“Who gave you the special Akira?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Sure you can. Just give me a name, I’ll go, and you can get back to turning your brain to fish food.”
“Fuck you.”
She practically spits the words. Her whole body changes. She was a limp jellyfish a second ago and now she’s ready to put her fist through the wall. We’re on to the next step in this soap opera. She’s not thinking like a tame little user now. She’s moved into dealer mode. Hard-core. Defiant.
“Do you believe in magic, Carolyn?”
“Get out of my house, faggot.”
“I don’t mean kid-party magic. I mean the real thing. Witches on brooms. Love potions. Hexes and demons. Do you believe in that?”
“You know, one phone call and you’ll be smoked before you get back to Hollywood.”
I run through some ideas. There are a lot of scary things I learned in the arena, but I only used them on Hellions and Lurkers. Ninety-nine percent of what I learned I’ve never tried on a civilian and I don’t particularly want to because I’m pretty sure they’d go off like a gerbil in a microwave.
Her hands are shaking from the drugs, but she’s past scared and is deep into gangster territory.
She puts on her best Scarface sneer and says, “You just going to sit there staring at me? I know you. Pussies like you talk and talk, but you won’t do anything. You don’t know the kind of people I know. They have balls.”
She sniffs and wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her hand.
I take out Mason’s lighter, thumb it open, and spark a flame. Her eyes flicker to mine and then zero in on the lighter.
“I’d like to show you a magic trick. Would you like to see a magic trick, Carolyn?”
She gets up. I grab her arm. She twists and tries to sucker punch me. Puts her whole body into it. I don’t try to stop her. I’m faster than any civilian, so she’s moving in exquisite slo-mo. When she’s a few inches from mfonnches faking contact, I lean back slightly and let her fist sail past. Grab the wrist and twist so her arm bends out like a chicken wing and every muscle and tendon in her shoulder feels like it’s going to snap. Carolyn goes down face-first onto the sofa and rolls herself into a little ball, squeezing her aching shoulder. I wait. Eventually, she sits up. There’s a half-finished cigarette in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. She takes it, puts it between her lips, and starts looking around for matches. I’m still holding the lighter. I hold the flame out to her. She leans forward. I pull the lighter back and she follows a few inches. When she realizes I’m fucking with her, she stops and gives me a dirty look.
I say, “Let me get that for you for real.”
There’s one thing you have to remember about threats: when you make one, mean it. This is especially true with addicts. Their brains aren’t designed to absorb new information and they’re used to being slapped and stomped, so that doesn’t scare them anymore. If you need to impress upon an addict the gravity of their situation, you need to make a threat that doesn’t seem like a threat, but more like God pissing on them from a mountaintop.
I hold the lighter to my hand and my skin bursts into flames. Fire is fire and this isn’t fun hoodoo, but I can stand the pain long enough to make my point.
Carolyn jumps back at the sight of my burning mitt. I play it up. Let the meat cook black until it flakes, and crispy skin drifts onto the carpet. I could let it get down to the bone, but I really don’t want to do that. I move my hand toward Carolyn. She presses herself against the back of the sofa, trying to put as much distance as she can between us. I touch the tip of a finger to her cigarette until it glows.
“This is what I meant by magic. I know worse tricks than this, but let’s focus on this one for the moment. What do you think would happen if I held you with this hand and used you to mop up this messy, messy house? Does that sound like fun? I think it would hurt. Maybe as much as it hurt Hunter when that shit you gave him turned him into a demon’s chew toy. I’m going to ask you one more time, and if you fuck with me, things are going to get drastic. Who gave you the Akira for Hunter?”
“Cale,” she says.
She takes a long breath after she says it. Rubs the sores on her arms. She wants to pick at them, but she knows I don’t like that.
“Cale what?”
She shrugs.
“I don’t know. Just Cale.” She nods at my still-burning hand. “I’ve seen him do weird shit like that, too. Like magic and shit.”
