Kill City Blues
Kill City Blues
Richard Kadrey
A smart, kick-arse Urban Fantasy from a new master of the genre. Kill City Blues is the fifth book in the fantastic Sandman Slim series.James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell – again – renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in LA. But he's not out of trouble yet. Somewhere along the way he misplaced a weapon from the banished older gods who now want it back.The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall — a multi-storey copy of LA — infested with Lurkers and bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of territory. Somewhere in the kill zone of the former mall is a dead man with the answers Stark needs.All Stark has to do is find the dead man, get back out alive, and outrun some angry old gods — with a few killers on his tail.
Copyright (#ulink_4548ef0b-3ba3-55b6-9f5b-523f2a62d380)
HarperVoyager
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First published by HarperVoyager 2013
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Richard Kadrey 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
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Richard Kadrey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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Source ISBN: 9780007446063
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007483877
Version: 2017-09-18
To JLK, who should havebeen around a little longer
It is evident that we are hurrying onward to someexciting knowledge—somenever to be imparted secret,whose attainment is destruction.
— EDGAR ALLAN POE, “MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE”
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lotfarther with a smile and a gun.
—AL CAPONE
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ud178abdc-c9ab-5dc1-a5fc-68575830fe8f)
Copyright (#u256fa57b-00d7-5841-be51-aeffe4fd952d)
Dedication (#ue63756a3-4b86-5da7-abb7-bb86cebf3f51)
Epigraph (#u1780bcf9-083a-5a8d-b175-cf12d6d44829)
I’m in a window (#u32ce558b-54e0-5908-8e3a-3b3bcd6c5c5d)
Maybe happy isn’t the right word (#litres_trial_promo)
When we reach Santa Monica (#litres_trial_promo)
I find a bottle of Aqua Regia (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Richard Kadrey (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I’M IN A window seat at Donut Universe eating heart-crippling lumps of deep-fried dough with the Devil. Ex-Devil technically, but then technically we’re both ex-Devils. He was Lucifer before I was. Now he’s Samael and I’m back to just plain Stark.
I take a bite of an apple fritter.
“How’s your donut?”
Samael eyes his glazed old-fashioned suspiciously, like maybe it’s haunted.
“Charming. Did I invent these? They taste like something designed to destroy mortals from the inside out.”
Candy says, “Nope. We came up with them all on our own.”
“How wonderfully suicidal you people are. Donuts must be the very essence of free will.”
As for the Devil job, I stuck another poor son of a bitch with that. Mr. Muninn. Some days I feel bad about it. Some days I don’t. Today the sun is out, I’m eating donuts with my girl and another ex-Devil, and it’s all pretty goddamn heartwarming.
Samael says, “That blond woman buying coffee. She sold me her soul for a 1956 Les Paul Goldtop. I don’t think she ever learned to play it. The man behind must be a pious bore. He’s virtually free of sin sign.”
The Devil can see people’s sins. They’re like streaks of black tar on skin. Since I quit the damnation biz, I can’t see sin sign, but as an angel, Samael can still pull that rabbit out of the hat. I don’t miss doing that trick.
I say, “This is why I don’t take you to Bamboo House. I don’t want you taking an inventory of my friends.”
“Sorry. It’s a hard habit to break.”
Candy is sitting next to Samael, trying not to let on how thrilled she is to meet the original Devil. I haven’t seen her this excited since we met a furry, six-foot-tall Pikachu at the Lollipop Dolls store in Beverly Hills.
She has her pink laptop on the table, open to Wikipedia. She’s updating the Sandman Slim page. And by “updating,” I mean taking out all the dumbest rumors about me.
“Does it say anything about me being Lucifer?”
She nods.
“Sort of. It says you were always Lucifer and that Sandman Slim doesn’t exist. He’s just one of the Devil’s fronts.”
“You might want to take that out,” says Samael. “You don’t want any demon hunters or aspiring crusaders taking potshots at you.”
“Yeah. Delete it all.”
Candy types something over the Devil stuff.
“Is there a picture of me?”
“A drawing. It’s pretty dumb. Kind of like a police composite sketch in a movie.”
“Delete it, please.”
“You got it, Chief,” she says, channeling Jimmy Olsen.
A police sketch. I’m not surprised. They’ve known who I am for a while now. So why aren’t there fifty patrol cars outside? Why isn’t there a SWAT team waiting for me at the Chateau Marmont? I’m not lucky enough that they’d lose my paperwork and all the surveillance photos. That means somebody doesn’t want me taken in, which means I have a secret benefactor. I don’t think Blackburn would do it, even if I did save his wife’s soul. The head of the Sub Rosa is too political to be sentimental. That means it’s someone I don’t know about. I don’t like that. Secret friends can turn into full frontal enemies without you even knowing about it.
“I was down in Hell yesterday. Father—Mr. Muninn—sends his regards.”
I smile at the image. Mr. Muninn is God. A piece of him anyway. A while back, when God finally admitted he didn’t know how to run the universe, he had a nervous breakdown. He broke into five smaller Gods. The good news is that the God brothers don’t like each other very much. The bad news is that the God brothers don’t like each other very much. It’s not doing creation any good being run by a B team that can’t stand the sight of each other.
“He looks a little funny in his Lucifer armor, doesn’t he? Like a beach ball in a tin can. He doesn’t have what you’d call a classic warrior’s physique.”
Samael pushes away his donut with his fingertips.
“Are you going to eat that?” says Candy.
“It’s yours,” he says.
Smiling, she wraps the donut in a napkin and drops it into her bag. Samael looks puzzled before he realizes she’s going to keep it as a souvenir.
“Did Mr. Muninn fix up the armor any?” I ask.
Samael gives me a look.
“Of course not. The damage is part of the mystique. I notice that you added more than a few burns and scrapes in a very short time.”
“Then you should thank me. I mystiqued it even more.”
Candy says, “He was cute playing Iron Man and it was fun pretending I was fucking Tony Stark, but the armor froze my boobs at night, so I’m kind of glad it’s gone.”
“No, we wouldn’t want one of the few intact holy remnants of the War in Heaven inconveniencing … your boobs,” Samael says.
Candy smiles at him.
“Would you like me to update your Wikipedia page?”
He frowns.
“I have a page? I don’t like that. Please remove it.”
“I can’t. But don’t worry about it. It’s mostly old Bible stories and folktales. There isn’t anything about your nice suits.”
“Still.”
“By the way, thanks for all the swell help when I was Downtown,” I say. “It took me three months to find your stupid clues in the library and escape.”
“I told you to read books. If you’d been more curious, you would have found your way out sooner. You’re always complaining that I don’t do enough for you.”
“You do plenty, but even when you help, I end up with more scars.”
“Then you should thank me,” says Samael. “I mystiqued you even more.”
Candy giggles.
“You have no idea how hard it is not to put everything you boys say on Stark’s page.”
Before Samael can explain to Candy all the reasons she shouldn’t call him a boy, a guy walks up and stands next to our table. He’s wearing a loose, expensive-looking black jacket. A dark red silk shirt open at the neck. An alligator belt with a gold buckle. He looks like a rep from a talent agency that could have handled Traci Lords in her jailbait prime.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, Mr. Stark, but can I speak to you in private?”
“Do my friends look like cops? If you can’t talk in front of them, you can’t talk to me.”
The guy holds up his hands defensively.
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone. My name is—”
“Declan,” I say.
His eyebrows furrow.
“Yes. Declan Garrett. How did you know?”
“It’s just a trick I can do.”
He looks skeptical, then his inner hustler takes over and he keeps talking.
“I just thought that you and the gentleman might be doing some business and I didn’t want to get in the way.”
“Yes, you did,” says Samael. “That’s exactly what you wanted. To stop a business deal.”
“I see. Because he’s in a suit and I’m not, we can’t just be a couple of friends eating donuts,” I say.
Samael looks at me.
“Are we friends, Jimmy?”
“Pipe down, Hugo Boss.”
I look back at Declan.
“You just hurt my feelings.”
“He’s very sensitive,” says Candy. “He might cry.”
“I might cry.”
Declan steps closer to the table. A salesman trying to establish intimacy with the mark.
“Would a million dollars soothe your wounded soul?”
Samael tsks.
“Do you really think a man like this can be bought with money?”
“Hell,” I say. “For a million dollars you can call me Suzy Quatro.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Jimmy.”
“Eat a jelly roll.” Then to Declan, “So what do I have to do for all the tea in China?”
He opens his hands like a preacher invoking the Holy Spirit or asking for a handout.
“Give me something more precious than gold—”
“I think he means me,” says Candy.
“—but that you have no use for.”
Candy does a mock frown.
“Now he’s hurt my feelings.”
“Does this thing have a name?” I ask.
Declan speaks quietly. Suddenly serious.
“Come now, Mr. Stark. We both know what I’m talking about.”
“No. We don’t.”
Samael sighs.
“He means the Qomrama Om Ya.”
“Is that right?”
Declan’s lips curl in a sly smile.
“He’s a smart man.”
“Yeah, he is. Ask nice and he’ll guess your weight. What makes you think I have it?”
“Because you were seen using it. On the child ghost.”
Oh, right.
The Qomrama is a weapon designed by old gods, the Angra Om Ya, to kill other gods. Namely ours. Turns out that the universe really belongs to the Angra and our God foxed them out of it. Now they’re pissed and they want it back. The child ghost, Lamia, was a piece of one of the Angra that leaked through to this universe, and in a pretty blue dress and with a great big knife, she came close to destroying the world.
“You got me there. I guess I did have it.”
“Did?” says Declan.
Candy nods.
“As in past tense. As in it went bye-bye, Charlie.”
Declan cocks his head. A coy move I’d call him on if I wasn’t sure it would cost me money.
“Come now. Who could take it from you, Mr. Stark?”
“A crazy rogue angel named Aelita.”
Declan doesn’t say anything for a minute, like he’s thinking things over.
“If it’s a question of payment, I can offer you more than money. A man like you must have a use for power objects. I can offer you the Spear of Destiny. The actual spear that pierced Christ’s side on the Cross.”
Samael rolls his eyes. He’s heard the line before. Candy smiles. She thinks she’s getting a new toy.
“No thanks. I already have one of those. Right between my Nunchucks of Fate and my Zip Gun of Doom.”
“I’m disappointed to hear that,” says Declan.
“How do you think I feel? I just lost a million dollars.”
“Not if you find it. If, for instance, you manage to reacquire it, I wouldn’t ask how.”
“How open-minded of you.”
Declan’s eyes flicker to Samael and back to me.
“Can I ask what kind of business you are discussing?”
“I was updating their Wikipedia pages,” says Candy. “Do you have one? I can do yours too.”
Declan gives her an indulgent smile.
“I’m afraid I’m not nearly as colorful as these gentlemen. But thank you for the kind offer.”
He reaches into an interior pocket in his jacket and pulls out a business card. He sets it on the table.
“I suppose there isn’t a lot more for us to talk about here in public. If you’re interested in getting serious, you can reach me here.”
“If I find anything interesting under the sofa cushions.”
“Exactly,” says Declan. He holds out his hand. I don’t shake it. After a minute he drops it to his side.
“Good-bye,” he says and walks away.
“Bye,” Candy calls. “It was strange meeting you.”
No one talks until Declan gets outside.
Samael says, “You realize that he didn’t believe a word you said. He thinks you still have the Qomrama and that you’re selling it to me.”
“How do you know that?”
Samael pushes Candy’s hands away from the laptop and closes the lid.
“Because the man I said was a pious bore? He’s about to shoot you.”
He pushes Candy down and ducks himself.
The guy fires just as I turn. The shot is close enough that I feel it breeze by my ear. It hits Candy’s laptop dead center. Her head pops up from under the table.
“You killed La Blue Girl, you asshole!”
Samael pulls her back down.
The guy pulls the trigger again, but I’m looking at him this time. I think he’s more used to shooting people in the back because the moment we make eye contact his hand shakes and his next shot goes through the window, cracking the safety glass. He pulls open the door and takes off across the parking lot. I’m not wasting time going for the door. I go out the window, broken glass flying across the windshields of parked cars.
Samael was right that it looks like things haven’t worked out for the shooter. He’s in a tan raincoat wrinkled enough that it looks like he sleeps in it. He’s an older guy. Midfifties. A bit of a gut hanging over the top of his jeans. But he runs like a fucking demon.
I chase him across Hollywood Boulevard and down La Brea. The shooter lane-splits between the gridlocked traffic, gracefully sliding across hoods and car roofs when they’re too close to squeeze between. I chase him as hard as I can, but I’m not gaining much ground and I can run damned fast. This tubby sad sack isn’t normal. He’s potioned up or there’s hoodoo on him. I could fry the shooter’s fat ass with a hex, but I learned my lesson after blowing up Rodeo Drive. Zipping through traffic at Mach 5 isn’t exactly low profile, but it’s better than launching hoodoo RPGs at the guy. I don’t need a beef with the Sub Rosa right now. So I suck it up and run faster.
He cuts to his right, running behind a gas station. I follow him but he clears a fence in one jump. I have to climb the damned thing. He’s gone when I hit the ground. I take off after him again.
At the corner of Sunset the shooter turns and sees me. His chest is heaving like his lungs are going to blow up like Macy’s Thanksgiving balloons. His eyes are twitching in their sockets like he’s maxed out on PCP. He’s definitely on a potion or two. I don’t think anyone has ever caught up with him before. He looks scared.
Then all of a sudden he’s calm. He smiles like a kid whose mom just tucked him in and kissed him good night.
I don’t know what he’s doing until he’s already doing it.
The bus’s engine growls. Without looking, he steps back off the curb, right in its path. It takes the bus another twenty feet to stop, but the shooter has flown forty feet. All around me people are screaming. Traffic in the intersection that was moving a second ago screeches to a halt.
I muscle my way through the crowd forming around him. He’s lying facedown. I kick him onto his back, get out my phone, and photograph him. People yell at me, taking me for a gore freak looking for something hot to put on his blog. There’s a tattoo on the side of his neck. I don’t recognize it. I shoot that too. One of his shoes came off and his wallet is lying a few feet away. I shove my way over and pick it up. More people are yelling. I guess I’ve blown my low profile. For all I know there’s a traffic camera shooting everything I’m doing.
I take out the dead man’s driver’s license and photograph that too. Then toss it and the wallet back on the ground just as a cop car pulls up. They must have been right around the corner.
Voices get shrill behind me. I don’t have to look. Villagers with pitchforks are pointing out the monster to the guys with the badges. I wonder what the penalty is for pickpocketing a corpse. I can’t be the first person who’s done it. This is L.A.
I walk to a guy sitting on a Harley. He’s a big boy. His feet are planted on either side of the bike, but his hands aren’t on the handlebars. I don’t have time for subtle.
With one hand, I grab the front of his shirt and lift him off the seat far enough to toss him off the bike without hurting him too much. With the other hand, I grab the handlebars so the bike doesn’t fall. The keys are still in the ignition. I gun the engine and take off before either of the cops closing in on me can get within grabbing range.
The moment I take off they hoof it back to the patrol car. Which isn’t going to do them any good at all. The accident has turned the street into a solid mass of cars, gawkers, and now, twenty or more amateur paparazzi, phones and cameras blasting. I steer the Harley onto the sidewalk and open the throttle, laying on the horn to clear the way. I turn the corner and head back up to Hollywood Boulevard.
I ditch the bike on the sidewalk behind a pickup truck with a camper shell big enough to hide it from patrol cars rolling by.
There are six more cop cars outside Donut Universe. Patrons are out in the parking lot yammering to the uniformed cops all at once. One takes statements but the others don’t want to hear about it. They just want the cattle to wait for the detectives while putting up yellow tape around the crime scene.
I spot Candy waving to me on the opposite corner, near a Christian Science church. Samael has his hand to his ear, talking on his phone.
Candy squeezes my hand when I reach them. She worries. It’s sweet. A second later Samael closes his phone.
“Did you get him?”
“He got himself. Strolled off the curb and kissed a bus.”
“Why? You’re not that scary.”
“Yes, I am.”
“If you say so.”
“How much do you have to pay a guy to go out like that?”
“You don’t. He chose to do it himself. It’s the mark of a true believer. In what, I don’t know and I don’t care. But you should.”
I thumb on my phone and go to the picture of the shooter’s driver’s license. I read it out loud.
“Trevor Moseley. Either of you ever hear of him?”
I show them his picture.
Candy shakes her head.
“I took a lot of souls back in the day, but I don’t recognize his name or face,” says Samael.
Candy beams at Samael.
“Sam just called some people. He’s getting me a new laptop.”
“Sam?” says Samael.
“Thanks,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Just thanks? Nothing pithy or sarcastic?”
“I’m capable of appreciating when someone does something nice for someone I care about.”
Samael looks at Candy.
“Good lord. What have you done to him?”
“Shocking, isn’t it?” she says. “Pinocchio is almost a real boy.”
I take a bite of my donut.
“Fuck both of you.”
Samael nods.
“Ah. There’s the Jimmy I know.”
He looks at his watch.
“Look at the time. I should be getting back home before I’m missed.”
“How are things Upstairs?” I ask.
“Just don’t die anytime soon. You’ve seen Hell and right now I wouldn’t wish Heaven on anyone. Ruach is more paranoid every day. Imagine Josef Stalin with unlimited resources.”
Ruach is one of the five God brothers and the current God sitting on the throne in Heaven. Unfortunately for both humans and angels, he’s the “troubled child.” A stone son of a bitch. Supposedly he’s cut a deal with Aelita to let her kill the other four brothers if she leaves him alone. She’s already killed at least one, maybe more. Aside from Mr. Muninn and Ruach, no one knows where the other brothers are.
“At least he can’t send you to Tartarus,” I say.
“There are worse things than Tartarus, I’m afraid.”
“Like what?”
Samael just shakes his head.
“If you want to get in touch with me, go through Muninn. Don’t do it directly. Sandman Slim isn’t a name I want on my contacts list right now.”
And he’s gone. Just blips out of existence. Interesting. With all the shit that’s happened—Mason Faim’s attempted war with Heaven, and God fragmenting into warring siblings—I’ve never seen Samael nervous before.
A couple of people in the Donut Universe parking lot are pointing our way. I wonder if the cops have put together that the hero who chased a shooter from the donut shop is the same asshole that desecrated his corpse and jacked a biker a few blocks away. This isn’t the time to find out. I see a tasty shadow by the side of the church and pull Candy inside with me.
We go through the Room of Thirteen Doors and come out around the back of the Chateau Marmont. Our digs these days. Really it’s Lucifer’s penthouse, but until they figure out that I’m not Lucifer anymore, it’s a room-service, clean-towels, and free-cable party.
BACK WHEN I was still the Lord of Flies, I’d walk through the Chateau Marmont lobby like Errol Flynn back in the day. Now that I’m not, I creep through with my head down like a flea-bitten hillbilly trying to sneak out on a bar tab. Sooner or later word is going to get out up here. The local Satanists might be nouveau riche headbangers and trust-fund creeps with a grudge against the world, but they have some good psychics on their payroll. One of them is going to pick up Mr. Muninn’s vibes and start wondering how Lucifer is doing paperwork in his palace in Hell and ordering kung pao shrimp in his Chateau penthouse at the same time.
Lady Snowblood is playing on the giant plasma screen in the living room. Kasabian is at the long table he uses for a desk, surrounded by dirty plates and beer cans. He’s naked, but it isn’t like ordinary naked. Kasabian is a disembodied head. I’m the one who disembodied him. He shot me, so it seemed like the thing to do. He used to scuttle around on a little wood-and-brass skateboard I conjured for him. Now he gets around on a mechanical hellhound body I brought back from Downtown. Only the body has never quite worked right. Manimal Mike is trying to fix that.
Kasabian is bouncing on the balls of his two rear hound feet. His balance looks good. Mike looks up as Candy and I come inside. He points to Kasabian, looking pale and hopeful.
“Can I have my soul back now?” he says.
I watch Kasabian.
“I don’t know. Can Gimpy make it down the catwalk on his own?”
Kasabian takes a step, teeters, and plants his ass on the side of the table to keep from falling.
Mike slumps into a desk chair. Wipes his face with a dirty rag. It leaves a trail of grease on his forehead and cheek. He wheels himself over and uses a delicate tool that looks like a screwdriver crossed with a spider to make adjustments to Kasabian’s legs.
Mike is a Tick-Tock Man. He builds mechanical spirit familiars for the Sub Rosa chic set. He might be a drunk and nutty and a little suicidal, but he knows his way around machines. He also owes the Devil a favor. The idiot sold his soul a few years back. Now he wants it back. He still thinks I’m Lucifer, so I’m making him work off the debt by fixing up Kasabian.
While Mike works on him, I show Kasabian the dead man’s bloody photo on my phone.
“Friend of yours?” Kasabian says.
“He missed, if that’s what you mean.”
“And now you feel guilty for offing him.”
“That’s the problem. I didn’t. He did it to himself. And I want to know why.”
I flip to the guy’s driver’s license. Kasabian squints at it.
“Trevor Moseley. When did he die?”
“Just now,” I say. “Like twenty minutes ago.”
He shakes his head.
“I won’t see him for a day or so. They’re not exactly state-of-the-art when it comes to sorting out the new meat Downtown.”
Kasabian has a few useful skills. He’s a passable computer hacker, he has good taste in movies—he once ran a choice indie video-rental place in Hollywood. Also, he can see into Hell. It’s a gruesome little trick, but gruesome describes 99 percent of his life, so what’s one more percent between friends?
The trick works like this: when I came back from Hell, I brought a jar of peepers with me. Peepers are eyeballs a lot like ours (no, I don’t know where they come from and I don’t want to know), only they work like surveillance cameras. I scattered dozens of them around Hell. Between the peepers and his ability to peek into Downtown through the Daimonion Codex, Kasabian can spyglass a good chunk of Hell. Entrepreneur that he is, he’s even turning his deadeye trick into a business. Setting himself up as an online psychic. When it’s up and running, he’ll track down any of your dead relatives and report back on them—as long as they’re in Hell. Seeing as how that’s where most suckers are headed, he should be in business until the sun turns this rock into one big overcooked s’more.
“Let me know when you spot him. I might just go down and ask Mr. Moseley a few questions.”
Candy says, “Can I go too?”
I should have been ready for that.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Candy tosses down the magazine she was thumbing through.
“We talked about this. If you leave me here and disappear down there again, you better stay down there because I swear I’ll salt your skull and drink you like a daiquiri.”
Candy isn’t exactly human. She’s a Jade. That’s sort of like being a vampire, only Jades dissolve your insides and drink you, kind of like a spider. I know it sounds bad, but she’s off the people juice these days. And it’s kind of sexy when she lets the monster out. I just have to be around to make sure it goes back in.
“What’s the difference between true love and a murder spree?” says Kasabian.
“I don’t know. What?”
He shrugs.
“I don’t know. I was hoping you lovebirds would have a clue.”
He smiles, pleased with his half-assed joke.
I say, “Go bite a mailman, Old Yeller.”
Mike lets go of Kasabian’s leg. He flexes it and it looks like it’s working all right. Mike goes to work on the other one.
“Well?” says Candy. She’s right beside me, her hands balled into fists. She’s not backing down on this.
“You’re right. I promised. But this is only if I actually go. I’m not making any special trips down so you can take snapshots with Stiv Bators.”
“Deal.”
She stands on her toes and kisses me on the cheek.
“I got it,” says Kasabian. “When it’s true love you know why you’re getting stabbed.”
“Kasabian, you romantic fool,” says Candy. “You just got ten percent cuter.”
He smiles at her.
“Kitten, I’ve got romance coming out my ass.”
“And now the cute is gone.”
Mike chuckles to himself. Kasabian shifts his leg, clipping him on the nose.
“Learn to stop while you’re ahead,” I say.
“I haven’t had much practice with women since you turned me into a carnival attraction.”
“I’ll have you tripping the light fantastic in no time,” says Mike.
As casually as he can, Kasabian says, “Stark, you still have Brigitte’s number?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not asking for a hookup, just an introduction.”
“I’ve put Brigitte through enough. I’m not letting you loose on her.”
“You won’t do me one favor, but you want me to look up your dead pal in Hell.”
“Look, Mike gets your legs working, you can come down to Bamboo House of Dolls and ask her yourself. Maybe she’ll say yes just for the novelty of doing a robot.”
“I think she might be seeing someone,” says Candy.
“Who?” says Kasabian.
“The King of Candy Land. Or was it Josie and the Pussycats?”
“Great. Now she gets discreet. Forget it. Chicks only want one monster in their life and Stark got to Brigitte first.”
Mike stops working and Kasabian tries to stand. This time he makes it. His legs support him and he takes a few steps like, well, a circus dog doing a trick for biscuits.
I say, “You know, no matter how well you make his arms and legs work, he still looks like a mutt.”
Mike sighs and nods.
“To rework his whole body so it’s more human shaped, I’d have to cut it up with a plasma torch, lengthen and straighten his back legs, redo the spine, and rebalance and recalibrate the whole thing,” he says. “The only way to do that is for Kasabian to get off it.”
I look at Kasabian, walking steady for the first time since I’ve been back.
“Maybe he’s right. Maybe you should go back to your skateboard for a while and let Mike do his thing.”
Kasabian looks panicked. He stumbles back against his desk, his hound legs giving way.
“No way anyone is chopping up this body. I looked like a fucking bug on that skateboard. Now at least I’m mammal shaped.”
“I’ve got all your limbs working right for the moment,” says Mike. “Maybe there’s some way I can do your legs without taking them off.”
Kasabian sits down and slaps his computer keyboard. The screen lights up.
“Yeah. You work on that. Right now let me get back to work building my site.”
As Mike packs up his tools he looks at me.
“I’m not getting my soul back, am I?”
“Not today, Mike. But keep up the good work. You’re closing in on daylight.”
I head into the big bedroom Candy and I share. Samael’s old clothes still hang in the closet. Custom shirts and suits so sharp they could cut you like a knife. I toss my jeans and T-shirt on the bed and change into a bloodred button-down shirt and black silk trousers.
Candy follows me in and sits on the bed.
I say, “Why don’t you stay here and see if Kasabian can pull up any information on Moseley when he was alive.”
Candy doesn’t move.
“I know you’re not dressing up for me, so who’s the lucky girl?” she says.
I comb my hair in the bedroom mirror. It doesn’t help much. The neater I get my hair, the worse it makes the scars on my face look. There are donut crumbs on the glove that covers my prosthetic left hand, so I toss the glove onto a pile of dirty clothes and put on a clean one.
“Brigitte was there when the Qomrama disappeared, but even if she wasn’t, I bet she’s not the one sending hit men after me.”
“Then who is?”
“I don’t know. But there were only two other people there when Aelita took the 8 Ball. Saragossa Blackburn and his wife. So, I’m off to see the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
THE SUB ROSA is the underground magic community that keeps the old practices alive and secretly runs a few pieces of the world. Saragossa Blackburn is our Augur, the president and holy high chieftain of the entire Sub Rosa freak squad in California. There’s no one bigger. With his heavy money Illuminati of politicians, corporate honchos, bankers, entertainment-industry lackeys, and law enforcement creeps, he’s the power behind the power, and when we don’t have a Sub Rosa governor running the state, Blackburn makes sure that Mr. or Ms. Civilian knows who’s really calling the shots.
He’s a scryer, a seer who gets glimpses of the future. All Augurs are scryers and Blackburn is supposed to be a good one. On the other hand, he didn’t see me coming the last time I paid him a visit, but I was still Lucifer back then. Now that I’m just another asshole, chances are he has me right on his radar.
And here comes the proof. Men in shades and dark Brooks Brothers suits pile out of a line of blacked-out vans. The last time I dropped by, Blackburn was so sure of his untouchability that he didn’t bother with security guards. He had enough wards and hoodoo mantraps around the place to hold off King Kong but not the Devil.
I don’t like this. It feels too much like the bullshit I had to put up with when I worked for Larson Wells and his holy brown shirt army, the Golden Vigil.
