The Getaway God

  “When I’m done.”

  The 8 Ball jumps in my hand. Sprouts spider legs that wrap around my arm and hold on tight. It softens. Liquefies. Crawls over my sharp, skeletal claw of a hand, wrapping it in living silver. The 8 Ball jumps again, pulling my hand down onto Mr. Chop Shop’s chest. The Shonin retreats back to his worktable, grabbing a fistful of talismans and charms and holding them up like a shield.

  “Take it off,” he shouts. “Take it off.”

  “I can’t.”

  Mr. Chop Shop is back snarling and snapping his cracked teeth. His eyes are wide, the whites splotched with broken veins.

  My Kissi hand closes on Chop Shop’s chest, ripping into the skin. I have a bad feeling the hand is going to tear out his heart or lungs, but it only breaks the surface flesh. Chop Shop goes into convulsions, bucking and kicking against the gurney’s straps. Rivets pop. I hear the restraints by his feet rip. I try to pull my hand away. I get it up an inch, then another. It feels like I’m being held to him by invisible chains. I lean back, using my weight to pull back my hand. Slowly, I come up off of him. But something comes with me.

  The Qliphoth emerges from his flesh like a mist. A long beaklike mouth. Concentric circles of cutting fangs and grinding molars. It’s an Eater, but without a body. Just spiritual essence.

  I plant my feet on the ground and pull, dragging the demon from Chop Shop’s body.

  Bad idea. It makes sense that a Qliphoth with no body wouldn’t have any power. It makes sense, but it turns out it’s not true.

  The Eater twists and snaps at my face. I try to hold on, but it wriggles out of my hand and goes straight for the wall, attacking it with its massive choppers. In just a few seconds, it’s almost through the concrete. I grab it with my Kissi hand and pull it back. Toss it across the room. It hits one of the lab tables by the door and bites right through it. Ripping through high-­impact plastic and steel like it was cotton candy. It scrambles to its feet, pulling equipment off tables and the wall, cutting deep grooves into the floor, where it tears at them with its teeth. I throw a chair at the thing and its beak snaps it in two.

  The Eater charges me. I pull the na’at and snap it open. It goes right through the Eater’s mist body without slowing it.

  Fuck me.

  I’m reaching for my gun when the Eater hits me, driving me into the wall like a bull in a jet pack. The beak dives for my face.

  And my Kissi hand closes on it. Holds it in place. Jerks up and snaps the beak like a Popsicle stick. It slides into the Eater’s body to where its heart should be and closes on it. There’s nothing in my hand but mist, but the Eater thrashes like I’m pulling its guts out. One more jerk, and the mist explodes, knocking me into the damaged wall. I scramble to my feet, my head spinning. I turn around in a quick circle, making sure the Eater isn’t behind me. It isn’t. It’s gone. And the 8 Ball has changed. It’s just a metallic ball in my left hand. I take it back to the magnetic chamber and put it inside. It hovers, spinning quietly.

  I lean against the wall and slide down into a sitting position. Half the furniture in the room is broken. I hope the Vigil has homeowner’s insurance.

  “Do you think it’s dead?”

  The Shonin comes out from around his potion table. But he doesn’t let go of his talismans.

  “No doubt,” he says.

  “Admit it. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  The Shonin looks around his wrecked lab.

  “How did you remove it? And how did you kill it?”

  “I have no idea. The damned thing acts a little different each time I use it. Every time anyone uses it.”

  “This is good. You made it work, fatso.”

  “I’ve made it work before, but I still don’t know how. That’s no help.”

  The Shonin walks around the room righting broken chairs, which fall back over. He tiptoes around scattered piles of herbs, dried lizards, caustic chemicals, and pickled animal hearts.

  “The Qomrama likes your ugly hand.”

  “The Kissi were seriously fucked-­up angels. Maybe they taste good or something. More goddamn theories aren’t going to help.”

  The Shonin picks up a box of dried tarantulas.

  “Wisdom comes from knowledge. Knowledge begins with theories.”

