Killing Pretty

  “The Japanese look was her idea. She always wanted to be in Spirited Away.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You love it,” she says.

  I don’t say anything or change my expression. Just give her a minute to settle down. Then I say, “How are you doing? Do you feel any different? Is there anything else strange going on besides the twister?”

  Cherry turns and watches the TV.

  “I don’t want to talk about death and dying. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “In fact, I do. I’ve died. A ­couple of times.”

  She laughs quietly.

  “You’re a fucking angel. What do you know? I mean dying like a person, with no power, no say, no nothing. Just a cold hand on your arm and everything you ever were slipping away. It’s horrible. He’s horrible.”

  She turns back to me. Gives me a big smile.

  “But all that’s over with and everything’s peachy now.”

  “Have you felt anything else? Any tugs or nudges from necromancers trying to wheedle secrets from you?”

  “All the time. A lot of them, they sound desperate. Hysterical. I guess the half dead are sucking up all the bandwidth and it’s hard to get through. Who cares? I never bothered with them. Some of the duller spirits love to chat away with them. Not me. I have my girls and my store. And you, of course.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Except today you’re being boring,” says Cherry.

  She goes and sits on the bed. Her feet don’t touch the floor. She swings them back and forth.

  “Bad desserts and dumb questions,” she says. “You should work more on your patter before you come around. You used to be a real player before you went away. Remember? You were a looker back then. But you’ve got no game these days.”

  “I didn’t come here to hit on you. Or get hit on.”

  She shakes her head gravely.

  “You should have fucked me when you had the chance.”

  “You looked like you were twelve. That isn’t exactly my thing.”

  She moves her legs apart.

  “You really missed out.”

  “Why do we have to do this every time we meet?”

  She pulls her legs back together.

  “Because it’s fun to watch you squirm.”

  “Now who’s being boring? See you around.”

  I open the door to the office.

  “No, Jimmy. Don’t go away mad. I promise I’ll be good.”

  I come back in and she points to the small chair by the makeup table. I sit down, feeling like a giant in a dollhouse.

  “Have you ever watched any ghost porn?” she says. “I bet that girl of yours has. It’s quite the thing among discerning perverts and L.A.’s jaded royalty.”

  “What the fuck is ghost porn?”

  She sighs and drops her shoulders like a little kid about to have a tantrum.

  “Fine. Never mind. What were we talking about?”

  “Where are all the souls of the half dead? Anywhere in the Tenebrae?”

  “The new souls are suspended in the sky like rotten fruit on sick trees. You’d love it, you morbid thing, you. Sometimes the twister reaches out like he’s trying to pluck them. He gets closer each time. You think it’s scary having ­people not die? Wait until this new Death gets going. He’s going to be a wild one.”

  “I told you. He’s not Death. Maybe he thinks he is. Maybe he just wants to be, but he’s not the real thing.”

  “I know he’s not really Death,” Cherry says. “He’s the Devil, finally coming to eat us, sins, bad dreams, and all.”

  “That’s not true either. Listen to me. Lucifer isn’t like he was before. I know him and that isn’t him.”

  Cherry crosses her arms and leans forward on her legs.

  “I’m scared, Jimmy. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared all the time.”

  Her face turns a pale red. She brushes some tears from her eyes.

  “None of this would be happening if I’d listened to Mason and gotten myself a blue-­yonder contract. If you love that girl of yours, you’ll get her one. You don’t want us to end up roomies here in the middle of this nowhere, do you?”

  “Trust me, Cherry. Hell isn’t what you think it is anymore. It’s opening up to Heaven. You won’t have to stay down there. Soon you’ll be able to walk straight Upstairs.”

  “If that’s true, come to the Tenebrae and go there with me.”

  “I can’t. I’ve lost the Room. I can’t go anywhere anymore.”

  “If you won’t go, then I’m sure not going alone.”

  “I’m going to work it out. I can’t stand being stuck here on Earth all the time. When I fix things, I’ll see what I can do about you.”

  “Sure. Later. When you’re not busy,” she says, and disappears.

  I look around and find her in the mirror. I pick it up. She wipes away more tears.

  “I’ll just wait right here, shall I, while you go save everybody else but me? Go away, Jimmy. You always let me down.”

  I go out through the office and head for the front door.

  “Wait a minute, Stark,” says Kitty. “You owe us for the mirror.”

  “The mirror is in the back. I’m not paying for it. Cherry said it was a freebie.”

  “Liar. I’ll call the police.”

  “Leave him alone,” says Cherry.

  I see her, blurry and distorted, in the side of a polished metal display case.

  “The police won’t come. He’s too dull to arrest,” she says.

  “Thanks, Cherry. I’ll take you on a tour of Downtown sometime.”

  “Of course you will. Remember to bring ice cream the next time you come by.”

  “Right. And mochi for Kitty’s ass.”

  “Excuse me?” Kitty shouts.

  “Get out, Stark,” says Cherry.

  This is the second time today someone’s thrown me out. A few more times and my feelings are going to get hurt.

