The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(30)

“I’m not going to beg,” I said softly.

“Beg?” A smile glinted in her eyes. “Oh, I’m sure I could make you beg. Another time, perhaps.”

She curled her other hand in my hair, letting me feel the scrape of her fingernails, razor-sharp and hungry. My eyes closed as she leaned close. Her lips brushed against my cheek, a gentle kiss that left an electric tingle in its wake.

When I opened my eyes, she was gone.

I stood alone in the carnage. Just me, two corpses, and a houseful of evidence. Sunrise would bring visitors. Witnesses. Emotions were an indulgence I couldn’t afford right now. I took all the horror and shock and bottled it in the back of my mind, safely out of the way while my professional instincts took over.

First stop, Kaufman’s bedroom. I was nowhere near his size, but my clothes and shoes were sticky with his blood and they had to go. I found some clunky sneakers and a T-shirt and gym pants that fit like a tent, but at least they’d get me home. I slid my hand under his mattress, closing my fingers around a tiny wedge of plastic. The black Sony memory card must have come straight from Kaufman’s camera. The stick went into a shopping bag along with the Black Eye, the cash take from the poker game, and the money left in the office safe. Not a bad little payday. I walked through the house with a hand towel from the bathroom, wiping down every doorknob and surface I might have touched.

I didn’t want to go back into the kitchen, but I had no other option. Holding my breath and reeling at the stench, trying not to look at the corner of the room, I rummaged through the cabinet under the sink for a plastic bucket and an assortment of cleaners. A pour of this and a dollop of that resulted in a witch’s brew straight out of The Anarchist Cookbook.

I splashed the concoction across baseboards and dribbled it in a trail along carpets, spreading the nostril-searing slop in every room I’d visited except for the kitchen. I wanted those bodies found and identified. I used the last of the bucket’s contents to soak my old clothes, piled close to the door, and watched the blue flames rise at a touch of my lighter. The arson would be obvious, but that was the point. It’s a lot easier to leave a crime scene in hopeless confusion than it is to make it pristine.

Flames licked the windows, mirroring the glow from the rising sun, as I hopped into the Mustang and rolled out of the driveway. Once I got two blocks away, I paused at a stop sign and used my burner phone to call 911 and report the fire, hanging up when they asked my name. My next call was to Jud.

“Is this—” he started to say, and I cut him off fast.

“Don’t talk. Just listen. The job’s done. Watch the news tonight. Now lose this number and never contact me again.”

I opened the back of the phone, pulled out its SIM card, and dropped it on the asphalt. I jumped out of the car and ground it to broken fragments under my heel. The rest of the phone wound up in a Dumpster half a mile away. I dropped off the Mustang at the rental place, signing off on it as Peter Greyson, and took a cab to a convenience store a few blocks from my apartment. All direct connections between me and the two dead men, and most of the indirect ones, were sliced away clean.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have congratulated myself on a job well done. Jud Pankow had hired me for payback, and he’d gotten it in spades. Carl and Artie’s deaths were no great loss to the world, and nobody got hurt in the crossfire. Still, I didn’t feel like celebrating. I’d lied to Jud. The job wasn’t done, not by a long shot.

Stacy’s half-formed wraith still wailed under the city streets. I’d have liked to think that taking down her killer would set her free to move on, but she wasn’t that kind of ghost. Artie had done something beyond mere murder: in the kitchen he’d babbled about a “special kill” and a “special spell.”

It was my brother’s idea, he’d whined. The same brother, I assumed, as the one who read him the riot act over the phone about letting Carl have as much time with Caitlin as he wanted. His brother needed seeing-to.

Then there was Nicky Agnelli. He had a hand in this grim mess, and I still didn’t know why. If my paranoia held true and he’d been keeping magical tabs on me, he’d know what I had done by now. Taking off the Black Eye in the middle of Artie’s house, exposing me to Nicky’s pet seer, made sure of that. Nothing I could do about it now. I’d just have to hope I was wrong, that Jud was the one he was watching, or that I’d lucked out and nobody was looking my way. If not, things were about to get a lot more complicated.

And then there was Caitlin. Maybe she’d gone back to hell. Maybe she hadn’t. I wasn’t sure what to think about Caitlin, only that I couldn’t stop seeing her every time I closed my eyes.

I went home, put Kaufman’s clothes in a trash bag, and fell back on my bedspread. I’d long since burned through the last of my adrenaline, moving on nothing but momentum and survival instinct. I didn’t have the strength left to do anything but sleep.

? ? ?

Orange light washed against my curtains as the hammering of a woodpecker dragged me from a fitful sleep. No, not a woodpecker, it was my main cell phone vibrating against my end table. I pushed myself up, groaning, and reached for it. Four missed calls. Wonderful.

“I’m here,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Daniel.” Bentley’s voice was a mixture of reproach and fear. “What did you do?”