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.”
10.
“Man, I swear, I don’t know anything—”
I pulled a lever. The conveyor belt rattled and the pine box lurched toward the open grate. Todd screamed like he was on the world’s deadliest roller coaster. I stopped the belt.
“The ink, Todd. Where do you get it?”
Beads of greasy sweat ran down the side of his face. He had his eyes squeezed shut, tighter than his mummy wrap of duct tape, and he mouthed a prayer with no breath behind it.
“You’re about…I’m going to say eight feet from the furnace door,” I said. “Oh, hey, speaking of, it’s not a coincidence that you’re going in feet-first. See, first thing that’ll happen is, the rubber on your shoes is going to melt. It’ll be like…hot tar, searing the soles of your feet.”
I knew what he was wrestling with. I’d seen it before: he was asking himself if his bosses would do worse things to him, if he talked, than I would. My job was to convince him that they couldn’t. He had to believe this was his worst-case scenario, here and now, and giving me what I wanted was his only way out.
“The skin is next,” I told him. “You ever see a chicken rotisserie with the oven set too high, Todd? The flesh chars, then it just…sloughs off the bone.”
“Santiago!” he yelped.
“Pardon?”
“S-Santiago. That’s the name of the guy I get my shit from. That’s the name he gave me, anyway.”
“And he’s tight with the Network?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what that is. I swear, please, I don’t know!”
I believed him. There comes a point when a man is too afraid to lie, and Todd was about ten feet over that line. It was looking more and more like I’d netted a guppy; he’d been played, too dumb to realize what he’d done. I wanted the people who were playing him.
Hell, I was starting to think Todd might live to go back to the Burger Barn. I wasn’t done wringing him out yet, though.
“Tell me about Santiago.”
“Not much to tell, man. He’s…he’s a short guy, built like a football player, bushy black mustache. He’s—he’s Spanish. I know because I asked if he was from Mexico once and he got really pissed at me. I thought it was the same thing.”
“Spaniards are from Spain,” I told him. “Mexicans are from Mexico.”
“That’s what he said. I thought Spain was in Mexico.”
I cocked my head at him. “Let’s move on. How do you get in touch with him?”
“I don’t. He gets in touch with me. Once a month, he texts me and tells me where to meet up. Always a different place. He brings my supply, I bring his cut of the money from last month’s sales. He gets ninety percent. I keep the rest, and he kicks me a little junk on the side, you know, for personal use.”
Ninety percent. No wonder the kid was living in a van and flipping burgers. There was something else there, though. Not a lie, but the whiff of something he was holding back, like he had an ace card squeezed to his chest under the duct tape.
“There’s something you want to tell me, Todd.”
I phrased it as a statement, not a question, and gave a knowing look to the crematory oven.
“You…you aren’t going to believe me.”
“Try me. You might be surprised.”
He breathed as deep as the bands of tape would let him and stared at his feet like he could imagine the first kiss of the flames.
“This dude, Santiago…he’s not human. It sounds crazy, I know, but he’s not human.”
“I’m still listening,” I said. “How do you know?”
“When he brought me on board, you know, he was laying down the law. How much money I had to kick back to him every month, and how he’d be checking up on me, making sure I didn’t screw him.” One of Todd’s hands jerked, pointing up to his face. “His eyes, man. The dude’s eyes…changed. The color drained out and they went all yellow and pus-white, like a couple of rotten eggs.”
Cambion eyes. Todd’s supplier, his pipeline into the Network, had demon blood. That was interesting; the feuding courts of hell were united in agreement that the Network wasn’t their creation. The members we’d faced off against until now, as far as I knew, were human magicians.
By the looks of it, they’d expanded their recruitment. Caitlin would want to hear about this. More importantly, if this “Santiago” was a local, she might even know where to find him.
“I believe you,” I said. “You’re doing good, Todd. Real good.”
“So you’ll—you’ll let me go?”
I pulled the lever and sent the pine box rattling toward the mouth of the furnace. He shrieked at the top of his lungs. I yanked the lever back, my eardrums stinging, and the belt jolted to a stop.
“Maybe.”
A dark stain spread across the crotch of his acid-washed jeans. He’d survive. I’d already decided to cut the poor dope loose, but I needed to squeeze any last lies out of him.
“Let’s talk about the house party on Eagle Glen Road. You sold a bad batch, Todd.”
His face was slug-belly white, glistening and pale. He stared at something a million miles away.
“That…that wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault—”
“The stuff you sold to the guy throwing the party—was that all of it? Is there more tainted ink floating around out there? I need to know, Todd. I need to gather it all up before somebody else gets hurt. This is really important, okay?”
I put my hand on the control lever.
“No,” he wheezed. “No, it was…I met with Santiago that morning, he gave me the ink, I sold the whole batch to Rob, and that was it. There’s no more, I swear!”
He was on the home stretch. And if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have made it.
“I sold it to Rob,” he said, “just like Santiago told me to.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. I had been starting to wonder if my theory about the ink being tainted on purpose was off base. Maybe not.