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“Maybe. A few months back you’d have John Wayne’d your way in there and started your own war. I think that angel in your head’s made you soft. You’ve been Glenda the Good Witch too long.”
He’s right. Mason talked to me once. He possessed other people’s bodies and talked to me through them. He’s getting stronger and he’s working on a key. He’s rallying troops. I should be Downtown murdering him and giving fallen angels new nightmares. I wasted the last six, seven months skipping rope with Wells and the Vigil, drinking myself stupid and losing my edge.
After all this time, I still don’t understand this world. It’s soft and stupid and full of soft and stupid people. Why aren’t they all crazy and ripping each other to bloody confetti? They want to. I can read their eyes. Hear their hearts beating. Smell the fear sweat. The anger sweat. The fury inside they can never let out. I’m turning into one of them. It’s the price of living in this world and trying to fit in.
The angel in my head is part of it. On the other hand, is the angel even there? Maybe I’m going crazy and it’s my Tyler Durden. Maybe I’ve always been crazy, and coming back here let it loose. Hell was my Haldol and without it I’m slowly going schizo. Hearing voices. Taking orders from something that might not even exist.
Alice isn’t here and this place will never be anything but a desert without her. But I’m connected to people now. Vidocq. Allegra. Candy. Carlos. Kasabian. Even Brigitte, who dumped me. They’re the cinder blocks dragging me to the bottom of the ocean. Knowing them, giving a damn about them, sucks the marrow out of my bones. Makes me weak. They want me sane and clean, but the monster in me wants to hear Hellion necks snap and pop like champagne bottles on New Year’s.
Kasabian sinks one ball and lines up another. Am I playing stripes or solids? I can’t remember. I finish the last of my cigarette and drop the butt in an abandoned soda can under the plastic “No Smoking” sign.
“Maybe you should start something here. Go beat up some more skinheads. Fight a dragon. Or a Kissi.”
I look at him, trying to read him. He doesn’t breathe or sweat much, so it’s hard. He’s concentrating on his shot, so I can’t see his eyes.
“What made you say that? The Kissi are gone.”
I know it because I’d killed them, the whole race of deformed, half-finished angels. Well, almost the whole race. I saw one, he calls himself Josef, a few weeks back. He’s alive and he knows where there are other Kissi. We talked about that for a long time.
Kasabian stops and looks at me. We’ve lived together long enough that he knows when I’m being … well, deadly serious.
“Cool out,” Kasabian says. “It was a joke.”
He gives the fifteen a solid kick and it slams into the hole. He moves around fast, trying to get things back to normal. Back to the game. He sinks another.
I say, “Don’t joke about them. I don’t like it.”
“Whatever you say, man. If I hurt your feelings we can watch Fried Green Tomatoes and eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs.”
I can’t stand it anymore. I take out Vidocq’s pain potion and down the whole thing in one gulp.
“No. Let’s watch The Wild Bunch and pay strangers to bring us Korean ribs.”
“Well, fuck me with Lloyd Bridges’s dick. You’re still alive in there after all,” he says. Then, “Corner pocket.”
He lays down a solid kick, bounces the eight ball off the far rail, and sinks it in the corner pocket at my end.
“You pay,” he says.
“I always do.”
I PUT KASABIAN in his bowling bag so I can carry him to the room without the other hotel residents having a nervous breakdown. I close the bag all the way, but he always unzips it a few inches so he can see out.
On the way across the parking lot I spot a Nahual beast man grab a little blonde’s arm. She sounds Scandinavian when she shouts at him. She has on the traditional surfer tank top and shorts all foreign exchange students seem to wear. The Nahual isn’t showing his beast face, so she has no idea that the guy she’s arguing with isn’t human.
I set Kasabian down on a bench and walk over. The Nahual lets the girl go when he sees me. I shove his head through the windshield of a shiny rental car and bounce his face off the dashboard a few times. When I stop hurting him he runs like hell. The Scandy girl hasn’t moved an inch. Her eyes are fixed on the broken windshield. She doesn’t say thanks when I go past, but I don’t expect her to. Between the Nahual and me, she’s too shell-shocked to say anything at all. Welcome to L.A., darlin’.
As I carry Kasabian upstairs he says, “That’s exactly what I was talking about.”
