Devil Said Bang (40 page)

I get in the Metro while Cherry is still talking.
Traven looks a little alarmed.

“You were talking to a hole. Why?”

“Sometimes you need to remind the dead to stay
dead. Maybe I hurt her feelings. She’ll get over it.”

“Who?”

“After we deal with Teddy, I’ll tell you all about
it. Now please, can we just fucking go?”

Traven starts the car and pulls away from
Blackburn’s, aiming us at Malibu.

“Why do we hate Teddy so much that we have to go
there now instead of patching you up?”

“Teddy kills people and eats them and I don’t know
if he does it in that order. And if he keeps killing dreamers, the world is
over.”

Traven nods.

“I understand. But maybe we could stop and at least
get you some bandages?”

“Also, Teddy seems to have a real taste for
kids.”

Traven stops the car.

“Drive, Father.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t just leave you bleeding. I have
towels in the trunk. You can at least staunch your wounds.”

“Fine.”

Traven pops the trunk and Candy grabs a couple of
towels. I stuff them under the armor. The pressure feels good but I can’t help
wondering a little if Traven doesn’t want me leaking all over the back of his
car.

While Traven drives, Candy reaches between the
seats and squeezes my bloody hand. I squeeze hers back.

W
hat
am I supposed to think about someone like Teddy Osterberg? I want to kill him
but I want to understand him. Maybe that makes me weak. Maybe it’s just
self-serving. Teddy is a stone-cold son-of-a-bitch killer. I want to look into
his eyes and cross my fingers and hope I don’t see myself looking back. Which me
would it be? Stark? Sandman Slim? Lucifer?

As much as I hate this guy, I can’t get rid of the
image of those Hellion skins hanging loose and limp around the palace in
Pandemonium. Maybe that’s the joke and has been all along. I go after a ghoul
with all kinds of righteous fury, but looking back at all the things I’ve done,
what if I’m there too, gnawing on skulls right along with Teddy? Just another
ghoul in love with the dead.

I hid a lot of myself from Alice and I’ve hidden
what I did in Hell from Candy. I know the monster part of myself. I love it and
I hate it. Sometimes I’m ashamed of it. I don’t want to be Teddy, sitting on a
hill by himself with only his ghosts and corpses for company. Being a real
monster is easy enough on your own but not so much when you have something to
lose. When this is over, I’m taking Candy back to the Chateau Marmont and get
good and drunk and tell her a long story about how I spent my summer vacation in
Hell. I should have done it earlier. It’s one thing to congratulate yourself for
saving Wild Bill and maybe a couple of other souls from torture but it’s another
to let someone who thinks they know you in on your dirty secrets about the
bodies in gibbets and wet skins flapping like flags on the Fourth of July.
That’s how you don’t become Teddy. You lay it all out and let others decide if
they want to hang around the graveyard with you or catch the bus back to
town.

Thank God for whiskey or the world would be so full
of secrets the weight would spin us into the sun.

T
he
front door is open when we reach Teddy’s Malibu mansion. The sky has stopped
pulsing. Now clouds spin like airborne tornados, coming together in a single
funnel cloud as big as the sky and then falling apart into islands of
minitwisters that skim along the top of the ocean. A rain of fish, birds, and
smooth ocean stones falls like hail when we reach the door. We don’t have any
choice but to run inside or be brained.

Like the first time I was here, it’s mausoleum dark
inside. We leave the door open for a little light but there’s not much to see
besides the spindly foyer tables and Teddy’s bone sculptures. I take out the .45
and head into one of the side rooms to look for Teddy.

I left the towels in the car. It’s hard
intimidating people with fluffy white towel corners sticking out from under your
shirt. I feel a little liquid in my chest when I take deep breaths. Maybe a
bullet sliced into my lung. The armor is holding me together, but whenever I
cough there’s blood in it. Besides Teddy, my biggest worry is not letting Candy
see it. I wish I had some Aqua Regia. That stuff is better than a swimming pool
full of penicillin.

Something small shoots past my ear. A hand grabs my
shoulder and slides down my back. When I turn, Candy is lying on the polished
marble floor.

“Wow. She really is a Jade. I wasn’t sure.”

