Sandman Slim
Sandman Slim
Richard Kadrey
Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero in Sandman Slim, star of this gripping, gritty new series by Richard KadreyLife sucks and then you die. Or, if you’re James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.Now Stark’s back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you’d expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future.Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.Darkly twisted, irreverent, and completely hilarious, Sandman Slim is the breakthrough novel by an acclaimed author.
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published by Voyager US 2009
Copyright © Richard Kadrey 2009
“Alice,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Copyright © 2002
By Jalma Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Richard Kadrey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007460977
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007445998
Version: 2017-10-18
For Nicola
Just judge of vengeance,
grant the gift of forgiveness,
before the day of reckoning.
– DIES IRAE, REQUIEM MASS
The dumber people think you are, the more
surprised they’re going to be when you kill them.
– WILLIAM CLAYTON
Table of Contents
Cover (#u07294287-8df5-5cd4-b557-a8d8bd13ef18)
Title Page (#u7a250738-e21d-5b89-b3b3-6dcfea85dd66)
Copyright (#ue1290dd2-a406-5739-a267-9b0d69dcd0c5)
Dedication (#ua7581ff9-d8e4-50e9-adfe-428e028109fa)
Epigraph (#u29059cb0-fcf5-593a-9203-f0593b075c93)
One (#ua5c6f9bb-5e5c-5eaa-a672-08ad395abb5c)
Two (#u7e190e1b-67f7-5594-a021-b94891fcb0bf)
Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Richard Kadrey (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One
I WAKE UP on a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don’t come to me until later. Right now all I know is that I’m back in the world and I’m on fire. My mind hasn’t quite kicked in yet, but my body knows enough to roll off the burning trash and to keep rolling until I can’t feel the heat anymore.
When I’m sure I’m out, I struggle to my feet and shrug off my leather jacket. I run my hands over my lower back and legs. There’s no real pain and all I feel are a couple of blisters behind my right knee and calf. My jeans are a little crispy, but the heavy leather of my jacket protected my back. I’m not really burned, just singed and in shock. I probably hadn’t been on the fire too long. But I’m lucky that way. Always have been. Otherwise, I might have crawled back into this world and ended up a charcoal briquette in my first five minutes home. And wouldn’t those black-hearted bastards down under have laughed when I ended up right back in Hell after slipping so sweetly out the back door? Fuck ’em for now. I’m home and I’m alive, if a little torn up by the trip. No one said birth was easy, and rebirth would have to be twice as hard as that first journey into the light.
The light.
My body isn’t burning anymore, but my eyes are cooking in their sockets. How long has it been since I’ve seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight. I can’t even tell you the colors of the cemetery where I’m standing because my vision goes into an agonizing whiteout every time I open my eyes.
Squinting like a mole, I run to the shade of a columbarium and crouch there with my forehead on the cool marble walls and my hands over my face. I give it a good five or ten minutes then lower my hands to let my eyes get used to the bloody-red light that seeps through my lids. Little by little, over the next twenty or so minutes, I open my eyes, letting in minute amounts of glaring L.A. sun. I mentally cross my fingers and hope that no one sees me hunkered down against the wall. They’d probably think I was crazy and call a cop, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.
The muscles in my knees and legs ache before I can open my eyes all the way and keep them open. I sit down against the cool building to take some of the strain off. Though I can sort of see now, there’s no way I’m marching off into full daylight for a while. Instead, I stay in the shade and take stock of things.
My clothes are burned, but wearable, if you ignore the burning garbage smell. I have on an ancient Germs T-shirt that my girlfriend lifted from a West Hollywood vintage shop for me, worn black jeans with holes in the knees, a pair of ancient engineer boots, and a battered leather motorcycle jacket, strategic points of which are held together with black gaffer’s tape. The heel of my right boot is loose from when I’d kicked the living Jesus out of some carjacking piece of shit after he dragged some screaming soccer mom to the pavement at a stoplight. I hate cops and I fucking hate goody-goody hero types, but there is some shit I will not put up with if it happens in front of me. Of course, that was back then, before my trip down under. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I saw the same scene today. I’d probably still put a boot into the car thief, but I don’t know if I’d let him walk away.
Right now there’s something more important on my mind—the fact that these are the exact clothes I was wearing when I got demon-snatched. When I’d hit the pavement down under I’d been naked. That got me my first big laughs, stumbling around trying to find my footing before I puked myself in front of an audience of fallen angels. After that, the laughs were mostly about my physical abuse and humiliation at the hands of one devil dog or another. Trust me on this—Hell is a tough room.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen these clothes. I go through my pockets to see if there’s money or anything useful. There’s not much. There’s nothing in my pockets but twenty-three cents and an empty pink matchbook with the name and address of a Hollywood bail bondsman printed on it. I don’t even have the keys to my apartment or the old Impala my father left me.
I feel just above my right ankle and a genuine wave of happiness hits me. The black blade is still there, strapped to my leg with strips of basilisk leather. I put my hand over my heart and can feel the chain under my T-shirt and the fat gold Veritas coin that hangs there. The fact I’m on Earth at all means that I still have the key to the Room of Thirteen Doors, even though I can’t touch it or see it. So, I managed to smuggle three things back with me from Hell. That’s no small feat. Of course, none of it alters the fact that I have no money, no ID, no wheels, my clothes are half burned off, I don’t have a place to stay and no real idea where I am, except for the fact that this tombstone trailer park looks and feels like L.A. I’m off to a damn good start. I’ll be the first hitman in history who has to panhandle for bullets.
I make my way slowly, still half blind, to the front gates of the cemetery. Near them, I cup my hands in the water flowing from the top of a contemplation fountain. I take a drink and splash water onto my face. It feels as cool and perfect as a first kiss. Right then it hits me. This isn’t some devil’s illusion, a glamour or some game designed to crush my spirit. I’m really home.
So, where the hell is everybody? Outside, I catch sight of the one thing I’ve been hoping to see. North from where I’m standing, in the distance, are the big white letters of the Hollywood sign. Perched high on the dirty brown scrub hills, it’s never looked so beautiful. In the other direction, toward Melrose, a car hisses by every now and then, but there are way too few. And there are no people on the street at all. There are some small houses off at an angle from the cemetery gate. The green lawns are decorated with lights, plastic reindeer, and an inflatable snowman. Wreaths on a few doors across the street. Holy shit, it’s Christmas. For some reason, this strikes me as the funniest thing in the universe and I stand there laughing like an idiot.
Someone slams into me hard from behind. The hilarity ends abruptly. I spin around and I’m face-to-face with a young executive type. Brad Pitt’s stunt double handsome, with a haircut and black double-breasted jacket that together cost more than my car. Where the hell did he come from? I’ve got to shape up. Downtown, no one would have been able to creep up on me like that.
Brad Pitt takes a couple of stiff steps back. “What the fuck?” he yells, like it’s my fault he walked into me. It’s not that hot out, but he’s sweating like a racehorse and his movements are quick and jerky, like a broken windup toy. He looks at me like I just killed his dog.
“Calm down, Donald Trump,” I say. “You ran into me.” He wipes his upper lip with the back of his hand. There’s something tucked in his palm, and he’s so twitchy he drops it. Brad starts to lunge for it, but takes a step back instead. Lying on the sidewalk between us is a plastic bag with about a hundred little ice-white cocaine rocks inside. I smile. Welcome to Christmas in L.A. Say hi to Saint Nick loading up for a party I’ll definitely be skipping.
I look back at the guy, and before I can say anything, he reaches into his jacket. I latch onto his arm just as the stun gun comes out. I snap his wrist back and twist outward, taking him off balance and slamming him hard onto the pavement. I didn’t even think about it. My body just went on autopilot. Guess some part of my brain must still be working right.
Brad Pitt isn’t moving. He went down on the stun gun and it’s still jammed into his ribs. I kick the thing away and touch the side of his neck. Even out cold, his pulse is fast. Who says crack isn’t good for you? He’s wearing a small Christmas tree pin on his lapel. This makes me think about Christmas more, about being somewhere without friends and how I could use a Secret Santa of my own right now. I figure that my new friend is about as close to a Good Samaritan as I’m likely to find outside a cemetery off Melrose. I quick check to see that the street is still clear, pocket the stun gun, and then drag him into the cemetery, behind some hedges.
Turns out, the guy is Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. His eel skin wallet is fat with hundreds, at least a few grand worth. Even though the twitchy son of a bitch was so ripped on coke and paranoia that he tried to electrocute me for nothing more than standing on the street, I feel a small twinge of guilt as I rifle through his pockets. I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my time, but I never actually mugged anybody. Not that this was technically a mugging. Brad Pitt here attacked me. In another time, helping myself to this guy’s gear would just fall under the heading of “Spoils of War.” Besides, I need this stuff. I’m back with nothing. No friends that I know of and no real plan.
I help myself to his cash, his Porsche sunglasses, an unopened pack of Black Black gum, and his jacket, which is a little tight across the shoulders but not too bad a fit at all. I leave him my half-burned leather jacket, his credit cards, car keys, and the big bag of Christmas crack. I’ll just add this incident to the list of sins I’ll have to atone for later. Ten minutes back on Earth and I’m already adding to the bill.
I crack open the pack of caffeinated gum and chew a piece as I walk. I can’t seem to get the taste of burning garbage out of my mouth.
It feels like I’m walking on someone else’s legs, wobbly and disconnected. I trip over a couple of curbs and almost jump out of my skin when I step on a squeak toy some kid left in the street. Chuck Norris, I’m not. But the blood starts flowing and my legs start feeling like part of my body again. Other than that, I’m not walking with any purpose or direction. I want to go home, but what if Azazel has sent up some of his pet spiders—the bloodsuckers as big as rottweilers? I’m not ready to face that just yet. I pull the chain out from under my shirt and unclip the Veritas coin.
The Veritas is about two inches wide, silver and heavy. Around the edge in Hellion script it says HOME SWEET HOME. Good. It’s awake and snotty as ever.
One side of the coin is stamped with the image of the morning star—Lucifer—and on the other side is a round, many-petaled flower sort of like a chrysanthemum. It’s an asphodel, a Hellion word that translates as “evensong.” The flowers sing hymns that the fallen angels used to sing in Heaven. After belting out off-key hosannas all day, getting all the words wrong, they strangle themselves with their roots every evening and die. The next day, they resurrect and start all over again. This has been going on down there for probably a million years and most Hellions still think it’s a knee-slapper. Hellion humor doesn’t travel well. Plus, except for Lucifer and his generals, most of Hell’s troops make the Beverly Hillbillies look like the Algonquin Roundtable.
Holding the big coin on my thumb and forefinger, I flip it thinking, Hollywood or home? The Veritas comes down asphodel side up. That’s it, then. The Veritas never lies and gives better advice than most people I know. I put it back on its chain and turn north for Hollywood.
It’s over a mile to the Boulevard. I’m exhausted by the time I get there, and the payoff isn’t exactly what I was hoping for. Sometime while I was gone, Hollywood Boulevard had a nervous breakdown. Vacant storefronts. Trash dissolving in the street. Nothing but ghosts here—shadows of runaways and dealers huddled in padlocked doorways. I remember the Boulevard full of wild kids, drag queens, manic Dylan wannabes, and tourists looking for more than their next fix. Now the place looks like a whipped dog.
I’m beat from walking on these stranger’s legs and I’m sweating in Brad Pitt’s jacket. I should have taken the idiot’s car. I could have left it on the Boulevard, safe and sound. Though, more likely, I’d have tossed the keys to one of the street kids slouched against the buildings, just to see if there was any life left inside some of those dead eyes.
Walking deeper into Hollywood, I pass Ivar Avenue and see a funny sign flanked by burning tiki torches. BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS, it says. I remember the name. It’s an old-school kung fu movie with a women-in-prison twist. I saw it when I was Downtown. The devil steals cable. Who knew?
The Bamboo House of Dolls is cool and dim inside, and I can take off Brad Pitt’s sunglasses without wanting to faint. There are old Iggy and Circle Jerks posters on the black-painted walls, but behind the bar it’s all palm fronds, plastic hula girls, and coconut bowls for the peanuts. There’s no one in the place except for the bartender and me. I grab the stool at the end of the bar, farthest from the door.
The bartender is slicing up limes. He pauses for a second to give me a nod, the knife loose and comfortable in his right hand. That other part of my brain kicks in, sizing him up. He has close-cropped black hair and a graying goatee. He looks big under his Hawaiian shirt. An ex–football player. Maybe a boxer. He realizes I’m looking at him.
“Nice jacket,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“Too bad the rest of you looks like you just dropped out of the devil’s asshole.”
Suddenly I’m wondering if this is some Hellion setup, and if I can reach Brad Pitt’s stun gun or my knife in time. He must see it on my face because he gives me this big deer-in-the-headlights grin and I know that he was kidding.
“Relax, man,” he says. “Bad joke. Looks like you had a shitty day. What are you drinking?”
I’m not sure how to answer that. Yesterday, I’d been hunting for water that sometimes dripped through the ceilings of limestone caves under Pandemonium. Mostly I drank a Hellion homebrew called Aqua Regia, a kind of high-octane red wine mixed with a dash of angel’s blood and herbs that made cocaine seem like Pop Rocks. Aqua Regia tasted like cayenne pepper and gasoline, but it was there and I could hold it down.
“Jack Daniel’s.”
“On the house,” says the bartender, and pours a double.
There’s strange music playing. Something odd and tropical, with fake bird chirps every now and then. There’s a CD case on the bar. A Hawaiian sunset on the cover and the name “MARTIN DENNY.” I put the chewed Black Black in a cocktail napkin and sip the JD. It tastes strange, like something a human might actually drink. It washes the last of the garbage taste away.
“What the hell is this place?”
“Bamboo House of Dolls. L.A.’s greatest and only punk-tiki club.”
“Yeah, I always thought L.A. needed one of those.” I’m in a bar, but something’s missing. “I forgot my cigarettes. Think I can borrow one?”
“Sorry, man. You can’t smoke in bars in California.”
“When did that happen? That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree completely.”
“At least I’m home for Christmas.”
“Close. But you missed it by a day. Didn’t Santa bring you anything?”
“This trip, maybe.” I sip my drink. So, not Christmas, after all. Just Christmas enough to keep the streets deserted so no one saw me crawl home. Lucky me.
I ask, “You have today’s paper?”
He reaches under the bar and drops a folded copy of the L.A. Times in front of me. I pick it up, trying not to look too eager. Can’t even read the headlines. Can’t focus on anything but the date at the top of the page.
Eleven years. I’ve been gone eleven years. I was nineteen when I went Downtown. I’m practically an old man now.
“You have any coffee back there?”
He nods. “That’s how you missed Christmas. A lost weekend. I’ve had a few of those.”
The coffee is beautiful. Hot. A little bitter, like it’s been brewing for a while. I pour the last of the Jack Daniel’s into it and drink. My first perfect moment in eleven years.
“You from around here?”
“I was born here, but I’ve been away.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Incarceration.”
He smiles again. A normal one this time. “In my reckless youth, I did six months for boosting cars. What were you inside for?”
“I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth. Mostly wrong place, wrong time.”
“That’ll put a smile on your face.” He refills my coffee cup and pours me another shot of JD. This bartender might be the finest human being I’ve ever met.
“So, why’d you come back?”
“I’m going to kill some people,” I tell him. I pour the Jack into the coffee. “Probably a lot of people.”
The bartender picks up a rag and starts wiping glasses. “Guess someone’s got to.”
“Thanks for understanding.”
“I figure that at any given time, there’s probably three to five percent of the population that are such unrepentant rat-fuck pendejos that they deserve whatever they get.” He’s still wiping the same glass. It looks pretty clean to me. “Besides, I get the feeling you might have your reasons.”
“That I do, Carlos.”
He stops wiping. “How did you know my name was Carlos?”
“You must’ve said it.”
“No, I didn’t.”
I look over his shoulder, at the wall behind the bar. “That trophy on top of the cash register. ‘Carlos, World’s Greatest Boss.’”
“You can read that from here?”
“Apparently.” The thing with his name popping into my head? That was weird. Time to go. “What do I owe you?”
“On the house.”
“You this nice to every aspiring assassin who wanders in here?”
“Only the ones who look like they just crawled out of a burning building and didn’t even get their jacket dirty. And I like repeat business. Maybe now you’ll come back sometime.”
“You want someone who, like you said, just fell out of the devil’s asshole as a regular?”
“I’d love it.” He looks away, like he’s trying to think of the next thing to say. “There are these guys. White boys. All tattooed, like Aryan Nation or some shit. They’re coming around, wanting money for protection. A lot
more money than I can afford with a little bar like this.”
“And you think I can do something about them.”
“You look like someone who might know what to do in a situation like this. Who wouldn’t be …” That look again, groping for words. “You know … afraid.”
I could tell it was really hard for him to say that. Is this why the Veritas sent me here? I’m back a couple of hours and already I’m into karmic payback? And with the carnage I have planned, but haven’t even started? No, that didn’t make any sense.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can help you.”
“How about this? Free drinks. Free food at night, too. Good burgers, ribs, tamales. You eat and drink free until the end of time.”
“That’s a really nice offer, but I don’t think I can help you.”
He looks away and starts wiping glasses again. “If you change your mind, they come on Thursdays, in the afternoon, when we’re getting deliveries.”
I get up and head for the door. When I’m halfway there he says, “Hey,” and slides something down the bar at me. It’s a pack of American Spirit browns, the nonfiltered kind. There’s a pack of matches tucked under the cellophane wrap.
“Take them,” he says. “I can’t smoke in here, either.”
Slipping on Brad Pitt’s shades, I ask, “You have anymore of these back there?”
“No.”
“You’re a hell of a first date, Carlos.” Damn. When someone gives you his last cigarette, you owe him.
Martin Denny bird chirps follow me to the door.
Turns out, I don’t need the shades for long. It must have been later in the day than I thought when I went into the Bamboo House of Dolls. As I leave, the sun is almost down and lights are coming on all along the Boulevard. I’ve always liked Hollywood better at night. The streetlights, headlights, and flashing signs outside the tourist traps blur away the straight lines and hard right angles that ruin the place. The Boulevard is only ever real at night when it’s both bright and black and there are promises hidden in every shadow. It’s like it was designed and built specifically for vampires. For all I know, it was.
Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.
I count to eleven as I walk deeper into Hollywood. Eleven parking meters. Eleven hookers looking for their first post-Christmas trick. Eleven actors I never heard of on eleven stars in the sidewalk.
Eleven years. Eleven goddamn years and I’m home with a key and a pocketknife and a coin that won’t buy me a cup of coffee.
Three, five, seven, eleven, all good children go to Heaven.
Gone eleven years and I make it back the day after Christmas. Is someone trying to tell me something?
I pull out one of Carlos’s American Spirits and light up. The smoke feels good in my lungs. This body is starting to feel like mine again. Like me. I’m just not sure about the rest of the world.
Who the hell are all these people on the Boulevard the day after Christmas? How am I supposed to blend in with them? There’s a nice guy at a bar a few blocks from here. He was just doing his job, but he had a knife in his hand and all I could do was count all the ways I knew to kill him.
It hits me then how unprepared I am for being back, how everything that made sense in Downtown is strange here, wrong and ridiculous. All the skills I developed—how to draw an enemy in and how to kill, all the magic I’d learned or stolen—suddenly feels feeble and foolish in this bright and alien place. I’m steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.
I finish off the first cigarette and light another. The world is a much louder and stranger place than I remember. I need to start doing and stop running around screaming inside my own head. Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.
I need to concentrate on what’s important, like my sure and certain plans to find and kill, in as painful a way as possible, the six traitorous snakes who stole my life. And something worse. It makes me weak inside to think about it. It’s a woman’s face.
Her name is Alice. She’s the only bright thing I ever loved, the only person I ever met worth giving a damn about. If Heaven ever meant anything, she should be married, probably now to some skinny leather-pants guitarist she has to support with temp jobs in those fluorescent-tube high-rise dungeons along Wilshire. Or she’d have gone straight, married a dentist, squeezed out a minivan full of crib lizards, and gotten fat. That would be okay, too. But none of those things are going to happen for her. Nothing nice happens to murdered women, except that maybe someone cares about how they got that way.
If Alice was still around, would she even recognize me under all these scars? There was a mirror inside the entrance to the Bamboo House of Dolls, but I’d been careful not to look at it. Walking along the Boulevard, I take quick glances at my reflection in the dim glass of dead storefronts. I’m bigger than I was when I went down, heavier with muscle and scar tissue, but still thin by human standards. I can still recognize the rough outline of my face, but it looks more like stone than flesh. My cheeks and chin are chiseled out of concrete; my eyes are dark, shining marbles above lips the color of dirty snow. I’m a George Romero zombie, except I’ve never been dead. Just vacationing in the land of the dead. Suddenly I want to get my hands around the throat of fat Alice’s imaginary husband and squeeze him till he pops like a balloon.
That stops me cold.
It’s the first time I’ve fantasized about killing anyone outside the Circle. What a stupid and dangerous thought. Exactly the kind of thing that will steer me away from the real job and maybe get me killed. Then I’d be right back in Hell with nothing to show for it and wouldn’t that be a lot of laughs?
That leads me back to the $64,000 question: Why did the Veritas send me this way? It’s interesting being back on familiar turf, but I could have brooded back at the cemetery. That’s why it’s called a “cemetery.” And I didn’t need a bartender to offer me a job or give me free smokes. With a pocketful of Brad Pitt’s hundreds, I’m Richie Rich with a knife in his boot. So, why am I here?
I’m walking and smoking on a block that’s two open liquor stores, an empty secondhand bookstore, a dead record store, and a shuttered sex shop. As I’m speculating on how fucked up a town has to be when it can’t even keep a dildo-and-porn shop open, the inside of my skull lights up like God’s own pinball machine.
I have my answer. I know why I’m here.
He’s turning off the Boulevard onto Las Palmas, waddling on his little legs a short way up the block to a place called Max Overdrive Video. At the front door, he has to juggle things for a minute—transfer a cup of coffee to one hand, grip the top of a bag of doughnuts in his teeth, and do a little ass dance so he can work the keys out of his pocket and let himself into the store.
I watch him from across the street, just to make sure that I’m not imagining things. As he enters the place, I get a nice backlit shot of his face.
It’s Kasabian, one of my friends from the old magic circle. One of the six on my list.
Santa brought me something, after all.
Max Overdrive Video occupies both floors of an old Hollywood town house, the kind of weekend getaway kept by the gentry back in the forties and fifties, when this area was the most glamorous place in the known universe. Kasabian is moving around inside Max Overdrive like he owns the place. I think I should go and ask him if he does.
It’s full-on night now and I’m surrounded by fat, ripe shadows. I cross the street and pick a plump, dark one around the side of Max Overload, next to a health food restaurant. I glance over my shoulder to make sure the street is clear, and when I’m sure I’m alone, I slip into the shadow. The key tickles inside my chest and I emerge into the Room of Thirteen Doors.
I cross to the Door of Ice and quietly step out of the shadow on the other side.
I’m in the far back of the store, in the porn section. The lights are off back here, so I get a good look at the rest of the place.
There’s a door to an employee restroom on my right, tucked back behind the porn. Just beyond this section is a chained-off stairway leading upstairs. Neat racks of DVDs and bins of VHS tapes fill the rest of the store. I guess that’s something that’s changed in the last eleven years. Even the porn in the back is all discs. The only tapes I can find are piled carelessly in the sale bins. VHS is dead. This is something good to remember since I don’t want to sound like the Beverly Hillbillies when I’m talking to regular people. I should sit down and make a list of everything I missed while I was gone. If you can’t smoke in bars anymore, what other atrocities has the world committed?
Kasabian is up front, behind the counter, going over the day’s receipts. He lost some hair while I was away, but he’s made up for it by getting fat. He’d always been a little chubby, but now he’d taken on a truly odd shape. Not like one of those guys who grows a big belly and man boobs. He just seems to have expanded horizontally, like a balloon filled with too much air. It’s admirable in its own weird way. His chin and gut are defiant in the face of gravity, making him look more like Frosty the Snowman than Orson Welles.
I walk slowly down the main aisle toward the counter, checking the corners of the room, making sure we’re alone. Kasabian is deep in thought, crunching numbers. When I’m halfway to the counter, I take Brad Pitt’s stun gun from my jacket pocket and hold it behind my back.
“Evening, Kas. Long time no see.”
He starts and knocks a pile of receipts to the floor. I stop where I know he can see me, but also where the lighting is weak enough that I’m pretty sure he can’t see my face.
“Who the fuck are you? Get out of my store. I don’t want any trouble.”
“It’s right after Christmas, Kas. Don’t you ever take a day off?”
“Everybody’s on vacation. Who are you?”
“Did you have a merry Christmas this year? Did you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to baby Jesus? Maybe pick up something at Baby Gap?”
“What do you want?”
“Know what I did for Christmas? I cut a monster’s head off. Then I did the same thing to the guy who owned the monster.”
“You want money? Take it. It was a lousy day and I’ve already deposited all the Christmas money, so you’re shit out of luck there.”
Kasabian has been a drama queen from the first day I met him, so I can’t resist hitting him with a Vincent Price moment.
“I don’t want your money, Kas. I want your soul,” I say, stepping into better light to give him a clear full frontal.
It gets exactly the reaction I was hoping for. His mouth opens, but he doesn’t make a sound. One of his hands comes up to cover his open yap, stifling a silent scream. He steps back from the counter, his eyes wide.
Forgive me, God and Lucifer and all you angels high and low, but this is fun. This is an e-ticket roller coaster.
“Shut your mouth, Kas. You look like one of those blow-up sheep in the back of porn zines.” I stop about ten feet from the counter, just letting him feast on me. “What did you get me for Christmas? Right, you gave it to me eleven years ago. Damnation. The gift that keeps on giving.”
His hands are down now and he’s leaning on the counter like a drunk trying to decide whether to fall on his face or his back. I thumb on the stun gun.
“It’s okay. I know you don’t have anything for me. But I sure as hell have something for you, Kas. Climb up on Santa’s lap and I’ll show you.”
I take a baby step closer to the counter and Kasabian takes one back. Then he does the funniest thing. He raises his hands and there’s a gun there—a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker. Wyatt Earp’s favorite gun. He gives me five of the six slugs in the chest and belly, completely ruining my moment.
