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“You get a twenty percent bonus added on to your next check.”
“Twenty percent? What am I, your waiter? I got you five vampires, not a BLT.”
“Twenty percent is what I’ve been authorized. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
He takes a white business envelope from his jacket and hands it to me. The check for my last Vigil hit. A bunch of suburban Druids in Pomona were trying to resurrect the Invidia, a gaggle of transdimensional chaos deities. The Druids were hilarious. They looked like extras from The Andy Griffith Show trying to call up the devil in matching white housedresses. What’s even funnier was that their plan almost worked. Their scrawny Barney Fife leader was one murdered infant away from annihilating Southern California.
I wonder if I’d just held back a little and Barney did get to unleash the Invidia, would we really be able to tell the difference?
I look at the check and then at Wells.
“Why do you always pull this shit?”
“Do what? Obey the law?”
“I’m a freelancer and you’re deducting things like taxes and Social Security.”
“You don’t strike me as the type who files his taxes on time. I’m doing you a favor.”
“I don’t pay taxes because I don’t exist. You think I’m going to apply for Social Security when I’m sixty-five?”
“You’re going to want to wait until you’re seventy. The extra benefits are worth it.”
“I’m not waiting for anything. I’m legally dead. Why am I paying any of this bullshit?”
“I told you to watch your language.”
“Fuck you, Miss Manners. You get me to kill for you and then you screw me out of my money.”
“That money belongs to the government. It funds what we do here. You don’t like it, run for office.”
I don’t want to run for anything. I want to shove this miserable cheap-ass check so far up Wells’s ass he can read the routing number out the back of his eyes.
But Max Overdrive is just limping along these days and I don’t want to have to find someplace else to live. Landlords in L.A. don’t want you to have pets. What am I going to do with a chain-smoking severed head? Dignity is nice but it’s money makes the lights and shower work.
I watch the welders working across the warehouse so I don’t have to look at Wells while I fold the check and slip it into my pocket.
“At the end of time, when your side loses, I want you to remember this moment.”
Wells narrows his eyes.
“Why?”
“’Cause Lucifer doesn’t expect you to thank him when he fucks you over. That’s why he’s going to win.”
Wells looks down at the floor for a minute. Puts his hands behind his back.
“You know, my mother watched a lot of Christian TV when I was growing up. Hellfire-and-brimstone hucksters telling Bible stories and yelling about damnation to get fools and old people to send them their welfare checks. I never paid much attention to ’em, but one day out of nowhere this one wrinkled old preacher starts telling what he says is a Persian parable. Now, that’s weird for a Baptist Bible-thumper.
“You see, there was once a troubled man in a little village near Qom in ancient Persia.”
“This is the story, right? ’Cause I don’t want to hear about you and your dad going off-roading.”
“Shut up. One day the troubled man got out of bed to work his fields and maybe he was killed or maybe he just kept walking, but he was never heard from again. The sun was shining through the door as the man left and threw his shadow on the wall by the hearth or whatever it is you call it over there. When the man’s wife and children came home and found the house empty, the wife sees her husband’s shadow and asks who he is. The shadow says, ‘The man is gone and become a shadow to this house. I am the shadow of the man who did not go, but will remain here.’ The shadow stayed and over time became a man and he and the woman and her children lived there happily together for many years.”
Wells puts his hands together almost like he’s praying. It creeps me out seeing this side of him.
“Later, when I heard that the Golden Vigil was founded in Persia, I knew it was God speaking to me through the TV that day. He was telling me that here is where I’m supposed to be.”
“That story doesn’t even make sense, and what exactly does it have to do with anything we’re talking about?”
“It means we’ve done our job for more than a thousand years, so you can shove your disapproval.”
“That sounds like the sin of pride, Marshal. Better run downstairs and let Miss December flog it out of you. Webcam it and charge by the minute. You won’t ever have to take government money again.”
Wells looks at me. His phone goes off. He ignores it.
I want to tell him to go fuck himself.
“You done whining? You ready to work? I have something else for you.”
But I need this.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to walk through a murder scene with me. The victim was Sub Rosa. No rough stuff. Just observation.”
“You have forensics people. Why do you need me?”
“I don’t want them getting too deep into this one yet. I want you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been to Hell.”
“So?”
“I want you to take a look at a body and tell me what you think it means.”
“Are you sure it’s just one body and not five?”
“Funny.”
“I want my full fee.”
“Half. No one is asking you to kill anything.”
“You’re using up my valuable drinking and smoking time. I need compensation.”
“As you just pointed out, we’re government funded, which means that we work within a simple and predetermined pay structure. In other words, looking and pointing doesn’t pay the same as hunting and killing.”
“Tell you what, go down to Chinatown, find a club called the Owl’s Shadow, and hire yourself a Deadhead. Those gloomy necromancers are a bunch of low-self-esteem Siouxsie and the Banshees bitches. They’ll fall all over themselves to help a fed do a murder-scene magic show.”
Wells takes the phone from his pocket, looks at the caller ID, and frowns.
“Look, you can sprinkle some pixie dust around while you’re at the scene. Do some damn magic that won’t break anything and I can get you two-thirds of your normal fee. But that’s it.”
“Done.”
I put out my hand. He puts the phone to his ear so he doesn’t have to shake on it.
“We’ll meet at three A.M., when things are quiet and the bars are closed. I’ll call you with the address.”
“Nice doing business with you, Marshal. Give the missus my best.”
