“I knew they’d drag you in. You can’t stay away from trouble.”
“Can I help it if trouble has me on speed dial?”
“Have fun, sucker.”
“Vaya con Dios, Alfredo Garcia.”
Sola already gave Vidocq the Sentenza family’s address, so I pick him up and we head north on the Hollywood Freeway.
STUDIO CITY IS the kind of place where the poor have to settle for two-million-dollar “luxury properties” instead of mansions. The only difference between them and the genuinely rich in the hills is that they have to get by with one pool and they can’t park a 747 in their two-story living room, though they can probably squeeze in a decent-size blimp. There are fake villas with fake Roman mosaics out front and fake castles with wrought-iron gates like Henry VIII is going to stop by with guacamole for the keg party.
Lucky for everyone, the address Julia gave us belongs to a place on Coldwater Canyon Avenue with nothing but a long snaking driveway. No monarchist gates, armed guards, or a giant hermetically sealed Jetsons dome.
At the end of the drive, a gold Lexus is parked next to a clean but well-used Ford pickup. There are streaks of mud and dried cement around the truck’s wheel wells. We get out and follow a stone path to the front door. I ring the bell.
A woman opens the door a second later. She’s obviously been waiting for us. She’s about fifty and pretty, with short dark hair and a high-quality chin tuck.
“Oh,” she says, all the hope and brightness disappearing from her eyes.
It’s Hunter’s mom. I can see the resemblance from one of the photos back at the bar. Mom takes one look at my scarred face and I can practically see the words home invasion with multiple fatalities spinning around her brain like the dragon in a Chinese New Year’s parade.
I say, “Mrs. Sentenza. Julia Sola sent us.”
She relaxes. The storm in her brain clears and her blood pressure drops to below aneurysm levels. Her little freak-out probably shaved a good five years off her life, but they’re the shitty ones at the end, so no big deal.
“Oh. You must be Mr. Stark and Mr. Vidocq. Julia said you’d be dros t019;d bpping by.” She stops, staring at Candy in her robot sunglasses.
I say, “This is my assistant, Candy.”
Mrs. Sentenza gives Candy a thin smile.
“Of course she is. Please come in.”
The inside of the house is bright, with light coming through a million windows and reflecting off the polished tile floor. Obsessive California chic. Like they own the sky and are goddamn well going to use every inch of it. Hunter’s father is waiting for us by the stairs leading to the upper floor of a two-story living room. (I told you.)
“This is Hunter’s father, Kerry.”
“Nice to meet you all. Call me K.W.”
Handshakes all around. His grip is firm and serious. He has rough laborer’s hands, like he actually works for a living.
“Are you three exorcists, too?” he asks.
“No. Father Traven holds the prayer beads. We’re more like spiritual bouncers.”
“Well, if you can fix this, we’re willing to try.”
There aren’t any hoodoo vibes coming off these people. Nothing shifty and hidden. They come across like straight-arrow civilians who wouldn’t know a Hand of Glory from an oven mitt. They’re not responsible for calling a demon into the house. Unless they’re a lot more powerful than they look and can throw up a glamour powerful enough to even fool the angel in my head. Their eyes are dilating and their hearts are racing. I smell Valium and alcohol in Mom’s sweat. Most of what I’m getting off them is heavyweight fear for their kid and confusion and a meek mistrust of us three. No surprise there. They don’t run into people like us on the golf course at the country club.
Vidocq looks around the place. Like me, he’s looking for any traces of magic, in his case mystical objects.
“You have a very lovely home,” says Candy. “It looks like a happy place.”
“It was,” says Mom.
I say, “Can we see the room?”
“It’s Hunter’s room. His name is Hunter.”
“Hunter. Got it. Can we see Hunter’s room?”
Mom isn’t sure about Candy and Vidocq, but I can tell she hates me already. I’m not sure about Dad. He looks like the kind of guy who didn’t come from money, and now that he has it, he’s always a little on edge waitingrunedge wa for someone to try to take it away. That means he’ll have a handgun or two in the house.
