Текст книги "Aloha from Hell"

Автор книги: Richard Kadrey

Соавторы: Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“Do you have a car?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Is it insured? Like, well insured?”

“It was my late mother’s car. She was a careful driver and had every kind of insurance there is.”

“f y00">Ên I borrow it?”

Traven takes out his keys and hands them to me.

“How long will you need it?”

“Just tonight.”

TWO HOURS GOES a lot faster with whiskey and food than it does without either.

By the time the sun’s gone down, everyone is pretty much acting like a person again and not a mourner in training. Candy catches me looking out the window.

“You probably need to get going soon.”

“Yeah, I do.”

We get up from where we’ve been eating on the floor and I put on my jacket. I’m very aware of its weight on my body. Nervousness is all about heightened senses.

Traven is the closest to me. I shake his hand and he nods. Vidocq grabs me in a massive bear hug.

“No good-byes. I’ll see you soon.”

“Sooner than that.”

Allegra comes over and pecks me on the cheek. It’s sweet and she means it, but I don’t think she’s ever quite forgiven me for working for Lucifer a couple of months ago.

Candy loops her arm in mine and walks me to the door.

“Do you want me to walk with you to the car?”

“You should stay here with the others. From here on out, I need to not be Stark. I need to be Sandman Slim and a very bad person.”

“You mean more so.”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”

Candy puts the plastic rabbit in my hand and we kiss.

Before I go outside, I look at Kasabian. He’s gone back to the beginning of the DVD and the opening credits for The Wizard of Oz are playing.

“See you soon, Alfredo Garcia.”

He doesn’t look up.

“Shut up. The movie’s starting.”

I open the door and look at Candy.

“Three days.”

She nods.

“Three days.”

I close the door and get out the car keys.

TRAVEN’S KEYS ARE for a Geo Metro, a glass-enclosed gum wad of fiberglass that’s like a car the same way movie-theater nachos are like food. Holding the keys out in front of me like the world’s most pathetic magic wand, I push the lock button. Something a few cars up chirps. The Geo is exactly like the kind of car that a preacher’s mother would drive. It’s blue and looks like something that should come free with a kid’s meal at a burger joint. This isn’t how I imagined I’d be leaving this world, but I don’t have time to hunt and kill a real car. The only thing worse than driving a car like this is having someone see you driving a car like this. Naturally, that’s when I see Medea Bava strolling over from across the street. I already have the door open, so I can’t even pretend I was going to steal something else. I get the Maledictions out and light one. Going back to Hell may be the worst thing I ever do, but at least I’ll be able to get decent cigarettes.

“Why are you bugging me, Medea? I’m leaving town and may not be coming back. Go buy yourself a new crown of thorns. You win.”

Medea stops in the street so that cars have to drive around her. She just looks at me, her face sweeping through the phases of the moon, turning her from a beautiful young woman to an old crone and back again.

“You’re as constant as the stars in a few things, Sandman Slim. For example, your stupidity and selfishness.”

“I also steal cable. What’s your point?”

“What you’re planning is reckless beyond belief. War is coming from below and above. And you plan on inserting yourself into the middle of it? And for what? A personal vendetta. You’ve even involved the Kissi. That alone has made the situation a thousand times worse.”

“What I’m doing is a lot more than a vendetta.”

A minivan full of frat boys goes around her, hooting and flipping her off. Medea flicks her head at them and the van’s windows explode inward. You can hear the frat boys screaming as the van rolls to a stop at the corner.

“The last time we met, who were you with? Ah yes, the Czech whore.”

“Watch your mouth. Her name is Brigitte and the proper term you’re looking for is ‘porn star.’ You’re just jealous of her because you never had a three-way with a cosmonaut.”

“And now you’re debasing yourself with that rabid dog in your room.”

“Candy and I are only at the shoc Yo at thek and awe stage. Debasing is penciled in for next Thursday.”

Medea glances up the street as the bloody frat boys stumble out of the van. She turns and looks at me.

“Now you’re sacrificing yourself for dear sweet Alice.”

“You already know that, and I want to be dead before one, so I’m leaving. Have a nice time playing pranks on civilians.”

I get into the car, but suddenly she’s next to me with her hand on the door.

She says, “Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You and Alice didn’t find each other by chance. We sent her to you.”

She lets that sink in for a minute. It doesn’t. It just sits there staring at me, ugly and cold.