IN THE MORNING it feels like my brain ran away to join the circus, got mauled by a lion, and rolled over every bump and boulder coming home. The pain juice Vidocq gave me doesn’t mix well with Jack Daniel’s, unless you enjoy feeling like someone parked a Saturn V on your eyeballs.
Weird whiskey dreams last night. I dreamed about the old Faces of Death movies. Sideshow pseudo-documentary mash-ups of real and obviously fake footage of people being killed in interesting and creative ways. A real carnage rodeo. And each of my dream segments starred Alice being mangled in wide-screen Technicolor.
After all this time I still don’t know how she died. I know that Parker, a magician, professional asshole, and Mason’s favorite hoodoo thug, murdered her and that Mason ordered it. But I don’t know how Parker killed her. The question always hovers at the back of my mind whenever I think of her. When I’m asleep my dreams play out different scenarios. Everything from a quick bullet in the back of the head to being stabbed and bleeding out. Her death scenes get mixed up with dreams of being back in the arena. Whatever beast I kill morphs into Alice dying at my feet.
I know it’s a kind of betrayal to hide from the truth of how she died, but I know Parker’s mind and I doubt that he made it quick. Parker’s the kind of guy that makes you want to believe in reincarnation. I already murdered him once, but if I had the chance I’d never stop killing him. Killing Parker would be my circuit training. My racquetball game. I could build a whole new healthy lifestyle running him to the ground and snapping his neck three times a week.
VIDOCQ COMES BY with a cab around ten. On my best days, the sun isn’t my friend. This morning, hungover and still wearing yesterday’s clothes, all I can do is cover my head and run from shadow to shadow like a vampire that forgot to wind its watch.
When I get to the cab, Vidocq is waiting by the front passenger door, which is weird. We usually ride in the back so we can talk. I look through the window into the back and see why he’s up front. Candy is inside.
“What, are you playing matchmaker?”
Vidocq grabs the door and starts into the cab.
“Oui. You need to talk to someone besides me and that chattering jack-o’-lantern in your room.”
Vidocq slides in next to the driver. I get in the back with Candy.
She’s in her usual ensemble of white T-shirt, a beat-up and just a little too big leather jacket, Chuck Taylors, and black jeans about to completely give up at the knees. She looks like Joan Jett’s little sister. She’s got on a pair of kid’s sunglasses, like something you’d pick up in Little Tokyo. The frames are white with blue flames and there are flying robots down the sides. When I sit down she doesn’t say hello. She touches the middle of the frames just above her nose. The sunglasses start singing the theme song to some Japanese kiddie cartoon in a tinny robot voice. It makes my skull throb.
“Did you wear those just to torture me?”
She touches the frames and the robot song starts again.
“Not everything is about you, but yeah, pretty much. And I always wanted a robot sidekick.”
“Can it be a quiet robot?”
The song stops. She holds a finger over the frames.
“Don’t make me use my super-awesome robo powers on you again.”
Candy is like me. A monster. Specifically, she’s a Jade. Jades are sort of like vampires, only worse. They dissolve your insides and drink them like spiders. But she’s a good girl and is trying to kick the human milkshake thing with a special potion. Blood-and-bone methadone. Besides being cute and dangerous, she saved my ass from joining the living dead after a Drifter bit me. I was far gone and didn’t want to take the cure, so she stabbed me with a knife coated in the stuff. Yeah, it hurt. And yeah, I’m glad she did it.
I throw up my hands.
“You win. Take our lands and gold but leave me my virtue.”
“Those are my only choices?”
“If you’re going virtue hunting, you better bring a backhoe and dynamite. You’re going to have to dig deep.”
“I’ll bring a strap-on.”
I look at Vidocq in the front seat.
“Make her stop. I’m hungover and she has a robot. It’s not fair.”
“Life is fair only in the grave and in the bedroom. This, you will notice, is neither.”
“That’s why I don’t take cabs.”
I look out the window. The cabbie takes us down Hollywood Boulevard for a few blocks and then U-turns on Sunset and heads back the way we came.
“Where are we headed?”
“The Bamboo House of Dolls.”
“What the hell, man? It’s just a few blocks. We could have walked.”
