“It’s the way it has to be.”
“Okay, then. Is there anything else?”
“Stay home. Eat something. Go to bed and get an early start in the morning. We’ll meet with the Vigil after the raid and go from there.”
“Sure. Good night.”
“Good night.”
I put down the phone and Candy turns up the sound on the TV. I reach across her and retrieve my tamales.
“What does she have you doing tomorrow?”
“Same as you,” says Candy. “Babysitting Dead Heads. We divvied the list in half.”
“You know she’s making a big mistake.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to go to jail, so she calls the shots.”
“She wouldn’t rat you out.”
“I don’t think she would either, but I just want to be an employee with a job who does what she’s told for a while, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So, do what you’re told. We can talk on the phone. If you’re lucky, I’ll get bored and sext you.”
“Just as long as you don’t mind Kasabian getting a copy. He can hack my phone.”
“I’m the only one with a laptop. He’ll have to make do with hotel spanktrovision.”
I take a bite of my tamale. It’s great. I used to mooch off Carlos’s kitchen all the time. I might have to start again.
I say, “Life is funny, isn’t it? Look at us. We’re private dicks.”
“It’s not where I thought I’d end up. But it’s not bad.”
“We’re going to have to do something about getting the store back.”
“I kind of like the place, but we can’t live here forever,” she says.
“We can’t afford it.”
“Yeah.”
We eat our tamales and Candy brings the rest out of the kitchen. We gnaw on a couple more while Candy turns on the news. Crew Cut was right. More people are dying all over the world. It’s still just a few at a time, but more than a hundred have checked out in the last twenty-four hours. Vincent needs to get back in the saddle.
I look at Candy.
“That thing you said the other day, about missing women. I meant it when I said I’m not getting in the way of anyone you want to be with.”
“Not now. I’m busy eating.”
“Okay. I just wanted you to know.”
She sits for a minute.
“I miss the Jades sometimes. Rinko came by with a message that one of the Ommahs is coming to town. I should go see her. And the rest of the girls.”
“The Ommahs are kind of your den mothers, right? The matriarchs?”
“That’s right.”
“Going sounds like a good idea.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.”
Candy turns back to the other channel. Cowboy Bebop is on. She hums along with the closing theme music, sounding almost happy. Like maybe she hadn’t hooked up with a complete idiot after all.
IN THE MORNING, she leaves first. Julie loaned Candy her Prius and she wants to get to her Dead Head’s place before opening, but without rushing. No scratches on the boss’s wheels.
I’m supposed to keep an eye on a guy named Sabbath Wakefield. He runs his necromancer office out of a shop on Venice Beach. He doesn’t have a necromancer sign in the front window or anything. He’s set up as a fortune-teller. Cards. Palm reading. Crap for the tourist trade. It says in the file Julie texted me that he makes sure the local authorities know it’s all in good fun, and he greases the palms of the local cops so they spend their time hassling boardwalk weed vendors and leave him alone.
He runs the actual necromancy trade out of a back room, like a speakeasy. Only the right customers with the right passwords get past the counter to the inner sanctum. In other words, he’s utterly boring. If he conjured Fatty Arbuckle and sent him down the beach on a mammoth’s back, he’d still be boring.
I get there a few minutes before he opens, when I can get a parking space with a decent view of the shop. The camera Julie gave us to work with is pretty idiot proof, so I get some shots of him opening up. Checking out a few lady joggers who run by. Feeding a piece of his morning donut to a local mutt who trots away to hustle other handouts. I write it all down in my notebook. Julie is going to get a record of every person who goes in, every tarot reading, every pigeon who shits on his awning. It will all end up in my report.
Ten people wander in and then quickly out of Wakefield’s shop in the first hour. I take photos of all of them. The mailman comes by. I get a shot of him. In another hour, six more people go in and out of the place. I get shots. Wakefield comes out for a smoke. Click. Click. Click.
