9.
The next morning I called the Burger Barn on Lake Mead Boulevard, posing as a human-resources flunky doing an employment verification. Had to make sure I was casting my bait into the right pond.
“His name is Todd…sorry,” I said, “the application got smeared in the photocopier. I always tell them to make sure the ink is dry. Looks like a C or a K maybe—”
“Could it be an L?” asked the tired voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes! You’re right, it’s definitely an L.”
“Todd Long. Yep, he works for us.”
She didn’t sound too enthused about that fact. She was quick to offer up all the information she could legally provide, with thinly veiled pleasure that some other company was poised to take a slacker off her hands. I relayed the info to Pixie and told her to cross-check it with the Palo Verde High School rolls for the last couple of years. Dig up enough bits and pieces of a person’s life, sooner or later you have enough to draw a complete picture.
That said, I planned on getting most of what I needed straight from the horse’s mouth. Today was Todd’s last day at the Burger Barn.
It was a gritty, dry morning. I pulled in at the edge of the parking lot, under the bulbous plastic shell of a burger-shaped sign, and jumped down onto dusty asphalt. The air left a dirty taste in my mouth, like truck exhaust mingled with charred meat and old grease. It was a little after ten, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, and the plate-glass windows looked in on a barren fast-food joint.
That meant most of the cars belonged to the doomed souls behind the counter. And one, down on the lot’s far end by a stretch of chain-link fence, was a van that matched Melanie’s description. It was a vintage GMC, beige with a ketchup-red swoop. Cheap white curtains hung in a dusty side window. The owner, amazingly enough, had no stickers decorating the rust-spotted bumper. This minor concession to taste was offset by his Playboy-bunny-silhouette mud flaps.
“Keep it classy,” I muttered as I strolled on by. My gaze went up, prowling along the dead concrete lampposts and the eaves of the restaurant, hunting for security cameras. Not one glass eye pointed my way. I reached into my breast pocket and tugged out a pair of blue latex disposable gloves, slipping them on. Once I stepped around the side of the van, I was all but invisible. Invisible long enough to get my picks out, teach the cheap lock to roll over and play dead, and let myself inside.
I breathed deep and smelled a hellish chemical mélange of pine air freshener, Drakkar Noir, and Axe body spray. Underneath that, the musk of stale sweat and furtive sex. I crouched as I stepped into his little love nest. Sheets lay rumpled and storm-tossed on a narrow slab of mattress; the other side of the van sported a long, low counter and some shallow cupboards. He had a hot plate, a half-full box of Honey Smacks next to an empty bowl caked with dried milk, a few scattered muscle-car magazines…and that was most of his worldly belongings. Todd was not living his best life.
A footlocker near the bed caught my eye. I crouched down, ears perked for anyone approaching the van, and flipped open the hasps. Inside, some mismatched, unwashed socks and wrinkled underwear shared space with more magazines. Porn, mostly, tawdry and tattered. I’d worn the gloves to conceal my fingerprints; now I wished I’d brought a second pair just to add another layer between my hands and Todd’s fantasies.
I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the locker. A fat sock concealed a fistful of tiny plastic packets, each about the size of a condom wrapper, stuffed with spiky black grains. Ink. I held up one of the packets and took a closer look. The granules glistened like bubbles of oil with hair-fine bristles, ready to be slipped under a user’s tongue or melted down with a lighter and a spoon.
Ink was America’s new favorite party drug, a guaranteed good time for all. Except when somebody skunked the product and turned a houseful of teenagers into homicidal maniacs. I wondered if this was more of the bad batch or Todd’s personal stash.
I walked to my rented car and came back with a duffel bag. Just the essentials inside: handcuffs, duct tape, a foursome of beeswax candles with brass stands, and two tubs of Tupperware. One held a few fistfuls of coarse white sea salt. The other, fresh blood from a butcher’s shop, syrupy and thick. Removing a geas was essentially a kind of exorcism, and a good exorcism had two key objectives: to make the host’s body an unpleasant place to live, and to give the creature under his skin a more attractive option.
I crouched down in the back of the van and waited, like a trapdoor spider.
* * *
It was around five o’clock when Todd got off his final shift at the Burger Barn. The autumn sky had gone dirt-brown dark with streaks of grimy clouds, cars casting cold shadows across the parking-lot asphalt. He was a tall guy, gangly, with arms and legs that seemed a little too long for his body. He clambered into the front seat of the van and tossed his yellow-and-red paper hat onto the passenger seat.
Todd was sliding the keys into the ignition when I put the muzzle of my nine-millimeter against the back of his skull. He turned to stone. The only part of him that moved were his eyes, flicking to the rearview mirror.
“You scream, you die,” I told him. “You try to run, you die. If you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, you have a very good chance of living through this.”
I was lying about that last part. He was desperate enough to believe me, though, and that was all that mattered. I tossed the handcuffs into his lap.