A marine type with a blond crew cut and steroid shoulders the size of baby bulls puts his hand up.
“Excuse me, sir. Do you have an appointment?”
It’s not the “excuse me” part that gets under my skin. It’s the “sir.” Procedures. Protocol. They’re all civilized masks for contempt. I can deal with that, but I like my hate straight and up front. And these boys radiate hate like Tijuana blacktop in August. They know who I am and that I put a massive hurt on the last bunch of Sub Rosa security goons that braced me like this.
But I learned a bit of the protocol dance myself when I was playing Lucifer. Sometimes civilized is the best play. The feint they’re not expecting. Besides, I’m decked out in silk and shiny shoes like Louis the Sun King’s jester. Unless I crack someone’s head and eat their brains, I couldn’t scare a Brownie.
“I’m here to see the Augur. My name is James Stark.”
“Yes, sir. Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but if you tell Blackburn I’m here, I’m sure he’ll see me.”
Mr. Shoulders smiles.
“The Augur is a busy man. If you call his secretary and make an appointment, we’ll be happy to make sure you get inside. I can give you his secretary’s phone number.”
“Yeah. You see, I kind of saved his wife’s soul, so he owes me a favor. Plus, someone tried to shoot me today, so I’d like to see the Augur right fucking now, pretty please with ice cream on top.”
This is what Shoulders and his friends have been waiting for. An excuse. His heartbeat is going up. Microtremors in his face and hands are sure signs he’s waiting for me to make a move. And if I don’t do something soon, he’s going to work himself up to where he’ll make a move for me.
A few months ago I would already have had half of these merc fuckwits on their backs, bleeding and crying for their mommies. But I’m trying to cool some of that these days. Go with the advice Wild Bill Hickok gave men in Hell and pick and choose my fights.
“I’d really appreciate it if one of you gentlemen could call the house for me,” I say. I follow it with a big, sunny smile.
Shoulders is one second from Tasing me when his phone rings. A funny, chirping ring tone. He relaxes. It’s not conscious. It’s reflex. He’s been trained to stand down when he hears that particular tone. Besides, he has six other roid-rage behemoths behind him ready to stomp me to apple butter if I scratch my nose. But that’s not going to happen. I can already see it in his body language. His shoulders are slumped. His voice is calm and low. His heart rate is dropping back to normal. When I see flat-out disappointment on his face, I know whose funny ring tone just saved my nice creased slacks.
Shoulders slaps his phone closed and sticks it back in his jacket pocket. It takes him a second to get the words out.
“Mr. Stark, I’ve been told that you’re authorized for a visit with the Augur.” Then comes the really hard part. “I hope you’ll forgive any inconvenience the new security measures might have caused you.”
“I forgive you,” I say, “but I’m not bringing a piñata to your birthday party. You’ll have to get your own goddamn candy.”
In grand Sub Rosa tradition, from the outside Blackburn’s mansion looks like something a wino coughed up after a night of Sterno and generic, nonfilter cigarettes. In this case, it looks like an abandoned residency hotel on South Main Street. The first floor is boarded up, covered with cryptic gang graffiti and stapled flyers for bands and strip clubs. The second and third floors are empty, burned-out shells. It’s all just hoodoo, of course. Inside, Blackburn’s place is a Victorian wet dream. Hell, it’s so real he probably has opium addicts and lungers planted in the guest rooms to add a little more color to the place.
Inside, a guy in his early twenties in a gray suit he can’t possibly afford greets me. A staff monkey. A young Sub Rosa emperor-in-training waiting to enter the big leagues. I wonder how connected you have to be to get a gig like this at his age.
“Please follow me, sir,” he says in a voice smooth as buttermilk. I follow him into Blackburn’s study. I killed a few people in here last month, but you’d never know it by the look of the place. No blood or a single bone fragment in sight. My compliments to your mystical janitors.
“James. Good to see you,” says Blackburn, coming from around his desk to shake my hand. He’s on a first-name basis with me since I saved his wife. I’m not on a first-name basis with him because he’s as close to God as we have in California.
“Thanks. And thanks for calling off your dogs. Did you hire all of them on my account? I’m flattered all to hell.”
Blackburn points to a seat by the desk. I sit. He goes back around and settles down.
“Not you specifically. It’s more because of … well, everything. Your coming in so easily was unnerving, of course, but Aelita’s behavior was worse. I’m good at seeing what people really are, but I suppose that skill doesn’t extend to angels. Anyway after the …”
“Massacre?”
“Yes, the massacre here, I decided that we finally needed to update security. The old ways of respect and even fear for the office of Augur are long gone. The twenty-first century is a fine place, but it’s a little medieval too. We need our Great Companies to keep the neighbor’s dog from crapping on the lawn.”
“If ‘Great Companies’ means expensive mercs, I guess so. Still, with your money I think you could do better. At least one of your guys wanted to start trouble, not put it down.”
“I know,” says Blackburn. “That’s why I called when I did. And he’s not usually like that. He’s usually a good man. It’s just that you scared him.”
“Me? Look at me. I’m dressed like a Deadwood dance-hall girl. How am I going to scare pros?”
“Because you’re still James Stark and everyone knows the things you’ve done. And gotten away with.”
“Now you’re making me blush.”
Blackburn gives me a smile. I can read people too. He’s indulging me because he wants something.
“If you’re really so interested in my security, why don’t you come and work for me? I hear you’re having some trouble with your revenue stream,” Blackburn says.
“Is it that obvious these aren’t my clothes?”
“I’m offering you Aelita’s old position as head of my security team. Wouldn’t you like to step into her shoes and show how much better you’d be at the job?”
“Don’t you already have a new security chief?”
“Yes. Audsley Ishii. A very competent man. But I’d rather have Sandman Slim on my side.”
“On the payroll, you mean.”
“Exactly. What do you say?”
I shake my head.
“I tried the salaryman thing back with the Golden Vigil. I work a lot better on my own, thanks. And right now I’m kind of busy trying to save, you know, the world.”
“I thought your chasing Aelita was a more personal thing.”
“It’s pretty damn personal, but she’s not what I’m chasing right now.”
Blackburn leans back in his chair. Steeples his hands.
“You mean the bauble.”
“It’s a god-killing weapon.”
“I’ve heard the stories. All unsubstantiated.”
“Do you think when the Angra Om Ya come stomping back, you’ll bribe pissed-off elder gods with brunch and VIP night at Disneyland?”
Blackburn’s hands go from a steeple to a dismissive little wave.
“Come on, Stark. You’ve seen the celestial realms. You don’t really believe all this nonsense about old gods and ultimate weapons, do you?”
“I believe it because I met one of the Angra. Remember the ghost that offed the mayor a while back? Her name is Lamia.”
“The little girl with the knife, you mean?”
“She killed off enough Dreamers to destabilize reality. If I hadn’t stopped her, she might have destroyed the world all on her own. And she’s just one little piece of what these fuckers can do.”
Blackburn goes quiet for a minute. It’s on his face. Am I here hustling him with ghost stories or am I telling the truth and maybe he and the other masters of the universe ought to start getting scared?
“I’ve looked into L.A.’s future and haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing.”
I shrug.
“You couldn’t see what an angel was angling to do. What makes you think you can see what gods want?”
He leans forward, his elbows on the desk.
“Work for me. I can give you access to more resources than you can possibly have on your own.”
“Thanks, but seriously, I’m terrible. You’d want me dead in a week,” I say. “But let me ask you something. Are you the one keeping the cops off me? Maybe clearing the decks just enough so I have to work for you?”
He shakes his head.
“No. Someone else is your guardian angel.”
“Who?”
“I have no idea. But you’re right. If you work for me, you’ll never have to worry about the police again.”
“I told you I already have something to do.”
“You’re awfully altruistic all of a sudden. What happened to Stark the monster? I seem to remember a bit of a madman storming into my house.”
“I don’t know what altruistic is, but I’m pretty sure I’m not it. I just want to keep a few people I like from burning in a hellfire shitstorm.”
He looks away for a second and then back to me.
“You know there’s a rumor that you already have the Qomrama Om Ya. That you found Aelita and took it back.”
“I know. I heard about it today. Recognize this guy?”
I hold out my phone so Blackburn can see Moseley’s photo. He makes a sour face and looks away.
“Warn me if you’re ever going to show me anything like that again,” he says. “Not everyone is as used to mangled bodies as you.”
I forget that blood and dead eyes can be kind of gruesome to regular people. Something to add to the etiquette list I swear I’ll start tomorrow.
“Sorry.”
“Who was that?”
“The all-meat hood ornament on a city bus. He took a shot at me today after I told a buyer I didn’t have the 8 Ball.”
“Why do you think I might know the man?”
“I was hoping he might have been one of Aelita’s crew when she ran your security.”
Blackburn shakes his head.
“Aelita took care of the men herself and kept them at a distance from the household. I never got to know any of them personally.”
It was a long shot but I had to try.
“If you want my opinion,” says Blackburn, “you’re looking at this all wrong. You see the Qomrama and immediately think of Aelita. But what about a rival? If she doesn’t have it anymore—if she’s lost it or is hiding it—surely there are other people in L.A. who would like to get their hands on an object with that much power.”
“You included.”
Blackburn shakes his head.
“It’s tempting, but I don’t want anything to do with Aelita or anything she’s involved with.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“You might also be interested to know that someone in L.A. has put a magic object on the market recently. An object he claims is unrivaled in its importance. Sound familiar?”
“You think this asshole has the Qomrama?”
“It’s possible,” says Blackburn. “If I had something that powerful, I would only approach a few of the best-placed families. You don’t want something like that going to the wrong sort of people. However, this person might not realize what he or she has.”
“Then why would someone try to buy it from me and take a shot at me when I wouldn’t sell?”
“Because the buyer is hedging his bets. He’s probably made offers to both of you. The two people currently connected to the Qomrama.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“True. But if you can find out who’s selling the object and who’s bid on it, maybe it would point you in the direction of what you’re really looking for.”
I want to poke holes in Blackburn’s idea, but I can’t, mainly because I have no ideas of my own. I’ve spent the last month chasing rumors and banging my head into stone walls and come up with nothing. At least Blackburn’s idea gives me something to do.
“So who’s selling Aladdin’s lamp?”
“I don’t know. The seller is shy and only goes through intermediaries.”
“What’s the intermediary’s name?”
“Brendan Garrett. A professional dealer in mystical exotica. I’ll write down his address.”
Now there’s one less maybe in the world.
“Garrett? The guy who tried to buy from me today was named Garrett.”
Blackburn finishes writing and hands me the piece of paper.
“That’s probably your answer right there. You’ve been pulled into the middle of a family squabble.”
“Right. One brother wants it and the other has a line to it but won’t cut the other brother in on the deal. I can see some Lifetime Channel drama in that.”
I look at the address. It’s a glitzy hotel and a room number.
“I’m glad I could be of help. Especially if it’s going to save the world. Even I have people I’d rather not see hurt in a celestial war.”
Blackburn stands, letting me know my time is up.
I get up, and when he extends his hand I shake it. I wonder if he’s looking into my future. I want to ask him what he sees, but I don’t. I’m not sure if I altogether believe in scrying, and what does it matter what he tells me? If I live or die it doesn’t change what I’m going to do: find the 8 Ball. And when I finally do die, I know I’m going back to Hell. That was easy. Now I’m a scryer too. All I need is a crystal ball and a pointy wizard hat. I can get a booth at the Renn Faire and make a mint.
On the way out a couple of Blackburn’s security goons get me by each arm and shove me up against the front door. I’m one deep breath shy of putting the idiots out of their misery, then marching back in and twisting Blackburn’s head off for lying to me. But another man in a suit strolls up. He’s almost a head shorter than me, with a fine-boned face and hands. His skin is so pale it’s almost white. Calm, blue, almond eyes set in a face so handsome it’s almost pretty.
“Oh, my ears and whiskers, is that little Audsley Ishii?” I say.
He gives me a lopsided grin. Not a nice grin. The kind a headsman gives you when he doesn’t like you and knows his ax is good and dull today.
“I’m not going to engage with you Stark, so don’t even try.”
“What’s the matter? Did you hear Blackburn and me talking inside? A little nervous about your job?”
Ishii gets close enough for me to smell his fresh and minty mouthwash.
He says, “I don’t want you showing up here again without an invitation.”
“What you want matters as much to me as the price of pinto beans on Mars.”
“I won’t warn you again.”
“Perfect. The next time your boys jump me, it’ll give me the perfect excuse to lop off your head.”
“Get out of here and don’t come back.”
The guys on my arms pull me away from the door and try to shove me outside. I plant my feet on the carpet and push back. I look at Audsley.
“I’m just curious. Did you know you were going to write a suicide note when you woke up this morning or did the urge just sneak up on you?”
Ishii walks way. Before I can say anything else stupid, I’m pushed out on the shitty street in front of the shitty hotel. A few of the other security hoods are standing around. They laugh when they see me get the bum’s rush. I stare at them, memorizing their faces. If everything goes wrong and fire comes down from the sky, I’m making an igloo out of their bodies and taking Candy inside with me. We’ll still die but I’ll get to listen to these idiots roast first.
I make like I’m walking over to them. They get serious. Hands move toward gun bulges under their jackets. Just before one of them faints or pops a shot off, I disappear into a shadow on the side of Blackburn’s building.
Teach your boys that trick, Ishii, you Napoleon-complex Snow White prick.
THE BEVERLY WILSHIRE Hotel is so posh it gives the Taj Mahal a hard-on. Almost four hundred rooms and a million more secrets. It’s strange seeing it in daylight instead of Hell’s perpetual twilight. Downtown, there’s another version of the Beverly Wilshire. The penthouse was my—Lucifer’s—private space in the infernal palace. Of course, there are other differences. Basement kennels full of the hellhounds. Gibbets out front for extra-naughty prisoners. Hell’s legions on guard. And as far as the eye can see, the wreckage of Pandemonium, Hell’s capital. The heady reek of blood tides and open sewers.
Up here, the Beverly Wilshire is where Blackburn’s crowd buy and sell small countries and bang their mistresses before hunkering down in gated communities with more guns than the Third Reich.
This is the address Blackburn gave me for Brendan Garrett. The room number is for a corner suite. I have a hoodoo key buried in my chest. It lets me enter the Room of Thirteen Doors, the still center of the universe. Nothing can touch me in the Room. Not God or the Devil. It’s my vacation resort and my ace in the hole. From the Room I can come out through a shadow anywhere I want. But that doesn’t mean I like doing it. I especially don’t like walking into rooms when I don’t know what’s waiting inside. But I know the Beverly Wilshire well enough that I figure I can bail safely if I barge in on a gunfight or an ether frolic.
From Rodeo Drive, I step into a shadow next to a palm tree and come out in the hall by Garrett’s suite. I put my ear to the door and listen. Nothing. Just the steady hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning system. I go into the suite through a shadow around the doorframe.
The room isn’t too bad. Almost human in a show-offy kind of way. Gold carpet and drapes. Reds and earth tones for the pricey furniture. But even in Richie Rich hotels the art stinks. It’s all vague impressionist scribbles, like minimalist portraits of whoever the artist was hitting on that day. They’re not make-you-want-to-throw-up bad, they’re the kind of art designed not to offend or appeal to anyone. White noise in a classy frame. If I was staying here I’d have to cover them up like I was in mourning.
The room looks lived in, like Garrett’s been here awhile. Room-service menus and magazines on the coffee table. Clothes hung up in the closet and tossed over the backs of chairs in the bedroom. A half-empty bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses, one with lipstick. So he’s had company. But the most interesting things are the bird and the bedside table.
The bird is a raven and it’s fake. How do I know it’s fake? It hasn’t shit all over the floor. It’s a mechanical familiar and a nice one by the look of it. It cocks its head and stares at me with its shiny black eyes, letting me know that this is its space and it’s not going to move. In the bedside table I find a calfskin wallet, keys, a phone number in a feminine hand on a cocktail napkin, a thick wad of twenties and hundreds held together with a gold money clip, and five passports, all with different names but the same picture. I’m guessing Garrett’s. As I lay the goods out on the bed the bird cranes its head around and I’m reminded how stupid I can be.
I was so distracted by Garrett’s goods that I didn’t check out the whole suite. I don’t have to turn my head to know what the raven is looking at. Instead, I duck as a bullet from a silenced pistol flies by my head.
Garrett gets off another shot and hits the bedside table. That gives me just enough time to slip the black blade out of my waistband at the back and throw it. I don’t want to kill him. I just want him to stop shooting so I can ask him questions. Garrett flinches when he sees the knife, but he’s not quite fast enough. The blade hits the barrel of the gun and knocks it from his hand. But it doesn’t fall far enough away. He dives for it. I toss an easy chair at him and follow behind it, hoping to get to the gun first. Funny thing about hope. It seldom works out. That’s why they gave it a stupid name like “hope.”
Garrett gets to the pistol just as I reach him. Still on the floor, he tilts the barrel up and fires. My eyesight goes black for a second as the pain hits and almost doubles me over. I have enough momentum that I go over Garrett and hit the wall behind him. He looks me in the eye, but before he can swing the gun around, I clip him good on the temple with the heel of my chic loafer. Garrett flops onto the floor and the gun falls from his hand.
Having just had some sense shot into me, I grab the pistol and check to see that Garrett is really unconscious before I go into the bathroom to look at my wound.
I’m a nephilim. Half angel, which makes me hard to kill. And I’ve been hurt worse than this. Hell, just in the past year Kasabian shot me in the chest, Aelita stabbed me with an angelic flaming sword, and a Hellion cut off one of my arms. Garrett was packing a light, quiet .22. Not a shoot-out weapon. More like something a hit man would pack. A .22 shell might bounce off the thick part of your skull if it was coming from any distance, but put a slug in right behind the ear, it’s pennies-on-your-eyes time. So it seems like Declan and Brendan are both comfortable with killing when things don’t go their way. At least Brendan does his own dirty work.
I sit on the cool tile of the bathroom floor with a towel pressed to my side. The pain from the shot has turned to a steady ache that peaks when I breathe in. I’m lucky that he didn’t hit a rib or lung or I’d really be in bad shape. By tomorrow morning the wound will be healed. The bullet will still be inside me, but I’ll only feel it when I do the Twist, so I can wait to get it out.
In a few minutes the throbbing eases off. I get to my feet and go back into the suite. Check that Garrett is still unconscious and then go for his bottle of Laphroaig. Unscrew the bottle with one hand while holding the towel with the other and take a long pull. And instantly regret it. Laphroaig isn’t exactly my brand. I prefer Aqua Regia, Hellion moonshine. I developed a taste for it when I fought in Hell’s arenas. Sure it tastes like cayenne pepper and gasoline but it’s better than this Scotch. This stuff tastes like barnyard dirt and burned lawn clippings. The rich are different. They don’t just own the earth, they like to drink it.
Samael’s silk shirt is ruined. I’m hard on clothes. It’s like my body declared a jihad on everything I wear. At least this shirt wasn’t mine. But I kind of liked it. Candy isn’t going to be wild when she sees my blood soaked through.
I take the bottle and limp back to Garrett. I turn out his pockets but they’re empty. I pull my knife out of the floor and put it back in my waistband. Nothing to do now but wait for the guest of honor to wake up. Under other circumstances I’d dump water or a bucket of ice on him to get his ass moving, but I’m just as happy to have a few minutes of me time.
A phone on the coffee table rings. It’s not Garrett’s cell. It’s the hotel phone. I go over and pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Garrett?”
“Yes.”
“This is the front desk. A package has arrived for you. Would you like me to send it up to your room?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
I hang up.
I can’t answer the door like this. Garrett’s closet isn’t any help. He’s a lot bigger than I am. I’d look like I was wearing a tepee in one of his shirts. I toss the bloody towel in the bathroom and grab the hotel robe off the back of the door. I look at myself in the mirror. I’m pale and sweating, but I look more hungover than gut-shot. I set the pistol on the coffee table and drag Garrett to the bed, toss him on top, and cover him with blankets. The raven flutters over and stands on the lump that’s Garrett’s soon-to-be-kicked-around-the-room carcass.
There’s a gentle knock on the door. I grab the money clip and peel off a twenty.
A young, freckled woman in a hotel uniform stands in the hall.
“Mr. Garrett?”
“Yes. Thanks for bringing it up,” I say through my weak hangover smile.
“Of course.”
She hands me the box. There’s nothing on it but a tag for a local courier company.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” she asks.
“No. This is fine,” I say, and hand her the twenty. I didn’t get all the blood off my hands. There’s a line of red along one edge of the bill. But it looks more like ink than anything else. And let’s face it. This is an L.A. hotel. It can’t be the first time someone handed her bloody money.
“Thank you,” she says, and I close the door. That’s enough social interaction for now. I can feel my side starting to leak through the robe, so I carry the box to a larger table by the wet bar and set it down. I get a new towel from the bathroom and tie it tight around my waist. It burns like a son of a bitch, but it ought to stop all the annoying fucking blood for a while.
With the black blade I slice open the courier box. Inside is a leather brief bag, something like an oversize attaché case that lawyers carry. There’s another case inside that. Plastic, but heavy and substantial. Almost like a gun case. I slide it out of the brief bag, push that onto the floor, and set down the plastic one. I take a quick peek at Garrett to make sure he’s not going to sneak up on me. The raven is still standing guard over him. I pop the latches on the case and push back the lid.
Lying packed in a snug black foam liner is the Qomrama Om Ya.
Color me the luckiest son of a bitch on the planet. I grab it to make sure I’m not seeing things.
Wait. Keep the son-of-a-bitch part but forget the lucky. The 8 Ball is like the bird. A fake. The real 8 Ball radiates heavy magic that you can feel through your skin. This thing looks good, but it’s as magic as loaded dice.
Whoever made it isn’t a complete idiot. It gives off some minor hoodoo vibes, enough to feel real if you’ve never handled the real Qomrama. It’s like how Russian gangs sell kindergarten terrorists radioactive junk and tell them it’s plutonium. The morons think they’re going to build a nuke, but all they get is cancer-therapy scrap.
The only other thing in the case is an old book. It’s full of diagrams of the 8 Ball along with what look like instructions, but it’s in a language I’ve never seen before. I put the book in my back pocket. Father Traven might have some fun with it.
In the bedroom, the raven squawks and flutters back to the chair. Garrett sits up. His eyes go wide when he sees me with his courier box.
“That’s not for you!” he yells.
“Finders keepers.”
He starts feeling around the bed, knocking his passports and cash onto the floor. He’s looking for the gun, but it’s over on the coffee table. When he can’t find it, he swings his legs onto the floor and stumbles to his feet.
Just to be a dick about it, I take the fake Qomrama from the case and toss it from hand to hand like a basketball. I don’t see the blinking light right away. It’s down at the bottom of the compartment that held the 8 Ball. When I do notice it I have a pretty good idea what it is and I start running. So does Garrett, but the other way. He makes it to the coffee table, snatches up the pistol, and levels it at me.
“Give me back my merchandise,” he says.
I’m halfway into a shadow, bent low, when the bomb goes off. The concussion blasts me the rest of the way out of the room.
I suppose I could have been a Good Samaritan. Run back for Garrett, knocked the gun out of his hand, and pulled him into the shadow with me. But it hurt when I bent down to steal his money clip and … well, the bastard did shoot me.
I HATE GOING through the Room straight into the penthouse at the Chateau Marmont. Whatever hoodoo keeps the penthouse hidden from both civilians and Sub Rosa makes me dizzy and nauseous every time I walk through it. That doesn’t matter this time. I’m already dizzy and nauseous.
I fall near where we keep the food trays lined up buffet style against the wall. At least I don’t have to worry about Candy being concerned about my belly wound. My half-blasted-off clothes will distract her. Plus, I have the cash. And the fake Qomrama.
I grab the edge of a table and pull myself to my feet with my prosthetic left arm. The explosion must have blown off the glove. The arm is ugly as Hell. It was given to me by a Kissi, an extinct race of mutant angels that lived in the chaos at the edge of the universe. My prosthetic looks like a bug claw crossed with the Terminator, but it handles things like explosions pretty well, so I can use it sometimes when the rest of my body isn’t cooperating.
Before I know what’s happening, I’m being steered onto one of the leather sofas. I find half a cup of Aqua Regia on the coffee table and gulp it down. When I look up Candy is standing over me. She’s pulling off my shredded shirt, looking scared. And sees the bloody towel. Now her fear is mixed with annoyance.
“I let you out of my sight for ten fucking minutes,” she says.
My ears are ringing, so it takes me a second to understand what she said.
She pulls out the black blade I gave her and cuts off the rest of the shirt and towel. When she sees the bullet wound she looks at me hard.
Before she can say anything, I hold out the 8 Ball.
“Look, baby, I brought you a present.”
Then I pass out.
I WAKE UP in bed naked and wrapped in a sheet. There’s a stain where my blood and something else has soaked through. Candy sits beside me, playing a game on her pink laptop.
Vidocq is in a chair nearby, smoking, his feet propped on a corner of the bed. Spirited Away plays on the big screen. It’s what Candy always watches whenever she’s upset. A young girl sits on a train. Some kind of Japanese folk spirit sits beside her. White oval face. All draped in black.
“Where did that come from?” I say, nodding at the laptop.
She doesn’t look up from whatever she’s playing. It pings and pops. Plays a silly little tune.
“I don’t think she’s speaking to you at the moment,” says Vidocq in his smooth French accent.
I look at her. She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“I guess not.”
I’m blistered from the explosion. I lean down and sniff the stain on the sheet. It’s a strange mild acid reek with something sweet. Maybe even a little Spiritus Dei. A complicated potion. I look at Vidocq.
“One of yours?”
He smiles and inclines his head in a little bow.
“Thanks,” I say.
“De rien.”
Vidocq is an alchemist and a thief. He’s also a hundred and fifty years old. You’d think after living in this country for a hundred years, he would have lost the accent. I don’t think he wants to. It’s all he has left of France. It’s not like he can ever go back. Where does a hundred-and-fifty-year-old thief and murderer—he killed a couple of guys way back when. Don’t worry. They deserved it—get a birth certificate? A driver’s license? A passport? Yeah, he could get fake documents like Garrett had in his room, but Vidocq is too proud for that. Unless he can go back as himself, I don’t think he’ll ever set foot in the old country again.
I glance back at Candy. She still won’t look at me. I put a finger on the top of her laptop and start to close it.
“Don’t,” she says. “I just got to this level and I’ll lose it.”
“Your computer is dead. Whose is this?”
“Mine. Samael said he’d get me a new one and he did. It’s a newer model too. Lots more memory and a faster processor. Good for games.”
I lie down on my back.
“So all in all a good day for you.”
“Shut up,” she says.
I move closer to her. Put my hand on her leg.
“This is going to happen sometimes. It’s how my life works. You can’t always come with me and I can’t dodge every bullet. Just remember that bastards tried to kill me for eleven years in Hell and almost a year up here and no one’s done it.”
She says, “That’s not true. You’ve died a couple of times.”
“Not like lying-there-getting-smelly kind of dead. Just technically dead.”
She hits the keyboard harder. She still won’t look at me. I really want one of Vidocq’s cigarettes.
“You’ve got to understand that if this is going to work between us.”
“I don’t want to,” she says.
“I don’t always either. But it’s how things are. ‘Death smiles at us all and all a man can do is smile back.’”
“Where did you hear that crap?”
“I read it in a book Downtown. It’s Marcus Aurelius.”
She nods.
“Quote a dead guy. Real smooth.”
I kiss her leg and get up. I stink from sweat and burned skin and need a shower.
On my way to the bathroom I say, “I’m going Downtown to see Mr. Muninn. You can come with me or you can stay here and sulk.”
I stand under the hot water for a long time, washing off the grime and dead skin. The wound has already closed, though I can feel the bullet inside me.
I put on a robe and go back into the bedroom.
Candy has closed the laptop. She and Vidocq are quietly watching the movie. I sit down beside her on the bed. She balls up her fist and punches my real arm.
