It’s dark inside. I feel on the wall for a light switch but come up with nothing. It occurs to me that I’ve been living in cars and civilian homes too much lately. This apartment is a pure Sub Rosa product. Switches are beneath them.
I say, “Lights,” and the place is suddenly like premiere night at the Egyptian Theatre.
How can I describe the place? The walls and ceiling are rounded, like we’re living in a goddamn UFO. The tables and cabinets have rounded backs to fit against the walls. There’s an orange shag carpet and an avocado-green sofa covered with enough plush pillows that you could break a leg if they ever avalanched. The place is ringed by oval windows, and I can see lights beyond them. Aside from the sofa, the rest of the furniture is all smooth molded white plastic with the same warm seventies hipster colors on the chair seats and backs. The apartment is basically a Hugh Hefner bachelor pad in a Star Trek swingers’ resort.
When I go to one of the egg-shaped windows, I’m looking out at around forty years ago. Sub Rosa homes can be pretty much anywhere in time and space. This one is high on a hillside looking down over L.A., only it’s not current L.A. It’s the city when disco ruled the legit clubs and early punk shows were blasting away in warehouses and little spaces that were only clubs in the sense that you could pack in too many people and sell them shitty beer. It’s almost tempting to climb out one of these windows and go down into the city. Breathe in that prime seventies L.A. smog. Maybe steal a Mustang and head down Sunset to see who’s playing at the Whisky A Go Go and the Roxy. Hell, the Masque club might even be open. I always wanted to see that place, but it was long dead before I was in diapers. On the other hand, when you’re leaking black blood all over yourself with a passed-out necromancer on the floor, it isn’t the best time to plan a road trip. But if I don’t die, I swear I’m going to see what’s down that hill. I prop Howard up on the sofa and go looking for the bathroom.
Everything in there is round too, even the mirrors. The bathroom counter is wave shaped and trimmed in wood like I’m in a goddamn Hobbit house. I drop my coat on the floor and check the bathroom cabinets. There are bandages and peroxide in the back of one. In theory I ought to be able to stop the bleeding with a healing spell, but I’ve never been good at those, and in my current state, I might get the thing backward and turn myself inside out.
I clean my shoulder as well as I can but find that I have a few splinters and some shrapnel in my side. I pull the pieces out and I start bleeding there too. I use up all the bandages wrapping my shoulder and midsection.
I rinse out my bloody T-shirt and leave it hanging in the bathtub. I don’t want to give Howard anything to gloat about, so I need to cover my rotting body. Luckily, there are some clothes in the master bedroom closet. The only shirt that fits is a blood-red button-down number. On the same hanger is a blue seventies kerchief. That I throw in the trash.
Howard is still upright when I go back into the living room. I mumble some Hellion hoodoo, and in a few seconds, he starts to come around. As his eyes try to focus, I get hit with another wave of fatigue. I pull over one of the plush plastic chairs and sit down while he tries to remember what words are.
Finally, he’s conscious enough to see me and the crazy room.
“Where am I?” he says.
“In Bilbo Baggins’s spaceship.”
He rubs the back of his neck.
“What did you do to me? My neck and back hurt.”
“You were in cold storage for a little while, but you’re fine now. It’s time for us to have a talk.”
He looks at the pile of colorful pillows on the other end of the couch.
“No. I’m not performing the spell,” he says.
“Why not?”
“I told you earlier, I don’t trust you. Even if you took an oath not to hurt me, you’re tricky enough to find a loophole where you could get someone or something else to do it.”
“You mean, find a loophole just like Sandoval did to me?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I just know that she’s always upheld any contract I’ve had with her. You, on the other hand, are a lying murderer, so my position stands.”
This is one of those moments when being Sandman Slim, having a reputation like that, is not a goddamn asset. With a track record like mine, it’s hard to fall back on a “Let’s be reasonable” argument.
“Is there something I can give you? I’m a big fan of bribes. Tell me something you want and I’ll get it. Money? Bonds? A Rolls-Royce? A whole fleet of them?”
