Free The Living End by Craig Schaefer Page B

stairs.
    • • •
    I wanted a drink, but not here. Winter wasn’t my kind of place. I was about one demographic too old, one decade out of fashion, and two tax brackets too poor to hang with this crowd. The Tiger’s Garden was more my scene and had the added bonus of exclusivity. If you weren’t a bona fide magician, you didn’t get in the door. Or find the door.
    Still, I lingered on the edge of the dance floor a bit, taking in the vibe and nodding my head to the spine-throbbing beat. Then I looked over toward the bar and my teeth clenched.
    She’d layered on a raccoon mask of makeup and her little black dress was shorter than my temper, but I’d recognize that mop of neon blue hair from a mile away. I cut through the crowd like a shark spotting a manatee, moved up behind her, and snatched the drink from her hand.
    “Hey!” Melanie shouted, turning—then she saw my face and froze. “Oh. Oh, hey.”
    I sipped her drink. Some kind of fruity strawberry thing with enough rum to knock out a mule.
    “Hey, Melanie. Think you’re a little young for this, by about three years.”
    “That’s not what my ID says.”
    From the smell of her breath, this wasn’t her first round. I set her glass on the bar and slid it out of her reach.
    “That’s what
I
say,” I told her. “What are you doing here?”
    She shrugged one shoulder. “Came with some friends.”
    “Yeah? Where are they?”
    She squinted into the crowd. I waited patiently, or at least as patiently as I could manage.
    “They’re here somewhere,” she said.
    “Well, now you’re with me. Come on, I’m taking you home.”
    I had to give her a tug on the arm to get her walking. Outside on the sidewalk, I took off my blazer and draped it over her shoulders to keep off the night chill. She wore it sullenly all the way to my car.
    “This is ridiculous,” she said as I opened the passenger door and ushered her in. “And you’re a fucking hypocrite.”
    I walked around the car, got in, and revved the engine.
    “How do you figure?” I said.
    “You mean to tell me that when you were my age, you
never
drank? You never used a fake ID or went somewhere you weren’t allowed?”
    I almost laughed. Those were my
minor
sins.
    “There is a special kind of hypocrisy,” I said, “that comes from wisdom born of age. It works like this: I did really stupid shit when I was a kid, and I paid for it. I do not want
you
to have to pay for
your
stupid shit, so I intervene, knowing where your chosen road is headed.”
    “So you just decided to ruin my night, because you care about me.”
    “That sounds about right,” I said.
    She didn’t speak to me for rest of the drive. Can’t say I blamed her.
    Everything about Emma Loomis’s house screamed
ordinary and respectable
. That was by design. It was a spacious tan stucco house in a sleepy little cul-de-sac, with a manicured lawn and no reason for anyone to look at it twice. I pulled into the driveway and followed Melanie to the front door.
    “Seriously?” she said, looking over her shoulder at me as she jostled her keys in the lock.
    “Seriously,” I said. “I’m not leaving until you’re in bed and asleep, to make sure you don’t just leave again the second I’m gone. It’s either that or I can call your mom and let her deal with you.”
    “Like she gives a shit.”
    Track lighting clicked on, casting glowing circles across polished tile and prim white carpet. The last time I’d been in the Loomises’ living room, it was to assemble the best and brightest of Vegas’s magical and underworld communities for a single purpose: giving Melanie’s dad enough rope to hang himself.
    “She really does care, you know,” I said.
    Melanie spun to face me, waving at the cold and empty room.
    “Yeah? Then where is she, huh? Oh, right. She’s four hundred miles away, renovating a
whorehouse
, because that’s more important than being with her own daughter right now!”
    I didn’t have a good answer for that. I