Two hours in and I can’t stand it anymore. I dial Candy, but she doesn’t answer and the call goes to voice mail. Even with the windows down, it starts getting hot in the Crown Vic. I smoke a Malediction, then another. Wonder if I could sneak away to get a cup of coffee, and curse myself for not buying a cup on the way over.
Around one Wakefield locks up and wanders down the boardwalk to a burrito place and has one with a beer. I get some discreet shots of him with his mouth full. Sexy stuff. Helmut Newton would be jealous.
Another dozen people go in and out of his shop. No one stays very long. Either his business is on its last legs, or he charges enough for the stuff he does in the back that he doesn’t need much tourist trade and he just likes being at the beach. My guess is it’s the second. He looks like a man who truly does not give one single fuck.
It’s a sunny January day in L.A., but still technically winter. The sun starts going down around five. By five thirty, the sky is dark and Wakefield hasn’t had a customer in an hour.
At six thirty on the dot, Tamerlan Radescu and his crew arrive at the shop. Wakefield meets them outside and ushers them in. I put the camera on infrared and snap away.
Tamerlan is inside for all of twenty minutes. Then he’s out again. He and Wakefield shake hands warmly at the door. Tamerlan’s men scan the crowd like nervous meerkats in case a vicious skateboarder or some bikini girls decide to race up wearing dynamite vests.
After Tamerlan and his men leave, Wakefield starts to lock up. Faced with a choice between watching Wakefield have another cigarette or following Tamerlan, I go for door number two.
Just as I pull out of the parking lot, my phone goes off. It’s Candy.
“How was your day?” she says.
“I longed for Gojira to rise from the sea and put me out of my misery. But things are looking up. Tamerlan Radescu just showed up and I’m following him.”
“Aren’t you supposed to stay with the other guy?”
“He’s a stiff and Tamerlan was in and out of his place real quick. Just long enough for a shakedown. I want to see if he hits any other Dead Head shops.”
“I guess that’s a good idea. You should call Julie.”
“Why don’t you call her for me? I don’t want to lose him.”
“Don’t spook him. Stay cool.”
“Don’t worry about my cool. I’m Steve McQueen riding a polar bear.”
“Okay. I’ll call Julie.”
“How was your guy?”
“Boring too. He went to a bar down the street like ten times during the day. I kind of felt sorry for him after a while.”
“Weren’t you going to send me smut if you were bored?”
“Yeah, but I got depressed watching him. I’ll mail you dirty pictures from the kitchen when I get home.”
“Then I’ll make this quick.”
“You do that.”
I hang up and concentrate on Tamerlan’s limo. It heads onto the San Diego Freeway, then over to the 10. The fucker gets off in Boyle Heights and I have the strangest feeling I know what?
??s going on. The limo pulls over, one of Tamerlan’s men ducks into a coffee shop and comes out with a whole tray of cups. They head back on Whittier Boulevard, then turn north, straight toward the Sixth Street viaduct and the goddamn White Light Legion.
I let Tamerlan go on ahead of me. The street at the railroad yard near the Sixth Street bridge is dark, so that’s where I park the Crown Vic. The dirt by the side of the road is loose and easy to pick up. I use it to draw a protective ward—a mean one—on the car’s roof. Anyone who comes calling will go home sad, but wiser.
Over on Mission Road, I hunker down behind a lamppost and wait. I’ve been waiting all day. What’s a little more wasted time between friends?
It’s seven thirty when I sit down with a Malediction. It’s nine when I spot the first Golden Vigil vans and Humvees coming across the bridge. I even have a cigarette left. That has to be a good omen.
There’s a slight breeze blowing down off the river channel. It smells like exhaust and ashes. A couple of rats run ahead of me down the road. I’m still a football field away from the warehouse, but don’t want to be seen by White Light shitheads or the Vigil, so I take a step to the right, into the hurricane, and make the walk backstage the whole way.
The smell coming off the river is more intense in the storm wind. Strange tattered things blow by, grab at my legs. The walk down the road feels like I’m climbing a mountain with a pickup truck on my back. I swear the hurricane is stronger out here, maybe because of all the baleful magic at the warehouse. By the time I get to the White Light’s parking lot, I’m exhausted. My chest hurts and it’s hard to breathe. But I still have a long way to go.
