Читать книгу The Sandman Slim Series Books 1-4 - Richard Kadrey - Страница 20

IMAGINE SHOVING A cattle prod up a rhino’s ass, shouting “April fool!”, and hoping the rhino thinks it’s funny. That’s about how much fun it is hunting a vampire.

Personally, I don’t have anything against shroud eaters. They’re just another kind of addict in a city of addicts. Since most of them started out as civilians, the percentage of decent vampires to complete bastards is about the same as regular people. Right now, though, I’m hunting one that’s trying for a Nobel Prize in getting completely up my ass. It isn’t fun work, but it pays the bills.

The vampire’s name is Eleanor Vance. In the Xeroxed passport photo Marshal Wells gave me, she looks like she’s about seventeen. Probably because she is. A pretty blond cheerleader type with big eyes and the kind of smile that got Troy burned to the ground. Bad news for me. Young vampires are all assholes. It’s part of their job description.

I love older vampires. A hundred and fifty, two hundred years old, they’re beautiful. The smart ones mostly stick to the El Hombre Invisible tricks that urban monsters have worked out over centuries. They only feed when they have to. When they’re not hunting, they’re boring, at least to outsiders. They come off like corporate middle management or the guy who runs the corner bodega. What I like best about old bloodsuckers is that when you’ve got one cornered and it knows it’s coffin fodder, they’re like noble cancer patients in TV movies. All they want is to die quietly and with a little dignity. Young vampires, not so much.

The young ones have all grown up watching Slayer videos, Scarface, Halloween, and about a million hours of Japanese anime. They all think they’re Tony Montana with a lightsaber in one hand and a chain saw in the other. Eleanor, tonight’s undead dream date, is a good example. She’s got a homemade flamethrower. I know because when she blasted me back at the parking garage, she fried one of my eyebrows and the left sleeve of my new leather jacket. Ten to one she found the plans on the Web. Why can’t vampires just download porn like normal jailbait?

It’s Sunday, about a quarter to six in the evening. We’re downtown. I follow her along South Hill Street toward Pershing Square. I’m about half a block behind her. Eleanor is wearing long sleeves and carrying an umbrella to keep the sun off. She strolls along happy, like she owns the air and everyone has to pay her royalties whenever they breathe. Only she’s not really relaxed. I can’t read a juicer’s heartbeat or breathing changes because they don’t have them. And she’s too far away to see if her eyes are dilated, but she keeps moving her head. Microscopic twitches left and right. She’s trying to look around without looking around. Hoping to catch my shadow or reflection. Eleanor knows she didn’t kill me back at the garage. Eleanor’s a smart girl. I hate smart dead girls.

At the corner of Third Street, Eleanor shoulder-butts an old lady and what’s probably her grandkid into the street, in front of a flatbed truck carrying a backhoe. The driver slams on the brakes. The old lady is on the ground. Cue the screaming and squealing tires. Cue the sheep who stand around pointing and the Captain Americas who run to help. They pull the old lady and the kid back onto the sidewalk, which is great for them, but it doesn’t do anything for me. Eleanor is gone.

But it’s not hard to find her. Fifty people must have seen her pull the stunt and half of them point as she sprints down Third before cutting right onto Broadway. I take off after her. I’m fast, a hell of a lot faster than the flat-footed civilians trying to chase her down, but I’m not quite as fast as a vampire. Especially one who’s lost her umbrella and wants to get out of the sun before she turns into chicken-fried steak.

She’s gone when I hit Broadway. This part of town isn’t that crowded on Sundays. I have a clear view in both directions. No perky blondes running down the street in flames. It’s mostly stores and office buildings down here, but all the offices and most of the stores are closed. There are a few open doors in the small shops, but Eleanor is too smart to get cornered in one of those little cracker boxes. There’s only one place a smart girl would go.

God said, “Let there be Light, and cheap take-out Chinese,” and the Grand Central Market appeared. The place has been on South Broadway since before the continents divided. Some of the meat they use in the burritos and Szechuan beef is even older. I think I once saw Fred Flintstone’s teeth marks on some barbecued ribs.

