Killing Pretty

by Richard Kadrey

  “Consider also that seeing what happens to errant citizens would help keep discipline among the White Light Legion’s members,” says Vidocq.

  “You think that’s why they chose Townsend for the ritual? He wanted out of the group, so they used him for a sacrifice?” Julie says.

  “It makes sense.”

  “I wonder if his spirit is in their murder stable?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” I say. “He was probably the last guy on the planet to die before Vincent lost his job.”

  “I keep coming back to one thing,” Julie says. “What does the White Light Legion want with Death? Yes, he’s a powerful entity and you could use him as your own personal killer, but that seems like a lot of work when they were killing ­people so efficiently before.”

  Candy says, “There’s something missing. Something we haven’t figured out yet.”

  Allegra stares at her drink, then blurts out, “I thought I’d seen enough blood and violence at the clinic, but this is on a whole new scale.”

  Everyone looks at her. She shrugs and looks at Julie.

  “Stark told me about your new office.”

  “Yes, it’s coming together slowly, but nicely.”

  “I heard you have a downstairs you’re not using.”

  Julie nods.

  “For now. I might rent it out to help with the mortgage.”

  “Why not rent it to a new clinic? I could give you a good rate on any medical ser­vices you need.”

  Allegra gives Julie her brightest smile.

  “Allegra would be a great choice,” says Candy so that I don’t say anything and maybe jinx the deal.

  Candy continues. “She’s worked on humans and Lurkers. She can fix anything.”

  Julie gets up to get another drink.

  “I’ll give it serious consideration,” she says.

  “Thank you,” says Allegra.

  As Julie walks to the bar, Brigitte comes in. Julie sees her and points her in the direction of our table.

  Brigitte comes over and sits down, still decked out in the evening dress she had on at the fights.

  “Good evening for the second time,” she says.

  No one says anything. I lean across the table at her.

  “What the fuck were you doing tonight? Have you been to that slaughterhouse before?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No. And I hope to never go again.”

  “Who was that guy and how did he talk you into going?”

  “Someone from the old country. A producer acquaintance wanted me to show him the sights. It sounded like fun. I haven’t been home in a year. I don’t often get to speak my own language.”

  “How did you end up at the fight?” says Candy.

  “He knew about them. He’d been to something like it in Vienna.”

  “Did he tell you what you were going to see?” I say.

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave when you saw what was going on?”

  “He’s a financier of some kind. A powerful man with powerful friends. He could make trouble for me with my visa if I didn’t stay with him.”

  “He said that? He flat-­out threatened you?”

  “He didn’t even say it as a threat. It was a game to him. He wanted me to sleep with him, but I left. You have to draw a line somewhere, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” says Allegra.

  Candy says, “Damn straight.”

  “Give me his name and hotel and I’ll have him on the first plane out of town tomorrow,” I say.

  “Don’t bother,” says Brigitte. “There was another reason he took me to see the fight.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember Simon Ritchie? The friend who helped me come to America last year?”

  “Yeah, you were supposed to be in his Lucifer movie.”

  “Yes. That’s him. He did something else for me. He said that all of his wealthy friends had done it. That it was common practice in Los Angeles.”

  “Shit. Please don’t tell me.”

  She wipes a finger under her nose, stifling tears.

  “Yes. I have a wild-­blue-­yonder contract. That man tonight. He wanted to show me where I’d end up if I didn’t let him do what he wanted to me.”

  “Okay, then. He’s dead. Tell me where he is. I’ll go right now.”

  “I left him at the fight.”

  Candy squeezes my hand, trying to calm me down. It doesn’t work.

  “Are you going somewhere, Stark?” says Julie, coming back. She heard my tone and her question has the ring of a warning. I stay put.

  “I was thinking about it,” I say.

  She sets a glass of Aqua Regia in front of me and sips a new martini.

  “Don’t,” Julie says. “Have your drink and stay with us for a while.”