  DON’T TALK TO ghosts.

  Don’t talk to ghosts.

  Don’t ever talk to fucking ghosts. They’re carrying more baggage than the Hindenburg and are just as likely to burst into flames.

  Still, through all her bullshit, Cherry coughed up something useful. The new Death—­wannabe Death, this year’s model Death—­is slowly pulling himself together, accreting form and power. It’s not a new story in the mystical transformation game. Hell, I went through something like it myself after a Drifter bit me. I died a little. The human part of me. Just enough that the angel half began to take over. I could feel it happening. Layers of me stripped away, like someone skinning a dead deer, until the human part of me was gone and all that was left was the red raw meat of a bouncing baby angel. Only with this neo-­Death the effect is the opposite. I was un-­becoming. New Death is getting stronger, growing in power and position. What’s he going to do when he manifests himself completely? No one joins the Death game as a retirement plan. This is an active boy who’ll soon have plenty of plans, tricks, and toys. I hope I have the chance to put many, many holes in his face before he gets to play with any of them.

  It’s another hour home from Beverly Hills, but the traffic doesn’t make me angry this time. It just reminds me of the freeways Downtown. Lined with damned souls twisted into lane dividers and guardrails, and other souls trapped in rusting hulks of barely functional cars stuck in bumper-­to-­bumper traffic on the endless loops, sucking fumes and exhaust heat for the rest of eternity. That’s all over now in Hell, but I have to admire L.A. for its dedication to this primal form of Hellion humor.

  KASABIAN IS BEHIND the counter explaining to a ­couple of new customers about how our movies don’t really exist in this world and that’s why the discs rent for $100 a night. You’d think that all they had to do was turn around and watch a few
minutes of the Mulholland Drive TV series David Lynch never got off the ground, or maybe acknowledge that they’re haggling with a dead man on a mechanical body. Either of those things should give them a hint to our business model, but no. Some ­people’s brains can only handle so much weirdness. So, they pretend this is a regular video store and they should get a discount on the Die Hard 2 someone threw in the bargain bin (which is where it always belonged). Me? I would have shot both of them by now and burned their bodies in the Dumpster, but that’s why Kasabian is the businessman and I’m the silent partner who lurks upstairs, which is where I head before I get drawn into the debate society.

  Candy is on her lunch break, picking at a baguette and watching an episode of Yakitate!! Japan. She looks up when I come in and pauses the cartoon.

  “How did it go, Nick Charles? Did you crack the case?”

  “Yeah. Death is really a crooked shoe magnate from Minneapolis on the run from loan sharks in the Wisconsin cheese Mob.”

  “I’d run too. There’s a lot of cannibals in Wisconsin.”

  “Hey, Ed Gein spent his golden years as the asylum barber, a decent and noble profession. Don’t slander the man for a few bad dinner choices.”

  “What about Dahmer?”

  “Dahmer was a drunk with power tools who watched Return of the Jedi one too many times. I know I’ve thought about murder when ­people won’t shut up about Star Wars.”

  “Guess I won’t be sending for those Millennium Falcon sheets after all.”

  “Please don’t.”

  I want a drink, but I go to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee. Just what I need: a three-­hundred-­degree drink on a scorching L.A. afternoon. I once considered learning to love iced coffee, but then I remembered I’d have to kill myself, so I gave up the idea.

  “Have you seen Vincent? He wasn’t downstairs.”

  Candy restarts the anime.

  “I think he’s on the roof.”

  “Why is he up there?”

  “I think he’s feeling cooped up, but is too afraid to go out.”

  “You don’t think it’s dangerous, him on the roof by himself?”

  “He’s a smart boy. He understands gravity.”

  “I wonder.”

  I go through the door in the back of the closet and climb the stairs to the roof. Vincent is crouched on the edge like a black-­clad pigeon.

  “If you’re thinking about jumping, we’re not high enough. You’d just break your legs and ruin the pants I loaned you.”

  He glances over his shoulder, shielding his eyes with his hand. When he sees who it is, he turns back to the street.

  I walk over and sit down beside him.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Just looking at the city. All the lives. They used to form a floating web of sound and heat that I could follow to any individual. It was like a symphony in a furnace. Now . . .” he says, and shrugs. “Everything seems so much more fragile since I’ve had this body.”

  “Yeah, we break easy, but we fix ourselves too.”

  “Not all of you.”

  “You mean suicides? Yeah. That whole thing sucks. It doesn’t seem right for anyone to get pushed that far.”

  Vincent half turns to me.

  “When you were imprisoned in Hell, did you consider it?”

  “Why bother? I was already in the belly of the beast. What were they going to do? Send me to Super Hell?”

  That makes him smile. He takes out his bottle of pills, taps out a ­couple, and dry-­swallows them.

  “You’re getting good at that. You’re not turning into a pill head, are you?”

  “Being human never stops hurting.”

  “You learn to roll with it. And seriously, don’t get hooked on those things. It’s hard getting off.”

