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“Don’t move.”
I jam the blade between her ribs. One clean, surgical, pain-free thrust up into her heart. Eleanor stiffens, flares, and ashes out. The dead girl is finally dead.
I look around, making a quick mental map of the bodies and checking that we’re still alone. I can hear voices outside. Now that the wind has died down, some curious civilian is going to stick a nose in here soon. I have to work fast.
Eleanor’s clothes are pretty much gone, but I give her a quick pat-down. She’s wearing a gold locket that’s half-melted into her blackened chest. A couple of rhinestone rings have fallen off her fingers, so I grab those. No money in her pockets, but there’s a flat metal thing, about the size of a rodeo belt buckle. One side is blank. There’s a snarling demon encircled by a spooky monster alphabet on the other. Junk. Goth bling. That’s the other problem with baby Lugosis. Eleanor’s friends were brainless street kids and she wasn’t a vampire long enough for any educated bloodsuckers to clue her in to what she really was. Death in go-go boots. A V-8 devil doll who could explode like a cruise missile and bite like an armor-piercing shark. Silly, stupid kid. Maybe if she hadn’t pissed off whoever it was that got the Golden Vigil to call in the hit, she would have had enough time to figure that out.
Good night, Eleanor. I’m sure Mutti forgives you and maybe even misses you. As long as she never finds what you’ve been up to these last few weeks. She sure won’t find it out from me.
I give the ghoul belt buckle one more look. It’s heavy like metal, but the edges are chipped like an old china saucer. The dumbest fence in L.A. wouldn’t give me a dime for it. I toss it into the dark with the other trash and get to work on Eleanor’s friends, going through their pockets, bags, and backpacks. These aren’t Beverly Hills Lurkers, just a bunch of downtown scroungers, so I’m not exactly coming up with the crown jewels. Still, it’s tourist season, so there’s about three hundred in cash that didn’t burn up when they ashed out. Some joints, movie ticket stubs, car keys, condoms, and Eleanor’s play jewels. I toss everything but the jewelry and the cash. Looting the dead might seem harsh, but they don’t need the stuff anymore and the Vigil doesn’t pay overtime. Besides, killing monsters is my day job. The way I look at it, me stealing from the dead is like regular people pocketing Post-its on their way out of the office.
I go out into the sun and take a breath to clear the greasy flesh smoke and ashed bodies out of my lungs. I sit on my haunches, head down, my back against the broken theater door, just breathing. My face and chest are covered in darkening bruises and enough blood that it looks like I’ve been sumo wrestling in a barbwire kimono. My burned arm, the one Eleanor got back at the garage, is starting to flake black skin. When I look up, a dozen faces are locked on me, mostly old Mexican women holding T-shirts and pink-and-orange flip-flops.
I stand and the women take a step back like maybe they’re doing Swan Lake. There’s a knockoff Evil Dead T-shirt on a hanger at the end of the nearest rack. I take it. The woman by the market cash register is holding an unopened bottle of water. I take that, too, and give her twenty dollars from the cash I took off the shroud eaters.
“Gracias,” I say.
“De nada.”
She nods at me nervously, a big “please get the hell out of here before my brain explodes” smile plastered on her face. I take off my bloody shirt, drop it into the trash can by her register, and slip on the new shirt. I kill the water in three big gulps before walking back into the theater.
In the dark, Mason’s lighter sparks on the first try and I hear sirens just as the cigarette begins to glow.
The woman from behind the counter leans her head in the door.
“Hey, mister.”
She points out at the street.
“Thanks. I heard.”
She shoos me away with her hands.
“Just go. No trouble here.”
“Plenty of trouble here,” I tell her, pointing into the theater, where I left the bodies.
“Los vampiros? No trouble. Only bother turistas and pendejos.”
So, they knew about the pod. L.A. is a get-along kind of town. The ladies work the day shift and los vampiros work the night. As long as they don’t shoplift flip-flops, the undead are probably pretty decent neighbors. The muggers and dealers will learn to stay away. Hell, as long as you wear a muffler 24/7, this might be one of the safer streets in L.A.