I drop to my knees, vision going black. The stun gun falls to the floor and I follow it down. I can feeling my lungs drawing in air. I can feel my heart beating. Both organs seem more than a little confused by what’s happening. Death is settling over me, soft and warm, like a down comforter fresh from the dryer. My heart stops.
SOMETHING FUNNY HAPPENED to me when I was Downtown. I got hard to kill. When I first arrived there, I was the first and only living human to ever set foot in Hell. I was a sideshow freak. Pay a dollar and see Jimmy, the dog-faced boy. Later, when they got tired of slapping me around, examining me, and displaying me like a pedigreed poodle, they thought it might be fun to watch me die. They made me fight in the arena and they made a big deal out of it. Imagine the Super Bowl every week or two.
Naturally, the location being Hell and the setting being an arena, there was a lot of cheating going on. Hellions don’t like losing bets any more than humans. Before almost every fight, a bribed trainer or attendant would show up with a sneaky little gift. They slipped me special weapons. They gave me diabolical drugs. They whispered fiendish spells into my ears. It all helped, though it didn’t make me Superman. I was knifed and speared. I was burned. I was almost torn in half by a giant crab-thing that bled fire and screamed in the anguished voices of all the souls it had devoured. My ribs and skull were beaten to Silly Putty.
But I didn’t die.
I don’t know if it was the spells, the drugs, the Aqua Regia, or just clean living, but I was changing. Every time I should have died but didn’t, I got stronger. That meant that the next attack had to be harder, faster, even more ferocious than the one before. After a while, I actually looked forward to the beat-downs. Each one changed me and that change meant that I was immune from a similar attack next time. By the end, I was a flesh-and-bone, armor-plated Dirty Harry.
By the time the ruling-class, old-school Hellions and nouveau celebutante fiends decided it was time to get rid of me, it was too late. I was too strong and by then I was doing more interesting things than killing in the arena. I was freelance-killing Hellions out of the arena, and that meant I was protected from on high by forces far darker than your run-of-the-mill tail-and-pitchfork type.
On the other hand, I’d never been shot before.
“Stark?” says Kasabian from a million miles away. “Is that really you?” He laughs quietly, nervously. “Mason is going to shit himself.”
My left hand shoots to the side, grabbing the .45’s still-warm barrel and driving it into the floor. Kasabian’s fat finger is still looped in the trigger guard, so he comes down with the gun. Meanwhile, my right hand flickers to my boot and tears free the black bone knife. I twist my body toward Kasabian and bring down the knife in a smooth arc. Kasabian’s head tumbles to the floor and rolls away like a pumpkin. His body flops to the floor.
From beneath the Disney new-releases rack, Kasabian’s head begins to wail.
“Oh God! Oh Jesus, fuck! I’m dead!” It’s quality wailing. Downtown, I became kind of a connoisseur of wailing and this is prime stuff.
“I’m dead! I’m dead!”
Crawling shakily to my feet, I pick up Kasabian’s shrieking melon by the hair, tuck the .45 in the back of my jeans, and grab his leg by the ankle with my free hand. In a situation like this, when you want to clear away the evidence, you want to drag the body. You might think it’s faster to toss it over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but lifting a limp body is like wrestling with two hundred pounds of Jell-O. It wiggles, shifts, and refuses to stay still. Dragging is slower, but much less aggravating.
I carry Kasabian upstairs, his head still screaming blue murder and his heavy torso bumping along behind us.
The second floor is one big room. It’s large, with a nice big window on one wall, but sparsely furnished. There’s a bed, a couple of desk chairs, and a table piled high with tape decks, DVD burners, and a big color printer—a mini video-bootlegging factory. I drop the body by the door and set his head on the worktable. The gun I toss on the bed. Kasabian is still shrieking like a banshee, which is pretty good for a guy with no lungs.
I grab a chair and drop down in front of him. Digging the cigarettes out of Brad Pitt’s now-bloody jacket, I light one up and blow smoke in Kasabian’s face.
“Smell that? That means you’re not dead.”
He stops screaming and looks at me. Then he spots his body on the floor and starts caterwauling again. I take a slow drag and blow an extra-long cancer cloud right in his face.
He gets quiet and finally seems to focus on me.
“Stark? You’re dead.”
“Tell me, Kas, how does it feel to wake up in the worst place you can imagine? Of course, you’re luckier than me because you know why you’re there.”
“Fuck you! You think you’re sneaky? You used magic. The whole Sub Rosa will know you’re here. Mason will know you’re here. He’ll kill you.”
I make a game-show-buzzer noise.
“Guess again, fat man. This knife doesn’t disturb the aether and doesn’t leave any magical traces. Pure stealth tech, which is sort of its point. That, and not killing its victims unless I tell it to.”
“Oh God, look what you did.”
“God’s away on business, Kas. Talk to me.”
He looks up at me with big moon eyes. “I thought you were dead. When you disappeared, we all thought you were dead. I mean, what Mason did, it worked?”
“I was alive and in Hell for eleven years, so, yeah, you could say it worked.”
“How could you live through something like that? Mason was right about you.”
“What did he say?”
“That you were the only other really great natural magician he’d ever met.”
I have to smile at that.
“Sounds like Mason. I mean, it comes off like a compliment. But he calls me a great magician so he can call himself an even greater one.”
I turn away like I’m checking out the room, but really my gut is killing me. I’m burned and bruised where the slugs went in and I’m pretty sure I have a couple of cracked ribs. They’ll probably be all right by morning, but I’m not going to do much more walking around tonight. And I’m not about to give Kasabian the satisfaction of knowing I’m in pain.
“It must be true, though. You survived all those Hellions and you came back.”
“Wringing your neck is what brought me back. Yours and the others’.” The old anger comes boiling up, but I don’t want to lose control. It’ll scare Kasabian too much and he’ll be useless for information. I need to catch my breath. I can’t plan anything running around barking like a mad dog.
“For your information, I didn’t use any magic Downtown. Our magic is a joke down there. It doesn’t work. You might as well be shouting brownie recipes.” I take a calming drag off the cigarette. “I don’t even remember much of the magic we did in the Circle, but I did learn a trick or two down under. Hellion magic, and every bit of it is designed to make you cry all the way home.”
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Did you happen to notice me cutting off your head? If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Why did you come after me? Is it about the girl?”
“I don’t want to talk about her yet.”
I can’t talk about her yet.
“What do you want, man?”
“I want all of you. You were all in on it when Mason sent me down.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Right. You just stood there. You knew what was coming and you just stood there.”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“But you knew Mason was going to off me.”
Kasabian starts to say something, but he looks away.
“What did Mason promise you?”
“The sun and the moon. All our dreams come true, if we stayed out of the way and zipped our lips. It was hard stuff to refuse.”
“So, you said yes, then Mason screwed you and dumped you here. What a surprise. That’s why you’re about the last one in the Circle I need to kill.”
“Why?”
He frowns, like me not killing him first hurts his feelings.
“Because you’re a fuckup. You’re a third-rate magician and a second-rate human being. That’s why Mason and the others left you at the altar. You’re excess baggage.”
“You want to find the others from the Circle and you want me to help you.”
“I want a lot of things, but let’s start with that.” I shift around on the chair, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt my ribs. I don’t find one. “Where are the cool kids hanging out these days?”
“Are you crazy? Do you know what any of them would do to me if I told you?”
When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium. But you have to be careful with threats. Some Hellions and humans don’t know when to back down, and you might have to actually follow through. It didn’t happen often, but it was always a possibility.
“You know what I’m going to do to you?” I ask quietly and evenly. “You see that body over there? I’m going to drag it to the deepest, darkest part of Griffith Park and leave it for the coyotes.”
“Please don’t do that!”
“Then talk to me about the others. Where’s Mason?”
Mason had been the leader of our magic circle, which made me Mr. Green Jeans to his Captain Kangaroo. He was a talented magician and never passed up a chance to remind you of it. He came from money. At least he acted like he did. The truth is, none of us really knew much about his life outside the Circle. Parker did, though. They were tight. Parker was a thug with a boxer’s build and just enough magical ability to make him really dangerous. Mason saw the possibilities in someone like that and made the guy into his pet pit bull. Mason never got blood on his hands because Parker was only too happy to do it for him.
Mason also made a point of calling me Jimmy, James being my given first name. No one else ever called me Jimmy because I wouldn’t let them. I’ve always gone by Stark because the rest of my name had always been an issue in the family. I don’t know how Mason found out the rest of my name.
“Are you kidding? Does it look like I hang out with Mason anymore? I rent porn and Schwarzenegger to halfwits,” Kasabian says. “I’ve hardly seen him since that night and, to tell you the truth, I’m glad. After you were gone, those demons, or whatever they were, charged him up with power. Superman stuff. No, more like the Hulk. He changed, right in front of us. His skin, his bones, his whole body turned weird. It kind of glowed and it looked like there were things crawling around under his skin.”
“Sounds like they gave him an assload of nebiros.”
“What’s a nebiro?”
“A parasite. They live off the energy of whatever they infest. The only reason the host doesn’t drop dead immediately is that the nebiros excrete supernatural energy. They shit magic. It supercharges the host, keeping him and the parasite alive. Hellions eat those things like popcorn. I didn’t know they worked on humans.”
“Whatever happened, he wasn’t just Mason anymore. He was Mason and something else. Like God’s older brother, who takes God’s money, steals his car, and fucks his girlfriend. That’s Mason now. A guy who isn’t afraid to pants God. He took off and took Parker with him.”
I know that he’s telling the truth. In the same weird way that Carlos’s name popped into my head back at the Bamboo House of Dolls, I know that Kasabian is telling me the truth. It’s not reassuring to know something without understanding why you know it, but I’ll figure that out later.
I flick ashes off the cigarette and place it between Kasabian’s lips. He puffs on it a few times and that seems to calm him down. When he’s done, I set the cigarette down in an ashtray on the table. I don’t want to finish it after he’s touched it.
“I’m going to have a lot more questions for you over the next few days. Maybe weeks. However long it takes to settle this. Be straight with me, keep telling me the truth, and I might just give you your body back.”
“Sit here and wait for Mason to get me. What a sweet deal.”
“Work with me and he won’t be around to get you.”
Kasabian’s expression goes blank, like he’s staring off into the distance at something I can’t see.
“You’re right, you know. I am a fuckup,” he says. “All the rest of them, they got power, money, and cushy jobs. But they cut me out. I got nothing.”
“Then you have every reason to want some payback, too.”
“Don’t you think I would have if I could? Look at me! I even had to steal this stupid store just to earn a living. Then a dead guy comes in and cuts off my head. Yeah, I’m the one who’s going to put down Mason Faim.”
“No, I am. You just point me at him.”
“I told you, I don’t know where he is. He’s gone. He’s Kesyer Sözer.”
“What about the others?’
“You’re asking a lot, man.”
“No. I’m asking for exactly what I’m owed.” I take a smoke again. I don’t want to get into the next thing. “Tell me, Kas, like your life depended on it. Who killed Alice?”
Kasabian’s eyes dart back and forth in his head like they’re looking for the eject button. I recognize the look of panic. It almost feels like I can hear his heart speed up. But he doesn’t have a body, though maybe he’s still somehow connected to it.
“You know about that? All the way down there and you know about that?”
“Talk to me, Kas. The coyotes are calling.”
I look at the floor, but I don’t move. If I move, I’m going to break like glass. I can’t stand talking about her. I raise my gaze to meet Kasabian’s. If he had a body, he would have bolted.
“I don’t know much. It’s not like Mason or anyone stops by to talk over old times. I get the same rumors as everybody else. I heard Parker did it.”
“Mason sent him?”
“Parker doesn’t shit unless Mason tells him it’s okay, so yeah, Mason must have told him to do it.”
“Why? After all these years, why would he do that?”
“I don’t known, man. Seriously.”
I stare into Kasabian’s eyes and know he isn’t lying. He’s absolutely panicked as I come over to him. When I take the burning cigarette out of the ashtray and let him finish it, he looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry.
My Alice is dead and I’m alone.
“Tell me about the store,” I say. “How many employees are there?”
“Four or five. College kids. They come and go. It changes with classes and holidays. Allegra is the only one with any brains.”
“Who’s she?”
“She manages the place. I don’t like being down there with the customers.”
“She runs the place so you can stay up here and bootleg movies.”
“We do what we have to do to get by. I bet you did some dirty trick or two when you were in Hell.”
“You have no idea,” I tell him. “What time do you open in the morning? Does Allegra open the place?”
“Ten. Yeah, she does.”
There’s a closet behind the door to the stairs. I push the stairs door closed and open the closet. It’s mostly empty, except for waist-high metal storage shelves. I drag the body into the back of the closet, then bring in Kasabian’s head. I set him on top of the shelves. He says, “I’m a little claustrophobic.”
I look around the room. He can’t stay out in the open, in case someone comes up here. There’s a small bathroom, but there’s no way that I’m having Kasabian share my morning pee. Sitting on the bottom of one of the shelves is a small portable TV. I plug it in and turn it on while fiddling with its old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. A local news show comes on and I put the set on the shelf with Kasabian.
“Maybe this’ll ease your pain.”
Kasabian frowns. “You’re a real prick, Jimmy.”
“But I wasn’t always, was I?” I close the closet door halfway and stop. “You ever call me Jimmy again, I’ll nail this door shut. You can complain about claustrophobia for the next fifty years in the dark.” I close and lock the closet door.
I sit down on the bed, exhausted and in pain. It’s been an eventful day. I landed here with nothing and ended up with a nice new jacket and a pocket full of cash. I even have somewhere to crash and wash my face. The American dream.
I stretch out full on the bed and something else occurs to me. “I guess I’m in the video biz.” Damn, I even have a job.
I want to go and wash off the blood that’s drying on my belly and chest, but when I try to stand, my cracked ribs shoot to the top of my pain threshold and convince me that I can wait until morning. I shrug off Brad Pitt’s jacket and lie back carefully. The moment my head hits the pillow, I’m out.
Alice had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We’d been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, “I can do magic. Want to see?”
“Of course.”
She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom.
She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. When she came back to bed, she had a top hat and a deck of cards. She sat down and put on the hat, straddling me on top of the covers.
“Pick a card,” she said. I took one. It was the jack of diamonds. “Now put it back in anywhere you want. Don’t let me see it.” She made a point of closing her eyes and turning her head away.
“It’s back in, Merlin,” I said.
She waved a hand over the deck and mumbled some made-up magic mumbo jumbo and fanned out the deck across my stomach.
“Is this your card?” she said, holding up one of the cards.
It was the jack of diamonds. “Right as rain,” I told her. “You’re the real thing, all right.”
“Know how I did it?”
“Magic?”
She flipped the deck so that I could see the cards. It was fifty-two identical jacks of diamonds.
“That’s not real magic,” I said.
“Fooled you.”
“Cheat. You distracted me.”
“I have the power to cloud men’s minds.”
“That you do.”
She slid under the covers still wearing the top hat and mustache and we made love that way. The top hat fell off, but she wore the mustache until morning.
The night after her card trick, I told Alice about magic. I told her it was real and that I was a magician. She liked me well enough by then not to fifty-one-fifty me to the cops, but she looked at me like I’d just told her that I was the king of the mushroom people. So, I pinched the flame off one of the candles she’d lit and made it hop across my fingertips. I charmed old magazines, dirty shirts, and Chinese-restaurant flyers up from the floor, formed them into a vaguely female shape, and had them strut around the apartment like a fashion model. I made my neighbor’s yowling cat speak Russian and Alice’s tattoos move around like little movies under her skin.
She loved it. She was like a kid, shouting, “More! More!” What she didn’t want was anything serious. Every civilian I’d ever shown magic to had the same response—how can we use it to get rich? Let’s manipulate the stock market. Turn invisible and rob a bank. Throw on a glamour so that cops can’t see us.
Alice didn’t ask for any of that. I showed her magic and that was enough for her. She didn’t instantly wonder what the magic could do for her. She loved the magic itself, which meant that she could love me because I wasn’t likely to make anyone rich. We hadn’t been going out that long and she wasn’t sure about me yet. It didn’t matter. I was already nine-tenths in love with her and could wait for as long as it took for her to come around.
It took two more days.
She showed up at my door with a box from a run-down magic shop in Chinatown.
“I can do magic, too,” she said.
“Let’s see.”
The magic box was about the size of two matchboxes. She lifted the top off. Her middle finger lay inside the box, wrapped in bloody cotton around the bottom. The finger wiggled. Stiffened. She held up her hand so the severed finger flipped me the bird, the cheapest of cheap gags. Of course, she hadn’t chopped her finger off. She’d slid it up through a hole in the bottom of the box that already had cotton and fake blood inside. It was about the stupidest thing I’d ever seen.
I kissed her and took her inside. We never talked about her moving in. She just came in and never left, because she knew this was where she should be.
Later, when Alice and I were in bed and still drunk from our one month anniversary party, I told her that I had a dream where we were on a road trip, eating lunch in some anonymous little diner. She told the waitress that we were driving to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator and held up her engagement ring for everyone to see. It was the magic store box, still on her finger. When I finished telling her the story, she bit me lightly on the arm.
“See?” she said. “I told you I can do magic.”
Two
I SNAP AWAKE at the sound of the door slamming downstairs. I sit up, relieved that the pain in my ribs is gone. The good feeling is short-lived, however, when I realize that the room looks like a bad night in a slaughterhouse. The bloody jacket and shirt are still on the floor where I dropped them. I’m covered in dried blood, a lot of which I’ve managed to smear in a crimson Rorschach blot all over the bed while I was asleep.
I toss the jacket and shirt onto the dirty sheet, pull it off the bed and onto the floor. In the bathroom, I use up most of a roll of paper towels scrubbing the blood off me. The bullet wounds are just black welts surrounded by psychedelic-blue-and-purple bruises. If I twist the right way, I can feel the .45 slugs nestled inside me, like marshmallows in Jell-O salad. I’ll probably have to do something about getting them out, at some point, but not now.
The wet paper towels I toss on the sheet with the bloody clothes. In a little storage cabinet under the sink, I find a roll of black plastic garbage bags. Tear one off and stuff the bloody remains of last night’s square dance inside.
It hits me then that I still have a problem. I’ve just thrown away half of my clothes, leaving me with nothing to wear but taped-together boots and scorched jeans, which are starting to crack and come apart in places. For a second, I consider stealing the shirt off Kasabian’s body, but that’s too disgusting even for me. Plus, opening the closet door will just start his head screaming again.
I toss the room, tearing open boxes, looking for a lost and found or something one of the college kids might have left behind. I hit the jackpot—a whole box of store T-shirts is stuffed in the back, under the worktable. The shirts are black, with MAX OVERDRIVE VIDEO printed in big white letters on the back. Printed on the front is a fake store name tag that says Hi. My name is Max. Cute.
I stand by the door for a second, listening to Allegra move around downstairs. I can almost see her in my mind’s eye. She’s young. Bored and annoyed at having to open the store so soon after Christmas. I get a sense of brains and something else. Something she’s trying not to think about as she straightens the shelves and counts the cash in the till. Quietly, I open the door and start down the stairs, then turn around and go right back up. The .45 and Brad Pitt’s stun gun are lying on the floor. I stuff them under the mattress, then head back down.
Allegra is by the door, backlit by the light through the window. She looks to be not much older than I was when I was carried off to Oz. Maybe old enough to drink. Maybe not. She doesn’t wear much makeup. Black around her eyes. Gloss on her lips. She’s thin, with darkish café au lait skin. She’d look like Foxy Brown’s little sister, except her head is shaved smooth. Her coat and skirt are thrift store hand-me-downs, but her boots look expensive. An art school girl with priorities.
She looks up as I unlock the chain at the bottom of the stairs.
“Morning. You must be Allegra.”
Her head snaps up in my direction. “Who are you? Where’s Mr. Kasabian?”
“Kasabian had to leave town. Some kind of family crisis. I’m an old friend. I’ll be in charge of the place while he’s gone.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say. Allegra is angry. She tries to hide it with surprise, but doesn’t pull it off.
“Really?” she asks. “Have you run a video store before?”
“No.”
“Ever run any kind of retail operation?”
I come up front and lean on the counter, checking the floor for blood as I go. Only a few drops that I can spot. I tend not to bleed for very long, and it looks like Brad Pitt’s clothes soaked up most of what leaked out of me.
“Let me clarify. When I say I’ll be in charge, that doesn’t mean I’m going to actually be doing anything. I’ll mostly be gone or working upstairs.”
“Ah,” she says, even colder than before. She knows exactly what Kasabian does up there and she doesn’t approve. An L.A. girl with a conscience. They’re about as rare as unicorns.
“Not doing anything is Mr. Kasabian’s management style, too. You’ll fit right in.” Her heartbeat kicks up and her pupils dilate. Why the hell am I noticing these things?
She frowns, looks down, then up at me. “Please, don’t tell him I said that.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
Her breathing slows. She relaxes, just a hair. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What the hell is wrong with your clothes?”
“Yeah. I had a little accident coming into town,” I say, giving her a sheepish grin. It’s a look that girls used to like when I was young and not entirely unhandsome. Talking to a cute human girl that I might have flirted with in my former life, I forget for a second that I’m no longer young or handsome. I shift to what I hope is a more neutral expression.
“I might need to pick up some new things. What do you think?”
“Don’t bother. I hear that arson is the new black.” She crosses her arms, giving me her best defiant look.
“Stark.”
“Stark. Just the one name then, like Madonna?”
“Or Cher.”
“Okay, Mr. Stark …”
“Stark. No ‘mister.’ Just Stark.”
“Okay, Just Stark. Here’s the thing—I quit. I can run this place in my sleep, but Mr. Kasabian obviously doesn’t trust me enough, so he brings in some, if you’ll excuse me, thug buddy to keep an eye on me? No fucking thanks.”
“The last thing I’m here to do is keep an eye on you. The truth is, I don’t have any place to stay and Kasabian told me I could crash upstairs. The running-the-shop thing is purely honorary. As far as I’m concerned, you’re in charge. Run the place any way you like.”
“You still look like somebody I probably shouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, you said that.” I take a step toward her, waiting to see if she’ll take a step back. She doesn’t. Nervous, but brave. I like her already. “Listen, a thug is someone who’s out for no one but himself. Me? I take care of my friends.” Alice’s face flashes in my brain, a reminder of how empty a promise like that can be. Good intentions and a dime won’t get you a damned thing in this world. Reluctantly, I push Alice back into the dark. “Stay here and I guarantee that you’ll work in the safest video store in L.A.”
“Gee, that’s not at all terrifying.”
“Also, whatever Kasabian has been paying you, I’ll give you a fifty percent raise.”
Now I have her attention.
“You can do that?”
“There’s no one here to tell me I can’t. I figure, as long as I’m technically in charge, I can pay people whatever I like.”
“When will Mr. Kasabian be back?”
“I have no idea. You know how these family things are. It could be a while.”
She nods, looks down, then up at me. “Okay. I’ll stay. For now.”
Hallelujah. “Thank you, Allegra.”
“You’re welcome, Just Stark.”
I WAIT FOR an hour upstairs, until the store fills with the lunch-hour crowd. When there’s enough ambient noise downstairs, I figure that I can check on Kasabian and be covered if he starts screaming again.
He’s right where I left him on the shelf. When he sees me, he doesn’t scream. He just moans.
“For chrissake, put a bullet in my head or change the goddamn channel!”
On the set, some daytime talk show is playing. An older guy in a suit and a bottle blonde are talking about an actress I never heard of and a pasta maker that’s going to change everyone’s life.
“Please, turn this shit off.”
“I don’t know. That sounds like one damn fine pasta maker.”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you have a car?”
He stares at the TV, ignoring me. I reach over and turn down the sound.
“The keys are in my right hand pocket,” he says.
I tilt his comatose body to the side so I can reach into his pocket. Got ’em.
“What kind of car is it?”
“Give me back my body.”
“Where’s Mason?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Trust me, if I knew how to send you to Mason, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Then I’d ask him to let me watch as he ripped your balls off.”
I turn the talk show back up and lock the closet door. Muffled profanity comes from inside.
I grab the garbage with the bloody clothes and sheets and head down the stairs to the store. Allegra and another kid are behind the counter, busy with customers. There’s a rear exit to the store in a small storage room behind the porn section. I get out the bone blade and try a trick that worked in Hell. Placing the tip of the blade into the lock, I push it inside and turn. The lock clicks open.
Behind the store is a short alley with a couple of Dumpsters. I toss the garbage bag and head for the street.
It’s nice out. Sunny, but not yet hot. I feel a lot more human and settled today, just another normal guy with a .45 tucked in the back of his jeans, out to run some errands. I counted Brad Pitt’s money last night and it came to twenty-two hundred bucks, so I’m sure I can get everything I need.
I keep pressing the little unlock button on the key chain and my good mood evaporates when Kasabian’s car finally chirps. A white Chevy Aveo with a dented trunk. Only rental companies buy white American cars, which means that not only is Kasabian’s car a piece of shit, it’s a used piece of shit. But who’s more pathetic, the guy who drives a used piece of shit or the guy who steals it?
IT’S WEIRD STARTING over from zero. It changes the scale of your ambitions. Instead of fantasizing about what kind of mansion you’ll buy when you win the lottery, you ask yourself, Do I own socks? Do I have a toothbrush? Do I have a shirt that’s not covered in blood?
Money is strange, too, if you haven’t used it for a while. Hell is mostly a barter economy. Especially among the high and mighty, having to buy something is a massive social faux pas. It means that you don’t have anything good enough to trade or you aren’t clever enough to swindle your way to your heart’s desire. Brad Pitt’s wad seemed like a fortune when I counted it, but I blow through most of it in a couple of hours.
The big money goes for a few choice items. A new pair of Caterpillar steel-toed boots, because steel is always a good idea. I also pick up a long, light overcoat. There’s a reason spies and private eyes wear trench coats in all those old movies. They’re big enough to hide a multitude of sins, especially the kind with bullets. I pick up a long, charcoal-gray silk overcoat at a West Hollywood rent-boy boutique. Anything heavier than silk will look ridiculous in L.A., and wearing a black overcoat is nature’s way of telling you to lay off the Bauhaus.
