Devil Said Bang (34 page)

“If we go down, the dominoes start falling. Ping.
Ping. Ping.”

She flicks her fingers, knocking over imaginary
dominoes in the air.

“I don’t know that the other houses can keep the
whole world together without us. Next thing you know, nothing is what it used to
be and then I don’t know. Maybe we all just disappear. No one knows because it’s
never happened.”

“Who in the Sub Rosa is in charge? Blackburn?”

“Do I look like Google? Go buy a fucking
laptop.”

My arm is starting to hurt. I get my own glass of
Aqua Regia and walk around until I find some Maledictions. I take the pack back
to the table, tap one out, and try to light it one-handed. Patty snickers at me.
Takes the cigarette, puts it in my mouth, lights it, and hands it back to
me.

“Thanks.”

“No worries. I’d’ve done it for a dog.”

My head is spinning a little. Not with pain or
liquor but with all that’s going on. Not to mention worrying about Candy. I
check the time. Too soon to call the clinic, goddammit.

“So someone is trying to replace the current
dreamers or kill them off. Cairo is working with them but he can’t use his
muscle because that would bring down the heat and whoever is running him knows
he’d squeal like a piglet. That means whoever is behind all this also controls
the girl. You can’t arrest or kill a crazy ghost. She’s a good cover. And maybe
you kill a few nondreamers to make the killings look random. It’s all for the
greater good, right?”

“If you say so.”

“I say so because I’m pretty sure I know who’s
behind this. The question is why does an angel care about our reality? Tell me
this. If you’re walking around with your boyfriend, then dreamers must work in
shifts, right?”

“Yeah. Two days on and three days off so we get our
heads back together.”

“Where do you do your dreaming?”

She sits up, almost spilling her wine. She points
to what she thinks is north. It’s not.

“There’s a place in Universal City. Near the movie
studio. It looks like a regular office building. Really boring on the outside.
Like camouflage, you know? The tour buses go right by it. We’re in there.”

“Has anyone been attacked around there?”

“No.”

Good. That means the building has good protection
against spirits.

“You should go there and stay and get the others to
do the same. As long as you’re inside, the girl can’t get you or she would have
done it already.”

“Anything you say, Sir Galahad.”

“Goddamn arm.”

I need both hands to tie the towel tighter, but if
I hold the cigarette between my lips, the smoke goes straight up my nose and I
can’t set it down now because the towel will come off completely.

Patty comes around the table.

“Let me help you. Goddamn men. They can tie you to
a bed but you can’t do up your own shoes.”

“Thanks. I’m usually a fast healer. It should have
stopped bleeding by now.”

“Shoulda woulda coulda,” she says. “Since like you
said we’re all BFFs now and I can ask things I always wanted to know, what the
hell kind of name is Sandman Slim?”

“Well, I’m not fat.”

“I grasped that.”

She gets the knot good and tight. Then sits back to
admire her handiwork.

“They used to watch a lot of old movies in Hell
before the cable went out. A
Sandman
is an old
B-movie word for ‘hit man.’ ”

“Oh. Okay. Wait. They have cable in Hell?”

“Now they do. It was out but we got it working
again.”

Patty doesn’t hear or has lost interest in what
we’ve been talking about.

She says, “This looks like a nice hotel. Don’t they
have a doctor or something?”

That’s what happens to you when you spend eleven
years in the arena tending your own wounds. When you’re hurt, you look around
for rags and string to hold whatever part of you is falling out on that
particular day. A doctor is way down on the list of things you think about when
you’re a gladiator slave. Lucifer, on the other hand, wants a whole team of
neurosurgeons flown in from Switzerland and he wants them now.

I dial the hotel phone.

“Yes, Mr. Macheath.”

“I need the hotel doctor. Do you have one?”

“Not one to tend your, um, special needs.”

“I’ll take a seamstress and a nurse right now. Send
up whatever you’ve got. Tell them to keep their eyes closed. I’ll bring them in
the clock.”

“Very good, sir.”