“Ow.”
“I wasn’t sulking. I was mad. And not entirely at you.”
“I know. Trust me. If I could, I’d be the most boring bastard in the world.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” says Vidocq.
“Okay. Tenth most boring bastard.”
Candy says, “Sometimes you get worked up. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“Really? How does stopping to grab money in the middle of an explosion count as careful?”
The fake Qomrama and the cash are lying nearby on the bed. I pick up the money.
“Did you count it?”
“It’s just shy of four thousand dollars.”
“Chicken-and-waffles money.”
Along the edges, the bills are as crisp and singed as I am. I show them to Vidocq. He chuckles and leans in closer.
He says, “That’s a strange design on the clip. It almost reminds me of the Golden Vigil. Though not entirely.”
The Golden Vigil. God’s Pinkertons on earth. They were a Homeland Security offshoot that Vidocq and I used to work for. The Vigil worked with a special group of agents using angelic tech, supposedly monitoring and policing nefarious hoodoo-related activity. Zombies. Rogue vampires. Demon attacks. Hell, they even put Lucifer on a terrorist watch list. Mostly, though, they were just another set of bullheaded cops in better suits. U.S. Marshal Larson Wells and, more importantly, Aelita ran the show. That’s until she went on her god-killing crusade and the government shut the Vigil down. Not a tear was shed.
“Not quite? You’re sure?”
Vidocq nods.
“I’m positive. Not the Vigil.”
“But still similar.”
“Yes. Similar.”
I toss the money back on the bed.
“I wish I could have talked to Garrett. All this cash. Passports. A mechanical familiar. Who the hell was he waiting for?”
“And who was the bomb for? Monsieur Garrett or the party buying from him?” says Vidocq.
“He had a familiar?” says Candy.
“Yeah; a good one too. I should have grabbed the asshole’s wallet.”
I can see Kasabian banging away on his own computer, building his Web site.
“Did Old Yeller find out anything on Moseley?”
Candy says, “Not much. He had a record but all minor stuff. He was kind of a religious nut. A couple of arrests for protesting outside abortion clinics. A fine for trashing a Scientology office and some Orthodox graves at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It looks like he’s been through every religion on the planet. There’s photos of him in a dozen getups from different religious sects and cults.”
“A lost soul in a hard city. A volatile combination,” says Vidocq.
“I got the 8 Ball and the cash,” I say to him. “You steal anything fun lately?”
He shakes his head.
“Jewelry here and there. A vase for the apartment. Helping look for your weapon puts too many temptations in my path and the old habits are the hardest to break.”
He puffs his cigarette.
“And sometimes stealing a bit helps. Not everyone who comes to the clinic can pay.”
Vidocq’s girlfriend, Allegra, runs a hoodoo clinic for down-and-out Sub Rosas and Lurkers. Doc Kinski used to run it with Candy taking care of the front desk. Then Aelita murdered him. That bothered a lot of people, myself included. Kinski was my father.
“How is Allegra?”
“Well. She has trained two competent assistants.” He looks at Candy. “She misses you working beside her.” He looks at me. “And believe it or not, she misses you.”
Allegra didn’t take it well when she found out that I’d become Lucifer. She accused me of all kinds of nefarious shit. Mostly Sunday school stuff, which I didn’t expect from her. We haven’t spoken much since.
“Maybe we ought to keep it that way,” I say. “Whenever we get near each other, someone says something stupid.”
“Someone?” asks Candy.
“Okay. Me.”
“And yet her desire to see you both remains unchanged,” Vidocq says.
I toss him Garrett’s cash.
“Give her this.”
He nods and puts it in the pocket of his greatcoat.
“We both thank you for this.”
Candy says, “Can I have the clip?”
I say, “Why? We don’t have any money.”
Vidocq takes the clip off the cash and hands it to her. Her eyes light up.
“I just like it,” she says. “It’s shiny. I’ll find something to do with it.”
I take off the robe. The bullet wound stings a little, but the blisters hurt like a son of a bitch. I put on my leather bike pants and boots. Find an old Maximum Overdrive video-store T-shirt that’s not covered in bullet holes or blood and put that on too.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me along,” says Vidocq.
“To Hell? I don’t want to take her. Why would I subject you to it too?”
“I’d like to see the afterlife. With my condition it’s doubtful I’ll ever see it legitimately.”
A hundred and fifty years ago Vidocq made himself immortal. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t trying to do it. Just one of his alchemical experiments took a wrong turn and left him with a condition most people would kill for. Me, I’d rather have X-ray vision. At least it would be fun at parties.
I say, “Forget it. Allegra would truly kill me dead if I took you.”
He sighs, knowing I’m right.
“And she’d be right, of course. You’re a terrible influence on us all.”
He nods to me and blows Candy a kiss. He holds up the cash.
“And thank you for this,” he says before leaving through the grandfather clock, the real entrance to our secret hideaway.
“He’s right. You are a terrible influence,” says Candy.
“I thought that’s why you stuck around.”
“There’s also the free food and movies.”
“Free computers too.”
“And getting blown up and shot at.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to work on my ducking skills.”
“Please do.” She doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “So, we’re really going?”
“You’re the one who wanted to.”
“Yeah, but now I’m a little scared.”
“Good. That means you’re sane.”
“So, we just go there? No spells? We don’t have to sacrifice chickens or pray to any hoary overlords of the deep or something?”
“You can dance naked around a maypole if you want. Me? I’m just walking in.”
She gets up.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Don’t wear anything you really like.”
“Why?”
“You’re won’t be springtime fresh when you get back and I’m not sure the stink of Hell comes out in the wash.”
I WENT DOWNTOWN when I was nineteen. I was thirty when I came out. I’ve only been back on earth for around eleven months. Sometimes it seems as long was the previous eleven years.
Another magician, Mason Faim, sent me to Hell in a deal to supersize his hoodoo power. He also wanted me out of the picture. We were a pair of Sub Rosa golden boys. Way too clever and powerful for our own good. The difference between us was that Mason had to work and study his ass off to stay on top of the hoodoo heap. Me? I could always improvise a spell or hex and have it fly. That was my angel half at work, only I didn’t know that at the time. When Mason got rid of me he was top dog in L.A. He murdered my old girlfriend, Alice. He tried to take over Hell and start a new war with Heaven. You have to hand it to the boy. He knew how to dream big. So I killed him.
But in a way, Mason won. He wanted to destroy me, and the one who went to Hell sure isn’t who came out. I was James Stark going down but Sandman Slim when I left. Eleven years of torture and fighting in the arena to entertain monsters will alter your perspective on life.
Most nights I still dream about Hell. I can feel it inside me. It’s in the stink of my sweat. Flashing on the place even for a second makes me furious and sometimes afraid and sometimes ashamed of both those things.
On the plus side, I got up close and personal with the killer inside me. I learned I was good at taking lives. Doc Kinski called me a natural-born killer, so now it’s what I do. But I don’t always like it, and when I do, I don’t always like myself for liking it. That’s what Hell is. It’s the shithole bottom of the universe, but it’s a place where you’ll learn more about yourself than you ever wanted to know.
I GET A pack of Maledictions from a box under a table in the living room. Maledictions are the most popular cigarettes in Hell. The only brand I really like. The taste is, well, unique. Like a tire fire in a candy factory. With luck, the angel part of me is immune to cancer. If it isn’t I’m going to be a solid two-hundred-pound tumor.
Candy gives me a faint smile as I take her hand and we step through a shadow into the Room of Thirteen Doors. I open the door to Hell but I don’t take her through. I hold her there looking at the place.
“Wow. It really does smell like sulfur,” she says.
“Don’t worry. When you get inside, between the sewers and the Hellion stink, you’ll forget all about the sulfur.”
“You know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Nothing but the best for you.”
“Whoa.”
This is what I’ve been waiting for.
“What do you see?”
“It looks just like L.A. A more fucked-up L.A. but still L.A.”
“It’s called a Convergence. A kind of magical fuckup where one place gets layered on top of another. When I first landed in Hell, it was all dark palaces and cobblestone streets. Now it’s L.A. None of that changes what Hell is. It just makes it easier to get around.”
“Somehow, none of that is very reassuring.”
“That’s Hell in a nutshell. You ready?”
“Yes. No. Yes. I think so.”
“Before we go in, here are a couple of rules. And they’re nonnegotiable. Stay close to me. Close enough for me to grab if things get weird. If anyone starts anything let me handle it. No Jade stuff. You see any damned souls, don’t look them in the eye. They’re used to me but another live human could freak them out.”
“I’m not human.”
“You look human. That’s enough. Also, don’t talk to anyone but Mr. Muninn.”
“Who?”
“The current Lucifer.”
“Right. Mr. Muninn. You told me about him.”
I squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.
“Banzai,” I say, and pull her inside.
WE COME OUT on the front gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The Hellion version is a train wreck. Open graves. Smashed headstones. Statues and tombs swallowed by flames. It looks like it was looted by the Golden Horde and shit on by King Ghidorah.
I lead her out the front gate, where a block-long street market has set up. It wasn’t here the last time I was Downtown, but a lot of things are probably different now that Mr. Muninn is ringmaster.
We’re noticed immediately. A couple of living beings, one of whom used to be Lucifer, tend to stand out down here.
Candy digs her nails into my hand, but she doesn’t show any actual fear. Hellions are fallen angels. Some of them look almost human. Others are walking, talking nightmares. Like mutant versions of fish, reptiles, or insects, or all three. The crowd in the market is a nice assortment pack of all the different Hellion types.
The chatter and the hawkers’ calls trail off as the crowd turns its rheumy eyes on us. The only sound is the thin Hellion breeze, the sizzle of cooked meat, and grating Hellion music from a windup player. No one moves toward us. What are they seeing? Some version of Lucifer or Sandman Slim with a dangerous Lurker on his arm?
I’m not waiting around to find out. I’ve seen Hellions riot and I don’t need to see it again. Not with Candy here.
I head to a stall where a merchant has mugwump meat turning on a spit. The smell is somewhere between filet mignon and coffin liquor. The fire throws up some nice fat shadows. I pull Candy into one and we go back out through the Room.
My aim is better the second time and we come out in the lobby of Lucifer’s palace. Back inside the Beverly Wilshire for the second time today. This time I’m not accepting any mystery packages from the front desk.
I can see a dozen guards in the lobby. I don’t wait to see if Muninn has posted more. I pull Candy over to Lucifer’s private elevator. Like the crowd in the market, the guards look more confused than anything else.
Candy tugs on my arm.
“Are we going somewhere soon? ’Cause there’s like a hundred guys watching us through the windows.”
She’s right. A mob of the legions guarding the palace is clustered around the lobby windows. This isn’t any time to find out if they’re happy to see their old boss or if they want to flay me alive. I pull Candy to the elevator.
One of the guards all of a sudden grows a pair and yells, “Halt!”
When I look he already has his rifle leveled at us.
I let go of Candy’s hand and turn and face him. Put out my arm and manifest a Gladius, an angelic flaming sword. It’s impressive anywhere, but inside the lobby it’s like the sun reflecting off the skin of a cruise missile.
“Make your move, shit heel. I took Mason Faim’s head and I can take yours.”
He stands there for a minute pointing his gun at me. I know he’s not going to shoot. There’s a window on these things. Someone points a gun at you and doesn’t shoot in the first few seconds, they get thinking about the consequences. And the more they think, the less likely they are to pull the trigger. This clown’s been thinking long enough to whistle the long version of “Layla.”
He looks around at his Hellion buddies. None of them have their guns up. Why should they? That’s Lucifer upstairs, king high prick himself. If he can’t handle Sandman Slim with a chick civilian in tow, then what the hell good is he?
I touch a brass plate on the wall and the elevator doors slide open. The guards stand and stare. Touch the plate inside the elevator and the doors close and we start up.
“So far Hell is a barrel of monkeys,” says Candy.
“You ought to come on Halloween. Everyone dresses up like The Brady Bunch. Seriously. The show is huge down here.”
Her heart isn’t just beating fast, it’s trying to pound its way out of her chest and hop a plane to Bora Bora.
“You couldn’t have walked us into Lucifer’s living room or something?” she says.
“That would be rude. I stuck the guy here, I have to show him a little respect.”
She takes a couple of deep breaths.
“Sorry. I thought I was more ready for this. I’ve seen some crazy Lurker stuff, but …”
“But not a whole world of it? Don’t feel bad. No one’s prepared for this dump.”
“So this is where Sandman Slim comes from.”
“Yep.”
“You killed a lot of those guys down here.”
“Don’t be sexist. There are women Hellions too. And I killed pretty much everything down here at one time or other. And when I wasn’t doing it in the arena, Azazel, my old slave master, was sending me out to kill anyone on his shit list. Until I killed him.”
“The monster who kills monsters.”
“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” Then, “Nothing’s going to happen to you. I promise.”
“I believe you.”
She lets go of my hand and loops her arm in mine. We must look funny and weirdly formal when the doors open, like kids dressing up in their parents’ clothes.
“James, so good to see you,” says Mr. Muninn.
I’m not sure he means it, but he gives me a quick hug, something he’s never done before. He must really be smarting to see someone besides neurotic Hellions. Now I feel bad I didn’t come down sooner.
Mr. Muninn is entirely black. Like squid-ink black. He’s also as round as a beach ball. He’s dressed in a long brocade robe woven with a subtle fire pattern. Under it glitters Lucifer’s battle armor, the ultimate symbol of power down here. It lets everyone know who’s in charge. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to call him Lucifer or what, so I just take a shot.
“Nice to see you too, Mr. Muninn.”
He smiles. He’s already tired of being called Lucifer and all the thousand toadying variations you get with the penthouse. I know how he feels.
“You’ve brought a friend,” he says.
Muninn looks a little bemused, like I’m a neighbor kid who brought a stray cougar cub into the living room. Is that how Muninn sees Candy? I hadn’t thought about how he might react to a Jade. Maybe I’m overthinking it. I’ve dragged a civilian down with me into the worst place in existence and he probably doesn’t approve.
“Mr. Muninn, this is my friend Candy.”
“Very nice to meet you. I see you’re like our friend James here, with his penchant for a single name.”
“Yeah,” she says. “For the longest time all I knew was Stark. It must have taken him six months to tell me the James part.”
“Well, I still don’t know your last name,” I say.
She shrugs.
“As far as I know, I don’t have one. When I have to use one I usually just go with Jade.”
“Candy Jade. It sounds like one of your cartoon characters.”
“Sandman Slim sounds like grout cleaner.”
Muninn puts out his hand.
“Welcome to my humble home, Candy.”
She shakes, but her arm tightens around mine. She’s scared, like she’s afraid she’ll burst into flames if she touches him. But she’s brave and does it anyway. No flames. No explosions. Not even smoke.
“Was it smart to bring someone more innocent than you or I to this place?”
“I introduced her to Samael and she survived. She knows about me, so she was twisting my arm to meet the new Lucifer.”
Muninn says, “I wish I could meet a new Lucifer too. I don’t suppose you want the job back.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Muninn sighs and waves us to a sitting area.
The place isn’t anything like the penthouse when I lived here. I never bothered fixing it up. I left all of the anonymously expensive hotel furniture right where it was. Now the place looks like a museum. Back in L.A., Muninn lived in an underground cavern full of art, machines, toys, food, and geegaws from every civilization since the last ice age. It looks like he’s moved half of it down here.
Candy and I sit on a solid-gold love seat with tentacles for armrests and shaggy horsehide cushions. From the look of the thing it’s probably nestled the rear end of at least a couple of emperors. Muninn drops into a vintage La-Z-Boy recliner, but he keeps it upright for his guests.
“That’s not quite the look I was expecting for the new Devil,” I say.
Muninn glances across the room.
“I have a throne around here somewhere. A piece that’s even grander than the seat you’re on now. I wish I could greet all my guests in this chair. The throne plays hell with my back, no pun intended.”
“Sorry again about sticking you down here, but I had stuff I needed to get back to in the world.”
Out of the corner of my eye I catch Candy’s lips flicker into a brief smile.
“I understand. I should never have let Samael play his little trick and force you into taking his place. I created Hell, which makes me responsible for its well-being.”
Candy looks puzzled, and then lets it go.
I say, “So how’s it going down here?”
Muninn leans back into the chair.
“Better than it was,” he says.
“Better than when I ran it.”
“Oh my, yes. I’m rebuilding much faster than you were and it seems to have raised everyone’s spirits.”
“You know I had to drag my feet, right? I had to keep these Hellion bastards running around making plans so they were too busy to get together and kill me.”
“I understand completely. But it didn’t help the psyches of those who had to live here.”
“That’s why I wanted you to take over. I knew you could make things right and hold off the wolves too.”
Muninn looks at Candy.
“And what do you think, young lady? Did James’s hundred days as Lucifer improve his disposition?”
“Sure. He’s a pussycat now. Of course, I kicked his ass when he got home, so maybe it was that. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Why don’t you not?” I say. “Have you heard anything about Aelita or the 8 Ball?”
He shifts in his chair, trying to ease his back.
“Aelita still has confederates in Hell and she tried to use them to hide the Qomrama here. General Semyazah and I persuaded her that that was a bad idea.”
“I wonder if she took it to Heaven?”
“I doubt it. Aelita has as many enemies as allies there. Heaven isn’t a safe place for her.”
“If she can’t hide the 8 Ball in Heaven or Hell …”
“Then it’s still on earth,” says Candy.
“That’s a relief. I got stuck with the fake Qomrama earlier today and was starting to think I’d wasted the last month chasing my tail.”
“No. You are right to keep looking there,” says Muninn.
“How do you know she didn’t hide it in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean?” says Candy.
Muninn says, “It’s my understanding that soon after getting the Qomrama, Aelita was pursued by a contingent of loyal angels from Heaven, so she had to hide it quickly. I suspect it’s still somewhere in Los Angeles.”
Candy shakes her head.
“Why doesn’t God just kill the bitch?” she says.
Muninn settles back in the chair and looks at me.
“Candy, remember how Mr. Muninn said that he was responsible for Hell because he made it?”
“Yes.”
“Lucifer didn’t make Hell. God did.”
“Yeah. I thought that sounded funny.”
“It makes more sense when you know that before he was Lucifer, Mr. Muninn was God.”
Candy looks at me to see if I’m joking. Then she looks at Muninn.
“I’m afraid he’s telling the truth,” Muninn says. “And the reason I don’t, as you said, kill the bitch is I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I say, “He’s not as strong as he used to be. See, God isn’t exactly God anymore. He had sort of a nervous breakdown. Instead of one big God, there’s five little ones.”
“Four,” says Muninn. “Aelita has already killed Neshamah.”
“Word is your brother Ruach is tearing it up in Heaven.”
Muninn unconsciously squeezes the easy chair’s arms.
“Yes. You see, Ruach is the oldest brother. The oldest fragment. He covets the power the rest of us have. He’s a little mad, I think.”
“Was he always that way?”
“He was always a bit fragile. Then my brother Nefesh did what he did.”
“What does he do?” says Candy.
“Our quarrels became more and more violent. Finally Ruach flew into a rage. He demanded that the rest of us relinquish our powers or he would kill us all. When we wouldn’t he attacked us. Nefesh was the one who finally stopped him, in much the way I cast the first Lucifer out of Heaven.”
“With a thunderbolt.”
“Yes. It left Ruach blind and partially deaf. His anger and fear of us grew to the point where the rest of us knew we couldn’t stay.”
Candy says, “So there’s a God in Heaven, only he’s just a little piece. And there’s other pieces of God running around. And you’re a piece of God and Lucifer at the same time.”
“In a nutshell,” says Mr. Muninn.
Candy pats my arm in mock sympathy.
“Now I understand why you are the way you are. The universe is a lot more fucked up than I ever imagined.”
“Can your brothers help?” I say. “Where are they?”
Muninn waves a hand at the window.
“Here. There. Anywhere. I haven’t talked to them in a long time.”
“Okay. So, anything new with Merihim and Deumos? Are they at war yet?”
Merihim is a big wheel in the old official Hellion church. Hell’s Vatican. Strictly an old-boys club. No girls allowed. Deumos and her sister Hellions had a little problem with that. They started their own church, worshipping a kind of goddess that’s supposed to be the new post-God deity. A fairy godmother to kiss all the scraped knees and make everything all right again. One of the last things I did when I was Lucifer was give the women their own church. After I left, Merihim and his crew burned it down. What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and rotten little assholes that don’t want to share their toys.
“Not quite at war but far from peace. Deumos and many of the other sisters have gone into hiding,” says Muninn. “You might be amused to know that Medea Bava went into hiding with them.”
Medea Bava was the Sub Rosa’s Inquisition. Their ultimate enforcer. The lone-wolf cop who handed out life sentences in a little place called Tartarus, the Hell below Hell, where souls were burned to stoke the celestial furnaces. It was a place no one ever escaped from. Only I escaped and I took all the other lunatics in the asylum out with me. After that, Medea disappeared. I hate her almost as much as Aelita.
Muninn sighs.
“She lost faith in me—the God part, at least—when you destroyed Tartarus, so she joined Deumos and the sisters. Another voice lost in the wilderness.”
“Fuck Medea. She’s not a voice anyone needs in their head, especially you. She’s as crazy as Aelita. Deumos is the only one of the bunch who’s sane, and she’s completely deluded. And Merihim is just a power-hungry prick. He’s long overdue for a hard fall down a long flight of stairs, if you get my drift.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I don’t know how he did it, but Merihim used to crank-call me in L.A. after I left here.”
“He was upset with how you left things.”
“Cry me a river, pal,” I say. “Isn’t there something you can do to get Merihim and the church under control and off Deumos’s back?”
“That would be taking sides.”
“Fine. Then stop them both and make them play nice.”
He looks around, uncomfortable. Slams his fist down on the arm of the chair.
“It’s not that simple,” Muninn shouts.
It’s the first time I’ve heard him raise his voice about anything.
“You never understood how being a ruler works, James. And you have no idea what a deity is. You want me to make myself known and manifest to humankind. Do you really think that would solve anything? Or would it make things worse? You, like Samael, want total free will for the angels.”
Muninn sweeps his arms out to the broken landscape of Hell.
“Behold. That is what angelic free will looks like.”
“That’s not fair. You took the worst of the worst, the losers and the rat-fuck crazies, and locked them at the shit-pit bottom of the universe. There was no way they were ever going to build anything but this.”
“That’s also Samael’s argument. You two are so much alike.”
“I’m not anything like Samael.”
Muninn leans forward in his chair.
“Really? Does that wound in your side hurt?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Of course it is.”
He looks at Candy.
“Samael walked around for millennia bleeding from a wound I gave him during the first Heavenly war. All he ever had to do was ask and I would have healed him.”
Candy gives me a look.
“That does sound familiar.”
“Samael and I aren’t anything alike.”
Muninn looks at Candy.
“He’ll bleed with that bullet in him until the end of time before he’ll ask for help.”
“What if I ask?” Candy says.
Muninn raises his eyebrows.
“Ah. Here’s someone unburdened by the sin of pride.”
“Don’t you dare,” I say to Candy.
“Too late,” says Muninn. “Here.”
He puts something in my hand. The bullet.
Candy leans over to look at it.
“And what do we say when someone magically heals us?”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
She smiles at Muninn.
“He says, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Muninn.’”
“I hope you’ll forgive me for snatching away your martyrdom, James,” Muninn says.
“That’s okay. You I can forgive but the idiot who put it in there and whoever he works for I don’t. Or his bastard brother.”
“Will you be seeing Wild Bill while you’re here?”
“Next visit. When I’m not on the clock.”
Candy holds out her hand.
“Can I have the bullet?”
“What, are you a crow all of a sudden? You want all the shiny things.”
“I wanted the money clip because it was pretty. I want the bullet because you’re going to conveniently lose it somewhere and I want to keep it.”
“What for?”
“Who knows? Maybe when you get shot again I’ll make you cuff links.”
“For all the times I wear dress shirts.”
Dress shirts. Clothes. The bullet in my gut. I almost forgot the whole reason I came down here in the first place.
“Mr. Muninn, I’m looking for a new damned soul. His name is Trevor Moseley. Is there any way I can find him?”
“You say he’s new down here?”
Muninn shakes his head.
“I’m afraid our intake procedures aren’t what they should be. Why do you want to speak to him?”
“I want to know why he was so happy to walk in front of a bus.”
“That is unusual. I can put out a notice for him and let you know when he pops up on my radar.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate it. We should go. We’ve taken up enough of your time.”
Muninn gets up.
“I’m sorry I raised my voice.”
“Don’t apologize. I probably deserved it.”
“You did,” says Candy.
“Feel free to come or go through any of the shadows in here,” says Muninn. “I don’t think you’ll be wanting to take the long way next time.”
“Not even a little. See you around, Mr. Muninn.”
“It was nice meeting you,” says Candy.
“Good-bye, my dear. I hope we meet again.”
“Me too.”
I pull Candy through a shadow and a wave of nausea and we come out in the living room in the Chateau.
Kasabian looks up from his computer.
“Where have you two been? You smell like something a dead raccoon horked up.”
I look at Candy.
“Told you so.”
“WHO ARE YOU calling?” says Candy.
I’m dripping on the carpet and she’s still toweling off from the shower. I’m turned away dialing the phone so she doesn’t have to look at the new scar I picked up from Garrett’s lucky shot.
I say, “Manimal Mike. He might know who made the fake 8 Ball.”
She comes out of the bathroom, takes the phone from my hand, and tosses it on the bed.
“Stop it,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you just got shot. Because you just got blown up and we just came back from Hell.”
“I had a donut this morning.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
“You were sitting right there.”
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
I know what she’s getting at even if she doesn’t want to say it. Days like this I can maybe catch a bullet, she can maybe get her laptop murdered, and maybe we can go to Hell, but doing them all the same day isn’t exactly normal, even for someone as fierce as Candy.
I nod. Get a glove to put on over my Kissi hand.
“Okay, country mouse. I guess getting to Mike’s in the next ten minutes isn’t going to save the world. What did you have in mind? Shuffleboard or coupon clipping?”
She pushes me down so I’m sitting on the bed.
“How about sitting still for a whole sixty seconds. I think you have this illusion that you’re a shark. Like you think you’ll choke if you stopped moving all the time.”
“The bullet’s out. I’m all healed up inside.”
“I know that in my head, but it doesn’t feel that way yet. And I see you trying to hide the wound, so don’t bother. Can we please just be here for a minute together without weird weapons or old gods or monsters between us?”
“Come here,” I say, and pull her down on the bed. She curls around me with her leg over mine.
“I know I’m not always easy to be around,” I say.
“No. You’re fine. It’s just everything you do.”
“I should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and studied air-conditioning repair.”
“Then you’d have all those sexy jumpsuits I could wear around the place.”
“Jumpsuits aren’t sexy.”
“They are when you’re not wearing anything under them.”
She gets up and turns off the light, then comes back to bed. A few minutes later her breathing is shallow and regular. She’s asleep. I close my eyes and drift off. In my dream, I’m in the arena in Hell with the mad little ghost, Lamia. We circle each other, looking for an opening.
“Are you here to kill me?” says Lamia.
I tell her the truth.
“Only if I have to.”
Part of me feels like an idiot. Lamia looks like a little girl, nine or ten years old, wearing a blue party dress. She also has a knife as big her forearm. And the only thing keeping her from sticking me with it is that I have the 8 Ball. It’s the only thing that’s ever seemed to scare her.
But this isn’t right. This isn’t how I met Lamia. It wasn’t in the arena. It was in the Tenebrae, the limbo land of lost and desperate ghosts too afraid to move on to Heaven or Hell.
Lamia was there, radiating crazy like a Chernobyl straitjacket and stalking the place like a Sherman tank in kneesocks. She knifed ghosts in the Tenebrae and killed people back on earth, laughing the whole time.
When I asked who she was and what she wanted, all I got was schizobabble about the world before it was the world. Eventually she told me her name.
