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.Until circumstances proved otherwise, I stood on hostile ground.We rumbled around a circular drive lined with gravel and pulled up in front of the plantation house.The chauffeur hopped out to open the door for us.While I got out, stretching my legs and squinting against the sinking sun, a middle-aged man in denim and rolled-up sleeves jogged down the mansion steps to greet us.“Mr.Faust!” he called, flashing movie-star teeth and giving a wave.“Cameron Drake.Welcome to Eastern Pines.So glad you could join us.”His handshake was dry and firm.He had a strong Texas twang in his voice and a confident swagger.Maybe there was still a little adrenaline in my system from the flight, or maybe it was his too-friendly grin, but I struggled with the sudden urge to punch him out.“I didn’t have much of a choice,” I told him.My eyes eased out of focus as psychic tendrils uncoiled from my spine, brushing over his hand, licking the sky and taking their measure of the place.Cameron was magically inert.So was his slab of beef, Pachenko.Fleiss, though, she had some tricks up her sleeve and an iron wall around her soul.My senses slid right off her, like she was made of glass.Cameron’s house was what really caught my eye, glowing black and throbbing in my second sight.Something was in there—no, under there—something that felt hungry and cruel and stank like sulfur.Cameron furrowed his brow at me, like he didn’t know what I was talking about.“We put Mr.Faust through the usual test,” Fleiss said pointedly, as if she was feeding a bad actor his lines.“Oh, the test.” Cameron’s gaze darted between us.“Of course, right.Well, I…I take it he passed with flying colors?”If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be breathing.Apparently Cameron didn’t know what his own people were up to.“You have a conference call in thirty-eight minutes,” Fleiss told him.“Right.Thank you, Ms.Fleiss, we’ll take it from here.” He gave me a nervous schoolboy smile.“Lose my own head, if she wasn’t watching it for me.C’mon, lemme give you the grand tour.”Pachenko followed us, a lumbering shadow, as we mounted the porch steps and crossed a foyer lined with flowery Spanish ceramic tiles.“Grew up watching reruns of Dallas,” Cameron said.“Always wanted my very own ranch.”I stayed close to his shoulder, only half listening, sending out feelers for trouble.The house felt cold.Unloved.Like a museum pretending to be a home.The malevolent thrum underneath worried me most, leaking up through the tile and itching at the soles of my feet.“Heard you came into some money,” I said.“Lucky play.”“Lucky me, yeah.Everybody tells me I’m a lucky guy.Born lucky.”Cameron grabbed a pair of wooden door handles and shoved them wide.The office on the other side was bigger than my old apartment.An oval cherry-wood desk sat angled toward a bank of wall-mounted televisions, each muted screen showing a feed from a different channel.Money-green carpet draped the floor, and vintage movie posters—mostly ’80s action flicks, a few signed by the stars—lined the walls.Cameron turned, looking like he had something to say, then froze in Pachenko’s shadow.“Drink?”“No thanks.”“Mind if I do?”I gave a noncommittal shrug, and he led me over to a minibar by the desk.From the looks of his collection, the local liquor store must have been running a sale on near-empty bottles.He took down a cut-crystal glass and rummaged until he found half a fifth of Southern Comfort.He filled his glass almost to the brim.No mixer, no soda, just five fingers of high-proof liquor.He tossed back a mouthful like it was tap water.“It’s five o’clock somewhere.” He looked just embarrassed enough that I knew he had a problem.Not embarrassed enough to stop himself from topping off his glass, though.I felt my impatience trying to get the better of me.I decided to let it.“So what’s the job?”He blinked.“Oh.The job.Right.Nicky says you’re good—I mean, really good.He says you’re his best man.”His best man? Wow, I was going to have words with Nicky when I got back to Vegas.For now I kept my irritation to myself.“Depends on what you’re in the market for,” I said.“What do you know about…stealing art?”“That it’s strictly amateur hour, for the most part.Punks hear that a Picasso is worth twenty million, so they pull a smash and grab.Never occurs to them that a one-of-a-kind artwork might be worth twenty mil, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to pay ’em a dime for it.There’s exceptions.Ransoming it back to the insurance company—that can be done, but it’s risky as hell.It’s safer to cross the feds than it is to cross an insurance company.”“But you can do it?”“A score is a score,” I told him.“It’s not what you’re stealing, it’s who you’re stealing it from and how far they’ll go to protect what’s theirs.What are you after, anyway?”A manila folder lay on his desk blotter.Cameron flipped it open and rested his fingers on the photograph inside, twisting it around to face me.The glossy picture made my skin crawl.Worse, I couldn’t figure out why.It was just a knife, propped up in a wooden cabinet, with a gleam suggesting the photographer had shot it through a pane of glass.The knife had a flared, black blade like a diseased leaf.Pits and craters marred the blade’s rough face, making me think of a cold and distant moon.The handle was carved from some yellow-green stone, with the pommel forming the roaring mouth of a lion and the grip wavy like a serpent’s coils [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]