  “I don’t want wisdom. I want a bazooka.”

  “We have other demon-­possessed bodies. We can try more experiments.”

  I get up. My back aches where the demon drove me into the wall.

  “How many experiments do we do? A hundred? A thousand? That means we have to catch more chop-­shop assholes. Do we have that much time?”

  The Shonin goes back to his table. Sets down the box and starts straightening things.

  “Probably not. Do you have any ideas?”

  I could use a drink about now. Getting monster-­hugged by the 8 Ball and fighting a demon, it’s more than I counted on. But I don’t suppose the Shonin keeps Aqua Regia around here.

  “You have any sake around here?”

  “For rituals. Not for you to guzzle.”

  “Too bad. A drink would help me think better.”

  “Look what you did to my room. You think I want to see you drunk?”

  He picks up and drops a shattered alembic.

  “Some say I’m charming that way.”

  “Then you should go and work with them. I don’t think I like your methods.”

  “I don’t like anything about any of this,” I say. “I don’t know any more about the 8 Ball than when I came here. You ­people said you knew how it worked, but you were lying. As usual, the Vigil is full of shit.”

  “I don’t know why I ever tried correcting your speech,” says Wells, coming into the room. He stops by the door and looks around.

  “What did you do to my laboratory?”

  I drop the cup with the Malediction butt into a trash can before Wells can see.

  “We pulled a Qliphoth out of one of Saint Nick’s little Frankensteins. It kicked up a fuss about it.”

  Wells looks past me to the Shonin.

  “Is that true?”

  The Shonin nods and adjusts his conical hat, which is sliding off to one side.

  “He extracted and dispelled it using the Qomrama Om Ya.”

  “That’s a breakthrough then,” says Wells.

  I pick up a chair and sit down.

  “It would be if we knew how we did it. I just picked up the 8 Ball and it did the rest. I wasn’t in control at all.”

  Wells goes over to the magnetic chamber where the 8 Ball floats. He checks the lock on the chamber door.

  “You took it out?”

  “Yep.”

  “Knowing how dangerous it is.”

  “I just said yes.”

  “I could terminate you for that.”

  I pull the na’at from under my coat.

  “You think any of your choir boys wants to come for me after what they saw me do yesterday?”

  “Always looking for a fight, aren’t you?” says Wells. “Put that away. I only meant terminate your employment.”

  I study him. His heartbeat is normal. Up a little, but that might be because I drew down on him. His eyes aren’t dilated, another good indicator that he’s telling the truth. I slip the na’at back under my coat.

  “You’re going to watch that kind of behavior for the next few hours,” Wells says. “I’m pulling you off the Angra case for a while. You need to come with me.”

  “Am I getting detention?”

  “You’re going to want to watch that kind of thing too. Saragossa Blackburn is dead and someone is making accusations.”

  “Against me?”

  “Yes. We need to deal with this.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Later. Shonin, I’ll have some ­people come by
to help you put your lab back together. Between that and the breakthrough with the demon, it sounds like you have enough work to keep you busy for a while.”

  “More than enough. You really think he killed Blackburn? I studied ­people a long time. He’s a fool, not a murderer.”

  “We’ll see,” says Wells. He goes to the door and holds it open for me.

  I turn to the Shonin.

  “See you around, dead man.”

  “Keep your nose clean, dumb-­ass.”

  IT’S A LONG walk to Wells’s office. The silence is different this time. It’s not the general silence of ­people going quiet as I pass. Now it’s Wells’s silence as he walks slightly ahead of me so he doesn’t have to speak or look at me. This is truly fucked and potentially dangerous. But I have my na’at, my gun, and my blade. If things go bad for me, I’ll make them worse for everybody else.

  Wells’s office is at the far end of the Vigil clubhouse. There’s a plastic Christmas wreath on the door. Inside it’s all wood paneling. A desk big enough you could rodeo on it. A Marshals Ser­vice seal and Vigil sigil on the wall behind. A cross on his desk. Everything you need to put the fear of God and Gitmo into anyone he drags in here. There’s also something very loud in the room and it’s in a really nice suit.

