The White Gold Score (A Daniel Faust Novella)

1.
The Long Way Down

2.
Redemption Song

3.
The Living End

4.
A Plain-Dealing Villain

5.
The Killing Floor Blues

Three weeks passed between the events of
The Long Way Down
and
Redemption Song
. This is what happened.

Greenbriar was the kind of guy who treated poisoning your food as a basic business-negotiation tactic. He was also the kind of guy who had watched
The Princess Bride
twenty-seven times and expected everybody else had too.

“Don’t you wanna switch bowls with me, Dan?” He couldn’t hide the worry on his pinched rat face.

We sat side by side at the glass-topped bar inside Umami, the Monaco’s latest foodie magnet. The little restaurant nestled right off the casino floor, done up in beechwood and bright orange lacquer. The theme was “Japanese street food meets gourmet fusion,” which was a nice way of charging seventeen bucks for a bowl of ramen. To be fair, this wasn’t the convenience store junk I’d bought ten for a dollar when I was a kid: the bartender brought us two steaming bowls piled with noodles and broth, cloudlike wisps of scrambled egg, and blood-drop constellations of Thai chili, topped off with a candy-bar-shaped chunk of fried pork belly.

“Do I wanna what?” I asked. I’d ordered a “road soda” on the side—gin, sake, and a tart splash of lemon—and two swallows had hit my brain like a warm, friendly bullet.

Greenbriar licked his wormy lips, his greased-back hair and scraggly mustache glimmering under the hot lights as he nodded at our bowls. “Switch,” he said. “You know, for your safety.”

I thought about it. Then I picked up a ladle-like spoon, fished up a dollop of steaming broth, and swallowed it down. Spicy, sweet, perfect.

“Nope,” I said.

Greenbriar looked at his own bowl, crestfallen. Then he waved over the bartender and shoved it his way.

“What the hell, man? This isn’t what I ordered. I said the
shrimp
ramen. Did I not say the shrimp ramen?”

The bartender hustled, picking up the bowl and scooting off with a muttered, “Sorry, Mr. Greenbriar.”

“That’s right,” he said to the man’s retreating back. “Show your boss some goddamn respect.”

I sipped my drink and ate my ramen. He was buying, after all. “Free” is my favorite style of cuisine.

“So, uh,” he said, “thanks for meeting with me. I got a…a job offer for you.”

I shrugged amiably. “One you’re going to pay cash for, I presume. Instead of offering me the antidote for whatever was in that bowl.”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’re playing pretend now? All right. I’ll be the cowboy, and you can be the magical pony princess.”

Greenbriar looked pained. He always looked pained—a pained, stunted rodent with a coal-black widow’s peak—but today, more than usual.

“It wasn’t easy for me to call you, you know. I’m really swallowing my pride here.”

“Right,” I said, “the director of special security for CMC Entertainment reaching out to the Vegas underground for help. What happened, Greenbriar? Somebody finally manage to take the money and run? Did they hit a jackpot the easy way and split town with the loot?”

Greenbriar leaned a little closer, lowering his voice.

“We got a guest upstairs, in one of the penthouse suites. He checked out…” He drew a hand across his throat, a slow slash from ear to ear. “But he won’t
leave
.”

Not his usual line of work, then. More like mine.

Sometimes novices ask, if magic is real, why aren’t all magicians rich? Why don’t we just go to the dog track or buy a lottery ticket and enchant our way to a nice fat payoff? Well, some of us do, but it’s more of a pain in the ass than it sounds—and the bigger the purse, the more likely it is that some other sorcerer in the crowd is working her own mojo in the exact opposite direction.

Then there’s Vegas.

The occult underworld and organized crime have always worked arm in arm, and organized crime
built
Las Vegas. Ever since Bugsy Siegel hired a
strega
from the Old Country to help guide his vision of a jewel in the desert sands, there’s always been somebody on every casino’s board of directors who knows the real score. Even after the ’80s, when the feds pushed out the mob and the corporations moved in, certain traditions remained.

And that was how you ended up with a guy like Greenbriar, whose job was to be the firm hand on your shoulder the day you decided to use magic to cheat in one of his boss’s casinos. Guiding you into the back room for a little chat about ethics with his large, unfriendly pals. If it was your first time and you seemed the type who could learn from experience, they’d probably be nice and not mess up your face too badly. Push it and you got blacklisted for good, sorcerer-style.

That meant you got a psychic lobotomy from Greenbriar and a one-way bus ticket to some random city back east, where you were officially no longer Vegas’s problem.

Me and my friends, we didn’t gamble on the Strip. We also didn’t like Greenbriar very much. That was fine. He didn’t like us either.

“Got a dead man overstaying his welcome, huh?” I asked him. “What makes you think so?”