He lowers his head, almost in disappointment, it seems.
“You can’t buy me or convince me of your good intentions. I have nothing for you. If you’re going to kill me, get on with it. If you’re going to let me go, then let me go.”
I pull my chair in closer, until I can practically smell his mouthwash.
“First off, I’m the madman here. Don’t explain my options to me. Second, you’re not going anywhere until I’m alive again. I’m going to seal this place tight, so that I’m the only one who can get in or out. If I’m going to die, I’m going to spend those last few precious moments with you, liquefying all over your nice suit. After that, you can stay in here until you’re bones and gristle too. And after that, I’ll be waiting for you in Hell with a lava tuxedo just your size.”
Howard pats his hands on his knees.
“Empty threats. I’m exempt from damnation. You can’t touch me in the afterlife.”
“First off, Heaven is out for you. For everyone really, but especially for you, so don’t even worry about that. Second, I’d try to explain all the ways I can hurt you in Hell, but I don’t have time. Let me simply impress upon you that I can find you anywhere in the afterlife and make your eternity a fucking misery.”
I grab him and use the last of my strength to throw him a few feet across the room.
“I’m going to find a way to fix myself without you. And when I do, you and me are going to have words.”
Howard sits up and adjusts his suit.
“You have no idea how absurd you are. When I say that the spell is obscure I mean that it only appears in one book and I had the only copy left in the world. Do you know what I did with it?”
“What?”
“I burned it. You see, I have a photographic memory. I didn’t need it anymore and I didn’t want anyone else to have those secrets.”
“What was the name of the book?”
He purses his lips for a moment.
“Goodness. I can’t remember.”
I step on his hand. As he winces I say, “This isn’t the time to fuck with me.”
I step off his hand and he cradles it against his body. But he still doesn’t look scared. In fact, he’s the opposite.
“Why don’t you try hypnotizing me?” he says. “Maybe I’d spill my secrets then. But wait. How many languages do you speak? Ludovico’s Ellicit is written in six, and none of them are currently spoken on Earth.”
Ludovico’s Ellicit. That’s not much, but it’s the most I’ve had to go on since Wormwood brought me back. Before Howard realizes that he gave something away, I whisper the hoodoo I used earlier and he falls over unconscious again. I drag him into a small guest bedroom and roll him onto the mattress. I seal the room with a little more hoodoo and leave him there, safe and sound for now.
I can’t find a bar in this dump, but I do find the kitchen. The refrigerator is fully stocked. I pile some chicken and potatoes on a plate and heat them up in the microwave. The chicken tastes like cardboard and the potatoes like wallpaper paste. But I finish everything. The food is going to either kill me or give me back a little strength. With food in my empty belly, I’m more tired than ever. I have to get some sleep, but before I do I text Ray.
Ludovico’s Ellicit. That’s the spell.
I sit there groggy and wondering if I have any options left.
There’s one I can think of. I hate to use it, but I don’t have time to be subtle anymore.
If you need hel
p, call Vidocq. A friend.
I give Ray his number and collapse on the couch. I set the alarm on my phone for one hour. That’s as long as I can spare doing nothing.
I sleep right through it.
If I dream anything, I can’t remember it. All I have is a sense of drifting in absolute darkness and feeling like a complete idiot. Hell I can take, but I hope that isn’t my eternity.
SUPPLIES. I NEED supplies, but I don’t have a dime. I go through every drawer in the living room, hoping the Sub Rosa left some petty cash. There’s nothing, but I do finally find the liquor cabinet. With the bourbon now on the living room table, I head into the guest bedroom and go through Howard’s pockets. I come up with two hundred in cash and an American Express black card. The cash I keep. The card I don’t trust.