“Where can I find Cale?”
“Downtown. At Dead Set. It’s a club on Traction Avenue near Hewitt. You can’t miss it. At night they show old zombie movies on the side of the building.Iuilding01D;
“What’s Cale look like?”
“Tall. Skinny. He wears big boots to look taller and he wears one of those, like, Nazi-officer trench coats. His hair is bleached all white and there’s like these runes or some kind of voodoo shit tattooed on the sides of his head.”
I whisper some Hellion and the flames on my hand flutter and disappear. There’s most of a flat can of beer on the floor next to the sofa. I pour it over my aching hand. The beer bubbles and steams away. I hand Carolyn the empty can. She clutches it to herself like it’s a holy relic. I wipe the beer off my hand on the sofa and get up.
“Remember what I said, Carolyn. Go see a doctor about your blood pressure. You’re about to lose your supplier, so your job is going to evaporate. The good news is that Cale won’t be asking for any of that money you have in the wall. Take it and use it to clean yourself up. Dying isn’t the worst thing in the world, but dying because you’re stupid is.”
I head out the front door. I’m halfway across the doomed lawn when I hear Carolyn yell something. I go back to the house. Behind the bright mesh of the screen door Carolyn looks like a ghost child.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
She leans forward so that her face is almost touching the screen and whispers, “Tell Hunter I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . you know.”
I nod.
“Sure. I’ll tell him.”
WHEN I GET back to the hotel, I find Candy in the room and Kasabian holding forth on Terrence Malick’s Badlands.
“See, what Malick did wasn’t tell us the story of a couple of kids on a cross-country murder spree, but to tell us a dream about it. Like the whole thing is a shared fantasy in the kids’ heads and ours, which, from what I’ve heard, is pretty close to what it was like for Charlie Starkweather to kill all those people.”
She smiles up at me from the foot of the bed as I come in.
“Hey there. I’m getting Film 101 from your boss.”
“My boss?”
“That’s what he said.”
I look at Kasabian.
He says, “What do you know about accounting, insurance, inventory control, and, you know, running a video store besides watching movies all day?”
“Not much.”
“Then I’m the boss.”
I sit down next to Candy.
“You can’t argue with that logic,” she says.
“I could, but it would end in tears and divorce lawyers, and I can’t stand paperwork.”
Candy leans gently into me so our shoulders are touching.
I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to her.
“Why don’t you get us another room where we can talk? If the night manager gets weird, use my name and give him too much money. He’ll set you up.”
She bounces off the bed onto her feet and goes to the door. On her way out she blows Kasabian a kiss.
“I’ll be back for your master class on Monte Hellman.”
He beams at her as she leaves.
“Now that’s the kind of girl you shoplift beer for.”
He whizzes around on his skateboard to face me.
“Good thing you got here when you did. I was going to rock her world with some surfboard moves. She would have been mine.”
“You’re the boss and I don’t surf. You could probably have her in Mexico by now with a preacher and a cut-up fishnet stocking for a wedding veil and a donkey for the witness.”
“Badlands was probably too cerebral for a first date. I should have gone with something sexy and scary like Suspiria. Next time.”
“Sure. Next time.”
I start to say something about delusions of grandeur, but keep my mouth shut. I haven’t seen Kasabian this happy in probably ever.
I’m out of cigarettes. I reach into the nightstand and get a fresh pack of Maledictions. There aren’t too many packs left. Kasabian’s happy. He doesn’t need to know that. I light two and stick one between Kasabian’s lips.
“I need you to look up something for me in the Codex.”
“That sounds like work. Didn’t you see the sign? I’m closed for the evening.”
“You may be the boss, but I pay the beer bills a
Kasabian puffs on his cigarette and frowns. His little legs take the Malediction out of his mouth and tap ashes onto the floor.
“What do you want to know?”
