Aloha From Hell (10 page)

“One more thing, Father. Julia never told us why you are excommunicated.”

He’s thinking. Not sure he wants to answer.

“I’ll tell you if you promise to talk with me about Hell sometime,” he says.

“Deal.”

Traven goes back to his desk and picks up the book he’d hidden earlier.

“I don’t like other people to see this particular book. It seems wrong for it to be a mere curiosity.”

“I saw you cover it up.”

The spray of red on the front of the book nearly covers an ancient sigil.

“I don’t recognize the symbol.”

“It’s the sign of one of the Angra Om Ya cults,” says Vidocq, looking over my shoulder.

Traven nods.

“You’ll understand why the church was so angry with me. They have an unswerving policy that there is no God but their God. There never was D;

“You translated the Angra Om Ya’s bible. No wonder God doesn’t want you whacking his piñata anymore.”

“Certainly the Church doesn’t.”

“It isn’t all bad, Father. I own a video store. Come around sometime. The damned get a discount.”

He gives us one of his exhausted smiles.

“That’s very kind of you. Since leaving the Church, I’ve come to believe that it’s the little, fleeting pleasures like watching videos that mean the most in this life.”

“Amen to that.”

W
HEN WE’RE BACK
in the car I call the Sentenzas. K.W. answers.

“K.W., it’s Stark. Did Hunter ever tell you where he got his drugs? Maybe give you a name?”

A slight pause.

“It was a girl. Not a girlfriend exactly, but someone he spent time with. Hang on a minute.”

Over the phone comes the sound of things being moved. Furniture scrapes. K.W. curses. Then he’s back on the phone.

“I knew he’d written it down somewhere. Her name is Carolyn. Carolyn McCoy.”

“Is there an address?”

He reads it to me.

“Okay. Thanks. We’ll be in touch.”

I call up the phone’s map app and punch in the address. It’s off the Golden State Freeway in Sun Valley.

Vidocq is in the backseat. I turn to look at him.

“How did you hear about Akira? Did you ever try it?”

He shakes his head.

“No. What Hunter’s father said at the house was wrong. Akira is nothing new. Like all drugs, it goes in and out of favor. I haven’t heard it mentioned for perhaps two years. It sounds as if it’s coming back. I’m a bit surprised.”

“Why?”

“It’s not an easy thino man easyg to fashion. The chemistry must be precise. Even a small mistake and you will not have synthesized Akira, but a very potent
neurotoxine
. Also, many of the elements are not readily available. Some of the plants and herbs required can only be cultivated in native soil. A mountaintop in China. A rain forest in Brazil. You must find a reliable source of the pure ingredients even to attempt to formulate Akira.”

“How is it you know so much about it?”

“I was once asked to manufacture it. I was offered quite a large sum of money, in fact. I refused, but they asked again. Each time they asked, the amount of money increased, but I still refused.” He turns and looks out the window. “Finally I said yes. Not because I wanted the money, but because I’m a coward, and when they grew insistent, I was afraid to keep saying no.”

“Was it Mater Leeds? I heard that she and her people are big dope suppliers to the Sub Rosa.”

He shakes his head and looks at me.

“No. It was Marshal Wells. The Golden Vigil wanted Akira.”

I frown and look at Vidocq. He nods.

“What would a bunch of Homeland Security Bible-thumpers want with Akira? Were their office parties better than I thought?” I ask.

“I suspect they were interested in the drug’s psychic aspects. They had many staff psychics, but mind reading has never been a precise art and subjects can resist. Now imagine that you had a drug that made a psychic link pleasurable. A drug that made the subject being interrogated feel as merry as New Year’s Eve.”

“Wells would love that. It sounds like something Aelita would love. Or Lucifer.”

They tried something like that on me Downtown. For a while I was fighting in the arena so much that they gave me quarters in the basement. They made a big deal of it. Really it was just another holding pen, but it had four walls and a door and I had it to myself. I was so grateful I kicked and punched my guards harder than ever when they came for me. It was worth taking a beating to keep them from knowing that the filthy room made me happy.

When I was in Hell a funny thing happened. Every time I got beaten, burned, stabbed, or impaled in the arena, it just made me stronger. When I discovered I was a nephilim, it all made sense. But at the time I didn’t know why it was happening. The Hellion fight masters and soldiers wanted to know why I didn’t have anything useful to tell them and they beat me more. Which only made me stronger. Hellions aren’t always clear on cause and effect.

Then they started the mind games. They’d spike my food with a kind of Hellion Ecstasy and send in the damned soul of a pretty murderess to play concubine. We’d work each other for a while, and when I was good and relaxed the questions would start. I didn’t even realize I was being interrogated, it felt so goodwntfelt so talking to another human. But I still couldn’t answer their questions because I didn’t have any answers. They tried young women and old ones, boys and oiled-up beefcake. They still didn’t get any answers and by then my body had grown used to the drugs. But I could fake it. When the last devil doll didn’t get any answers, a gaggle of disappointed guards bum-rushed my cell and did the hokeypokey on my head. I’d been in my Folsom Prison mansion a few weeks by then. I’d found the weak bolt in the iron door on my second night. I’d worked it out with my nails and teeth and had been sharpening it on the stone walls ever since.

I shoved it through one guard’s ankle and kept going north, peeling off his calf muscle. That caught the other guards by surprise and they stopped kicking me for a second. Just enough time for me to get hold of one and shove the bolt into his thigh, opening up an artery that painted my walls and the last two guards with glistening black Hellion blood. It looked like we’d struck oil in there. They didn’t try the pleasure principle on me again, which was nice, but a couple of days later I lost my private suite and got moved back to the bunkhouse with the other cattle. Moo, motherfucker.