I’m bleeding all over the nice furniture and Candy
is hurt and L.A. is being buried in volcanic ash. I wonder what’s going on in
the rest of the world. I’m formulating a new mantra. WWWBD. What Would Wild Bill
Do? I can’t burn down Cairo like I did when I set Josef and the skinheads on
fire. I’ll have to kill him later. And I don’t know where Aelita is. The little
girl is the only clear line to anything I’ve got, and if she isn’t out slicing
and dicing, I know where she’ll be. That’s what Bill would do. If he couldn’t
find the head of the bad guys, he’d find the arms and break them. It’s time to
say
hola
to the Imp of Madrid.

“When the doctor leaves, we’ll get you to the
dreamer safe house.”

“Okay. Is it all right if I take a nap while we’re
waiting?”

“I’ll get you some aspirin. You’re going to need
them.”

A
fter
the hotel doc stitches me up, I take Patty downstairs and we catch a cab just
like regular schmucks. No limos today. I don’t want anyone at the hotel knowing
where we’re going. All the cabbie will see is me taking my half-tanked squeeze
to Universal to throw up on the big plastic shark.

The hotel is practically empty. Even in L.A., the
Apocalypse is bad for business.

The freeway north is a joke. Angelinos and tourists
are fleeing the city, locking traffic in a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic
like a university experiment demonstrating just how impossible it is to flee
L.A. And it’s not like the sky is any closer to normal up here. Clouds shoot
overhead at double speed, like the whole sky is on fast-forward. The volcano and
ash have disappeared as cleanly and thoroughly as Catalina but it seems to have
made an impression on the unwashed. If that wasn’t enough, the cabbie’s radio
explains how as part of its clever plan to panic even the nonpanicked
population, the powers that be have shut down both LAX and the Burbank
Airport.

I have the cabbie drop us off by the office
buildings at the edge of Universal City. Instead of heading back in to town, the
cab gets on the freeway north with the other abandon-the-ship types.

Patty leads us into the heart of Universal City,
past huge glass buildings and to a squat four-floor building hidden behind a row
of trees, just off the regular tourist route. There’s a guard station but it’s
empty. I get the feeling the big office towers are deserted too.

Patty takes a pass card from her purse and lets us
in. She seems perfectly sober now. The girl can hold her liquor. I’ve never seen
anyone mix Hellion and civilian booze before. I hope she doesn’t explode and
destroy the rest of the world.

The first floor of the dreamers’ building looks
like any unfinished office space. A big open area with cable for DSL and phones.
A couple of offices roughed in at the back. Walls a neutral shade of suicide
beige. How could you work in one of these places and not seriously consider
going apeshit postal at least once? An optional murder-suicide pact ought to be
part of the hiring agreement right next to the 401(k) plan.

The stairway to the second floor is locked. Patty
waves her card again and the door clicks open.

It’s dark inside and smells faintly of asphodel and
belladonna. Forgetting and stimulation. Sounds like a party to me.

A cobweb brushes my face. I start to push it away
but Patty says, “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of them.”

Through the dark I see more of the webs. They grow
thicker the higher we climb. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see that they’re
not webs. They’re long, almost invisible filaments, like fishing line. Only they
seem to hum and whisper.

“It sounds like they’re talking to each other.”

Patty glances back over her shoulder.

“Good ears. They’re alive. When we’re asleep, our
nervous systems merge with the Big Collective and these nerves broadcast our
dreams.”

The second floor is a neural obstacle course. Most
of the nerves are bundled along the walls like computer cords but the densest
bunch run out from a twelve-sided wood-and-brass enclosure in the middle of the
room.

A room off this one is a small but
comfortable-looking rest area with a fridge, a massage table, and big
overstuffed chairs.

The floor around the wooden enclosure is inlaid
with the images of silver arches. The twelve vaults of Heaven. Patty touches
each door as she walks around the big toy box. And stops by one. She pulls it
open.

“Someone isn’t here today. Johnny Zed is supposed
to be in here. I hope he’s all right.”

Inside the chamber is a fleshy pitcher-shaped pod
of clear fluid. Nerve filaments drift inside like pale seaweed.