Inside, I’m facing down tacos and pizza. There’s a liquor store to my left and ice cream against the far wall. Every spice known to man is mixed with the smell of sweat and cooking meat. Not too much of a crowd at this time of day. Some of the shops and kiosks are already counting up receipts. I don’t see Eleanor down the central walkway or either of the side ones. I start down the middle of the place, cut to the right, and walk by a fish stand. I’m reaching out. Listening, smelling, feeling the movement of the air, trying to pick up any tiny vibrations in the aether. I’m getting better at this kind of hunting. Ambush predator stuff as opposed to my old Tyrannosaurus-with-a-hard-on moves that don’t go down quite as well in the streets of L.A. as they did in the arena.

Subtle hunting, acting like a grown-up, I really miss Hell sometimes.

A tourist dad asks me how they can get back on the freeway to Hollywood from here. I ignore him and he mumbles something about his taxes and how come we don’t have more cops to clear out these drug addicts.

Six months after the New Year’s bash at Avila and I’m still not used to this place, these people. In a lot of ways civilians are worse than Hellions because at least Hellions know they’re miserable sacks of slaughterhouse shit. More and more, I want one of these mortal types to have to face down a vampire, a Jade, or a bat-shit demon elemental. Not a ghost glimpse in the dark, but having to stare straight into a beast’s red meat-grinder eyes hungry for the souls of the terminally clueless.

Be careful what you wish for.

A long orange jet of fire rains from overhead and there’s Eleanor, standing on top of the glass-and-chrome cases at a spice kiosk. The business end of the flamethrower is a little thing, no bigger than a .45 semiauto. A tube runs from the pistol to an Astro Boy backpack, where the gas and propellant are stored.

Eleanor moves her arm in a wide arc, torching produce, signs, and the backs of a few slack-jawed market workers. She’s smiling down at us. Annie Oakley and Charlie Manson’s demon baby, jacked up on that sweet and special prekill adrenaline.

Then she’s down and running with a small bubbling laugh like a naughty six-year-old. I take off after her, running deeper into the market. She’s small and fast and a second later she cuts left, down the far aisle, and doubles back toward Broadway.

I can’t catch her or cut her off, but there’s an empty utility cart by a produce stand. I give it a kick and send it through the empty dining area. Tables and chairs go flying. The cart slams into her legs at the end of the aisle, knocking her through the counter of Grand Central Liquor. Suddenly it’s raining glass and Patrón Silver. Right on cue, people start screaming.

Eleanor is back on her feet a second before I can grab her. She’s not smiling anymore. Her left arm is bent at a funny angle and a chunk of bone the size of a turkey drumstick is sticking out just below her elbow. She has the flamethrower up, but I’m moving flat out. No way I can stop. Instead, I go faster. She pulls the trigger and I’m drowning in fire.

I hit her a millisecond later. I can’t see anything, but I know it’s her because she’s the only thing in the store light enough to fly like that. My vision clears, but even I don’t want to see this. When she pulled the trigger to hose me down, all the liquor on her clothes and the floor went up. Eleanor is an epileptic shadow puppet pirouetting around in a lake of whiskey fire.

Vampires don’t scream like regular humans. I don’t know how they scream at all without lungs, but when they let loose, it’s like a runaway train meets the screech of a million fighting cats. You feel it in your kidneys and bones. Tourists pee and puke at the sound. Fuck ’em. Eleanor still isn’t going down. And the fire is starting to spread. Grease on the grills of nearby food stalls starts going up. A propane tank blows, setting off the sprinkler system. When I look back, Eleanor is sprinting out of the market back onto Broadway, still covered in flames.

Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow, whiny bowling pins. You’d think that on some basic animal level they’d want to get the hell out of the way of a burning schoolgirl screaming loud enough to crack store windows and the stupid son of a bitch chasing her. Not that I’m doing this for them. I’m doing it for the money, but they still stand to benefit from it.

