Then the question became, was it a coincidental resemblance? Or did whoever had plotted this specifically send in someone who looked like Fred’s ideal man in order to catch her off guard?
There was a vague, indefinite goal that Lorne had had now and again during the years he’d been on Earth. In his pipe dream, instead of owning a downtown nightclub, he owned a resort in some balmy South Pacific paradise. The southern coast of Mexico, maybe, or some Polynesian island. Vampires like Angel could come and enjoy the nightlife, but for other demons there would also be daytime activities—snorkeling in impossibly clear blue waters; lounging at the beach; sailing, tennis, and golf—the whole tropical fun package, all rolled into one vast sanctuary.
That dream came back to him now because he thought if he had a place like that, he could welcome his guests at a private airstrip, all Ricardo Montalban in a lightweight silk summer suit, and then see them off again when they left. And that way, he’d never have to feel responsible for anything that might happen just outside the doors to his place, because he would have seen them safely come and go. Before they arrived and after they went, they were on their own.
The same applied at Caritas, of course, but there was always the freak event—like whatever had happened to Fred, where she had just stepped out of protected ground for a couple of minutes—that threw a monkey wrench into his whole theory. On his beachfront hideaway, there would be no stepping out—sanctuary would extend to the border of international waters, and anyone who went beyond that would know what they were opening themselves up to.
He shook his head to bring himself back to Caritas and the business at hand. “Let me just get this straight,” he said. “You didn’t see this guy in the club before you spotted him talking to Fred, and you couldn’t find him after. He just showed up for those few minutes?”
“That’s all I saw of him. I couldn’t say he wasn’t there before—I was kind of nervous, waiting my turn to sing.”
“And then you finally did sing, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention,” Lorne said. “I’ll make it up to you, Visssclorf honey. I promise. Did you see anything else that might help?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Like I told you, I didn’t even go outside when the explosion went off. I know I’m not well liked around here. I didn’t want to leave the confines of the club when all those others were outside. I wanted to just sing my songs and then go, by myself, so I could get home before anybody spotted me. If anybody ever followed me home from here, or caught me outside, I’d be dead for sure.”
Virtually every demon felt that way from time to time, existing in a world that had become so overwhelmingly dominated by humans. But it’s too bad, Lorne thought, that she has to feel that way because of something beyond her control.
Absolutely disgusting and heinous, but nonetheless, not exactly her choice.
“Okay,” he said. He wanted to pat her pinchers, to reassure her if he could. But who knew if that would even be taken the right way by such an alien breed? She might see it as an attack, or an insult. “Thanks, Visssclorf. I appreciate the assist, and I know Angel will too.” He left her sitting there, sipping her drink through the long straw, and marveled at the courage it had taken her to come to this place knowing she was universally hated by the rest of the clientele.
Just goes to show you, he thought, you can never tell what’s in someone’s heart by the way they look on the outside.
Chapter Fifteen
Having left Gunn and Wesley on the trail of another informant’s tip—though informants, Angel was beginning to think, are not exactly proving their worth tonight—the vampire was back behind the wheel of his GTX, heading for the Hyperion. He’d had another idea, but it would take some online research to pin down the guy he needed to talk to, and Cordy was already on her way out to join the guys, having had just about all the online time she could stand. Angel understood. There are times when you just can’t take the sitting and sifting data anymore, and you just have to find someone you can hit.
The more the night dragged on, the more frustrated he grew, and the more hitting sounded like a good idea—especially after having heard Fred get cut. The fight at the demon market had been pointless, as it turned out, but at least it had dissipated some of his restless energy. Without that break, he might not have been able to look at the problem with a fresh enough eye to come up with this new approach.
It all started with the fire, he had realized. He wasn’t sure if the explosion was what had started the fire, or if the fire had set off the explosion. But either way, the building across from Caritas had been burning, and that’s what had drawn everyone out of the club and onto the sidewalk, where the drive-by car could shoot into their midst and distract them long enough to snatch Fred.