“Get out.”
I DECIDE TO skip the Ray and Huston show on the way out, so I slip through a dark patch on a wall outside the warehouse. Come out in the alley across the street from the Bamboo House of Dolls.
What I thought was a one-night blowout right after I saved the world on New Year’s has turned into a six-month running party. After I tossed Mason to the mob Downtown, it seemed like half the Sub Rosa in L.A. showed up at Bamboo House to kiss his ass good-bye. And they never left. Carlos is happy enough. Sub Rosa tip big at civilian places where they can hang out without ending up part of the floor show.
Most Sub Rosa, you’d never notice. They look boringly human, are human, and go out of their way to fit in with other humans, even if they sometimes dress like nineteenth-century dandies or Mayan priests. Others in the bar look like they stepped off a steam-powered zeppelin from Neptune. They’re the Lurkers, and good, upstanding Sub Rosa don’t like them soiling the furniture at their clubs so they come here. There are succubi and transgendered Lamia. Shaggy Nahual wolf and tiger beast men laughing like frat boys and stacking their beer cans in a pyramid until they knock it over. Again. A group of blue-skinned schoolgirls with pale blond hair and horns peeking out through their pigtails are playing some kind of betting game with ivory cups and scorpions.
Carlos is a big part of the reason Bamboo House of Dolls is still standing. He didn’t even blink when the crusty half of L.A.’s magic underground dropped in to get shit-faced. If Jesus was a bartender, He would still only be half as cool as Carlos. With all his newfound lucre, all the man has done to the place is get some new bar stools, a better sound system, and cleaned up the bathrooms so they’re a little less like a Calcutta bus station. It’s good to have one thing that hasn’t changed much. We need a few anchors in our lives to keep us from floating away into the void. Like Mr. Muninn said the one time he came in, “Quid salvum est si Roma perit?” What is safe if Rome perishes?
“Swamp Fire” by Martin Denny is playing on the jukebox. Carlos comes over with a cup of black coffee.
“You didn’t have to get dressed up just for me,” he says.
“Like the look? It’s from the Calvin Klein Book of Revelations line.”
“The crispy black arm is nice even if it is shedding dead skin all over my floor, but that burned-up jacket is un pedazo de basura.”
“Time to let it go?”
“One of you needs to be buried and my Dumpster has a lovely lakeside view of the alley. Give it to me and I’ll get rid of it.”
I push the charred pile of leather across the bar.
“Do me a favor and pour some salt and bleach on it when you put it out.”
“Is that a magic thing or a cop thing?”
“Both. Bleach for DNA. Salt for any leftover hoodoo someone can use in a hex.”
He nods and puts the jacket under the bar.
“I’m guessing since you haven’t even looked at that coffee that you want a drink.”
“Some of the red stuff.”
“You sure?”
“Does the pope live in a nice house?”
“At least have some food, too. I just pulled some pork tamales out of the steamer.”
“Maybe that and some rice?”
“You got it.”
“City of Veils” by Les Baxter comes on. Crazy trumpets and drums at the beginning, then it slides into old-fashioned strings and Hollywood exotica. I half expect to see Errol Flynn dressed like a pirate in a corner booth trying to get a hand job from Lana Turner. After some of the red stuff, maybe I will.
I haven’t heard that Alice song again since the night it came blaring out of the jukebox, like nails being hammered into my ears. I had Carlos check and the song wasn’t even on the machine. He had the company bring him a new box, just so I wouldn’t sit at the bar getting twitchy, waiting for it to come up again.
Later I knew that the song had never been on the machine. It was one of Mason’s hexes. He wanted to watch me go crazy. If he’d pumped me full of LSD and locked me in a spinning mirrored room full of rats, he couldn’t have done any better.
That was six months ago. Half a year since I sent Mason to be poached in Hell and waved bye-bye to his Kissi pals as they burned up and blew away on the solar winds. A hundred and eighty days since I watched Alice’s ashes drift away like fog into the Pacific. I’m doing fine, thanks. Maybe a little bruised around the edges, but I have all the medicine I need right here in this glass.
Carlos sets down the plate of tamales and pours a double shot of the red stuff into a heavy square tumbler, the way we used to drink it in Hell. Aqua Regia is so red it’s almost black, like blood under moonlight. It goes down smooth, like gasoline and pepper spray. It probably saved my life Downtown. When I discovered I could swallow Aqua Regia and keep it down, Hellions starting looking at me differently. I think that’s when one of them got the idea of putting me in the arena instead of killing me. Just when my novelty was wearing off, I was interesting again.
“I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
Carlos shakes his head.
“You weren’t strong enough to kill him.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because you told me. We’ve had this conversation about fifty times before.”
“Really?”
“Maybe you should stick with coffee or maybe a beer. You don’t need the red stuff.”
He reaches for my glass and I slide it away from him.
“Yeah, I really do.”
“You couldn’t have beaten him. He was too strong. You knew it, so you did what you could.”
“Yeah, but sometimes it’s not about winning and losing. It’s about doing the right thing. I didn’t do the right thing. I shouldn’t have walked away. Lucifer was right. By leaving Mason in Hell I gave the prick exactly what he wanted.”
“You’re alive and you’re walking around. Long as you can say that, doing the right thing remains an option. Just keep your head down until you figure out the right time and place.”
“Thanks, Carlos. You’re the best dad a boy could ask for. Will you adopt me?”