  I take a gulp of my drink.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  We drink in silence for a ­couple of minutes, then Vidocq says, “You should let him go. There are things that can only be settled a certain way.”

  “I have a better idea of what to do about the Legion,” says Julie.

  “We weren’t really talking about the White Lights, but what is your idea?”

  “If not the case, what were you talking about?”

  “A tourist. I’m going to show him Hollywood Forever cemetery.”

  If Julie gets what I mean, she doesn’t show it.

  “That can wait,” she says. “I have an idea of what to do about the White Lights and the fight club.”

  “What?”

  “I owe friends in the Vigil a favor. Shutting down the Legion and getting proof about what they and Burgess have been doing would be quite a feather in their cap.”

  “A raid? Tell them I’ll go along.”

  Julie laughs.

  “Yes, they’d love that. No. They’re done with you.”

  “They’ve seen what I can do. They need me.”

  “They don’t need trouble, and that’s what you always bring with you. Forget about it.”

  “I promise to play nice.”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “If you say so, boss.”

  She starts to say something, but gives it up.

  “Do you really think there’s a way out of my contract?” says Brigitte.

  “There’s a way out of anything,” I say. “Let us handle it.”

  I look at Julie.

  “When do you think the Vigil can move?”

  “They don’t like to waste time. If there’s another fight tomorrow night, they’ll probably go then.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stark, I’m telling you to stay away from this.”

  “I understand. I won’t interfere with the Vigil or the raid.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Who wants another drink?”

  “You haven’t finished that one,” says Allegra.

  I swallow the rest. Odds are I can drink these lightweights under the table, go back to the club, and peel the skin off one sharp-­dressed dead man.

  IT TAKES NINETY minutes, but ­people start fading, one by one. Brigitte is the first to go, looking exhausted after her lousy evening. Allegra and Vidocq are next. Arms around each other, they head outside to find a cab. Julie is the last holdout. I don’t think she wants to leave because she knows I’m going to do something she won’t approve of. But even she succumbs after half a dozen martinis. Candy and I pour her into a taxi and walk home.

  I put Candy to bed, go the kitchen, and drink some coffee. By the second cup, I’m wide-­awake. No one figured it out, not even Candy, but once it was my turn to pick up a round of drinks, I’d gotten Carlos to water down my Aqua Regia. My hands are steady enough to do surgery. Maybe
that’s what I’ll do to Brigitte’s pal. A heart bypass. Or his head staked out on a parking meter.

  I drive back out to the warehouse, park, and try to blend into the crowd milling around outside. I can’t just stroll back in through the front door. Crew Cut already took our tickets. So I go around the back of the warehouse like I’m looking for somewhere to piss.

  It’s like old times for a second. Around back, I head straight for a shadow. I can’t walk through it, but it’s a good place to launch from. I step right and enter the hurricane. Then back around front, I squeeze past the shit heels with their tickets, past the crew cut, and back into the crowd, where no one is going to notice me as I step left.

  And I’m back in the steam room heat and humidity of the fight club. The crowd whoops and cheers as some stupid son of a bitch pummels another stupid son of a bitch. The sounds of meat slamming into meat is old and familiar, but I don’t bother looking at the fight. There’s nothing I can do about it, and considering what I’m here for, it’s an unnecessary distraction.

  Keeping to the edges of the place, I make a circuit of the second floor walkway where I first saw Brigitte and her friend, but I don’t see him. Downstairs, I wade into the tightly packed crowd. No way a guy in a sharp suit like his would allow himself to be steam-­pressed by these troglodytes, so I push my way up front to the barbed-­wire fence separating the good seats from the cheap. I spend several minutes up there, scanning the crowd. The bettors. The touts. A body hits the floor. I look at the fight long enough to see an old MTV reality-­show contestant with a machete bearing down on a D-­list game-­show host swinging a motorcycle chain. Neither is long dead, but they’re both already forgotten enough to end up as ghost chum.