  He nods, but I don’t think he’s listening. We sit together, neither of us talking.

  A ­couple of minutes later, I say, “You ever have any second thoughts about your job?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Sometimes. We’re both sort of in the same game. Death.”

  “You can choose to change.”

  “That’s easy to say. My father, the archangel Uriel, called me a warrior, a natural-­born killer. He said that’s what I was good at, what I was made for, so I should get on with it.”

  “I wonder if all the nephilim were killers like you. Maybe that’s why they were so hated.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He shakes his head.

  “The affairs of angels don’t interest me.”

  Then he looks at me.

  “You’re still human too. You don’t have to listen to your father.”

  “Yeah, but he was right. Killing and hoodoo are the only things I’ve ever been good at. They’re sure the only things that have ever helped anyone else. Why should I quit? Shouldn’t I just get better at it?”

  “That’s not for me to say. But I do appreciate the steady stream of work you’ve sent me over the years. I like keeping busy.”

  “Glad to oblige.”

  I take out a Malediction, light it. I’m downwind, so the breeze blows the smoke away from Vincent. If he’s annoyed he doesn’t say it.

  He says, “When I was younger, there was a time when I didn’t want to be Death. I wanted to be one of the guardian angels, protecting life, not taking it. For a while I pretended to be one.”

  “Wait. This isn’t the first time ­people stopped dying?”

  ­“People? No? There weren’t any ­people back then. Most of the life in the universe was teeming swarms of microscopic organisms. I liked them. I didn’t want to see them go.”

  “Why did you change your mind?”

  “Life stagnated. Things were born, but nothing ever changed. After evolving from almost nothing, the universe filled with copies of copies of copies of the same organisms for millennia. It felt wrong. So, I went back to work.”

  “And along came us.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Well, thanks for that. Understand, that’s my answer today. If you’d told me that story last Christmas, I might have punched you for letting humans, gods, and angels live at all.”

  “It will all be over soon enough.”

  I look at him.

  “That’s by immortal standards, right?”

  Vincent nods.

  “Don’t worry. I’m talking about billions of years from now.”

  “Good, because I haven’t even seen that Sergio Leone The Godfather we got.”

  “It must be nice to have things to look forward to.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess your job is kind of production-­line work. The same thing over and over.”

  He looks up, tracking a seagull as it flies over us.

  “When I took Henry Ford’s soul, he made some suggestions about how I could operate more efficiently.”

  “Did you take any?”

  “No. I have few enough surprises that turning death into a true assembly line would make existence unbearable. I might have to end things early.”

  “Then by all means, be as inefficient as you can.”

  I smoke and Vincent looks down at his hands.

  “What if I never get back to myself again? I can feel myself getting weaker. My spirit is settling into this body. I feel like I’m losing all connection to the eternal.”

  “From what I hear, the guy who’s taken your place is getting stronger. That’s probably what you’re feeling. Don’t worry. We’ll stop him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why don’t we go back inside. I’ll introduce you to some annoying customers downstairs. They deserve a good scare.”

  “All right.”

  VINCENT HEADS DOWN to see Kasabian and I stay upstairs with Ca
ndy. She ignores me, wrapped up in her cartoon. I walk around the table and take a peek at her laptop. The screen saver is running, blocking my view of whatever she’s been working on.

  “You researching the White Light Legion?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “They’re interesting. Why?”

  “Just curious. Wikipedia says they used to publish books and pamphlets. Do they still do that? Maybe I could go over and get some.”

  Candy pauses Yakitate!! Japan and looks at me like I just lied about eating the last cookie.

  “Do you have my brass knuckles?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Then forget it. Julie said not to tell you anything, and she’s right. We need to understand them, not clunk their heads together like coconuts.”

  Damn. Candy has gone reasonable on me.

  “Listen to you, Nancy Drew. I thought we could pay them a visit together, like old times. Put a nice scare into them.”

  She looks back at the frozen image on the screen.

  “You struck out with the Cold Cases and Cherry?”

  I sit down on a stool by the kitchen counter.

  “No. I got some information. Little scraps. I think Tamerlan is up to his ass in this thing. But I’m sick of tiptoeing around. Come on. Let’s go break things.”

  “As much fun as that sounds, you should just sit down and write your report for Julie. You’re the one always saying how much we need the money.”

  “Can I use your laptop?”

  “Sure. All my work files are password protected, so don’t bother snooping for the White Light’s address.”

  “That’s a hurtful thing to say.”

  She puts out her lower lip in a mock pout.

  “Poor dear. Want me to run you a bubble bath?”

  “Fine. If you insist on being no fun, I’ll do it your way. But you’re going to regret walking away from hilarious mayhem.”

  “I’m trying to watch my show,” says Candy.

  I sit down at her laptop, open a blank text file, and start typing. I’m pretty much a two-­finger typist. With a good tail wind, I can sometimes work in a third finger. Let her listen to me hunt and peck my way through this report. By the time I’m done, she’ll be begging to kick someone’s ass.