4.
I was still renting my wheels. The last I’d heard, my Barracuda had been “requisitioned” by Special Agent Harmony Black, an act I considered tantamount to grave robbery. And then dancing on my grave after robbing it.
The point is, I loved that car.
I had feelers out, trying to track it down so I could steal it back. At the moment, though, my ride was a dirty-silver Hyundai Elantra. Good mileage, good cargo space, and forgettable enough to vanish like a ghost in the city’s arteries. I drove off the edge of the Vegas Strip and straight down, down into the neighborhoods the tourists never saw.
St. Jude’s was open for breakfast. The place had been a dance hall in its heyday; now the wooden floors were scuffed and scarred, dust clung to the cathedral-style arches, and a skeleton crew of volunteers played host to the city’s lost souls. Most mornings I could find Pixie working the soup kitchen’s serving line. When I first met her, I assumed she was doing penance for some unbearable sin, trying to make amends.
Turned out she just liked to help people and make the world a little better. I guess that should have been my first assumption. Says something about me that it wasn’t. But if I were a good person, I’d have been rolling up my sleeves and helping out, not waving cash under her nose to lure her away from her work.
“Ten minutes,” she told me, passing her ladle to another volunteer and stepping out from behind the serving line. She led me over to an open spot at the end of a row of folding tables, lugging her laptop under one arm.
The recap took me five. I left out the part about the King of Worms. Just the bare and bloody facts, more or less how they’d be splashed across the morning’s papers.
“I need to know where they got that bad batch,” I said. “And who sold it to them, before any more of that shit hits the streets.”
She flipped up the lid of her laptop, all business, and slipped on a chunky pair of Buddy Holly glasses.
“Keep your money,” she told me. “This one’s a freebie.”
“I figure our first step is to figure out who was at that house. Not everybody took the ink, and the kids who weren’t affected—or killed by the ones who did—scattered before the cops showed up. If I can track one of them down, they can at least tell me who brought the drugs to the party. I’m thinking…teenagers, they’re all on social media, right? Should I look on Facebook?”
She arched an eyebrow at me. “Facebook? Seriously? They’re in high school. What are you going to check next, MySpace? Ooh, maybe try LiveJournal too.”
“Is…is that a thing I should be doing?”
I was treated to the most extravagant of eyerolls.
“Instagram,” she said. “Everyone’s on Instagram now.”
“I’m not.”
Her fingers danced across the keyboard. “Everyone who isn’t old. Got a name, somebody you know was there?”
“Helms, H-e-l-m-s, William, middle initial H. He was one of the victims.”
It took some searching. And longer than ten minutes, more like forty, but she wasn’t watching the clock anymore. Pixie was a hunter in her element, plowing through waves of data like a torpedo. Finally, she struck gold: one of William’s classmates had been on the scene. She’d left early—lucky for her—and apparently she hadn’t heard about the massacre yet because her Instagram feed was chock-full of pictures from the party. Best night of the year, she called it.
Lots of smiles, lots of goofing around, lots of illegally bought beer sloshing in red Solo cups, but no names and nothing that even hinted at who brought the drugs. Lots of happy teenagers who were currently lying on cold slabs down at the city morgue. My stomach went tight. All they wanted was to blow off some steam, have a little fun. They hadn’t done anything to deserve this.
“Tell me something,” Pixie said as we studied the photographs in silence.
“The answer is yes,” I told her.
She was looking for reassurance, asking if I was going to get my hands on the person who did this. I was. Then she would have asked me, if I’d let her, if I was going to kill him. I was. We’d known each other long enough that all she needed was the shorthand. She nodded and clicked through to the next picture.
“Hold it,” I said. “There. That one.”
She squinted at the shot. It was just like the others, a couple of kids clowning around and almost spilling their beer on a floral-upholstered couch while the party swirled around them.
“What do you see?” she asked me.
“An eyewitness.” pointed to the corner of the shot, where a girl was dancing like a dervish, whirling too fast for the camera to catch her face. Just her short-cut mop of cobalt-blue hair.
* * *
There are places where a man pushing forty shouldn’t be seen hanging out alone. Toy stores, for instance. Playgrounds. Or in my case, cruising slow along the curb outside Palo Verde High School. Students walked in tight clumps along the sidewalk, heads low, voices hushed. Word about last night was spreading. I waited around, catching a few looks from parents dropping off their kids, until I spotted my target. My passenger-side window hissed down.
“Melanie,” I called out. “Get in.”
She was walking with a trio of friends. They all looked like they’d survived an earthquake, but Melanie wore the only face that blended a little guilt with the loss. Her buddies looked from her to me and back again.
“Is this…like, your uncle?” one asked her.
“Yes,” I said. “Melanie, Uncle Daniel needs you to get in the goddamn car.”
She jerked a shaky thumb over her shoulder. “I…I have to get to school.”
“You can talk to me now, or you can talk to your mother later. Your choice.”
I waited, as patiently as I could manage, while she stuttered out an excuse I couldn’t hear and sent her friends on ahead of her.
High school was hard. Facing it as a cambion—half human, half demon—was even harder. A while back, Melanie, was running with a gang of would-be rebels suffering from delusions of competency. That I could hide from her mom. When I caught her getting drunk at Winter on a fake ID, chasing clues to her dad’s murder in the bottom of a cocktail glass, I decided I could keep my lips sealed once I was sure she’d gotten her head on straight.