“I’m Lamia. I breathe death and spit vengeance.”
Try having a ten-year-old tell you that and knowing they mean it. It’s a Hallmark moment.
Father Traven is our resident mystical trivia expert. He used to translate books for the Church, but then he translated the wrong one. The Angra Om Ya’s bible. He got the boot for that. Excommunicated. A one-way ticket to Hell.
Father Traven thinks Lamia is a demon. A “Qliphoth,” he calls them. Not a little imp with a pitchfork and anger-management issues. A real demon is a broken thing. A mindless fragment of the old gods, the Angra Om Ya. But demons are basically morons, with about as much brainpower as an underachieving maggot. Some eat. Others dig. Others curse. But none of them choose it. It’s what they’re programmed for.
What makes Lamia special is that she’s relatively smart and chatty. You might think that’s a good thing, letting us get into a demon’s mind so we can see how the gears work and all that forensic horseshit. But it’s not good news at all.
You don’t want to get anywhere near a smart demon. A smart demon is a bigger, more powerful piece of the Angra. Lamia means that more of the old gods are leaking into our universe. How long until other smart demons break through? How long before a complete Angra?
And even though I know it’s wrong, Lamia and I are back in the arena, only she’s not slashing me. She’s slashing Candy. But I can’t protect her because even though I have the 8 Ball, I don’t know how it works. I’m helpless and useless.
I really want to ask Mr. Muninn about Lamia, but I haven’t figured out where to even start a question like that.
“Hey, Mr. Muninn, back when you were one big God, did you steal the universe from another race of older gods, lock them away somewhere, then pretend that you created everything and proceed to screw it all up for the next few billion years? Was that your plan? ’Cause if it was, mission fucking accomplished.”
CANDY IS STILL asleep when I wake up. I say her name and shake her, but she doesn’t budge. She gets like this sometimes. Some combination of being exhausted and her Jade metabolism. It’s more like she’s hibernating than sleeping. This can go on for hours. I’ll go out of my mind if I sit around that long.
I turn on the light and put on new leather pants and boots. No more button-down shirts for me. I don’t dress up for anyone. The only clean T-shirt I can find has a winking Japanese schoolgirl on the front over “I
TENTACLES.” Guess who gave me that. I also grab my coat. It’s still too hot for it, but after the party at Garrett’s room I’m not going anywhere without my na’at and a gun.
Going to Manimal Mike’s place is a no-sweat trip I can do without anyone holding my hand. I leave Candy a note telling her where I am. She’ll be pissed if she wakes and finds me gone, but it’s better than lying around in the dark or watching Kasabian walk around on all fours like a Hellion windup toy.
I take the fake 8 Ball and go out through the grandfather clock. Take the elevator down to the lobby and wait for a second before going any farther.
The lobby feels all right. No hostile vibes aimed my way. The concierge nods in my direction. I nod back. Still, polite staff doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. They might be playing possum while calling security. There’s only one way to find out if the hotel still thinks that I’m Mr. Macheath, the Devil himself, and the rightful occupant of his gratis suite.
I pull out a Malediction and light it. In California, this is the equivalent of pissing into the pope’s minestrone. But aside from a few dirty looks and make-believe coughs from a family of red-faced tourists going up in the next elevator, nothing happens.
I’m safe. For another day. I’ll think I’ll order lobster and a T-bone tonight.
Time to press my luck one more time.
I go into the bar and tell them to give me a sealed bottle of Stoli. The bartender hands it over without blinking.
“Thanks. Put it on my tab.” Why not? Nothing actually ever gets charged to the Devil’s room.
When the Chateau throws us out one day, will they try to stick me with the charges for the suite and the miles of food and booze we’ve put away? Good thing I’m broke.
Even with a shower and clean clothes, I still feel a little rough around the edges. Candy was right about one thing. Sleep was a good idea even if it brought on fucked-up dreams. The blisters on my side are mostly healed, but the skin is still sensitive. It’s really putting me in the mood to punch something. Where’s a skinhead when you need one?
I go into the garage and spot a cherry-red ’68 Charger. Jam the black blade into the door and it pops opens. Jam it into the ignition and the car starts right up. I drive out into the early-evening L.A. sun, all thought of pain, the Angra, and eviction gone. Nothing improves my mood better than stealing a really nice car.
MANIMAL MIKE LIVES and works in a piece-of-shit garage in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. Mike does his Tick-Tock Man work in the back while his cousins, a couple of straight-off-the-boat Russian muscleheads, try to look like they know what they’re doing by pretending to fix the same cars that have been sitting in the garage for years. Mike’s cousins are vucaris. Russian beast men. Kind of like what civilians call “werewolves.” Like beast men, they’re not too bright, but with the right motivation they can be trained to fetch or just get out of the way.
Mike’s cousins wanted to gnaw my hide the first time I came here. Now I’m their best friend. I toss them the Stoli on my way in and get a couple of quick spasibas before they have the cap off and are arguing over who gets the first jolt. I leave them to work that out for themselves and head for Mike’s workshop in the back.
The first time I met Mike he was committing slow-motion suicide, getting blind drunk and playing a game called Billy Flinch. It’s basically playing William Tell only you’re trying to shoot a glass off your own head by ricocheting a bullet off the opposite wall. Good thing Mike was such a lousy shot.
Nowadays Mike’s office looks less like a grease monkey’s alcoholic crash pad and more like a professional workshop. I take a little credit for that. I think promising Mike his soul back gave him the kick in the ass he needed to pull himself out of the bottle and do real work. Now I just have to figure out how to wrangle his soul out of damnation so I can give it back to him.
“Hey, Mike. How’s tricks?”
Mike must have been lost in his work. He lurches up from his seat like he wants to jump out of his own skin and into whatever kind of animal he’s building. It looks like a Nerf ball with spikes. Mike has always been high-strung. It takes him a second to catch his breath.
“Shit. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
Then he remembers he’s talking to the guy he thinks is the Devil.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
I shake my head.
“No worries. It’s about the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today.”
Mike’s right hand is still sort of attached to the strange Nerf animal by spiderweb-thin filaments that run from a tiny clamp in his hand to the animal’s back. The animal is gently suspended in the air in a larger web strung up between two long, curved pipes bolted to each side of a metal table. The pipes look like they might have come off a car’s exhaust system. Mike’s terrifying tools are spread out on the table. They look like things Hellions would use to perform surgery on people they don’t like very much.
Once Mike has a second to process that this is an unscheduled visit, thankfully, a smaller wave of panic sets in.
“Oh God, don’t tell me. Something went wrong with Kasabian’s hands? His legs? I swear I’ll get whatever it is working again.”
“Attempt to be cool, Mike. Kasabian is fine. What’s the story with your spiny friend?”
“It’s a puffer fish. A fugu. Some famous Sub Rosa sushi chef is in town and one of the families wants to give him a present.”
“A fish. So, if the guy made barbecue, you’d be making him a mechanical brisket?”
“No, man. Fugu is special. Like an art form. It’s loaded with this stuff called tetrodotoxin. A badass neurotoxin. Cut the fish wrong and bam. Everyone’s dead. You need a license to make it and everything.”
I shrug.
“And people pay brisk money for this stuff?”
“‘Brisk’ ain’t the word. It’s more like make-you-weep money.”
“I didn’t realize that civilians were as stupid as Hellions when it comes to the shit they’ll stick in their mouths.”
“I wouldn’t know about that and hope I never do.”
Mike detaches the clamp from his little fish and wipes his hands on his dirty rag.
“The commission sounds like a good thing for you. You’re moving up in the Tick-Tock world.”
“Yeah. Things are going okay. You didn’t come by just to check up on me, did you?”
Up until now I’ve been holding the 8 Ball under my arm like a loaf of bread. I take it and hold it up so he can get a good look at it.
“Nothing like that. I was wondering if you’d look at something for me. It’s a fake mystical object I’m guessing someone paid a lot of money for. I was hoping you’d have some idea who made it.”
Mike takes it gently, like he’s handling a baby duck.
“I’ll have a look but I mostly know animals. Those charm- and talisman-making assholes won’t give us the time of day. They talk about Tick-Tock Men like all we make are big-ass Tamagotchis. But we’re artists, you know?”
“I know. That’s why I brought it to you. I figure an artist knows an artist.”
Mike turns the 8 Ball over in his hands, looking over every inch of it. He pulls down a magnifier mounted on the edge of the table and examines every bolt and fastening.
“Beautiful work,” he says. “Incredible detail. And these materials. Brass-and-platinum skin over a core of surgical steel and cinnabar. You see these tiny sapphires by the base?”
He holds it up. There are a few blue specks on the 8 Ball’s belly.
“Someone’s charmed them. That’s what gives it a low-level magic signature. It’s gorgeous work. Does it have a name?”
“Qomrama Om Ya.”
“Never heard of it. I like animals.”
“If it helps, the guy had a raven in his room. Good work. Very convincing.”
Mike looks up from the magnifier.
“You didn’t happen to check under the tail feathers, did you?”
“You mean, did I look at the bird’s ass? No. It never crossed my mind. I’d go back and try, only by now the ass is probably blown halfway to Las Vegas.”
Mike goes back to the 8 Ball.
“Too bad. Lots of people sign their work in places most people don’t look. That way if the bird changes hands and needs repairs, they can find the original builder.”
“That’s truly fascinating. I’ll look under your ass if it’ll help you tell me something I can use.”
“Wait,” says Mike. “Gotcha. Right there.”
He hunches over the magnifier, holding the 8 Ball closer.
“I know who made it.”
“You sure?”
He crooks a finger at me and I go around to his side of the table. The 8 Ball is huge in the magnifier. He uses one of his delicate tools to point to a single sapphire stud.
“You see that little mark etched around the sapphire? That’s the alchemical symbol for verdigris. Only one Tick-Tock Man signs his work with that. You’ll love him. He’s a total asshole. Atticus Rose.”
“Do you have a number for him?”
Mike does a sarcastic little laugh.
“Are you kidding? Rose is a golden eagle riding a gumdrop thermal over Candy Land. On a good day I’m a snail crawling across that grease pit out front. Eagles don’t give their business cards to snails.”
“You’re not a snail, Mike. You’re at least a ferret.”
“Thanks,” he says like he actually means it. “Anyway, like I was saying, we don’t move in the same circles.”
“Who would know him?”
“The high-and-mighties. Someone who can pay the equivalent of a Lamborghini for a parakeet. Someone like Blackburn. Maybe his government or showbiz buddies. You ever party with them? Me neither.”
I take the 8 Ball back from Mike. It’s hard for him to let go. It’s like he’s fallen in love and doesn’t want to see his girlfriend carried off by a highwayman.
“I don’t party with people like that, but I know someone who might. Thanks, Mike.”
I’m halfway to the door when Mike calls after me.
“Hold up. I’ve been thinking about Kasabian.”
“Don’t do that. You’ll get lesions on your brain.”
“I figured it out. If you can get me another hellhound body, then I can modify that and then put new parts on Kasabian’s body without taking him off.”
“Great idea. I’ll stop by Costco on the way home and pick up a new hellhound. Oh, wait. They only have those in Hell.”
Mike frowns.
“It was just an idea. You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“Sorry, Mike. I was just down in Hell and it wasn’t fun. I’ll see about getting another hound, but I have other things to do first.”
“Okay. Make sure Kasabian knows it was my idea.”
“Will do.”
I go out through the garage, wave to Mike’s cousins, and climb back into the Charger. By the time I’m in, I’ve already thumbed Brigitte Bardo’s number into my phone.
BRIGITTE IS MY favorite zombie hunter in the world. Except we killed off all the zombies a few months ago and she’s been kind of at loose ends ever since. She was a big-time, classy porn star in Europe and she’s been trying to get a legit acting career going. With her looks and brains in a town like L.A., she can really work the hell out of a room. Brigitte has more phone numbers and dirt on people in her little black book than Homeland Security.
“Jimmy,” she says in her sweet Prague accent. “How lovely for you to call. How are you? Have you killed anyone interesting lately?”
“Does it count if I just happened to be in the room when the bomb went off?”
“Of course not.”
“Then no.”
She sighs.
“You’ll have to do better. I live vicariously through you these days.”
She’s only half joking. We’re both trained killers. Brigitte was trained for zombie hunting since she was a kid. Being a killer is a hard thing to walk away from and have a normal life.
“Listen. I wouldn’t normally call you with something as boring as this.”
“Boring? How could a task of yours be boring?”
“I’m trying to track someone down, and the thing is, Blackburn might know the guy, but his head of security braced me the last time I was there, so I can’t ask him.”
“So we won’t be fighting monsters or kicking in doors?”
“Right now I’m just looking for a phone number and maybe an address.”
“You were right. This is boring,” she says. “Who is it?”
“A Tick-Tock Man named Atticus Rose.”
“Are you looking for a pet? I can see you strolling down Sunset Boulevard with a lovely poodle. Or perhaps a white cockatoo on your shoulder. A very butch cockatoo, of course.”
“How do you butch up a bird? Get it a little leather cap and chaps?”
“That’s your fantasy, Jimmy. Not mine.”
“Do you think you can find me a number?”
“Of course. I can get anyone’s number. But just remember that everything comes with a price.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll call you later with Herr Rose’s information.”
“What price, Brigitte?”
Too late. The line is dead. Once a killer, always a killer.
I DITCH THE Charger by the Whisky a Go Go and walk the rest of the way back to the Chateau.
When I get back to the room, Candy is just waking up. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and stretches like a panther. She blinks when she sees me.
“Oh. I thought you were off bringing me coffee in bed. What are you dressed for?”
“I was out talking to Manimal Mike. I tried waking you.”
“Try harder next time. Where did he shoot you?”
I hold up my arms so she can see me.
“No blood. See? I made it back unmolested.”
She runs her foot up my leg to my thigh.
“Maybe we should do something about that.”
I close the bedroom door and turn up the new Skull Valley Sheep Kill album on the stereo. Kasabian doesn’t like to listen when we smash up the furniture.
AN HOUR LATER and we’ve only broken one side table. The gunshot and the blast took a little more out of me than I like to admit. I light up a Malediction and look for some Aqua Regia, but the bottle is still in the living room.
Candy is lying next to me in one of the absurdly plush hotel robes.
“So what did you and Mike talk about?”
“The 8 Ball. He says he knows who made it.”
“Great. Let’s go pay Dr. Frankenstein a visit.”
“Can’t. He didn’t have a number for the guy, so I called Brigitte.”
“She knows the guy?”
“No. But she can probably track him down.”
“Clever girl.”
“They’re the only kind worth knowing.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
We wander out to the living room. I pour some Aqua Regia into a coffee mug and Candy picks at the remains of last night’s food. We always order too much and leave the food carts along the wall buffet style. I wish we could squirrel away all the leftovers. We’re going to miss them when they kick us out.
Kasabian calls us from across the room.
“Check it out. My first client.”
“Congratulations,” says Candy.
“I didn’t even know you had the site finished.”
Kasabian is on the landing page for Aetheric Industries Psychic Investigations.
“The wonders of the cyberspace and desperate suckers,” he says. “I put the site up an hour ago and already have three inquiries and one bona fide, already-got-his-credit-card-number customer.”
“Who are you supposed to find?”
“The guy’s idiot older brother. Get this. Big brother was a hoarder and hid their dad’s gold coin collection somewhere in the house. My client doesn’t want to spend the next ten years spelunking under old pizza boxes and soggy newspapers looking for Daddy’s swag.”
Candy says, “I didn’t think you could get that kind of information. All you can do is look at things.”
“That’s right. But get this. My client thinks if I can find big bro in Hell, he can get another psychic to do a kind of Vulcan mind meld and they can talk over old times.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.
Kasabian nods and smiles.
“I know. Isn’t it great? See, being online so much, I learned that normal desperate people are sad and boring, but stupid desperate people are a fucking riot. And some of them have money.”
“That’s not very nice,” Candy says.
“If my life was any lamer, I would have taken a nap in a trash compactor a long time ago, so forgive me for not farting kittens and rainbows.”
“I didn’t know you were that unhappy.”
“I’m not. I’m realistic about my situation. And I’m honest with my clients. I spell out exactly what I can and can’t do in the site’s disclaimer. If someone comes along and wants to pay me to do what I said I can’t, I’m not turning him down. Stupid people’s money is just as green as everyone else’s.”
“I might have been that desperate after Doc died,” says Candy. Doc Kinski was the guy who took her off the street and gave her potions to calm her Jade bloodlust. I think he was as close to a real father as she ever had. Kind of like Vidocq for me.
“Yeah, well. You might have been desperate but you’re not dumb, so it wouldn’t be the same thing,” says Kasabian. “And goddammit, can I have just one minute of happiness here before one of you points out what a monster I am and tries to shut me down? What do I have left then? I go back to finding weirder and weirder online porn just to keep my brain cells from imploding.”
“Sorry. Of course,” says Candy.
She puts a hand on his hellhound shoulder. Says, “Good luck in the Hellovision business.”
Kasabian’s eyes open a little more.
“Damn. I wish I’d thought of that name. I wonder if I can get that domain?”
“I guarantee you someone else already has it. Someone always has the cool names,” I say.
Kasabian is already typing.
“We’ll see how long they can keep it.”
I say, “Did you find anything else out about Moseley?”
He shakes his head, still looking at the screen.
“Nothing except that he kind of dropped off the face of the earth a few months ago. No employment records. No bills or utilities. Nada.”
“Thanks. Oh yeah. Mike says he has another idea on how to fix you up.”
That gets his attention.
“How?”
“Don’t get your tail bunched up, Old Yeller. It means I have to go back to Hell and maybe steal something with teeth and claws, so it’s not happening this afternoon.”
He turns back to the screen.
“Hurry up and wait. Story of my life.”
Candy looks over Kasabian’s shoulder at the screen.
“What’s the weirdest porn you ever found?” says Candy.
Kasabian gives her a serious look.
“Unless you want to wake up screaming, don’t ever ask me that again.”
“Yes, sir.”
AROUND TEN, MY phone rings. It’s Brigitte.
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself. You have an appointment with Herr Rose at three tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thanks, Brigitte. You’re my hero.”
“Don’t be so hasty. Remember I said that everything has a price?”
“Go on.”
“The price for the address is this. I’m coming with you.”
“You haven’t exactly been in the field lately. What if things get hot?”
“That’s why I’m coming. If I go to another audition without at least the chance to kill something, I’m afraid my behavior will become quite drastic. So you see, Jimmy, you’re not just doing me a favor. You’ll be doing a humanitarian service too.”
“Fine. Come along. I’m sure Candy will enjoy it. You can tell each other stories about your favorite childhood kills.”
A pause.
“That’s the rub, you see. Herr Rose is terribly claustrophobic and only ever sees a maximum of two people at a time. It’s a rule he breaks for no one.”
“No problem. He’ll be tickled pink when he finds you and Candy at his door.”
“And where will you be?”
“Coming down the chimney.”
“Through a shadow.”
“Yeah.”
“I miss seeing that.”
“You can get an eyeful tomorrow.”
“He’ll hear you and throw us out.”
“Hear me? I’ll be as quiet as a cotton-candy mouse.”
“I’m not so sure about this, Jimmy.”
“Sure you are. It’ll be fun. Dress pretty and bring your gun.”
“A man who knows how to speak to my heart.”
She gives me Rose’s address. I repeat it and Candy writes it down.
I say, “See you tomorrow, Brigitte,” and hang up.
Candy beams at me.
“I hope we get to shoot something. I haven’t had a girls’ day out in a long time.”
BEL AIR IS a neighborhood that lies just west of Beverly Hills and sees its neighbor the way that neighbor sees the rest of L.A.: as a wasteland of upstarts, criminals, and wayward teens with their bongos and jungle music. If the sun ever set in Bel Air, no one would notice because its homes and residents are so luminous they’d light the night sky all on their own. It’s a land where the gold standard never died and the roads are so clean you could perform open-heart surgery on any street corner.
Candy and I emerge from the shadow of a lamppost so pristine it could’ve been put there this morning. We’re on North Beverly Glen Boulevard, across the street from the address Brigitte gave me.
The place is called Clear, an old upscale faux-Gothic hotel rebranded by one snotty nouveau chic chain or the other. The residents of these hotels are always the same. Oblivious executives in town for a day to make another billion because the billions they have aren’t enough. Handsome young lovers so bursting with happiness and privilege that you want to punch the DNA that created them. And old long-term residents baffled by the bright lights and excited plastic-surgeried crowds rushing in and out of the place 24/7. Clear reminds me of palaces I saw in Hell, but in worse taste.
Brigitte is in the lobby. She’s a knockout in a short green sequin dress and pearls and a little silver clutch purse just big enough for her CO
pistol. She looks like a flapper ninja. Candy is in her usual too-big leather jacket and Chuck Taylors. I’m in a frockcoat with guns. Which two of us don’t look like we belong in the Clear?
Brigitte kisses Candy and me on both cheeks. Candy says something to her that I miss and they both start laughing. They’re giddy at the idea they’re going to see some action. I’m hoping we don’t. And if something happens, fingers crossed that we don’t start it, and by “we,” I mean them.
We ride the elevator to the twelfth floor, go left, and walk almost to the end of the corridor.
“Herr Rose has two rooms, 1210 and 1212. But we’ve been instructed to knock only on 1210,” says Brigitte.
“Easy to remember,” I say. “Twelve-ten. When they signed the Magna Carta.”
Both women look at me.
“Don’t look at me like that. There was nothing to do in Hell but hide and read books. Is that a crime?”
Candy says, “Marcus Aurelius and now the Magna Carta? I’m starting to think that bullet unleashed your inner geek.”
“I had an inner geek once. But a doctor lanced it and it went away.”
“Call an ambulance. It’s growing back.”
Brigitte smiles.
“You two are charming together.”
“I was plenty charming all on my own,” says Candy. “I’m just carrying the geek so he doesn’t cut himself on a bullet and bleed to death.”
“Are you two done? I knew I should never let you near each other.”
Brigitte says, “I think he just called us … What’s the word?”
“Brats,” says Candy.
“Yes. Brats.”
“That’s because you are brats.”
“And who’s more foolish? The brats or the man who invites the brats to a gunfight?” says Brigitte.
“No gunfights. I didn’t invite anyone to a gunfight. This is a normal everyday ambush, not the O.K. Corral.”
“If you’re going to be boring about it, at least be entertaining. Disappear into one of your shadows while we distract Rose with our wiles.”
“Yeah,” says Candy. “The wiles girls are in business.”
She loops her arm in Brigitte’s.
I walk into a shadow by a picture window down the hall, surer than ever that I should have worn body armor.
I STILL HATE walking into unknown rooms, but I’ve never heard of a dangerous Tick-Tock Man, so I’m more likely to walk in on a game of Dungeons & Dragons than bearbaiting.
I come out in a room that reminds me of Garrett’s. A generically elegant place, but a little more old school than his was. The wood looks like wood instead of veneer and the paintings look real instead of like overpriced prints.
Rose has two adjoining apartments. One for living and one for a workspace. The guy is either loaded or his rental agreement is so old it’s written on parchment and he pays for it with shells and brightly colored beads.
He must be one of those genius types, like Tesla. Guys who would rather live in a hotel than have their own home. Live somewhere they know the sheets and towels will always be clean and where they can get a grilled-cheese sandwich from room service at four A.M. Because we’re in Bel Air, I want to hate his setup, but the truth is, I understand the addiction. I love squatting in the Chateau Marmont. Plus, I never told anyone, but part of me is happy that so many of my clothes end up burned, slashed, shot up, or generally too bloody to deal with. It’s a great excuse never to do laundry. I can deal with fighting in the arena in Hell, but laundry and dishes put the fear of God in me.
I can hear Rose in his workroom, so I stay out of sight in his living quarters.
At three on the dot there’s a knock. Rose goes to open the door and I get my first look at him.
He’s an older guy but not over the hill. In his early sixties maybe. Long, salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his forehead and over his ears. I see lab coats on the wall, but he knows company is coming, so he’s wearing a pressed, old-fashioned, forties-style high-waisted blue suit and tie with a diamond pattern down the center. He could have stepped right off the set of Out of the Past.
He opens the door and there are Candy and Brigitte, carpet-bombing him with their wiles. Old Rose can’t help but smile.
“Knock knock,” says Brigitte.
“You must Mr. Blackburn’s friends.”
“You bet,” says Candy. “Can we come in? We don’t bite.”
“Of course. Please come in.”
Rose stands aside and Candy and Brigitte walk in like they already own the place. Old Atticus looks like he’s about to hand it over to them.
“Would either of you ladies care for some coffee? If you’d like something stronger, I keep whiskey in the apartment. If you’d like wine I can have some sent up.”
He speaks in a deliberate flat drawl. Not southern. Maybe Okie. I had some cousins from Oklahoma. All I remember about them was that they pronounced theater with a long a.
“No thank you. You have a lovely workshop,” says Brigitte.
That’s an understatement. It’s a little slice of Heaven compared to Manimal Mike’s jerry-rigged setup. The space is clean and stocked with every tool in this world and probably a couple of others. There’s enough room for several people to work at once. Rose must have assistants because there are at least a dozen animal familiars around the room, some fully built and others just steel and gear frames.
“Thank you,” he says. “May I give you ladies a tour?”
Just like I thought. Atticus, a professional recluse, can’t help but want to show off his toys. He brings them over to a table where a half-constructed tabby cat lies curled up near unsewn swatches of fur.
Watching them like this isn’t fun. It brings bad old feelings. This is how my hits in Hell used to go. I’d come through a shadow into someone’s home and wait, sometimes hours, for them to get relaxed or distracted, and then quickly, quietly, I’d cut their throats with the black blade. Things only got messy if they had a bodyguard or a hapless, soon-to-be-dead friend strolled into the slaughter scene. No one ever got away. I was a slave and a killer and I was good at it. I don’t want to be any of those things today, so I stay put and take deep breaths, letting the memories fade away.
Speaking of people who need to crank things down a notch, Rose’s heart is doing its own tap dance. Brigitte got good information. This boy likes wide-open spaces. Even with two not-very-large women in the room, he’s uncomfortable.
“Thank you for seeing us so quickly,” Brigitte says to Rose.
“Of course. Any friends of Saragossa are welcome.”
“What’s this?” says Candy. She’s across the workroom on her own, lost in Rose’s mechanical zoo. Nearby is what looks like a wild dog with broad stripes down its back.
“That’s a Tasmanian tiger, young lady. They’re extinct. If you want one I’m the only Tick-Tock Man in the world who can give you an exact copy of an original, capturing both its spirit and its wild soul.”
“It looks expensive.”
“Very expensive,” says Rose.
Candy looks at Brigitte.
“Mom, can I have one if I’m good?”
Brigitte laughs.
“Maybe for your birthday, dear.”
Candy strokes the tiger’s ears.
Rose’s breathing and heart spike like someone rigged his scrotum to a 220 line.
“Please don’t touch that,” he says, and crosses the room in a few strides to where Candy is standing. She backs off and goes back to Brigitte while Rose combs the tiger’s fur back the way it was.
“Do you ever make anything besides animals?” says Candy.
She’s setting him up for me to knock down. Rose isn’t relaxed enough to attack, but he’s plenty distracted. I take off my glove and put it in my pocket.
“Like what?” says Rose.
I walk into his workspace balancing the 8 Ball on my Kissi hand.
“Something like this.”
I toss the ball at Rose. He catches it. Clutches it to his chest like a life preserver.
“How did you get in here? Get out before I call hotel security.”
I look at the girls.
“You know, people used to have pride. They’d keep a baseball bat by the door and hit you themselves. Now everyone has hired goons. What happened to the American can-do spirit?”
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Richard Kadrey
A smart, kick-arse Urban Fantasy from a new master of the genre. Kill City Blues is the fifth book in the fantastic Sandman Slim series.James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell – again – renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in LA. But he's not out of trouble yet. Somewhere along the way he misplaced a weapon from the banished older gods who now want it back.The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall — a multi-storey copy of LA — infested with Lurkers and bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of territory. Somewhere in the kill zone of the former mall is a dead man with the answers Stark needs.All Stark has to do is find the dead man, get back out alive, and outrun some angry old gods — with a few killers on his tail.