Down on Melrose, the movie biz show-offs and trust-fund bikers meet at smart cafés for lattes and burgers that cost as much as a face-lift. Out in front of the cafés stretch long, gleaming lines of $40,000 Harleys that have never seen a speck of dust or a splash of mud. As much as these clowns set off the self-righteous parts of my white-trash ego, I know there’s one good thing about them. They demand the best bike gear available.
At a bike shop that’s laid out more like a museum than a store, I pick up leather race pants and an armored motocross jacket. After getting shot and almost stun-gunned, I like the idea of having a layer of Kevlar between the world and me. I also get a Kevlar jacket liner, a kind of long sleeve mesh shirt with armored panels sewn in. I’ll wear the liner under the overcoat and hope it’s not so bulky that I look like a robot in a bathrobe.
I put on my new boots, pants, and the motocross jacket in one of the dressing rooms, and toss my burned stuff into the trash on the way out of the store. That’s just about the last of it, I think. The last physical connections to my former life. The only thing left is the Germs T-shirt, now full of blood and bullet holes, stuffed under the mattress back at Max Overdrive. Maybe I should have tossed it with the rest, but Alice gave it to me, so it stays with me until I crash and burn for good.
When I parked the Aveo earlier, I left the .45 under the driver’s seat. I do a switch when I get back, putting the .45 in the bag with my new coat and leaving the Aveo’s keys on the seat. Maybe some desperate-for-wheels kid will find it, or a few homeless guys can turn it into a condo. I carry my bags down Melrose to do some car shopping.
There’s only one way to steal a car and not feel guilty about it, and that’s to steal the most expensive car you can find. That way, you know that it carries the maximum insurance possible, so whatever happens, the owner is covered. I pick out a black Mercedes S600, go around to the driver’s side, and using my body to block the view, stab the bone knife into the lock. I hold my breath. The car chirps once and the lock pops. I slide in with my bags, jam the knife in the ignition, and the engine purrs to life. I do a check of the mirrors and windows. No one is even looking at me. Stepping on the gas, I guide the Mercedes into the afternoon traffic.
THE BUILDING IS like the Sphinx—eternal and unchanging—exactly as I remember it. Same wrought-iron bars bolted over the first floor windows. The chicken-wire-embedded glass in the upper floor windows reveals dusty curtains and tattered window shades. The building manager’s window is easy to spot: there are shreds of the gold-leaf letters that once spelled out the safe company’s name. Instead of a curtain, the manager’s window is covered in foil. I’ve always wondered what goes on in there that he’s so desperate to keep out the light. Someday I’ll have to find out.
I watch the building for the time it takes me to smoke three cigarettes. Nothing unusual or even interesting happens. Cars drive by. An old woman wanders by pulling a couple of tired-looking Jack Russells.
I’m not sure about the wisdom of walking into the place in broad daylight, but I’m not getting any demonic vibes off the place. I snap the Veritas off its chain and give it a quick flip inside the car. Should I go in or not? The coin comes down with the morning-star side up. The Hellion script around the edge reads, Go back to the store and talk to the pretty girl. Nice. My magic coin is trying to get me laid. While I appreciate the thought, the timing stinks. I get out of the car, tuck the .45 under my jacket, and jog across the street to the building.
As usual, the front door is locked, but the side door, by the loading dock, is wide open. There’s a freight elevator to the right of the entrance. I pull down the upper gate, which closes the elevator’s wooden jaws, and hit the third-floor button with the side of my fist. The elevator jerks and starts to climb.
I could have stayed across the street and walked in here through a shadow. I could have walked through a shadow straight into my apartment. Fuck that. This is my home. I’m going in through the door.
When the elevator hits three, I roll up the gate and sprint right down the central corridor, then cut left. My place is at the end of a hall just long enough to let me get a running start. The door is the original, solid steel and balanced perfectly on two heavy metal hinges. I wouldn’t have thought about doing this before, but I’m a bit stronger now. I take a few long, running steps, swing my leg up, and slam my heel into the door. It pops open, the rusty lock mechanism spinning through the air like a metal Frisbee. I have the .45 up and in front of me, ready for anything.
“Well,” says the two-hundred-year-old Frenchman from his easy chair. “It fucking took you long enough.”
HE STANDS UP from a battered, green recliner. He’s a little taller than I remember and a little heavier, but he still has the same salt-and-pepper beard and close-cropped hair, the same impressive Roman nose and dark eyes that, at different times, might belong to your favorite uncle on Christmas morning or to the pissed-off ex-thug who’s about shove a power drill through your forehead.
I just look at him. Normally, I like hearing Vidocq shout “fuck” because he pronounces it “fock.” On the other hand, of the top ten people I didn’t expect to find here, he’s the entire top five. I stay put, not moving to the right or left, orienting my body so that, if I have to, I can make it out the door without looking.
“Vidocq? What are you doing here?”
“That’s how you greet a friend after all these years?” he asks, setting the battered book he’d been reading on the floor. “I’ve been waiting for you, keeping your home safe. You think I wanted to squat in this concrete shithole?”
I raise the .45 and aim it at his head. “How did we meet, old man?”
“Ah, you don’t think it’s me, no? You think this is some trap. I might, too, if I were you.” He picks up a tumbler filled to the top with wine so red it looks black.
“You and I met at a saloon. It’s closed now. Blood Meridian. This was before you met lovely Alice. We were both at the bar, each chatting up the same pretty girl, who stood between us. Neither of us had more than a few dollars then, so we’d employed a small memory charm on the bartender so that we could pay for drinks with the same money over and over again. When we realized what the other was doing, we forgot the pretty girl and talked about what and who we were, what and who we knew, paying the poor bartender with the same few dollars all night.”
“No great loss, from what I remember. The girl was pretty, but kind of wasted.”
“So were we, as I recall. Our sudden loss of interest offended her.”
“Next lifetime, I’ll buy her drinks and listen to her all night long.”
“Next lifetime.”
The gun suddenly feels heavy in my hand. I lower it. Vidocq, a head taller than me and half again as wide, comes over and crushes me in a long bear hug.
“It’s good to see you, boy,” he says.
Like the building, Vidocq hasn’t changed a bit. He looks about forty-five, but is old enough that he can tell you what guillotines sounded like offing the aristocracy during the French Revolution.
I look around the room. It doesn’t look right. Where’s all my stuff? Where’s Alice’s?
“How long have you been living here? Where is everything?” I ask.
“Alice moved out a few months after you disappeared. I saved your things and the things she left in the bedroom.”
“Where did she go?”
“She moved in with a friend in Echo Park. That’s where she was when the terrible things happened.”
“Mason murdered her. You can say it.” I feel stupid, but I have to ask him. “The friend she moved in with, was it a girl or a guy?”
“No, a girlfriend,” he says. “Alice had lovers after you were gone, but none of them were very serious. You broke her heart. She wasn’t the same girl.”
I go over to the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. The teakettle on the stove looks familiar, but not much else. And I’m not sure about the kettle.
“You checked up on her?”
“As much as I could. She didn’t really want to see anybody from your old days together. Certainly, no one associated with magic.”
That sounds like her. She didn’t like Mason or anyone else in the Circle. After I was gone, she’d want to get as far away from magic as she could. But she didn’t run far enough. I should have told her to leave town if something happened to me. I should have given her an escape plan. But what could happen to me? I was a golden boy. I was bulletproof.
I say, “Thanks for trying. And thanks for keeping the place. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d come in and found some asshole stranger sitting here.”
Vidocq picks ups the bottle of red wine from the coffee table, gets a glass for me from the kitchen, and fills it to the rim. He fills his glass, raises it, and we both drink. I sit down on the couch.
“So, how are you? What have you been doing since I’ve been gone?”
“I’ve been working. These days, the work is all I have,” he says. “Thievery pays for the tools, and the work shows me the mind of God. Stealing is a lot like alchemy, you know. In each, we each try to find what is beautiful and hidden and make it ours.”
“This is funny. The whole time we’ve known each other, I don’t remember you staying more than a few weeks anywhere. It’s hard to picture you here as a rent-and-electric-bill guy.”
“Don’t insult me. I wouldn’t pay a penny for this hovel. I used an old gypsy potion, a vin de mémoire manquée. I painted the walls, the windows, floor and ceiling, et voilà! Your home no longer exists. It is not seen or remembered, except, of course, by our funny sort of people. The Sub Rosa.”
The Sub Rosa. I haven’t thought about the Sub Rosa in a long time.
Vidocq is Sub Rosa. So are Kasabian, Mason, and the rest of the Circle. I’m Sub Rosa, too, though back in the day I never thought of myself that way, even though there are maybe a few thousand of us walking around Southern California.
Sub Rosas are the secret people who look just like you, but are different. They bank where you bank. They stand behind you in line at the coffee shop. They panhandle you for the money that you suddenly and inexplicably have to drop into their grimy hands. Some of us also talk to the dead. Some see the future, trade souls like baseball cards, or bribe angels for a peek at God’s to-do list. Mostly, Sub Rosas are the people regular people aren’t supposed to know about. It’s not that we don’t like you; it’s that you have a habit of burning us at the stake when you notice us.
Vidocq’s alchemical supplies and burglary gear cover nearly every surface—racks of potions, books and scrolls in Latin and Greek, alembics, test tubes, and grinding stones. On a table in a corner are the baubles he’s stolen on commission—netsukes, loose diamonds spilling from courier envelopes, passports, and computer discs. It was one of his less successful experiments that turned him immortal. He’s spent the last hundred and fifty years stealing things to fund his research for a cure.
“Thanks for watching the place. I’m glad you have it,” I tell him. “I couldn’t live here without Alice.”
He nods solemnly.
“Where will you live?”
“I’m crashing at a friend’s place. There’s a bathroom, a comfy bed, and all the movies you can eat. You should come by and see it.”
“It sounds charming.”
“I’m back here to kill some people, you know.” I blurt it out, trying to get the words out fast. “I’m going to take out the whole magic circle.”
“I knew that when you walked in. And I understand. I won’t even try to talk you out of it, but there are things you should know before you start.”
I can tell this is going to be a Real Talk. I light a cigarette as Vidocq pours more wine.
“I did something much like what you’re doing, many years ago. Long before you or your grandparents were born. Revenge is never what you think it’s going to be. There’s no pleasure and glory, and when it’s done your grief remains. Once a man does the things you’re talking about, he will never be the same, and he can never go back to who he was before. Worst of all, no matter how many enemies you kill, you are never satisfied. There is always one more who deserves it. When it becomes too easy to kill, it never ends.”
“You stopped.”
“The desire is still there, even though all the men are dead, the ones I killed and the ones who passed away during the many years I restrained myself. Worse, when it was over I had to leave Paris, get on a ship, and come here to the land of cheeseburgers and cowboys. You are starting down a bad road, my friend.”
“I appreciate the advice. Don’t worry. I’m not here to ask for help.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll help you. We must always look after our friends, even when they are foolish. Especially when they are foolish.”
“Thank you, old man.”
“Salut,” he says, and holds out his glass. I clink mine into his.
When I finish the cigarette, I take out the knife I used on Kasabian and pry up some boards under the coffee table. The oilcloth wrap containing my father’s guns is still there. I pull out the bundle and set the guns on the table, one by one. A good copy of an 1861 Navy Colt revolver, modified for modern .44 caliber shells. A heavy Civil War–era LeMat pistol. A Browning .45 semiauto my granddad used on D-day. And a Benelli M3 shotgun. They all need a good cleaning before I can use them.
Something flashes through Vidocq’s mind. I only catch a fragment of it before he pushes it away. Seeing it feels like a migraine coming on, a knife behind my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” asks Vidocq.
“There’s something funny going on with my head. I keep feeling and hearing things I shouldn’t. Like right now you’re sweating and your heartbeat is going up. Like maybe you’re a little afraid.”
“You’re back here from Hell, talking about murder, and you’re pulling guns from under my floor. Shouldn’t I be a little frightened for both of us?”
“There’s other things, too. I’ve turned kind of death-proof. I can get shot, ripped apart, dropped in a Cuisinart, and I just get up and walk away. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.”
“You fall into the Abyss a young magician and you emerge as Superman. How is that possible?”
“You’re the one with the all the books. You tell me.”
“Perhaps, like me, you were cursed with an inability to die.”
“What happened to you wasn’t a curse. You just decided it was. Besides, if anything, those Downtown demonfuckers would make me easier to kill so I’d get back there quicker.”
“Perhaps it’s simple biology. You’re the first living man to have entered Hell. Your condition might be a natural biological response. A side effect of having been in that awful place. Perhaps you should be grateful that you have this new gift to accentuate your natural magical abilities.”
“I don’t trust it. It means something I can’t figure out. Or it’s a setup. Nothing that happened down there was for my benefit.”
“We’ll know in time, then. Your friends in Hell will be after you soon, I suppose?”
“Eventually, but not now. There’s a war going on down there. It’s fucking chaos.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me.”
I get a dish towel from the kitchen, bring it back to the living room, and use it to wipe the dust from each gun. Even though I had them in the oil wrap, I can see traces of rust. I’ll have to clean them for real later.
“So, what was it like in Hell? Did you try to escape? You were always such a clever magician.”
“Clever magic doesn’t get you much down there. Even when I got stronger, I couldn’t cast the simplest hex until I started learning Hellion magic.”
“Is that how you got away?”
“No. I was the property of Azazel, one of Lucifer’s generals. He made me his designated hitman. He said that Alice would be all right, as long as I played along.”
“And then she wasn’t all right.”
“I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It’s like these new things I can hear and feel.” I gulped some wine. “Before I left, I cut out Azazel’s heart and left it on his altar.”
“How did you get out?”
“A key. A key to anywhere in the universe I want to go.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“It’s right here,” I say, putting my hand on my chest like I’m about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Over my heart. I took his knife, cut myself open, and put the key inside. Now I can walk through shadows to the Room of Thirteen Doors. Go anywhere I want, anytime I want. Back to Hell. Maybe Heaven, too. I don’t know. I haven’t opened all thirteen doors.”
“You put the key inside you? And it was made with Hellion magic? It will poison you.”
“Everything that happened to me for eleven years poisoned me. You think one little key is going to make a difference now?”
“This isn’t good, Jimmy.”
“Please don’t call me that. I don’t have that name anymore.”
“So, you are still afraid of them. Afraid they can find you through your name?”
“Not if no one uses it.”
“Your name is who you are. It’s your family. It connects you to this world. You can’t give it away so easily.” He took a long gulp of wine and said, “Wild Bill.”
“Especially, don’t call me that.”
Vidocq is one of the few people who know that my full name is James Butler Hickok Stark. That’s Wild Bill Hickok’s name, except for the Stark. I learned to shoot and appreciate guns young because we’re supposed to be direct descendants of Wild Bill, the greatest shootist of the American West. “Stark” was tacked on sometime after those prairie towns became cities to keep idiots from showing up at the door wanting to touch great-great-granddad’s legend. Or worse. There were more than a few fights and even some gunplay. The funny thing is no one knows for sure if we really are connected to Wild Bill. Supposedly, he left a few little bastards behind in Kansas and Missouri, so it’s possible. But it might just be a tall tale. My family never let facts get in the way of a good story.
“Wild Bill is dead. I’m just Stark.”
“That is your family, your identity. You can’t just walk away from your name.”
“I can and I have. I’m looking for Mason. He gave me to the Hellions for power and now I’m here to pay him back. Do you know where he is?”
“No one sees Monsieur Faim anymore. Like God, he is a great mystery. What will you do if you find him?”
“Kill him.”
“And then what?” Vidocq sets down his glass and steeples his fingers. “What you want may not be possible. Mason is a very powerful man these days. Very well protected.”
“I’ve gotten through to plenty of well-protected Hellions. And I learned a few things along the way. Want to know what the first lesson was?”
“Tell me, please.”
I pick up a little vial of mercury sitting on the coffee table and shake it, watching the light glint of its silver surface.
“Up here in the City of Angels USA, magicians worry about good and evil. White magic versus black.”
“All magicians think about those differences.”
“Not Downtown they don’t. Hellions understand something we don’t. That there is no white magic. There is no black magic. There’s just magic. You can kill with a healing spell as easily as with a curse. If you were having a heart attack right now, I could do a spell to slow your heart and keep it from beating out of your chest. I could regulate your blood pressure, bring it up or down. But I can use those same spells if you aren’t having a heart attack. I can turn down your blood pressure until you pass out. Slow and stop your heart. And you’d be just as dead as if I’d hexed you.”
“This isn’t Hell, boy. People will know. There are rules up here.”
“Not for me. I don’t even know if they can read my magic up here. If it will even disturb the aether.”
Vidocq picks up, and then sets down his wineglass with a thud. Loudly, he says, “Then why don’t you use it? Go on and do a location charm for Mason right now.”
I set down the mercury and look around the unfamiliar familiar room. “I can’t. I don’t know what will happen. The magic might not show up at all, or it might go off like fireworks at the Super Bowl. I can’t take a chance on anyone knowing I’m back.”
Vidocq smiles and wags his finger at me. “So, for all your power you have no power at all. That’s a little funny, don’t you think?”
“I have guns.”
“Yes, you’ll conquer the whole Sub Rosa with guns. More Roy Rogers bullshit.”
I think about that for a minute. “There are things I used in the arena. I’m going to have to get some weapons made. I need to find someone who can work with metal.”
“You must let me help you,” says Vidocq intently. “Let me help keep this plan of yours from going too far. I know that you’ve come back to Le Merdier, this world of shit, but where else is there for you to go? You must live here. You must have a name. You must be a man again.”
What’s that old Sunday school warning about how if you fight dragons too long, you can become one? That’s been spinning around in my head for years, long enough that I know I’d rather be a dragon than a sheep to the slaughter. Maybe, in some kinder, gentler version of the world, I could walk away from the Circle, get Zen, and forgive them for what they did to me. But I can’t forgive them for Alice. Never for that. Maybe I’m not worth killing for, but she is.
“I should go. I have to meet someone,” I lie. I set the guns back in the oilcloth and wrap them up. I’m feeling a little ashamed of myself, like I’m letting down the old man. Without looking at him, I ask, “Want to meet up tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
I make it out the door before he can give me another French bear hug.
I STEER THE Mercedes west toward the one other place in town that makes my skin crawl almost as much as the old apartment.
I turn off Sunset and onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The change from Hollywood to Beverly Hills is always sudden and startling, like flipping a switch. Bus fumes and strip-mall nail salons transform to trimmed green lawns and stately homes. This isn’t movie-star Beverly Hills, but the older part. The homes are large, but not bloated parade floats. It looks like grown-ups might have lived here.
After crossing Mulholland, I turn right into a maze of streets all named Doña. Doña Isabel. Doña Marta. Doña Sarita. When I find the right Doña, I park and sit for a minute, thinking. I should have seen something like this coming. Things had been going too easy since I got back. Brad Pitt wasn’t my fuck-you welcome back to the world. This is.
There’s no need to get out of the car, but I do anyway, and cross the street to the empty lot where Mason’s house—the place where our magic circle used to meet—once stood. The vacant land looks corrupt and out of place in this perfect landscape, like a starlet showing rotten teeth behind her million-dollar smile. Tall weeds grow through the sandy soil. There’s a faded sign with the name of a real-estate developer and a “Coming Soon!” message on top, but it doesn’t look like anyone has set foot anywhere near the lot in years.
The sun is going down fast. When a breeze picks up, I feel a chill. I know it’s all in my head. Even at Christmas, L.A. isn’t that cold, but it doesn’t stop my teeth from chattering.
Night is coming on fast. I walk back to the Mercedes, get in, and light up one of the last few cigarettes from the pack Carlos gave me. I look at the empty lot and wonder what happened there. It doesn’t look like the house burned. From what I remember, this neighborhood is on bedrock, so it probably didn’t fall down in a quake. It just went away. I know I should go over and walk around to see if I can find something that could point me to Mason and the others. But not tonight. The shit and sulfur smell when I was dragged to Hell through the basement floor are coming back strong. I stay in the car, and when the last of the cigarette is gone, I flick the butt onto one of the manicured lawns and drive away.
I DITCH THE Mercedes a few blocks from Max Overdrive. At another time it would break my heart to have to leave such a brilliant machine behind, but L.A. is an all-you-can-eat car buffet, and now that I’ve seen what the knife does to locks and ignitions, I’m never going to starve.
I grab the oilcloth bundle with the guns and the bags with my new clothes. When I get to the store, it is closed, but I rap on the glass and Allegra lets me in.
“Damn,” she says. “You clean up pretty good.”
“Thanks.” It feels nice being complimented by a human woman. The few kind words I’d heard in the last eleven years usually came from Hellions that looked like something a snake had just thrown up.
“Did you lose your key?”
“I forgot it. I haven’t had to carry one for a while.”
“Where did you live that you didn’t need keys?” She looks at something in her hand that’s beeping at her. It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring. She types something on the tiny typewriter with her thumbs, and smiles.
“What’s that you’re playing with?”
“You’ve never seen one of these? It’s a BlackBerry.”
“Is it like a phone? But you’re typing with it.”
“I’ve got it now. You’ve been in a coma since the seventies. No. Abducted by aliens.”
“You nailed me. Klatuu barada nikto.”
“The Day the Earth Stood Still, right? That was one of my favorites when I was a kid.”
“Me, too. So, why are you typing on your BlackBerry thing?”
“Just BlackBerry. Like you, Just Stark.” She turns the little device so I can see it better. “You can talk on it or you can send text messages. It’s like e-mail, only it’s instant. You’ve heard of e-mail, right.”
“Sure. But why would you type something to someone? Why not just call them?”
“Sometimes texting is more fun. Or, like now, if you’re sending someone an address, it’s nice to have it in writing.”
“What’s that on the screen?”
“It’s Google Maps. I looked up the address so I could give Michelle directions.” She clicks and the little screen changes. “See, you just get on the net and enter the address.”
“You have the Internet on that? If I got the Internet, I could look things up on it, right? Names, places, history?”
“First off, you don’t get the Internet. It’s the Web, and you don’t get it. You use it. And, yeah, you can look up anything you want.”
“Can I get one of these?”
She looks at me like I really have spent a decade with Martians.
“Of course. You just have to figure out what kind you want.” She types a few more words into the BlackBerry and puts it in her coat pocket.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No problem. I’ve got to go and meet some friends. Can you lock up after me?”
“Sure. Good night.”
“Night.”
I haven’t used keys for a while. What a stupid damn thing to say. I could see it in her eyes. She’s wondering if I’m flat-out crazy or a recent jailbird. Worse, she’s wondering if I’ve done something to Kasabian. Plus, she’s wondering about what’s wrapped in the dirty oilcloth. I’ll have to start locking the upstairs door. I’ll have to do something about her suspicions, too, but I don’t know what, and I’m not going to figure it out tonight. I take my bags and the bundle with the guns upstairs and drop them on the bed. Tomorrow I’ll check into the BlackBerry thing. Having the Internet or Web or whatever with me will help me catch up on the world and keep me from sounding like a newly landed Martian.
I go over and open Kasabian’s closet.
“Morning, sunshine. Sleep well?”
There’s a cheesy infomercial playing on the TV. Some guy in a chef’s uniform is waving kitchen utensils around.
“You ever see these knives, man? I just might have to get a set. They cut right through soda cans and bricks.”
“If I ever start eating bricks, I’ll come by and borrow them. You had any thoughts about our conversation last night? Like, where I can find some of the old crowd?”
Kasabian doesn’t look at me, but keeps staring at the TV. “They never rust, you know. And you never have to sharpen them. They’re amazing. They’re almost magic.”
“You’re really not in a position to be fucking with anybody right now.”
He finally aims his eyes up at me. “Think so? See, I think I’m in exactly the position where I can do any goddamn thing I want. You want to kill me? Go ahead. I wasn’t exactly having an E ticket life before and now I don’t even have that.”
“You’re not getting back your body. Someday maybe, but not right now.”
He turns back to the TV. “Did you meet Allegra? That is one sweet little piece of art girl scooter pussy. It’s not like I fucked her yet or anything, but New Year’s is coming and I figure some champagne, a couple of roofies, and I’ll finally know if the carpet matches the drapes.”
“Whether you mean any of that or not, you really are just puke on two legs.”
“I don’t have any legs, asshole.” He nods toward his body. “Aw, did I offend the serial killer? I’m so sorry. Murder anyone today? Cut off any friends’ heads?”
I recognize the pose, the B-movie defiance. I tried the same thing in Hell. It’s hard to scare someone who thinks he has nothing to lose. The trick is to remind him that there’s always something left to lose. For some, it’s family or friends. For a creep like Kasabian, demonstrating the possibility of future loss is easy.
I get his gun from the bed, wrap it in a towel from the bathroom, and fire off three shots in the direction of his body.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he screams. “I need that!”
“All of it? You’ve got two knees, two kidneys. That’s a spare for each.”
“Fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
“You want to answer some questions or do you want me to play William Tell?”
“You know, this, right here, is why it was so easy for Mason to sell you out and why the rest of us didn’t really care.”
“Why was that?”
“Because you’re such a dick.” He raises his eyebrows at me, hoping I’ll react. I don’t. “Back with the Circle, Christ, you were just a punk kid and you had all this power. More than any of the rest of us, including Mason. But did you care? Hell no. It all came too easy for you. The rest of us had to kill ourselves studying to get the simplest spell to work. Most of the time, you didn’t even pretend to study the books. You’d just make up something on the spot and angels would fly out of your ass. Do you know how that made the rest of us feel?”
“So, you sent me to Hell because I hurt your feelings?”
“No, because you hurt Mason’s. You never let up on the guy.”
“If I gave Mason a hard time it’s because he deserved it. Always going on about being a great dark magician. He didn’t want to learn anything from magic. He didn’t even want to have fun with it. He just wanted to be Lex Luthor. I might not have given him so much grief if I’d known what a little hothouse flower he was.”
“See? You’re still doing it. But for all your bullshit and your show-off magic, Mason beat you, didn’t he? You could pull magic out of the air, but he ended up with real power and you ended up blowing demons for eleven years. Every night, before I go to sleep, I cherish the look on your face as they dragged your ass down to Hell.”
Without looking where I’m aiming, I pop off a couple more rounds in the direction of his body.