When Eleanor runs across Fifth Street she isn’t burning anymore. She’s a black beef-jerky Barbie doll running on charred stick insect legs.

Up ahead, there’s an abandoned wreck of a movie theater called the Roxie. The lobby and marquee areas have been converted into an open-air market. Eleanor blows past the racks of knockoff T-shirts and toxic rubber sandals. Slams straight through the inch-thick plywood screwed over the theater doors where the glass used to be. I follow her inside, but hang back by the smashed door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

The na’at would be a smart weapon in a place like this, but I feel like shooting something. Besides, Eleanor won’t know what a na’at is, so it won’t scare her the way I want. I retired Wild Bill’s Navy Colt pistol a while back and replaced it with a Smith & Wesson .460 hunting pistol. The thing is so big and mean it doesn’t even need bullets. I could beat Godzilla to death with it if I stood on a chair. The gun is loaded alternately with massive .460 rounds and shortened .410 shotgun shells, all coated in my special Spiritus Dei, silver, garlic, holy water, and red mercury dipping sauce. It only holds five shots, but it does its job well enough that I’ve never had to reload.

When you’re going in someplace blind, don’t know the layout or what’s waiting inside, a place you know a Lurker likes to hang out, a smart guy will hang back, circle the perimeter, and look for traps and weak points. I’m hot, annoyed, and in a rush, so that’s exactly what I don’t do. Besides, I’m just chasing one dumb little Kentucky fried blonde. She can’t be much trouble now that she’s cornered. Yeah. That’s probably what all those G-men said about Bonnie Parker before they saw the tommy gun.

Inside the theater, it’s a sauna. Burst water pipes in a sealed-up building. I haven’t moved and I’m sweating like a lawyer at the pearly gates. It smells like they invented mildew in here. How the hell did suburban Valley girl Eleanor end up day-squatting here? She didn’t run into the theater by accident. She knew where she was going. By the sound of all the broken beer and wine bottles under my feet, so do a lot of other people. Make that “did,” past tense. The winos are probably what attracted her to the place. Who doesn’t love a free lunch? I have a feeling that there aren’t too many random squatters in here anymore.

Turns out I’m half right.

The squatters aren’t random. They’re vampires. Friends of hers. A guy and a girl.

They jump from the balcony and the guy slams a piece of two-by-four between my shoulders. I go down on my knees in the crunchy glass, but I roll with the blow and come up with the .460 cocked. That’s when Eleanor’s other friends hit me. Two more guys from beneath the seats on either side of the aisle. I grab the smaller one by the throat and toss him into the second. The girl vampire pair hits me from behind and jams a broken bottle into my arm. I drop the gun and it’s too dark to see where it went. I throw an elbow back and feel the side of the girl’s skull crack. She jumps up like a gazelle and stumbles over two rows of seats, screaming. That gives me a second to sprint down the aisle toward the screen and put some distance between Eleanor’s dead friends and me.

That’s where Eleanor has been waiting. Not only is she smart, but she has titanium balls. Even when she was on fire and running through the boarded-up front doors, she never let go of the flamethrower. The other bloodsuckers fall back as she opens up.

The shot back at the market was her just introducing herself. This one is a “fuck you very much and good night” just for me. Eleanor pulls the trigger and doesn’t let up until the gun is empty.

Stabbed and cold-cocked, I’m still not dumb enough to just stand there. I dive to the right, behind a row of seats. Fire wraps around them like it’s reaching for me. I’m getting burned from above and below, steaming like a pork bun in my leather jacket. Even when the flamethrower is empty, the burning seats keep right on cooking me, and the two-by-four shot left me too dizzy to move very fast. I stagger over to the wall and try to run up the aisle, but I’m tripping on the garbage snowdrifts and land face-first in candy wrappers, needles, and malt liquor bottles.

I’ve turned into Buster Keaton and Eleanor and her friends are getting a real kick out of me gimping along on all fours. She’s burned beyond any human recognition, but she’s a juicer and they get over pain pretty quick. I do, too, but I’m not there yet. Not even in the same time zone. I give up and lie down on the sticky-sweet carpet to do what I should have done in the first place.

