Kill The Dead Part 4

I turn in my seat and look at Evelyn and t.i.tus. He has Aki's ring in one hand and the photo in the other. His eyes are half closed and he's whispering an incantation. Evelyn hangs on his every word. She doesn't look happy, but maybe a little more hopeful.

I'm suddenly aware that while I'm watching t.i.tus, pretty much everyone else in the bar is watching me. I'd like to think they're staring because of my white-hot animal magnetism, but I know I'm not Elvis. I'm Lobster Boy, hear me roar.

Carlos gives me the tamales in a Styrofoam carrier.

Thanks and good night. Be sure to tip your waitresses.

I leave through a shadow near the fire exit in back.

YOU KNOW HOW they put out oil well fires by setting off an explosion that's so big it snuffs out the first fireball with a bigger one? Sometimes the only way to get past something impa.s.sable is to smash it with itself. Like kills like. When you live with a dead man's head that won't shut up and smokes all your cigarettes, the only way to deal with the awfulness is to make it so unbelievably awful that it becomes kind of weirdly beautiful. Like an exploding giraffe full of fireworks. (h.e.l.lions really know how to throw a birthday party.) Kasabian calls it his "p.u.s.s.y wagon," but I can't go there, so I call it the "magic carpet." Really it's a polished mahogany deck about the size of a dinner plate, supported by a dozen articulated bra.s.s legs. When I brought it home from Muninn's-partial payment for a quick smash-and-grab job-one end of the deck was loaded down with prisms, mirrors, and gears that must have meshed with another long-lost machine. The top is covered in what looked like teeth marks and stained with something black. I don't want to know what used to drive the thing or what happened to it.

After I unscrewed and sawed off all the extra hardware, I let Kasabian take it out for a test drive. What do you know? His low-rent, third-rate hoodoo was just powerful enough to keep the bra.s.s legs in sync, so he can move around on his own now. It's nice not to have to carry Kasabian everywhere anymore, but it means that every day I come home to a chain-smoking Victorian centipede.

He's standing on what used to be the video bootlegging table and using his bra.s.s legs to tap numbers into a PC. Ever since he got mobile, Kasabian has been doing Max Overload's books again. He and Allegra set up a little in-store wireless network so he can do the banking and buy new inventory online. Race with the Devil, a decent piece of mid-seventies trash with Warren Oates and Peter Fonda trying to outrun a bunch of rural devil worshippers, plays on a monitor next to the PC. Ever since his visit Downtown, Kasabian has been on a devil movie kick. He doesn't look up when he hears me come in.

"So, how did it go?" He turns and looks at me. "Oh, that bad."

"Just about that bad, Alfredo Garcia."

"I told you not to call me that."

"I had to go Wild Bunch in the theater. Left me in a Peck-inpah state of mind."

"Did you get paid, at least?"

"Yeah, here's the big money. Plus the usual deductions."

I drop the check next to the keyboard. Kasabian pinches the ends of the check between two of his bra.s.s legs and holds it up to read it.

"That p.r.i.c.k. He just does this to humiliate you. It makes him feel better about not being able to do the stuff you can do and needing you for his dirty work. It's pure envy."

"Yeah, it's a glamorous life here in Graceland."

I pick up the bottle of Jack Daniel's from the bedside table and pour some into the same gla.s.s I've been using for three days.

"And he's trying to keep us on the hook by starving us. You know that, right? You ought to let me hex his a.s.s."

I sip the Jack. It's good, but after the Aqua Regia, it's about as potent as cherry Kool-Aid.

"Save your hoodoo for real work. And, technically, he's only starving me. If he knew about you, he'd s.h.i.t his heart out."

"Great, get him up here. I'll video it and put it up on YouTube."

"Aelita would be the fun one to get on tape. I'm an Abomination, but I don't even know if angels have a word for you."

"One does. 'Hey, s.h.i.thead.'"

"Lucifer always had a way with words. He's just like Bob Dylan, but without all the annoying talent."

"That's hilarious. He loves it when you say stuff like that. Every time you do, he turns up the temperature Downtown ten degrees."

"Then he should be able to cook biscuits on his t.i.ts by now."

"I'll ask him for you."

"No, you won't. When you download your brain or play video highlights or whatever it is you do for the old man, you'll only show him what you want him to see. You hold back crumbs 'cause when you know something he doesn't it gives you power. Just like you hold back things from me. And I hold back things from you and he holds back things from both of us. We're a little cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k of liars."

Kasabian nods to the Styrofoam container I set on the bed when I ditched my weapons.

"Do I smell tamales?"

"Yeah, you want them? I lost my appet.i.te."

Kasabian kneels down on six of his legs and hangs over the edge of the table. He uses four of his free legs to open the door of the minifridge I installed and uses two more legs to grab a bottle of Corona. He pops the top off the beer while pulling himself back onto the table and waggles a bunch of his other legs at me like a h.o.r.n.y lobster.

"Slip me some crimson, Jimson."

I hand him the container.

"Don't forget your bucket."

"Have I ever?"

"I just don't want a first time."

He doesn't answer. He's already diving into Carlos's spicy tamales, working a plastic fork with two of his front legs. After each bite of food, a glob that looks like white-orange putty oozes from the bottom of his neck, through the hole I drilled in the magic carpet and into a blue kid-size plastic beach bucket. There's a pop-top trash can at the end of that table. Kasabian is good about dumping his scat when he's done, but he's short, so he needs me to step on the pedal to open the top. It's nice to be needed.

I'm not in the mood for Cirque de Puke right now, so I find a pad and pencil and try to remember what Eleanor's monster belt buckle looked like. Alice was the artist in my family. Even my handwriting made my teachers weep. When I'm done, I have a sketch that's pretty good if I was a half-blind mental patient in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. I hold it up so Kasabian can see it.

