Devil Said Bang (19 page)

This is it. The end of the road. A hundred yards
ahead, the city spreads out below the thicket of jagged rebar that marks where
the freeway has collapsed. I get low in the saddle. Every time we hit a pothole,
Lucifer’s armor collides with the gas tank and kicks sparks into my eyes. I’m
blasting down a broken road toward the heart of a half-dead city with fireworks
burning my face. Whatever happens next, it’s a hell of a trip.

Jetting off the end of the freeway, the universe
goes quiet and a ghost melody fills my head. “The Girlfriend of the Whirling
Dervish” by Martin Denny. Carlos’s favorite song on the jukebox at the real
Bamboo House of Dolls. I picture home but I’m still in Hell. What am I doing
wrong?

The front of the bike noses down toward the
rubble.

Did I use up all the armor’s power on
Brimborion?

Wouldn’t that be a hilarious goddamn end to
everything?

The ground comes up fast. “The Girlfriend of the
Whirling Dervish” mixes with the rising sound of the engine. What did I expect?
Fucking up is my true home and I’m heading there fast.

I wish I had a cigarette.

Then there’s nothing at all.

Then there’s something.

The front wheel hits pavement. A rush of vertigo.
Lights. Smeared and jittering. The nothing parts like heavy curtains. Or a
trapdoor.

The rear wheel drops. The impact is like being
rear-ended by a battleship. I can’t hold the bike. So I lean it to the side. Lay
it down and let it slide. Ten or twenty yards. The asphalt grinds against my
legs but the leathers hold. I’m not so sure about the coat. Have I mentioned I’m
hard on clothes?

When the bike finally stops, it’s sliced a deep
groove in the roadbed. I grab the handlebars, get my weight low, and tilt the
bike upright. It’s not even scratched.

Welcome home.

It feels good to say it and mean it. How do I know?
The place doesn’t smell like bad meat and misery. The sky is clear and full of
stars. Clue number three: the bike’s stopped right in front of the Hollywood
Forever Cemetery. Tombstones never looked so good.

A big screen is set up by the columbarium. People
sit and sprawl on blankets among the dead. Movie night at the cemetery. It’s not
as weird as it might sound. On Día de los Muertos, families offer food and eat
meals with their dead. In Hollywood, we show up with offerings of cowboys and
show tunes.

Tonight we’re entertaining our favorite stiffs with
a pristine print of
The Bad Seed
. Pigtailed moppet
Patty McCormack just set Leroy the janitor on fire and her mother and best
friend watch him burn from an upstairs window. How are you enjoying the movie so
far, dead people? We could have shown
The Sound of
Music
but we thought we’d scare the last few scraps of coffin jerky
off your bones.

I’m back on the bike when I notice a kid by the
cemetery gates. A girl in a frilly blue party dress. Maybe nine or ten years old
and she’s all alone. Who brings their kid to a murder movie in a graveyard
drive-in and lets her run off alone? Hell, who brings their kid to one of these
things at all? The place is half stoners and speed-freak hipsters. The moment
the show is over the whole block will turn into one big bumper-car ride.

The kid doesn’t move. Just stares at me until she
realizes I’m staring back. Then she turns and runs through the cemetery gates. I
can hear her laughing all the way across the street. With an attitude like that,
she’s going to grow up and start a mind-blowing band or become a serial killer.
I flash on Candy: that could have been her years ago bouncing into Hollywood
Forever, a tombstone Disneyland for kids too carnivorous for teacup rides and
cotton candy.

I step on the kick-starter and the bike fires up on
the first try.

First question. Where’s Candy? No way she’s at the
Beat Hotel anymore. What’s the second choice? L.A. is a lot to take in when it’s
not on fire. I can’t get used to seeing the sky. I need to get my bearings and
screw my head on straight.

I’m starting to feel just a little conspicuous on
this Hellion hog, with a headlight that could blind the space shuttle, no
driver’s license, license plate, title, or insurance. Not that I ever had any of
those things. But now I don’t have them and I’m on an illegally imported foreign
motorcycle. Back on Earth thirty seconds and I’m already a felon. Welcome home,
shithead. I’ll stick to the side streets for now.