“Stop it! Stop, goddammit! What do you want to know?”
“Same thing I wanted yesterday. Where’s the rest of the Circle?” I toss the gun onto the bed. God, I want a cigarette. “Let’s try a different approach. You’re right here, so where’s Jayne-Anne?”
If Donald Trump and the Wicked Witch of the West had a kid, it would be Jayne-Anne. She looks like a librarian with some money and good taste in clothes, but underneath the Versace, she’s Godzilla with tits. She isn’t as powerful a magician as Mason, but next to him she’s the most focused and ruthless and, in her way, scarier than bad dog Parker.
“I don’t know. I heard she’s got some kind of movie-business gig.”
“What about Cherry Moon?”
Crack open a pedophile’s piñata and Cherry Moon is the candy that falls out. She’s a Lollipop Doll, one of a gang of girls who take their manga and anime a little too seriously. They all want to grow up to be Sailor Moon and Cherry had the magical skill to do it. Last time I saw her, she was in High Gothic Lolita drag, radiating rough sex and looking all of twelve years old.
“Also don’t know about her. Someone said she’s running some kind of spa or plastic surgery thing for rich assholes.”
“I’m glad to hear that everyone’s using their new power for such worthy causes.”
“We’ve all gotta eat. Not me right now, but generally.”
“Where’s TJ?”
He rolls his eyes when I say the name. “That fucking hippie. After the Lurkers grabbed you, he bawled like a little girl for days. Some people aren’t cut out for real life.”
“Lurker” is what the Sub Rosa call any secretive magical, mystical, or monstrous freak that isn’t them. A naiad is a Lurker. So are zombies and werewolves. Undercover cops are secretive and sometimes monsters, but they aren’t Lurkers. They’re just pricks.
“Where is he?”
“Sucking dirt in Woodlawn. The little faggot hung himself a week after you went bye-bye. Guess he couldn’t get the monsters out of his head.”
Poor dumb kid. TJ was even younger than me. He would have been sixteen or seventeen back then. But Kasabian is right about one thing; some people aren’t built to see the dark side of magic or deal with the vicious parts of life. TJ never belonged in our little wolf pack. In a way, I was glad he was gone. I hadn’t been looking forward to hunting him down.
“I guess we covered Mason and Parker last night. Mason’s gone and he took Parker with him. Do I have that right?”
“Yeah. And don’t ask me about them because I don’t know. People see Parker around town sometimes. Usually right before some other nosy magician gets his neck broken.”
The thought of an attack dog like Parker and a Darth Vader wannabe like Mason running wild with heads full of Hellion hoodoo does not take me to a happy place. And the two of them could be holed up anywhere, from Glendale to Bhutan.
“You been out to the old house yet? Pretty, isn’t it?”
“What happened to it?”
“Don’t know. Maybe Mason took the house with him. Did you find anything good when you went inside?”
“Inside what? The house is gone. What’s there to find?”
“You simple son of a bitch. The basement’s still there. You’ve got to go underground.” Kasabian gives me an appraising look. “What, did you just drive up and leave? Pretty tough, tough guy.”
Beautiful. Now I have to burrow like a groundhog into Mason’s basement to the same room where he summoned those things to take me Downtown. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan.
When I turn to leave, Kasabian yells at me.
“Hey, asshole. I gave you information. At least let me have a cigarette.”
“I’m out, so tonight we both suffer. I’ll pick up more tomorrow.”
I step out of the closet, and just before I close the door, I say, “I almost forgot. Your car was parked in a two-hour zone and I was afraid you were going to get a ticket, so I gave your car away.”
“You what?”
“Sweet dreams.”
I SIT ON the edge of the bed wanting a cigarette, but unable to summon the will to go out and find a store that’s still open. The bullets in my chest ache, almost like someone shot them in there. I think one of the slugs is scraping against a rib. I get up and scrounge around the room, moving furniture, opening cabinets, and digging through piles of empty DVD cases. Finally, at the bottom of a box filled with mangled porn tapes—I don’t want to even think about how they got that way—I find a bottle of cheap, no name vodka in a plastic screw-top bottle. In high school, we called drinks like this Devil’s Rain after an old horror movie. That strikes me as pretty funny, under the circumstances. I screw off the top and take a drink. The vodka burns my throat, and tastes like Windex and battery acid.
I can’t believe that some small, ridiculous part of me feels kind of sorry for a pig like Kasabian. To spend your whole life brownnosing and riding on the coattails of smarter and more talented magicians, then having them dump you like the prom date who wouldn’t put out right as they become infused with who knows what kind of power, has to sting. It has to be the final confirmation of all your worst fears, that you really are the chump you were always afraid you might be.
I, on the other hand, was exactly the prick Kasabian said I was. While he was struggling with kindergarten levitations and Mason was compulsively showing off some new spirit conjuration or fire blast, I bullshitted my way through magic the way I bullshitted my way through everything else, pretty well.
Magic really was always easy for me. At my fifth birthday party, I floated the family cat over to Tiffany Brown, a redhead I had a crush on, and dropped it on her. Tiffany didn’t get the joke and that was the end of my first romance.
When I was twelve, the teacher had us make clay animals in art class. I squeezed together some fat little birds. Then I made them fly around the room and out the window. I got suspended for a week for that one, though no one could explain to me exactly why.
I didn’t even know I was doing magic back then. All I did know was that I could do funny tricks and make the other kids laugh.
My family never talked about it, but they knew what I could do. I was dangerous when I got sick. I’d break windows with a look. My fevers started fires. I only learned that what I was doing had a name when my father gave me an old, leather-bound book titled A Concise History and Outline of the Magickal Arts. I knew right away what I was. Not a warlock or a wizard. That was Disney stuff to me. I was a magician. A few years later, I found out there were other magicians and some invited me into their tight little Circle. Then they tried to kill me.
Sitting on Kasabian’s bed, drinking his lousy vodka, I can picture Jayne-Anne, Cherry, Parker, and Mason sitting high above the city in one of those houses that hangs over the side of a hill on spindly spider legs, daring the earth to throw an earthquake their way. Each of them knows they’ll survive. Even without magic, they’ll survive, because that’s their greatest talent. And soon they’ll be up on another hill, looking down on us losers. They’re strong and we’re weak because we won’t do the things they did to get up to the top of the hill.
They’re right, of course. We won’t crawl through the shit, and over the bones and bodies of the dead. By their definition of the word, we really are weak, no matter how much we’d like to imagine ourselves being as cold and hard and determined as they are.
On the other hand, it might be fun to crawl up the hill one night and strap some dynamite to the spider legs holding up their houses. We’d jump on the roofs, like kids jumping on sleds in the snow, and ride down the hill until their bright, candy-colored mansions crash into the sea.
Between the bullets in my chest and the talk with Kasabian, sleeping isn’t going to be easy tonight. Kasabian’s vodka is pretty much poison, but it’ll quiet the noise in my head and that’s good enough.
When I finally drift off into alcohol dreamland, I’m back in Hell, lying in the dirt on the floor of the arena. My belly is slashed open and I’m holding my innards in with my hands. The beast I’d been fighting, a silver bull-like thing with a dozen razor-sharp horns, is lying dead a few yards away. They always had me fighting weird animals. I didn’t know for a long time that it was another Hellion insult. They made me a bestiari. It was a Roman thing—a fun way to use their dumbest, gimpiest, most cross-eyed fighters. Bestiari weren’t good enough to fight people, so they fought animals. Why waste a human gladiator on someone who had just as good a chance of cutting off his own leg as stabbing his opponent? Plus, it was fun watching bears eat retards. Still is, really.
A couple of Hellion arena slaves roll me onto a stretcher and take me backstage. In the fighters’ quarters, a wizened old Hellion gladiator trainer shuffles over and hands me a bottle of Aqua Regia. That’s medical care in Hell. A hospital in a bottle. Later, the same old Hellion comes by with a needle and werewolf-hair thread and sews me up.
Later that night, Azazel, my slave master, sends for me. Fresh wounds or not, when he calls, you go. At least he’s reasonable enough to send a couple of burly damned souls to carry me to his palace on a litter.
None of the palaces in Hell come close to Lucifer’s in size or beauty. Lucifer lives at the top of a literal ivory tower, miles high. You can’t even see the top from the ground. The joke is that he built it that high so he can lean out the window and pound on Heaven’s floor with a broom handle when he wants them to turn down the choir.
Lucifer’s four favorite generals have their own palaces.
Azazel is Lucifer’s second favorite general, so his palace is second only to Beelzebub’s in size and beauty. Beelzebub is Lucifer’s favorite general. While Azazel’s palace is made entirely of flowing water, Beelzebub’s is mud-and-dung bricks covered in human bones. Not what you’d call pretty, but it makes a statement.
Inside Azazel’s palace it’s all Gothic arches and stained glass, laid out in classic cathedral style. A carpeted nave leads to an altar at the far end where a mammoth clockwork Christ buggers the Virgin Mary every hour on the hour.
“You’re going to use those arena skills of yours to kill Beelzebub for me,” says Azazel.
“Don’t I rate a night off? I’m held together with Silly String and good wishes.”
He smiles, showing his hundred pointed teeth. “Perfect. Then no one will suspect you. More importantly, they won’t suspect me.” He hands me something, a sharpened piece of spiral-cut metal, like a long ice pick. I’ve seen it before. It’s General Belial’s favorite weapon. “Leave that behind, but be sure to dip it into Beelzebub’s blood first.” He pauses. “And wear gloves. I don’t want your human taint all over it. They have to think that Belial did it.”
“Beelzebub’s palace is a fucking fortress with about ten times more troops and guard animals than you have. And he knows I work for you. His guards will never let me get near him.”
Azazel shows me his teeth again. He likes doing that. It used to make me want to pee my pants. Now it’s just a ritual, like a dog biting another dog’s throat to remind it who’s the alpha.
Azazel reaches into his robes made of shimmering golden water and pulls out a heavy brass key. “Have you ever heard of the Room of Thirteen Doors?” he asks. “This key will take you there. The room leads to anywhere and everywhere in the universe simultaneously. Including Beelzebub’s bedroom.”
He hands me the key. It’s heavier than it looks and weirdly soft. I realize that it’s not made of brass after all. It’s living skin over bones.
“In one hour, you’ll enter the Room of Thirteen Doors through a shadow behind this altar. From the room, you’ll go out through the Door of Fire. That’s a killing portal. It will take you right to your prey. Once you’ve killed Beelzebub, leave Belial’s weapon and return here.”
I turn the key over in my hands. I should be horrified by it, but I’m not. There’s something animal-like about the key, like it’s a pet that wants to please its master.
“You’re thinking that I’ve given you your means to escape, aren’t you?” Azazel asks.
“Me? I love it here, boss. Why would I ever want to escape?”
He touches the edge of the key with a fingertip.
“Lucifer can leave Hell and travel easily through the cosmos, while the rest of us are bound here, cursed by the heavenly enemy. I’ve found a way out. Not for me, but for someone like you. However, you should remember not to go too far. Though I can’t leave Hell, I have some influence in your world, among those humans dedicated to Hell. Cross me, try to escape from me, and something awful will happen to the one you love. That pretty girl you left behind. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“You’re not leaving here. Someday maybe, but not right now and not for a good long time.” Azazel turns and starts away. “Keep the key next to your body. That way, it will know to open the room to you. Wait an hour before you go. I need to be somewhere public when it happens.”
An obedient little slave, I do as my master tells me. I wait an hour and slip into a shadow behind the altar. Passing into that utter blackness feels like falling through cool air.
I find myself in a semicircular room that, surprise, contains thirteen doors. Each door seems to be made from a different material. Wood, water, air, stone, metal. More abstract things, too. The Door of Dreams moves and writhes, reshaping itself from second to second. There’s a sound from the far side of the room. I go to the only unmarked door and listen. There’s something moving behind the door and it knows I’m here. Something growls and scratches to get at me. Then there’s a shriek, a long, keening, furious animal sound that hits me like a knife dragged through my skull. Right then and there I know I’m going to do whatever Azazel wants and kill any damned Hellion he tells me to. I’ll be his servant as long as he leaves Alice alone and never, ever asks me to go through the unmarked door.
I wake up with the taste of Hell in the back of my throat. I know it’s just the bad vodka, but that doesn’t help. My head is full of monsters and I’m one of them. I sit up smelling sulfur and I want to kill something. I want a Hellion to burst through the window so I can take this bone knife and cut its black heart out. There are so many questions left. It feels like I’ve been doing nothing but talking since I got back. I need to do something. I need to hurt something. I need to kill Azazel, but I’ve already killed him.
I’m afraid. I’m so fucking afraid. I don’t know what’s worse, Hell or this stupid world where I’ll never be at home. But I need to keep talking to people. I need to keep asking the right questions. And I’ve already missed maybe the most important question of all.
I roll out of bed and slam the closet open, nearly tearing the door off its hinges. Kasabian lets out a yelp and turns his eyes up at me. I pick up his head in both hands and hold him so that we’re eye to eye.
“I have one question for you and I swear to God and the devil and everything holy and unholy that if you fuck me around for even one second, I will drop you in the ocean right now. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah.” He barely whispers the word.
“Where’s Alice’s body?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I swear, I don’t know. Jesus, even I’m not that fucked up. Parker would know. He killed her. Parker’s the one that can tell you.”
There’s real terror in Kasabian’s eyes. I’m still holding him up, squeezing him tighter than I thought. His cheeks are red and starting to bruise. I set him back on the shelf and lean against the wall.
Kasabian stares at me like he’s never seen me before.
“What are you, hypoglycemic or something? Go eat a muffin, for shit’s sake.”
“I’ll bring by some cigarettes later,” I tell him, and close the closet door.
At least I got to ask the big question, but I’m not any less agitated. Kasabian was telling the truth a minute ago; I could see in his mind that he would have made something up if he could have thought of a convincing enough lie. That means I can’t find Alice’s body until I track down Parker. I’m still so wound up from having Hell in my head all night that I need to break something, and soon. I hate it when I get this way. Do they have anger-management classes for hitmen?
Allegra’s voice comes from downstairs. I didn’t hear her come in. She’s talking into her BlackBerry. I look around for a clean shirt and realize that I forgot to buy some yesterday. I steal another Max Overdrive shirt from the box and go downstairs quietly. I’m not in the mood for this, but I need to do something now so that I don’t have to do something worse later.
Allegra is still on the phone and has her back to me. She doesn’t hear me come up behind her. When she turns around and sees me, she jumps a little.
“Jesus, you’re quiet,” she says. Then, into her BlackBerry, “No, not you. Let me call you back.” She takes off her coat, stashes it behind the counter, and begins setting up the money and register for the day. “I thought you were upstairs. I heard noise.”
“I had a movie on. Dust Devil. You ever see it?”
“Isn’t that a horror flick?”
“Sort of a horror movie crossed with a spaghetti western. You ought to take a look. The girl character dumps her boyfriend and then spends the rest of the movie trying to get away from a ghost world killer who’s sort of in love with her. She runs, but she’s no coward. She fights back and stays brave. You’d like her.”
“Thanks. I’ll have a look.” She gives me a distracted smile.
“Listen, I’m sorry if I said anything stupid last night. I haven’t been in the city in a long time. I grew up here, but it might as well be the dark side of the moon.”
“I feel that way sometimes, too.”
“There’s something else you’re wondering about. You’re wondering if I’m an ex-con. The answer is yes.”
“Oh.” She busies herself breaking open rolls of coins and putting the change in the register. “I only wondered because of, you know, the scars.”
“Would it help if I told you that I didn’t go away because of something I did, but because of something someone else wanted?”
“Are you, like, on parole?”
“It’s more of a work-release thing. If things work out, I won’t be going back at all.”
“I had a boyfriend who did time.”
“A dealer, right?”
She looked up at me, her expression shifting from interest to suspicion. “How did you know that?”
“A long time ago, I had a girlfriend named Alice. Your eyes are like hers were when I first met her. There’s this funny thing that happens to girls’ eyes when they’ve been in love with a dealer. It’s a real particular look. More than not trusting people. It’s like you’re trying to figure out if they’re the same species as you, like they might be a snake in a people mask.”
She’s still looking at me, sizing me up, and trying to classify me as animal, vegetable, or mineral. “Can we maybe change the subject?”
“Sure. I just wanted you to know the truth. I’m not a snake. I’m just a person like you.”
She turns a key on the register, clearing yesterday’s transactions and getting ready for today’s. “But it’s not the whole truth, though, is it? You’re not like Michael was, but there’s still a little bit of the snake thing going on behind your eyes.”
“What do you expect? I’m from L.A.”
She laughs. I can hear her breathing steady, her heart slow. Her fear doesn’t disappear; she’s too smart and wary for that. But she’s not going to call the cops or stab me in my sleep, and what more can you ask of a pretty girl?
I start upstairs, but turn back to Allegra. “What day is it?”
“Thursday. It’ll be New Year’s in a few days.”
“We should get some champagne for the store. And those popper things, too. They look like little bottles. Take some money out of the till and go buy whatever you think is fun.”
“How much can I spend?”
“Buy whatever you want.”
“Hey, those were nice leathers you had on yesterday. Do you have a motorcycle?”
“I might just pick one up today.”
WHEN I WAS Downtown, Galina, one of Azazel’s vampire drinking buddies, liked to regale me with stories about what it’s like to hunt humans. She would go into exquisite detail, mostly to spoil my dinner. Sometimes to screw me up before a fight in the arena. She had a gambling problem.
Galina told me that most vampires work hard to keep a low profile. They dress, act, and often get jobs like regular people. Most vampires only feed once a month, at the new moon. A month is the longest vampires can go without fresh blood, unless they don’t mind shriveling to something that looks like hundred-year-old beef jerky.
There are the other vampires, too. The kind they make movies about. Mad-dog, Dracula-Has-Risen-from-the-Grave psycho killers. They hunt every night just for the sheer meat-market thrill of it. The craziest ones don’t even wait for night. They hunt during the day. Streaking from shadow to shadow, they snatch people right off the street and feed on them behind Dumpsters or in crack houses, next to the other addicts.
These vampires hunt for kicks, but not for fun. They hunt for rage. They hunt because something inside them is broken, and no matter how much new blood they fill their bellies with, it turns to fire in their veins. They hunt and kill because they need to, because if they didn’t, they’d tear their own heads off. Just like any fix, the calm that comes from the kill doesn’t last long, but for a few minutes or maybe an hour, the fire fades to a single glowing ember and they’re at peace. Until they need to hunt again.
If I learned anything Downtown it’s this: I’m not a vampire, but I am a junkie. And every junkie needs a fix.
A DELIVERY VAN is pulling away from the curb outside the Bamboo House of Dolls. I go in and see stacks of whiskey in boxes, steel beer kegs, and Carlos by the bar, flanked by three lanky skinheads. One is in a bomber jacket, one is in a T-shirt of some black metal band, and the third, a huge skinhead, is in a German military officer’s coat.
Bomber Jacket jerks his head toward me. “We’re closed!”
“Just a quick one, sweetheart,” I say. “So I know you love me.”
Bomber Jacket pulls out—can you fucking believe this guy?—a Luger pistol, like he thinks he’s Rommel. Quicker than he can react, I scoop up one of the beer kegs and underhand it at him. It slams into his chest and knocks him across the room. The Luger flies out of his hand and lands on the floor somewhere near the bar.
The shaved ape in the officer’s coat starts across the room at me while the black metal skinhead pulls an impressive shank from his boot. Just to make things fun, I go straight for the one with the knife. This confuses the ape, who turns just as I reach his pal, whose arm is straight out, trying to pig-stick me. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone up against a human, so I don’t know if I’m really fast or if these geniuses are really slow, but I slip past the skinhead’s blade and pop him in the elbow, hyperextending the joint just enough to hurt, but not to snap. While little birdies are still flying around his head, I grab his arm and do-si-do around him, swinging him into the ape just as he comes up behind me.
But the ape is too huge to go down. He staggers back a step then lunges at me, faster than I expected. Fast enough to get hold of my jacket and throw a fist as hard as a tire iron into my jaw. I don’t want to get into a real fight with this guy because I’m more interested in his partner with the knife. When he loads up for another John Wayne punch, I grab one of the squat, bottom-heavy glass candles off the bar and smash it into the side of his head. That sends him staggering back to the opposite wall, where he slides down like a pile of bloody laundry.
The guy with the knife is back on me. He has just enough brains to know not to try to stab me straight on, so he’s going for a slashing attack. His arm blurs back and forth, then down, then up, trying to catch me off guard and bleed me. I parry his blows, letting one land on my forearm or shoulder occasionally. This is what I’ve wanted, a real chance to test the Kevlar armor in this jacket. He’s working up a pretty nice sweat, coming at me with all he’s got. Still, he’s easy to dance around, easy to block. His face is contorted and frantic with anger. As long as I let him get a shot in every now and then, I bet he’ll keep coming until he dies of old age or a stroke.
The guy I hit with the beer keg hasn’t moved, but the ape is getting back to his feet. Time to wrap things up.
As the black metal skinhead slashes down at my head, I reach up with my right hand and grab the knife. There’s a familiar ache, like electricity and heat, as the blade slices deep into my palm. I slam the heel of my left hand up under his jaw, staggering him, then twist my right hand, snapping the blade cleanly off his knife. As the ape rushes me, I go low and shove the broken blade deep into his thigh. He howls in pain and falls against the bar.
Damn, it feels great to hurt idiots.
None of the skinheads is getting up for a minute, so I look around for the Luger. Carlos is behind the bar, frozen in place, like he’s not sure if he’s more afraid of me or the Nazis on the floor. I spot the gun under a stool at the end of the bar and kneel to get it.
Good thing, too.
A blue-white ball of plasma misses me by a few millimeters and explodes against the far wall.
I wheel around and see him. It occurs to me that I might have been having a little too much fun before. I hadn’t thought to check if there was another skinhead in the storeroom. I snatch the Luger from under the stool, but it doesn’t help because the new skinhead does something a lot more interesting.
He holds up his right hand. There’s something with a glowing end. Gnarled like a short tree branch. It extends from his hand and wraps around his forearm to his elbow. It’s a piece of a Devil Daisy. I don’t know the real name. Devil Daisy is just what I called them. I haven’t seen one in a long time and that was in the arena. That’s all I get to think before he blasts a tongue of blue-white dragon fire at me. I’m still afraid to use magic. All I can do is dive to my left, rolling over some tables and chairs and landing on the floor. The second shot goes wide, as does his third. Still, I feel the heat and skin-crawling static as each shot streaks by.
This is some powerful magic the skinhead is packing, but it’s obvious from the way he’s waving the branch around that he doesn’t fully understand what it is or how to use it, beyond a dim aim-and-pray strategy.
My theory that he’s not in control of the weapon is confirmed when the ape yells something and the guy with the Devil Daisy turns and almost blows his own foot off. It’s the Three Stooges with death rays over there. The one I took the Luger from yells, “Asshole!” He gets to his feet and he and the ape, limping, with the knife still in his leg, get the skinhead I hit with the keg between them and drag him out the door. The one with the Daisy backs out of the place, holding the branch out like he’s covering himself with a gun.
“What the fuck was that?” yells Carlos.
“The Nazi asshole must have had a flare gun,” I lie.
I walk over, drop the Luger on the bar, and push it to Carlos. “Merry Christmas. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I don’t know. Put it up next to the tiki dolls.”
“I don’t like guns. Is it loaded?”
I pop the clip out, check it, and slide it back in. “Yeah. Keep it behind the bar. Those guys are going to come back. Not tonight, but sometime soon.”
“You think so?”
“Definitely.”
“I still don’t want it,” he says, and pushes the Luger toward me. I flick on the safety and shove it into my jacket pocket. Carlos nods toward me. “You’re bleeding,” he says, and hands me a clean bar towel. I wrap it around the hand I used to grab the skinhead’s knife. The hand still hurts, but it’ll stop bleeding by the time I walk outside.
Carlos leans on the bar. “So, what are you? Special Forces? Some kind of ninja?”
“Yeah, I’m the ghost of Bruce Lee. You have a cigarette?” Carlos shakes his head. The moment is still burning bright for him, but it’s over for me. The rage has gone south and now I have a bigger problem. No question I was shot at by a magic weapon, but it was used by someone who had no idea what he was doing. I consider the possibility that Mason sent the skinheads, not to shake down Carlos, but to ambush me, only that doesn’t make any sense. If Mason decides to send a hit squad for me, he’ll make sure they know exactly what weapons they’re packing and how they work.
So, what devil Kris Kringle is handing out death rays to pinheads?
“Can I borrow your phone?” I ask. Carlos hands it to me and I dial the number of my old apartment. Vidocq picks up.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER Vidocq and I are sitting in a doughnut shop on Sunset drinking coffee and eating. He’s paying. I’m close to tapped out. At least I spent Brad Pitt’s money well. Before Vidocq got to Donut Universe, I’d examined the motocross jacket for damage. The Kevlar did a pretty good job. None of the knife slashes made it through the armor down to me. All the damage was to the leather, and I could fix that with gaffer tape.
“I’ve heard of power amulets like guns, but not like the one you describe,” says Vidocq. “But I think I know someone who will. I’ll introduce you soon.”
The Frenchman puts a paper bag on the table. I take a bite of my Bavarian cream.
“What’s that?”
“Look for yourself,” he says, and pushes the bag at me. I open it and look inside. It’s full of shirts.
“They are yours. You look like a fucking child in those video store things. You should wear your own clothes. They will help you remember who you are.”
I roll down the top of the bag and put it on the seat beside me. I suppose I do look stupid in these shirts. In my head I’m still nineteen. Time is stuck there and it’s like a punch in the balls every time I look in the mirror. At least no one will bother me for ID when I buy beer now.
But I don’t want to look at what’s in the bag right away. Part of me wants to burn everything Alice and I left behind eleven years ago. Another part wants to leave it all right where it is, frozen in time, like bugs trapped in amber. It never occurred to me to wear any of my old clothes again.
“There was something weird and familiar about that amulet and I’ve been trying to remember what since I left the club.”