“Put ’em on,” I told him. “Nice and tight.”
He almost dropped them, but with time and some gentle coaching, he managed to lock the steel bracelets around his wrists. I stepped back. I nodded my head where I wanted him to go, keeping the gun fixed and level.
“In back. Not one word.”
He had to brush past me, closer than I ever wanted to get to a desperate hostage. If he was going to try to jump me, wrestle for the gun, that was when it would happen. I kept my finger firm on the trigger and braced for it.
Todd didn’t even try to make a move. He was cowed enough to plod right past me, into the back of the van.
“Lie down on the bed,” I told him.
That got a reaction. He turned to face me, his wrists flexing against the cuffs.
“H-hey,” he said, “you don’t want to do this. I’ve got AIDS. Swear to God, I’ve got full-blown AIDS. And syphilis. And the mumps.”
I stared at him. “I’m not going to lay a hand on you. Relax. Lie down.”
He stood his ground until I thumbed back the hammer on the gun. The universal symbol for “this is your last chance.” He lay on the bed and stared at the roof of the van, his sweaty face turning pale.
“I need to ask you some questions,” I told him, setting up my duffel bag on the narrow ledge next to his hot plate, “but the thing inside you isn’t going to let you answer. So getting that out, that’s the first order of business.”
He stared at me like he thought I was crazy, and his eyes only bulged harder when I took out the Tupperware.
“Thing?” he stammered. “Inside me? What…what thing?”
“You might not remember it going in, but your employers—and I do not mean the Burger Barn—implanted a fail-safe to keep your lips shut. The bad news is, the next fifteen minutes aren’t going to be much fun for you. The good news is, I have done this once before, and the guy is…well, he was still breathing when I got finished with him.”
“What employers? Man, I flip burgers for a living, that’s all! I mean, yeah, I do some dealing on the side, but that’s just to pay for my own habit. I’m nobody, swear to God!”
I barely heard him, too busy sinking into my preparations for the ritual. Years of occult practice had left me with layers of mental shortcuts, mnemonics, patterns of breathing and thought that eased me into a waking meditation like I was sliding into a warm tub of water. I focused on symbols, following jagged curves and flashes of color, forcibly rerouting the neurons in my brain. Electric impulses woke old, sleeping nodes, buried knots of gray matter whose purpose was lost in the primordial.
My senses stretched out, glimmering in my third eye like violet sea anemones, their stalks brushing and tasting everything around them. I drank in the remnants of a life that failed to launch, fragmented memories of empty beer cans and Todd’s father’s belt curled around a hairy-knuckled fist. Hopes broken, dreams he stopped bothering to reach for. The van’s tires were mired in an oily residue of this is good enough.
What I didn’t sense from Todd was the one thing I was looking for.
He didn’t have a geas.
My psychic tendrils pushed their needle-thin feelers under his skin, peeled back the layers of his mind like skinning an onion, and found…nothing. I squinted my physical eyes at him. Then I took my roll of duct tape, sliced off a strip with a box cutter, and slapped it over his mouth.
“Either this just got a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,” I said, “or a lot more complicated. And given the way my week is going so far, smart money is on ‘complicated.’ Sit tight. You and me, we’re going for a little ride.”
* * *
I took his keys and took the wheel, making phone calls on the road to set everything up. Our destination was on the west side of town: the Rosewood Funeral Home. Doc Savoy, everybody’s favorite off-the-record patch-up man, ran his operation out of the back room. He had, anyway, until the Chicago Outfit decided they didn’t respect the rules of neutrality and pitched a firebomb through his window.
The Doc and his nurse got out fine; we were in the process of finding them a new place to hang their scalpels. For now, the van’s headlights swept across yellow strands of police tape and shattered glass, wooden walls charred black. The fire had destroyed the front of the house, but the rooms in back survived just fine. Specifically, the one room I needed.
Half an hour later, Todd wasn’t a happy man. I didn’t blame him. I’d laid him out in a pine box, not even a pillow to rest his head. Cocoons of duct tape looped his ankles and his wrists and bound his arms to his sides, so he couldn’t do much more than wriggle like a pinned bug. I left him there while I went downstairs to find the circuit breaker.
The power came on with a rattling thrum, and stark white light gleamed across a speckled tile floor. I loomed over the box, reached in, and tore the tape off Todd’s mouth.
“So,” I said, “about those questions I need answered.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know anything—”
I held up a finger for silence.
“First, let’s establish your situation. You’re in a coffin. That coffin, though you can’t see it from where you’re at, is on a conveyor belt. Now pay attention, Todd, this part is important.”
I held his gaze, stepping back toward his feet, and reached up to rap my fist against a shell of black iron.
“That conveyor belt,” I said as a grate clanked open, “feeds into this crematory furnace.”
I flicked a few switches. The gas jets hissed to life.
“So that’s your situation,” I told him. “Let’s chat.”