“Guy dropped dead of a heart attack. Since then we’ve rented that room three times. Not one guest manages to stay the whole night. They’re having hallucinations, getting woken up by a guy screaming in their face then disappearing into the damn wall—people are starting to
talk
, Dan. My bosses can’t have this.”

“And you want me to do what about it?”

“
Banish
it. I know you’ve done work like that before. I heard something just went down—you cleared some dead broad’s ghost out of the storm tunnels, right?”

I frowned into my drink and tossed back two swigs more than I needed.

“Word gets around fast.”

“It’s my job to hear stuff,” he said. “I’m right, aren’t I? Somebody had a ghost problem and you handled it.”

I remembered the wraith of Stacy Pankow, screaming in the darkness beneath the city streets, and swallowed down a little bitterness with my next spoonful of ramen. A familiar and unwelcome spice.

“Yeah,” I said, “I handled it.”

“So handle this, and I’ll pay cash money. I just need you to go up there and clean it up. I’m not…I’m not equipped for this kinda thing. My magic is all about life, and growth, and nature.”

I lifted my glass halfway to my lips and arched an eyebrow at him. “You were a disciple of the Order of the Septic Blossom, until they kicked you to the curb. You work with mold and fungus.”

“Which are living things, thank you very much. At least I have a pedigree.”

I thought it over. Most ghosts—
unlike
Stacy—were nothing but psychic imprints. Snatches of emotional pain burned into the world, about as dangerous as a 3-D movie. I could take care of Greenbriar’s problem, and it wouldn’t be too hard a job. More importantly, I didn’t have any plans for the night.

The question then becomes
, I thought,
how much can I squeeze out of him?

“You said…this happened in a penthouse suite?”

He jerked a thumb toward the ceiling. “Top floor. It’s sort of a boutique hotel-inside-a-hotel thing for the high rollers, up on twenty-eight. Every night we can’t rent that penthouse my bosses are losing money, and there’s a big convention coming up in a couple of weeks. We gotta get this fixed pronto. Look: you get it done, I’ll pay you two grand. Cash.”

I’d heard of Hotel 28, but I’d never had a chance to visit.
A penthouse suite
, I thought.
Imagine that
.

“All right,” I told him, “I can get started right away. Thing is, this isn’t a quick procedure. To do a thorough job, I need to spend the night in that penthouse.”

“The whole night?”

I nodded. “Did the deceased order room service the night he died?”

Greenbriar shrugged. “I think so, sure, why?”

“I need to follow his footsteps. Trace the events that led to his death and determine what’s making him linger on this plane of being.” I put a finger to my temple. “To break the ghost, I must
become
the ghost. So you’ll comp my room-service bill.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry, are you suddenly an expert on ghost removal? Because I can get up and leave. I’ve got stuff to do tonight—”

He waved a hand as I started to rise. “Hold on, hold on. Fine. Get room service if you have to. Whatever you gotta do, as long as it’s gone by tomorrow.”

“Come find me in the morning, and it’ll be done.” I paused. “But not before ten a.m.”

*     *     *

Greenbriar escorted me across the casino floor. Past the sirens and clangs and the cascading electronic lights, hot machines calling out like carnival barkers to grab every passing eye, each one louder than the one beside it. Drunken cheers rang out from a craps table, some lucky tourist on a winning streak. The top floor had its own private elevator with a bold
28
embossed across its cherry-red steel doors. Key-card access only. Greenbriar used his. He didn’t offer me one.

The elevator whisked us up to the top of the Monaco, smooth as silk, and opened onto blissful silence.

Hotel 28 was an oasis of regal calm, the entrance a cool corridor done up in rich dark wood and quilted brown leather, Italian marble gleaming under my wingtip shoes. It opened onto a rounded lobby, where a tree made of glass—its big square leaves lit up and gleaming icy white—cast an electric glow across the room. A woman in a prim vest rose from behind a small, businesslike desk as we arrived.

“Mr. Greenbriar?” she said. “We have another problem. The housekeeping staff is
refusing
to set foot in—”

He held up a placating hand. “All handled, honey. This is Mr. Faust. He’s gonna fix our, ah, room with the leaky plumbing.”

“I’m here to help,” I said.

She gave me a key card and a nervous smile.

Greenbriar led me to the end of a long, dimly lit hall. We stopped outside a pair of double doors, where a brass
2804
hung over the card reader.

“I’ll be back at ten sharp,” he told me. “You fix this mess, you’ll walk outta here with an envelope of cash. My word on it.”

His word was worth about as much as mine. Still, I figured I had the better part of this deal. Only one of us was sleeping in a penthouse suite tonight.

I slotted the card, listened to the locks click as the light on the reader flickered from red to green, and pushed open the double doors.

Time to erase a ghost. Easy job. Nothing to it.