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Richard Kadrey
Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero in Sandman Slim, star of this gripping, gritty new series by Richard KadreyLife sucks and then you die. Or, if you’re James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.Now Stark’s back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you’d expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future.Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.Darkly twisted, irreverent, and completely hilarious, Sandman Slim is the breakthrough novel by an acclaimed author.
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published by Voyager US 2009
Copyright © Richard Kadrey 2009
“Alice,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Copyright © 2002
By Jalma Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Richard Kadrey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007460977
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007445998
Version: 2017-10-18
For Nicola
Just judge of vengeance,
grant the gift of forgiveness,
before the day of reckoning.
– DIES IRAE, REQUIEM MASS
The dumber people think you are, the more
surprised they’re going to be when you kill them.
– WILLIAM CLAYTON
Table of Contents
Cover (#u07294287-8df5-5cd4-b557-a8d8bd13ef18)
Title Page (#u7a250738-e21d-5b89-b3b3-6dcfea85dd66)
Copyright (#ue1290dd2-a406-5739-a267-9b0d69dcd0c5)
Dedication (#ua7581ff9-d8e4-50e9-adfe-428e028109fa)
Epigraph (#u29059cb0-fcf5-593a-9203-f0593b075c93)
One (#ua5c6f9bb-5e5c-5eaa-a672-08ad395abb5c)
Two (#u7e190e1b-67f7-5594-a021-b94891fcb0bf)
Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Richard Kadrey (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One
I WAKE UP on a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don’t come to me until later. Right now all I know is that I’m back in the world and I’m on fire. My mind hasn’t quite kicked in yet, but my body knows enough to roll off the burning trash and to keep rolling until I can’t feel the heat anymore.
When I’m sure I’m out, I struggle to my feet and shrug off my leather jacket. I run my hands over my lower back and legs. There’s no real pain and all I feel are a couple of blisters behind my right knee and calf. My jeans are a little crispy, but the heavy leather of my jacket protected my back. I’m not really burned, just singed and in shock. I probably hadn’t been on the fire too long. But I’m lucky that way. Always have been. Otherwise, I might have crawled back into this world and ended up a charcoal briquette in my first five minutes home. And wouldn’t those black-hearted bastards down under have laughed when I ended up right back in Hell after slipping so sweetly out the back door? Fuck ’em for now. I’m home and I’m alive, if a little torn up by the trip. No one said birth was easy, and rebirth would have to be twice as hard as that first journey into the light.
The light.
My body isn’t burning anymore, but my eyes are cooking in their sockets. How long has it been since I’ve seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight. I can’t even tell you the colors of the cemetery where I’m standing because my vision goes into an agonizing whiteout every time I open my eyes.
Squinting like a mole, I run to the shade of a columbarium and crouch there with my forehead on the cool marble walls and my hands over my face. I give it a good five or ten minutes then lower my hands to let my eyes get used to the bloody-red light that seeps through my lids. Little by little, over the next twenty or so minutes, I open my eyes, letting in minute amounts of glaring L.A. sun. I mentally cross my fingers and hope that no one sees me hunkered down against the wall. They’d probably think I was crazy and call a cop, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.
The muscles in my knees and legs ache before I can open my eyes all the way and keep them open. I sit down against the cool building to take some of the strain off. Though I can sort of see now, there’s no way I’m marching off into full daylight for a while. Instead, I stay in the shade and take stock of things.
My clothes are burned, but wearable, if you ignore the burning garbage smell. I have on an ancient Germs T-shirt that my girlfriend lifted from a West Hollywood vintage shop for me, worn black jeans with holes in the knees, a pair of ancient engineer boots, and a battered leather motorcycle jacket, strategic points of which are held together with black gaffer’s tape. The heel of my right boot is loose from when I’d kicked the living Jesus out of some carjacking piece of shit after he dragged some screaming soccer mom to the pavement at a stoplight. I hate cops and I fucking hate goody-goody hero types, but there is some shit I will not put up with if it happens in front of me. Of course, that was back then, before my trip down under. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I saw the same scene today. I’d probably still put a boot into the car thief, but I don’t know if I’d let him walk away.
Right now there’s something more important on my mind—the fact that these are the exact clothes I was wearing when I got demon-snatched. When I’d hit the pavement down under I’d been naked. That got me my first big laughs, stumbling around trying to find my footing before I puked myself in front of an audience of fallen angels. After that, the laughs were mostly about my physical abuse and humiliation at the hands of one devil dog or another. Trust me on this—Hell is a tough room.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen these clothes. I go through my pockets to see if there’s money or anything useful. There’s not much. There’s nothing in my pockets but twenty-three cents and an empty pink matchbook with the name and address of a Hollywood bail bondsman printed on it. I don’t even have the keys to my apartment or the old Impala my father left me.
I feel just above my right ankle and a genuine wave of happiness hits me. The black blade is still there, strapped to my leg with strips of basilisk leather. I put my hand over my heart and can feel the chain under my T-shirt and the fat gold Veritas coin that hangs there. The fact I’m on Earth at all means that I still have the key to the Room of Thirteen Doors, even though I can’t touch it or see it. So, I managed to smuggle three things back with me from Hell. That’s no small feat. Of course, none of it alters the fact that I have no money, no ID, no wheels, my clothes are half burned off, I don’t have a place to stay and no real idea where I am, except for the fact that this tombstone trailer park looks and feels like L.A. I’m off to a damn good start. I’ll be the first hitman in history who has to panhandle for bullets.
I make my way slowly, still half blind, to the front gates of the cemetery. Near them, I cup my hands in the water flowing from the top of a contemplation fountain. I take a drink and splash water onto my face. It feels as cool and perfect as a first kiss. Right then it hits me. This isn’t some devil’s illusion, a glamour or some game designed to crush my spirit. I’m really home.
So, where the hell is everybody? Outside, I catch sight of the one thing I’ve been hoping to see. North from where I’m standing, in the distance, are the big white letters of the Hollywood sign. Perched high on the dirty brown scrub hills, it’s never looked so beautiful. In the other direction, toward Melrose, a car hisses by every now and then, but there are way too few. And there are no people on the street at all. There are some small houses off at an angle from the cemetery gate. The green lawns are decorated with lights, plastic reindeer, and an inflatable snowman. Wreaths on a few doors across the street. Holy shit, it’s Christmas. For some reason, this strikes me as the funniest thing in the universe and I stand there laughing like an idiot.
Someone slams into me hard from behind. The hilarity ends abruptly. I spin around and I’m face-to-face with a young executive type. Brad Pitt’s stunt double handsome, with a haircut and black double-breasted jacket that together cost more than my car. Where the hell did he come from? I’ve got to shape up. Downtown, no one would have been able to creep up on me like that.
Brad Pitt takes a couple of stiff steps back. “What the fuck?” he yells, like it’s my fault he walked into me. It’s not that hot out, but he’s sweating like a racehorse and his movements are quick and jerky, like a broken windup toy. He looks at me like I just killed his dog.
“Calm down, Donald Trump,” I say. “You ran into me.” He wipes his upper lip with the back of his hand. There’s something tucked in his palm, and he’s so twitchy he drops it. Brad starts to lunge for it, but takes a step back instead. Lying on the sidewalk between us is a plastic bag with about a hundred little ice-white cocaine rocks inside. I smile. Welcome to Christmas in L.A. Say hi to Saint Nick loading up for a party I’ll definitely be skipping.
I look back at the guy, and before I can say anything, he reaches into his jacket. I latch onto his arm just as the stun gun comes out. I snap his wrist back and twist outward, taking him off balance and slamming him hard onto the pavement. I didn’t even think about it. My body just went on autopilot. Guess some part of my brain must still be working right.
Brad Pitt isn’t moving. He went down on the stun gun and it’s still jammed into his ribs. I kick the thing away and touch the side of his neck. Even out cold, his pulse is fast. Who says crack isn’t good for you? He’s wearing a small Christmas tree pin on his lapel. This makes me think about Christmas more, about being somewhere without friends and how I could use a Secret Santa of my own right now. I figure that my new friend is about as close to a Good Samaritan as I’m likely to find outside a cemetery off Melrose. I quick check to see that the street is still clear, pocket the stun gun, and then drag him into the cemetery, behind some hedges.
Turns out, the guy is Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. His eel skin wallet is fat with hundreds, at least a few grand worth. Even though the twitchy son of a bitch was so ripped on coke and paranoia that he tried to electrocute me for nothing more than standing on the street, I feel a small twinge of guilt as I rifle through his pockets. I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my time, but I never actually mugged anybody. Not that this was technically a mugging. Brad Pitt here attacked me. In another time, helping myself to this guy’s gear would just fall under the heading of “Spoils of War.” Besides, I need this stuff. I’m back with nothing. No friends that I know of and no real plan.
I help myself to his cash, his Porsche sunglasses, an unopened pack of Black Black gum, and his jacket, which is a little tight across the shoulders but not too bad a fit at all. I leave him my half-burned leather jacket, his credit cards, car keys, and the big bag of Christmas crack. I’ll just add this incident to the list of sins I’ll have to atone for later. Ten minutes back on Earth and I’m already adding to the bill.
I crack open the pack of caffeinated gum and chew a piece as I walk. I can’t seem to get the taste of burning garbage out of my mouth.
It feels like I’m walking on someone else’s legs, wobbly and disconnected. I trip over a couple of curbs and almost jump out of my skin when I step on a squeak toy some kid left in the street. Chuck Norris, I’m not. But the blood starts flowing and my legs start feeling like part of my body again. Other than that, I’m not walking with any purpose or direction. I want to go home, but what if Azazel has sent up some of his pet spiders—the bloodsuckers as big as rottweilers? I’m not ready to face that just yet. I pull the chain out from under my shirt and unclip the Veritas coin.
The Veritas is about two inches wide, silver and heavy. Around the edge in Hellion script it says HOME SWEET HOME. Good. It’s awake and snotty as ever.
One side of the coin is stamped with the image of the morning star—Lucifer—and on the other side is a round, many-petaled flower sort of like a chrysanthemum. It’s an asphodel, a Hellion word that translates as “evensong.” The flowers sing hymns that the fallen angels used to sing in Heaven. After belting out off-key hosannas all day, getting all the words wrong, they strangle themselves with their roots every evening and die. The next day, they resurrect and start all over again. This has been going on down there for probably a million years and most Hellions still think it’s a knee-slapper. Hellion humor doesn’t travel well. Plus, except for Lucifer and his generals, most of Hell’s troops make the Beverly Hillbillies look like the Algonquin Roundtable.
Holding the big coin on my thumb and forefinger, I flip it thinking, Hollywood or home? The Veritas comes down asphodel side up. That’s it, then. The Veritas never lies and gives better advice than most people I know. I put it back on its chain and turn north for Hollywood.
It’s over a mile to the Boulevard. I’m exhausted by the time I get there, and the payoff isn’t exactly what I was hoping for. Sometime while I was gone, Hollywood Boulevard had a nervous breakdown. Vacant storefronts. Trash dissolving in the street. Nothing but ghosts here—shadows of runaways and dealers huddled in padlocked doorways. I remember the Boulevard full of wild kids, drag queens, manic Dylan wannabes, and tourists looking for more than their next fix. Now the place looks like a whipped dog.
I’m beat from walking on these stranger’s legs and I’m sweating in Brad Pitt’s jacket. I should have taken the idiot’s car. I could have left it on the Boulevard, safe and sound. Though, more likely, I’d have tossed the keys to one of the street kids slouched against the buildings, just to see if there was any life left inside some of those dead eyes.
Walking deeper into Hollywood, I pass Ivar Avenue and see a funny sign flanked by burning tiki torches. BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS, it says. I remember the name. It’s an old-school kung fu movie with a women-in-prison twist. I saw it when I was Downtown. The devil steals cable. Who knew?
The Bamboo House of Dolls is cool and dim inside, and I can take off Brad Pitt’s sunglasses without wanting to faint. There are old Iggy and Circle Jerks posters on the black-painted walls, but behind the bar it’s all palm fronds, plastic hula girls, and coconut bowls for the peanuts. There’s no one in the place except for the bartender and me. I grab the stool at the end of the bar, farthest from the door.
The bartender is slicing up limes. He pauses for a second to give me a nod, the knife loose and comfortable in his right hand. That other part of my brain kicks in, sizing him up. He has close-cropped black hair and a graying goatee. He looks big under his Hawaiian shirt. An ex–football player. Maybe a boxer. He realizes I’m looking at him.
“Nice jacket,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“Too bad the rest of you looks like you just dropped out of the devil’s asshole.”
Suddenly I’m wondering if this is some Hellion setup, and if I can reach Brad Pitt’s stun gun or my knife in time. He must see it on my face because he gives me this big deer-in-the-headlights grin and I know that he was kidding.
“Relax, man,” he says. “Bad joke. Looks like you had a shitty day. What are you drinking?”
I’m not sure how to answer that. Yesterday, I’d been hunting for water that sometimes dripped through the ceilings of limestone caves under Pandemonium. Mostly I drank a Hellion homebrew called Aqua Regia, a kind of high-octane red wine mixed with a dash of angel’s blood and herbs that made cocaine seem like Pop Rocks. Aqua Regia tasted like cayenne pepper and gasoline, but it was there and I could hold it down.
“Jack Daniel’s.”
“On the house,” says the bartender, and pours a double.
There’s strange music playing. Something odd and tropical, with fake bird chirps every now and then. There’s a CD case on the bar. A Hawaiian sunset on the cover and the name “MARTIN DENNY.” I put the chewed Black Black in a cocktail napkin and sip the JD. It tastes strange, like something a human might actually drink. It washes the last of the garbage taste away.
“What the hell is this place?”
“Bamboo House of Dolls. L.A.’s greatest and only punk-tiki club.”
“Yeah, I always thought L.A. needed one of those.” I’m in a bar, but something’s missing. “I forgot my cigarettes. Think I can borrow one?”
“Sorry, man. You can’t smoke in bars in California.”
“When did that happen? That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree completely.”
“At least I’m home for Christmas.”
“Close. But you missed it by a day. Didn’t Santa bring you anything?”
“This trip, maybe.” I sip my drink. So, not Christmas, after all. Just Christmas enough to keep the streets deserted so no one saw me crawl home. Lucky me.
I ask, “You have today’s paper?”
He reaches under the bar and drops a folded copy of the L.A. Times in front of me. I pick it up, trying not to look too eager. Can’t even read the headlines. Can’t focus on anything but the date at the top of the page.
Eleven years. I’ve been gone eleven years. I was nineteen when I went Downtown. I’m practically an old man now.
“You have any coffee back there?”
He nods. “That’s how you missed Christmas. A lost weekend. I’ve had a few of those.”
The coffee is beautiful. Hot. A little bitter, like it’s been brewing for a while. I pour the last of the Jack Daniel’s into it and drink. My first perfect moment in eleven years.
“You from around here?”
“I was born here, but I’ve been away.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Incarceration.”
He smiles again. A normal one this time. “In my reckless youth, I did six months for boosting cars. What were you inside for?”
“I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth. Mostly wrong place, wrong time.”
“That’ll put a smile on your face.” He refills my coffee cup and pours me another shot of JD. This bartender might be the finest human being I’ve ever met.
“So, why’d you come back?”
“I’m going to kill some people,” I tell him. I pour the Jack into the coffee. “Probably a lot of people.”
The bartender picks up a rag and starts wiping glasses. “Guess someone’s got to.”
“Thanks for understanding.”
“I figure that at any given time, there’s probably three to five percent of the population that are such unrepentant rat-fuck pendejos that they deserve whatever they get.” He’s still wiping the same glass. It looks pretty clean to me. “Besides, I get the feeling you might have your reasons.”
“That I do, Carlos.”
He stops wiping. “How did you know my name was Carlos?”
“You must’ve said it.”
“No, I didn’t.”
I look over his shoulder, at the wall behind the bar. “That trophy on top of the cash register. ‘Carlos, World’s Greatest Boss.’”
“You can read that from here?”
“Apparently.” The thing with his name popping into my head? That was weird. Time to go. “What do I owe you?”
“On the house.”
“You this nice to every aspiring assassin who wanders in here?”
“Only the ones who look like they just crawled out of a burning building and didn’t even get their jacket dirty. And I like repeat business. Maybe now you’ll come back sometime.”
“You want someone who, like you said, just fell out of the devil’s asshole as a regular?”
“I’d love it.” He looks away, like he’s trying to think of the next thing to say. “There are these guys. White boys. All tattooed, like Aryan Nation or some shit. They’re coming around, wanting money for protection. A lot
more money than I can afford with a little bar like this.”
“And you think I can do something about them.”
“You look like someone who might know what to do in a situation like this. Who wouldn’t be …” That look again, groping for words. “You know … afraid.”
I could tell it was really hard for him to say that. Is this why the Veritas sent me here? I’m back a couple of hours and already I’m into karmic payback? And with the carnage I have planned, but haven’t even started? No, that didn’t make any sense.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can help you.”
“How about this? Free drinks. Free food at night, too. Good burgers, ribs, tamales. You eat and drink free until the end of time.”
“That’s a really nice offer, but I don’t think I can help you.”
He looks away and starts wiping glasses again. “If you change your mind, they come on Thursdays, in the afternoon, when we’re getting deliveries.”
I get up and head for the door. When I’m halfway there he says, “Hey,” and slides something down the bar at me. It’s a pack of American Spirit browns, the nonfiltered kind. There’s a pack of matches tucked under the cellophane wrap.
“Take them,” he says. “I can’t smoke in here, either.”
Slipping on Brad Pitt’s shades, I ask, “You have anymore of these back there?”
“No.”
“You’re a hell of a first date, Carlos.” Damn. When someone gives you his last cigarette, you owe him.
Martin Denny bird chirps follow me to the door.
Turns out, I don’t need the shades for long. It must have been later in the day than I thought when I went into the Bamboo House of Dolls. As I leave, the sun is almost down and lights are coming on all along the Boulevard. I’ve always liked Hollywood better at night. The streetlights, headlights, and flashing signs outside the tourist traps blur away the straight lines and hard right angles that ruin the place. The Boulevard is only ever real at night when it’s both bright and black and there are promises hidden in every shadow. It’s like it was designed and built specifically for vampires. For all I know, it was.
Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.
I count to eleven as I walk deeper into Hollywood. Eleven parking meters. Eleven hookers looking for their first post-Christmas trick. Eleven actors I never heard of on eleven stars in the sidewalk.
Eleven years. Eleven goddamn years and I’m home with a key and a pocketknife and a coin that won’t buy me a cup of coffee.
Three, five, seven, eleven, all good children go to Heaven.
Gone eleven years and I make it back the day after Christmas. Is someone trying to tell me something?
I pull out one of Carlos’s American Spirits and light up. The smoke feels good in my lungs. This body is starting to feel like mine again. Like me. I’m just not sure about the rest of the world.
Who the hell are all these people on the Boulevard the day after Christmas? How am I supposed to blend in with them? There’s a nice guy at a bar a few blocks from here. He was just doing his job, but he had a knife in his hand and all I could do was count all the ways I knew to kill him.
It hits me then how unprepared I am for being back, how everything that made sense in Downtown is strange here, wrong and ridiculous. All the skills I developed—how to draw an enemy in and how to kill, all the magic I’d learned or stolen—suddenly feels feeble and foolish in this bright and alien place. I’m steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.
I finish off the first cigarette and light another. The world is a much louder and stranger place than I remember. I need to start doing and stop running around screaming inside my own head. Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.
I need to concentrate on what’s important, like my sure and certain plans to find and kill, in as painful a way as possible, the six traitorous snakes who stole my life. And something worse. It makes me weak inside to think about it. It’s a woman’s face.
Her name is Alice. She’s the only bright thing I ever loved, the only person I ever met worth giving a damn about. If Heaven ever meant anything, she should be married, probably now to some skinny leather-pants guitarist she has to support with temp jobs in those fluorescent-tube high-rise dungeons along Wilshire. Or she’d have gone straight, married a dentist, squeezed out a minivan full of crib lizards, and gotten fat. That would be okay, too. But none of those things are going to happen for her. Nothing nice happens to murdered women, except that maybe someone cares about how they got that way.
If Alice was still around, would she even recognize me under all these scars? There was a mirror inside the entrance to the Bamboo House of Dolls, but I’d been careful not to look at it. Walking along the Boulevard, I take quick glances at my reflection in the dim glass of dead storefronts. I’m bigger than I was when I went down, heavier with muscle and scar tissue, but still thin by human standards. I can still recognize the rough outline of my face, but it looks more like stone than flesh. My cheeks and chin are chiseled out of concrete; my eyes are dark, shining marbles above lips the color of dirty snow. I’m a George Romero zombie, except I’ve never been dead. Just vacationing in the land of the dead. Suddenly I want to get my hands around the throat of fat Alice’s imaginary husband and squeeze him till he pops like a balloon.
That stops me cold.
It’s the first time I’ve fantasized about killing anyone outside the Circle. What a stupid and dangerous thought. Exactly the kind of thing that will steer me away from the real job and maybe get me killed. Then I’d be right back in Hell with nothing to show for it and wouldn’t that be a lot of laughs?
That leads me back to the $64,000 question: Why did the Veritas send me this way? It’s interesting being back on familiar turf, but I could have brooded back at the cemetery. That’s why it’s called a “cemetery.” And I didn’t need a bartender to offer me a job or give me free smokes. With a pocketful of Brad Pitt’s hundreds, I’m Richie Rich with a knife in his boot. So, why am I here?
I’m walking and smoking on a block that’s two open liquor stores, an empty secondhand bookstore, a dead record store, and a shuttered sex shop. As I’m speculating on how fucked up a town has to be when it can’t even keep a dildo-and-porn shop open, the inside of my skull lights up like God’s own pinball machine.
I have my answer. I know why I’m here.
He’s turning off the Boulevard onto Las Palmas, waddling on his little legs a short way up the block to a place called Max Overdrive Video. At the front door, he has to juggle things for a minute—transfer a cup of coffee to one hand, grip the top of a bag of doughnuts in his teeth, and do a little ass dance so he can work the keys out of his pocket and let himself into the store.
I watch him from across the street, just to make sure that I’m not imagining things. As he enters the place, I get a nice backlit shot of his face.
It’s Kasabian, one of my friends from the old magic circle. One of the six on my list.
Santa brought me something, after all.
Max Overdrive Video occupies both floors of an old Hollywood town house, the kind of weekend getaway kept by the gentry back in the forties and fifties, when this area was the most glamorous place in the known universe. Kasabian is moving around inside Max Overdrive like he owns the place. I think I should go and ask him if he does.
It’s full-on night now and I’m surrounded by fat, ripe shadows. I cross the street and pick a plump, dark one around the side of Max Overload, next to a health food restaurant. I glance over my shoulder to make sure the street is clear, and when I’m sure I’m alone, I slip into the shadow. The key tickles inside my chest and I emerge into the Room of Thirteen Doors.
I cross to the Door of Ice and quietly step out of the shadow on the other side.
I’m in the far back of the store, in the porn section. The lights are off back here, so I get a good look at the rest of the place.
There’s a door to an employee restroom on my right, tucked back behind the porn. Just beyond this section is a chained-off stairway leading upstairs. Neat racks of DVDs and bins of VHS tapes fill the rest of the store. I guess that’s something that’s changed in the last eleven years. Even the porn in the back is all discs. The only tapes I can find are piled carelessly in the sale bins. VHS is dead. This is something good to remember since I don’t want to sound like the Beverly Hillbillies when I’m talking to regular people. I should sit down and make a list of everything I missed while I was gone. If you can’t smoke in bars anymore, what other atrocities has the world committed?
Kasabian is up front, behind the counter, going over the day’s receipts. He lost some hair while I was away, but he’s made up for it by getting fat. He’d always been a little chubby, but now he’d taken on a truly odd shape. Not like one of those guys who grows a big belly and man boobs. He just seems to have expanded horizontally, like a balloon filled with too much air. It’s admirable in its own weird way. His chin and gut are defiant in the face of gravity, making him look more like Frosty the Snowman than Orson Welles.
I walk slowly down the main aisle toward the counter, checking the corners of the room, making sure we’re alone. Kasabian is deep in thought, crunching numbers. When I’m halfway to the counter, I take Brad Pitt’s stun gun from my jacket pocket and hold it behind my back.
“Evening, Kas. Long time no see.”
He starts and knocks a pile of receipts to the floor. I stop where I know he can see me, but also where the lighting is weak enough that I’m pretty sure he can’t see my face.
“Who the fuck are you? Get out of my store. I don’t want any trouble.”
“It’s right after Christmas, Kas. Don’t you ever take a day off?”
“Everybody’s on vacation. Who are you?”
“Did you have a merry Christmas this year? Did you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to baby Jesus? Maybe pick up something at Baby Gap?”
“What do you want?”
“Know what I did for Christmas? I cut a monster’s head off. Then I did the same thing to the guy who owned the monster.”
“You want money? Take it. It was a lousy day and I’ve already deposited all the Christmas money, so you’re shit out of luck there.”
Kasabian has been a drama queen from the first day I met him, so I can’t resist hitting him with a Vincent Price moment.
“I don’t want your money, Kas. I want your soul,” I say, stepping into better light to give him a clear full frontal.
It gets exactly the reaction I was hoping for. His mouth opens, but he doesn’t make a sound. One of his hands comes up to cover his open yap, stifling a silent scream. He steps back from the counter, his eyes wide.
Forgive me, God and Lucifer and all you angels high and low, but this is fun. This is an e-ticket roller coaster.
“Shut your mouth, Kas. You look like one of those blow-up sheep in the back of porn zines.” I stop about ten feet from the counter, just letting him feast on me. “What did you get me for Christmas? Right, you gave it to me eleven years ago. Damnation. The gift that keeps on giving.”
His hands are down now and he’s leaning on the counter like a drunk trying to decide whether to fall on his face or his back. I thumb on the stun gun.
“It’s okay. I know you don’t have anything for me. But I sure as hell have something for you, Kas. Climb up on Santa’s lap and I’ll show you.”
I take a baby step closer to the counter and Kasabian takes one back. Then he does the funniest thing. He raises his hands and there’s a gun there—a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker. Wyatt Earp’s favorite gun. He gives me five of the six slugs in the chest and belly, completely ruining my moment.