I kneel by Candy. Hold my fingers to her throat.
She’s still breathing and her heart is beating.

I look around for the voice.

“This stuff doesn’t do anything to regular people
but it’s like curare to Jades. Completely paralyzing. Amazing stuff.”

I turn slowly while Teddy talks, listening for
where he might be. I hear him reloading the tranq gun but the foyer echoes,
making him hard to pinpoint.

“Are you going to play with your gun all day or do
something?”

“Come for me,” he says.

Traven leans down beside me and says, “There.”

In the dark, I can make out someone at the foot of
the sweeping staircase with his hands up like a bank robber surrendering in a
movie.

I charge him. Fish and rocks smash and splat
outside and in my head I see Teddy hitting the ground and splitting open with
them. Maybe I’ll toss him off the roof.

I fall. But it’s not really a fall. More like I’m a
piece of iron sucked down by a magnet the size of Arizona. I land on my injured
side on a big square of canvas, coughing up an impressive fountain of blood.
Something is holding me to the floor like two-ton shackles. Lying here isn’t so
bad. It’s hard to catch my breath, so I doubt I could stand right now
anyway.

Traven moves from Candy to kneel beside me. He
tries pulling me up but I don’t budge.

Teddy flicks a switch and a crystal chandelier
lights up the foyer. There’s someone with him. She’s on the stairs above him, so
even though she’s smaller, she towers over him. She has a pistol in her
hand.

“You. Priest. Get away from them. Over by the
wall.”

She moves the barrel of the gun to indicate where
she wants Traven to stand.

Teddy opens his hands wide.

“Two-for-two. I’ve never been so lucky. You’re a
gem. Do you know that? Poison for the Jade and a binding circle to trap the
Devil.”

He looks at Traven and frowns.

“We didn’t expect a civilian. All there is for you
is the gun. How boring.”

I can move just enough to crane my head around and
see the woman. I’m low and from this angle can only see her upside down but I
know those scars. It’s Lula Hawks.

Teddy comes over from the stairs. I haven’t seen
him like this before. Happy and animated. The crazy fuck is practically skipping
like a little kid to dinner. He walks right past me to Candy. I try to turn my
head but I’m stuck.

“I’m keeping this one alive,” he says. “She’ll go
into one of the Gnostic graves until she’s ripe. I won’t eat her all at once.
How often does one get to eat a Jade? I have to make her last.”

All I can see are his calfskin loafers as he
circles in front of me. He bends at the waist and looks down so we’re eye to
eye.

“Cat got your tongue?” he says.

He looks at Lula and brightens.

“Can I have his tongue? You can have the rest. I
just want one little taste.”

“No,” she says. “The deal was you get the girl and
I get the monster.”

She comes around next to Teddy, one hand on
Traven’s arm and the other holding the gun.

“You know me now but do you remember me from before
King’s place? Before Blackburn’s? Before I got these scars?”

“Didn’t I scrape you off my boots at a Fresno dairy
farm?”

Teddy laughs. All worked up like this, he sounds
creepily like the little girl.

“You killed Josef right in front of me. I loved him
and you cut off his head and handed it to me like it was a big joke.”

All the birds do come home to roost. Cherry was
right. The past catches up with us in Hell and in L.A.

I remember a girl. It was right before New Year’s
at a skinhead clubhouse where Josef the Kissi had set up shop. His pretty-boy
Aryan face and dominant personality made him a perfect White Power leader. He
used the skinheads for muscle and cover. Lula was there but I didn’t know her
name back then. She was just a pretty tattooed girl with a shaved head. It was
right after I escaped from Hell the first time. I hadn’t been back on Earth very
long and was still getting used to mortal women. I fell in love with her for the
ten seconds I saw her in her white wife beater. A day or two later I burned the
skinhead clubhouse to the ground. Probably killed a lot of them. Burned the hell
out of others. I cut off Josef’s head that night. Of course, all I did was kill
Josef’s human body. The Kissi part of him was fine but Eva Braun here never got
the joke because she never copped to the fact that Josef wasn’t human. I’m going
to die because a dumb little Nazi bitch had a crush on another monster. Maybe
God has a sense of humor after all.

“Why?” I say. It’s all I can get out.