I press my right hand down into the broken glass and put my weight on it. The jagged bottle shards slice deep into my palm and I keep pushing until I feel glass hit bone. Most hexes don’t need blood to work, but a little of the red stuff is like a nitrous afterburner when you want a hex to come on hard and fast.

Eleanor takes the two-by-four from the boy bloodsucker and thumps it on each seat as she strolls over to me.

“Hey, Speedy Gonzales. You like chasing things? Why don’t I knock your head across the street and you can chase that?”

“Get him, Nellie. Look at that scarred piece of shit. He’s too ugly to drink. Waste that faggot.”

It’s one of the boys talking. The one who got me with the chunk of wood. He has a southern accent. Somewhere deep, old, and hot. You can almost hear the kudzu wrapped around his words.

Eleanor says, “Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot.”

Everyone laughs but Jed.

While Eleanor does an “Evening at the Improv” thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion’s guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I’m moaning.

“Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does Daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything.”

The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they’re the ones unsteady on their feet.

Even though I can’t read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor’s. I can’t tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten’s name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She’s gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn’t been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can’t figure out what’s happening.

Mommy is in her head, too, a black hole of anger and fear. Eleanor might even have gotten herself bit just to spite her. She has a secret, too. She thought it would save her in the end, but now she’s having her doubts.

A gust blasts down the aisle like an invisible fist, knocking all five of them ass over horseshoes into the air. Eleanor loses the two-by-four and lands on top of me. I can smell the fear through her burned skin. The wind keeps going, moving up from Hurricane Katrina to space shuttle exhaust.

With all her strength, Eleanor pushes herself off of me.

“It’s him! He’s doing it!” she yells. “What do we do?”

Jed Clampett hauls his ass up off the floor and pulls himself to me using seat backs like crutches. I’ve changed the chant, but he hasn’t noticed yet.

The wind shifts from a wind tunnel to a swirling twister. I haul myself to my knees and shrug off my leather jacket. The twister rips the carpet from the floor, throwing a junkyardful of broken glass into the air. The shards circle us like a million glittering razor blades, which doesn’t do much more than annoy Eleanor and her friends. They bat the glass away like flies. Each of their hundred cuts heals before the second hundred happen. But I’m getting cut, too. In a few seconds I’m the fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel and all that broken glass is doing a water ballet in my blood.

The swirling air turns pink as I bleed out, which Jed and his girlfriend think is goddamn hysterical. They stick out their tongues and catch drops of my blood like kids catching snowflakes. About ten seconds later they’re both screaming and tearing open their throats with their fingernails. Then the other three start to feel it. They try to run, but the wind and glass are everywhere. It’s one big Veg-O-Matic in here, spraying my tainted blood down their throats and onto their million wounds.

Eleanor already looks like a Chicken McNugget, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on with her, but the others are starting to sizzle and glow from the inside like they swallowed road flares on a bet and lost. That’s what happens to vampires dumb enough to drink angel blood.

It doesn’t take long for them to go catatonic, then flare fast and hot. Human flash paper. They sizzle for a few seconds and cook down to a fine gray ash. I growl the end of the hex and the air grows still. The vampires are all dead, except for Eleanor. She hunkered down and held on to me during the twister. My body blocked enough of the wind for her to survive, but just barely. She moves her cracked lips like she’s trying to talk. I lean my ear close to her.

“When you see Mutti, tell her I’m sorry. I only did what I did to scare her like she scares me and Daddy sometimes.”

When you’re hired to kill someone, the last thing you want is to have to give them absolution. You want them dead fast, not lying there asking you to be their therapist. Worse, you don’t want to hear anything that might make you feel sorry for them. I don’t want Eleanor’s mommy trauma in my head. She’s a monster just like me, but I want her to be a dead monster like her friends. She lets go of my leg and gives me a Say Good Night, Gracie sigh. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to stick her on a spit and toast marshmallows on her while she burned. Now I cover her eyes with my hand and get out the black knife.

“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.

“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.”