Medea says, “Do you think the Sub Rosa is so blind that it wouldn’t notice a child as powerful as you being raised by ordinary parents? You were dangerous when a child and became more so as you grew. Then you chose to distance yourself from the Sub Rosa, its codes and bylaws.”

“Codes and bylaws? What are you? The Rotary Club? Fuck off.”

Medea leans in closer. A faint smile plays around her mouth as it morphs from a young woman’s full lips to a crone’s, as dry and cracked as a desert plain.

“When you left us we needed to know what you were up to. A simple spell wouldn’t do. You would have broken it. So we sent something you would accept wholeheartedly. The girl.”

“Alice wasn’t Sub Rosa. She didn’t have any magic. I would have known.”

“You’re right. Poor Alice was an invalid. But her parents had the gift. They’re Sub Rosa, which makes her Sub Rosa, too. Alice’s infirmity is what made her the perfect operative. With no magic of her own, you would never suspect her. And keeping watch over you was the one way she could contribute to her people’s welfare.”

Alice flashes in my memory. A thousand snapshots of her face. Her hands. Her body. There’s nothing that reads as magic or lies.

“I don’t believe you.”

“The truth doesn’t require your belief. Alice was never yours. She belonged to us.”

“Did Mason put you up to this? Aelita? Maybe both of them. What did they promise you, Baba Yaga? Your owdivaga? Yon Kentucky fried-chicken-leg house?”

Medea laughs. Up the block frat boys are pulling glass fragments out of each other’s faces. One sits on the curb staring at the phone in his hand. He can’t think of who to call.

“I’m the Inquisition and the Inquisition is beyond the sort of desires that make bribery possible.”

Medea takes something from an inside pocket of her coat and tosses it into the car with me. Wolf teeth and crow feathers bound in linen with horsehair. An Inquisition death sign. She even went to the trouble to dribble a bloody X on top.

She says, “You’ve used up your nine lives. Go back to your room and be with that animal you rut with. Be happy and ruin yourself quietly the way you should have done years ago. If, however, you continue on the course you’re planning, the Inquisition will deal with you permanently. This is your last chance for redemption.”

I toss the death sign over my shoulder and take a puff of the Malediction.

“Redemption? I want redemption about as much as I want to be one of the blue-blood Ren Faire masters of the universe you report to. Lucifer chose me to deal with this. Not the Sub Rosa or you or the Golden Vigil or Mickey Mouse. Me. I’m the one who can stop Mason. You get in my way and he wins. That will be the end of everything and it’ll be your fault. So why don’t you go back to your gumdrop house in the forest and eat some lost children, witch?”

Medea walks to the curb and swings out her arm like a maître d’.

“I won’t stop you, but remember this. When your final judgment arrives, I won’t come for you. You’ll be the one who comes to me, and of your own free will.”

“So no hug good-bye?”

I pull the door closed and turn the ignition. The Geo coughs a few times, but the engine finally catches. Medea knocks on the passenger window and I push the button to lower it.

“We’ll see each other much sooner than you think,” she says.

“Super. You bring balloon animals and I’ll hire clowns. It’ll be a party.”

I steer the Geo around the wrecked van. The frat boy on the curb finally figured out someone to call. Blood runs down his forehead and drips onto his phone, but he looks relieved. There’s a siren in the distance.

I turn right at the corner and steer the Geo onto the freeway.

THINKING ABOUT DEATH makes a ride go by fast. Thinking about your own death—even if it’s supposed to be temporary—makes it fly by like a cheetah with a jet pack>

You’d think that with all my connections to the celestial sphere, I’d have a better handle on death. But I don’t know anything. I didn’t die in Hell and since then I’ve lived through every kind of attack, abuse, and humiliation Hellions, humans, and hell beasts could pile on. After you’ve been shot, stabbed, slashed, burned, and almost zombified and survived it all, death gets kind of abstract. It’s like valentines and diplomas. Something other people have to deal with. But now it’s my turn to ride the pale horse and I have serious reservations about it.

Every day I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and see civilians making themselves crazy worrying about the meetings they’re late for or did they put the rent check in the mail or is their ass starting to sag and I think, “I’ve seen the creaky clockwork that turns the stars and planets. I’ve gotten drunk with the devil and body-slammed angels. I’ve seen the Room of Thirteen Doors at the center of the universe. I know the taste of my own blood as well as you know your favorite wine. I’ve seen so much more than you’ll ever see. I know so much more than you’ll ever know.” And then it hits me like a runaway semi. I don’t know anything that matters. Here I am thinking how much better and smarter I am than all the stuffed-shirt meat puppets wandering L.A. and I remember that there’s a billion people who haven’t done a tenth of the things I’ve done but who know the big answer to the big question: What happens when you die? I’ve seen fragments of it. I stood in the desert of Purgatory with Kasabian after he died and before Lucifer brought him back. But that doesn’t count. That was someone else’s death and Purgatory was just a projection of the afterlife created by my spell. Not the real thing. I’ve seen death a thousand times, and almost snuffed it myself, but I’ve never made it through all the way, and that scares me.