It took me longer than I thought to get up the road. The first Vigil cops are already in the fight club and more pour in ultra–slow motion from the vans, moving like ants in liquid amber. Civilians sprint out of the club—couples, bikers, mean-eyed blue bloods. They scramble out the door, frozen in place like snapshots of pants-wetting fear. Getting inside the club is like swimming upstream through human-size salmon, all going the other way.
Guns are going off all over the place. Skinheads pop off shots at the Vigil; each muzzle flash is an orchid of fire. The Vigil’s nonlethal rounds move almost imperceptibly. Flashbang grenades explode like glacial fireworks. Beanbag rounds hang in the air, turning slowly like fat fist-size wasps. Looking over at the fight ring, I wonder if the ghosts can see me. The current bout features two men with barbed-wire-wrapped ax handles. Both ghosts are covered in bloody ectoplasm. One of the fighters wears a Lucha Libre mask. I swear his eyes follow me as I move around the frozen patrons.
The stairs are completely blocked by more White Light bully boys and panicked civilians. It’s too packed to push through them. I have to climb on the outside of the stairs, holding on to the handrail, moving up one toehold at a time. It feels like forever getting up there. My legs shake and I’m sweating more than I should be. This backstage world feels like it’s getting harder on me each time I enter it. Maybe I should have hung back and let the Vigil do the heavy lifting. But I can’t risk them stumbling across Vincent’s heart. It won’t take them long to figure out that I lied about its location, but by then I’ll be long gone.
When I make it up the stairs, I climb over the railing and head into the snuff room. I’m not careful with people anymore. I shove goddamn civilians and White Lights out of my way. Their legs tangle and heads butt against each other, or they will eventually. They fall and smash into each other a millimeter at a time.
The scene on the killing floor is the usual horror. A muscled guy in tighty whities I recognize from a series of forgettable straight-to-video martial-arts movies is running with a chain saw aimed at the head of a singer I can’t quite recall. From his hair and clothes, he might be a one-hit-wonder hippie from the sixties who sang a song about flying horses. Maybe. They’re both ghosts and I can’t move them around like I can the civilians, but I can change the fight. The chair the singer is tied to is real enough, so I drag it a few feet to the side. If Mr. Martial Arts isn’t hexed into staying on the fighting floor, he might just stumble out of the ring and into the crowd. I’m not exactly looking for him to saw anyone’s head off, just maybe give a few patrons a taste of what they’ve been getting off on.
I go around the room testing the curtains that cover the walls, looking for the Gruppenführer’s office. The curtain fabric feels both stiff and gelatinous. My hand finally lands on a doorknob. I push the curtain aside and try to go in, but the door is locked. I get out the na’at and extend it into a sword, slice the lock off the door. When I kick the pieces out of the way they hang in the air like slow confetti.
The light is on inside the office. Cheap, dark paneling, like the inside of a trailer. A gray metal desk. An enormous Nazi flag that covers one wall, with a bookcase right across from it. There’s a glass-front gun cabinet against one wall. I’ll have to inspect that before leaving. I’m feeling pretty nauseous now. I close the office door and step left, coming out of the hurricane.
Tykho was right. There’s a canopic jar covered in Nordic runes on a top shelf of the bookcase right next to a shot of their mustached dear leader and his squeeze. Another photo sits right below them. A battered, faded photo of Sigrun back in her Thule Society prime. Young blond Aryan perfection. Is this what Tykho was talking about? Is this trailer-park Colonel Klink trying to muscle her into some kind of liaison? Blackmailing a vampire is a questionable move, but blackmailing Tykho seems like an idea sure to get you drawn and quartered. I guess having Death on your side gave the Nazi fuck giraffe-size balls. I smash the frame and take out Tykho’s photo, stuff it in my pocket. I also grab a Luger with an ivory grip off another shelf and a Bowie knife, stuff them all in my pockets too.
