The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(31)

News had spread fast. Naked, I ambled over to the desk and turned on my laptop, stifling a yawn.

“I, ah…things got complicated.”

“Did you kill those men?”

The Las Vegas Sun’s website showed a picture of Artie’s house, the front window smashed out and his doorframe licked by fire. The headline screamed, “Double Murder, Arson in Henderson.”

“No,” I said, clicking the article, “but I was there when they died.”

“…home of porn director Arthur James Kaufman, who successfully won out against obscenity charges in Georgia in 2011. One victim has been confirmed as Detective Carl Holt, a thirteen-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division. Holt was decorated last year for valorous…”

Memories of last night hit me like a fist. It had been easy not to think during the cleanup. Making sure I didn’t leave a trail for the cops was a more pressing concern than thinking about how Kaufman screamed until his throat gave out, or remembering the smell when Caitlin peeled open his—

I dropped the phone and ran to the bathroom, falling on my knees in front of the toilet, heaving until nothing came up but a trickle of bile.

Bentley was still on the line when I stumbled back to my desk. “It’s complicated,” I told him.

“…robbery may be a motive, but first responders reported seeing what they described as a ‘satanic shrine’ hidden in Kaufman’s bedroom…”

“What happened to it, Daniel?” Bentley demanded.

“It?”

Her.

“Kaufman’s demon,” he said. “It got loose, didn’t it?”

I dug in my mini-fridge, looking for something to get the taste out of my mouth. I took out a small bottle of ginger ale, cracked it open, and chugged half of it.

“I think she left.”

“Left?”

“Went back to hell,” I said. “Sounded like she had some serious fun and games planned for those two. Listen, can we discuss this later? I’m not up for it now.”

“We’ll need to discuss it. I’m not sure if you understand how serious—”

“Serious as a heart attack,” I told him. “Believe me. But right now I’m trying to keep my stomach from climbing up my throat, so I’d be grateful for a change of subject.”

“Fine. I’ll bring you up to date. We had our little research party last night, trying to learn anything we could about this ‘hound’ that the cambion ranted about.”

“And?”

“Nothing,” Bentley said. “Found plenty of material on hellhounds, gloomhounds and the Hounds of Gnar’peth, none of which you’d want to encounter in a dark alley, but nothing that could ride herd over an entire community of half-demons. Spengler even brought over some of the rarer volumes from his personal collection, but we came up empty. Either it was merely a quirk of this cambion’s insane mind, or someone is using ‘hound’ as a title or a pseudonym.”

“It was worth checking.”

“We had an unfortunate confirmation that this wasn’t a one-time affair. Jennifer was attacked outside her home. Don’t worry, she’s fine. It turns out cambion aren’t immune to military-strength pepper spray. It was your friend from the other night—”

“The toe-eater?” I said, remembering his odd fixation.

“—the very one, along with a woman in rags. He’s made allies.”

“Just what we need, more problems. Hey, you and Corman don’t own a camcorder or anything like that, do you?” I picked up the lozenge of black plastic, turning it in my fingertips. “I’ve got a ‘duo pro’ memory card here and I need to see what’s on it.”

“We still have our Handycam from our anniversary vacation last year, but I’m not sure what it uses. You’re welcome to take a look at it.”

“Perfect, I have to bring back the Black Eye anyway. Hopefully I’ll never have to wear the damn thing again.”

The answer to the secret of Stacy’s death, and her tormented half-life, lay on that card. I didn’t want to watch it. God, I didn’t want to watch it. If I was going to put things right, though, the only way forward was down.





Sixteen



Three hours later I came back home with a Sony camcorder in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. Bentley and Corman had laid down nearly a thousand bucks for the thing and used it exactly once, on a trip to Niagara Falls. The bag held a Chinese takeout dinner and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’d been drinking too much lately, but no f*cking way was I watching this thing sober.

I poured three fingers of Jack into a plastic cup and broke out the chopsticks, digging into my sweet-and-sour pork while reading the camera manual. It looked like I could just load the memory card into the camera, then use a cable to transfer its contents onto my laptop. Simple enough.

I rigged the cables and moved the file, a movie clip with a string of random numbers for a title, onto my laptop. The icon sat there, anonymous and innocent, waiting for me to click it. Two more drinks and I was almost ready. Seemed funny how I’d just seen a man torn to pieces right next to me but this seemed so much worse. Maybe because one of them deserved it, and one was a dumb, innocent kid from Minnesota who never asked to go out like this.