Are sex and death connected? Hell yes. They’re the two things in the world you can’t explain. You only know them by experiencing them. Maybe that was my mistake. I should have asked Mustang Sally if I could trade this death trip for having to relose my virginity at the crossroads. Easy. Any fun girl would be up for that. Instead of driving to my doom in a mom’s powder-blue shit wagon, I could be back in Hollywood, stumbling down the street with a grin, a beer, and a frustrated boner, trying to lure drunken dollies into a night of black-magic freeway lust. But no, I didn’t think of that and now I’m stuck on a backed-up interstate with what Medea said about Alice banging around in my head and wondering what this steering wheel is going to taste like when my face smashes into it at a hundred miles an hour.

IT HAPPENS ON West Adams as I’m closing in on the crossroads underpass at I-10 and Crenshaw.

The light bar on top of a cop car flashes in my rearview mirror.

Maybe he’s looking for someone else.

His sirenn">His bleeps twice.

“Pull over.”

The cop’s voice comes out of the car’s bullhorn sounding like a bigger and angrier version of the robot in Candy’s glasses.

“Pull over.”

The one time I don’t steal a car this is what happens. That’s the lesson for tonight. Anytime I try to do something like a regular person, I get fucked for it. Never again.

I slow down, but I don’t pull over. Every nerve in my body is vibrating, telling me to jam the accelerator and leave these shitbirds in my dust. But I can stomp this accelerator from now until the sun burns out and there still won’t be any dust. This three-speed rowboat would lose a drag race to a crippled monkey on a Big Wheel.

I pull over and cut the engine. The patrol car stops behind me. The driver aims the car’s outside spotlight at my side mirror, blinding me. I unclamp the angel a little and its eyes cut right through the glare.

Two cops in the car. Both male. One is young and wiry with a close-cropped flattop. He’s more excited than he should be at a simple traffic stop. Probably a recent cop school graduate.

The driver, the one getting out, is heavier. A bit of a donut gut, but he’s got at least fifty pounds of muscle over his partner. The older cop showing a young pup the ropes. Shit. I’m probably one of his life lessons. Any other night, this Romper Room scene would be playing out somewhere else. I should have pulled over when I saw the lights go on.

I roll down the window. The cop comes up on me sticking close to the car. Smart. If he came in wide, I could reach for a weapon and shoot before he had a chance to get his gun out. Sidling up like he is, I’d have to turn around in my seat to get a shot off and he’d put six slugs in the back of my head before I could say, “Ouch.”

The cop has his flashlight out, held in an underhand grip so he can swing it like a club. He shines the light in my face then lowers it a few inches, leaving me temporarily night-blind.

“Evening, sir. Did you know that your left taillight is out?”

“No, I didn’t. Thank you. I’ll get it fixed first thing tomorrow.”

He’s unmoved by my diplomacy.

“May I see your license and registration, please?”

“This isn’t my car.”

“Whose is it?”

“A friend’s. He’s a priest.”

“Is he? May I see your license, then?”

Here it comes.

“I don’t have a license.”

The light goes back into my eyes. I turn my head this time so I won’t go blind. When I look back, the cop has backed away a little from the car. He’s lowered the flashlight and his other hand is resting lightly on the grip of his gun.

“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

“Nope.”

“Please step out of the vehicle.”

“I told you already. I don’t have a license. None. No bank account. No credit cards. No insurance. No library card. No magazine subscriptions. I’m legally dead, so technically I don’t need a goddamn license.”

His hands close on the pistol grip. His breathing and heart rate are rising, but his mind is calm and focused. I can’t read it, but I can get a feel, and he’s all concentration. The young cop could do worse than learning from this guy, but I don’t have time to compliment either of them on their keen professionalism.

“Step out of the vehicle, sir.”

He says it with a lot more gusto this time.

I say, “Listen, man.” But that’s all I get out. The cop goes flying over the hood of my car and into the weeds on the other side.

I get out. Josef is there with his perfectly coiffed Nazi hair.