Another wave of nausea hits. I need to sit down, so I set the jar on the desk and drop in the Gruppenführer’s chair. And start going through his drawers. Jackpot in the first one. I stuff more baubles in my pockets.
I take a bronze bust of Adolf’s head from his desk and toss it through the front of the gun cabinet. Push away the glass and start piling weapons on the desk.
The door slams open and shut behind me. I turn around and lock eyes with a guy in a bloody White Light uniform. It isn’t like the others I’ve seen. His is cut better and has some kind of insignia on the shoulders and breast pocket. We stare at each other for a second, Colonel Klink is as surprised to see me as I am to see him. He sees the guns and the canopic jar on the desk and pulls a pistol from its holster.
I don’t have time to go for the Colt, so I grab a Benelli shotgun from the pile of guns on the desk and hope it’s loaded.
It is. The sound of the gun going off in such a small space is like getting whacked with hammers on both sides of your head. But I miss and it only stops Klink for a second. He blasts away with his 9mm and a shot catches my upper right arm. My right side goes instantly numb, but I fire away as another slug grazes my leg. I fall back against the wall as Klink’s chest explodes, a couple of loads of double-ought buckshot catching him just below his throat.
I lean against the wall and slide down, leaving a red streak behind me. Nausea mixes with the numbness, trying to convince my body to lie down and not move for a couple of weeks. But my brain is on high alert. There’s a better than even chance someone outside heard the shots. I don’t want the Vigil catching me here, especially with a ventilated Nazi and my pockets stuffed with his bric-a-brac. I get up and step right.
The hurricane hits and blows my dumb ass down again. Getting hold of the desk, I pull myself up. The canopic jar goes under my good arm. I look at the pile of guns. What a waste. Some stupid feds are going to get most of them when they’d look so much nicer decorating my hotel room. I try to pick up a few with my injured arm, but it refuses to work right. Using my left arm and a lot of wiggling, I get the Benelli’s sling over my shoulders so I can haul it out without holding it.
/> Strange light shines through the shot-up Nazi flag. I go over and look through the holes. And can see the river and railroad yard. I put down the jar and pull the flag down. There’s a door in the wall, Klink’s private emergency exit. It’s probably what he was going for when he came in. I can’t quite swing the Benelli around, so I bark some Hellion hoodoo. Part of the door explodes, splinters and metal spinning away languidly into the dark.
Getting down the stairs with a jar, a shotgun, a bad arm, and a goddamn bleeding leg isn’t easy, but it’s better than navigating the rat trap back in the club.
When I get around the front of the warehouse, more Vigil vans have pulled up. It’s D-Day over here. Have a fun night, boys and girls. Bust everyone and don’t be too mad when you don’t find anything under the fight ring. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I don’t trust anything you say or do. I’d rather be shot up with the heart under my arm than Schwarzenegger-perfect beefcake without it.
The walk back to the Crown Vic is longer than it took to build the Pyramids. I stop at one point, lean against a stalled Mercedes and tear off part of my shirt, wrap it around my bleeding leg. That takes another century since I’m working with one good arm and another that’s as numb as bologna. When I start off again, I’m no longer leaving a trail of blood behind me so the Vigil can follow, maybe get some DNA samples. With luck, all the traffic tearing along the road will rub out most of the blood I already left behind.
When I make it to the car, I’m shaking, ready to puke up the entire menu of the Last Supper. The tightness in my chest is back, but at least something interesting happened. There’s a nice scorch mark around the Crown Vic where someone tried to break in and got a hotfoot for their trouble. That puts a smile on my face.
Stepping left, I come out of the hurricane. And almost fall over again.
I get the Crown Vic’s passenger door open and wrap the canopic jar in a seat belt. Don’t want Vincent’s heart slip-sliding around the car if we hit any red lights. I wrestle my coat off and toss it on top of the shotgun in the backseat. Then I drag my ass behind the wheel of the car.