And yet, in trying to find a new way to come at the problem, he had completely ignored the fire. Lorne had speculated that it was arson, a fire set by the building’s owner to claim insurance money since he couldn’t afford to finish construction. It had sounded plausible to Angel—certainly it had happened just that way, many times—so he’d put it out of his mind. But after the market brawl, when he, Wes, and Gunn had been standing around outside shaking out sore knuckles and reliving the best parts, it had suddenly struck him as odd. Any other time, the explanation would have been fine. But tonight, the timing had been so precise that the fire must have been intentionally set to draw out the clientele of Caritas.
Which meant it was still arson—but maybe arson with two completely different purposes in mind.
He wouldn’t know until he could find out who owned the building, and what his real financial situation was. And who his friends were—that would be key. If he had any dealing with Wolfram and Hart, for instance, or any known connections with any demonic groups, that would be a definite starting point.
Angel stomped on the accelerator and gunned the car through a yellow light, then down the street, barely slowing to turn into the hotel’s driveway. He stopped in front of the doors, killed the engine, and jumped from the car. Inside, he found that Cordelia had left her computer powered up and online. Good, he thought. Saves me at least three minutes.
And this was one of those occasions, he knew, in which every minute might literally count.
“I’m tellin’ you,” Gunn said, for what seemed like the sixth or seventh time, “this is where we said we’d meet her.”
“I just don’t want to be standing on this corner waiting when Cordelia is, in fact, standing on some other corner waiting for us,” Wesley said. He glanced up at the street signs again, as if they might have changed since the last ten times he’d looked at them. When they didn’t seem to have, he looked back down at the sidewalk and crossed his arms impatiently. Gunn found himself almost wishing Cordy would be even later, just so he could see if Wes would actually explode.
But since Fred was still in danger, he figured that should be a pleasure saved for some other time.
“You could try her cell again,” Gunn offered, with a wry grin. “But she’d just think you were worrying for nothin’. Or insane—there’s always that.”
Wesley was about to say something else—probably another variation on “I just want to be certain,” Gunn suspected—when Cordy’s Jeep rolled up to the corner and stopped. She lowered the passenger window. “You guys going to stand out there all night?” she asked cheerfully.
Gunn went to the front passenger door and climbed in. Wesley took the seat behind him. “You always pick up any men you see on street corners?” Gunn asked.
“Just the cute ones,” Cordelia replied. “And believe me, most guys you see standing around on street corners look more like someone else’s leftovers than cute ones.”
“We’re going to Fourth and Hartford,” Wesley told her. Gunn thought there was still a trace of impatience in his voice, though really she’d only kept them waiting a couple of minutes longer than she had promised.
“Meter’s running,” she informed them. “Seriously, you guys, thanks
for letting me come out with you.”
“You’re part of the team,” Wesley replied stiffly.
“The part of the team who was going stir-crazy in that hotel,” she announced. “I felt about as useless there as that bottle of Bain de Soleil we got Angel as a gag gift but that he refuses to just throw away.”
“Not completely useless,” Wes said, and this time Gunn caught an undercurrent of humor in his tone. “You did tell Angel that one of the demon species that might possibly be involved was a Zhoon.”
Gunn picked up the narrative. “And I happened to know a Zhoon, from the old neighborhood. Used to freak some of my boys out, see me talk to this freaky-lookin’ demon like it was just one of the locals. But that’s what it was. Demon wasn’t suckin’ blood or anything like the vamps we took down. It used to collect bottles and cans in a shopping cart, for the money it could get down at the recycling place.”
“Was it homeless?” Cordelia asked, sounding genuinely sympathetic. “That’s so sad.”
“No, it had a crib. It just liked a clean neighborhood, and it had a lot of time on its hands. Zhoons never need to sleep, and this one loved to talk. Thing would talk all night long and never get tired.”