“Why are you wasting time with these people? Kill them and go on,” he says.

“I wasn’t going to kill them. I was going to knock their heads and lock them in the trunk of their car.”

“You enjoyed killing Kissi so much before, but when you had nowhere else to go, you asked us for our help. Now we’re on the same side and you won’t kill a couple of humans who would happily shoot you.”

I flick the burning Malediction butt at him. He looks more surprised at that than he did when I cut off his head.

“You and your whole race were off floating around in the universe like dust. You wanted my deal. And I killed Kissi before because you’re unreasonable psycho fucks and you were on Mason’s side.”

I look over at the cop lying in the weeds.

“These guys I could have handled without anyone having t thone havo go to the emergency room.”

Which reminds me.

A door opens and slams. The rookie cop is out of the patrol car, his gun cocked and ready. Josef heads right for him.

“Stop where you are!” the rookie shouts. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Josef is almost on him.

“Stop!”

The rookie fires twice. Exit wounds punch fist-size holes out of the back of Josef’s designer shirt, but he never stops moving. I can hear the rookie’s neck snap from all the way over here. I go over to the curb to check on the older cop. He’s unconscious, but his heart is beating.

“Get away from him and do what you came here to do!” shouts Josef.

He heads for me, but he’s been shot and he’s a little slow. I get to him first. Squeezing his throat with one hand and his balls with the other, I flip him up and over the front of the cop car. He rolls and smashes the windshield. Before he can scramble off, I grab his ankle and spin, tossing him into the back of the Metro. He bounces off it and takes a swing at me, but he’s off balance. I slip his blow and punch him in the throat. He falls to his knees.

“Don’t ever just walk in and take over a situation I have in hand. Understand?”

He nods, trying to remind his throat how to breathe.

“And don’t tell me how to do what I do. I invited you here, but it’s still my tea party. It might not look like it to you sometimes, but I know what I’m doing. Got it?”

Josef nods. Resting his elbows on the Metro, he pulls himself to his feet. He’s still unsteady, so I lean him back against the car, playing concerned dad now that the kid’s been put in his place. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing two-thirds of the time, but I’d never admit that to a Kissi. What I need to do is calm Hermann Göring down.

I say, “You’re going to get to do a lot more killing soon. And against a lot more fun and interesting opponents than these two. When it’s over, you’ll have Hell and your own kingdom again. That is if you don’t get trigger-happy and Fuck. Up. Everything. Do you know where Eleusis is?”

Josef nods.

“When I get Downtown that’s where I’m heading. Wait for my signal there. Got it?”

“Yes,” he says. If his eyes could walk out of his head, they’d march over here and strangle me with my own intestines.

llsr="#000I take his hand and drop Traven’s car keys in them.

“Do you remember the hotel where you came to see me?”

“Yes.”

“Drive this car over there and leave it on the street. Leave the keys under the driver’s seat.”

He looks at the keys like I just shoveled dog shit into his hand.

“Why would I do that? I’m not your errand boy.”

“Because it’s not an errand. It’s a loose end and loose ends are what ruin plans and get people hurt. Understand?”

He takes the keys and gets into the Metro.

Before he closes the door he says, “Go to Hell.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

As he heads out I check on the older cop. His heart and breathing are on the low end, but steady. I take the car keys off his belt and go back to the patrol car.

Inside, I reach across the laptop bolted between the seats and unhook the mike from the dashboard.

“Officers down at the corner of Adams and Eleventh Street. One is alive but hurt and the other is pretty much dead. For the record, I didn’t do either one of them, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you who did.”

The cop’s communication unit crackles. I look for an off button but can’t find one, so I kick everything on the dashboard until the noise stops. While I’m in Hulk mode, I punch the shattered windshield out of the way. The safety glass comes out in one piece. I shove it across the hood and let it fall on the side of the road.

Sorry, boys. I really wanted both of you to go home tonight. But sometimes pianos really do fall from the sky and sometimes you’re the Coyote and catch it in the teeth. I’ve been there plenty of times. If I see you on the other side, I owe you a drink. If not, maybe it’ll help knowing I’m about to do something that’s really going to hurt.

I start the patrol car and the Crown Vic’s V-8 engine screams. This is what I need for a Black Dahlia. This is the right way to leave, like Vidocq likes to say, le merdier. I slam the car into drive and floor it, smoking the tires and fishtailing down the street before I get hold of the thing. Suicide is still a goddamn scary idea, but burning rubber in a cop car at least makes it a little more fun.