  I give the killing floor one more look. Forget it. If Brigitte’s friend is with the crowd past the barbed wire, I can’t see him.

  Back upstairs, I take one more look around. Nothing. I head for the bar in the corner and order a whiskey. The bartender pours something brown from a plastic bottle and I taste it. It’s quite memorable. Like someone melted a G.I. Joe into a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I drink half to be polite and toss the rest in a trash can held together with “Caution” tape.

  Just past the bar is a curtained room. A White Light in uniform takes money from men and women and lets them inside one or two at a time.

  I head over and get in line. When I make it to the front, I fake it.

  “This the special show?”

  The White Light grunts either yes or no. Who can tell?

  “I lost my ticket.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s an extra fifty to get in.”

  I reach in my pocket for some of Julie’s advance money, peel off three twenties. The White Light gives me change and stamps the back of my right hand with the number eighty-­eight. I’ve seen it before. It’s not a head count. It’s skinhead shorthand for Heil Hitler. I nod and push through the curtain.

  A White Light on the other side opens a heavy door. When I get through, he closes it and the whooping from the front of the club disappears. The room is soundproofed.

  It’s as silent as a library back here, and dark. The only lights are focused on whatever is happening down below us. The air is thick with cigarette and weed smoke. Moans here and there as ­couples play grab ass and guys on their own hold a joint in one hand and the crotch of their jeans in the other. A ­couple move away, deeper into the dark, and I slip up to where they were standing. The scene below is awful, but it isn’t surprising.

  There’s a ­couple on a dais, both ghosts. The man is tied to a chair bolted to the floor and the woman is strung up on a set of bare metal box springs. The man is bleeding ectoplasm onto the floor. One of his hands is missing. Two assholes, also ghosts, in crude homemade devil masks are behind him. Devil one is sawing off the guy’s other hand while devil two is browning the guy’s first hand on a hibachi. I recognize these fucking freaks. I bet they’ve been having fun in town a long time.

  Back in the early 1900s, way before Bugsy and his bunch rolled into town, one of the first L.A. crime syndicates was run by the Matranga family, big shots in the New Orleans Mob. When word got back to the Big Easy about the sweet pickings in sunny Southern California, it brought out more gangsters and even a few semilegit business types. It also attracted some of Louisiana’s more colorful swamp crazies, including Les Enfants du Diable. Take a shot of backwoods Catholicism, a twisted, survivalist version of Santeria, add a dash of good old-­fashioned inbred devil worship, and you get Les Enfants. Their cannibalism was a sacrament. Even their shit was sacred, considered the temporary resting point before their victims’ souls eventually joined them in Hell. I guess it’s easier hiding a lifetime’s worth of shit in a swamp, but it’s harder in a city, even one as rural as turn-­of-­the-­century L.A. The smell gave them away and street justice did the rest. But here the clan is, star of their own variety spectacular.

  It makes sense that lowlifes like the White Lights would end up running snuff shows. Bread and circuses keep the money flowing, but when the crowd gets tired of the slap and tickle show in the front room, some of them are going to look for a rougher scene. And the White Lights wouldn’t consider any of the victims in their cannibal melodrama clean enough, pure enough, lily white enough, or simply strong enough to care about, so why not make some coin?

  None of what’s happening onstage particularly shocks me. There’s isn’t much left regular ­people can do to make me think less of them. Plus, I’ve seen similar scenes Downtown. What I can’t get out of my head is an image of Cherry Moon. I know she’s back safe at Lollipop Dolls. She never had a blue-­yonder contract, maybe the one smart thing she ever did in her ridiculous life. The thing is, I know there’s someone like her here. Just as dumb and desperate and afraid of death as she was. Someone as pretty. Someone who’d put on a hell of a show for these blood-­hungry corpse fuckers. I don’t want to kill them. I want to slash their hamstrings and set the place on fire. Let them be the meat on Les Enfants’ grill. But none of that is why I’m here, and if Julie is right, I won’t have to lift a pinkie because the Vigil is going to ride in on white stallions and carry all these theater lovers off to Jesus jail, hallelujah.