“I need to know about a . . . Qlifart? Qlifuck? Screw it. Demon. This one is different. It’s confident. Maybe even smart. It does possessions, but it doesn’t automatically attack unless it feels threatened. I thought for a while it might be a Kissi, but I know them, and this doesn’t feel like their work.”
He shakes his head.
“That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a demon, it’s dumb. All demons are dumb. Which means they have an inferiority complex that makes them trigger-happy.”
“If it made sense, I wouldn’t ask you to look in the Codex.”
“Why are you dragging me into this thing? I don’t like demons. Just because you’re feeling magnanimous doesn’t mean I am.”
I sit on the end of the bed and smoke. I flick the ashes onto the carpet, too. Got to give the maid something to do when she comes in so she won’t notice the dead man on the skateboard.
“Yes, you are. Candy’s working with me on this. Do it for her. Dazzle her with your kung fu.”
“Nice try. I was kidding before.”
“She’s a Jade. You never know what kind of fetishes they have.”
Faint traces of cigarette smoke drift from the bottom of Kasabian’s neck and hang around his face like mountain mist.
“I was going to watch Blue Velvet and order chicken wings. What more could a guy want?”
“How about a body?”
His eyes narrow.
“Is this case of yours going to get me one?”
“I doubt it. But fucking off in here isn’t either. The more hoodoo work we do, the more likely one of us will stumble on a fix-it spell for your situation.”
“My situation,” he mumbles. “You put me in this situation.”
“After you shot me.”
He smacks the keyboard and the computer wakes up.
“Asshole. Here I was, talking to a pretty girl, content as Jayne Mansfield’s pasties, and you come in and want me to flip burgers on the night shift.”
“You’ll check the Codex?”
“I’ll check.”
“Cool.”
I get up to go out. He yells something at me.
“I need highly concentrated carbs to do this brain work. Get me something cold and I’ll make you Employee of the Month.”
I go to the kitchen and get a six-pack from the fridge.
I set it on his table and say, “You want a soufflé or something, too? I’ll need to warm up the oven.”
“This will do. Don’t forget to punch out when you leave.”
“I’m about to punch something.”
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Aloha from Hell
I ASK THE night manager what room Candy is in and head upstairs to the last one at the back. It has a nice view of a used-car lot.
I stop for a second before going in, feeling a little strange. Candy and I have been dancing around each other for months, but we’ve hardly ever been alone together. Maybe the one and only time was when she stabbed me in the heart to give me the zombie serum. Does that count as a first date? And if so, on what planet? I’m thirteen again, trying to figure out how to talk to a girl. This is ridiculous. We’ve killed and fought side by side and kept the gates of Hell from opening. I should be able to string enough words together not to drool on myself.
I open the door and Candy is waiting for me, standing naked in the middle of the bed. I barely get the door closed when she jumps all the way across the room and lands on my chest, pinning me against the wall. A pure predator ambush.
Candy’s skin is as corpse cold as I remember from the first time she pecked me on the cheek outside Doc Kinski’s clinic. But she warms up when we fall onto the bed and I’m on top of her and we’re kissing like it’s the cure for cancer.
She shreds my shirt with her nails and I barely get my pants off before she destroys those, too.
Candy wraps her legs around me. I slip inside her and the world goes black and hot. Her teeth woombHer teelf into my shoulder. I pull her hair as her nails dig into my back. I pull harder and bend her head back so I can see her face. I catch a glimpse of the Jade lurking just under the skin. Her nails extend into claws and our grinding bodies torpedo us from this soft and stupid human world to someplace where monsters can tear and bite. No one’s afraid of it and all the groans and pain and craziness are beautiful.
The hotel bed makes a sound like a bullet and collapses beneath us. I pull her legs onto my shoulders and push deeper inside her. When she throws back her arms, her hands smash through the cheap wall paneling. She shifts her weight and rolls on top of me. My elbow comes down on the nightstand, cracking it and demolishing the phone.