K.W. leads us to Hunter’s room while Mom trails behind.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but did Hunter take anything like antidepressants? Or was he ever locked up for, you know, behavior problems?”
“You mean, was our son crazy?” asks Mom.
“Was he?”
“No. He was a normal boy. He ran track.”
So that’s what normal is. I should write that down.
“Did he take any recreational drugs?”
Mom’s attitude has gone from hate to stabby.
“He’d never touch those. He’s an athlete. Besides, when Hunter was a boy he saw Tommy, his older brother, destroy himself with drugs. He hallucinated. He was scared all the time and couldn’t sleep for weeks on end. And it kept getting worse. Then Tommy died. Hunter saw all of it.”
“He didn’t die. He hanged himself,” says Dad. His face is set and hard, but it’s clear that admitting this hurt.
“Don’t say it like that,” says Mom. The tears come fast, an automatic reaction when her other son’s death comes up.
These people are unbelievably easy to read. They don’t have any magic. There aren’t any spells that will hide it this thoroughly.
K.W. puts an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“Jen, why don’t you put on some fresh coffee for our guests?”
Mom nods and heads down the hall.
When she’s gone K.W. turns to us.
“Sorry. This thing has us both a little crazy, but it’s hit her worse. How are you supposed to live after one son’s suicide and your other son’s . . . well, whatever the hell this is. What’s normal again after that?” he says. He swallows hard. “I still don’t know what we did to ruin our boys.”
“You didn’t ruin anyone,” says Candy. “Things just happen sometimes. It’s easier to fall off the edge of the world than you might think. Even for nice people.”
K.W. looks at her. His eyes are wet, but he’s fighting hard not to let it go any further. I hate being reminded that rich people are still people.
He pushes open the door to Hunter’s room.
“This is it,” he says. “Look around at anything you want. We don’t have any secrets.”
Mom comes back.
“I put coffee on.”
She looks past us into the ruined room.
She says, “Julia told us not to touch anything, so we haven’t.”
I scan the wreckage inside.
“You haven’t done anything? Like a spilled glass of water or class photo?”
“No.”
“Good. Never clean up after monsters.”
“My son isn’t a monster.”
“I’m not talking about your son.”
Vidocq goes into Hunter’s room.
“What my associate is saying is that when powerful supernatural forces are at work, without proper preparation any encounter can be extremely dangerous. My advice would be to not enter the room at all and to keep it locked unless Julia or one of her associates is here.”
Jen nods and stares, a little surprised at Vidocq’s accent. She relaxes a little. Even in a pile of splintered furniture Vidocq is a charmer.
Candy and I go inside while Mom and Dad watch from the hall.
I kneel down, take some packets of salt I lifted from Roscoe’s, and sprinkle a white line across the entrance. Vidocq sticks iron milagros down one side of the door frame with some green hardware-store putty.
“I have to close the door for a second,” I tell the Sentenzas.
I get out the black blade and carve a protective rune into the wood on the inside of the door frame.
Vidocq reaches for my hand like he wants to stop me, but he’s too slow.
“Why are you destroying their house further? Why not put an ash twig over the door?”
“Why don’t we send the demon roses while we’re at it? I hate hippie hoodoo.”
Vidocq rummages in his coat and finds ash powder in one of his vials. He reaches up and sets it on the frame oft" the frver the door.
“Okay,” I say to K.W. and Jen when I open the door. “Nothing should get out of here.”
“Thank you,” Jen says.
The room is a wreck. It looks like it was worked over by Linda Blair on a crack binge. One of the windows is boarded up. There are holes in the wall where it looks like someone punched through. The place hums with residual dark hoodoo, like there are wasps in the walls. I don’t think the Sentenzas can hear it, but Candy, Vidocq, and I can. Something bad was stomping around in here, but I have no idea what. Vidocq is blowing some kind of powder into the air and watches it settle on the floor and furniture. He looks at me and shrugs. Candy is over by Hunter’s closet. I look at her and she shakes her head.