I
cross Hollywood Boulevard and pull the bike into the alley next to Maximum
Overdrive video, the store where I lived with Kasabian. Kasabian used to be
dead. I know because I cut off his head. It’s where I’ve been staying since I
got back from Hell the first time, which makes it the closest thing I’ve had to
a home in eleven years.

A man and a woman walk by holding hands as I turn
into the alley. It looks like they’ve been picnicking by a coal-mine fire. Their
hands and faces—every exposed patch of skin—is smeared with gritty dirt, but
their clothes are clean and pressed. I’ve never see two dirtier clean people in
my life. They catch me looking at them and cross to the other side of the
street.

The alley by Max Overdrive is a snowdrift of junk.
The Dumpster overflows with plastic trash bags and food cartons. There are
enough broken bottles that the alley looks like a salt plain. I don’t think the
garbage has been picked up in weeks. I steer the bike and park in the Dumpster’s
shadow.

In the old days I’d use the Key to the Room of
Thirteen Doors to walk into the store through a shadow but Saint James has that.
I take the duffel off the bike, get out the black blade, and slip the tip into
the door lock. One turn and it clicks open.

Inside, the place stinks of paint. The floors and
display stands are covered with plastic drop cloths, but there’s a fine layer of
dust on them. No one’s done any work in a long time.

There’s a light on upstairs in the room I used to
share with Kasabian. I go up the stairs quietly, knife out and ready. At the top
I push open the door with the toe of my boot. It opens on a messy bedroom.
There’s a wooden desk where Kasabian used to keep his bootleg video setup. Now
there’s a computer surrounded by monitors. I push the door open more. Something
is in the room with its back to me. A heavy mechanical body with a human head.
It picks up a bag from Donut Universe in its mouth and heads for the desk on all
fours like a dog. When it sees me, the head opens its mouth and drops the bag.
It raises a paw and points at me.

“Don’t say a goddamn word.”

The last time I saw him, Kasabian was still just a
chattering head without a body. Now he’s something more, but I don’t know if
it’s an improvement.

I come inside and drop the duffel. My armor is
sticking out from under my shirt. Kasabian nods at it.

“Did the Wizard give you a heart, Tin Man?”

“Funny. Careful you don’t pop a rivet, Old
Yeller.”

His face is like the couple in the street. Smeared
with something dark and coarse, like black sand. He trots to the desk on all
fours. Kasabian’s head on a hellhound body isn’t a pleasant sight.

When he gets to the desk chair, Kasabian pushes
back with his hind legs until his ass is firmly on the seat. Then he leans the
rest of his body back like half of a drawbridge rising. In a second he’s gone
from windup toy to Pinocchio on a good day, an almost real boy. He picks up the
bag of donuts with his claws and drops it on the desk without offering me
one.

“Is that the best Saint James could come up with?
It’s better than nothing but it doesn’t exactly look finished.”

Kasabian frowns for a second then gets it.

“Saint James? Yeah. That’s about right. As for
this”—he raps a fist against his chest—“your better half never paid off the
charm maker reworking it, so he didn’t finish the job.”

“Why not?”

“The asshole disappeared.”

“How did you know it was me and not him just
now?”

“He looks like a bathing beauty and you’re the Loch
Ness Monster. Seeing you young like that was giving me the heebee-jeebies.”

“You mean how I looked before you sent me
Downtown.”

“Something like that.”

With the back of one metal hand, he pushes away an
ashtray overflowing with Maledictions. Fidgety jailbird stuff, like now that I’m
back he thinks I’m going to steal him blind. I lean in for a closer look at his
body.

“So how does it feel?”

He flexes his arms and legs. Stands and starts
picking up the beer bottles, pizza boxes, and crusted food containers that cover
every flat surface.

“You remember that arcade game where you move a
claw around to grab a shitty teddy bear out of a bin? It’s kind of like I’m the
claw.”

He flexes his fingers and picks up a Chinese-food
container. His hands are the hound’s paws reworked and extended into clawlike
hands.

“I know I’m ugly as a spider on a baby but it’s
nice to have hands again.”

“Don’t feel so bad. We’re both in gimp club these
days.”

I take the glove off and push up my left
sleeve.

Kasabian shakes his head in disgust.