“Why didn’t I kill you when I met you at
Blackburn’s? Why didn’t I feed you to King or send you straight to Teddy to die?
Because I knew all I had to do was give you a little push and you’d find your
way up the hill on your own. And it would hurt a lot more along the way. I hope
it did. But not as much as what’s going to happen.”

“Mr. Osterberg,” says Traven. “When God threw Satan
out of Eden, he said, ‘Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast
of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days
of thy life.’ Do you know how much lower than that you are?”

Good for you, Father.

Teddy raises his eyebrows in mock innocence.

“None of this is my fault. I was just hungry and
King Cairo told Lula here my secret. All the men in my family have the hunger.
If you want to blame someone, blame Great-Grandfather. He made a deal with
. . .” Teddy leans down into my face and yells, “The Devil. Yes,
Great-Grandfather made a deal for wealth and power and volunteered to become
something abominable—an eater of the dead—to prove his loyalty to Satan.”

Samael must have laughed his ass off at that. He
would have been happy with the idiot’s soul, but when the nitwit offered to eat
corpses for the next fifty years, how could he say no to that? Some people are
too stupid to even damn themselves properly.

“None of you will be as tasty as the kids but I’m
forced to go on a child-free diet for a while. The Imp hasn’t killed all the
parents of the ones I’ve already taken and until then I’m forced to subsist on
dreary adults.”

I was right. He used the girl to kill for Aelita,
then for himself when Aelita didn’t need her. A sweet deal for a guy like Teddy.
I wonder if he used her to kill new food for his pantry? How could he resist? I
think I finally know what Aelita wanted out of all this. Not that it matters
down here on the floor.

I take a deep breath and cough up blood on Teddy’s
shoes.

His face turns red and he kicks me in the teeth.
Lula slaps him hard enough to leave a mark.

“You don’t touch this one.”

Traven says, “How do you control something as
powerful as the girl? You barely seem to be able to control yourself.”

Lula hits him in the back of the neck with the gun
butt.

Teddy goes to a table where a child’s skull sits
under a bell jar.

“Isn’t she beautiful? The angel bought me the Imp’s
cemetery for safekeeping. As payment, she gave me the skull. There was hardly
any flesh left on her and it was as dry as paper. I soaked it in toddler fat and
fried it brown and crispy. The Imp was exquisite. And after I said the words the
angel gave me, her ghost was mine to command.”

“That’s it,” says Lula. “They’ve heard enough to
know they’ve been fucked all along. Especially this one.”

She kicks me in my injured side. Teddy laughs.

“He pulled a gun on me, you know.”

Lula rolls her eyes.

“Yes, I know. You’ve told me at least twenty
times.”

“I was being polite and he pulled a gun.”

She nods.

“Go play with yours and leave mine alone.”

“I want to watch,” he says.

“Then get out of my way.”

Lula disappears and comes back with a big jerry
can. I can smell the gasoline from here. She kicks Traven.

“Turn him over on his back and drag him outside on
the canvas. We don’t want to break the circle. I want plenty of room to see him
squirm while he burns.”

Teddy smiles down at me.

“Burn yours if you want. I’m eating mine raw.”

Fish and stones fall outside. Traven looks scared.
He doesn’t want to help Lula kill me or go out into the supernatural rain. I
know the look on his face. He’s vapor-locked. His brain can’t process the
choices. He’s a good man and good men shouldn’t be in places like this having to
do these things.

I feel a tiny earthquake. Teddy screams and drops
the Imp’s skull. Tries to turn and falls backward into a hole.

All I can see is the top of the hole. Teddy’s hands
scrabble around the edges trying to pull himself out while Cherry’s bony arms
pull him back down. Lula points the gun at Traven and sidles up to the hole.

“What the fuck?”

She’s disgusted. The dead are misbehaving. You have
no idea, lady.

Lula points the pistol into the hole and fires shot
after shot. She doesn’t see Traven. He picks up the Imp’s skull and hits Lula
from behind. She drops the pistol into the hole and falls to her knees. Traven
hits her again and knocks her against the wall. He pushes Lula upright and pins
her arms.

“Do you want to go to Hell, young lady?”

“Fuck you.”