The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(32)

I launched the movie.

Instead of his usual handheld style, Artie had put the camera on a tripod for Stacy’s final performance. She stood in the same grimy bathroom where he’d shot their other movies, staring into the lens, sniffling.

“I want to go home,” she said in a halting whisper.

“We talked about this,” his voice echoed from behind the camera. He sounded distracted, an edge of tension in his voice I hadn’t heard before.

“I don’t care. I just want to go home. Please let me go home.”

“One more,” he said. “Do one more for me, and you can go home. I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

Her eyes, red from crying, widened. “You mean it?”

“I promise. We can go to the airport as soon as we’re done here, if you do a good job for me. You can be with your granddad for dinner tonight. Wouldn’t you like that?”

She caught a tear as it rolled down her cheek, brushing it away with the back of her hand. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Do you love me, Stacy?”

“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Good. Now take off your clothes.”

She undressed, her hands shaking, and he stepped out from behind the camera. My stomach muscles tightened, bracing for a punch that never came. Instead he held her, almost gently, and whispered in her ear as he stroked her hair. She nodded, sinking to her knees before him on the dirty tile floor, and he used her one last time.

Then he drowned her in the toilet.

My fingers flinched against the keyboard, wanting to skip this, to fast forward through her death spasms as she kicked and thrashed, but I held back. My teeth clenched. I hoped she’d somehow fight him off, escape, even though I already knew how this movie ended. He held her head down until her body finally went limp, standing motionless over her like a clockwork executioner.

Then Artie hauled her up by her hair, dropping Stacy to the floor and rolling her onto her back with his shoe. Open eyes stared towards the camera, stared at me, a plea for help that never came.

He walked out of the camera’s sight and came back with a leather pouch in his fist. He straddled Stacy’s corpse and crouched down, chanting in a sibilant whisper. I cranked the laptop’s speakers until my room filled with a static hum. The words were foreign, Eastern-sounding. Chinese? I couldn’t be sure. His burly shoulder blocked part of the view, but he waved the bag slowly over Stacy’s face before putting the opening to her lips.

A faint glimmer of light, like a silver mist, drifted from her bloodless lips to the pouch. He tugged the drawstring taut, still chanting, rising and walking off camera as a few final driblets of light leaked from her mouth and boiled away like water vapor.

“A soul-trap,” I said to the screen, “but you screwed it up, you impatient amateur bastard. You stole half of what she is, and the rest is stumbling around in the dark like a wounded animal. Where did you put the pouch? Show me where you put it.”

He wandered in and out of frame, ignoring the dead girl at his feet, his phone to his ear.

“Hey, bro, it’s done,” he said. “What? I don’t know. It doesn’t…it doesn’t feel like anything. I don’t know, I just expected it’d be…cooler. Just feel kinda numb, I guess. Maybe I need to do it again.”

You’ll never get that chance, I thought. The one thing I did right.

“Yeah, I did it just like you told me. I’ll bring you the bag. So am I in?” He stopped, grinned, and did a little fist-pump. “All right, awesome! Totally worth it, bro. We’re gonna be kings. Yeah, all right, tell Mom I said hi.”

Hanging up the phone, he looked toward the camera, as if realizing it was still recording. Something flickered across his face. A moment of doubt? Guilt? He reached out and turned the camera off.

In the darkness of my apartment, I stared at my reflection in the black void of my laptop screen. I drank my whiskey in silence.

I’d heard of soul-traps, knew the theory, but I’d never seen one in action before tonight. This was the realm of truly hardcore black magic, the kind that takes decades to master. Unlike Artie, his brother knew what he was doing. But why was he doing it at all? Stacy’s murder wasn’t some random thrill killing; it was part of a plan, and any plan that would make a slug like Artie into a “king” had bad news written all over it.

One thing was clear: Stacy’s half-souled wraith wasn’t going anywhere until I got my hands on that pouch and used it to put her back together again. I decided to pay a visit to Artie’s mysterious brother and see if he wanted to do this the easy way or the hard way.

I hoped he’d choose the hard way.

? ? ?

A tenor saxophone purred under the clink of glasses and low, seductive laughter. I sat in a leather-backed chair, cigar smoke swirling through the hazy air, and tried to remember how I got there.

The nightclub was a swath of mahogany and scarlet, elegant and baroque, the kind of place you see in photographs of prewar Berlin. All around me lovers talked, drank, shared cigarettes in the dark. Everyone but me, sitting alone in front of an empty stage.

“A drink for you, sir.”

A prim man with a white jacket and a towel draped over his arm, his lip adorned with a pencil-thin mustache, set a tall glass of something amber and smoky on the small table beside me.