away.

“Look,” he said, “me and the ladies, we’re what you might call exemplary specimens of our kind. Do I know of other halfbloods living in the city? Yes. Do we get together for a regular knitting circle and black mass on Tuesday nights? No. Between you and me, buddy, most of those guys are batshit crazy. Not dependable, and not our kind of crowd.”

“Sorry.” I faked an apologetic smile. “You’re right, that was pretty dumb of me. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” Juliette said. She flicked a forked tongue across her pearly white teeth.

Nicky shook his head. “My advice to you is to not worry about it. You probably met some lone crazy out there, flapping his gums about nothing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my mahjong partners are waiting outside, and I haven’t finished taking all their money. Think about my offer and get back to me.”

“Do come back soon,” Justine whispered in my ear.

? ? ?

The evening light show heralded my return to Fremont Street. The canopy over the pedestrian mall blazed with neon synchronized to a medley of Beatles songs. I hummed along, letting the music move my feet, feeling the street’s energy pulling me—

—and then I was inside the Tiger’s Garden, still moving, brass bells jingling behind me. Bentley and Corman waved from their table.

“We knew you were about to arrive,” Bentley said, holding out a glass of whiskey. Two fingers, poured over a single ice cube. “Amar just brought it over for you, said you were going to order it.”

“Right as usual.” I took the glass and tossed back a swallow to ease my nerves. It wasn’t the quality of the drink I refused in Nicky’s backroom mahjong game, but it did the job. “Does anyone else think that’s weird, by the way? Anyone at all?”

“It all makes sense if you study quantum mechanics,” Jennifer Juniper drawled with a thick Kentucky accent, her chair tilted back on two legs and leaning against the wall.

That was her real name. Her parents were heavily into peace, love, and psychedelics. The only hippie thing about Jennifer was her ubiquitous, blue-tinted Lennon glasses. That, and her pot-growing operation, which she kept hidden from the cops with the aid of some high-quality witchcraft. A sleeve of tattoos sheathed her left arm, the centerpiece a spray of rainbow rose petals around an image of Elvis as the Gautama Buddha.

“This is it?” I asked, looking at the three of them. “Where is everybody?”

“Margaux’s coming,” Bentley said, ticking off names on his fingers. “Spengler’s coming. The Hernandez brothers are on a job in New Orleans. Jorgensen’s living off the grid in a cardboard box somewhere. David has a prior engagement—”

“Not that he’d come anyway,” I muttered.

“What is it with you two?” Corman asked.

“He knows what he did.”

“Brother K is in a cell in the county jail for drunk and disorderly conduct,” Bentley continued, ignoring us both. “And Sophia is hiding from what she claims is the vengeful ghost of Merle Haggard and she won’t leave her house until the new moon.”

“Merle Haggard isn’t dead.”

He shrugged. “It’s Sophia.”

Magic is not, as a general rule, the healthiest of passions or the gentlest of muses.

The jingling of bells heralded Mama Margaux’s arrival, and Amar appeared just long enough to pull out her chair and offer her a tall hurricane in a smoky glass. The last guest to the party showed up a few minutes later. Dressed to the nines in a Brooks Brothers suit, Spengler was big. Big shoulders, big gestures, a big voice, and big ambitions.

Everybody in the scene knew Spengler. Not for his reputation as a magician, seeing as he was so inept none of us could figure out how he even got into the Garden, but for a web of connections that stretched from Chicago to Calcutta. If you needed a powdered fossil or a bone from a saint’s finger, he could have it for you in a week. More importantly for some of us, he was always happy to take questionable merchandise off your hands in exchange for clean cash.

“I’m back from the big sandbox,” he said with a wave, “so everybody line up and tell me how much you missed me. I will accept presents in lieu of praise if you’re feeling tongue-tied.”

“You were gone? Didn’t notice,” Jennifer said, though she couldn’t keep the affection from her voice.

“Two weeks in Saudi, baby, and don’t pretend you didn’t count the hours ‘til my return. I did it this time. Really did it. I hit the score of a lifetime.”

“You always say that.” She rolled her eyes.

“This time I mean it. This thing I found? People are gonna be breaking down my door trying to throw money at me. You just wait, ye of little faith. Hey, Faust, where is everybody? I thought this was a party.”

“Hey, Spengler,” I said. “It’s just us. Apparently everybody else is drunk, in jail, or temporarily insane.”

“So, it’s a day ending in the letter y then,” he said, pulling up a chair.

“That’s about right,” I said and gave everyone a quick recap of my encounter with the cambion.

“Hound?” Jennifer peered at me over her glasses. “Like a dog?”