“Is that Kissi?”

“Yeah. Josef’s idea of a joke.”

He shakes his head and goes back to picking up
trash.

“I get Rin Tin Tin’s gnawed-on bones and you get to
look like Robocop. Story of my life.”

I reach over and take the Donut Universe bag off
the desk. Kasabian’s eyes flicker over at me but he doesn’t say anything. I take
out an apple fritter and bite into it. Fuck me. People food. The day-old
dried-out grease bomb is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

“How’d you lose the arm?”

“In a fight.”

“Did it hurt?”

“A lot. Does that make you feel better?”

He moves his head side to side like he’s
thinking.

“A little. Not enough. You can go out and pretend
to be a person. Me? I’m still stuck in this room.”

“Why? You’ve got arms and legs. Get yourself some
clothes and some gloves and you’ll be dancing in the rain.”

He picks up a burger wrapper, sniffs it, and drops
it in with the other trash.

“If only. The body works okay dicking around here
but I can’t go much further than the corner for beer. The legs won’t hold. Like
I said, the guy never finished the job.”

“Take some of the Dark Eternal money and pay off
the charm guy yourself.”

After I snuffed all the zombies in L.A., one of the
local vampire cohorts, the Dark Eternal, handed me a suitcase full of cash as a
reward for saving the city, i.e., their snack supply.

“Saint James took it. Gave it all away.”

“What?”

“Right before he disappeared. Got all pious about
it being dirty Lurker money. That kind of bullshit.”

I bite into the donut, talking with my mouth half
full.

“I can’t tell you how many ways I’m going to kill
that prick.”

Kasabian takes the bulging garbage bag, pushes open
the alley window, and drops it into the pile on the Dumpster.

“That’s why the trash is piling up and downstairs
isn’t finished.”

“Smart boy. Now tell me what number I’m
thinking.”

He sits down at the desk and reaches past the
overflowing ashtray to get a pack of Maledictions. Takes one for himself and
holds out the pack to me. I take it and light our smokes with Mason’s
lighter.

“What are you watching?” I ask.

“
The Long Goodbye
.”

“Nice.”

“The best movie ever made about L.A. Fuck
Chinatown
. And don’t try to argue with me ’cause your
opinion is going to be wrong.”

We smoke and watch the movie for a couple of
minutes. A gangster is starting to strip and he’s telling Elliott Gould to do
the same. I want to ask about Candy but the words won’t come out. I had this
fantasy that she would have moved in here, taken my place, and be waiting for
me. Being alone makes you stupid.

“If the money’s gone, why are the lights on? How do
you pay for all this takeout?”

Kasabian blows smoke rings at the video screen.

“Not all the money’s gone. Just what he knew about.
I embezzled some. You tried to throw me out enough times, so I set myself up a
trust fund.”

“I know.”

He turns and looks at me.

“When?”

“Always. You’re a thief. You can’t help stealing.
And I probably gave you some cause to do it. How much did you get?”

“About two hundred grand.”

I cough, almost choking on the cigarette.

“Two hundred grand and you’re still hiding and
living off delivery-boy donuts?”

He shakes his head.

“It sounds like a lot but it’s not exactly the
rest-of-your-life money. At least the store brought in a little cash but with
that gone . . .”

A few months back, Samael gave Kasabian the power
to see into the Daimonion Codex, Lucifer’s Boy Scout handbook of clever awful
things. Through it, Kasabian can also lurk behind the scenes watching parts of
Hell like a surveillance cam.

“Did you ever look into the Codex? Did you see me
Downtown?”

“Candy used to come by and ask me that.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Three weeks. Maybe a month ago.”

“What did you say?”

He takes the Malediction out of his mouth with
metal fingers stained yellow with nicotine.

“What I see is kind of erratic. I can’t see
everywhere. I could see you on and off for the first few days, then you went off
the air.”

“Maybe because of the Lucifer thing.”

“Lucifer thing?”

“Never mind. I killed Mason, by the way.”

“You sure?”

“There was a big hole in his head where his brains
used to be.”

“Oh man.”

He leans an elbow on the desk and runs a metal hand
over his head.

“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time. I
used to dream about him coming back and finding me all crippled up and not able
to run away.”