Crenshaw is up ahead.

Candy flashes in my head. Red-slash eyes in black ice. Mad-dog teeth in my shoulder. Yes, I’m leaving you for another woman, buacrer womat she’s dead and it’s only for three days and I’m coming back. I promise.

Shut up. Not the time for that. I push her back with the angel.

When Alice’s face rolls up, I don’t run from it. I examine it from a dozen different angles. Was Medea telling the truth? Is it possible Alice lied to me the whole time we were together? To my surprise, the angel comes up with an answer: “Who cares?”

It’s right. Even if she’s Lizzie Borden, am I going to leave Alice down there?

No.

Am I going to give up a chance to twist Mason’s head off when he sees I’ve rescued her?

No.

Don’t think. Just go. There’s no time. No thought. No consequences. Just a bright flash of pain and then I’m home. There’s nothing but the rush.

When I can see where Crenshaw passes under I-10, I stop, shift into reverse, and drive back a half a block. I can see cop lights in the distance, heading for the officer-down call.

Fuck Bava. Fuck doubt. Fuck everything.

I stomp the accelerator and aim the car for a freeway support midway under the roadway, in the center of the crossroads. I take the plastic rabbit from my pocket and hold it in my teeth.

I hope you’re up there, Mustang Sally. I never prayed to God, but I’m praying to you right now. Please know what the fuck you’re doing.

I’m doing just a hair over a hundred and ten when I hit. Time slo-mos as the car jumps the curb and takes the last few yards airborne.

It doesn’t really hurt when we hit. It’s more like a supersonic body blow as all the air and fluids in my body explode out of me like butcher-shop fireworks. My eyes can’t focus. The world is a liquid blur. I hear the scream and groan of metal as the Crown Vic pancakes against the support. The steering wheel twists upward and turns my skull to cake batter. The front of the car comes apart and a million metal and plastic razor blades rip my skin off the bones. My arms break as I flip over the dashboard and out the window. One knee catches and is torn apart on the way out. I glide over the car hood like an Olympic figure skater and into a whirlpool of flame as the engine explodes.

Time shifts again. Shoots back up to normal speed. I slide through fire and gas and come out the other side a limp ball of flame. My eyes focus long enough to see the freeway support. Funny thing. It doesn’t look like I’m flying at it. It’s like it’s coming for me.

And the world goes away.

THERE’S GidtEȁRIT IN my eyes. When I try to brush it away, I just grind it in more. I roll over so my face is to the ground and run my hand all over my face so whatever’s there falls down and not back onto me. The grit is all over me, like I’ve been rolling around in kitty litter. When my eyes are clear, I work up a little saliva and spit, clearing more grit from the back of my throat.

That’s it. That’s as much as I can do right now. Did I save everything yet? Guess not.

The world goes away again.

WHEN I WAKE up things are a little better. It feels like this thing weighing me down might be my body and not a bag of wet cement. I open my eyes.

The world is a fuzzy indistinct place, like I’m looking at it from inside a vodka bottle.

From what I can make out, I’m still under the freeway. Sunlight streams in from both sides of the underpass. I roll onto my back. My left foot rests on the crumpled front bumper of the cop car. I focus my eyes on that one image. My foot and the car. Slowly, the world comes back into focus.

The car isn’t a car anymore. It’s a big metal cigarette butt a giant stubbed out in a six-lane concrete ashtray. I pull my leg off the bumper and let it drop to the ground. I was expecting a lot of blood, but there isn’t any. I check my arms. No bones sticking out. I feel for the knee I left behind in the car. It’s on my leg right where it should be. My clothes aren’t even ripped. The plastic rabbit is laying in the grit by my head. I pick it up and wobble to my feet. Mustang Sally was right. I went through the Dahlia and came out me again. But where am I?

I’m still at the crossroads. Sort of. This isn’t the underpass from last night. This one is an underpass and nothing else. There isn’t any freeway on either side of it, just cracked hardpan in both directions. The concrete support and the car are half buried in sand, like they’ve been there a hundred years. The sun is so bright out in the open that I can’t see anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that this isn’t L.A. and it sure as hell isn’t Hell.

I go out the far side of the underpass into the light. I have to close my eyes until my eyes adjust to the glare. When I can see, there’s nothing to see, just sand and more sand. Big rippling dunes curving down to little dunes. They go on forever. There’s a miserable path of compacted dirt leading between the sand hills. A few parched and poisonous-looking weeds stick up along the sides of the path. I go back through the underpass and check the other side. It’s the same. I’m in the middle of a goddamn desert. And this side doesn’t even have a little path, so I head back out the other.