  Now that my eyes have adjusted to the dark room, I look around again. But I get the feeling Brigitte’s friend is long gone. I’m wasting my time and I don’t even know if I should tell Julie about the snuff since she didn’t want me coming back here. Still, I’ll have to chance it. Who knows what the Vigil is into these days? They might need prodding to go after the White Lights. This should do it.

  Before I split, I take one last quick look at the scene. Over in the corner of the room, smoking a spliff and looking slightly bored, is the crew-­cut doorman. I was so busy trying not to be seen when I first came in that I never got a real look at him. He has tattoos all over his face, including curving devil horns where his eyebrows should be. What did Vincent say about one of the men at the ritual? That he had horns. And a number in a circle.

  I edge around the room, moving to where I can see the other side of Crew Cut’s face. The crowd gets restless as the action onstage builds. It’s a good thing humans can’t smell ghost smoke, or the stink of cooking human flesh would have this bunch knee-­deep in their own puke by now.

  As the crowd creeps in closer to the action, so does the crew cut. As he edges in close enough, I can see it. A circle of letters that reads PROPERTY OF SAN QUENTIN. Inside the circle is a number fourteen, skinhead code for “We must secure the existence of our ­people and the future of white children.”

  The crew cut is so wrapped up in the action onstage that he doesn’t feel me come up behind him until I have the Colt against his back. He starts to say something, but I pull him back into the dark and sidestep.

  Here’s the funny thing. I have no idea if I can sidestep with another person. For all I know, I’m going to kill this cheeseste
ak instantly or leave half of him back in the regular world. Lucky for me, Hermann Göring comes along just fine. The hurricane kind of surprises him. He doesn’t fight or try to run away. He falls right down on his ass and stays there, looking around like a lost dog instead of getting up. Some ­people just don’t like surprise parties. I pull him to his feet and shove him into the storm. It feels like a ­couple of hundred years trudging from the club back to the Crown Vic. My Nazi new best friend can’t wrap his brain around what’s happening. He keeps reaching out to touch the barely moving ­people around us. I have to swat his hand like a kid trying to steal cookies before dinner.

  Finally, we make it to the car. I step left, bringing us back into the regular world, and slam my knee into the crew cut’s lower spine. He collapses beautifully, falling headfirst into the Crown Vic’s spacious trunk. I slam the top down and get behind the wheel. He doesn’t make a sound the whole drive.

  BEFORE RETURNING TO the Beat Hotel, I stop at a bodega and buy a roll of duct tape.

  The asshole is waiting for me when I open the trunk, but being an asshole myself, I’m waiting for him.

  When the trunk is half open, he kicks out with both boots, aiming for my head. He’s fast, I’ll give him that. So fast he doesn’t see the black blade in my hand. I step back as he kicks and stick the knife through the sole of his right boot until he can feel it, but not so far it cripples him. He howls and thrashes around like a wolf on acid, so I pop him on the chin to bring his temperature down. While he’s lying there stunned, I wrap duct tape around his head, from nose to scalp. Ball up my fist and make like I’m going to punch him again, and he doesn’t flinch, so I know he’s blindfolded enough to take inside. While he’s still loopy, I flip him over and tape his wrists together behind his back. Before finally hauling his ass out of the trunk, I wrap more tape around his mouth. Give him a ­couple of slaps and all he can do is mmmm and rrrrr through the gag. One more loop of tape goes around the foot I stabbed so he won’t bleed all over all the hotel’s theoretically clean carpets. I wrap Crew Cut in my coat, toss him over my shoulder like a sack of Nazi potatoes, and head inside to our room fast. Even at the Beat Hotel, which is used to some weird sights, ­people might think twice about me carrying a body inside.