“But then you might have walked away. You’ll notice I told our driver to take the long way so that I could talk to you. The woman we’re going to meet thought you’d be more comfortable discussing business there.”
“What woman?”
“Julia Sola.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Marshal Julie, you used to call her. One of Marshal Wells’s agents. You liked her. You said she was the only one in the Golden Vigil who treated you like a human being.”
I sit up.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Just cause she didn’t icepick me doesn’t mean I want to work with her. Or any other Homeland Security. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”
“Keep going,” Vidocq says to the driver. He turns back to me.
“Stop behaving like a child. The Vigil is dead and Homeland Security isn’t here anymore. You know that. Julia has opened her own private investigation business. Trust me. Do you think I’m so stupid that I would work for someone without investigating them?”
“With who? Your little thief pals?”
“Who better to know who works for law enforcement and who is a free agent?”
I’m not sure what to think. Vidocq has a nose for cops. He knows how they think, how they work. A hundred years ago he taught the French police forensic analysis techniques he’d picked up from his science and alchemical books, and transformed them from a bunch of medieval thumb breakers into actual cops that could do real criminal investigations.
The cabbie has the radio on. Patti Smith is singing “Ask the Angels.”
Pounding devotion, armegeddon, and rock and roll. A song to die to.
“This situation is total bullshit.”
Candy looks at me, presses the button, and her robot glasses are singing over the radio. I’m back in Hell.
WHEN WE GET to the Bamboo House of Dolls, Vidocq comes around to my side of the car and opens the door fast like he thinks I’m going to bolt. Hands the driver a twenty and doesn’t wait for change. The three of us go inside, where it’s dark and cool. Carlos is behind the bar setting up glasses for the night’s business. He nods at me when we walk in. It’s weird seeing the bar at this time of day with no music playing. The tiki dolls and coconuts look as bleary as I feel.
Carlos says, “Funny seeing you awake. I thought you’d melt like the Wicked Witch if someone tried to wake you up before dark.”
“You, too. Are you part of this conspiracy, too?”
“I’m just the hired help. Ask the pretty lady in the bathroom what’s going on. She booked the place at this unholy hour. Is it your birthday or something? You should have told me.”
“No. This is just me being shanghaied, is what it is. If that’s coffee I smell, I don’t want any. I’m not staying long.”
Julia comes out of the back. Her dark hair is longer than I remember and she’s wearing it up. She has on a sensible black skirt with a power-color bloodred blouse. She looks like a sexy librarian, but moves like someone who could casually dislocate your knee or crack some ribs with a tactical baton.
She stops when she sees me. Smiles a little and comes over to the bar.
The last time I saw U.S. marshal Julia Sola was here in the bar. She told me how Wells had taken the fall for the Drifters’ tearing the city apart. Homeland Security had shut down its L.A. branch, disbanding the Golden Vigil and recalling Wells to Washington. She told me she was quitting the marshals’ service to open her own investigation company. Just the general awkward bar chatter between two people who barely knew each other, but had seen a lot of the same craziness and slaughter over the last few days.
“Hello, Stark.”
“Marshal.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come. I had a bet with myself that you wouldn’t.”
“Looks like you lost.”
“I guess I owe myself five dollars.”
She holds out a hand to shake. I give her a quick polite one to make Vidocq happy. He wants me to be a gentleman. I want him to be quiet about it.
“It’s not ‘Marshal’ anymore. It’s just ‘Julia.’”
“Well, Julia, truth is I wouldn’t have come if I’d known who we were seeing.”
That night, while Julia and I were talking, her voice had changed. Dropped an octave and turned snotty. It was Mason’s voice coming out of her mouth. He couldn’t get himself out of Hell, but he’d conjured up a way to turn people into meat puppets for a few seconds. Mason hopped in and out of maybe a half-dozen different bodies, making threats and generally being the first-class asshole he always is. When he was gone, Julia didn’t seem to remember a thing. Seem being the important part.
Carlos sets a cup of black coffee on the bar. She says, “Thank you,” and picks it up. “You don’t even want to know why I got you here?”
“Not even a little.”
She smiles and I smile back, looking for Mason’s shadow behind her eyes. But I can’t find him. It’s just her in there and I can’t pick up anything that feels like deception. Julia looks at me like she’s waiting for me to say something else. Maybe she’s just sizing me up. I let the silence hang to see if the tension makes Mason reveal himself.
