Aloha From Hell (22 page)

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I should have dealt with this long ago. How to get back Downtown now that Mason has pretty much made it impossible for me to get in. I hadn’t counted on the little prick making friends so quick. He fast-talked his Hellion guards, their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses, clawing and hoodooing his way up the Infernal food chain until he got to some of Lucifer’s generals. With that kind of pull, it was easy for him to set up traps and guards at all my favorite entrances and exits in and out of Hell. And it’s not like I can just pick a new entrance at random. Hell is a complicated place. I might come out in a swamp or the House of Burning Ice. And it’s not like you can trust most of the maps of Hell. Lucifer was paranoid enough to put in fake landmarks and move mountains and towns around, so it’s damned close to impossible to navigate outside the cities unless you already know where you’re going. Or you have a guide. But I’m a little too famous down there to hop on a Gray Line tour bus and hope no one recognizes me.

I know every crawl space and backstreet in Pandemonium, but if Mason has Alice locked up in another city, I’ll need help getting there. Hellions can be very cooperative if you pull out enough of their teeth, so I know I can get a guide. What I really fucking need is a fucking way in. There’s only one person in L.A. who might know and who I trust enough to ask.

I take my basket of donuts, candy, chips, refrigerated burgers, and barbecue sandwiches up to the clerk. He’s red-eyed and bored, trying to hide the
Hustler
he’s been thumbing through the whole time I’ve been in the store. I let him take the stuff from my basket. My hands could get diabetes and a stroke just from touching the wrappers.

I say, “Throw in a carton of Luckies.”

The kid sighs. I’ve ruined his day by asking him to turn around and pick up something.

“We don’t sell cartons. Just packs.”

“Then sell me ten packs and leave them in the box.”

He thinks this over for a minute. I can hear the gears turning. The factory that runs his brain is spewing copious amounts of ganja fumes. Finally, he thinks of something that won’t make him sound too stupid.

“You have any ID?”

“Do you really think I’m underage?”

He shrugs.

“No ID, no smokes.”

I take two twenties from my pocket and slide them across the counter to him.

“There’s my ID.”

He has to think again. The workers are fleeing the factory. The boiler might blow.

The kid holds up the bills to see if they’re counterfeit.

“Yeah, okay. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Who am I going to tell?”

He considers this for a moment, like it’s a trick question, but it soon fades from his resin-clogged brain along with the state capitals and how to do math. He drops a carton of Luckies onto the pile of death snacks and rings them up, setting the well-thumbed
Hustler
on the counter as he counts out my change. Then realizes what he’s done. He freezes. It looks like he might stay like that for the rest of the day.

I pick up my bag and say, “Keep the change. I respect a man who reads.”

I go back to the Bonneville and set the bag on the passenger seat. Time to talk to the one person who might be able to help me get Downtown. Mustang Sally, the freeway sylph.

E
VERY CITY HAS
a Mustang Sally. Every town and jungle village with a dirt path. She’s a spirit of the road, an old and powerful one. If you add up all the freeways, the county and city roads, in and around L.A., it means Sally controls twenty thousand miles of intense territory. And that doesn’t even count the ghost roads and ley lines.

I steer the Bonneville onto the shoulder of the 405, the freeway that runs along Sepulveda Boulevard, the longest street in L.A. I break open the carton of Luckies, take out a pack, and slice it open with the black blade. I slide across the front seat and get out on the passenger side. This would be a lousy time to die.

Traffic blasts past at sixty per hour and no one even glances in my direction as I walk behind the car and scratch Mustang Sally’s sigil into the freeway concrete. When I’m done I stand in the center of the mark, take out a Lucky, and light up. Passing cars pull the smoke in their direction, like it wants to follow them down the road. I smoke and wait.

Mustang Sally has been cruising L.A.’s roads twenty-four/seven since they were nothing more than mud paths, horse tracks, and wagon ruts. As far as I know, she never sleeps and never stops except when someone leaves an offering. For the last hundred years she’s been through every kind of car you can name. Of course, she never has to stop for gas. Sally eats, but only road food. Things you can find in gas-station markets and vending machines. She doesn’t need to eat. She just likes it. It’s like me and stealing cars. Sometimes you just want to feel ordinary. Like a person. She eats. I drive.

Twenty minutes later, a silver-and-black Shelby Cobra pulls onto the shoulder a few yards behind me. I stomp out of her emblem and hold the Lucky out to her.

Sally is taller than I remember. Taller than someone who spent all day and night comfortably in a compact sports car. Her hair is dark. Maybe jet black with blue highlights. She’s dressed in a white evening gown and the highest spike heels this side of the Himalayas. I don’t know how she drives in those thiwaiin thosngs. She walks over to me slowly, sizing me up. She’s running the show, and making me wait is part of it. She has on a pair of soft white calfskin driving gloves. From one hand dangles a small clasp purse rimmed in gold. She’s every bit a goddess except for one thing. She’s wearing what looks like a pair of round glasses with smoked lenses; the kind the blind wore a hundred years ago. They break up the goddess look. Like the
Mona Lisa
with a lip ring.

When we’re just a couple of feet apart, she stops, peels off the driving gloves, and drops them into the clasp bag. She takes the cigarette from my hand and inhales deeply, letting the smoke drift slowly from her nostrils.

“Unfiltered. You sweet boy.”

I wonder what’s behind those dark glasses. I swear, even in daylight I can see a faint glow from underneath the lenses. She could be sporting twin suns or headlights back there. You would not want to aim your road rage at this woman.

Mustang Sally cocks her head and stares at me for a few seconds.