The woman standing in the door turns to someone outside. I can hear them talking, but I don’t really listen. The cop’s voice is loud and clear and I know what he’s asking. I take my phone out of my pocket, go to Eleanor’s body, and snap a proof-of-death shot. When I get back to the lobby the cop is coming in, his hand on his Glock. He goes for it when he sees me. He’s pretty smooth, but his body is all wrong for this game. He’s been exercising for bulk at the gym, all showy slow twitch muscles, going for a Terminator look. He can probably throw a mean choke hold, but I bet even the old ladies outside could outdraw him. I flick my cigarette and it bounces off his chest before he has the gun belly-button-high.
He screams “Freeze!”, but I’m already slipping into a shadow.
GETTING IN TO see Wells is always a merry little dance. At the gate, the guys in suits go through an elaborate security and ID check. They scan my photo and fingerprints. Scrape cells off the back of my hand for quickie DNA profiling and species confirmation. Then they have to call inside for verification because maybe there’s another guy who shows up at their gate from out of a shadow.
There are two agents on the gate today. One is the usual fresh-faced new guy that always pulls door duty and the other is a Shut Eye. A salaryman psychic. This one is young, almost as young as the guard. He’s ambitious, too. I can feel him sizing me up. Most people don’t like having their minds read. It doesn’t bother me.
When I was a kid, I once took a sharp piece of wood from the backyard and smacked one of our neighbors’ Dobermans with it. The dog chased me all the way to the end of the block, and when he was done, I had bruises and bloody teeth marks all down my left calf. My father was in the driveway, working on my mom’s old Impala, and saw the whole thing. When I asked why he didn’t stop the dog from biting me, he said, “’Cause you deserved it.”
“What’s that line from The Maltese Falcon?”
“Excuse me?” asks the guard. His name tag reads Huston.
“Bogart says it. ‘The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.’ You ever think about that when you’re patting people down?”
“We’re just doing our jobs, sir.”
“Trust me, I know. I’ve been coming here about every week for six months. You’re doing a really thorough job of looking at my fingerprints for the four-hundredth time and talking to the same guy inside you always talk to, the one who always gives you the same answer. I mean, I always get invited in, right?”
“We have to establish your identity, sir. It’s procedure.”
“You know who I am. Or do a lot people show up here covered in blood and goofer dust?”
That last bit sets off the Shut Eye. An unsubstantiated claim of identity. Catnip to psychic snoops. I can feel it when they’re slipping their ghost fingers into my skull. It tickles behind my eyes.
There are two basic ways to deal with a peeper. You can back off and go blank. Name all the presidents or run through multiplication tables.
The other way to deal with psychics is to welcome them in. Throw open all the doors and windows and invite them deep inside your mind. Then grab them by the throat and drag them straight down to Hell. Well, that’s what I do. It’s not mandatory. The point is that once you’ve led them deep enough into your psyche, you’re the one behind the wheel and they’re strapped in the kiddy seat in back.
I give them the grand tour of Downtown, starting out with a quick jolt of the early days in Hell when it was all nausea and panic. Give them a quick taste of psychic rape. Experiments and Elephant Man exhibitions. Being the fox in a mounted hunt through forests of flayed, burning souls. Then some highlights from the arena. Killing, eleven years of killing. I let them see exactly what being Sandman Slim is all about. Most of them don’t get that far.
This Shut Eye doesn’t make it past my first week Downtown, when a drunk Hellion guard slit me open and tried to pull out my intestines because he’d heard that’s where humans hid their souls. But I don’t let the Shut Eye off that easy. I hold him inside long enough to feel me running away from the neighbor’s dog and getting my leg chewed up.
When I let go, Criswell flies out of my head like a goose through a jet engine. He gasps and is on the verge of tears when the connection finally breaks.
Huston grabs him by the shoulder.
“Ray, you okay?” Ray doesn’t hear him. He’s looking at me.
“Why?” he asks.
“’Cause you deserved it.”
Ray takes a key card from his jacket, waves it over a magnetic reader, and the gate swings open.
When I go through I turn back to them.