She sets down the coffee.
“Eugène must have told you that we’ve worked together a few times.”
“He mentioned it.”
“I know you feel a certain reluctance to talk to someone involved with DHS or the Vigil.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
Carlos says, “Wait a minute. She’s with those people who got you beat up and fucked over? Lady, if I’d known that, you wouldn’t have set foot in my place.”
She looks at Carlos and then at me.
“I know I could tell you that I’m not with them from now until the end of time and you wouldn’t believe me. But for what it’s worth, I’m not and I won’t ever be again.”
“Is that supposed to impress me?”
“I thought maybe Eugène vouching for me would mean something, but you never let facts get in the way of your judgment, do you?”
“Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?”
Vidocq bumps me with his shoulder from behind.
“Listen to what she has to say.”
Candy comes up beside me. I don’t have to look. I can smell her slightly inhuman scent. I once killed the pimp who ran a Hellion brothel. He lit the place with burning amber and it smelled like burning pine and smoke. Candy kind of smells like that.
“So tell me why you wanted me here.”
“I have a job I think you’d be uniquely suited for.”
“What kind of job?”
“It might be dangerous.”
“I figured that when you wanted me and not Vidocq or one of your marshal buddies. What you want is someone disposable. Someone off the grid who won’t be missed when whatever this is goes balls-up.”
“You’re way off. I want you because I think you’re the only person in L.A. with the skill set needed to handle this particular situation.”
“When someone says ‘skill set’ I get nervous. Just tell me what this is.”
“It’s a demonic possession. An exorcism went wrong and a boy is missing.”
I get up to leave.
“Thanks for getting me here for nothing. I’m gone.”
Candy puts a hand on my shoulder.
“You, too?” I say.
“Just let her finish.”
I look at Sola.
“I don’t do exorcisms or bounty-hunt demons. The Vigil got me mixed up in a demon skip trace and it ended with me and Brigitte gnawed on by a roomful of Drifters.”
She nods.
“I know. But that was Wells and this is me. There are no tricks here. No hidden agendas. Just a kid who needs your help.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re the one who needs help. You sent the kid a demon jacker, but he blew it and the kid ended up worse than before. Now you want someone to clean up your mess.”
She picks up her coffee, takes a sip, and sets it back down. She doesn’t look at me when she starts talking.
“You’re right. Okay? There. I said it. I need you to fix up my screw-up.”
The muscles in her shoulders and the back of her neck are tight. Her breathing has gone a little shallow and rapid. Her heartbeat’s up. If I trusted her, I’d swear she’s telling the truth.
Sola shakes her head.
“I don’t know what happened and neither does Father Traven. Have you heard of him? The Vigil had him on retainer for freelance exorcisms. He’s the real deal. A genuine old-school demon ass-kicker. Only this time the demon kicked back harder.”
“Why come to me? Why not get another priest? Or a houngan or one of those old nyu wu witches in Chinatown? They love this kind of thing.”
“I tried to get another priest, but when word got out that I was working with Father Traven, none of them would talk to me.”
“Now you’ve finally said something interesting. What’s wrong with your snake handler?”
“He was excommunicated.”
I turn to Vidocq.
“Did you know about this? You were a nice Catholic boy. This is big-time stuff. Is there anything worse than an excommunicated priest?”
“Yes. One who’s not excommunicated.”
I get out a Malediction and light it. I look at Carlos. State law says I’m not supposed to smoke in here, but he gives me a don’t-sweat-it shake of his head.
“What did Traven do? Skim from the collection plate? Oil-wrestle altar boys?”
Julia shakes her head.
“Nothing like that. Father Traven is a paleolinguist. He specializes in translating ancient religious texts and deciphering dead languages.”
“Let me guess. Instead of collecting stamps for a hobby, he translated a book the Church didn’t approve of and got nailed for it.”
“Something like that. It was one book in particular that got him into trouble, but he won’t talk about it. However, none of that has anything to do with the fact he’s an experienced and extremely successful exorcist.”
“So what went wrong with the kid?”
She sits down on one of the bar stools. Shakes her head and drops her hands to the bar.