I drop to my knees, vision going black. The stun gun falls to the floor and I follow it down. I can feeling my lungs drawing in air. I can feel my heart beating. Both organs seem more than a little confused by what’s happening. Death is settling over me, soft and warm, like a down comforter fresh from the dryer. My heart stops.
SOMETHING FUNNY HAPPENED to me when I was Downtown. I got hard to kill. When I first arrived there, I was the first and only living human to ever set foot in Hell. I was a sideshow freak. Pay a dollar and see Jimmy, the dog-faced boy. Later, when they got tired of slapping me around, examining me, and displaying me like a pedigreed poodle, they thought it might be fun to watch me die. They made me fight in the arena and they made a big deal out of it. Imagine the Super Bowl every week or two.
Naturally, the location being Hell and the setting being an arena, there was a lot of cheating going on. Hellions don’t like losing bets any more than humans. Before almost every fight, a bribed trainer or attendant would show up with a sneaky little gift. They slipped me special weapons. They gave me diabolical drugs. They whispered fiendish spells into my ears. It all helped, though it didn’t make me Superman. I was knifed and speared. I was burned. I was almost torn in half by a giant crab-thing that bled fire and screamed in the anguished voices of all the souls it had devoured. My ribs and skull were beaten to Silly Putty.
But I didn’t die.
I don’t know if it was the spells, the drugs, the Aqua Regia, or just clean living, but I was changing. Every time I should have died but didn’t, I got stronger. That meant that the next attack had to be harder, faster, even more ferocious than the one before. After a while, I actually looked forward to the beat-downs. Each one changed me and that change meant that I was immune from a similar attack next time. By the end, I was a flesh-and-bone, armor-plated Dirty Harry.
By the time the ruling-class, old-school Hellions and nouveau celebutante fiends decided it was time to get rid of me, it was too late. I was too strong and by then I was doing more interesting things than killing in the arena. I was freelance-killing Hellions out of the arena, and that meant I was protected from on high by forces far darker than your run-of-the-mill tail-and-pitchfork type.
On the other hand, I’d never been shot before.
“Stark?” says Kasabian from a million miles away. “Is that really you?” He laughs quietly, nervously. “Mason is going to shit himself.”
My left hand shoots to the side, grabbing the .45’s still-warm barrel and driving it into the floor. Kasabian’s fat finger is still looped in the trigger guard, so he comes down with the gun. Meanwhile, my right hand flickers to my boot and tears free the black bone knife. I twist my body toward Kasabian and bring down the knife in a smooth arc. Kasabian’s head tumbles to the floor and rolls away like a pumpkin. His body flops to the floor.
From beneath the Disney new-releases rack, Kasabian’s head begins to wail.
“Oh God! Oh Jesus, fuck! I’m dead!” It’s quality wailing. Downtown, I became kind of a connoisseur of wailing and this is prime stuff.
“I’m dead! I’m dead!”
Crawling shakily to my feet, I pick up Kasabian’s shrieking melon by the hair, tuck the .45 in the back of my jeans, and grab his leg by the ankle with my free hand. In a situation like this, when you want to clear away the evidence, you want to drag the body. You might think it’s faster to toss it over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but lifting a limp body is like wrestling with two hundred pounds of Jell-O. It wiggles, shifts, and refuses to stay still. Dragging is slower, but much less aggravating.
I carry Kasabian upstairs, his head still screaming blue murder and his heavy torso bumping along behind us.
The second floor is one big room. It’s large, with a nice big window on one wall, but sparsely furnished. There’s a bed, a couple of desk chairs, and a table piled high with tape decks, DVD burners, and a big color printer—a mini video-bootlegging factory. I drop the body by the door and set his head on the worktable. The gun I toss on the bed. Kasabian is still shrieking like a banshee, which is pretty good for a guy with no lungs.
I grab a chair and drop down in front of him. Digging the cigarettes out of Brad Pitt’s now-bloody jacket, I light one up and blow smoke in Kasabian’s face.
“Smell that? That means you’re not dead.”
He stops screaming and looks at me. Then he spots his body on the floor and starts caterwauling again. I take a slow drag and blow an extra-long cancer cloud right in his face.
He gets quiet and finally seems to focus on me.
“Stark? You’re dead.”
“Tell me, Kas, how does it feel to wake up in the worst place you can imagine? Of course, you’re luckier than me because you know why you’re there.”
“Fuck you! You think you’re sneaky? You used magic. The whole Sub Rosa will know you’re here. Mason will know you’re here. He’ll kill you.”
I make a game-show-buzzer noise.
“Guess again, fat man. This knife doesn’t disturb the aether and doesn’t leave any magical traces. Pure stealth tech, which is sort of its point. That, and not killing its victims unless I tell it to.”
“Oh God, look what you did.”
“God’s away on business, Kas. Talk to me.”
He looks up at me with big moon eyes. “I thought you were dead. When you disappeared, we all thought you were dead. I mean, what Mason did, it worked?”
“I was alive and in Hell for eleven years, so, yeah, you could say it worked.”
“How could you live through something like that? Mason was right about you.”
“What did he say?”
“That you were the only other really great natural magician he’d ever met.”
I have to smile at that.
“Sounds like Mason. I mean, it comes off like a compliment. But he calls me a great magician so he can call himself an even greater one.”
I turn away like I’m checking out the room, but really my gut is killing me. I’m burned and bruised where the slugs went in and I’m pretty sure I have a couple of cracked ribs. They’ll probably be all right by morning, but I’m not going to do much more walking around tonight. And I’m not about to give Kasabian the satisfaction of knowing I’m in pain.
“It must be true, though. You survived all those Hellions and you came back.”
“Wringing your neck is what brought me back. Yours and the others’.” The old anger comes boiling up, but I don’t want to lose control. It’ll scare Kasabian too much and he’ll be useless for information. I need to catch my breath. I can’t plan anything running around barking like a mad dog.
“For your information, I didn’t use any magic Downtown. Our magic is a joke down there. It doesn’t work. You might as well be shouting brownie recipes.” I take a calming drag off the cigarette. “I don’t even remember much of the magic we did in the Circle, but I did learn a trick or two down under. Hellion magic, and every bit of it is designed to make you cry all the way home.”
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Did you happen to notice me cutting off your head? If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Why did you come after me? Is it about the girl?”
“I don’t want to talk about her yet.”
I can’t talk about her yet.
“What do you want, man?”
“I want all of you. You were all in on it when Mason sent me down.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Right. You just stood there. You knew what was coming and you just stood there.”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“But you knew Mason was going to off me.”
Kasabian starts to say something, but he looks away.
“What did Mason promise you?”
“The sun and the moon. All our dreams come true, if we stayed out of the way and zipped our lips. It was hard stuff to refuse.”
“So, you said yes, then Mason screwed you and dumped you here. What a surprise. That’s why you’re about the last one in the Circle I need to kill.”
“Why?”
He frowns, like me not killing him first hurts his feelings.
“Because you’re a fuckup. You’re a third-rate magician and a second-rate human being. That’s why Mason and the others left you at the altar. You’re excess baggage.”
“You want to find the others from the Circle and you want me to help you.”
“I want a lot of things, but let’s start with that.” I shift around on the chair, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt my ribs. I don’t find one. “Where are the cool kids hanging out these days?”
“Are you crazy? Do you know what any of them would do to me if I told you?”
When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium. But you have to be careful with threats. Some Hellions and humans don’t know when to back down, and you might have to actually follow through. It didn’t happen often, but it was always a possibility.
“You know what I’m going to do to you?” I ask quietly and evenly. “You see that body over there? I’m going to drag it to the deepest, darkest part of Griffith Park and leave it for the coyotes.”
“Please don’t do that!”
“Then talk to me about the others. Where’s Mason?”
Mason had been the leader of our magic circle, which made me Mr. Green Jeans to his Captain Kangaroo. He was a talented magician and never passed up a chance to remind you of it. He came from money. At least he acted like he did. The truth is, none of us really knew much about his life outside the Circle. Parker did, though. They were tight. Parker was a thug with a boxer’s build and just enough magical ability to make him really dangerous. Mason saw the possibilities in someone like that and made the guy into his pet pit bull. Mason never got blood on his hands because Parker was only too happy to do it for him.
Mason also made a point of calling me Jimmy, James being my given first name. No one else ever called me Jimmy because I wouldn’t let them. I’ve always gone by Stark because the rest of my name had always been an issue in the family. I don’t know how Mason found out the rest of my name.
“Are you kidding? Does it look like I hang out with Mason anymore? I rent porn and Schwarzenegger to halfwits,” Kasabian says. “I’ve hardly seen him since that night and, to tell you the truth, I’m glad. After you were gone, those demons, or whatever they were, charged him up with power. Superman stuff. No, more like the Hulk. He changed, right in front of us. His skin, his bones, his whole body turned weird. It kind of glowed and it looked like there were things crawling around under his skin.”
“Sounds like they gave him an assload of nebiros.”
“What’s a nebiro?”
“A parasite. They live off the energy of whatever they infest. The only reason the host doesn’t drop dead immediately is that the nebiros excrete supernatural energy. They shit magic. It supercharges the host, keeping him and the parasite alive. Hellions eat those things like popcorn. I didn’t know they worked on humans.”
“Whatever happened, he wasn’t just Mason anymore. He was Mason and something else. Like God’s older brother, who takes God’s money, steals his car, and fucks his girlfriend. That’s Mason now. A guy who isn’t afraid to pants God. He took off and took Parker with him.”
I know that he’s telling the truth. In the same weird way that Carlos’s name popped into my head back at the Bamboo House of Dolls, I know that Kasabian is telling me the truth. It’s not reassuring to know something without understanding why you know it, but I’ll figure that out later.
I flick ashes off the cigarette and place it between Kasabian’s lips. He puffs on it a few times and that seems to calm him down. When he’s done, I set the cigarette down in an ashtray on the table. I don’t want to finish it after he’s touched it.
“I’m going to have a lot more questions for you over the next few days. Maybe weeks. However long it takes to settle this. Be straight with me, keep telling me the truth, and I might just give you your body back.”
“Sit here and wait for Mason to get me. What a sweet deal.”
“Work with me and he won’t be around to get you.”
Kasabian’s expression goes blank, like he’s staring off into the distance at something I can’t see.
“You’re right, you know. I am a fuckup,” he says. “All the rest of them, they got power, money, and cushy jobs. But they cut me out. I got nothing.”
“Then you have every reason to want some payback, too.”
“Don’t you think I would have if I could? Look at me! I even had to steal this stupid store just to earn a living. Then a dead guy comes in and cuts off my head. Yeah, I’m the one who’s going to put down Mason Faim.”
“No, I am. You just point me at him.”
“I told you, I don’t know where he is. He’s gone. He’s Kesyer Sözer.”
“What about the others?’
“You’re asking a lot, man.”
“No. I’m asking for exactly what I’m owed.” I take a smoke again. I don’t want to get into the next thing. “Tell me, Kas, like your life depended on it. Who killed Alice?”
Kasabian’s eyes dart back and forth in his head like they’re looking for the eject button. I recognize the look of panic. It almost feels like I can hear his heart speed up. But he doesn’t have a body, though maybe he’s still somehow connected to it.
“You know about that? All the way down there and you know about that?”
“Talk to me, Kas. The coyotes are calling.”
I look at the floor, but I don’t move. If I move, I’m going to break like glass. I can’t stand talking about her. I raise my gaze to meet Kasabian’s. If he had a body, he would have bolted.
“I don’t know much. It’s not like Mason or anyone stops by to talk over old times. I get the same rumors as everybody else. I heard Parker did it.”
“Mason sent him?”
“Parker doesn’t shit unless Mason tells him it’s okay, so yeah, Mason must have told him to do it.”
“Why? After all these years, why would he do that?”
“I don’t known, man. Seriously.”
I stare into Kasabian’s eyes and know he isn’t lying. He’s absolutely panicked as I come over to him. When I take the burning cigarette out of the ashtray and let him finish it, he looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry.
My Alice is dead and I’m alone.
“Tell me about the store,” I say. “How many employees are there?”
“Four or five. College kids. They come and go. It changes with classes and holidays. Allegra is the only one with any brains.”
“Who’s she?”
“She manages the place. I don’t like being down there with the customers.”
“She runs the place so you can stay up here and bootleg movies.”
“We do what we have to do to get by. I bet you did some dirty trick or two when you were in Hell.”
“You have no idea,” I tell him. “What time do you open in the morning? Does Allegra open the place?”
“Ten. Yeah, she does.”
There’s a closet behind the door to the stairs. I push the stairs door closed and open the closet. It’s mostly empty, except for waist-high metal storage shelves. I drag the body into the back of the closet, then bring in Kasabian’s head. I set him on top of the shelves. He says, “I’m a little claustrophobic.”
I look around the room. He can’t stay out in the open, in case someone comes up here. There’s a small bathroom, but there’s no way that I’m having Kasabian share my morning pee. Sitting on the bottom of one of the shelves is a small portable TV. I plug it in and turn it on while fiddling with its old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. A local news show comes on and I put the set on the shelf with Kasabian.
“Maybe this’ll ease your pain.”
Kasabian frowns. “You’re a real prick, Jimmy.”
“But I wasn’t always, was I?” I close the closet door halfway and stop. “You ever call me Jimmy again, I’ll nail this door shut. You can complain about claustrophobia for the next fifty years in the dark.” I close and lock the closet door.
I sit down on the bed, exhausted and in pain. It’s been an eventful day. I landed here with nothing and ended up with a nice new jacket and a pocket full of cash. I even have somewhere to crash and wash my face. The American dream.
I stretch out full on the bed and something else occurs to me. “I guess I’m in the video biz.” Damn, I even have a job.
I want to go and wash off the blood that’s drying on my belly and chest, but when I try to stand, my cracked ribs shoot to the top of my pain threshold and convince me that I can wait until morning. I shrug off Brad Pitt’s jacket and lie back carefully. The moment my head hits the pillow, I’m out.
Alice had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We’d been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, “I can do magic. Want to see?”
“Of course.”
She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom.
She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. When she came back to bed, she had a top hat and a deck of cards. She sat down and put on the hat, straddling me on top of the covers.
“Pick a card,” she said. I took one. It was the jack of diamonds. “Now put it back in anywhere you want. Don’t let me see it.” She made a point of closing her eyes and turning her head away.
“It’s back in, Merlin,” I said.
She waved a hand over the deck and mumbled some made-up magic mumbo jumbo and fanned out the deck across my stomach.
“Is this your card?” she said, holding up one of the cards.
It was the jack of diamonds. “Right as rain,” I told her. “You’re the real thing, all right.”
“Know how I did it?”
“Magic?”
She flipped the deck so that I could see the cards. It was fifty-two identical jacks of diamonds.
“That’s not real magic,” I said.
“Fooled you.”
“Cheat. You distracted me.”
“I have the power to cloud men’s minds.”
“That you do.”
She slid under the covers still wearing the top hat and mustache and we made love that way. The top hat fell off, but she wore the mustache until morning.
The night after her card trick, I told Alice about magic. I told her it was real and that I was a magician. She liked me well enough by then not to fifty-one-fifty me to the cops, but she looked at me like I’d just told her that I was the king of the mushroom people. So, I pinched the flame off one of the candles she’d lit and made it hop across my fingertips. I charmed old magazines, dirty shirts, and Chinese-restaurant flyers up from the floor, formed them into a vaguely female shape, and had them strut around the apartment like a fashion model. I made my neighbor’s yowling cat speak Russian and Alice’s tattoos move around like little movies under her skin.
She loved it. She was like a kid, shouting, “More! More!” What she didn’t want was anything serious. Every civilian I’d ever shown magic to had the same response—how can we use it to get rich? Let’s manipulate the stock market. Turn invisible and rob a bank. Throw on a glamour so that cops can’t see us.
Alice didn’t ask for any of that. I showed her magic and that was enough for her. She didn’t instantly wonder what the magic could do for her. She loved the magic itself, which meant that she could love me because I wasn’t likely to make anyone rich. We hadn’t been going out that long and she wasn’t sure about me yet. It didn’t matter. I was already nine-tenths in love with her and could wait for as long as it took for her to come around.
It took two more days.
She showed up at my door with a box from a run-down magic shop in Chinatown.
“I can do magic, too,” she said.
“Let’s see.”
The magic box was about the size of two matchboxes. She lifted the top off. Her middle finger lay inside the box, wrapped in bloody cotton around the bottom. The finger wiggled. Stiffened. She held up her hand so the severed finger flipped me the bird, the cheapest of cheap gags. Of course, she hadn’t chopped her finger off. She’d slid it up through a hole in the bottom of the box that already had cotton and fake blood inside. It was about the stupidest thing I’d ever seen.
I kissed her and took her inside. We never talked about her moving in. She just came in and never left, because she knew this was where she should be.
Later, when Alice and I were in bed and still drunk from our one month anniversary party, I told her that I had a dream where we were on a road trip, eating lunch in some anonymous little diner. She told the waitress that we were driving to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator and held up her engagement ring for everyone to see. It was the magic store box, still on her finger. When I finished telling her the story, she bit me lightly on the arm.
“See?” she said. “I told you I can do magic.”
Two
I SNAP AWAKE at the sound of the door slamming downstairs. I sit up, relieved that the pain in my ribs is gone. The good feeling is short-lived, however, when I realize that the room looks like a bad night in a slaughterhouse. The bloody jacket and shirt are still on the floor where I dropped them. I’m covered in dried blood, a lot of which I’ve managed to smear in a crimson Rorschach blot all over the bed while I was asleep.
I toss the jacket and shirt onto the dirty sheet, pull it off the bed and onto the floor. In the bathroom, I use up most of a roll of paper towels scrubbing the blood off me. The bullet wounds are just black welts surrounded by psychedelic-blue-and-purple bruises. If I twist the right way, I can feel the .45 slugs nestled inside me, like marshmallows in Jell-O salad. I’ll probably have to do something about getting them out, at some point, but not now.
The wet paper towels I toss on the sheet with the bloody clothes. In a little storage cabinet under the sink, I find a roll of black plastic garbage bags. Tear one off and stuff the bloody remains of last night’s square dance inside.
It hits me then that I still have a problem. I’ve just thrown away half of my clothes, leaving me with nothing to wear but taped-together boots and scorched jeans, which are starting to crack and come apart in places. For a second, I consider stealing the shirt off Kasabian’s body, but that’s too disgusting even for me. Plus, opening the closet door will just start his head screaming again.
I toss the room, tearing open boxes, looking for a lost and found or something one of the college kids might have left behind. I hit the jackpot—a whole box of store T-shirts is stuffed in the back, under the worktable. The shirts are black, with MAX OVERDRIVE VIDEO printed in big white letters on the back. Printed on the front is a fake store name tag that says Hi. My name is Max. Cute.
I stand by the door for a second, listening to Allegra move around downstairs. I can almost see her in my mind’s eye. She’s young. Bored and annoyed at having to open the store so soon after Christmas. I get a sense of brains and something else. Something she’s trying not to think about as she straightens the shelves and counts the cash in the till. Quietly, I open the door and start down the stairs, then turn around and go right back up. The .45 and Brad Pitt’s stun gun are lying on the floor. I stuff them under the mattress, then head back down.
Allegra is by the door, backlit by the light through the window. She looks to be not much older than I was when I was carried off to Oz. Maybe old enough to drink. Maybe not. She doesn’t wear much makeup. Black around her eyes. Gloss on her lips. She’s thin, with darkish café au lait skin. She’d look like Foxy Brown’s little sister, except her head is shaved smooth. Her coat and skirt are thrift store hand-me-downs, but her boots look expensive. An art school girl with priorities.
She looks up as I unlock the chain at the bottom of the stairs.
“Morning. You must be Allegra.”
Her head snaps up in my direction. “Who are you? Where’s Mr. Kasabian?”
“Kasabian had to leave town. Some kind of family crisis. I’m an old friend. I’ll be in charge of the place while he’s gone.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say. Allegra is angry. She tries to hide it with surprise, but doesn’t pull it off.
“Really?” she asks. “Have you run a video store before?”
“No.”
“Ever run any kind of retail operation?”
I come up front and lean on the counter, checking the floor for blood as I go. Only a few drops that I can spot. I tend not to bleed for very long, and it looks like Brad Pitt’s clothes soaked up most of what leaked out of me.
“Let me clarify. When I say I’ll be in charge, that doesn’t mean I’m going to actually be doing anything. I’ll mostly be gone or working upstairs.”
“Ah,” she says, even colder than before. She knows exactly what Kasabian does up there and she doesn’t approve. An L.A. girl with a conscience. They’re about as rare as unicorns.
“Not doing anything is Mr. Kasabian’s management style, too. You’ll fit right in.” Her heartbeat kicks up and her pupils dilate. Why the hell am I noticing these things?
She frowns, looks down, then up at me. “Please, don’t tell him I said that.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
Her breathing slows. She relaxes, just a hair. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What the hell is wrong with your clothes?”
“Yeah. I had a little accident coming into town,” I say, giving her a sheepish grin. It’s a look that girls used to like when I was young and not entirely unhandsome. Talking to a cute human girl that I might have flirted with in my former life, I forget for a second that I’m no longer young or handsome. I shift to what I hope is a more neutral expression.
“I might need to pick up some new things. What do you think?”
“Don’t bother. I hear that arson is the new black.” She crosses her arms, giving me her best defiant look.
“Stark.”
“Stark. Just the one name then, like Madonna?”
“Or Cher.”
“Okay, Mr. Stark …”
“Stark. No ‘mister.’ Just Stark.”
“Okay, Just Stark. Here’s the thing—I quit. I can run this place in my sleep, but Mr. Kasabian obviously doesn’t trust me enough, so he brings in some, if you’ll excuse me, thug buddy to keep an eye on me? No fucking thanks.”
“The last thing I’m here to do is keep an eye on you. The truth is, I don’t have any place to stay and Kasabian told me I could crash upstairs. The running-the-shop thing is purely honorary. As far as I’m concerned, you’re in charge. Run the place any way you like.”
“You still look like somebody I probably shouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, you said that.” I take a step toward her, waiting to see if she’ll take a step back. She doesn’t. Nervous, but brave. I like her already. “Listen, a thug is someone who’s out for no one but himself. Me? I take care of my friends.” Alice’s face flashes in my brain, a reminder of how empty a promise like that can be. Good intentions and a dime won’t get you a damned thing in this world. Reluctantly, I push Alice back into the dark. “Stay here and I guarantee that you’ll work in the safest video store in L.A.”
“Gee, that’s not at all terrifying.”
“Also, whatever Kasabian has been paying you, I’ll give you a fifty percent raise.”
Now I have her attention.
“You can do that?”
“There’s no one here to tell me I can’t. I figure, as long as I’m technically in charge, I can pay people whatever I like.”
“When will Mr. Kasabian be back?”
“I have no idea. You know how these family things are. It could be a while.”
She nods, looks down, then up at me. “Okay. I’ll stay. For now.”
Hallelujah. “Thank you, Allegra.”
“You’re welcome, Just Stark.”
I WAIT FOR an hour upstairs, until the store fills with the lunch-hour crowd. When there’s enough ambient noise downstairs, I figure that I can check on Kasabian and be covered if he starts screaming again.
He’s right where I left him on the shelf. When he sees me, he doesn’t scream. He just moans.
“For chrissake, put a bullet in my head or change the goddamn channel!”
On the set, some daytime talk show is playing. An older guy in a suit and a bottle blonde are talking about an actress I never heard of and a pasta maker that’s going to change everyone’s life.
“Please, turn this shit off.”
“I don’t know. That sounds like one damn fine pasta maker.”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you have a car?”
He stares at the TV, ignoring me. I reach over and turn down the sound.
“The keys are in my right hand pocket,” he says.
I tilt his comatose body to the side so I can reach into his pocket. Got ’em.
“What kind of car is it?”
“Give me back my body.”
“Where’s Mason?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Trust me, if I knew how to send you to Mason, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Then I’d ask him to let me watch as he ripped your balls off.”
I turn the talk show back up and lock the closet door. Muffled profanity comes from inside.
I grab the garbage with the bloody clothes and sheets and head down the stairs to the store. Allegra and another kid are behind the counter, busy with customers. There’s a rear exit to the store in a small storage room behind the porn section. I get out the bone blade and try a trick that worked in Hell. Placing the tip of the blade into the lock, I push it inside and turn. The lock clicks open.
Behind the store is a short alley with a couple of Dumpsters. I toss the garbage bag and head for the street.
It’s nice out. Sunny, but not yet hot. I feel a lot more human and settled today, just another normal guy with a .45 tucked in the back of his jeans, out to run some errands. I counted Brad Pitt’s money last night and it came to twenty-two hundred bucks, so I’m sure I can get everything I need.
I keep pressing the little unlock button on the key chain and my good mood evaporates when Kasabian’s car finally chirps. A white Chevy Aveo with a dented trunk. Only rental companies buy white American cars, which means that not only is Kasabian’s car a piece of shit, it’s a used piece of shit. But who’s more pathetic, the guy who drives a used piece of shit or the guy who steals it?
IT’S WEIRD STARTING over from zero. It changes the scale of your ambitions. Instead of fantasizing about what kind of mansion you’ll buy when you win the lottery, you ask yourself, Do I own socks? Do I have a toothbrush? Do I have a shirt that’s not covered in blood?
Money is strange, too, if you haven’t used it for a while. Hell is mostly a barter economy. Especially among the high and mighty, having to buy something is a massive social faux pas. It means that you don’t have anything good enough to trade or you aren’t clever enough to swindle your way to your heart’s desire. Brad Pitt’s wad seemed like a fortune when I counted it, but I blow through most of it in a couple of hours.
The big money goes for a few choice items. A new pair of Caterpillar steel-toed boots, because steel is always a good idea. I also pick up a long, light overcoat. There’s a reason spies and private eyes wear trench coats in all those old movies. They’re big enough to hide a multitude of sins, especially the kind with bullets. I pick up a long, charcoal-gray silk overcoat at a West Hollywood rent-boy boutique. Anything heavier than silk will look ridiculous in L.A., and wearing a black overcoat is nature’s way of telling you to lay off the Bauhaus.