He had caught Wesley yawning. “A trait more of us could use, apparently,” Wesley put in.
“No doubt,” Cordelia said, squealing around a hard right. She drove the Jeep well, but faster than Gunn was quite comfortable with. Gunn thought she had probably been riding with Angel too much before she’d gotten her own L.A. wheels.
“So you found this sleepless streetcleaner…,” Cordelia prodded when Gunn failed to resume his story.
“It wasn’t quite that simple,” Wesley told her. “First we had to go to Gunn’s old neighborhood, which, quite frankly, isn’t on the Fodor’s list of top Los Angeles tourist attractions—”
“Well, it ain’t as cool as the La Brea tar pits or the Bradbury Building,” Gunn interrupted. “But I think it beats Forest Lawn and that diner shaped like a hot dog.”
“Hey, I love Tail O’ the Pup!” Cordelia shouted. “I mean, the building. It’s classic Southern California architecture. I don’t actually eat the hot dogs.” She paused, reconsidering. “Well, almost never.”
“Yes,” Wes humphed. “As I was saying, we had to tour the high points of Gunn’s misspent youth—”
“I lived there two years ago,” Gunn interjected.
“Quite. Before you moved to your current slice of heaven. And when we finally did find the Zhoon, he didn’t so much want to talk to us as to use our headlights to see if the plastic bottles and jars he had gathered were number ones, twos, or fives.”
“Recycling place only takes ones and twos,” Gunn explained.
“Is going out with you two always so entertaining?” Cordy asked. “Because it just occurs to me that maybe there’s some online research I could be doing.”
“You did ask,” Gunn said.
“Did I? I don’t remember that.”
“Actually, you didn’t,” Wesley corrected. “But we started to tell you, anyway.”
“And once we start somethin’, we don’t stop,” Gunn threatened. “So you might as well listen to the rest of the story.”
“If it’s short,” Cordelia said. “We’re almost there. And if I keep jabbering, maybe I’ll get to miss the rest.”
“Not that easy,” Gunn said, playfully punching her shoulder. Joking through hard times, he thought. I’m glad we can do that. Makes things easier. Families had that kind of comfort level, he knew—he and his sister Alonna had had it once, before she had been turned into a vamp and he’d had to dust her. But if he started thinking about her, he’d think about Fred being in danger, and he’d ruin the mood that made coping with it possible. “Troublemaker.”
“That’s me,” she agreed, rubbing her arm where he had hit her. “Trouble with a capital C, and that stands for Cordy. And hey, ow!”
“Okay, long story short—,” Gunn began.
“Little late for that.”
He ignored her. “We found the Zhoon who likes to talk. He’d been talking, to someone who talked to someone else, you know how it goes. And this someone mentioned an abandoned car that had turned up near the corner of Fourth and Hartford. Not just a car, but a Z-28, which is what the shooters drove. So we thought we’d check it, see what’s up.”
“Ahh,” Cordelia replied. She scanned the street ahead, dark and silent. “So that’s why we’re in this neighborhood that seems to have gone to sleep hours ago.”
“Well, most bad guys don’t dump cars where there are a lot of people to see ’em,” Gunn pointed out. “Except for the really stupid ones.”
Cordelia turned onto Hartford and slowed the Jeep. At the curb, badly parked behind a rust-pocked pickup truck, a dark Z-28 sat. There was no light falling directly on it, so Gunn couldn’t tell if it was black or dark blue, but it sure looked like the car he’d seen on the street outside Caritas. Cordy pulled in behind it, and in the wash of her headlights, he decided it was dark blue.
“That looks like it,” he said.
“Or like a hundred thousand identical vehicles,” Wesley observed. “I think we need to take a closer look before we decide for sure that’s the one.”
Gunn already had the Jeep’s door open. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said. He stepped to the sidewalk and approached the car, peering into the windows. It was definitely empty. And smelly. “Kinda stinks,” he said.