"You recognize this?"

"I'm on my lunch hour, man."

"Just look at the G.o.dd.a.m.n paper."

He doesn't move his head from the food, just swivels his eyes and squints at the image.

"Nope. Never seen it before. What is it, some monster you're supposed to kill or have you started dating again?"

"It's something I saw today. Like a belt buckle or an icon or something. I didn't think much about it at the time, but it's been bugging me."

"I don't recognize it."

Plop goes the tamale putty.

"Can you check it out in the Codex?"

Now he turns to look at me. He hates it when I ask him to look things up. I'm not even supposed to know about the Daimonion Codex.

"I don't think so. Someone's using it. Occupado, you know?"

"Bulls.h.i.t. I saw this kind of thing when I was Downtown. It might be a book, but you don't read it like one. It's conceptual, mental. Like a mystical database."

"If you know so much about it, why don't you look it up yourself?"

The Daimonion Codex is Lucifer's private notebook, reference book, strategy, spell and wisdom book, and anything-else-you-can-think-of book.

"The Codex is for official h.e.l.lion business and I only use it when the big man asks me because he's too busy to find something himself."

Satan's Big Little Book of Bada.s.s. A kind of Bizarro World Boy Scout manual. High-grade Gnostic p.o.r.n. The Codex is the second most important doc.u.ment in the universe, right after the Scroll of Creation in you-know-who's personal library.

"Bulls.h.i.t. Every time I leave the room, you're in there trying to find some angle that'll get your body back."

"No, I'm not."

"You always were a terrible liar, Kas. A career crook should be able to bull better than that."

"Leave me alone. When I get a spare minute, I'll look for your monster. Now let me eat these while they're warm."

I sit back on the bed and sip the gla.s.s of Jack. On the monitor, Peter Fonda is shooting at carloads of backwoods demon fanciers from the roof of a speeding camper.

"You been watching this all day?"

Kasabian talks between mouthfuls of food.

"No. Before that it was Shout at the Devil, only there wasn't any devil in it."

"No. That's a war movie."

"Why doesn't it say that on the box? 'Warning: Lee Marvin might look p.i.s.sed off, but he's not the devil. There's not one f.u.c.king devil in this thing.'"

"Watch what you want, but promise me that I'm never going to ever come in here and find you spanking yourself to The Devil in Miss Jones."

"You're a scream, Milton Berle. Now I'm not going to tell you the good news."

"What good news?"

Kasabian takes a last bite of tamale and lets it fall into the bucket. Then he takes it and the Styrofoam container to the end of the table and waits. I haul my a.s.s up off the bed and step on the trash-can pedal. When it opens, he tosses in the Styrofoam and upends the bucket into the can.

"What good news?"

Kasabian goes back to where he'd been working, leans over the table, and sets the bucket underneath, next to the minifridge. Then he finally looks at me.

"You have an actual job. Starting tonight. Something a lot better than stepping on bugs for the Wells."

"I've already got a job tonight. Straight consulting for the Vigil. No killing."

"When are you supposed to do it?"

"Around three? Why?"

"Good. You'll probably be done by then."

"Done doing what?"

He smiles at me exactly the way you don't want a dead man to smile at you.

"The big man is in town. He wants to see you tonight at the Chateau Marmont."

d.a.m.n. I finish my drink.

"What's Lucifer doing in L.A.?"

"What do I know? I'm just the answering machine."

"And snitch."

"That, too. He knows every time you jerk off. Unfortunately, so do I. You really need to get a girlfriend."

"What time am I supposed to be there?"

"Eleven. And be on time. He hates late. It's a real thing with him."

"Christ. I don't even have a jacket anymore. I need to get cleaned up."

"Don't freak out, man. You've got hours. This is a good thing. We need the money. Doing the deed for the Vigil tonight and picking up some new work from Mr. D might just let us keep the lights on for another month."

I go into the bathroom, close and lock the door. I've never been a shy boy until recently.

I peel the Evil Dead shirt off over my black shoulder. The pink flesh under the peeling black skin looks like the worst sunburn since Hiroshima. I kick off my boots and jeans, and check myself in the mirror.

A pretty sight, I am not. I turn the light on over the sink and lean close to the mirror, turn my head from side to side. The thousand tiny cuts from the flying gla.s.s at the theater are mostly gone. I tilt my head forward and back. Run my hands over my face and neck, looking at the shadows of the lines and creases from my neck to my forehead, feeling familiar contours.

Maybe not so familiar.

I felt the changes before, but over the last month they're undeniable.

I'm pretty sure my scars are healing.

The one thing I brought back from h.e.l.l that I wanted. The one thing I counted on. I spent eleven years and shed a thousand pounds of blood, flesh, and bone to grow my armor, and after six months of living in the light, I'm losing it.

I hate this place.

h.e.l.l is simple. There are no friends, just an ever-shifting series of allies and enemies. There's no pity, loyalty, or rest. h.e.l.l is twenty-four-hour party people, and the buddy you shared a foxhole with yesterday is a head on the end of a stick today, letting everyone in shouting distance know, "Abandon all hope ye who p.i.s.s me off."

Back here in the world it's all soft, fish-belly white, "normal" people with jelly for backbones and not even the basic kill-or-be-killed honor of the arena. The L.A. sky doesn't turn brown because of smog. It's the metric tons of s.h.i.t coming out of people's mouths every time they open them to talk. Know the old joke, "How do you know when a lawyer is lying?" "He's moving his lips." Up here, everyone is Perry Mason.

Little by little, I've been preparing for this moment, when I couldn't lie to myself anymore.