This was different.
This time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I figured I’d hear the kid out, then decide. She got in and sat there with her head bowed and her hands in her lap. The faintest outline of blue veins pulsed across her face like the pattern of a butterfly’s wings; cambion blood exerts itself under stress. Normally they can keep it under control, keep their true nature hidden from the world, but Melanie was still learning. And I could only imagine how much stress she was feeling right about then.
“You’re putting me in a lousy position, you know that?”
She flicked her gaze at me. “How do you mean?”
“I just got off your mom’s shit list. I mean, just got off it. Now I find out you were at a party where twelve kids overdosed and killed each other. If I don’t tell Emma—”
“Please.” Her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, squeezing hard. “You can’t.”
“Calm. Down. Take deep breaths. Your face is showing.”
She checked herself in the rearview mirror and ducked low in the seat, doing breathing exercises until the web of blue veins faded away. Four seconds in, four seconds out.
“I’m not looking to bust you,” I told her, “but you’re one of the only living witnesses and I need to know what happened out there. What were you even doing at that party? I mean, drugs? That’s not the kind of crowd you run with.”
She found something interesting on her knees to stare at. “You don’t know what kind of crowd I run with.”
“I know you’ve got a four-point-oh grade average and you’re the star of the school paper and the track team. Trust me, Emma makes sure we know about these things.”
“Oh God.” She slumped lower in her seat.
“You think I’m kidding? The biggest crime bosses in Las Vegas are regularly appraised of your academic prowess. The Bishops and the Calles are very impressed.” Deadpan, I waggled my hand from side to side. “The Inagawa-kai think you need to study harder and add some more extracurriculars, but you know the yakuza, those guys are hardcore.”
Melanie mashed her face into her hand. “I was just…partying, okay? That’s all.”
“And drinking. Melanie, you know the rules. You can’t be doing that around outsiders, not until you get older and you can keep your blood under control. You flash your real face to the wrong person and then it’s not just your mother who has to fix things. That’s when Caitlin gets involved. What about the ink, did you take any?”
“What? No!” She glared at me like I’d slapped her across the face. “I don’t do that stuff, okay? But…that’s why I was there. I was undercover.”
“You’re going to have to explain that one.”
She took another deep breath. It gusted loose in an exhausted sigh.
“We’ve never had a big drug problem at my school—a little beer, a little pot, normal high school stuff, but not, like, drugs. A couple months ago, though, ink started going around. I mean, everybody’s doing it. But everybody’s getting it third- or fourth-hand, buying it off somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else. And I was thinking, if I could break a really big story for the school paper, I mean, real-world-journalism big, it’d look amazing on my college applications.”
I connected the dots. “You’ve been trying to track down the source. The dealer at the top of the food chain.”
“Exactly. If I could find the student bringing it in—or maybe it’s even a faculty member—can you imagine? It would be huge. Maybe even the ‘full-ride scholarship and job offers after I graduate’ kind of huge.”
“Okay,” I told her. “First thing, your Nancy Drew adventure is officially over. Drop the story.”
“Dan, you can’t—”
“Oh, I can. We’ve been doing some digging too. Ink isn’t just a designer drug. It’s mixed with alchemical reagents. Nasty stuff.”
Her brow scrunched up. “There’s magic in it? Why? What does it do?”
“We don’t know yet, and that’s a big problem. What we do know is the cartel pushing this stuff isn’t any ordinary gang. You do not want to land in their crosshairs. I’m sorry, I know this was a big deal to you, but you need to leave the sleuthing to me. What did you find out?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sullen, talking to her knees again. “Not much.”
“Melanie.”
Her shoulders sagged. “Okay, fine. This kid named Rob Ackerman is in my algebra class. It was his house, his party. I heard he was going to have ink, a lot of it, so I bugged him until he threw me a pity invite. I thought he might be the source.”
“Was he?”
“No. And he…he didn’t make it out.” She folded her arms, hugging herself as her lips curled. “He was the first one to, you know, lose it when the crazy hit. But I snooped around before everything went bad and found out his supplier is a guy named Todd. Todd something, I don’t even know his last name, but everybody knows him. Major burnout. He drives this van from the eighties, and I think he actually lives in it.”
“Another student?” I asked.
“No. I mean, he was. He dropped out last year, but he still hangs around campus, mostly trying to pick up freshman girls. Gross. I think he works at the Burger Barn on Lake Mead Boulevard when he’s not being Creeper McCreeperson.”
“Did he take the ink too?”
“No,” Melanie said. “He wasn’t even there. Which was weird, because Rob invited him, and Todd always shows up at parties. Like, whether he’s invited or not. He sold Rob the ink and said he’d drop by later, but he never showed up.”
It wasn’t weird, not if you saw the world like I did. The pieces clicked into place clear as the desert sky. Melanie was a good kid, too good, too much heart to see the obvious answer.
“We’ve been treating this like somebody slipped up, contaminated the ink by accident. Wrong assumption.”
She tilted her head at me. “What do you mean?”
“Todd wasn’t there because he knew what was going to happen,” I said. “The batch was tainted on purpose. This wasn’t a mistake. It was mass murder.”