When I’m out I grab hold of the rusted guardrail and pull myself onto the Twilight Zone slice of freeway. A road sign is suspended across all eight lanes. One of the support legs has fallen, but it’s still readable. Big white letters studded with reflectors on a green background. Typical California freeway stuff. The sign reads:

WELCOME TO NOD

POPULATION 0

A second smaller sign points to where an exit might have been a million years ago. It reads:

EDEN 10 MILES WEST

The arrow at the bottom points in the same direction as the dirt path. I climb down and start walking.

IT’S AS HOT as a dragon’s balls. I have my coat off and thrown over my shoulder before I’ve gone fifty yards. I don’t do outdoors. I’ll take the arena any day over this Miami damnation tanning contest.

Bava showing up and sticking her bony fingers in my skull really threw me at the end. If something has gone wrong and I’m stuck in an afterlife cow town somewhere between Nowhere and Fuck All it could be my fault.

Alice was a mole feeding the Sub Rosa intel about my life and me? I don’t buy it. That’s exactly the kind of psyops party trick Mason would come up with. Then he’d get Aelita to tell Bava because she’s security and security believes anything a superior or a halo tells them.

I don’t believe it, but the angel won’t shut up about it. I think the Black Dahlia might have shaken something loose in its head. I’m the unreasonable one in this Laurel and Hardy act, but it’s jabbering away in a frantic stream of What if? Could it be? And that explains everything.

Maybe the angel can’t deal with being on this side of death or whatever this is. Have I blown its tiny feathered brain? This treasure hunt was going to be hard enough with Little Mary Sunshine whispering to me, but it’s going to be a whole lot worse if I end up with a crazy person trying to claw his way out of my skull.

The simple truth of it is that Alice couldn’t be a mole. I would have felt it if she was Sub Rosa. Alice is the only person I never bullshitted or lied to. She’s the only person I ever really trusted. That means if she was what Bava says and I missed it, everything I’ve ever believed about my life or myself is wrong.

My human father, the one stuck with the lousy job of raising me after a certain angel called Kinski knocked up my mom, hated me. He even took a shot at me once when we were deer hunting. So much for the father-son three-leg race at the church picnic.

My mother loved me, but was lost at sea most of the time when I was growing up. The drinking and pills didn’t help. I don’t remember a single moment when she didn’t seem lonely. She jumped at every sound in the yard or at the door like she was expecting someone who was never there.

There’s Vidocq, who’s been more of a fatherend of a f to me than my civilian father or Kinski. He’s the only other person I trust as much as Alice. Trusted.

I don’t see how Bava’s bullshit could be true, but Alice did hold out on me at least once. One night she told me that she was rich and that she came from heavy money. She never said much else about her family, but I always took that to mean she was as far from hers as I was from mine. Was she about to confess that all that filthy lucre came from Daddy’s late-night infomercial magic-wand business or youth potions from Elizabeth Báthory’s blood?

Goddammit. How could I let Bava get to me like this? Was she throwing some hoodoo at me when we talked? No. I would have felt it, and if I didn’t, the angel in my head would. It has to be a mind game and I’m ashamed that it’s worked. Or maybe the bitch was telling me the truth.

And where in the goddamn middle of for fuck’s sake am I? Is Mustang Sally in on Mason’s cosmic scam? If there even is a scam.

Calm down. Deep breaths. Go to your happy place. Oh, wait. I don’t have one. Slow down and think, but thinking is supposed to be the angel’s job. Nice time to stop taking your pills, Saint Acid Test.

Fuck me, it’s hot here.

There isn’t even a decent enough shadow so I can slink into the Room and go home.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and there will be a postcard stand somewhere. “Dear Everyone. Hope you don’t mind being doomed. Xoxo Stark.”

The road disappears ahead. A dune has blown across it like the wall of a sand fortress. If the desert has eaten the rest of the road, things are about to get really interesting.

The dune is soft and loose. I can’t walk. I have to crawl up it. It’s slow and hot with the coat draped over my shoulder. I move one hand. One foot. The other hand. The other foot. If this is a joke and Sisyphus is waiting at the top to hand me his boulder, he can kiss my ass.

Halfway up and I’m getting very pissed off. The angel is freaking out and the clock is ticking. Even if Mason is lying about having Alice and just wants me chasing my tail all over Hell, I need to know. It means that he’s ready to make his move on Heaven.