If I start stinking, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell, so I go into the bathroom and brush my teeth twice. There’s shaving cream and a razor in a cabinet but before I lather up I realize that I don’t need them. My beard has stopped growing. Also, my face looks funny. I think. It’s hard to tell at this point. I see rot everywhere. What complicates things is that eleven, now twelve years in Hell left me pretty pale. But have I lost what little color I had left? And are my lips turning blue?I start to put on the glamour but get nervous. How much energy will it take to maintain it? Do I have enough to spare right now? In the end, I decide against it. The outside world will just have to deal with my regular face.
I shadow-walk out of the UFO house onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sun is like an anvil and the heat is like a hammer pounding on my skull.
Stumbling into the first tourist shop I see, I grab a pair of cheap Ray-Ban knockoff sunglasses and slip them on. The world is suddenly a little less horrifying. I also pick up a couple of black I LUV LA shirts, with hearts and palm trees on the front. They’re so hideous that if I thought I was going to last long enough, I’d want to be buried in them.
I give the nice lady some twenties and she snips the plastic price tag off my shades. Under my coat, I can feel the towels I taped to my body starting to soak through. My next stop is a corner market where I pick up some Tabasco sauce, sriracha, plums in hot red pepper, and four boxes of cling wrap. There goes another twenty and something.
Back at the UFO mansion, I strip off the red shirt and rinse it in the sink. The left side is never going to be red again, but I hang it up to dry next to my other shirt. It’s riddled with holes and still a little stiff with blood. I leave it where it is and pull off the towels I wrapped around me.
Immediately, dark blood falls in big drops onto the floor. I pour more peroxide over my cuts and open one of the boxes of cling wrap. My side is bleeding the most, so I wrap my torso first. I go around eight times, from my waist to my armpits. My whole body feels stiff and awkward, but I’m not raining as much muck onto the floor.
Wrapping my shoulder is a little trickier, since I have to do it one-handed. After a few awkward attempts, I get the job done. I’m officially one big blood sausage, ready for frying.
Before I leave the bathroom, I wipe my blood off the floor with one of Abbot’s nice towels. It’s so vile with my toxic blood that I don’t even bother putting it in the hamper. I just stuff it into the kitchen trash.
While I’m in there, I take a couple of slices of chicken, coat one with sriracha and the other with Tabasco. I get a little tingle from the sriracha, but I can’t really taste it. Next I try the dried plums in red peppers. I might as well be eating Styrofoam. I spit out the plums and throw everything else in the trash with the towel. I swear, if I don’t taste food again soon I’m going to eat Howard just to show him what happens to a man too sad to chance a bad burger.
When I go out later, I’m wearing a glamour. Even if it takes some extra energy, I need to do some things without people staring at me.
The first thing I do is steal a brown Subaru. I don’t even know what model it is. It’s simply the most boring wheels I can find. Cops are generally color-blind when it comes to brown cars, and this Subaru is too boring for even a soccer mom. It looks like it was made for people into competitive tire filling.
On my way to Max Overdrive, I stop at a little grocery and buy an insulated chest. Fill it with beer, cold cuts, and ice cream. Anything that will keep me cool so I don’t rot in the heat.
If it was night, I might just watch the store from across the street, but it’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s no way I wouldn’t be noticed hanging around. Besides, sitting in a broiling-hot car all day isn’t stalking. It’s a stakeout.
STAKEOUTS ARE BORING. I’ve been on them before and they never get any better. I have a beer and some ice cream to cool down, then some sliced ham to keep my strength up. I forgot to buy bread or mustard, so I shove the naked slices in my mouth one by one. I think of every old joke about how divorced guys are supposed to live. All I need are some week-old pizza boxes around to complete the look.
Even with the cold food and beer in my belly, I still feel hot. I shrug off my coat and it’s better for about a minute, but half of me is still mummified in cling wrap. I turn on the car and run the air conditioner for a while. It helps, but after half an hour, the engine starts to overheat, so I have to turn the damn thing off. The air outside is dead, so opening the windows doesn’t help. Eventually, there’s nothing left to do but take one of the bags of ice from the cooler and hold it in my lap like I’m trying to nurse it.