“So you made it for them.”

Vidocq nods.

“Yes. To give myself just a little credit, I did it rather badly. After several attempts in which I produced mild forms of the drug and pure poison in one case, I convinced the marshal that the ingredients he had acquired were of too poor a quality. I suppose he believed me because I remained alive and unincarcerated.”

“That’s good news, then,” says Candy.

I look at her.

“If it’s so hard to make and there are so few dealers, that means it’s a small operation, right?”

“Or a bunch of lousy ones,” I say.

Vidocq shakes his head.

“No. If people had died from Akira, there would be rumors everywhere. Candy is right. Akira is a specialized business. Possibly as small as one or two labs.”

“See,” Candy says. “I’m a good detective too.”

“Just like Philip Marlowe. He’s the one with the robot glasses in
The Maltese Falcon,
right?”

Candy sticks her tongue out at me. The sight of it is more distracting than I want it to be.

“Thanks for the talk. I think I’ve got things clearer. Now both of you get out. I’m doing this thing alone.”

Silence. Then Vidocq pipes up.

1C;Do you think that’s wise? You’re not in the best frame of mind today.”

“That’s why you’re not coming. Call a cab.”

“Stark—” says Candy. I cut her off.

“I mean it. You’re both reasonable and I don’t want reasonable around when I talk to an Akira dealer.”

Neither of them moves. Candy’s up front with me. I reach across her and open the door.

“Go. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I’m calling you in one hour,” she says. “If you don’t like it, tough.”

Candy and Vidocq get out. I leave them on the curb and head for the 405.

I can already picture Carolyn as one of those seductive damned souls that used to hover around my room under the arena. Getting me high. Getting me talking. Treating me like the soft fool I was back then. I’m not soft now and I’m even less forgiving. I don’t know if Carolyn’s blood is red or black, but if things go right, I just might find out.

C
AROLYN
M
C
C
OY LIVES
on Cantara Street in a run-down tract home surrounded by a low metal fence and a half-dead lawn where patches of bleak grass break through the bare soil. Her house is right across the street from Sun Valley Park. Prime real estate for a small-time dealer.

I knock on her front door. It takes a while for anything to happen. I can hear someone banging around inside. I surprised her. She’s hiding her stash.

The front door opens. Carolyn doesn’t open the screen door, but stands there blinking in the sun like a not very bright groundhog. I’ve seen exhumed corpses with better tans.

“Who the fuck are you?” she says.

I lean close to the screen and smile.

“Hi. I’m a young college student trying to earn extra money selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Would you be interested in a ten- to twenty-year subscription to
Possession with Intent to Sell,
and its sister publication,
I’m Going to Burn Your House Down While You’re Asleep in Bed Tonight
?”

She stares, her mouth open a little, like she’s trying to form a question but forgot how to speak English in the last three seconds. I pull the screen door open and brush past her inside. She stands there, turns, and watches me invade her living room.

Carolyn has short dry hair that frames her face perfectly. She’d be pretty if she dids ty if sdn’t have deep bruise-colored rings around her eyes and her skin wasn’t the texture of sandpaper. There are red welts on the inside of her arms where she’s been compulsively picking at the skin. I can smell not-quite-metabolized meth in her sweat. Her heart’s jacked up and her eyes are pinpricks, but that’s the drugs and not me. The angel in my head wants me to go easy so the back of her skull doesn’t blow off and take her brain with it. That’s a good idea. On the other hand, she’s dealing DHS black-box psychic poison to teenyboppers who don’t have a clue that demons, Kissi, and other brain-sucking assholes are out there waiting to get a claw hold in their cortex.

Carolyn stands by the door, arms crossed. When the clockwork in her brain kicks back in, she follows me into an avocado-and-orange living room with overstuffed chairs, throw pillows, and a long rattan sofa. It looks like the set for a seventies snuff film. She stops a few feet away and looks at me with a jittery stare, trying to figure out if she should know me. If she owes me money. If I owe her.

“Sit down,” I say.

She doesn’t. I take a step toward her.

“Sit down,” I say again.

She walks around me and sits on the sofa, knees together, hands folded in her lap like she just graduated from charm school. I sit across from her on a cushioned green chair. I pull it over to the sofa so we’re sitting face-to-face. The chair springs are long gone and my ass tries to sink below my knees. Not a good look when you want to come across as intimidating. I slide forward and sit on the edge of the chair.

“Are you a cop?” she asks.

“Do you think I’m a cop?”

“No.”

“Then maybe we should go from there and see where it takes us. Is that all right with you, Carolyn?”

“Fine. Whatever. If you’re not a cop, who are you?”

“I lied earlier. I’m not a college student.”

She starts picking at the skin on her left arm.

“Stop that. You dig that arm open and you’re going to get gangrene in a dusty shithole like this.”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t, but it’s annoying to look at.”

“What the fuck is it you want? You want money? Do I look like I have any money? Look around.”

She waves a hand at the general wreckage. It’s not so much that the place is a mess, itl rs a mes’s that nothing is where any sane person would put it. It’s like everything she owns, from furniture to coffee cups, she’s used once and then dropped where she was when she was done with it.

“I don’t have to look, Carolyn. I know that whatever kind of pig wallow you live in, you have money because you’re a dealer,” I say. “I can see it in your eyes and hear it in the tiny catches in your voice. You’re also strung out and about six months from a fatal stroke. You know you have high blood pressure, don’t you? That doesn’t mix well with meth.”