Copyright (#ulink_4548ef0b-3ba3-55b6-9f5b-523f2a62d380)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published by HarperVoyager 2013
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Richard Kadrey 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Designed by Crush Creative (www.crushed.co.uk (http://www.crushed.co.uk))
Richard Kadrey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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, downloaded, 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
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Source ISBN: 9780007446063
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007483877
Version: 2017-09-18
To JLK, who should havebeen around a little longer
It is evident that we are hurrying onward to someexciting knowledge—somenever to be imparted secret,whose attainment is destruction.
— EDGAR ALLAN POE, “MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE”
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lotfarther with a smile and a gun.
—AL CAPONE
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ud178abdc-c9ab-5dc1-a5fc-68575830fe8f)
Copyright (#u256fa57b-00d7-5841-be51-aeffe4fd952d)
Dedication (#ue63756a3-4b86-5da7-abb7-bb86cebf3f51)
Epigraph (#u1780bcf9-083a-5a8d-b175-cf12d6d44829)
I’m in a window (#u32ce558b-54e0-5908-8e3a-3b3bcd6c5c5d)
Maybe happy isn’t the right word (#litres_trial_promo)
When we reach Santa Monica (#litres_trial_promo)
I find a bottle of Aqua Regia (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Richard Kadrey (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I’M IN A window seat at Donut Universe eating heart-crippling lumps of deep-fried dough with the Devil. Ex-Devil technically, but then technically we’re both ex-Devils. He was Lucifer before I was. Now he’s Samael and I’m back to just plain Stark.
I take a bite of an apple fritter.
“How’s your donut?”
Samael eyes his glazed old-fashioned suspiciously, like maybe it’s haunted.
“Charming. Did I invent these? They taste like something designed to destroy mortals from the inside out.”
Candy says, “Nope. We came up with them all on our own.”
“How wonderfully suicidal you people are. Donuts must be the very essence of free will.”
As for the Devil job, I stuck another poor son of a bitch with that. Mr. Muninn. Some days I feel bad about it. Some days I don’t. Today the sun is out, I’m eating donuts with my girl and another ex-Devil, and it’s all pretty goddamn heartwarming.
Samael says, “That blond woman buying coffee. She sold me her soul for a 1956 Les Paul Goldtop. I don’t think she ever learned to play it. The man behind must be a pious bore. He’s virtually free of sin sign.”
The Devil can see people’s sins. They’re like streaks of black tar on skin. Since I quit the damnation biz, I can’t see sin sign, but as an angel, Samael can still pull that rabbit out of the hat. I don’t miss doing that trick.
I say, “This is why I don’t take you to Bamboo House. I don’t want you taking an inventory of my friends.”
“Sorry. It’s a hard habit to break.”
Candy is sitting next to Samael, trying not to let on how thrilled she is to meet the original Devil. I haven’t seen her this excited since we met a furry, six-foot-tall Pikachu at the Lollipop Dolls store in Beverly Hills.
She has her pink laptop on the table, open to Wikipedia. She’s updating the Sandman Slim page. And by “updating,” I mean taking out all the dumbest rumors about me.
“Does it say anything about me being Lucifer?”
She nods.
“Sort of. It says you were always Lucifer and that Sandman Slim doesn’t exist. He’s just one of the Devil’s fronts.”
“You might want to take that out,” says Samael. “You don’t want any demon hunters or aspiring crusaders taking potshots at you.”
“Yeah. Delete it all.”
Candy types something over the Devil stuff.
“Is there a picture of me?”
“A drawing. It’s pretty dumb. Kind of like a police composite sketch in a movie.”
“Delete it, please.”
“You got it, Chief,” she says, channeling Jimmy Olsen.
A police sketch. I’m not surprised. They’ve known who I am for a while now. So why aren’t there fifty patrol cars outside? Why isn’t there a SWAT team waiting for me at the Chateau Marmont? I’m not lucky enough that they’d lose my paperwork and all the surveillance photos. That means somebody doesn’t want me taken in, which means I have a secret benefactor. I don’t think Blackburn would do it, even if I did save his wife’s soul. The head of the Sub Rosa is too political to be sentimental. That means it’s someone I don’t know about. I don’t like that. Secret friends can turn into full frontal enemies without you even knowing about it.
“I was down in Hell yesterday. Father—Mr. Muninn—sends his regards.”
I smile at the image. Mr. Muninn is God. A piece of him anyway. A while back, when God finally admitted he didn’t know how to run the universe, he had a nervous breakdown. He broke into five smaller Gods. The good news is that the God brothers don’t like each other very much. The bad news is that the God brothers don’t like each other very much. It’s not doing creation any good being run by a B team that can’t stand the sight of each other.
“He looks a little funny in his Lucifer armor, doesn’t he? Like a beach ball in a tin can. He doesn’t have what you’d call a classic warrior’s physique.”
Samael pushes away his donut with his fingertips.
“Are you going to eat that?” says Candy.
“It’s yours,” he says.
Smiling, she wraps the donut in a napkin and drops it into her bag. Samael looks puzzled before he realizes she’s going to keep it as a souvenir.
“Did Mr. Muninn fix up the armor any?” I ask.
Samael gives me a look.
“Of course not. The damage is part of the mystique. I notice that you added more than a few burns and scrapes in a very short time.”
“Then you should thank me. I mystiqued it even more.”
Candy says, “He was cute playing Iron Man and it was fun pretending I was fucking Tony Stark, but the armor froze my boobs at night, so I’m kind of glad it’s gone.”
“No, we wouldn’t want one of the few intact holy remnants of the War in Heaven inconveniencing … your boobs,” Samael says.
Candy smiles at him.
“Would you like me to update your Wikipedia page?”
He frowns.
“I have a page? I don’t like that. Please remove it.”
“I can’t. But don’t worry about it. It’s mostly old Bible stories and folktales. There isn’t anything about your nice suits.”
“Still.”
“By the way, thanks for all the swell help when I was Downtown,” I say. “It took me three months to find your stupid clues in the library and escape.”
“I told you to read books. If you’d been more curious, you would have found your way out sooner. You’re always complaining that I don’t do enough for you.”
“You do plenty, but even when you help, I end up with more scars.”
“Then you should thank me,” says Samael. “I mystiqued you even more.”
Candy giggles.
“You have no idea how hard it is not to put everything you boys say on Stark’s page.”
Before Samael can explain to Candy all the reasons she shouldn’t call him a boy, a guy walks up and stands next to our table. He’s wearing a loose, expensive-looking black jacket. A dark red silk shirt open at the neck. An alligator belt with a gold buckle. He looks like a rep from a talent agency that could have handled Traci Lords in her jailbait prime.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, Mr. Stark, but can I speak to you in private?”
“Do my friends look like cops? If you can’t talk in front of them, you can’t talk to me.”
The guy holds up his hands defensively.
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone. My name is—”
“Declan,” I say.
His eyebrows furrow.
“Yes. Declan Garrett. How did you know?”
“It’s just a trick I can do.”
He looks skeptical, then his inner hustler takes over and he keeps talking.
“I just thought that you and the gentleman might be doing some business and I didn’t want to get in the way.”
“Yes, you did,” says Samael. “That’s exactly what you wanted. To stop a business deal.”
“I see. Because he’s in a suit and I’m not, we can’t just be a couple of friends eating donuts,” I say.
Samael looks at me.
“Are we friends, Jimmy?”
“Pipe down, Hugo Boss.”
I look back at Declan.
“You just hurt my feelings.”
“He’s very sensitive,” says Candy. “He might cry.”
“I might cry.”
Declan steps closer to the table. A salesman trying to establish intimacy with the mark.
“Would a million dollars soothe your wounded soul?”
Samael tsks.
“Do you really think a man like this can be bought with money?”
“Hell,” I say. “For a million dollars you can call me Suzy Quatro.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Jimmy.”
“Eat a jelly roll.” Then to Declan, “So what do I have to do for all the tea in China?”
He opens his hands like a preacher invoking the Holy Spirit or asking for a handout.
“Give me something more precious than gold—”
“I think he means me,” says Candy.
“—but that you have no use for.”
Candy does a mock frown.
“Now he’s hurt my feelings.”
“Does this thing have a name?” I ask.
Declan speaks quietly. Suddenly serious.
“Come now, Mr. Stark. We both know what I’m talking about.”
“No. We don’t.”
Samael sighs.
“He means the Qomrama Om Ya.”
“Is that right?”
Declan’s lips curl in a sly smile.
“He’s a smart man.”
“Yeah, he is. Ask nice and he’ll guess your weight. What makes you think I have it?”
“Because you were seen using it. On the child ghost.”
Oh, right.
The Qomrama is a weapon designed by old gods, the Angra Om Ya, to kill other gods. Namely ours. Turns out that the universe really belongs to the Angra and our God foxed them out of it. Now they’re pissed and they want it back. The child ghost, Lamia, was a piece of one of the Angra that leaked through to this universe, and in a pretty blue dress and with a great big knife, she came close to destroying the world.
“You got me there. I guess I did have it.”
“Did?” says Declan.
Candy nods.
“As in past tense. As in it went bye-bye, Charlie.”
Declan cocks his head. A coy move I’d call him on if I wasn’t sure it would cost me money.
“Come now. Who could take it from you, Mr. Stark?”
“A crazy rogue angel named Aelita.”
Declan doesn’t say anything for a minute, like he’s thinking things over.
“If it’s a question of payment, I can offer you more than money. A man like you must have a use for power objects. I can offer you the Spear of Destiny. The actual spear that pierced Christ’s side on the Cross.”
Samael rolls his eyes. He’s heard the line before. Candy smiles. She thinks she’s getting a new toy.
“No thanks. I already have one of those. Right between my Nunchucks of Fate and my Zip Gun of Doom.”
“I’m disappointed to hear that,” says Declan.
“How do you think I feel? I just lost a million dollars.”
“Not if you find it. If, for instance, you manage to reacquire it, I wouldn’t ask how.”
“How open-minded of you.”
Declan’s eyes flicker to Samael and back to me.
“Can I ask what kind of business you are discussing?”
“I was updating their Wikipedia pages,” says Candy. “Do you have one? I can do yours too.”
Declan gives her an indulgent smile.
“I’m afraid I’m not nearly as colorful as these gentlemen. But thank you for the kind offer.”
He reaches into an interior pocket in his jacket and pulls out a business card. He sets it on the table.
“I suppose there isn’t a lot more for us to talk about here in public. If you’re interested in getting serious, you can reach me here.”
“If I find anything interesting under the sofa cushions.”
“Exactly,” says Declan. He holds out his hand. I don’t shake it. After a minute he drops it to his side.
“Good-bye,” he says and walks away.
“Bye,” Candy calls. “It was strange meeting you.”
No one talks until Declan gets outside.
Samael says, “You realize that he didn’t believe a word you said. He thinks you still have the Qomrama and that you’re selling it to me.”
“How do you know that?”
Samael pushes Candy’s hands away from the laptop and closes the lid.
“Because the man I said was a pious bore? He’s about to shoot you.”
He pushes Candy down and ducks himself.
The guy fires just as I turn. The shot is close enough that I feel it breeze by my ear. It hits Candy’s laptop dead center. Her head pops up from under the table.
“You killed La Blue Girl, you asshole!”
Samael pulls her back down.
The guy pulls the trigger again, but I’m looking at him this time. I think he’s more used to shooting people in the back because the moment we make eye contact his hand shakes and his next shot goes through the window, cracking the safety glass. He pulls open the door and takes off across the parking lot. I’m not wasting time going for the door. I go out the window, broken glass flying across the windshields of parked cars.
Samael was right that it looks like things haven’t worked out for the shooter. He’s in a tan raincoat wrinkled enough that it looks like he sleeps in it. He’s an older guy. Midfifties. A bit of a gut hanging over the top of his jeans. But he runs like a fucking demon.
I chase him across Hollywood Boulevard and down La Brea. The shooter lane-splits between the gridlocked traffic, gracefully sliding across hoods and car roofs when they’re too close to squeeze between. I chase him as hard as I can, but I’m not gaining much ground and I can run damned fast. This tubby sad sack isn’t normal. He’s potioned up or there’s hoodoo on him. I could fry the shooter’s fat ass with a hex, but I learned my lesson after blowing up Rodeo Drive. Zipping through traffic at Mach 5 isn’t exactly low profile, but it’s better than launching hoodoo RPGs at the guy. I don’t need a beef with the Sub Rosa right now. So I suck it up and run faster.
He cuts to his right, running behind a gas station. I follow him but he clears a fence in one jump. I have to climb the damned thing. He’s gone when I hit the ground. I take off after him again.
At the corner of Sunset the shooter turns and sees me. His chest is heaving like his lungs are going to blow up like Macy’s Thanksgiving balloons. His eyes are twitching in their sockets like he’s maxed out on PCP. He’s definitely on a potion or two. I don’t think anyone has ever caught up with him before. He looks scared.
Then all of a sudden he’s calm. He smiles like a kid whose mom just tucked him in and kissed him good night.
I don’t know what he’s doing until he’s already doing it.
The bus’s engine growls. Without looking, he steps back off the curb, right in its path. It takes the bus another twenty feet to stop, but the shooter has flown forty feet. All around me people are screaming. Traffic in the intersection that was moving a second ago screeches to a halt.
I muscle my way through the crowd forming around him. He’s lying facedown. I kick him onto his back, get out my phone, and photograph him. People yell at me, taking me for a gore freak looking for something hot to put on his blog. There’s a tattoo on the side of his neck. I don’t recognize it. I shoot that too. One of his shoes came off and his wallet is lying a few feet away. I shove my way over and pick it up. More people are yelling. I guess I’ve blown my low profile. For all I know there’s a traffic camera shooting everything I’m doing.
I take out the dead man’s driver’s license and photograph that too. Then toss it and the wallet back on the ground just as a cop car pulls up. They must have been right around the corner.
Voices get shrill behind me. I don’t have to look. Villagers with pitchforks are pointing out the monster to the guys with the badges. I wonder what the penalty is for pickpocketing a corpse. I can’t be the first person who’s done it. This is L.A.
I walk to a guy sitting on a Harley. He’s a big boy. His feet are planted on either side of the bike, but his hands aren’t on the handlebars. I don’t have time for subtle.
With one hand, I grab the front of his shirt and lift him off the seat far enough to toss him off the bike without hurting him too much. With the other hand, I grab the handlebars so the bike doesn’t fall. The keys are still in the ignition. I gun the engine and take off before either of the cops closing in on me can get within grabbing range.
The moment I take off they hoof it back to the patrol car. Which isn’t going to do them any good at all. The accident has turned the street into a solid mass of cars, gawkers, and now, twenty or more amateur paparazzi, phones and cameras blasting. I steer the Harley onto the sidewalk and open the throttle, laying on the horn to clear the way. I turn the corner and head back up to Hollywood Boulevard.
I ditch the bike on the sidewalk behind a pickup truck with a camper shell big enough to hide it from patrol cars rolling by.
There are six more cop cars outside Donut Universe. Patrons are out in the parking lot yammering to the uniformed cops all at once. One takes statements but the others don’t want to hear about it. They just want the cattle to wait for the detectives while putting up yellow tape around the crime scene.
I spot Candy waving to me on the opposite corner, near a Christian Science church. Samael has his hand to his ear, talking on his phone.
Candy squeezes my hand when I reach them. She worries. It’s sweet. A second later Samael closes his phone.
“Did you get him?”
“He got himself. Strolled off the curb and kissed a bus.”
“Why? You’re not that scary.”
“Yes, I am.”
“If you say so.”
“How much do you have to pay a guy to go out like that?”
“You don’t. He chose to do it himself. It’s the mark of a true believer. In what, I don’t know and I don’t care. But you should.”
I thumb on my phone and go to the picture of the shooter’s driver’s license. I read it out loud.
“Trevor Moseley. Either of you ever hear of him?”
I show them his picture.
Candy shakes her head.
“I took a lot of souls back in the day, but I don’t recognize his name or face,” says Samael.
Candy beams at Samael.
“Sam just called some people. He’s getting me a new laptop.”
“Sam?” says Samael.
“Thanks,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Just thanks? Nothing pithy or sarcastic?”
“I’m capable of appreciating when someone does something nice for someone I care about.”
Samael looks at Candy.
“Good lord. What have you done to him?”
“Shocking, isn’t it?” she says. “Pinocchio is almost a real boy.”
I take a bite of my donut.
“Fuck both of you.”
Samael nods.
“Ah. There’s the Jimmy I know.”
He looks at his watch.
“Look at the time. I should be getting back home before I’m missed.”
“How are things Upstairs?” I ask.
“Just don’t die anytime soon. You’ve seen Hell and right now I wouldn’t wish Heaven on anyone. Ruach is more paranoid every day. Imagine Josef Stalin with unlimited resources.”
Ruach is one of the five God brothers and the current God sitting on the throne in Heaven. Unfortunately for both humans and angels, he’s the “troubled child.” A stone son of a bitch. Supposedly he’s cut a deal with Aelita to let her kill the other four brothers if she leaves him alone. She’s already killed at least one, maybe more. Aside from Mr. Muninn and Ruach, no one knows where the other brothers are.
“At least he can’t send you to Tartarus,” I say.
“There are worse things than Tartarus, I’m afraid.”
“Like what?”
Samael just shakes his head.
“If you want to get in touch with me, go through Muninn. Don’t do it directly. Sandman Slim isn’t a name I want on my contacts list right now.”
And he’s gone. Just blips out of existence. Interesting. With all the shit that’s happened—Mason Faim’s attempted war with Heaven, and God fragmenting into warring siblings—I’ve never seen Samael nervous before.
A couple of people in the Donut Universe parking lot are pointing our way. I wonder if the cops have put together that the hero who chased a shooter from the donut shop is the same asshole that desecrated his corpse and jacked a biker a few blocks away. This isn’t the time to find out. I see a tasty shadow by the side of the church and pull Candy inside with me.
We go through the Room of Thirteen Doors and come out around the back of the Chateau Marmont. Our digs these days. Really it’s Lucifer’s penthouse, but until they figure out that I’m not Lucifer anymore, it’s a room-service, clean-towels, and free-cable party.
BACK WHEN I was still the Lord of Flies, I’d walk through the Chateau Marmont lobby like Errol Flynn back in the day. Now that I’m not, I creep through with my head down like a flea-bitten hillbilly trying to sneak out on a bar tab. Sooner or later word is going to get out up here. The local Satanists might be nouveau riche headbangers and trust-fund creeps with a grudge against the world, but they have some good psychics on their payroll. One of them is going to pick up Mr. Muninn’s vibes and start wondering how Lucifer is doing paperwork in his palace in Hell and ordering kung pao shrimp in his Chateau penthouse at the same time.
Lady Snowblood is playing on the giant plasma screen in the living room. Kasabian is at the long table he uses for a desk, surrounded by dirty plates and beer cans. He’s naked, but it isn’t like ordinary naked. Kasabian is a disembodied head. I’m the one who disembodied him. He shot me, so it seemed like the thing to do. He used to scuttle around on a little wood-and-brass skateboard I conjured for him. Now he gets around on a mechanical hellhound body I brought back from Downtown. Only the body has never quite worked right. Manimal Mike is trying to fix that.
Kasabian is bouncing on the balls of his two rear hound feet. His balance looks good. Mike looks up as Candy and I come inside. He points to Kasabian, looking pale and hopeful.
“Can I have my soul back now?” he says.
I watch Kasabian.
“I don’t know. Can Gimpy make it down the catwalk on his own?”
Kasabian takes a step, teeters, and plants his ass on the side of the table to keep from falling.
Mike slumps into a desk chair. Wipes his face with a dirty rag. It leaves a trail of grease on his forehead and cheek. He wheels himself over and uses a delicate tool that looks like a screwdriver crossed with a spider to make adjustments to Kasabian’s legs.
Mike is a Tick-Tock Man. He builds mechanical spirit familiars for the Sub Rosa chic set. He might be a drunk and nutty and a little suicidal, but he knows his way around machines. He also owes the Devil a favor. The idiot sold his soul a few years back. Now he wants it back. He still thinks I’m Lucifer, so I’m making him work off the debt by fixing up Kasabian.
While Mike works on him, I show Kasabian the dead man’s bloody photo on my phone.
“Friend of yours?” Kasabian says.
“He missed, if that’s what you mean.”
“And now you feel guilty for offing him.”
“That’s the problem. I didn’t. He did it to himself. And I want to know why.”
I flip to the guy’s driver’s license. Kasabian squints at it.
“Trevor Moseley. When did he die?”
“Just now,” I say. “Like twenty minutes ago.”
He shakes his head.
“I won’t see him for a day or so. They’re not exactly state-of-the-art when it comes to sorting out the new meat Downtown.”
Kasabian has a few useful skills. He’s a passable computer hacker, he has good taste in movies—he once ran a choice indie video-rental place in Hollywood. Also, he can see into Hell. It’s a gruesome little trick, but gruesome describes 99 percent of his life, so what’s one more percent between friends?
The trick works like this: when I came back from Hell, I brought a jar of peepers with me. Peepers are eyeballs a lot like ours (no, I don’t know where they come from and I don’t want to know), only they work like surveillance cameras. I scattered dozens of them around Hell. Between the peepers and his ability to peek into Downtown through the Daimonion Codex, Kasabian can spyglass a good chunk of Hell. Entrepreneur that he is, he’s even turning his deadeye trick into a business. Setting himself up as an online psychic. When it’s up and running, he’ll track down any of your dead relatives and report back on them—as long as they’re in Hell. Seeing as how that’s where most suckers are headed, he should be in business until the sun turns this rock into one big overcooked s’more.
“Let me know when you spot him. I might just go down and ask Mr. Moseley a few questions.”
Candy says, “Can I go too?”
I should have been ready for that.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Candy tosses down the magazine she was thumbing through.
“We talked about this. If you leave me here and disappear down there again, you better stay down there because I swear I’ll salt your skull and drink you like a daiquiri.”
Candy isn’t exactly human. She’s a Jade. That’s sort of like being a vampire, only Jades dissolve your insides and drink you, kind of like a spider. I know it sounds bad, but she’s off the people juice these days. And it’s kind of sexy when she lets the monster out. I just have to be around to make sure it goes back in.
“What’s the difference between true love and a murder spree?” says Kasabian.
“I don’t know. What?”
He shrugs.
“I don’t know. I was hoping you lovebirds would have a clue.”
He smiles, pleased with his half-assed joke.
I say, “Go bite a mailman, Old Yeller.”
Mike lets go of Kasabian’s leg. He flexes it and it looks like it’s working all right. Mike goes to work on the other one.
“Well?” says Candy. She’s right beside me, her hands balled into fists. She’s not backing down on this.
“You’re right. I promised. But this is only if I actually go. I’m not making any special trips down so you can take snapshots with Stiv Bators.”
“Deal.”
She stands on her toes and kisses me on the cheek.
“I got it,” says Kasabian. “When it’s true love you know why you’re getting stabbed.”
“Kasabian, you romantic fool,” says Candy. “You just got ten percent cuter.”
He smiles at her.
“Kitten, I’ve got romance coming out my ass.”
“And now the cute is gone.”
Mike chuckles to himself. Kasabian shifts his leg, clipping him on the nose.
“Learn to stop while you’re ahead,” I say.
“I haven’t had much practice with women since you turned me into a carnival attraction.”
“I’ll have you tripping the light fantastic in no time,” says Mike.
As casually as he can, Kasabian says, “Stark, you still have Brigitte’s number?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not asking for a hookup, just an introduction.”
“I’ve put Brigitte through enough. I’m not letting you loose on her.”
“You won’t do me one favor, but you want me to look up your dead pal in Hell.”
“Look, Mike gets your legs working, you can come down to Bamboo House of Dolls and ask her yourself. Maybe she’ll say yes just for the novelty of doing a robot.”
“I think she might be seeing someone,” says Candy.
“Who?” says Kasabian.
“The King of Candy Land. Or was it Josie and the Pussycats?”
“Great. Now she gets discreet. Forget it. Chicks only want one monster in their life and Stark got to Brigitte first.”
Mike stops working and Kasabian tries to stand. This time he makes it. His legs support him and he takes a few steps like, well, a circus dog doing a trick for biscuits.
I say, “You know, no matter how well you make his arms and legs work, he still looks like a mutt.”
Mike sighs and nods.
“To rework his whole body so it’s more human shaped, I’d have to cut it up with a plasma torch, lengthen and straighten his back legs, redo the spine, and rebalance and recalibrate the whole thing,” he says. “The only way to do that is for Kasabian to get off it.”
I look at Kasabian, walking steady for the first time since I’ve been back.
“Maybe he’s right. Maybe you should go back to your skateboard for a while and let Mike do his thing.”
Kasabian looks panicked. He stumbles back against his desk, his hound legs giving way.
“No way anyone is chopping up this body. I looked like a fucking bug on that skateboard. Now at least I’m mammal shaped.”
“I’ve got all your limbs working right for the moment,” says Mike. “Maybe there’s some way I can do your legs without taking them off.”
Kasabian sits down and slaps his computer keyboard. The screen lights up.
“Yeah. You work on that. Right now let me get back to work building my site.”
As Mike packs up his tools he looks at me.
“I’m not getting my soul back, am I?”
“Not today, Mike. But keep up the good work. You’re closing in on daylight.”
I head into the big bedroom Candy and I share. Samael’s old clothes still hang in the closet. Custom shirts and suits so sharp they could cut you like a knife. I toss my jeans and T-shirt on the bed and change into a bloodred button-down shirt and black silk trousers.
Candy follows me in and sits on the bed.
I say, “Why don’t you stay here and see if Kasabian can pull up any information on Moseley when he was alive.”
Candy doesn’t move.
“I know you’re not dressing up for me, so who’s the lucky girl?” she says.
I comb my hair in the bedroom mirror. It doesn’t help much. The neater I get my hair, the worse it makes the scars on my face look. There are donut crumbs on the glove that covers my prosthetic left hand, so I toss the glove onto a pile of dirty clothes and put on a clean one.
“Brigitte was there when the Qomrama disappeared, but even if she wasn’t, I bet she’s not the one sending hit men after me.”
“Then who is?”
“I don’t know. But there were only two other people there when Aelita took the 8 Ball. Saragossa Blackburn and his wife. So, I’m off to see the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
THE SUB ROSA is the underground magic community that keeps the old practices alive and secretly runs a few pieces of the world. Saragossa Blackburn is our Augur, the president and holy high chieftain of the entire Sub Rosa freak squad in California. There’s no one bigger. With his heavy money Illuminati of politicians, corporate honchos, bankers, entertainment-industry lackeys, and law enforcement creeps, he’s the power behind the power, and when we don’t have a Sub Rosa governor running the state, Blackburn makes sure that Mr. or Ms. Civilian knows who’s really calling the shots.
He’s a scryer, a seer who gets glimpses of the future. All Augurs are scryers and Blackburn is supposed to be a good one. On the other hand, he didn’t see me coming the last time I paid him a visit, but I was still Lucifer back then. Now that I’m just another asshole, chances are he has me right on his radar.
And here comes the proof. Men in shades and dark Brooks Brothers suits pile out of a line of blacked-out vans. The last time I dropped by, Blackburn was so sure of his untouchability that he didn’t bother with security guards. He had enough wards and hoodoo mantraps around the place to hold off King Kong but not the Devil.
I don’t like this. It feels too much like the bullshit I had to put up with when I worked for Larson Wells and his holy brown shirt army, the Golden Vigil.
A marine type with a blond crew cut and steroid shoulders the size of baby bulls puts his hand up.
“Excuse me, sir. Do you have an appointment?”