  “Marshal, I want you to place this man under arrest right now,” says Audsley Ishii.

  Wells goes around his desk and sits in his leather executive chair. I’m betting he’s not getting comfortable, but positioning himself so he’s in reaching distance of his Glock.

  “Based on what evidence?”

  “Don’t talk to me like you don’t know Stark. Living in Hell. Playing the Devil. It’s driven him insane. Don’t forget that a few months ago he broke into the Augur’s home and threatened him.”

  I look at Ishii.

  “And I saved his wife and him from Aelita. How did he die?”

  Ishii raises a righ­teous finger.

  “Don’t play detective, like you’re investigating a crime you don’t know about. It was a Saint Nick killing. You have a history of cutting ­people up, don’t you? Story is, you cut off a friend’s head and still have it in your house.”

  Wells picks up a pen and puts it back in the holder on the edge of his desk.

  “We know all about his relationship with Aldous Kasabian. Do you have any actual evidence that Stark was at the murder scene?”

  Ishii takes a plastic evidence bag from his pocket and drops it on the desk.

  “We found this.”

  Wells has a look and hands it to me. It’s the torn edge of a receipt from Max Overdrive. There’s a mark on it like it was stuck to the bottom of someone’s shoe. Or marked to look that way.

  I say, “Seriously? You think I wouldn’t check myself over before running off to kill the king of the Sub Rosa?”

  “Blackburn told me that he was afraid for his family’s safety,” says Ishii. “He invited you over and a ­couple of days later he’s dead and this is at the scene. You can’t dismiss that.”

  I look at Wells. He’s the sphinx. I don’t get anything from him at all.

  “I was there for him to offer me your job, asshole,” I say, and wait for Wells to reprimand me. He’s doesn’t, which can’t mean anything good. “What does Tuatha think? Does she think I’m Saint Nick?”

  Ishii takes back his evidence bag.

  “She’s distraught. She doesn’t know what to think.”

  “Meaning she doesn’t think it was me. You’ve always had it in for me and now’s your chance to prove you’re the investigator to the stars.”

  Wells looks at me, then at Ishii.

  “Is it true that Blackburn offered Stark a job?”

  “According to him.”

  “Ask Tuatha,” I say. “She was there.”

  “Where did the murder take place?” says Wells.

  “In his office at home,” Ishii says.

  “What time?”

  Ishii pulls out his phone and checks a note.

  “The doctors say yesterday between eight and eleven. The necromancers say closer to ten.”

  Wells shakes his head. Leans back in his chair.

  “Then it wasn’t Stark. He was with my team on official Vigil business all morning. Sorry, Mr. Ishii, but you’re looking at the wrong man.”

  Ishii closes in on Wells’s desk, stabbing the top with his finger.

  “No, I’m not. Saint Nick is clearly working with powerful magic forces. Stark is an accomplished magician. He could be fooling all of us. Played with time. Killed from a distance. Or possessed someone to kill for him.”

  Wells leans forward, glancing at the fingerprints Ishii left on his pristine desk.

  “I have a dozen accomplished magicians on my staff. Not all of them are pleasant ­people. Personality defects seem endemic among the Sub Rosa. But it doesn’t make them killers.”

  “Maybe it was you, Audsley,” I say. “You knew your days with Blackburn were numbered, so you flipped out and killed him by mistake. Maybe you’re the thing that was making him nervous for his safety. Then you go Jack the Ripper on the corpse to make it look like Saint Nick.”

  “That’s an interesting point,” says Wells. “Blackburn was a scryer. Why wouldn’t he have seen who was coming after him or the time of the attack?”

  Ishii gives me a look.

  “More proof that it would take a very powerful magician to hide both his identity and his intentions from the Augur.”

  Wells nods.

  “And you just said that Saint Nick was a powerful magician.”