Down on Melrose, the movie biz show-offs and trust-fund bikers meet at smart cafés for lattes and burgers that cost as much as a face-lift. Out in front of the cafés stretch long, gleaming lines of $40,000 Harleys that have never seen a speck of dust or a splash of mud. As much as these clowns set off the self-righteous parts of my white-trash ego, I know there’s one good thing about them. They demand the best bike gear available.
At a bike shop that’s laid out more like a museum than a store, I pick up leather race pants and an armored motocross jacket. After getting shot and almost stun-gunned, I like the idea of having a layer of Kevlar between the world and me. I also get a Kevlar jacket liner, a kind of long sleeve mesh shirt with armored panels sewn in. I’ll wear the liner under the overcoat and hope it’s not so bulky that I look like a robot in a bathrobe.
I put on my new boots, pants, and the motocross jacket in one of the dressing rooms, and toss my burned stuff into the trash on the way out of the store. That’s just about the last of it, I think. The last physical connections to my former life. The only thing left is the Germs T-shirt, now full of blood and bullet holes, stuffed under the mattress back at Max Overdrive. Maybe I should have tossed it with the rest, but Alice gave it to me, so it stays with me until I crash and burn for good.
When I parked the Aveo earlier, I left the .45 under the driver’s seat. I do a switch when I get back, putting the .45 in the bag with my new coat and leaving the Aveo’s keys on the seat. Maybe some desperate-for-wheels kid will find it, or a few homeless guys can turn it into a condo. I carry my bags down Melrose to do some car shopping.
There’s only one way to steal a car and not feel guilty about it, and that’s to steal the most expensive car you can find. That way, you know that it carries the maximum insurance possible, so whatever happens, the owner is covered. I pick out a black Mercedes S600, go around to the driver’s side, and using my body to block the view, stab the bone knife into the lock. I hold my breath. The car chirps once and the lock pops. I slide in with my bags, jam the knife in the ignition, and the engine purrs to life. I do a check of the mirrors and windows. No one is even looking at me. Stepping on the gas, I guide the Mercedes into the afternoon traffic.
THE BUILDING IS like the Sphinx—eternal and unchanging—exactly as I remember it. Same wrought-iron bars bolted over the first floor windows. The chicken-wire-embedded glass in the upper floor windows reveals dusty curtains and tattered window shades. The building manager’s window is easy to spot: there are shreds of the gold-leaf letters that once spelled out the safe company’s name. Instead of a curtain, the manager’s window is covered in foil. I’ve always wondered what goes on in there that he’s so desperate to keep out the light. Someday I’ll have to find out.
I watch the building for the time it takes me to smoke three cigarettes. Nothing unusual or even interesting happens. Cars drive by. An old woman wanders by pulling a couple of tired-looking Jack Russells.
I’m not sure about the wisdom of walking into the place in broad daylight, but I’m not getting any demonic vibes off the place. I snap the Veritas off its chain and give it a quick flip inside the car. Should I go in or not? The coin comes down with the morning-star side up. The Hellion script around the edge reads, Go back to the store and talk to the pretty girl. Nice. My magic coin is trying to get me laid. While I appreciate the thought, the timing stinks. I get out of the car, tuck the .45 under my jacket, and jog across the street to the building.
As usual, the front door is locked, but the side door, by the loading dock, is wide open. There’s a freight elevator to the right of the entrance. I pull down the upper gate, which closes the elevator’s wooden jaws, and hit the third-floor button with the side of my fist. The elevator jerks and starts to climb.
I could have stayed across the street and walked in here through a shadow. I could have walked through a shadow straight into my apartment. Fuck that. This is my home. I’m going in through the door.
When the elevator hits three, I roll up the gate and sprint right down the central corridor, then cut left. My place is at the end of a hall just long enough to let me get a running start. The door is the original, solid steel and balanced perfectly on two heavy metal hinges. I wouldn’t have thought about doing this before, but I’m a bit stronger now. I take a few long, running steps, swing my leg up, and slam my heel into the door. It pops open, the rusty lock mechanism spinning through the air like a metal Frisbee. I have the .45 up and in front of me, ready for anything.
“Well,” says the two-hundred-year-old Frenchman from his easy chair. “It fucking took you long enough.”
HE STANDS UP from a battered, green recliner. He’s a little taller than I remember and a little heavier, but he still has the same salt-and-pepper beard and close-cropped hair, the same impressive Roman nose and dark eyes that, at different times, might belong to your favorite uncle on Christmas morning or to the pissed-off ex-thug who’s about shove a power drill through your forehead.
I just look at him. Normally, I like hearing Vidocq shout “fuck” because he pronounces it “fock.” On the other hand, of the top ten people I didn’t expect to find here, he’s the entire top five. I stay put, not moving to the right or left, orienting my body so that, if I have to, I can make it out the door without looking.
“Vidocq? What are you doing here?”
“That’s how you greet a friend after all these years?” he asks, setting the battered book he’d been reading on the floor. “I’ve been waiting for you, keeping your home safe. You think I wanted to squat in this concrete shithole?”
I raise the .45 and aim it at his head. “How did we meet, old man?”
“Ah, you don’t think it’s me, no? You think this is some trap. I might, too, if I were you.” He picks up a tumbler filled to the top with wine so red it looks black.
“You and I met at a saloon. It’s closed now. Blood Meridian. This was before you met lovely Alice. We were both at the bar, each chatting up the same pretty girl, who stood between us. Neither of us had more than a few dollars then, so we’d employed a small memory charm on the bartender so that we could pay for drinks with the same money over and over again. When we realized what the other was doing, we forgot the pretty girl and talked about what and who we were, what and who we knew, paying the poor bartender with the same few dollars all night.”
“No great loss, from what I remember. The girl was pretty, but kind of wasted.”
“So were we, as I recall. Our sudden loss of interest offended her.”
“Next lifetime, I’ll buy her drinks and listen to her all night long.”
“Next lifetime.”
The gun suddenly feels heavy in my hand. I lower it. Vidocq, a head taller than me and half again as wide, comes over and crushes me in a long bear hug.
“It’s good to see you, boy,” he says.
Like the building, Vidocq hasn’t changed a bit. He looks about forty-five, but is old enough that he can tell you what guillotines sounded like offing the aristocracy during the French Revolution.
I look around the room. It doesn’t look right. Where’s all my stuff? Where’s Alice’s?
“How long have you been living here? Where is everything?” I ask.
“Alice moved out a few months after you disappeared. I saved your things and the things she left in the bedroom.”
“Where did she go?”
“She moved in with a friend in Echo Park. That’s where she was when the terrible things happened.”
“Mason murdered her. You can say it.” I feel stupid, but I have to ask him. “The friend she moved in with, was it a girl or a guy?”
“No, a girlfriend,” he says. “Alice had lovers after you were gone, but none of them were very serious. You broke her heart. She wasn’t the same girl.”
I go over to the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. The teakettle on the stove looks familiar, but not much else. And I’m not sure about the kettle.
“You checked up on her?”
“As much as I could. She didn’t really want to see anybody from your old days together. Certainly, no one associated with magic.”
That sounds like her. She didn’t like Mason or anyone else in the Circle. After I was gone, she’d want to get as far away from magic as she could. But she didn’t run far enough. I should have told her to leave town if something happened to me. I should have given her an escape plan. But what could happen to me? I was a golden boy. I was bulletproof.
I say, “Thanks for trying. And thanks for keeping the place. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d come in and found some asshole stranger sitting here.”
Vidocq picks ups the bottle of red wine from the coffee table, gets a glass for me from the kitchen, and fills it to the rim. He fills his glass, raises it, and we both drink. I sit down on the couch.
“So, how are you? What have you been doing since I’ve been gone?”
“I’ve been working. These days, the work is all I have,” he says. “Thievery pays for the tools, and the work shows me the mind of God. Stealing is a lot like alchemy, you know. In each, we each try to find what is beautiful and hidden and make it ours.”
“This is funny. The whole time we’ve known each other, I don’t remember you staying more than a few weeks anywhere. It’s hard to picture you here as a rent-and-electric-bill guy.”
“Don’t insult me. I wouldn’t pay a penny for this hovel. I used an old gypsy potion, a vin de mémoire manquée. I painted the walls, the windows, floor and ceiling, et voilà! Your home no longer exists. It is not seen or remembered, except, of course, by our funny sort of people. The Sub Rosa.”
The Sub Rosa. I haven’t thought about the Sub Rosa in a long time.
Vidocq is Sub Rosa. So are Kasabian, Mason, and the rest of the Circle. I’m Sub Rosa, too, though back in the day I never thought of myself that way, even though there are maybe a few thousand of us walking around Southern California.
Sub Rosas are the secret people who look just like you, but are different. They bank where you bank. They stand behind you in line at the coffee shop. They panhandle you for the money that you suddenly and inexplicably have to drop into their grimy hands. Some of us also talk to the dead. Some see the future, trade souls like baseball cards, or bribe angels for a peek at God’s to-do list. Mostly, Sub Rosas are the people regular people aren’t supposed to know about. It’s not that we don’t like you; it’s that you have a habit of burning us at the stake when you notice us.
Vidocq’s alchemical supplies and burglary gear cover nearly every surface—racks of potions, books and scrolls in Latin and Greek, alembics, test tubes, and grinding stones. On a table in a corner are the baubles he’s stolen on commission—netsukes, loose diamonds spilling from courier envelopes, passports, and computer discs. It was one of his less successful experiments that turned him immortal. He’s spent the last hundred and fifty years stealing things to fund his research for a cure.
“Thanks for watching the place. I’m glad you have it,” I tell him. “I couldn’t live here without Alice.”
He nods solemnly.
“Where will you live?”
“I’m crashing at a friend’s place. There’s a bathroom, a comfy bed, and all the movies you can eat. You should come by and see it.”
“It sounds charming.”
“I’m back here to kill some people, you know.” I blurt it out, trying to get the words out fast. “I’m going to take out the whole magic circle.”
“I knew that when you walked in. And I understand. I won’t even try to talk you out of it, but there are things you should know before you start.”
I can tell this is going to be a Real Talk. I light a cigarette as Vidocq pours more wine.
“I did something much like what you’re doing, many years ago. Long before you or your grandparents were born. Revenge is never what you think it’s going to be. There’s no pleasure and glory, and when it’s done your grief remains. Once a man does the things you’re talking about, he will never be the same, and he can never go back to who he was before. Worst of all, no matter how many enemies you kill, you are never satisfied. There is always one more who deserves it. When it becomes too easy to kill, it never ends.”
“You stopped.”
“The desire is still there, even though all the men are dead, the ones I killed and the ones who passed away during the many years I restrained myself. Worse, when it was over I had to leave Paris, get on a ship, and come here to the land of cheeseburgers and cowboys. You are starting down a bad road, my friend.”
“I appreciate the advice. Don’t worry. I’m not here to ask for help.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll help you. We must always look after our friends, even when they are foolish. Especially when they are foolish.”
“Thank you, old man.”
“Salut,” he says, and holds out his glass. I clink mine into his.
When I finish the cigarette, I take out the knife I used on Kasabian and pry up some boards under the coffee table. The oilcloth wrap containing my father’s guns is still there. I pull out the bundle and set the guns on the table, one by one. A good copy of an 1861 Navy Colt revolver, modified for modern .44 caliber shells. A heavy Civil War–era LeMat pistol. A Browning .45 semiauto my granddad used on D-day. And a Benelli M3 shotgun. They all need a good cleaning before I can use them.
Something flashes through Vidocq’s mind. I only catch a fragment of it before he pushes it away. Seeing it feels like a migraine coming on, a knife behind my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” asks Vidocq.
“There’s something funny going on with my head. I keep feeling and hearing things I shouldn’t. Like right now you’re sweating and your heartbeat is going up. Like maybe you’re a little afraid.”
“You’re back here from Hell, talking about murder, and you’re pulling guns from under my floor. Shouldn’t I be a little frightened for both of us?”
“There’s other things, too. I’ve turned kind of death-proof. I can get shot, ripped apart, dropped in a Cuisinart, and I just get up and walk away. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.”
“You fall into the Abyss a young magician and you emerge as Superman. How is that possible?”
“You’re the one with the all the books. You tell me.”
“Perhaps, like me, you were cursed with an inability to die.”
“What happened to you wasn’t a curse. You just decided it was. Besides, if anything, those Downtown demonfuckers would make me easier to kill so I’d get back there quicker.”
“Perhaps it’s simple biology. You’re the first living man to have entered Hell. Your condition might be a natural biological response. A side effect of having been in that awful place. Perhaps you should be grateful that you have this new gift to accentuate your natural magical abilities.”
“I don’t trust it. It means something I can’t figure out. Or it’s a setup. Nothing that happened down there was for my benefit.”
“We’ll know in time, then. Your friends in Hell will be after you soon, I suppose?”
“Eventually, but not now. There’s a war going on down there. It’s fucking chaos.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me.”
I get a dish towel from the kitchen, bring it back to the living room, and use it to wipe the dust from each gun. Even though I had them in the oil wrap, I can see traces of rust. I’ll have to clean them for real later.
“So, what was it like in Hell? Did you try to escape? You were always such a clever magician.”
“Clever magic doesn’t get you much down there. Even when I got stronger, I couldn’t cast the simplest hex until I started learning Hellion magic.”
“Is that how you got away?”
“No. I was the property of Azazel, one of Lucifer’s generals. He made me his designated hitman. He said that Alice would be all right, as long as I played along.”
“And then she wasn’t all right.”
“I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It’s like these new things I can hear and feel.” I gulped some wine. “Before I left, I cut out Azazel’s heart and left it on his altar.”
“How did you get out?”
“A key. A key to anywhere in the universe I want to go.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“It’s right here,” I say, putting my hand on my chest like I’m about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Over my heart. I took his knife, cut myself open, and put the key inside. Now I can walk through shadows to the Room of Thirteen Doors. Go anywhere I want, anytime I want. Back to Hell. Maybe Heaven, too. I don’t know. I haven’t opened all thirteen doors.”
“You put the key inside you? And it was made with Hellion magic? It will poison you.”
“Everything that happened to me for eleven years poisoned me. You think one little key is going to make a difference now?”
“This isn’t good, Jimmy.”
“Please don’t call me that. I don’t have that name anymore.”
“So, you are still afraid of them. Afraid they can find you through your name?”
“Not if no one uses it.”
“Your name is who you are. It’s your family. It connects you to this world. You can’t give it away so easily.” He took a long gulp of wine and said, “Wild Bill.”
“Especially, don’t call me that.”
Vidocq is one of the few people who know that my full name is James Butler Hickok Stark. That’s Wild Bill Hickok’s name, except for the Stark. I learned to shoot and appreciate guns young because we’re supposed to be direct descendants of Wild Bill, the greatest shootist of the American West. “Stark” was tacked on sometime after those prairie towns became cities to keep idiots from showing up at the door wanting to touch great-great-granddad’s legend. Or worse. There were more than a few fights and even some gunplay. The funny thing is no one knows for sure if we really are connected to Wild Bill. Supposedly, he left a few little bastards behind in Kansas and Missouri, so it’s possible. But it might just be a tall tale. My family never let facts get in the way of a good story.
“Wild Bill is dead. I’m just Stark.”
“That is your family, your identity. You can’t just walk away from your name.”
“I can and I have. I’m looking for Mason. He gave me to the Hellions for power and now I’m here to pay him back. Do you know where he is?”
“No one sees Monsieur Faim anymore. Like God, he is a great mystery. What will you do if you find him?”
“Kill him.”
“And then what?” Vidocq sets down his glass and steeples his fingers. “What you want may not be possible. Mason is a very powerful man these days. Very well protected.”
“I’ve gotten through to plenty of well-protected Hellions. And I learned a few things along the way. Want to know what the first lesson was?”
“Tell me, please.”
I pick up a little vial of mercury sitting on the coffee table and shake it, watching the light glint of its silver surface.
“Up here in the City of Angels USA, magicians worry about good and evil. White magic versus black.”
“All magicians think about those differences.”
“Not Downtown they don’t. Hellions understand something we don’t. That there is no white magic. There is no black magic. There’s just magic. You can kill with a healing spell as easily as with a curse. If you were having a heart attack right now, I could do a spell to slow your heart and keep it from beating out of your chest. I could regulate your blood pressure, bring it up or down. But I can use those same spells if you aren’t having a heart attack. I can turn down your blood pressure until you pass out. Slow and stop your heart. And you’d be just as dead as if I’d hexed you.”
“This isn’t Hell, boy. People will know. There are rules up here.”
“Not for me. I don’t even know if they can read my magic up here. If it will even disturb the aether.”
Vidocq picks up, and then sets down his wineglass with a thud. Loudly, he says, “Then why don’t you use it? Go on and do a location charm for Mason right now.”
I set down the mercury and look around the unfamiliar familiar room. “I can’t. I don’t know what will happen. The magic might not show up at all, or it might go off like fireworks at the Super Bowl. I can’t take a chance on anyone knowing I’m back.”
Vidocq smiles and wags his finger at me. “So, for all your power you have no power at all. That’s a little funny, don’t you think?”
“I have guns.”
“Yes, you’ll conquer the whole Sub Rosa with guns. More Roy Rogers bullshit.”
I think about that for a minute. “There are things I used in the arena. I’m going to have to get some weapons made. I need to find someone who can work with metal.”
“You must let me help you,” says Vidocq intently. “Let me help keep this plan of yours from going too far. I know that you’ve come back to Le Merdier, this world of shit, but where else is there for you to go? You must live here. You must have a name. You must be a man again.”
What’s that old Sunday school warning about how if you fight dragons too long, you can become one? That’s been spinning around in my head for years, long enough that I know I’d rather be a dragon than a sheep to the slaughter. Maybe, in some kinder, gentler version of the world, I could walk away from the Circle, get Zen, and forgive them for what they did to me. But I can’t forgive them for Alice. Never for that. Maybe I’m not worth killing for, but she is.
“I should go. I have to meet someone,” I lie. I set the guns back in the oilcloth and wrap them up. I’m feeling a little ashamed of myself, like I’m letting down the old man. Without looking at him, I ask, “Want to meet up tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
I make it out the door before he can give me another French bear hug.
I STEER THE Mercedes west toward the one other place in town that makes my skin crawl almost as much as the old apartment.
I turn off Sunset and onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The change from Hollywood to Beverly Hills is always sudden and startling, like flipping a switch. Bus fumes and strip-mall nail salons transform to trimmed green lawns and stately homes. This isn’t movie-star Beverly Hills, but the older part. The homes are large, but not bloated parade floats. It looks like grown-ups might have lived here.
After crossing Mulholland, I turn right into a maze of streets all named Doña. Doña Isabel. Doña Marta. Doña Sarita. When I find the right Doña, I park and sit for a minute, thinking. I should have seen something like this coming. Things had been going too easy since I got back. Brad Pitt wasn’t my fuck-you welcome back to the world. This is.
There’s no need to get out of the car, but I do anyway, and cross the street to the empty lot where Mason’s house—the place where our magic circle used to meet—once stood. The vacant land looks corrupt and out of place in this perfect landscape, like a starlet showing rotten teeth behind her million-dollar smile. Tall weeds grow through the sandy soil. There’s a faded sign with the name of a real-estate developer and a “Coming Soon!” message on top, but it doesn’t look like anyone has set foot anywhere near the lot in years.
The sun is going down fast. When a breeze picks up, I feel a chill. I know it’s all in my head. Even at Christmas, L.A. isn’t that cold, but it doesn’t stop my teeth from chattering.
Night is coming on fast. I walk back to the Mercedes, get in, and light up one of the last few cigarettes from the pack Carlos gave me. I look at the empty lot and wonder what happened there. It doesn’t look like the house burned. From what I remember, this neighborhood is on bedrock, so it probably didn’t fall down in a quake. It just went away. I know I should go over and walk around to see if I can find something that could point me to Mason and the others. But not tonight. The shit and sulfur smell when I was dragged to Hell through the basement floor are coming back strong. I stay in the car, and when the last of the cigarette is gone, I flick the butt onto one of the manicured lawns and drive away.
I DITCH THE Mercedes a few blocks from Max Overdrive. At another time it would break my heart to have to leave such a brilliant machine behind, but L.A. is an all-you-can-eat car buffet, and now that I’ve seen what the knife does to locks and ignitions, I’m never going to starve.
I grab the oilcloth bundle with the guns and the bags with my new clothes. When I get to the store, it is closed, but I rap on the glass and Allegra lets me in.
“Damn,” she says. “You clean up pretty good.”
“Thanks.” It feels nice being complimented by a human woman. The few kind words I’d heard in the last eleven years usually came from Hellions that looked like something a snake had just thrown up.
“Did you lose your key?”
“I forgot it. I haven’t had to carry one for a while.”
“Where did you live that you didn’t need keys?” She looks at something in her hand that’s beeping at her. It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring. She types something on the tiny typewriter with her thumbs, and smiles.
“What’s that you’re playing with?”
“You’ve never seen one of these? It’s a BlackBerry.”
“Is it like a phone? But you’re typing with it.”
“I’ve got it now. You’ve been in a coma since the seventies. No. Abducted by aliens.”
“You nailed me. Klatuu barada nikto.”
“The Day the Earth Stood Still, right? That was one of my favorites when I was a kid.”
“Me, too. So, why are you typing on your BlackBerry thing?”
“Just BlackBerry. Like you, Just Stark.” She turns the little device so I can see it better. “You can talk on it or you can send text messages. It’s like e-mail, only it’s instant. You’ve heard of e-mail, right.”
“Sure. But why would you type something to someone? Why not just call them?”
“Sometimes texting is more fun. Or, like now, if you’re sending someone an address, it’s nice to have it in writing.”
“What’s that on the screen?”
“It’s Google Maps. I looked up the address so I could give Michelle directions.” She clicks and the little screen changes. “See, you just get on the net and enter the address.”
“You have the Internet on that? If I got the Internet, I could look things up on it, right? Names, places, history?”
“First off, you don’t get the Internet. It’s the Web, and you don’t get it. You use it. And, yeah, you can look up anything you want.”
“Can I get one of these?”
She looks at me like I really have spent a decade with Martians.
“Of course. You just have to figure out what kind you want.” She types a few more words into the BlackBerry and puts it in her coat pocket.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No problem. I’ve got to go and meet some friends. Can you lock up after me?”
“Sure. Good night.”
“Night.”
I haven’t used keys for a while. What a stupid damn thing to say. I could see it in her eyes. She’s wondering if I’m flat-out crazy or a recent jailbird. Worse, she’s wondering if I’ve done something to Kasabian. Plus, she’s wondering about what’s wrapped in the dirty oilcloth. I’ll have to start locking the upstairs door. I’ll have to do something about her suspicions, too, but I don’t know what, and I’m not going to figure it out tonight. I take my bags and the bundle with the guns upstairs and drop them on the bed. Tomorrow I’ll check into the BlackBerry thing. Having the Internet or Web or whatever with me will help me catch up on the world and keep me from sounding like a newly landed Martian.
I go over and open Kasabian’s closet.
“Morning, sunshine. Sleep well?”
There’s a cheesy infomercial playing on the TV. Some guy in a chef’s uniform is waving kitchen utensils around.
“You ever see these knives, man? I just might have to get a set. They cut right through soda cans and bricks.”
“If I ever start eating bricks, I’ll come by and borrow them. You had any thoughts about our conversation last night? Like, where I can find some of the old crowd?”
Kasabian doesn’t look at me, but keeps staring at the TV. “They never rust, you know. And you never have to sharpen them. They’re amazing. They’re almost magic.”
“You’re really not in a position to be fucking with anybody right now.”
He finally aims his eyes up at me. “Think so? See, I think I’m in exactly the position where I can do any goddamn thing I want. You want to kill me? Go ahead. I wasn’t exactly having an E ticket life before and now I don’t even have that.”
“You’re not getting back your body. Someday maybe, but not right now.”
He turns back to the TV. “Did you meet Allegra? That is one sweet little piece of art girl scooter pussy. It’s not like I fucked her yet or anything, but New Year’s is coming and I figure some champagne, a couple of roofies, and I’ll finally know if the carpet matches the drapes.”
“Whether you mean any of that or not, you really are just puke on two legs.”
“I don’t have any legs, asshole.” He nods toward his body. “Aw, did I offend the serial killer? I’m so sorry. Murder anyone today? Cut off any friends’ heads?”
I recognize the pose, the B-movie defiance. I tried the same thing in Hell. It’s hard to scare someone who thinks he has nothing to lose. The trick is to remind him that there’s always something left to lose. For some, it’s family or friends. For a creep like Kasabian, demonstrating the possibility of future loss is easy.
I get his gun from the bed, wrap it in a towel from the bathroom, and fire off three shots in the direction of his body.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he screams. “I need that!”
“All of it? You’ve got two knees, two kidneys. That’s a spare for each.”
“Fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
“You want to answer some questions or do you want me to play William Tell?”
“You know, this, right here, is why it was so easy for Mason to sell you out and why the rest of us didn’t really care.”
“Why was that?”
“Because you’re such a dick.” He raises his eyebrows at me, hoping I’ll react. I don’t. “Back with the Circle, Christ, you were just a punk kid and you had all this power. More than any of the rest of us, including Mason. But did you care? Hell no. It all came too easy for you. The rest of us had to kill ourselves studying to get the simplest spell to work. Most of the time, you didn’t even pretend to study the books. You’d just make up something on the spot and angels would fly out of your ass. Do you know how that made the rest of us feel?”
“So, you sent me to Hell because I hurt your feelings?”
“No, because you hurt Mason’s. You never let up on the guy.”
“If I gave Mason a hard time it’s because he deserved it. Always going on about being a great dark magician. He didn’t want to learn anything from magic. He didn’t even want to have fun with it. He just wanted to be Lex Luthor. I might not have given him so much grief if I’d known what a little hothouse flower he was.”
“See? You’re still doing it. But for all your bullshit and your show-off magic, Mason beat you, didn’t he? You could pull magic out of the air, but he ended up with real power and you ended up blowing demons for eleven years. Every night, before I go to sleep, I cherish the look on your face as they dragged your ass down to Hell.”
Without looking where I’m aiming, I pop off a couple more rounds in the direction of his body.
“Stop it! Stop, goddammit! What do you want to know?”