Vidocq prowls the room, trying different powders and potions, trying to identify the magic residue. Candy paws through Hunter’s closet and dresser.
I ask, “How did the whole thing start?”
“I guess it started with the migraines,” says K.W. “His head would hurt and he’d get real sensitive to light. He said there were ants eating their way into his brain. I get migraines sometimes, too, so I’d give him some of my Imitrex and put him in a dark room. Sometimes it helped, but other times it made things worse. I’d hear him talking and he said it was to the voices in his head. After a week of that, things got really bad.”
Jen picks up the story.
“Hunter stopped sleeping. He said he had horrible dreams. Things were chasing him. Not to hurt him, just to have him. He drank coffee and energy drinks to stay awake, but he’d fall asleep anyway. There would be marks on the walls where he clawed them. His hands would be bleeding. It was like Thomas all over again.”
Hunter’s bed is just a bare mattress. The scene of the exorcism. All four corners are stained with blood. The kid cut himself on the restraints during the ritual. The rest of the mattress is stained with every fluid a human body can produce. There are deep claw marks by the head of the bed. Even some bite marks.
“Did he ever take anything more powerful to stay awake? Speed? Amphetamines, I mean.”
K.W. says, “I know what speed is. And no, not that I’m aware of.”
Candy stands at the foot of the bed looking. It’s the sigil Julia told us about, which was burned into the ceiling. I can’t place it, but I’m sure I’ve seen it before. I snap a picture with my phone.
Neither parent has moved from the door. Jen has one hand over her mouth as she watches us ransack her younger son’s room.
“What you’ve told me so far could be anything from a bad batch of acid usttch of to a brain tumor. When did you start thinking it was supernatural?”
Jen says, “There was the time I found him floating in midair.”
Vidocq stops pouring his potions.
“Julia didn’t mention that,” he says.
Jen turns away so she doesn’t have to look at us.
“Tell us what you saw,” says Candy. She has a good instinct for this kind of work, for knowing when it’s best for a woman to ask another woman a painful question.
“It was early in the morning. It was still dark out. I couldn’t sleep, so I came by Hunter’s room to check on him and I saw that.”
She nods at the scorched symbol on the ceiling.
“You saw him making it?”
She nods.
“He was floating there over his bed, smiling like he was the happiest boy in the world. He was digging that symbol into the ceiling with his fingers. There was blood all over his arms. He looked at me and then back at the ceiling. Then his whole body convulsed like he was going to throw up. He opened his mouth and out came a jet of flame. It spread all across the ceiling. I thought it was going to burn the house down. When he stopped, all that was burned was the symbol. After that he fell onto the bed and lay there like he was asleep. That morning we went looking for someone who could help.”
K.W. squeezes her shoulder.
“It smells like coffee is ready. Would you go and bring us some?”
She nods and disappears down the hall, her arms wrapped around herself.
When she’s out of earshot K.W. says, “Hunter did take drugs. Jen doesn’t know about it. It was Hunter’s and my secret. We made a deal. I’d pay for rehab and we’d never let his mother know. After Thomas, it would have killed her.”
“What was he on?”
“Some new thing. Akira, he called it.”
“I haven’t heard of it.”
“I have,” says Candy. “It’s a hallucinogen. Real popular with the Sub Rosa cool kids.”
Vidocq nods.
“I’ve heard of it, too. It’s supposed to enhance a user’s psychic ability. However, Akira seems to work on anyone, so it’halo its moving out into the civilian world.”
Candy says, “A bunch of kids take it together. The high comes from being able to touch other users’ minds.”
Brilliant. Teenyboppers use condoms to fuck safe and then they bore psychic holes in their heads so that anyone or anything can get inside.
“Were you here during the exorcism?” I ask K.W.