  Now Ishii shoots Wells a death-­beam look.

  “I have the entire Sub Rosa board on my side. If you don’t arrest Stark right now, I can’t guarantee his safety.”

  Wells stands up and comes around his desk.

  “You let me worry about his safety. And his criminal tendencies. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have a lot of work to do.”

  He goes to the door and holds it open. Ishii doesn’t move.

  “The chief of police is with us, Stark. There’s nowhere you can hide in L.A.”

  I look at him for a minute.

  “What size uniform do you wear? After your bang-­up job protecting Blackburn, I’m picturing your next gig as a rent-­a-­cop guarding a Denny’s in Fresno.”

  “That’s it,” says Wells. “Stark, you shut up. Mr. Ishii, thank you for the sad news about the Augur’s passing and your concerns about his death. The Vigil will do whatever it can to aid in the investigation.”

  I know Ishii wants to say something more, but Wells looks like he’s one deep breath from pepper-­spraying the guy. Ishii turns and leaves.

  Wells goes back to his desk. Takes out a handkerchief and wipes off Ishii’s prints.

  I say, “You finally convinced I’m not Saint Nick?”

  “Not by that scene,” Wells says.

  He takes a print out from a manila envelope on his desk. It’s a drawing. A crude map.

  “Washington convinced me you’re innocent. Their psychics are sure they’ve tracked down Saint Nick and he’s not where you’re standing.”

  “Where is he?”

  Wells turns the drawing around. I was right. It’s a map, probably drawn by one of the psychics. A long street dotted with what look like office towers.

  “He’s in the Pickman Building on Wilshire. They don’t know if he’s a guest or a prisoner, but they’re sure he’s there on the top floor.”

  He points to a building marked with a crude star, like something someone would draw while in a trance.

  “You’re going to go and get him,” says Wells.

  I look at the map. The mark looks like it’s around the corner of Wilshire and South Robertson.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re good at getting in and ou
t of places. You’re going to use that power for something useful and end this maniac’s run once and for all.”

  “Do you have anything more than this map? It’s pretty, but office buildings tend to have a lot of rooms in them.”

  Wells shows me another drawing with a room marked on the top floor of a ten-­story building.

  “We know right where he is. And you won’t be going in alone. An agent from our special operations team will be going with you.”

  “I’m not Saint Nick, but you still don’t trust me.”

  “You’re right, I don’t,” he says. “But this isn’t a matter of trust. It’s a matter of skills, which the agent has. Also, it’s a matter of judgment. Like what happened in the Shonin’s room today.”

  I push the drawing back across the table.

  “Do I get to meet Derek Flint before the job?”

  “You already know her,” says Wells. “Julie Sola. Why do you think I wanted her back on the team? She was just a rookie in the ser­vice, but she was experienced in special operations for an agency you don’t need to know about.”

  So that’s why she was with Vidocq. Probably picking up a few last minutes of B&E tips.

  “When do we leave?”

  “Tonight. Marshal Sola has sketched out a good plan. She’ll get you up to speed later.”

  “Shouldn’t we go over things now?”

  “She has work to do first. And nothing you’re doing is complicated. You’re just there to get her through any doors she can’t breach herself.”

  “I can probably do this whole thing myself in ten minutes.”

  “Or blow it in one. The plan is already in motion. Be back here at midnight.”

  I leave Wells’s office and walk around looking for Sola and Vidocq, but can’t find them. Not a bad day all in all. I saw Ishii tossed out on his ass. I’m cleared of being Saint Nick. And I got to sucker-­punch a demon.

  Armed guards stand around the entrance to the Shonin’s room as movers take out the wrecked furniture and bring in new. I’ve always been in such a hurry to get inside I never noticed that he’s hung mistletoe over the door.

  I RIDE THE Hellion hog home from the Vigil compound through wet, empty streets. The rain beats down hard today. Fat drops the size of quarters. I rev the engine and speed the hog down Hollywood Boulevard, sending mini-tidal waves onto the sidewalk.