“This is it,” says Patty. “Dreamer central.”

“You get in there?”

“Strip down for a two-day skinny-dip. It’s not bad.
It’s warm and you don’t feel a thing. You just float there. A womb with a
view.”

“What do you dream about?”

“It’s hard to describe. It’s not things so much as
the places between them. I wouldn’t dream of a table or you. I dream about big
empty spaces. The hollow parts inside things. The atoms and molecules. I don’t
dream about how fucked up things are out here but how perfect things are when
you go deep down inside them.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Want to strip down and try it? You’re a little
tightly wound, you know. It would probably do you some good.”

“What’s the dreamer safeword?”

She does a mock sigh.

“You’ve been to Hell but won’t even give Heaven a
try. Silly boy.”

She closes the door and crosses her arms, looking
serious for the first time since I got her away from the ghost.

“What happens now?”

“What happens is you stay here. Go inside the Silly
Putty and try to calm down the sky a little or just hang around the lounge. I’ll
see what I can do about the little girl. Don’t leave until you hear from
me.”

I start back down the stairs, stepping carefully
around the dreamers’ nerves.

“Hey, Sandman,” says Patty from the top of the
stairs. “Thanks for today. You didn’t have to do all that.”

“No problem. I’d have done it for a dog.”

She smiles and goes into the lounge.

I
take
a cab to Max Overdrive. Thank God for cabbies. People joke that when the world
ends, all that’ll be left are the roaches. They forget about the cabbies. As
long as the roaches have money to pay or something to trade, the cabbies will be
there to drive them from their roach motels to their roach offices and out to
the roach suburbs, slamming on the brakes, cursing out the window, and
overcharging them all the way.

The freeway into the city is almost empty, so we
make good time. I go into the store through the front door, careful to step
around the hexes.

Kasabian must have heard me come in because he
isn’t surprised to see me.

“Come to check if the Glory Stompers came back and
finished me off?”

“Remember when you said I should have been
unreasonable and ignored you the other night?”

“Yeah?” he says, looking more nervous than I’ve
seen him since I cut off his head.

“You got your wish. Get your gear together. You’re
coming with me.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere safe. Those guys who broke in here are
trying to change the entire fabric of reality and they’re using hit squads and a
crazy little ghost with a great big fucking knife. You want out of harm’s way,
you come with me right now.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“Of course I care. You know where my money is.”

“It’s my money. Does this hovel have cable, because
if I have to stay with you I’ll need a lot of distraction.”

“It’s nice as hovels go. There’s indoor toilets and
everything.”

Kasabian doesn’t want to go with me but he doesn’t
want to stay in the store on his own anymore. He slowly closes his laptop. He’s
trying to figure out a way to get me to stay so he doesn’t have to leave,
especially on a gimp leg. He drums his fingers on the desk and gives up.

“There’s a tracksuit on the floor next to the
bed.”

He has to struggle into the suit because of his
leg. I don’t offer to help because I’m not in the mood to get barked at. It
takes him a few minutes and he’s sweating but he finally gets the clothes
on.

“You look like you’re in the Russian Mob.”

“Yeah? Then carry my crap, Comrade. I’m a
cripple.”

We take the same cab back to the Chateau. When I
take Kasabian through the clock, he just stands there looking the place over.
The celebrity-magazine furniture. The trays of food and booze. The thick robe
Candy tossed over the arm of a chair. The epic bedroom with a closet full of
clothes.

He limps back into the main room. Holds out his
arms and drops them in exasperation.

Finally he says, “Fuck you.”

“
Mi casa es su casa
blah blah blah.”

“Fuck you.”

“There’s food over there.”

He goes to the spread, balancing himself on
furniture on the way over. He looks at it and turns.

I say, “I know. Fuck me. Quit whining. It’s your
lucky night. You’re going to help me commit suicide.”

“Goody.”

M
y new
chest scar itches at the thought of me hurting myself again but I don’t have a
lot of choices.

Before I off myself, I dial the clinic to check on
Candy. No answer. Are they busy or screening my calls? I let it ring and then
call back. Still nothing. Not a problem.