This might be the most pathetic day of my life.
I wonder if this is one of those things they call a “teachable moment.” What it’s supposed to teach me, I have no idea. Maybe that I should have stolen an ice-cream truck? Anyway, there’s nothing at all humiliating about clutching ten pounds of ice like your firstborn while the damn bag leaks all over your crotch so it looks like you pissed yourself with joy. I crack open another beer to celebrate fatherhood and keep reminding myself that I’m doing this for Candy.
What the hell am I going to do about Howard? I can’t kill him and he knows it. I can’t trust him, but I can’t let him go either because then the faction will get him. Should I tell him he’s on the kill list? Would that make things better or worse? I don’t need him making dumb decisions and he’s plenty scared now. If he was even more frightened, he might go off the rails completely. I need to think about it.
I check my phone. Nothing from Ray yet.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The street cools down a little after dark. I put my coat back on. I’m parked halfway down the block from Max Overdrive, so when a car ahead of me pulls away, I move up the Subaru. Now I’m only one house down from the store.
I’m smoking one of my last Shermans—I forgot to buy cigarettes too—when Candy sticks her head in the driver-side window and yells at me. I’m not used to Candy screaming right in my face and it’s even weirder when she’s wearing her Chihiro glamour.
“Who the fuck are you and why have you been watching us all day?” she shouts. Then, “And why do you have a bag of ice in your lap?”
She must have spotted me and gone out the back of the store and around the block to sneak up on me. Good for her. I deserve to be yelled at for not watching my rear.
Now I’m more glad than ever that I put on the glamour. I’ve been going over it all day, whether I should reveal myself since it might be the last time we ever see each other. But that’s junior high romance-novel stuff. She doesn’t need to see me die again. And if I do live, I don’t know if my body is ever going to be right again. I mean, even if I figure out what Ludovico’s Ellicit is and get cured, I might look like Freddy Krueger’s foreskin forever.
She’s getting angrier by the second. I have to tell her something.
I say, “Thomas Abbot sent me. He’s worried about you.”
Candy takes a step back and looks at me for a minute. She’s not entirely convinced, but she’s not going to eat my face right away.
She says, “What’s Abbot worried about? Everything is fine here.”
I decide that
I can tell her some of the truth, enough so she knows I’m not the enemy.
“It’s not you he’s worried about. It’s Alessa.”
That gets her interest. She leans back down to the window.
“What’s wrong with Alessa?”
“Nothing. He’s just worried that there might be people who want to hurt her.”
“What? Why? We run a video store. Who cares about us?”
I’m about to say something when someone shouts at me through the passenger window. It’s Alessa.
“Hey, fucker, what’s your problem with us?”
She sounds as mad and dangerous as Candy. I suddenly like her a little more.
Candy says, “He said Thomas Abbot sent him.”
Alessa reaches in and flips open my cooler.
“He’s a bum with a cooler full of beer. And it looks like he pissed all over himself. Abbot wouldn’t send this loser.”
I look from Alessa back to Candy.
“I know this setup looks a little strange but trust me, I’m here to help.”
“Help yourself and get out of here,” says Alessa. “I already dialed 911.”
She holds up her phone to show me.
Two LAPD cruisers swing around the corner and stop by the car. All four cops get out and head for us.
I look at her.
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I bet you do,” Alessa says.
“You don’t understand. They might not be cops.”
“Wishful thinking.”
The first cop to reach us is an older guy right out of central casting. He has a gray crew cut with a five o’clock shadow and the weary gaze of a guy who’s seen it all. Imagine a more malevolent Joe Friday. He stands by Candy.
“Did one of you call the police?”
“I did,” says Alessa. “This creep has been sitting outside our store all day drinking and god knows what else.”
Friday shines a light in my face, then swings it over to the cooler, where he spots all the beer.
“Have you been drinking, sir?”
“Yes, but I also have ice cream and cold cuts. I can show you.”
Hollywood Dead Page 17