It’s not the “excuse me” part that gets under my skin. It’s the “sir.” Procedures. Protocol. They’re all civilized masks for contempt. I can deal with that, but I like my hate straight and up front. And these boys radiate hate like Tijuana blacktop in August. They know who I am and that I put a massive hurt on the last bunch of Sub Rosa security goons that braced me like this.
But I learned a bit of the protocol dance myself when I was playing Lucifer. Sometimes civilized is the best play. The feint they’re not expecting. Besides, I’m decked out in silk and shiny shoes like Louis the Sun King’s jester. Unless I crack someone’s head and eat their brains, I couldn’t scare a Brownie.
“I’m here to see the Augur. My name is James Stark.”
“Yes, sir. Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but if you tell Blackburn I’m here, I’m sure he’ll see me.”
Mr. Shoulders smiles.
“The Augur is a busy man. If you call his secretary and make an appointment, we’ll be happy to make sure you get inside. I can give you his secretary’s phone number.”
“Yeah. You see, I kind of saved his wife’s soul, so he owes me a favor. Plus, someone tried to shoot me today, so I’d like to see the Augur right fucking now, pretty please with ice cream on top.”
This is what Shoulders and his friends have been waiting for. An excuse. His heartbeat is going up. Microtremors in his face and hands are sure signs he’s waiting for me to make a move. And if I don’t do something soon, he’s going to work himself up to where he’ll make a move for me.
A few months ago I would already have had half of these merc fuckwits on their backs, bleeding and crying for their mommies. But I’m trying to cool some of that these days. Go with the advice Wild Bill Hickok gave men in Hell and pick and choose my fights.
“I’d really appreciate it if one of you gentlemen could call the house for me,” I say. I follow it with a big, sunny smile.
Shoulders is one second from Tasing me when his phone rings. A funny, chirping ring tone. He relaxes. It’s not conscious. It’s reflex. He’s been trained to stand down when he hears that particular tone. Besides, he has six other roid-rage behemoths behind him ready to stomp me to apple butter if I scratch my nose. But that’s not going to happen. I can already see it in his body language. His shoulders are slumped. His voice is calm and low. His heart rate is dropping back to normal. When I see flat-out disappointment on his face, I know whose funny ring tone just saved my nice creased slacks.
Shoulders slaps his phone closed and sticks it back in his jacket pocket. It takes him a second to get the words out.
“Mr. Stark, I’ve been told that you’re authorized for a visit with the Augur.” Then comes the really hard part. “I hope you’ll forgive any inconvenience the new security measures might have caused you.”
“I forgive you,” I say, “but I’m not bringing a piñata to your birthday party. You’ll have to get your own goddamn candy.”
In grand Sub Rosa tradition, from the outside Blackburn’s mansion looks like something a wino coughed up after a night of Sterno and generic, nonfilter cigarettes. In this case, it looks like an abandoned residency hotel on South Main Street. The first floor is boarded up, covered with cryptic gang graffiti and stapled flyers for bands and strip clubs. The second and third floors are empty, burned-out shells. It’s all just hoodoo, of course. Inside, Blackburn’s place is a Victorian wet dream. Hell, it’s so real he probably has opium addicts and lungers planted in the guest rooms to add a little more color to the place.
Inside, a guy in his early twenties in a gray suit he can’t possibly afford greets me. A staff monkey. A young Sub Rosa emperor-in-training waiting to enter the big leagues. I wonder how connected you have to be to get a gig like this at his age.
“Please follow me, sir,” he says in a voice smooth as buttermilk. I follow him into Blackburn’s study. I killed a few people in here last month, but you’d never know it by the look of the place. No blood or a single bone fragment in sight. My compliments to your mystical janitors.
“James. Good to see you,” says Blackburn, coming from around his desk to shake my hand. He’s on a first-name basis with me since I saved his wife. I’m not on a first-name basis with him because he’s as close to God as we have in California.
“Thanks. And thanks for calling off your dogs. Did you hire all of them on my account? I’m flattered all to hell.”
Blackburn points to a seat by the desk. I sit. He goes back around and settles down.
“Not you specifically. It’s more because of … well, everything. Your coming in so easily was unnerving, of course, but Aelita’s behavior was worse. I’m good at seeing what people really are, but I suppose that skill doesn’t extend to angels. Anyway after the …”
“Massacre?”
“Yes, the massacre here, I decided that we finally needed to update security. The old ways of respect and even fear for the office of Augur are long gone. The twenty-first century is a fine place, but it’s a little medieval too. We need our Great Companies to keep the neighbor’s dog from crapping on the lawn.”
“If ‘Great Companies’ means expensive mercs, I guess so. Still, with your money I think you could do better. At least one of your guys wanted to start trouble, not put it down.”
“I know,” says Blackburn. “That’s why I called when I did. And he’s not usually like that. He’s usually a good man. It’s just that you scared him.”
“Me? Look at me. I’m dressed like a Deadwood dance-hall girl. How am I going to scare pros?”
“Because you’re still James Stark and everyone knows the things you’ve done. And gotten away with.”
“Now you’re making me blush.”
Blackburn gives me a smile. I can read people too. He’s indulging me because he wants something.
“If you’re really so interested in my security, why don’t you come and work for me? I hear you’re having some trouble with your revenue stream,” Blackburn says.
“Is it that obvious these aren’t my clothes?”
“I’m offering you Aelita’s old position as head of my security team. Wouldn’t you like to step into her shoes and show how much better you’d be at the job?”
“Don’t you already have a new security chief?”
“Yes. Audsley Ishii. A very competent man. But I’d rather have Sandman Slim on my side.”
“On the payroll, you mean.”
“Exactly. What do you say?”
I shake my head.
“I tried the salaryman thing back with the Golden Vigil. I work a lot better on my own, thanks. And right now I’m kind of busy trying to save, you know, the world.”
“I thought your chasing Aelita was a more personal thing.”
“It’s pretty damn personal, but she’s not what I’m chasing right now.”
Blackburn leans back in his chair. Steeples his hands.
“You mean the bauble.”
“It’s a god-killing weapon.”
“I’ve heard the stories. All unsubstantiated.”
“Do you think when the Angra Om Ya come stomping back, you’ll bribe pissed-off elder gods with brunch and VIP night at Disneyland?”
Blackburn’s hands go from a steeple to a dismissive little wave.
“Come on, Stark. You’ve seen the celestial realms. You don’t really believe all this nonsense about old gods and ultimate weapons, do you?”
“I believe it because I met one of the Angra. Remember the ghost that offed the mayor a while back? Her name is Lamia.”
“The little girl with the knife, you mean?”
“She killed off enough Dreamers to destabilize reality. If I hadn’t stopped her, she might have destroyed the world all on her own. And she’s just one little piece of what these fuckers can do.”
Blackburn goes quiet for a minute. It’s on his face. Am I here hustling him with ghost stories or am I telling the truth and maybe he and the other masters of the universe ought to start getting scared?
“I’ve looked into L.A.’s future and haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing.”
I shrug.
“You couldn’t see what an angel was angling to do. What makes you think you can see what gods want?”
He leans forward, his elbows on the desk.
“Work for me. I can give you access to more resources than you can possibly have on your own.”
“Thanks, but seriously, I’m terrible. You’d want me dead in a week,” I say. “But let me ask you something. Are you the one keeping the cops off me? Maybe clearing the decks just enough so I have to work for you?”
He shakes his head.
“No. Someone else is your guardian angel.”
“Who?”
“I have no idea. But you’re right. If you work for me, you’ll never have to worry about the police again.”
“I told you I already have something to do.”
“You’re awfully altruistic all of a sudden. What happened to Stark the monster? I seem to remember a bit of a madman storming into my house.”
“I don’t know what altruistic is, but I’m pretty sure I’m not it. I just want to keep a few people I like from burning in a hellfire shitstorm.”
He looks away for a second and then back to me.
“You know there’s a rumor that you already have the Qomrama Om Ya. That you found Aelita and took it back.”
“I know. I heard about it today. Recognize this guy?”
I hold out my phone so Blackburn can see Moseley’s photo. He makes a sour face and looks away.
“Warn me if you’re ever going to show me anything like that again,” he says. “Not everyone is as used to mangled bodies as you.”
I forget that blood and dead eyes can be kind of gruesome to regular people. Something to add to the etiquette list I swear I’ll start tomorrow.
“Sorry.”
“Who was that?”
“The all-meat hood ornament on a city bus. He took a shot at me today after I told a buyer I didn’t have the 8 Ball.”
“Why do you think I might know the man?”
“I was hoping he might have been one of Aelita’s crew when she ran your security.”
Blackburn shakes his head.
“Aelita took care of the men herself and kept them at a distance from the household. I never got to know any of them personally.”
It was a long shot but I had to try.
“If you want my opinion,” says Blackburn, “you’re looking at this all wrong. You see the Qomrama and immediately think of Aelita. But what about a rival? If she doesn’t have it anymore—if she’s lost it or is hiding it—surely there are other people in L.A. who would like to get their hands on an object with that much power.”
“You included.”
Blackburn shakes his head.
“It’s tempting, but I don’t want anything to do with Aelita or anything she’s involved with.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“You might also be interested to know that someone in L.A. has put a magic object on the market recently. An object he claims is unrivaled in its importance. Sound familiar?”
“You think this asshole has the Qomrama?”
“It’s possible,” says Blackburn. “If I had something that powerful, I would only approach a few of the best-placed families. You don’t want something like that going to the wrong sort of people. However, this person might not realize what he or she has.”
“Then why would someone try to buy it from me and take a shot at me when I wouldn’t sell?”
“Because the buyer is hedging his bets. He’s probably made offers to both of you. The two people currently connected to the Qomrama.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“True. But if you can find out who’s selling the object and who’s bid on it, maybe it would point you in the direction of what you’re really looking for.”
I want to poke holes in Blackburn’s idea, but I can’t, mainly because I have no ideas of my own. I’ve spent the last month chasing rumors and banging my head into stone walls and come up with nothing. At least Blackburn’s idea gives me something to do.
“So who’s selling Aladdin’s lamp?”
“I don’t know. The seller is shy and only goes through intermediaries.”
“What’s the intermediary’s name?”
“Brendan Garrett. A professional dealer in mystical exotica. I’ll write down his address.”
Now there’s one less maybe in the world.
“Garrett? The guy who tried to buy from me today was named Garrett.”
Blackburn finishes writing and hands me the piece of paper.
“That’s probably your answer right there. You’ve been pulled into the middle of a family squabble.”
“Right. One brother wants it and the other has a line to it but won’t cut the other brother in on the deal. I can see some Lifetime Channel drama in that.”
I look at the address. It’s a glitzy hotel and a room number.
“I’m glad I could be of help. Especially if it’s going to save the world. Even I have people I’d rather not see hurt in a celestial war.”
Blackburn stands, letting me know my time is up.
I get up, and when he extends his hand I shake it. I wonder if he’s looking into my future. I want to ask him what he sees, but I don’t. I’m not sure if I altogether believe in scrying, and what does it matter what he tells me? If I live or die it doesn’t change what I’m going to do: find the 8 Ball. And when I finally do die, I know I’m going back to Hell. That was easy. Now I’m a scryer too. All I need is a crystal ball and a pointy wizard hat. I can get a booth at the Renn Faire and make a mint.
On the way out a couple of Blackburn’s security goons get me by each arm and shove me up against the front door. I’m one deep breath shy of putting the idiots out of their misery, then marching back in and twisting Blackburn’s head off for lying to me. But another man in a suit strolls up. He’s almost a head shorter than me, with a fine-boned face and hands. His skin is so pale it’s almost white. Calm, blue, almond eyes set in a face so handsome it’s almost pretty.
“Oh, my ears and whiskers, is that little Audsley Ishii?” I say.
He gives me a lopsided grin. Not a nice grin. The kind a headsman gives you when he doesn’t like you and knows his ax is good and dull today.
“I’m not going to engage with you Stark, so don’t even try.”
“What’s the matter? Did you hear Blackburn and me talking inside? A little nervous about your job?”
Ishii gets close enough for me to smell his fresh and minty mouthwash.
He says, “I don’t want you showing up here again without an invitation.”
“What you want matters as much to me as the price of pinto beans on Mars.”
“I won’t warn you again.”
“Perfect. The next time your boys jump me, it’ll give me the perfect excuse to lop off your head.”
“Get out of here and don’t come back.”
The guys on my arms pull me away from the door and try to shove me outside. I plant my feet on the carpet and push back. I look at Audsley.
“I’m just curious. Did you know you were going to write a suicide note when you woke up this morning or did the urge just sneak up on you?”
Ishii walks way. Before I can say anything else stupid, I’m pushed out on the shitty street in front of the shitty hotel. A few of the other security hoods are standing around. They laugh when they see me get the bum’s rush. I stare at them, memorizing their faces. If everything goes wrong and fire comes down from the sky, I’m making an igloo out of their bodies and taking Candy inside with me. We’ll still die but I’ll get to listen to these idiots roast first.
I make like I’m walking over to them. They get serious. Hands move toward gun bulges under their jackets. Just before one of them faints or pops a shot off, I disappear into a shadow on the side of Blackburn’s building.
Teach your boys that trick, Ishii, you Napoleon-complex Snow White prick.
THE BEVERLY WILSHIRE Hotel is so posh it gives the Taj Mahal a hard-on. Almost four hundred rooms and a million more secrets. It’s strange seeing it in daylight instead of Hell’s perpetual twilight. Downtown, there’s another version of the Beverly Wilshire. The penthouse was my—Lucifer’s—private space in the infernal palace. Of course, there are other differences. Basement kennels full of the hellhounds. Gibbets out front for extra-naughty prisoners. Hell’s legions on guard. And as far as the eye can see, the wreckage of Pandemonium, Hell’s capital. The heady reek of blood tides and open sewers.
Up here, the Beverly Wilshire is where Blackburn’s crowd buy and sell small countries and bang their mistresses before hunkering down in gated communities with more guns than the Third Reich.
This is the address Blackburn gave me for Brendan Garrett. The room number is for a corner suite. I have a hoodoo key buried in my chest. It lets me enter the Room of Thirteen Doors, the still center of the universe. Nothing can touch me in the Room. Not God or the Devil. It’s my vacation resort and my ace in the hole. From the Room I can come out through a shadow anywhere I want. But that doesn’t mean I like doing it. I especially don’t like walking into rooms when I don’t know what’s waiting inside. But I know the Beverly Wilshire well enough that I figure I can bail safely if I barge in on a gunfight or an ether frolic.
From Rodeo Drive, I step into a shadow next to a palm tree and come out in the hall by Garrett’s suite. I put my ear to the door and listen. Nothing. Just the steady hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning system. I go into the suite through a shadow around the doorframe.
The room isn’t too bad. Almost human in a show-offy kind of way. Gold carpet and drapes. Reds and earth tones for the pricey furniture. But even in Richie Rich hotels the art stinks. It’s all vague impressionist scribbles, like minimalist portraits of whoever the artist was hitting on that day. They’re not make-you-want-to-throw-up bad, they’re the kind of art designed not to offend or appeal to anyone. White noise in a classy frame. If I was staying here I’d have to cover them up like I was in mourning.
The room looks lived in, like Garrett’s been here awhile. Room-service menus and magazines on the coffee table. Clothes hung up in the closet and tossed over the backs of chairs in the bedroom. A half-empty bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses, one with lipstick. So he’s had company. But the most interesting things are the bird and the bedside table.
The bird is a raven and it’s fake. How do I know it’s fake? It hasn’t shit all over the floor. It’s a mechanical familiar and a nice one by the look of it. It cocks its head and stares at me with its shiny black eyes, letting me know that this is its space and it’s not going to move. In the bedside table I find a calfskin wallet, keys, a phone number in a feminine hand on a cocktail napkin, a thick wad of twenties and hundreds held together with a gold money clip, and five passports, all with different names but the same picture. I’m guessing Garrett’s. As I lay the goods out on the bed the bird cranes its head around and I’m reminded how stupid I can be.
I was so distracted by Garrett’s goods that I didn’t check out the whole suite. I don’t have to turn my head to know what the raven is looking at. Instead, I duck as a bullet from a silenced pistol flies by my head.
Garrett gets off another shot and hits the bedside table. That gives me just enough time to slip the black blade out of my waistband at the back and throw it. I don’t want to kill him. I just want him to stop shooting so I can ask him questions. Garrett flinches when he sees the knife, but he’s not quite fast enough. The blade hits the barrel of the gun and knocks it from his hand. But it doesn’t fall far enough away. He dives for it. I toss an easy chair at him and follow behind it, hoping to get to the gun first. Funny thing about hope. It seldom works out. That’s why they gave it a stupid name like “hope.”
Garrett gets to the pistol just as I reach him. Still on the floor, he tilts the barrel up and fires. My eyesight goes black for a second as the pain hits and almost doubles me over. I have enough momentum that I go over Garrett and hit the wall behind him. He looks me in the eye, but before he can swing the gun around, I clip him good on the temple with the heel of my chic loafer. Garrett flops onto the floor and the gun falls from his hand.
Having just had some sense shot into me, I grab the pistol and check to see that Garrett is really unconscious before I go into the bathroom to look at my wound.
I’m a nephilim. Half angel, which makes me hard to kill. And I’ve been hurt worse than this. Hell, just in the past year Kasabian shot me in the chest, Aelita stabbed me with an angelic flaming sword, and a Hellion cut off one of my arms. Garrett was packing a light, quiet .22. Not a shoot-out weapon. More like something a hit man would pack. A .22 shell might bounce off the thick part of your skull if it was coming from any distance, but put a slug in right behind the ear, it’s pennies-on-your-eyes time. So it seems like Declan and Brendan are both comfortable with killing when things don’t go their way. At least Brendan does his own dirty work.
I sit on the cool tile of the bathroom floor with a towel pressed to my side. The pain from the shot has turned to a steady ache that peaks when I breathe in. I’m lucky that he didn’t hit a rib or lung or I’d really be in bad shape. By tomorrow morning the wound will be healed. The bullet will still be inside me, but I’ll only feel it when I do the Twist, so I can wait to get it out.
In a few minutes the throbbing eases off. I get to my feet and go back into the suite. Check that Garrett is still unconscious and then go for his bottle of Laphroaig. Unscrew the bottle with one hand while holding the towel with the other and take a long pull. And instantly regret it. Laphroaig isn’t exactly my brand. I prefer Aqua Regia, Hellion moonshine. I developed a taste for it when I fought in Hell’s arenas. Sure it tastes like cayenne pepper and gasoline but it’s better than this Scotch. This stuff tastes like barnyard dirt and burned lawn clippings. The rich are different. They don’t just own the earth, they like to drink it.
Samael’s silk shirt is ruined. I’m hard on clothes. It’s like my body declared a jihad on everything I wear. At least this shirt wasn’t mine. But I kind of liked it. Candy isn’t going to be wild when she sees my blood soaked through.
I take the bottle and limp back to Garrett. I turn out his pockets but they’re empty. I pull my knife out of the floor and put it back in my waistband. Nothing to do now but wait for the guest of honor to wake up. Under other circumstances I’d dump water or a bucket of ice on him to get his ass moving, but I’m just as happy to have a few minutes of me time.
A phone on the coffee table rings. It’s not Garrett’s cell. It’s the hotel phone. I go over and pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Garrett?”
“Yes.”
“This is the front desk. A package has arrived for you. Would you like me to send it up to your room?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
I hang up.
I can’t answer the door like this. Garrett’s closet isn’t any help. He’s a lot bigger than I am. I’d look like I was wearing a tepee in one of his shirts. I toss the bloody towel in the bathroom and grab the hotel robe off the back of the door. I look at myself in the mirror. I’m pale and sweating, but I look more hungover than gut-shot. I set the pistol on the coffee table and drag Garrett to the bed, toss him on top, and cover him with blankets. The raven flutters over and stands on the lump that’s Garrett’s soon-to-be-kicked-around-the-room carcass.
There’s a gentle knock on the door. I grab the money clip and peel off a twenty.
A young, freckled woman in a hotel uniform stands in the hall.
“Mr. Garrett?”
“Yes. Thanks for bringing it up,” I say through my weak hangover smile.
“Of course.”
She hands me the box. There’s nothing on it but a tag for a local courier company.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” she asks.
“No. This is fine,” I say, and hand her the twenty. I didn’t get all the blood off my hands. There’s a line of red along one edge of the bill. But it looks more like ink than anything else. And let’s face it. This is an L.A. hotel. It can’t be the first time someone handed her bloody money.
“Thank you,” she says, and I close the door. That’s enough social interaction for now. I can feel my side starting to leak through the robe, so I carry the box to a larger table by the wet bar and set it down. I get a new towel from the bathroom and tie it tight around my waist. It burns like a son of a bitch, but it ought to stop all the annoying fucking blood for a while.
With the black blade I slice open the courier box. Inside is a leather brief bag, something like an oversize attaché case that lawyers carry. There’s another case inside that. Plastic, but heavy and substantial. Almost like a gun case. I slide it out of the brief bag, push that onto the floor, and set down the plastic one. I take a quick peek at Garrett to make sure he’s not going to sneak up on me. The raven is still standing guard over him. I pop the latches on the case and push back the lid.
Lying packed in a snug black foam liner is the Qomrama Om Ya.
Color me the luckiest son of a bitch on the planet. I grab it to make sure I’m not seeing things.
Wait. Keep the son-of-a-bitch part but forget the lucky. The 8 Ball is like the bird. A fake. The real 8 Ball radiates heavy magic that you can feel through your skin. This thing looks good, but it’s as magic as loaded dice.
Whoever made it isn’t a complete idiot. It gives off some minor hoodoo vibes, enough to feel real if you’ve never handled the real Qomrama. It’s like how Russian gangs sell kindergarten terrorists radioactive junk and tell them it’s plutonium. The morons think they’re going to build a nuke, but all they get is cancer-therapy scrap.
The only other thing in the case is an old book. It’s full of diagrams of the 8 Ball along with what look like instructions, but it’s in a language I’ve never seen before. I put the book in my back pocket. Father Traven might have some fun with it.
In the bedroom, the raven squawks and flutters back to the chair. Garrett sits up. His eyes go wide when he sees me with his courier box.
“That’s not for you!” he yells.
“Finders keepers.”
He starts feeling around the bed, knocking his passports and cash onto the floor. He’s looking for the gun, but it’s over on the coffee table. When he can’t find it, he swings his legs onto the floor and stumbles to his feet.
Just to be a dick about it, I take the fake Qomrama from the case and toss it from hand to hand like a basketball. I don’t see the blinking light right away. It’s down at the bottom of the compartment that held the 8 Ball. When I do notice it I have a pretty good idea what it is and I start running. So does Garrett, but the other way. He makes it to the coffee table, snatches up the pistol, and levels it at me.
“Give me back my merchandise,” he says.
I’m halfway into a shadow, bent low, when the bomb goes off. The concussion blasts me the rest of the way out of the room.
I suppose I could have been a Good Samaritan. Run back for Garrett, knocked the gun out of his hand, and pulled him into the shadow with me. But it hurt when I bent down to steal his money clip and … well, the bastard did shoot me.
I HATE GOING through the Room straight into the penthouse at the Chateau Marmont. Whatever hoodoo keeps the penthouse hidden from both civilians and Sub Rosa makes me dizzy and nauseous every time I walk through it. That doesn’t matter this time. I’m already dizzy and nauseous.
I fall near where we keep the food trays lined up buffet style against the wall. At least I don’t have to worry about Candy being concerned about my belly wound. My half-blasted-off clothes will distract her. Plus, I have the cash. And the fake Qomrama.
I grab the edge of a table and pull myself to my feet with my prosthetic left arm. The explosion must have blown off the glove. The arm is ugly as Hell. It was given to me by a Kissi, an extinct race of mutant angels that lived in the chaos at the edge of the universe. My prosthetic looks like a bug claw crossed with the Terminator, but it handles things like explosions pretty well, so I can use it sometimes when the rest of my body isn’t cooperating.
Before I know what’s happening, I’m being steered onto one of the leather sofas. I find half a cup of Aqua Regia on the coffee table and gulp it down. When I look up Candy is standing over me. She’s pulling off my shredded shirt, looking scared. And sees the bloody towel. Now her fear is mixed with annoyance.
“I let you out of my sight for ten fucking minutes,” she says.
My ears are ringing, so it takes me a second to understand what she said.
She pulls out the black blade I gave her and cuts off the rest of the shirt and towel. When she sees the bullet wound she looks at me hard.
Before she can say anything, I hold out the 8 Ball.
“Look, baby, I brought you a present.”
Then I pass out.
I WAKE UP in bed naked and wrapped in a sheet. There’s a stain where my blood and something else has soaked through. Candy sits beside me, playing a game on her pink laptop.
Vidocq is in a chair nearby, smoking, his feet propped on a corner of the bed. Spirited Away plays on the big screen. It’s what Candy always watches whenever she’s upset. A young girl sits on a train. Some kind of Japanese folk spirit sits beside her. White oval face. All draped in black.
“Where did that come from?” I say, nodding at the laptop.
She doesn’t look up from whatever she’s playing. It pings and pops. Plays a silly little tune.
“I don’t think she’s speaking to you at the moment,” says Vidocq in his smooth French accent.
I look at her. She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“I guess not.”
I’m blistered from the explosion. I lean down and sniff the stain on the sheet. It’s a strange mild acid reek with something sweet. Maybe even a little Spiritus Dei. A complicated potion. I look at Vidocq.
“One of yours?”
He smiles and inclines his head in a little bow.
“Thanks,” I say.
“De rien.”
Vidocq is an alchemist and a thief. He’s also a hundred and fifty years old. You’d think after living in this country for a hundred years, he would have lost the accent. I don’t think he wants to. It’s all he has left of France. It’s not like he can ever go back. Where does a hundred-and-fifty-year-old thief and murderer—he killed a couple of guys way back when. Don’t worry. They deserved it—get a birth certificate? A driver’s license? A passport? Yeah, he could get fake documents like Garrett had in his room, but Vidocq is too proud for that. Unless he can go back as himself, I don’t think he’ll ever set foot in the old country again.
I glance back at Candy. She still won’t look at me. I put a finger on the top of her laptop and start to close it.
“Don’t,” she says. “I just got to this level and I’ll lose it.”
“Your computer is dead. Whose is this?”
“Mine. Samael said he’d get me a new one and he did. It’s a newer model too. Lots more memory and a faster processor. Good for games.”
I lie down on my back.
“So all in all a good day for you.”
“Shut up,” she says.
I move closer to her. Put my hand on her leg.
“This is going to happen sometimes. It’s how my life works. You can’t always come with me and I can’t dodge every bullet. Just remember that bastards tried to kill me for eleven years in Hell and almost a year up here and no one’s done it.”
She says, “That’s not true. You’ve died a couple of times.”
“Not like lying-there-getting-smelly kind of dead. Just technically dead.”
She hits the keyboard harder. She still won’t look at me. I really want one of Vidocq’s cigarettes.
“You’ve got to understand that if this is going to work between us.”
“I don’t want to,” she says.
“I don’t always either. But it’s how things are. ‘Death smiles at us all and all a man can do is smile back.’”
“Where did you hear that crap?”
“I read it in a book Downtown. It’s Marcus Aurelius.”
She nods.
“Quote a dead guy. Real smooth.”
I kiss her leg and get up. I stink from sweat and burned skin and need a shower.
On my way to the bathroom I say, “I’m going Downtown to see Mr. Muninn. You can come with me or you can stay here and sulk.”
I stand under the hot water for a long time, washing off the grime and dead skin. The wound has already closed, though I can feel the bullet inside me.
I put on a robe and go back into the bedroom.
Candy has closed the laptop. She and Vidocq are quietly watching the movie. I sit down beside her on the bed. She balls up her fist and punches my real arm.
“Ow.”
“I wasn’t sulking. I was mad. And not entirely at you.”
“I know. Trust me. If I could, I’d be the most boring bastard in the world.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” says Vidocq.