Wesley and Cordelia joined him. She made a face. “Kinda,” she said, breathing through her mouth. “In the sense that mustard is kinda yellow, or Prada is kinda better than Kmart.”
Wesley bent close to the car and then turned away, wrinkling his nose. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to get closer,” he said. “Like, inside.”
“What do you see?” Gunn asked.
“Take a look.” Wesley pointed toward the car’s ceiling, right around the dome light. Gunn hunched over and followed the line of his finger and saw what he was looking at. The ceiling was caked with something that looked like green cottage cheese. As he watched, a big droplet of it formed and fell between the front seats.
“That’s nasty,” Gunn said. “I mean, truly gross.”
“The door’s unlocked,” Cordelia observed. “So if you guys want to really get into the spirit of this, feel free.”
Wesley looked at Gunn. “We really need to,” he said. “So far, we just have a car that smells bad. But there’s no indication that it was the car that fired at us.”
“Wasn’t actually the car shot at us, but the demons inside,” Gunn countered. “And if we’re gonna find out what demons they were, I guess we gotta go in.” He put a hand on the door handle, lightly, as if expecting it to be white-hot, but then yanked on it and tugged open the front passenger door. The stench billowed out like heat from a blast furnace, catching him full on the face and making him gag. “Wow,” he said when he could speak. “That is some rank demon-stink.”
Cordelia turned away. “You’re not joking.”
Gunn looked back at Wesley, who was putting his head inside the car and taking a deep whiff. “Careful, man,” he said. “That stuff might be toxic.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Wesley replied. His voice sounded a bit strained. “It smells familiar, though….”
I don’t even want to think about how that could be true, Gunn thought. Can’t imagine I’ll ever forget that stink, though.
Wesley stepped away from the car and walked in a slow circle on the sidewalk. Gunn watched him, mouth-breathing and trying not to think about the fact that smells are caused by minute particles of the offending substance actually wafting into one’s nasal passages. As Wesley paced through the arc of his circle, again and again, he held his face to the sky, almost like a man trying desperately to remember a name that eluded him.
“Sulfur and ammonia,” he muttered. “But with a trace of onion—no, grilled onion….”
Gunn risked another sniff. “Don’t f
orget the sweat socks,” he said, half-joking.
“That’s it!” Wesley cried. “Thank you, Gunn. You’ve done it.”
“What’d he do?” Cordelia said. “Besides making me not care if I ever eat again. You guys should partner up with Jenny Craig.”
“This car has been occupied—and recently—by Roshon demons,” Wesley announced. He went back to it and pointed excitedly. “Look, see the mucousy drippings?”
“Who could miss them?” Cordy asked.
“Well, Roshons breathe oxygen, as we do,” Wesley said. “But they don’t exhale carbon dioxide.”
“And that goo came outta their noses?” Gunn inquired, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“No, not directly,” Wes replied. “It’s a reaction of the bacteria in an enclosed space to the gaseous substance they exhale. It isn’t something they excrete, it’s just what happens when they breathe heavily in a tight space.”
“Why wouldn’t they just roll down the windows?” Gunn wanted to know. “Let some air in. Or out, whatever.”
“It doesn’t bother them in the least, according to what I’ve heard,” Wesley pointed out. “It’s repulsive to us, but just as normal to Roshons as our own bodily processes are to us.”
“They sound like fun people to hang out with,” Cordelia said. “But how is this helping us?”
“Well, it lets us know that Roshons have been driving this car.”
“How long does it last?” Cordy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The gunk. If it comes from their breath, does it stay there until someone cleans it off? Does it go away on its own after a while, what?”
“I’m not sure,” Wesley said after a moment’s consideration. “I think it lasts for a while, at any rate. So we probably can’t determine exactly when the car was last driven, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Cordelia smiled like a student who had just scored a major point with the prof. But Gunn knew that understanding what they couldn’t figure out was less important than figuring out what they could.
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