“Your guess is as good as mine. The exorcism seemed to be going well, and Hunter—Hunter Sentenza, the possessed boy—was doing well. His color was coming back. The voices had stopped. There wasn’t a trace of fire.”
“Fire?”
“We didn’t actually see it, but there was a symbol burned into the ceiling over his bed. There weren’t any matches or lighters in his room. We think it was done by the demon possessing the boy. His hands and face were blistered.”
“What’s the symbol look like?”
“Old. I didn’t recognize it. Father Traven can tell you more about it.”
“What happened next?”
“It felt like we were reaching the end. Traven was sure that he had the demon under control and almost had it out. Before that, Hunter had been speaking in tongues. But then he seemed all right. He was calm and breathing normally. All of a sudden he grabbed Father Traven and tossed him across the room. Hunter levitated a few feet over the bed and shouted, ‘I won’t be locked in.’ After that, things got weird.”
“After that?”
“Hunter fell back onto the bed and didn’t move. I didn’t know if he was passed out or dead. As I helped Father Traven to his feet, the kid started singing.”
“‘Puff the Magic Dragon’?”
She shakes her head, a knowing little smile curling the edges of her lips.
“It was an old Chordettes song. It went, ‘Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream, make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen.’”
I can’t help but laugh.
“That’s what this is. You think the demon knows me.”
“Any idea who it might be?”
“I haven’t had much experience with them.” I try to think. Run over all my kills. There are so many. They run together like a dark stinking river.
“I might have killed a demon every now and then, but it’s not like they have distinct personalities. They’re like bugs. Who remembers stepping on a bug?”
“Maybe the song was a fluke, but I doubt it. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
I look her in the eye, take a drag on the Malediction, and blow it out.
“I’m going to Max Overdrive and find an Andrews Sisters musical. Then I’m going to the hotel, put it on, and drink steadily for the rest of the day.”
I stand up to leave, but Vidocq grabs my arm. He might look old, but he’s been using his muscles for over a century. His grip is like a claw lifter at a wrecking yard.
“Give me the folder,” he tells Julia.
Sola pulls a beige manila envelope from a shoulder bag she’d left on the bar.
Vidocq pushes me over to the bar and pulls something out of the folder. It’s a picture of a teenage boy in a school robe. Maybe a high school graduation shot. He’s smiling at the camera. Straight white teeth and messy brown hair under the graduation cap. He looks like the kind of kid who’d be captain of the track team. I hate him. Healthy, happy, popular jock. My natural enemy in school. On the other hand, he’s not someone I’d pick to square-dance with demons.
Vidocq says, “This is the boy we’ve been discussing. His name is Hunter. He’s nineteen. The same age you were when you were dragged to Hell. Tell me, Jimmy, did that experience improve your life? I don’t think so. Are you going to walk away and let what happened to you happen to this boy?”
There’s acid in the back of my throat. A whirlpool of anger and fear in my head as the nineteen-year-old kid I keep buried under the floorboards in my head, way deeper in the dark than the angel, struggles up to where I can’t help but look at him. Total Nam flashback time and I’m feeling things I didn’t know I could still feel. The dry, brittle arms gliding out from under the floor in Mason’s house, wrapping around me and dragging me Downtown. Sensations of falling. Crashing onto a blood- and shit-stained backstreet in Pandemonium. Trying to clear my head and focus as a thousand new smells, sounds, and the perpetually twilight sky hit me. Then the slow realization of where I was and the gleeful looks on the Hellions’ faces.
I toss the photo back onto the bar.
Lying there in that Hellion street, I had a strange sensation, like some primal and essential thing inside me had cracked and everything I ever was or ever might have been—my name, my hopes, Alice, my whole ridiculous life—was turning black and falling apart like rotten fruit. When it was done there was nothing left inside me but the numb hopelessness of a corpse. Not much to build a new life on but it was all I had when I realized the Hellions weren’t going to murder me right away. Maybe that’s why killing is so easy for me and why I’ve been hiding with a dead man in one room over a store since I crawled back here. There’s not enough of me left to do anything else.
I drop the rest of my cigarette into Sola’s coffee cup.
“I don’t like being manipulated. You fucked this thing up. You fix it.”