“Okay. Tenth most boring bastard.”
Candy says, “Sometimes you get worked up. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“Really? How does stopping to grab money in the middle of an explosion count as careful?”
The fake Qomrama and the cash are lying nearby on the bed. I pick up the money.
“Did you count it?”
“It’s just shy of four thousand dollars.”
“Chicken-and-waffles money.”
Along the edges, the bills are as crisp and singed as I am. I show them to Vidocq. He chuckles and leans in closer.
He says, “That’s a strange design on the clip. It almost reminds me of the Golden Vigil. Though not entirely.”
The Golden Vigil. God’s Pinkertons on earth. They were a Homeland Security offshoot that Vidocq and I used to work for. The Vigil worked with a special group of agents using angelic tech, supposedly monitoring and policing nefarious hoodoo-related activity. Zombies. Rogue vampires. Demon attacks. Hell, they even put Lucifer on a terrorist watch list. Mostly, though, they were just another set of bullheaded cops in better suits. U.S. Marshal Larson Wells and, more importantly, Aelita ran the show. That’s until she went on her god-killing crusade and the government shut the Vigil down. Not a tear was shed.
“Not quite? You’re sure?”
Vidocq nods.
“I’m positive. Not the Vigil.”
“But still similar.”
“Yes. Similar.”
I toss the money back on the bed.
“I wish I could have talked to Garrett. All this cash. Passports. A mechanical familiar. Who the hell was he waiting for?”
“And who was the bomb for? Monsieur Garrett or the party buying from him?” says Vidocq.
“He had a familiar?” says Candy.
“Yeah; a good one too. I should have grabbed the asshole’s wallet.”
I can see Kasabian banging away on his own computer, building his Web site.
“Did Old Yeller find out anything on Moseley?”
Candy says, “Not much. He had a record but all minor stuff. He was kind of a religious nut. A couple of arrests for protesting outside abortion clinics. A fine for trashing a Scientology office and some Orthodox graves at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It looks like he’s been through every religion on the planet. There’s photos of him in a dozen getups from different religious sects and cults.”
“A lost soul in a hard city. A volatile combination,” says Vidocq.
“I got the 8 Ball and the cash,” I say to him. “You steal anything fun lately?”
He shakes his head.
“Jewelry here and there. A vase for the apartment. Helping look for your weapon puts too many temptations in my path and the old habits are the hardest to break.”
He puffs his cigarette.
“And sometimes stealing a bit helps. Not everyone who comes to the clinic can pay.”
Vidocq’s girlfriend, Allegra, runs a hoodoo clinic for down-and-out Sub Rosas and Lurkers. Doc Kinski used to run it with Candy taking care of the front desk. Then Aelita murdered him. That bothered a lot of people, myself included. Kinski was my father.
“How is Allegra?”
“Well. She has trained two competent assistants.” He looks at Candy. “She misses you working beside her.” He looks at me. “And believe it or not, she misses you.”
Allegra didn’t take it well when she found out that I’d become Lucifer. She accused me of all kinds of nefarious shit. Mostly Sunday school stuff, which I didn’t expect from her. We haven’t spoken much since.
“Maybe we ought to keep it that way,” I say. “Whenever we get near each other, someone says something stupid.”
“Someone?” asks Candy.
“Okay. Me.”
“And yet her desire to see you both remains unchanged,” Vidocq says.
I toss him Garrett’s cash.
“Give her this.”
He nods and puts it in the pocket of his greatcoat.
“We both thank you for this.”
Candy says, “Can I have the clip?”
I say, “Why? We don’t have any money.”
Vidocq takes the clip off the cash and hands it to her. Her eyes light up.
“I just like it,” she says. “It’s shiny. I’ll find something to do with it.”
I take off the robe. The bullet wound stings a little, but the blisters hurt like a son of a bitch. I put on my leather bike pants and boots. Find an old Maximum Overdrive video-store T-shirt that’s not covered in bullet holes or blood and put that on too.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me along,” says Vidocq.
“To Hell? I don’t want to take her. Why would I subject you to it too?”
“I’d like to see the afterlife. With my condition it’s doubtful I’ll ever see it legitimately.”
A hundred and fifty years ago Vidocq made himself immortal. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t trying to do it. Just one of his alchemical experiments took a wrong turn and left him with a condition most people would kill for. Me, I’d rather have X-ray vision. At least it would be fun at parties.
I say, “Forget it. Allegra would truly kill me dead if I took you.”
He sighs, knowing I’m right.
“And she’d be right, of course. You’re a terrible influence on us all.”
He nods to me and blows Candy a kiss. He holds up the cash.
“And thank you for this,” he says before leaving through the grandfather clock, the real entrance to our secret hideaway.
“He’s right. You are a terrible influence,” says Candy.
“I thought that’s why you stuck around.”
“There’s also the free food and movies.”
“Free computers too.”
“And getting blown up and shot at.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to work on my ducking skills.”
“Please do.” She doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “So, we’re really going?”
“You’re the one who wanted to.”
“Yeah, but now I’m a little scared.”
“Good. That means you’re sane.”
“So, we just go there? No spells? We don’t have to sacrifice chickens or pray to any hoary overlords of the deep or something?”
“You can dance naked around a maypole if you want. Me? I’m just walking in.”
She gets up.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Don’t wear anything you really like.”
“Why?”
“You’re won’t be springtime fresh when you get back and I’m not sure the stink of Hell comes out in the wash.”
I WENT DOWNTOWN when I was nineteen. I was thirty when I came out. I’ve only been back on earth for around eleven months. Sometimes it seems as long was the previous eleven years.
Another magician, Mason Faim, sent me to Hell in a deal to supersize his hoodoo power. He also wanted me out of the picture. We were a pair of Sub Rosa golden boys. Way too clever and powerful for our own good. The difference between us was that Mason had to work and study his ass off to stay on top of the hoodoo heap. Me? I could always improvise a spell or hex and have it fly. That was my angel half at work, only I didn’t know that at the time. When Mason got rid of me he was top dog in L.A. He murdered my old girlfriend, Alice. He tried to take over Hell and start a new war with Heaven. You have to hand it to the boy. He knew how to dream big. So I killed him.
But in a way, Mason won. He wanted to destroy me, and the one who went to Hell sure isn’t who came out. I was James Stark going down but Sandman Slim when I left. Eleven years of torture and fighting in the arena to entertain monsters will alter your perspective on life.
Most nights I still dream about Hell. I can feel it inside me. It’s in the stink of my sweat. Flashing on the place even for a second makes me furious and sometimes afraid and sometimes ashamed of both those things.
On the plus side, I got up close and personal with the killer inside me. I learned I was good at taking lives. Doc Kinski called me a natural-born killer, so now it’s what I do. But I don’t always like it, and when I do, I don’t always like myself for liking it. That’s what Hell is. It’s the shithole bottom of the universe, but it’s a place where you’ll learn more about yourself than you ever wanted to know.
I GET A pack of Maledictions from a box under a table in the living room. Maledictions are the most popular cigarettes in Hell. The only brand I really like. The taste is, well, unique. Like a tire fire in a candy factory. With luck, the angel part of me is immune to cancer. If it isn’t I’m going to be a solid two-hundred-pound tumor.
Candy gives me a faint smile as I take her hand and we step through a shadow into the Room of Thirteen Doors. I open the door to Hell but I don’t take her through. I hold her there looking at the place.
“Wow. It really does smell like sulfur,” she says.
“Don’t worry. When you get inside, between the sewers and the Hellion stink, you’ll forget all about the sulfur.”
“You know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Nothing but the best for you.”
“Whoa.”
This is what I’ve been waiting for.
“What do you see?”
“It looks just like L.A. A more fucked-up L.A. but still L.A.”
“It’s called a Convergence. A kind of magical fuckup where one place gets layered on top of another. When I first landed in Hell, it was all dark palaces and cobblestone streets. Now it’s L.A. None of that changes what Hell is. It just makes it easier to get around.”
“Somehow, none of that is very reassuring.”
“That’s Hell in a nutshell. You ready?”
“Yes. No. Yes. I think so.”
“Before we go in, here are a couple of rules. And they’re nonnegotiable. Stay close to me. Close enough for me to grab if things get weird. If anyone starts anything let me handle it. No Jade stuff. You see any damned souls, don’t look them in the eye. They’re used to me but another live human could freak them out.”
“I’m not human.”
“You look human. That’s enough. Also, don’t talk to anyone but Mr. Muninn.”
“Who?”
“The current Lucifer.”
“Right. Mr. Muninn. You told me about him.”
I squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.
“Banzai,” I say, and pull her inside.
WE COME OUT on the front gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The Hellion version is a train wreck. Open graves. Smashed headstones. Statues and tombs swallowed by flames. It looks like it was looted by the Golden Horde and shit on by King Ghidorah.
I lead her out the front gate, where a block-long street market has set up. It wasn’t here the last time I was Downtown, but a lot of things are probably different now that Mr. Muninn is ringmaster.
We’re noticed immediately. A couple of living beings, one of whom used to be Lucifer, tend to stand out down here.
Candy digs her nails into my hand, but she doesn’t show any actual fear. Hellions are fallen angels. Some of them look almost human. Others are walking, talking nightmares. Like mutant versions of fish, reptiles, or insects, or all three. The crowd in the market is a nice assortment pack of all the different Hellion types.
The chatter and the hawkers’ calls trail off as the crowd turns its rheumy eyes on us. The only sound is the thin Hellion breeze, the sizzle of cooked meat, and grating Hellion music from a windup player. No one moves toward us. What are they seeing? Some version of Lucifer or Sandman Slim with a dangerous Lurker on his arm?
I’m not waiting around to find out. I’ve seen Hellions riot and I don’t need to see it again. Not with Candy here.
I head to a stall where a merchant has mugwump meat turning on a spit. The smell is somewhere between filet mignon and coffin liquor. The fire throws up some nice fat shadows. I pull Candy into one and we go back out through the Room.
My aim is better the second time and we come out in the lobby of Lucifer’s palace. Back inside the Beverly Wilshire for the second time today. This time I’m not accepting any mystery packages from the front desk.
I can see a dozen guards in the lobby. I don’t wait to see if Muninn has posted more. I pull Candy over to Lucifer’s private elevator. Like the crowd in the market, the guards look more confused than anything else.
Candy tugs on my arm.
“Are we going somewhere soon? ’Cause there’s like a hundred guys watching us through the windows.”
She’s right. A mob of the legions guarding the palace is clustered around the lobby windows. This isn’t any time to find out if they’re happy to see their old boss or if they want to flay me alive. I pull Candy to the elevator.
One of the guards all of a sudden grows a pair and yells, “Halt!”
When I look he already has his rifle leveled at us.
I let go of Candy’s hand and turn and face him. Put out my arm and manifest a Gladius, an angelic flaming sword. It’s impressive anywhere, but inside the lobby it’s like the sun reflecting off the skin of a cruise missile.
“Make your move, shit heel. I took Mason Faim’s head and I can take yours.”
He stands there for a minute pointing his gun at me. I know he’s not going to shoot. There’s a window on these things. Someone points a gun at you and doesn’t shoot in the first few seconds, they get thinking about the consequences. And the more they think, the less likely they are to pull the trigger. This clown’s been thinking long enough to whistle the long version of “Layla.”
He looks around at his Hellion buddies. None of them have their guns up. Why should they? That’s Lucifer upstairs, king high prick himself. If he can’t handle Sandman Slim with a chick civilian in tow, then what the hell good is he?
I touch a brass plate on the wall and the elevator doors slide open. The guards stand and stare. Touch the plate inside the elevator and the doors close and we start up.
“So far Hell is a barrel of monkeys,” says Candy.
“You ought to come on Halloween. Everyone dresses up like The Brady Bunch. Seriously. The show is huge down here.”
Her heart isn’t just beating fast, it’s trying to pound its way out of her chest and hop a plane to Bora Bora.
“You couldn’t have walked us into Lucifer’s living room or something?” she says.
“That would be rude. I stuck the guy here, I have to show him a little respect.”
She takes a couple of deep breaths.
“Sorry. I thought I was more ready for this. I’ve seen some crazy Lurker stuff, but …”
“But not a whole world of it? Don’t feel bad. No one’s prepared for this dump.”
“So this is where Sandman Slim comes from.”
“Yep.”
“You killed a lot of those guys down here.”
“Don’t be sexist. There are women Hellions too. And I killed pretty much everything down here at one time or other. And when I wasn’t doing it in the arena, Azazel, my old slave master, was sending me out to kill anyone on his shit list. Until I killed him.”
“The monster who kills monsters.”
“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” Then, “Nothing’s going to happen to you. I promise.”
“I believe you.”
She lets go of my hand and loops her arm in mine. We must look funny and weirdly formal when the doors open, like kids dressing up in their parents’ clothes.
“James, so good to see you,” says Mr. Muninn.
I’m not sure he means it, but he gives me a quick hug, something he’s never done before. He must really be smarting to see someone besides neurotic Hellions. Now I feel bad I didn’t come down sooner.
Mr. Muninn is entirely black. Like squid-ink black. He’s also as round as a beach ball. He’s dressed in a long brocade robe woven with a subtle fire pattern. Under it glitters Lucifer’s battle armor, the ultimate symbol of power down here. It lets everyone know who’s in charge. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to call him Lucifer or what, so I just take a shot.
“Nice to see you too, Mr. Muninn.”
He smiles. He’s already tired of being called Lucifer and all the thousand toadying variations you get with the penthouse. I know how he feels.
“You’ve brought a friend,” he says.
Muninn looks a little bemused, like I’m a neighbor kid who brought a stray cougar cub into the living room. Is that how Muninn sees Candy? I hadn’t thought about how he might react to a Jade. Maybe I’m overthinking it. I’ve dragged a civilian down with me into the worst place in existence and he probably doesn’t approve.
“Mr. Muninn, this is my friend Candy.”
“Very nice to meet you. I see you’re like our friend James here, with his penchant for a single name.”
“Yeah,” she says. “For the longest time all I knew was Stark. It must have taken him six months to tell me the James part.”
“Well, I still don’t know your last name,” I say.
She shrugs.
“As far as I know, I don’t have one. When I have to use one I usually just go with Jade.”
“Candy Jade. It sounds like one of your cartoon characters.”
“Sandman Slim sounds like grout cleaner.”
Muninn puts out his hand.
“Welcome to my humble home, Candy.”
She shakes, but her arm tightens around mine. She’s scared, like she’s afraid she’ll burst into flames if she touches him. But she’s brave and does it anyway. No flames. No explosions. Not even smoke.
“Was it smart to bring someone more innocent than you or I to this place?”
“I introduced her to Samael and she survived. She knows about me, so she was twisting my arm to meet the new Lucifer.”
Muninn says, “I wish I could meet a new Lucifer too. I don’t suppose you want the job back.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Muninn sighs and waves us to a sitting area.
The place isn’t anything like the penthouse when I lived here. I never bothered fixing it up. I left all of the anonymously expensive hotel furniture right where it was. Now the place looks like a museum. Back in L.A., Muninn lived in an underground cavern full of art, machines, toys, food, and geegaws from every civilization since the last ice age. It looks like he’s moved half of it down here.
Candy and I sit on a solid-gold love seat with tentacles for armrests and shaggy horsehide cushions. From the look of the thing it’s probably nestled the rear end of at least a couple of emperors. Muninn drops into a vintage La-Z-Boy recliner, but he keeps it upright for his guests.
“That’s not quite the look I was expecting for the new Devil,” I say.
Muninn glances across the room.
“I have a throne around here somewhere. A piece that’s even grander than the seat you’re on now. I wish I could greet all my guests in this chair. The throne plays hell with my back, no pun intended.”
“Sorry again about sticking you down here, but I had stuff I needed to get back to in the world.”
Out of the corner of my eye I catch Candy’s lips flicker into a brief smile.
“I understand. I should never have let Samael play his little trick and force you into taking his place. I created Hell, which makes me responsible for its well-being.”
Candy looks puzzled, and then lets it go.
I say, “So how’s it going down here?”
Muninn leans back into the chair.
“Better than it was,” he says.
“Better than when I ran it.”
“Oh my, yes. I’m rebuilding much faster than you were and it seems to have raised everyone’s spirits.”
“You know I had to drag my feet, right? I had to keep these Hellion bastards running around making plans so they were too busy to get together and kill me.”
“I understand completely. But it didn’t help the psyches of those who had to live here.”
“That’s why I wanted you to take over. I knew you could make things right and hold off the wolves too.”
Muninn looks at Candy.
“And what do you think, young lady? Did James’s hundred days as Lucifer improve his disposition?”
“Sure. He’s a pussycat now. Of course, I kicked his ass when he got home, so maybe it was that. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Why don’t you not?” I say. “Have you heard anything about Aelita or the 8 Ball?”
He shifts in his chair, trying to ease his back.
“Aelita still has confederates in Hell and she tried to use them to hide the Qomrama here. General Semyazah and I persuaded her that that was a bad idea.”
“I wonder if she took it to Heaven?”
“I doubt it. Aelita has as many enemies as allies there. Heaven isn’t a safe place for her.”
“If she can’t hide the 8 Ball in Heaven or Hell …”
“Then it’s still on earth,” says Candy.
“That’s a relief. I got stuck with the fake Qomrama earlier today and was starting to think I’d wasted the last month chasing my tail.”
“No. You are right to keep looking there,” says Muninn.
“How do you know she didn’t hide it in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean?” says Candy.
Muninn says, “It’s my understanding that soon after getting the Qomrama, Aelita was pursued by a contingent of loyal angels from Heaven, so she had to hide it quickly. I suspect it’s still somewhere in Los Angeles.”
Candy shakes her head.
“Why doesn’t God just kill the bitch?” she says.
Muninn settles back in the chair and looks at me.
“Candy, remember how Mr. Muninn said that he was responsible for Hell because he made it?”
“Yes.”
“Lucifer didn’t make Hell. God did.”
“Yeah. I thought that sounded funny.”
“It makes more sense when you know that before he was Lucifer, Mr. Muninn was God.”
Candy looks at me to see if I’m joking. Then she looks at Muninn.
“I’m afraid he’s telling the truth,” Muninn says. “And the reason I don’t, as you said, kill the bitch is I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I say, “He’s not as strong as he used to be. See, God isn’t exactly God anymore. He had sort of a nervous breakdown. Instead of one big God, there’s five little ones.”
“Four,” says Muninn. “Aelita has already killed Neshamah.”
“Word is your brother Ruach is tearing it up in Heaven.”
Muninn unconsciously squeezes the easy chair’s arms.
“Yes. You see, Ruach is the oldest brother. The oldest fragment. He covets the power the rest of us have. He’s a little mad, I think.”
“Was he always that way?”
“He was always a bit fragile. Then my brother Nefesh did what he did.”
“What does he do?” says Candy.
“Our quarrels became more and more violent. Finally Ruach flew into a rage. He demanded that the rest of us relinquish our powers or he would kill us all. When we wouldn’t he attacked us. Nefesh was the one who finally stopped him, in much the way I cast the first Lucifer out of Heaven.”
“With a thunderbolt.”
“Yes. It left Ruach blind and partially deaf. His anger and fear of us grew to the point where the rest of us knew we couldn’t stay.”
Candy says, “So there’s a God in Heaven, only he’s just a little piece. And there’s other pieces of God running around. And you’re a piece of God and Lucifer at the same time.”
“In a nutshell,” says Mr. Muninn.
Candy pats my arm in mock sympathy.
“Now I understand why you are the way you are. The universe is a lot more fucked up than I ever imagined.”
“Can your brothers help?” I say. “Where are they?”
Muninn waves a hand at the window.
“Here. There. Anywhere. I haven’t talked to them in a long time.”
“Okay. So, anything new with Merihim and Deumos? Are they at war yet?”
Merihim is a big wheel in the old official Hellion church. Hell’s Vatican. Strictly an old-boys club. No girls allowed. Deumos and her sister Hellions had a little problem with that. They started their own church, worshipping a kind of goddess that’s supposed to be the new post-God deity. A fairy godmother to kiss all the scraped knees and make everything all right again. One of the last things I did when I was Lucifer was give the women their own church. After I left, Merihim and his crew burned it down. What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and rotten little assholes that don’t want to share their toys.
“Not quite at war but far from peace. Deumos and many of the other sisters have gone into hiding,” says Muninn. “You might be amused to know that Medea Bava went into hiding with them.”
Medea Bava was the Sub Rosa’s Inquisition. Their ultimate enforcer. The lone-wolf cop who handed out life sentences in a little place called Tartarus, the Hell below Hell, where souls were burned to stoke the celestial furnaces. It was a place no one ever escaped from. Only I escaped and I took all the other lunatics in the asylum out with me. After that, Medea disappeared. I hate her almost as much as Aelita.
Muninn sighs.
“She lost faith in me—the God part, at least—when you destroyed Tartarus, so she joined Deumos and the sisters. Another voice lost in the wilderness.”
“Fuck Medea. She’s not a voice anyone needs in their head, especially you. She’s as crazy as Aelita. Deumos is the only one of the bunch who’s sane, and she’s completely deluded. And Merihim is just a power-hungry prick. He’s long overdue for a hard fall down a long flight of stairs, if you get my drift.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I don’t know how he did it, but Merihim used to crank-call me in L.A. after I left here.”
“He was upset with how you left things.”
“Cry me a river, pal,” I say. “Isn’t there something you can do to get Merihim and the church under control and off Deumos’s back?”
“That would be taking sides.”
“Fine. Then stop them both and make them play nice.”
He looks around, uncomfortable. Slams his fist down on the arm of the chair.
“It’s not that simple,” Muninn shouts.
It’s the first time I’ve heard him raise his voice about anything.
“You never understood how being a ruler works, James. And you have no idea what a deity is. You want me to make myself known and manifest to humankind. Do you really think that would solve anything? Or would it make things worse? You, like Samael, want total free will for the angels.”
Muninn sweeps his arms out to the broken landscape of Hell.
“Behold. That is what angelic free will looks like.”
“That’s not fair. You took the worst of the worst, the losers and the rat-fuck crazies, and locked them at the shit-pit bottom of the universe. There was no way they were ever going to build anything but this.”
“That’s also Samael’s argument. You two are so much alike.”
“I’m not anything like Samael.”
Muninn leans forward in his chair.
“Really? Does that wound in your side hurt?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Of course it is.”
He looks at Candy.
“Samael walked around for millennia bleeding from a wound I gave him during the first Heavenly war. All he ever had to do was ask and I would have healed him.”
Candy gives me a look.
“That does sound familiar.”
“Samael and I aren’t anything alike.”
Muninn looks at Candy.
“He’ll bleed with that bullet in him until the end of time before he’ll ask for help.”
“What if I ask?” Candy says.
Muninn raises his eyebrows.
“Ah. Here’s someone unburdened by the sin of pride.”
“Don’t you dare,” I say to Candy.
“Too late,” says Muninn. “Here.”
He puts something in my hand. The bullet.
Candy leans over to look at it.
“And what do we say when someone magically heals us?”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
She smiles at Muninn.
“He says, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Muninn.’”
“I hope you’ll forgive me for snatching away your martyrdom, James,” Muninn says.
“That’s okay. You I can forgive but the idiot who put it in there and whoever he works for I don’t. Or his bastard brother.”
“Will you be seeing Wild Bill while you’re here?”
“Next visit. When I’m not on the clock.”
Candy holds out her hand.
“Can I have the bullet?”
“What, are you a crow all of a sudden? You want all the shiny things.”
“I wanted the money clip because it was pretty. I want the bullet because you’re going to conveniently lose it somewhere and I want to keep it.”
“What for?”
“Who knows? Maybe when you get shot again I’ll make you cuff links.”
“For all the times I wear dress shirts.”
Dress shirts. Clothes. The bullet in my gut. I almost forgot the whole reason I came down here in the first place.
“Mr. Muninn, I’m looking for a new damned soul. His name is Trevor Moseley. Is there any way I can find him?”
“You say he’s new down here?”
Muninn shakes his head.
“I’m afraid our intake procedures aren’t what they should be. Why do you want to speak to him?”
“I want to know why he was so happy to walk in front of a bus.”
“That is unusual. I can put out a notice for him and let you know when he pops up on my radar.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate it. We should go. We’ve taken up enough of your time.”
Muninn gets up.
“I’m sorry I raised my voice.”
“Don’t apologize. I probably deserved it.”
“You did,” says Candy.
“Feel free to come or go through any of the shadows in here,” says Muninn. “I don’t think you’ll be wanting to take the long way next time.”
“Not even a little. See you around, Mr. Muninn.”
“It was nice meeting you,” says Candy.
“Good-bye, my dear. I hope we meet again.”
“Me too.”
I pull Candy through a shadow and a wave of nausea and we come out in the living room in the Chateau.
Kasabian looks up from his computer.
“Where have you two been? You smell like something a dead raccoon horked up.”
I look at Candy.
“Told you so.”
“WHO ARE YOU calling?” says Candy.
I’m dripping on the carpet and she’s still toweling off from the shower. I’m turned away dialing the phone so she doesn’t have to look at the new scar I picked up from Garrett’s lucky shot.
I say, “Manimal Mike. He might know who made the fake 8 Ball.”
She comes out of the bathroom, takes the phone from my hand, and tosses it on the bed.
“Stop it,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you just got shot. Because you just got blown up and we just came back from Hell.”
“I had a donut this morning.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
“You were sitting right there.”
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
I know what she’s getting at even if she doesn’t want to say it. Days like this I can maybe catch a bullet, she can maybe get her laptop murdered, and maybe we can go to Hell, but doing them all the same day isn’t exactly normal, even for someone as fierce as Candy.
I nod. Get a glove to put on over my Kissi hand.
“Okay, country mouse. I guess getting to Mike’s in the next ten minutes isn’t going to save the world. What did you have in mind? Shuffleboard or coupon clipping?”
She pushes me down so I’m sitting on the bed.
“How about sitting still for a whole sixty seconds. I think you have this illusion that you’re a shark. Like you think you’ll choke if you stopped moving all the time.”
“The bullet’s out. I’m all healed up inside.”
“I know that in my head, but it doesn’t feel that way yet. And I see you trying to hide the wound, so don’t bother. Can we please just be here for a minute together without weird weapons or old gods or monsters between us?”
“Come here,” I say, and pull her down on the bed. She curls around me with her leg over mine.
“I know I’m not always easy to be around,” I say.
“No. You’re fine. It’s just everything you do.”
“I should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and studied air-conditioning repair.”
“Then you’d have all those sexy jumpsuits I could wear around the place.”
“Jumpsuits aren’t sexy.”
“They are when you’re not wearing anything under them.”
She gets up and turns off the light, then comes back to bed. A few minutes later her breathing is shallow and regular. She’s asleep. I close my eyes and drift off. In my dream, I’m in the arena in Hell with the mad little ghost, Lamia. We circle each other, looking for an opening.
“Are you here to kill me?” says Lamia.
I tell her the truth.
“Only if I have to.”
Part of me feels like an idiot. Lamia looks like a little girl, nine or ten years old, wearing a blue party dress. She also has a knife as big her forearm. And the only thing keeping her from sticking me with it is that I have the 8 Ball. It’s the only thing that’s ever seemed to scare her.
But this isn’t right. This isn’t how I met Lamia. It wasn’t in the arena. It was in the Tenebrae, the limbo land of lost and desperate ghosts too afraid to move on to Heaven or Hell.
Lamia was there, radiating crazy like a Chernobyl straitjacket and stalking the place like a Sherman tank in kneesocks. She knifed ghosts in the Tenebrae and killed people back on earth, laughing the whole time.
When I asked who she was and what she wanted, all I got was schizobabble about the world before it was the world. Eventually she told me her name.
“I’m Lamia. I breathe death and spit vengeance.”
Try having a ten-year-old tell you that and knowing they mean it. It’s a Hallmark moment.