“I don’t have to do this, you know. I could come out of a shadow on this side of the fence and not deal with you assholes. But I’m trying to fit in a little better around here, so I’m polite and I try to play by your rules. You might consider cutting me the tiniest piece of slack.”
I head for the warehouse. Huston keeps asking Ray what happened and Ray keeps telling him to fuck off. I wonder if Ray is just a psychic reader or a projector, too, and what parts of the tour he’ll show Huston to shut him up.
WELLS YELLS AT me halfway across the warehouse floor so that everyone turns to see me looking like an executioner’s practice dummy.
“Damn, son. Did you stop to gut a deer on the way over or did that little girl do all that?”
I hold up my burned jacket with my blackened arm.
“Your little girl did this. Her four friends did the rest.”
“There’s a pod?”
“Was. Five of them.”
“That doesn’t jibe with our intelligence.”
I take four wallets from a jacket pocket and drop them on a table.
“Here’s your goddamn intelligence.”
Wells snaps, “Watch your language.”
“I took those off Eleanor’s pals. Their ash is still on them. Probably prints, too.”
“What about Eleanor?”
I take my cell out of my back pocket, thumb on the photo album, and hold it up so Wells can see the screen.
He frowns.
“What did you do to her?”
“Silly girl had a flamethrower. She fucked—I mean, messed up and set herself on fire. Then she ran out into direct sunlight. I would have been happy to quietly take her heart, but she had to turn it into D-day.”
“Are the remains still at the scene?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll secure the site for now. Clean up isn’t a priority if the pod has been cleared out.”
“I didn’t see anyone else there and they didn’t seem to be looking, so that was probably all of them, but I can’t be a hundred percent. Like I said, I went in thinking it was one girl.”
“I’ll need a copy of that photo. E-mail a copy to my account.”
“Just did.”
Wells isn’t looking at me. He’s put on Nitrile gloves and is examining the wallets.
He says, “They’re empty.”
“Are they?”
“Was there anything inside when you found them?”
“How do I know? I was killing vampires, not checking their IDs. I’ve seen plenty of Lurkers that don’t use money. They steal what they want.”
“Then why carry a wallet?”
Shit. Good point.
“Ask a shrink. I get paid to kill things.”
“Right.”
He turns to a female agent standing on his right.
“Bag these and take them downstairs for identification.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wells motions for me to follow him. We head out across the warehouse floor.
I kind of like the organized chaos of the Golden Vigil’s headquarters. There’s always something fun to scope out and think about stealing. A group of agents in Tyvek suits and respirators forklifting a massive stone idol onto the back of a flatbed truck. The idol is on its back, and from where I’m standing, it’s all tentacles and breasts, but I swear some of the tentacles move a little as they tether the idol down. Across the floor, welders are modifying vehicles. Agents are examining new guns as they’re uncrated. A guy as skinny, leathery, and looking as old as King Tut’s mummy wanders the floor sprinkling holy water on everything.
“What kind of a bonus am I getting for taking out those four extra bloodsuckers?”
“From the look of those wallets, seems to me that you already got your bonus.”
“Is that what it seems to you? If I happened to find anything at the crime scene, trust me, it’s barely enough to cover the cost of a replacement jacket. Besides, with intelligence as bad as that, I deserve extra money just on principle.”
“Do you?”
“Unless you knew what was inside that building.”
Wells stops and looks at me.
“Come again?”
“Unless you knew there was a pod in there, but sent me in looking for one inexperienced girl. Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing you’d tell someone if you were setting them up?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“How’s your lady friend downstairs?”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
Wells gets a little defensive whenever I mention Aelita. He’s got a thing for her but an angel is just a little out of his league.
“Okay. How is Miss Aelita? Healthy? Happy? I haven’t seen her since right after Avila.”
Aelita is a kind of drill sergeant angel. She runs the Golden Vigil, Heaven’s Pinkertons. She knows I’m a nephilim and has a cute nickname for me: “The Abomination.” I’m pretty sure she’d like to see me dead.
“Did you send candy and flowers on Valentine’s Day, Wells? It’s okay, you know. He was a saint.”
His phone goes off. He walks away and speaks quietly into the receiver. I think an angel’s ears are burning.
Wells nods and pockets the phone.