“I know you. The charming Frenchman introduced us.”

She has a low, purring smoker’s voice, the kind you can almost feel in your chest when she speaks.

“You’ve got a good memory. That was my friend Vidocq. He was looking for Mickey the Hammer’s grave and figured that since you’d been everywhere and see everything, you might have noticed where he was buried.”

“Yes. He’s an alchemist and Mickey was . . . what? A tracker? He left me a few offerings, too.”

“Mickey was a scoria hound. He could trace anyone or anything through its trail in the aether. I guess he found the wrong person because he ended up dead. People said he was buried with a scroll explaining how to do it. You told Vidocq where to find his grave.”

“And did he find what he was looking for?”

“The body was where you said it would be, but someone got there before us and picked it clean. It cost Vidocq a lot of donuts to find that body.”

She shrugs and gazes out at the traffic.

“That’s the way of the road. It’s gas, gab, or food. Nobody rides for free.”

I go back to the bike and bring her the bag of snacks. Sally smiles when she sees it. I hold it out to her. She doesn’t take it. Just pulls the edge of the bag with a fingernail and looks inside.

“My. You must be looking for a diamond as big as the Ritz.” She smiles a tiger’s smile. “Put it in the car and ask your question.”

I go to where she’s parked. The Cobra’s seats are perfect. They look brand-new, but she must have logged thousands of miles in the thing. The only thing that gives away she lives and eats there is the trail of litter that stretches out behind the car for as long as I can see. Cookie boxes. Cellophane from around snack cakes. Crushed cigarette packs. Sally marks her territory and no one stops her. Not CHP. Not cops. No one.

I get back just as she grinds out the cigarette with the toe of one delicate shoe.

“I need a back door into Hell,” I say. “A way in that no one will notice.”

She curls her lips into a half smile.

“Sneaking into Hell. That’s old magic. Beginning-of-the-world stuff. Back when the different planes of existence weren’t so far apart that the residents of one don’t even believe in the existence of the other.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It depends on how you want to go in. There are places where this twelve-lane Möbius strip is the Hell parents tell kids they’ll end up in if they don’t behave. There are other places where this is Heaven.”

She smiles.

“You don’t want to go in that way. It’s too unpredictable.”

“Are there other ways in?”

“Don’t be in such a rush. Give a lady a moment to think.”

She takes another Lucky from the pack. I light it with Mason’s lighter. As she breathes in the smoke, I swear the glow behind her sunglasses brightens.

“Nice car,” I say.

“Thanks. It’s pretty but it might be time to trade it in. It’s getting too noticeable. These days, if you own something long enough, it becomes vintage and everybody wants one. In my day, when something was old, it was just old.”

“I bet it handles these roads well.”

She shrugs, unimpressed.

“Each road has its own way of going. You should have seen those few scratches in the dirt in the Fertile Crescent. The first roads that called me into being. Back then a decent pair of sandals was high tech.”

She holds out the Luckies. I hesitate.

“It’s all right,” she says. “Half the job of being a spirit is knowing when to share.”

I take the cigarette. She pulls a gold lighter from her bag and sparks the Lucky for me.

When she drops the lighter back in the bag, she says, “Do you know what it is you’re asking? Do you have any concept of what Hell is?”

“I spent eleven years Downtown, so, yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”

That gets her attention. She gives me a slow once-over with her eyes or whatever it is behind those glasses.

I say, “I was alive. The only living thing that’s ever been down there and sure as Hell the only living thing that’s ever crawled out.”

“Oh. That’s you. The monster who kills monsters.”

Her body relaxes like we’re chatting each other up in a bar.

“What a relief. For a minute there, I was afraid you were a ghost. I don’t like doing business with the dead. They leave pitiful offerings.”

“I guess being all disembodied would make you a little skittish.”

“That’s not the half of it. Ghosts are whiners. When they don’t like the answer I give them, some even try haunting me. Me. Can you imagine how annoying it is to have a ghost moaning away in your car? I banish them to road structures. Overpasses or cloverleafs. Let them watch the living go by for a hundred years or so and see if that improves their manners.”

“I wonder if the bums that live in underpasses know they’re pissing on the dead?”

Mustang Sally looks at me hard.

“Why do you want to go back? Escaping once was quite a feat. Are you trying to become famous by doing it twice?”

“I’m going to find a friend who shouldn’t be there. And then I’m going to kill someone. If I have time, maybe I’ll stop a war or two.”

That makes her laugh. A full-throated husky howl.

“You’re not frivolous. But you might be crazy.”

“My friends wouldn’t argue that point, so I won’t either.”

“This friend you’re going to rescue, is she your lover?”

“Yeah.”

Sally looks out at the road. Heat reflects off it, making the cars in the distance soft and dreamlike.

“u t00"> o you know what most people ask me when I stop for them?”

She waits. I’m supposed to ask the question.

“What?”

“You’d think it would be about where to find the boy who got away or the girl they left behind. But no. They want to know where they should go to be happy. How can I possibly answer that? The road isn’t here to make you happy. It’s here so you can find your own way. Because they bring me cigarettes, they expect me to cure their misery.”

“What do you say?”

“I tell them to go to a gas station and buy the biggest map they can find. It doesn’t matter if it’s the city, the state, or the world. I tell them to open it, close your eyes, and drop your finger somewhere on the map. That’s where you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“Running off into the unknown can sure clear your head. It sounds like pretty good advice.”

“Thank you.”

I smoke the cigarette as a highway-patrol car slows down and gives us the once-over. Sally throws the driver a tiny backhanded wave. The patrol cop’s eyes go blank. He turns his attention back to the road and drives on.