Father Traven is our resident mystical trivia expert. He used to translate books for the Church, but then he translated the wrong one. The Angra Om Ya’s bible. He got the boot for that. Excommunicated. A one-way ticket to Hell.
Father Traven thinks Lamia is a demon. A “Qliphoth,” he calls them. Not a little imp with a pitchfork and anger-management issues. A real demon is a broken thing. A mindless fragment of the old gods, the Angra Om Ya. But demons are basically morons, with about as much brainpower as an underachieving maggot. Some eat. Others dig. Others curse. But none of them choose it. It’s what they’re programmed for.
What makes Lamia special is that she’s relatively smart and chatty. You might think that’s a good thing, letting us get into a demon’s mind so we can see how the gears work and all that forensic horseshit. But it’s not good news at all.
You don’t want to get anywhere near a smart demon. A smart demon is a bigger, more powerful piece of the Angra. Lamia means that more of the old gods are leaking into our universe. How long until other smart demons break through? How long before a complete Angra?
And even though I know it’s wrong, Lamia and I are back in the arena, only she’s not slashing me. She’s slashing Candy. But I can’t protect her because even though I have the 8 Ball, I don’t know how it works. I’m helpless and useless.
I really want to ask Mr. Muninn about Lamia, but I haven’t figured out where to even start a question like that.
“Hey, Mr. Muninn, back when you were one big God, did you steal the universe from another race of older gods, lock them away somewhere, then pretend that you created everything and proceed to screw it all up for the next few billion years? Was that your plan? ’Cause if it was, mission fucking accomplished.”
CANDY IS STILL asleep when I wake up. I say her name and shake her, but she doesn’t budge. She gets like this sometimes. Some combination of being exhausted and her Jade metabolism. It’s more like she’s hibernating than sleeping. This can go on for hours. I’ll go out of my mind if I sit around that long.
I turn on the light and put on new leather pants and boots. No more button-down shirts for me. I don’t dress up for anyone. The only clean T-shirt I can find has a winking Japanese schoolgirl on the front over “I
TENTACLES.” Guess who gave me that. I also grab my coat. It’s still too hot for it, but after the party at Garrett’s room I’m not going anywhere without my na’at and a gun.
Going to Manimal Mike’s place is a no-sweat trip I can do without anyone holding my hand. I leave Candy a note telling her where I am. She’ll be pissed if she wakes and finds me gone, but it’s better than lying around in the dark or watching Kasabian walk around on all fours like a Hellion windup toy.
I take the fake 8 Ball and go out through the grandfather clock. Take the elevator down to the lobby and wait for a second before going any farther.
The lobby feels all right. No hostile vibes aimed my way. The concierge nods in my direction. I nod back. Still, polite staff doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. They might be playing possum while calling security. There’s only one way to find out if the hotel still thinks that I’m Mr. Macheath, the Devil himself, and the rightful occupant of his gratis suite.
I pull out a Malediction and light it. In California, this is the equivalent of pissing into the pope’s minestrone. But aside from a few dirty looks and make-believe coughs from a family of red-faced tourists going up in the next elevator, nothing happens.
I’m safe. For another day. I’ll think I’ll order lobster and a T-bone tonight.
Time to press my luck one more time.
I go into the bar and tell them to give me a sealed bottle of Stoli. The bartender hands it over without blinking.
“Thanks. Put it on my tab.” Why not? Nothing actually ever gets charged to the Devil’s room.
When the Chateau throws us out one day, will they try to stick me with the charges for the suite and the miles of food and booze we’ve put away? Good thing I’m broke.
Even with a shower and clean clothes, I still feel a little rough around the edges. Candy was right about one thing. Sleep was a good idea even if it brought on fucked-up dreams. The blisters on my side are mostly healed, but the skin is still sensitive. It’s really putting me in the mood to punch something. Where’s a skinhead when you need one?
I go into the garage and spot a cherry-red ’68 Charger. Jam the black blade into the door and it pops opens. Jam it into the ignition and the car starts right up. I drive out into the early-evening L.A. sun, all thought of pain, the Angra, and eviction gone. Nothing improves my mood better than stealing a really nice car.
MANIMAL MIKE LIVES and works in a piece-of-shit garage in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. Mike does his Tick-Tock Man work in the back while his cousins, a couple of straight-off-the-boat Russian muscleheads, try to look like they know what they’re doing by pretending to fix the same cars that have been sitting in the garage for years. Mike’s cousins are vucaris. Russian beast men. Kind of like what civilians call “werewolves.” Like beast men, they’re not too bright, but with the right motivation they can be trained to fetch or just get out of the way.
Mike’s cousins wanted to gnaw my hide the first time I came here. Now I’m their best friend. I toss them the Stoli on my way in and get a couple of quick spasibas before they have the cap off and are arguing over who gets the first jolt. I leave them to work that out for themselves and head for Mike’s workshop in the back.
The first time I met Mike he was committing slow-motion suicide, getting blind drunk and playing a game called Billy Flinch. It’s basically playing William Tell only you’re trying to shoot a glass off your own head by ricocheting a bullet off the opposite wall. Good thing Mike was such a lousy shot.
Nowadays Mike’s office looks less like a grease monkey’s alcoholic crash pad and more like a professional workshop. I take a little credit for that. I think promising Mike his soul back gave him the kick in the ass he needed to pull himself out of the bottle and do real work. Now I just have to figure out how to wrangle his soul out of damnation so I can give it back to him.
“Hey, Mike. How’s tricks?”
Mike must have been lost in his work. He lurches up from his seat like he wants to jump out of his own skin and into whatever kind of animal he’s building. It looks like a Nerf ball with spikes. Mike has always been high-strung. It takes him a second to catch his breath.
“Shit. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
Then he remembers he’s talking to the guy he thinks is the Devil.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
I shake my head.
“No worries. It’s about the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today.”
Mike’s right hand is still sort of attached to the strange Nerf animal by spiderweb-thin filaments that run from a tiny clamp in his hand to the animal’s back. The animal is gently suspended in the air in a larger web strung up between two long, curved pipes bolted to each side of a metal table. The pipes look like they might have come off a car’s exhaust system. Mike’s terrifying tools are spread out on the table. They look like things Hellions would use to perform surgery on people they don’t like very much.
Once Mike has a second to process that this is an unscheduled visit, thankfully, a smaller wave of panic sets in.
“Oh God, don’t tell me. Something went wrong with Kasabian’s hands? His legs? I swear I’ll get whatever it is working again.”
“Attempt to be cool, Mike. Kasabian is fine. What’s the story with your spiny friend?”
“It’s a puffer fish. A fugu. Some famous Sub Rosa sushi chef is in town and one of the families wants to give him a present.”
“A fish. So, if the guy made barbecue, you’d be making him a mechanical brisket?”
“No, man. Fugu is special. Like an art form. It’s loaded with this stuff called tetrodotoxin. A badass neurotoxin. Cut the fish wrong and bam. Everyone’s dead. You need a license to make it and everything.”
I shrug.
“And people pay brisk money for this stuff?”
“‘Brisk’ ain’t the word. It’s more like make-you-weep money.”
“I didn’t realize that civilians were as stupid as Hellions when it comes to the shit they’ll stick in their mouths.”
“I wouldn’t know about that and hope I never do.”
Mike detaches the clamp from his little fish and wipes his hands on his dirty rag.
“The commission sounds like a good thing for you. You’re moving up in the Tick-Tock world.”
“Yeah. Things are going okay. You didn’t come by just to check up on me, did you?”
Up until now I’ve been holding the 8 Ball under my arm like a loaf of bread. I take it and hold it up so he can get a good look at it.
“Nothing like that. I was wondering if you’d look at something for me. It’s a fake mystical object I’m guessing someone paid a lot of money for. I was hoping you’d have some idea who made it.”
Mike takes it gently, like he’s handling a baby duck.
“I’ll have a look but I mostly know animals. Those charm- and talisman-making assholes won’t give us the time of day. They talk about Tick-Tock Men like all we make are big-ass Tamagotchis. But we’re artists, you know?”
“I know. That’s why I brought it to you. I figure an artist knows an artist.”
Mike turns the 8 Ball over in his hands, looking over every inch of it. He pulls down a magnifier mounted on the edge of the table and examines every bolt and fastening.
“Beautiful work,” he says. “Incredible detail. And these materials. Brass-and-platinum skin over a core of surgical steel and cinnabar. You see these tiny sapphires by the base?”
He holds it up. There are a few blue specks on the 8 Ball’s belly.
“Someone’s charmed them. That’s what gives it a low-level magic signature. It’s gorgeous work. Does it have a name?”
“Qomrama Om Ya.”
“Never heard of it. I like animals.”
“If it helps, the guy had a raven in his room. Good work. Very convincing.”
Mike looks up from the magnifier.
“You didn’t happen to check under the tail feathers, did you?”
“You mean, did I look at the bird’s ass? No. It never crossed my mind. I’d go back and try, only by now the ass is probably blown halfway to Las Vegas.”
Mike goes back to the 8 Ball.
“Too bad. Lots of people sign their work in places most people don’t look. That way if the bird changes hands and needs repairs, they can find the original builder.”
“That’s truly fascinating. I’ll look under your ass if it’ll help you tell me something I can use.”
“Wait,” says Mike. “Gotcha. Right there.”
He hunches over the magnifier, holding the 8 Ball closer.
“I know who made it.”
“You sure?”
He crooks a finger at me and I go around to his side of the table. The 8 Ball is huge in the magnifier. He uses one of his delicate tools to point to a single sapphire stud.
“You see that little mark etched around the sapphire? That’s the alchemical symbol for verdigris. Only one Tick-Tock Man signs his work with that. You’ll love him. He’s a total asshole. Atticus Rose.”
“Do you have a number for him?”
Mike does a sarcastic little laugh.
“Are you kidding? Rose is a golden eagle riding a gumdrop thermal over Candy Land. On a good day I’m a snail crawling across that grease pit out front. Eagles don’t give their business cards to snails.”
“You’re not a snail, Mike. You’re at least a ferret.”
“Thanks,” he says like he actually means it. “Anyway, like I was saying, we don’t move in the same circles.”
“Who would know him?”
“The high-and-mighties. Someone who can pay the equivalent of a Lamborghini for a parakeet. Someone like Blackburn. Maybe his government or showbiz buddies. You ever party with them? Me neither.”
I take the 8 Ball back from Mike. It’s hard for him to let go. It’s like he’s fallen in love and doesn’t want to see his girlfriend carried off by a highwayman.
“I don’t party with people like that, but I know someone who might. Thanks, Mike.”
I’m halfway to the door when Mike calls after me.
“Hold up. I’ve been thinking about Kasabian.”
“Don’t do that. You’ll get lesions on your brain.”
“I figured it out. If you can get me another hellhound body, then I can modify that and then put new parts on Kasabian’s body without taking him off.”
“Great idea. I’ll stop by Costco on the way home and pick up a new hellhound. Oh, wait. They only have those in Hell.”
Mike frowns.
“It was just an idea. You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“Sorry, Mike. I was just down in Hell and it wasn’t fun. I’ll see about getting another hound, but I have other things to do first.”
“Okay. Make sure Kasabian knows it was my idea.”
“Will do.”
I go out through the garage, wave to Mike’s cousins, and climb back into the Charger. By the time I’m in, I’ve already thumbed Brigitte Bardo’s number into my phone.
BRIGITTE IS MY favorite zombie hunter in the world. Except we killed off all the zombies a few months ago and she’s been kind of at loose ends ever since. She was a big-time, classy porn star in Europe and she’s been trying to get a legit acting career going. With her looks and brains in a town like L.A., she can really work the hell out of a room. Brigitte has more phone numbers and dirt on people in her little black book than Homeland Security.
“Jimmy,” she says in her sweet Prague accent. “How lovely for you to call. How are you? Have you killed anyone interesting lately?”
“Does it count if I just happened to be in the room when the bomb went off?”
“Of course not.”
“Then no.”
She sighs.
“You’ll have to do better. I live vicariously through you these days.”
She’s only half joking. We’re both trained killers. Brigitte was trained for zombie hunting since she was a kid. Being a killer is a hard thing to walk away from and have a normal life.
“Listen. I wouldn’t normally call you with something as boring as this.”
“Boring? How could a task of yours be boring?”
“I’m trying to track someone down, and the thing is, Blackburn might know the guy, but his head of security braced me the last time I was there, so I can’t ask him.”
“So we won’t be fighting monsters or kicking in doors?”
“Right now I’m just looking for a phone number and maybe an address.”
“You were right. This is boring,” she says. “Who is it?”
“A Tick-Tock Man named Atticus Rose.”
“Are you looking for a pet? I can see you strolling down Sunset Boulevard with a lovely poodle. Or perhaps a white cockatoo on your shoulder. A very butch cockatoo, of course.”
“How do you butch up a bird? Get it a little leather cap and chaps?”
“That’s your fantasy, Jimmy. Not mine.”
“Do you think you can find me a number?”
“Of course. I can get anyone’s number. But just remember that everything comes with a price.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll call you later with Herr Rose’s information.”
“What price, Brigitte?”
Too late. The line is dead. Once a killer, always a killer.
I DITCH THE Charger by the Whisky a Go Go and walk the rest of the way back to the Chateau.
When I get back to the room, Candy is just waking up. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and stretches like a panther. She blinks when she sees me.
“Oh. I thought you were off bringing me coffee in bed. What are you dressed for?”
“I was out talking to Manimal Mike. I tried waking you.”
“Try harder next time. Where did he shoot you?”
I hold up my arms so she can see me.
“No blood. See? I made it back unmolested.”
She runs her foot up my leg to my thigh.
“Maybe we should do something about that.”
I close the bedroom door and turn up the new Skull Valley Sheep Kill album on the stereo. Kasabian doesn’t like to listen when we smash up the furniture.
AN HOUR LATER and we’ve only broken one side table. The gunshot and the blast took a little more out of me than I like to admit. I light up a Malediction and look for some Aqua Regia, but the bottle is still in the living room.
Candy is lying next to me in one of the absurdly plush hotel robes.
“So what did you and Mike talk about?”
“The 8 Ball. He says he knows who made it.”
“Great. Let’s go pay Dr. Frankenstein a visit.”
“Can’t. He didn’t have a number for the guy, so I called Brigitte.”
“She knows the guy?”
“No. But she can probably track him down.”
“Clever girl.”
“They’re the only kind worth knowing.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
We wander out to the living room. I pour some Aqua Regia into a coffee mug and Candy picks at the remains of last night’s food. We always order too much and leave the food carts along the wall buffet style. I wish we could squirrel away all the leftovers. We’re going to miss them when they kick us out.
Kasabian calls us from across the room.
“Check it out. My first client.”
“Congratulations,” says Candy.
“I didn’t even know you had the site finished.”
Kasabian is on the landing page for Aetheric Industries Psychic Investigations.
“The wonders of the cyberspace and desperate suckers,” he says. “I put the site up an hour ago and already have three inquiries and one bona fide, already-got-his-credit-card-number customer.”
“Who are you supposed to find?”
“The guy’s idiot older brother. Get this. Big brother was a hoarder and hid their dad’s gold coin collection somewhere in the house. My client doesn’t want to spend the next ten years spelunking under old pizza boxes and soggy newspapers looking for Daddy’s swag.”
Candy says, “I didn’t think you could get that kind of information. All you can do is look at things.”
“That’s right. But get this. My client thinks if I can find big bro in Hell, he can get another psychic to do a kind of Vulcan mind meld and they can talk over old times.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.
Kasabian nods and smiles.
“I know. Isn’t it great? See, being online so much, I learned that normal desperate people are sad and boring, but stupid desperate people are a fucking riot. And some of them have money.”
“That’s not very nice,” Candy says.
“If my life was any lamer, I would have taken a nap in a trash compactor a long time ago, so forgive me for not farting kittens and rainbows.”
“I didn’t know you were that unhappy.”
“I’m not. I’m realistic about my situation. And I’m honest with my clients. I spell out exactly what I can and can’t do in the site’s disclaimer. If someone comes along and wants to pay me to do what I said I can’t, I’m not turning him down. Stupid people’s money is just as green as everyone else’s.”
“I might have been that desperate after Doc died,” says Candy. Doc Kinski was the guy who took her off the street and gave her potions to calm her Jade bloodlust. I think he was as close to a real father as she ever had. Kind of like Vidocq for me.
“Yeah, well. You might have been desperate but you’re not dumb, so it wouldn’t be the same thing,” says Kasabian. “And goddammit, can I have just one minute of happiness here before one of you points out what a monster I am and tries to shut me down? What do I have left then? I go back to finding weirder and weirder online porn just to keep my brain cells from imploding.”
“Sorry. Of course,” says Candy.
She puts a hand on his hellhound shoulder. Says, “Good luck in the Hellovision business.”
Kasabian’s eyes open a little more.
“Damn. I wish I’d thought of that name. I wonder if I can get that domain?”
“I guarantee you someone else already has it. Someone always has the cool names,” I say.
Kasabian is already typing.
“We’ll see how long they can keep it.”
I say, “Did you find anything else out about Moseley?”
He shakes his head, still looking at the screen.
“Nothing except that he kind of dropped off the face of the earth a few months ago. No employment records. No bills or utilities. Nada.”
“Thanks. Oh yeah. Mike says he has another idea on how to fix you up.”
That gets his attention.
“How?”
“Don’t get your tail bunched up, Old Yeller. It means I have to go back to Hell and maybe steal something with teeth and claws, so it’s not happening this afternoon.”
He turns back to the screen.
“Hurry up and wait. Story of my life.”
Candy looks over Kasabian’s shoulder at the screen.
“What’s the weirdest porn you ever found?” says Candy.
Kasabian gives her a serious look.
“Unless you want to wake up screaming, don’t ever ask me that again.”
“Yes, sir.”
AROUND TEN, MY phone rings. It’s Brigitte.
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself. You have an appointment with Herr Rose at three tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thanks, Brigitte. You’re my hero.”
“Don’t be so hasty. Remember I said that everything has a price?”
“Go on.”
“The price for the address is this. I’m coming with you.”
“You haven’t exactly been in the field lately. What if things get hot?”
“That’s why I’m coming. If I go to another audition without at least the chance to kill something, I’m afraid my behavior will become quite drastic. So you see, Jimmy, you’re not just doing me a favor. You’ll be doing a humanitarian service too.”
“Fine. Come along. I’m sure Candy will enjoy it. You can tell each other stories about your favorite childhood kills.”
A pause.
“That’s the rub, you see. Herr Rose is terribly claustrophobic and only ever sees a maximum of two people at a time. It’s a rule he breaks for no one.”
“No problem. He’ll be tickled pink when he finds you and Candy at his door.”
“And where will you be?”
“Coming down the chimney.”
“Through a shadow.”
“Yeah.”
“I miss seeing that.”
“You can get an eyeful tomorrow.”
“He’ll hear you and throw us out.”
“Hear me? I’ll be as quiet as a cotton-candy mouse.”
“I’m not so sure about this, Jimmy.”
“Sure you are. It’ll be fun. Dress pretty and bring your gun.”
“A man who knows how to speak to my heart.”
She gives me Rose’s address. I repeat it and Candy writes it down.
I say, “See you tomorrow, Brigitte,” and hang up.
Candy beams at me.
“I hope we get to shoot something. I haven’t had a girls’ day out in a long time.”
BEL AIR IS a neighborhood that lies just west of Beverly Hills and sees its neighbor the way that neighbor sees the rest of L.A.: as a wasteland of upstarts, criminals, and wayward teens with their bongos and jungle music. If the sun ever set in Bel Air, no one would notice because its homes and residents are so luminous they’d light the night sky all on their own. It’s a land where the gold standard never died and the roads are so clean you could perform open-heart surgery on any street corner.
Candy and I emerge from the shadow of a lamppost so pristine it could’ve been put there this morning. We’re on North Beverly Glen Boulevard, across the street from the address Brigitte gave me.
The place is called Clear, an old upscale faux-Gothic hotel rebranded by one snotty nouveau chic chain or the other. The residents of these hotels are always the same. Oblivious executives in town for a day to make another billion because the billions they have aren’t enough. Handsome young lovers so bursting with happiness and privilege that you want to punch the DNA that created them. And old long-term residents baffled by the bright lights and excited plastic-surgeried crowds rushing in and out of the place 24/7. Clear reminds me of palaces I saw in Hell, but in worse taste.
Brigitte is in the lobby. She’s a knockout in a short green sequin dress and pearls and a little silver clutch purse just big enough for her CO
pistol. She looks like a flapper ninja. Candy is in her usual too-big leather jacket and Chuck Taylors. I’m in a frockcoat with guns. Which two of us don’t look like we belong in the Clear?
Brigitte kisses Candy and me on both cheeks. Candy says something to her that I miss and they both start laughing. They’re giddy at the idea they’re going to see some action. I’m hoping we don’t. And if something happens, fingers crossed that we don’t start it, and by “we,” I mean them.
We ride the elevator to the twelfth floor, go left, and walk almost to the end of the corridor.
“Herr Rose has two rooms, 1210 and 1212. But we’ve been instructed to knock only on 1210,” says Brigitte.
“Easy to remember,” I say. “Twelve-ten. When they signed the Magna Carta.”
Both women look at me.
“Don’t look at me like that. There was nothing to do in Hell but hide and read books. Is that a crime?”
Candy says, “Marcus Aurelius and now the Magna Carta? I’m starting to think that bullet unleashed your inner geek.”
“I had an inner geek once. But a doctor lanced it and it went away.”
“Call an ambulance. It’s growing back.”
Brigitte smiles.
“You two are charming together.”
“I was plenty charming all on my own,” says Candy. “I’m just carrying the geek so he doesn’t cut himself on a bullet and bleed to death.”
“Are you two done? I knew I should never let you near each other.”
Brigitte says, “I think he just called us … What’s the word?”
“Brats,” says Candy.
“Yes. Brats.”
“That’s because you are brats.”
“And who’s more foolish? The brats or the man who invites the brats to a gunfight?” says Brigitte.
“No gunfights. I didn’t invite anyone to a gunfight. This is a normal everyday ambush, not the O.K. Corral.”
“If you’re going to be boring about it, at least be entertaining. Disappear into one of your shadows while we distract Rose with our wiles.”
“Yeah,” says Candy. “The wiles girls are in business.”
She loops her arm in Brigitte’s.
I walk into a shadow by a picture window down the hall, surer than ever that I should have worn body armor.
I STILL HATE walking into unknown rooms, but I’ve never heard of a dangerous Tick-Tock Man, so I’m more likely to walk in on a game of Dungeons & Dragons than bearbaiting.
I come out in a room that reminds me of Garrett’s. A generically elegant place, but a little more old school than his was. The wood looks like wood instead of veneer and the paintings look real instead of like overpriced prints.
Rose has two adjoining apartments. One for living and one for a workspace. The guy is either loaded or his rental agreement is so old it’s written on parchment and he pays for it with shells and brightly colored beads.
He must be one of those genius types, like Tesla. Guys who would rather live in a hotel than have their own home. Live somewhere they know the sheets and towels will always be clean and where they can get a grilled-cheese sandwich from room service at four A.M. Because we’re in Bel Air, I want to hate his setup, but the truth is, I understand the addiction. I love squatting in the Chateau Marmont. Plus, I never told anyone, but part of me is happy that so many of my clothes end up burned, slashed, shot up, or generally too bloody to deal with. It’s a great excuse never to do laundry. I can deal with fighting in the arena in Hell, but laundry and dishes put the fear of God in me.
I can hear Rose in his workroom, so I stay out of sight in his living quarters.
At three on the dot there’s a knock. Rose goes to open the door and I get my first look at him.
He’s an older guy but not over the hill. In his early sixties maybe. Long, salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his forehead and over his ears. I see lab coats on the wall, but he knows company is coming, so he’s wearing a pressed, old-fashioned, forties-style high-waisted blue suit and tie with a diamond pattern down the center. He could have stepped right off the set of Out of the Past.
He opens the door and there are Candy and Brigitte, carpet-bombing him with their wiles. Old Rose can’t help but smile.
“Knock knock,” says Brigitte.
“You must Mr. Blackburn’s friends.”
“You bet,” says Candy. “Can we come in? We don’t bite.”
“Of course. Please come in.”
Rose stands aside and Candy and Brigitte walk in like they already own the place. Old Atticus looks like he’s about to hand it over to them.
“Would either of you ladies care for some coffee? If you’d like something stronger, I keep whiskey in the apartment. If you’d like wine I can have some sent up.”
He speaks in a deliberate flat drawl. Not southern. Maybe Okie. I had some cousins from Oklahoma. All I remember about them was that they pronounced theater with a long a.
“No thank you. You have a lovely workshop,” says Brigitte.
That’s an understatement. It’s a little slice of Heaven compared to Manimal Mike’s jerry-rigged setup. The space is clean and stocked with every tool in this world and probably a couple of others. There’s enough room for several people to work at once. Rose must have assistants because there are at least a dozen animal familiars around the room, some fully built and others just steel and gear frames.
“Thank you,” he says. “May I give you ladies a tour?”
Just like I thought. Atticus, a professional recluse, can’t help but want to show off his toys. He brings them over to a table where a half-constructed tabby cat lies curled up near unsewn swatches of fur.
Watching them like this isn’t fun. It brings bad old feelings. This is how my hits in Hell used to go. I’d come through a shadow into someone’s home and wait, sometimes hours, for them to get relaxed or distracted, and then quickly, quietly, I’d cut their throats with the black blade. Things only got messy if they had a bodyguard or a hapless, soon-to-be-dead friend strolled into the slaughter scene. No one ever got away. I was a slave and a killer and I was good at it. I don’t want to be any of those things today, so I stay put and take deep breaths, letting the memories fade away.
Speaking of people who need to crank things down a notch, Rose’s heart is doing its own tap dance. Brigitte got good information. This boy likes wide-open spaces. Even with two not-very-large women in the room, he’s uncomfortable.
“Thank you for seeing us so quickly,” Brigitte says to Rose.
“Of course. Any friends of Saragossa are welcome.”
“What’s this?” says Candy. She’s across the workroom on her own, lost in Rose’s mechanical zoo. Nearby is what looks like a wild dog with broad stripes down its back.
“That’s a Tasmanian tiger, young lady. They’re extinct. If you want one I’m the only Tick-Tock Man in the world who can give you an exact copy of an original, capturing both its spirit and its wild soul.”
“It looks expensive.”
“Very expensive,” says Rose.
Candy looks at Brigitte.
“Mom, can I have one if I’m good?”
Brigitte laughs.
“Maybe for your birthday, dear.”
Candy strokes the tiger’s ears.
Rose’s breathing and heart spike like someone rigged his scrotum to a 220 line.
“Please don’t touch that,” he says, and crosses the room in a few strides to where Candy is standing. She backs off and goes back to Brigitte while Rose combs the tiger’s fur back the way it was.
“Do you ever make anything besides animals?” says Candy.
She’s setting him up for me to knock down. Rose isn’t relaxed enough to attack, but he’s plenty distracted. I take off my glove and put it in my pocket.
“Like what?” says Rose.
I walk into his workspace balancing the 8 Ball on my Kissi hand.
“Something like this.”
I toss the ball at Rose. He catches it. Clutches it to his chest like a life preserver.
“How did you get in here? Get out before I call hotel security.”
I look at the girls.
“You know, people used to have pride. They’d keep a baseball bat by the door and hit you themselves. Now everyone has hired goons. What happened to the American can-do spirit?”
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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: A smart, kick-arse Urban Fantasy from a new master of the genre. Kill City Blues is the fifth book in the fantastic Sandman Slim series.James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell – again – renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in LA. But he′s not out of trouble yet. Somewhere along the way he misplaced a weapon from the banished older gods who now want it back.The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall – a multi-storey copy of LA – infested with Lurkers and bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of territory. Somewhere in the kill zone of the former mall is a dead man with the answers Stark needs.All Stark has to do is find the dead man, get back out alive, and outrun some angry old gods – with a few killers on his tail.