“Same thing I wanted yesterday. Where’s the rest of the Circle?” I toss the gun onto the bed. God, I want a cigarette. “Let’s try a different approach. You’re right here, so where’s Jayne-Anne?”
If Donald Trump and the Wicked Witch of the West had a kid, it would be Jayne-Anne. She looks like a librarian with some money and good taste in clothes, but underneath the Versace, she’s Godzilla with tits. She isn’t as powerful a magician as Mason, but next to him she’s the most focused and ruthless and, in her way, scarier than bad dog Parker.
“I don’t know. I heard she’s got some kind of movie-business gig.”
“What about Cherry Moon?”
Crack open a pedophile’s piñata and Cherry Moon is the candy that falls out. She’s a Lollipop Doll, one of a gang of girls who take their manga and anime a little too seriously. They all want to grow up to be Sailor Moon and Cherry had the magical skill to do it. Last time I saw her, she was in High Gothic Lolita drag, radiating rough sex and looking all of twelve years old.
“Also don’t know about her. Someone said she’s running some kind of spa or plastic surgery thing for rich assholes.”
“I’m glad to hear that everyone’s using their new power for such worthy causes.”
“We’ve all gotta eat. Not me right now, but generally.”
“Where’s TJ?”
He rolls his eyes when I say the name. “That fucking hippie. After the Lurkers grabbed you, he bawled like a little girl for days. Some people aren’t cut out for real life.”
“Lurker” is what the Sub Rosa call any secretive magical, mystical, or monstrous freak that isn’t them. A naiad is a Lurker. So are zombies and werewolves. Undercover cops are secretive and sometimes monsters, but they aren’t Lurkers. They’re just pricks.
“Where is he?”
“Sucking dirt in Woodlawn. The little faggot hung himself a week after you went bye-bye. Guess he couldn’t get the monsters out of his head.”
Poor dumb kid. TJ was even younger than me. He would have been sixteen or seventeen back then. But Kasabian is right about one thing; some people aren’t built to see the dark side of magic or deal with the vicious parts of life. TJ never belonged in our little wolf pack. In a way, I was glad he was gone. I hadn’t been looking forward to hunting him down.
“I guess we covered Mason and Parker last night. Mason’s gone and he took Parker with him. Do I have that right?”
“Yeah. And don’t ask me about them because I don’t know. People see Parker around town sometimes. Usually right before some other nosy magician gets his neck broken.”
The thought of an attack dog like Parker and a Darth Vader wannabe like Mason running wild with heads full of Hellion hoodoo does not take me to a happy place. And the two of them could be holed up anywhere, from Glendale to Bhutan.
“You been out to the old house yet? Pretty, isn’t it?”
“What happened to it?”
“Don’t know. Maybe Mason took the house with him. Did you find anything good when you went inside?”
“Inside what? The house is gone. What’s there to find?”
“You simple son of a bitch. The basement’s still there. You’ve got to go underground.” Kasabian gives me an appraising look. “What, did you just drive up and leave? Pretty tough, tough guy.”
Beautiful. Now I have to burrow like a groundhog into Mason’s basement to the same room where he summoned those things to take me Downtown. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan.
When I turn to leave, Kasabian yells at me.
“Hey, asshole. I gave you information. At least let me have a cigarette.”
“I’m out, so tonight we both suffer. I’ll pick up more tomorrow.”
I step out of the closet, and just before I close the door, I say, “I almost forgot. Your car was parked in a two-hour zone and I was afraid you were going to get a ticket, so I gave your car away.”
“You what?”
“Sweet dreams.”
I SIT ON the edge of the bed wanting a cigarette, but unable to summon the will to go out and find a store that’s still open. The bullets in my chest ache, almost like someone shot them in there. I think one of the slugs is scraping against a rib. I get up and scrounge around the room, moving furniture, opening cabinets, and digging through piles of empty DVD cases. Finally, at the bottom of a box filled with mangled porn tapes—I don’t want to even think about how they got that way—I find a bottle of cheap, no name vodka in a plastic screw-top bottle. In high school, we called drinks like this Devil’s Rain after an old horror movie. That strikes me as pretty funny, under the circumstances. I screw off the top and take a drink. The vodka burns my throat, and tastes like Windex and battery acid.
I can’t believe that some small, ridiculous part of me feels kind of sorry for a pig like Kasabian. To spend your whole life brownnosing and riding on the coattails of smarter and more talented magicians, then having them dump you like the prom date who wouldn’t put out right as they become infused with who knows what kind of power, has to sting. It has to be the final confirmation of all your worst fears, that you really are the chump you were always afraid you might be.
I, on the other hand, was exactly the prick Kasabian said I was. While he was struggling with kindergarten levitations and Mason was compulsively showing off some new spirit conjuration or fire blast, I bullshitted my way through magic the way I bullshitted my way through everything else, pretty well.
Magic really was always easy for me. At my fifth birthday party, I floated the family cat over to Tiffany Brown, a redhead I had a crush on, and dropped it on her. Tiffany didn’t get the joke and that was the end of my first romance.
When I was twelve, the teacher had us make clay animals in art class. I squeezed together some fat little birds. Then I made them fly around the room and out the window. I got suspended for a week for that one, though no one could explain to me exactly why.
I didn’t even know I was doing magic back then. All I did know was that I could do funny tricks and make the other kids laugh.
My family never talked about it, but they knew what I could do. I was dangerous when I got sick. I’d break windows with a look. My fevers started fires. I only learned that what I was doing had a name when my father gave me an old, leather-bound book titled A Concise History and Outline of the Magickal Arts. I knew right away what I was. Not a warlock or a wizard. That was Disney stuff to me. I was a magician. A few years later, I found out there were other magicians and some invited me into their tight little Circle. Then they tried to kill me.
Sitting on Kasabian’s bed, drinking his lousy vodka, I can picture Jayne-Anne, Cherry, Parker, and Mason sitting high above the city in one of those houses that hangs over the side of a hill on spindly spider legs, daring the earth to throw an earthquake their way. Each of them knows they’ll survive. Even without magic, they’ll survive, because that’s their greatest talent. And soon they’ll be up on another hill, looking down on us losers. They’re strong and we’re weak because we won’t do the things they did to get up to the top of the hill.
They’re right, of course. We won’t crawl through the shit, and over the bones and bodies of the dead. By their definition of the word, we really are weak, no matter how much we’d like to imagine ourselves being as cold and hard and determined as they are.
On the other hand, it might be fun to crawl up the hill one night and strap some dynamite to the spider legs holding up their houses. We’d jump on the roofs, like kids jumping on sleds in the snow, and ride down the hill until their bright, candy-colored mansions crash into the sea.
Between the bullets in my chest and the talk with Kasabian, sleeping isn’t going to be easy tonight. Kasabian’s vodka is pretty much poison, but it’ll quiet the noise in my head and that’s good enough.
When I finally drift off into alcohol dreamland, I’m back in Hell, lying in the dirt on the floor of the arena. My belly is slashed open and I’m holding my innards in with my hands. The beast I’d been fighting, a silver bull-like thing with a dozen razor-sharp horns, is lying dead a few yards away. They always had me fighting weird animals. I didn’t know for a long time that it was another Hellion insult. They made me a bestiari. It was a Roman thing—a fun way to use their dumbest, gimpiest, most cross-eyed fighters. Bestiari weren’t good enough to fight people, so they fought animals. Why waste a human gladiator on someone who had just as good a chance of cutting off his own leg as stabbing his opponent? Plus, it was fun watching bears eat retards. Still is, really.
A couple of Hellion arena slaves roll me onto a stretcher and take me backstage. In the fighters’ quarters, a wizened old Hellion gladiator trainer shuffles over and hands me a bottle of Aqua Regia. That’s medical care in Hell. A hospital in a bottle. Later, the same old Hellion comes by with a needle and werewolf-hair thread and sews me up.
Later that night, Azazel, my slave master, sends for me. Fresh wounds or not, when he calls, you go. At least he’s reasonable enough to send a couple of burly damned souls to carry me to his palace on a litter.
None of the palaces in Hell come close to Lucifer’s in size or beauty. Lucifer lives at the top of a literal ivory tower, miles high. You can’t even see the top from the ground. The joke is that he built it that high so he can lean out the window and pound on Heaven’s floor with a broom handle when he wants them to turn down the choir.
Lucifer’s four favorite generals have their own palaces.
Azazel is Lucifer’s second favorite general, so his palace is second only to Beelzebub’s in size and beauty. Beelzebub is Lucifer’s favorite general. While Azazel’s palace is made entirely of flowing water, Beelzebub’s is mud-and-dung bricks covered in human bones. Not what you’d call pretty, but it makes a statement.
Inside Azazel’s palace it’s all Gothic arches and stained glass, laid out in classic cathedral style. A carpeted nave leads to an altar at the far end where a mammoth clockwork Christ buggers the Virgin Mary every hour on the hour.
“You’re going to use those arena skills of yours to kill Beelzebub for me,” says Azazel.
“Don’t I rate a night off? I’m held together with Silly String and good wishes.”
He smiles, showing his hundred pointed teeth. “Perfect. Then no one will suspect you. More importantly, they won’t suspect me.” He hands me something, a sharpened piece of spiral-cut metal, like a long ice pick. I’ve seen it before. It’s General Belial’s favorite weapon. “Leave that behind, but be sure to dip it into Beelzebub’s blood first.” He pauses. “And wear gloves. I don’t want your human taint all over it. They have to think that Belial did it.”
“Beelzebub’s palace is a fucking fortress with about ten times more troops and guard animals than you have. And he knows I work for you. His guards will never let me get near him.”
Azazel shows me his teeth again. He likes doing that. It used to make me want to pee my pants. Now it’s just a ritual, like a dog biting another dog’s throat to remind it who’s the alpha.
Azazel reaches into his robes made of shimmering golden water and pulls out a heavy brass key. “Have you ever heard of the Room of Thirteen Doors?” he asks. “This key will take you there. The room leads to anywhere and everywhere in the universe simultaneously. Including Beelzebub’s bedroom.”
He hands me the key. It’s heavier than it looks and weirdly soft. I realize that it’s not made of brass after all. It’s living skin over bones.
“In one hour, you’ll enter the Room of Thirteen Doors through a shadow behind this altar. From the room, you’ll go out through the Door of Fire. That’s a killing portal. It will take you right to your prey. Once you’ve killed Beelzebub, leave Belial’s weapon and return here.”
I turn the key over in my hands. I should be horrified by it, but I’m not. There’s something animal-like about the key, like it’s a pet that wants to please its master.
“You’re thinking that I’ve given you your means to escape, aren’t you?” Azazel asks.
“Me? I love it here, boss. Why would I ever want to escape?”
He touches the edge of the key with a fingertip.
“Lucifer can leave Hell and travel easily through the cosmos, while the rest of us are bound here, cursed by the heavenly enemy. I’ve found a way out. Not for me, but for someone like you. However, you should remember not to go too far. Though I can’t leave Hell, I have some influence in your world, among those humans dedicated to Hell. Cross me, try to escape from me, and something awful will happen to the one you love. That pretty girl you left behind. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“You’re not leaving here. Someday maybe, but not right now and not for a good long time.” Azazel turns and starts away. “Keep the key next to your body. That way, it will know to open the room to you. Wait an hour before you go. I need to be somewhere public when it happens.”
An obedient little slave, I do as my master tells me. I wait an hour and slip into a shadow behind the altar. Passing into that utter blackness feels like falling through cool air.
I find myself in a semicircular room that, surprise, contains thirteen doors. Each door seems to be made from a different material. Wood, water, air, stone, metal. More abstract things, too. The Door of Dreams moves and writhes, reshaping itself from second to second. There’s a sound from the far side of the room. I go to the only unmarked door and listen. There’s something moving behind the door and it knows I’m here. Something growls and scratches to get at me. Then there’s a shriek, a long, keening, furious animal sound that hits me like a knife dragged through my skull. Right then and there I know I’m going to do whatever Azazel wants and kill any damned Hellion he tells me to. I’ll be his servant as long as he leaves Alice alone and never, ever asks me to go through the unmarked door.
I wake up with the taste of Hell in the back of my throat. I know it’s just the bad vodka, but that doesn’t help. My head is full of monsters and I’m one of them. I sit up smelling sulfur and I want to kill something. I want a Hellion to burst through the window so I can take this bone knife and cut its black heart out. There are so many questions left. It feels like I’ve been doing nothing but talking since I got back. I need to do something. I need to hurt something. I need to kill Azazel, but I’ve already killed him.
I’m afraid. I’m so fucking afraid. I don’t know what’s worse, Hell or this stupid world where I’ll never be at home. But I need to keep talking to people. I need to keep asking the right questions. And I’ve already missed maybe the most important question of all.
I roll out of bed and slam the closet open, nearly tearing the door off its hinges. Kasabian lets out a yelp and turns his eyes up at me. I pick up his head in both hands and hold him so that we’re eye to eye.
“I have one question for you and I swear to God and the devil and everything holy and unholy that if you fuck me around for even one second, I will drop you in the ocean right now. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah.” He barely whispers the word.
“Where’s Alice’s body?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I swear, I don’t know. Jesus, even I’m not that fucked up. Parker would know. He killed her. Parker’s the one that can tell you.”
There’s real terror in Kasabian’s eyes. I’m still holding him up, squeezing him tighter than I thought. His cheeks are red and starting to bruise. I set him back on the shelf and lean against the wall.
Kasabian stares at me like he’s never seen me before.
“What are you, hypoglycemic or something? Go eat a muffin, for shit’s sake.”
“I’ll bring by some cigarettes later,” I tell him, and close the closet door.
At least I got to ask the big question, but I’m not any less agitated. Kasabian was telling the truth a minute ago; I could see in his mind that he would have made something up if he could have thought of a convincing enough lie. That means I can’t find Alice’s body until I track down Parker. I’m still so wound up from having Hell in my head all night that I need to break something, and soon. I hate it when I get this way. Do they have anger-management classes for hitmen?
Allegra’s voice comes from downstairs. I didn’t hear her come in. She’s talking into her BlackBerry. I look around for a clean shirt and realize that I forgot to buy some yesterday. I steal another Max Overdrive shirt from the box and go downstairs quietly. I’m not in the mood for this, but I need to do something now so that I don’t have to do something worse later.
Allegra is still on the phone and has her back to me. She doesn’t hear me come up behind her. When she turns around and sees me, she jumps a little.
“Jesus, you’re quiet,” she says. Then, into her BlackBerry, “No, not you. Let me call you back.” She takes off her coat, stashes it behind the counter, and begins setting up the money and register for the day. “I thought you were upstairs. I heard noise.”
“I had a movie on. Dust Devil. You ever see it?”
“Isn’t that a horror flick?”
“Sort of a horror movie crossed with a spaghetti western. You ought to take a look. The girl character dumps her boyfriend and then spends the rest of the movie trying to get away from a ghost world killer who’s sort of in love with her. She runs, but she’s no coward. She fights back and stays brave. You’d like her.”
“Thanks. I’ll have a look.” She gives me a distracted smile.
“Listen, I’m sorry if I said anything stupid last night. I haven’t been in the city in a long time. I grew up here, but it might as well be the dark side of the moon.”
“I feel that way sometimes, too.”
“There’s something else you’re wondering about. You’re wondering if I’m an ex-con. The answer is yes.”
“Oh.” She busies herself breaking open rolls of coins and putting the change in the register. “I only wondered because of, you know, the scars.”
“Would it help if I told you that I didn’t go away because of something I did, but because of something someone else wanted?”
“Are you, like, on parole?”
“It’s more of a work-release thing. If things work out, I won’t be going back at all.”
“I had a boyfriend who did time.”
“A dealer, right?”
She looked up at me, her expression shifting from interest to suspicion. “How did you know that?”
“A long time ago, I had a girlfriend named Alice. Your eyes are like hers were when I first met her. There’s this funny thing that happens to girls’ eyes when they’ve been in love with a dealer. It’s a real particular look. More than not trusting people. It’s like you’re trying to figure out if they’re the same species as you, like they might be a snake in a people mask.”
She’s still looking at me, sizing me up, and trying to classify me as animal, vegetable, or mineral. “Can we maybe change the subject?”
“Sure. I just wanted you to know the truth. I’m not a snake. I’m just a person like you.”
She turns a key on the register, clearing yesterday’s transactions and getting ready for today’s. “But it’s not the whole truth, though, is it? You’re not like Michael was, but there’s still a little bit of the snake thing going on behind your eyes.”
“What do you expect? I’m from L.A.”
She laughs. I can hear her breathing steady, her heart slow. Her fear doesn’t disappear; she’s too smart and wary for that. But she’s not going to call the cops or stab me in my sleep, and what more can you ask of a pretty girl?
I start upstairs, but turn back to Allegra. “What day is it?”
“Thursday. It’ll be New Year’s in a few days.”
“We should get some champagne for the store. And those popper things, too. They look like little bottles. Take some money out of the till and go buy whatever you think is fun.”
“How much can I spend?”
“Buy whatever you want.”
“Hey, those were nice leathers you had on yesterday. Do you have a motorcycle?”
“I might just pick one up today.”
WHEN I WAS Downtown, Galina, one of Azazel’s vampire drinking buddies, liked to regale me with stories about what it’s like to hunt humans. She would go into exquisite detail, mostly to spoil my dinner. Sometimes to screw me up before a fight in the arena. She had a gambling problem.
Galina told me that most vampires work hard to keep a low profile. They dress, act, and often get jobs like regular people. Most vampires only feed once a month, at the new moon. A month is the longest vampires can go without fresh blood, unless they don’t mind shriveling to something that looks like hundred-year-old beef jerky.
There are the other vampires, too. The kind they make movies about. Mad-dog, Dracula-Has-Risen-from-the-Grave psycho killers. They hunt every night just for the sheer meat-market thrill of it. The craziest ones don’t even wait for night. They hunt during the day. Streaking from shadow to shadow, they snatch people right off the street and feed on them behind Dumpsters or in crack houses, next to the other addicts.
These vampires hunt for kicks, but not for fun. They hunt for rage. They hunt because something inside them is broken, and no matter how much new blood they fill their bellies with, it turns to fire in their veins. They hunt and kill because they need to, because if they didn’t, they’d tear their own heads off. Just like any fix, the calm that comes from the kill doesn’t last long, but for a few minutes or maybe an hour, the fire fades to a single glowing ember and they’re at peace. Until they need to hunt again.
If I learned anything Downtown it’s this: I’m not a vampire, but I am a junkie. And every junkie needs a fix.
A DELIVERY VAN is pulling away from the curb outside the Bamboo House of Dolls. I go in and see stacks of whiskey in boxes, steel beer kegs, and Carlos by the bar, flanked by three lanky skinheads. One is in a bomber jacket, one is in a T-shirt of some black metal band, and the third, a huge skinhead, is in a German military officer’s coat.
Bomber Jacket jerks his head toward me. “We’re closed!”
“Just a quick one, sweetheart,” I say. “So I know you love me.”
Bomber Jacket pulls out—can you fucking believe this guy?—a Luger pistol, like he thinks he’s Rommel. Quicker than he can react, I scoop up one of the beer kegs and underhand it at him. It slams into his chest and knocks him across the room. The Luger flies out of his hand and lands on the floor somewhere near the bar.
The shaved ape in the officer’s coat starts across the room at me while the black metal skinhead pulls an impressive shank from his boot. Just to make things fun, I go straight for the one with the knife. This confuses the ape, who turns just as I reach his pal, whose arm is straight out, trying to pig-stick me. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone up against a human, so I don’t know if I’m really fast or if these geniuses are really slow, but I slip past the skinhead’s blade and pop him in the elbow, hyperextending the joint just enough to hurt, but not to snap. While little birdies are still flying around his head, I grab his arm and do-si-do around him, swinging him into the ape just as he comes up behind me.
But the ape is too huge to go down. He staggers back a step then lunges at me, faster than I expected. Fast enough to get hold of my jacket and throw a fist as hard as a tire iron into my jaw. I don’t want to get into a real fight with this guy because I’m more interested in his partner with the knife. When he loads up for another John Wayne punch, I grab one of the squat, bottom-heavy glass candles off the bar and smash it into the side of his head. That sends him staggering back to the opposite wall, where he slides down like a pile of bloody laundry.
The guy with the knife is back on me. He has just enough brains to know not to try to stab me straight on, so he’s going for a slashing attack. His arm blurs back and forth, then down, then up, trying to catch me off guard and bleed me. I parry his blows, letting one land on my forearm or shoulder occasionally. This is what I’ve wanted, a real chance to test the Kevlar armor in this jacket. He’s working up a pretty nice sweat, coming at me with all he’s got. Still, he’s easy to dance around, easy to block. His face is contorted and frantic with anger. As long as I let him get a shot in every now and then, I bet he’ll keep coming until he dies of old age or a stroke.
The guy I hit with the beer keg hasn’t moved, but the ape is getting back to his feet. Time to wrap things up.
As the black metal skinhead slashes down at my head, I reach up with my right hand and grab the knife. There’s a familiar ache, like electricity and heat, as the blade slices deep into my palm. I slam the heel of my left hand up under his jaw, staggering him, then twist my right hand, snapping the blade cleanly off his knife. As the ape rushes me, I go low and shove the broken blade deep into his thigh. He howls in pain and falls against the bar.
Damn, it feels great to hurt idiots.
None of the skinheads is getting up for a minute, so I look around for the Luger. Carlos is behind the bar, frozen in place, like he’s not sure if he’s more afraid of me or the Nazis on the floor. I spot the gun under a stool at the end of the bar and kneel to get it.
Good thing, too.
A blue-white ball of plasma misses me by a few millimeters and explodes against the far wall.
I wheel around and see him. It occurs to me that I might have been having a little too much fun before. I hadn’t thought to check if there was another skinhead in the storeroom. I snatch the Luger from under the stool, but it doesn’t help because the new skinhead does something a lot more interesting.
He holds up his right hand. There’s something with a glowing end. Gnarled like a short tree branch. It extends from his hand and wraps around his forearm to his elbow. It’s a piece of a Devil Daisy. I don’t know the real name. Devil Daisy is just what I called them. I haven’t seen one in a long time and that was in the arena. That’s all I get to think before he blasts a tongue of blue-white dragon fire at me. I’m still afraid to use magic. All I can do is dive to my left, rolling over some tables and chairs and landing on the floor. The second shot goes wide, as does his third. Still, I feel the heat and skin-crawling static as each shot streaks by.
This is some powerful magic the skinhead is packing, but it’s obvious from the way he’s waving the branch around that he doesn’t fully understand what it is or how to use it, beyond a dim aim-and-pray strategy.
My theory that he’s not in control of the weapon is confirmed when the ape yells something and the guy with the Devil Daisy turns and almost blows his own foot off. It’s the Three Stooges with death rays over there. The one I took the Luger from yells, “Asshole!” He gets to his feet and he and the ape, limping, with the knife still in his leg, get the skinhead I hit with the keg between them and drag him out the door. The one with the Daisy backs out of the place, holding the branch out like he’s covering himself with a gun.
“What the fuck was that?” yells Carlos.
“The Nazi asshole must have had a flare gun,” I lie.
I walk over, drop the Luger on the bar, and push it to Carlos. “Merry Christmas. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I don’t know. Put it up next to the tiki dolls.”
“I don’t like guns. Is it loaded?”
I pop the clip out, check it, and slide it back in. “Yeah. Keep it behind the bar. Those guys are going to come back. Not tonight, but sometime soon.”
“You think so?”
“Definitely.”
“I still don’t want it,” he says, and pushes the Luger toward me. I flick on the safety and shove it into my jacket pocket. Carlos nods toward me. “You’re bleeding,” he says, and hands me a clean bar towel. I wrap it around the hand I used to grab the skinhead’s knife. The hand still hurts, but it’ll stop bleeding by the time I walk outside.
Carlos leans on the bar. “So, what are you? Special Forces? Some kind of ninja?”
“Yeah, I’m the ghost of Bruce Lee. You have a cigarette?” Carlos shakes his head. The moment is still burning bright for him, but it’s over for me. The rage has gone south and now I have a bigger problem. No question I was shot at by a magic weapon, but it was used by someone who had no idea what he was doing. I consider the possibility that Mason sent the skinheads, not to shake down Carlos, but to ambush me, only that doesn’t make any sense. If Mason decides to send a hit squad for me, he’ll make sure they know exactly what weapons they’re packing and how they work.
So, what devil Kris Kringle is handing out death rays to pinheads?
“Can I borrow your phone?” I ask. Carlos hands it to me and I dial the number of my old apartment. Vidocq picks up.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER Vidocq and I are sitting in a doughnut shop on Sunset drinking coffee and eating. He’s paying. I’m close to tapped out. At least I spent Brad Pitt’s money well. Before Vidocq got to Donut Universe, I’d examined the motocross jacket for damage. The Kevlar did a pretty good job. None of the knife slashes made it through the armor down to me. All the damage was to the leather, and I could fix that with gaffer tape.
“I’ve heard of power amulets like guns, but not like the one you describe,” says Vidocq. “But I think I know someone who will. I’ll introduce you soon.”
The Frenchman puts a paper bag on the table. I take a bite of my Bavarian cream.
“What’s that?”
“Look for yourself,” he says, and pushes the bag at me. I open it and look inside. It’s full of shirts.
“They are yours. You look like a fucking child in those video store things. You should wear your own clothes. They will help you remember who you are.”
I roll down the top of the bag and put it on the seat beside me. I suppose I do look stupid in these shirts. In my head I’m still nineteen. Time is stuck there and it’s like a punch in the balls every time I look in the mirror. At least no one will bother me for ID when I buy beer now.
But I don’t want to look at what’s in the bag right away. Part of me wants to burn everything Alice and I left behind eleven years ago. Another part wants to leave it all right where it is, frozen in time, like bugs trapped in amber. It never occurred to me to wear any of my old clothes again.
“There was something weird and familiar about that amulet and I’ve been trying to remember what since I left the club.”
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Richard Kadrey
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежное фэнтези
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero in Sandman Slim, star of this gripping, gritty new series by Richard KadreyLife sucks and then you die. Or, if you’re James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.Now Stark’s back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you’d expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future.Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.Darkly twisted, irreverent, and completely hilarious, Sandman Slim is the breakthrough novel by an acclaimed author.