“Maybe.”
“Detective Meadows and Detective Sullivan. We’d like to ask you a few questions. Can we come in?”
“What kind of questions?”
The old guy, Detective Sullivan, produced a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. My wallet was inside. “We found something that belongs to you,” he said.
“Oh, cool,” I said, and reached for it. “You could have just dropped it in the mail, but thanks for stopping by.”
Sullivan jerked the bag away from me. “Your wallet was found at a crime scene, Ms. Riley,” Meadows said. “Now, can we come in, or should we come back with a warrant?”
“Give me the wallet and I’ll answer your questions,” I said. I put some juice into it, not a real spell but just enough spontaneous magic to make the suggestion stick.
“Sure,” Sullivan said, and handed me the bag. Then he frowned. “We’ll need that back at some point. It’s evidence.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I showed them in and closed the door. I took the wallet out of the bag and tucked it in the pocket of my robe. I pointed to the sofa and the cops sat.
“Nice place,” said Meadows. She seemed to be watching me a little too closely. Her attention was fixated on my talismans—I didn’t take them off, even when I slept. The talismans—jewelry and such—stored protective spells I could trigger in an emergency. They had juice, but a civilian wouldn’t notice. “What did you say you do, again?” the detective asked.
“I didn’t.”
“I know what you are,” Meadows said. “You work for Shanar Rashan, don’t you?”
I did my best to keep the shock off my face and took a closer look at the detective. She didn’t have much more juice than the average civilian, but she was obviously a sensitive. She couldn’t flow any juice or spin a spell, but she could feel it, maybe even see it, like a crude form of my witch sight.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, not this shit again,” Sullivan said. “There’s no Shanar Rashan. He doesn’t exist. Can’t we just stick to the real criminals?”
“You want some coffee?” I asked.
“Sure,” Sullivan said. Meadows kept watching me.
“I don’t have any. Beer?”
“We’re on duty and it’s eight-thirty in the morning.”
“No beer, then.” I went to sit in the armchair by the French doors that open onto the balcony, but Sam was already sitting there, grinning at me.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Excuse me, Ms. Riley?” Detective Meadows frowned. “As we explained, we have some questions…” She obviously wasn’t sensitive enough to see Sam.
“I’m just for you,” said Sam, laughing.
I shook my head and dropped into the recliner. “Sorry, still asleep. What do you want to know?”
“Where were you last night?” Meadows asked.
“I stayed in and had Chinese,” I said, pointing to the cartons on the coffee table.
“You don’t really have any friends, do you?” Sam asked. “And you can’t even trust most of the people you work with. You’re completely alone.”
I glared at him and started to respond, then looked quickly back to the detectives and faked a yawn.
“What time was that?” asked Meadows.
“Late.”
“Where were you earlier?”
“In the desert.”
“What were you doing in the desert?”
“Murder,” said Sam.
“Getting some air,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. I thought about a mud bath, but I don’t really see the point.”
“And later?”
“Tell them about how you nuked Benny’s corpse with a fire spell,” Sam suggested.
“I had some car trouble. Hired a wrecker service to tow my car back to the city.”
“And what time was that?”
“Maybe two, two-thirty.”
“And this wrecker service, it was Mark’s Garage out of Palm Springs?”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Or Mike’s Garage. Maybe Mack’s.”
“It was Mark’s,” Sullivan growled.
“Okay.”
“And what happened when you got back to the city?”
“Nothing. He took my car to a mechanic and dropped me off here.”
“Was there an argument? Maybe there was a disagreement about the charges?”
“Why don’t you ask Mark?”
“He’s dead,” Sullivan said. “He was the victim of an apparent homicide last night. That’s the crime scene I mentioned. Speaking of which, we’re going to need that wallet back. It’s evidence.”
“I took his heart,” Sam said. “There was a lot of blood, but I tucked your wallet under the body—that’s why it’s clean. ’Course, they’re probably wondering how it got under the body.”
I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry to hear that. But I don’t know anything that will help you and you’re not going to pin it on me, so maybe we can just wrap this up.”
Sam appeared beside me suddenly, sitting on the recliner’s armrest. I jumped and then tried to make like I was stretching. I glanced guiltily at the detectives. They seemed to be losing their patience.
“Maybe you’d like to go downtown to answer our questions,” Sullivan said.
Even when you tried to cooperate, cops always got around to the threats. They have their rituals just like gangsters do. Sorcery wasn’t an easy solution in a case like this. I could juice them and make them go away. I could make them forget about me completely. But they wouldn’t be working the case alone and their blind spot about me would eventually attract the attention and suspicion of others. My boss used a lot of juice to keep himself and our outfit off the radar, and I didn’t want to screw it up.
“You could rat me out,” Sam said. “Go ahead—tell them I’m their guy. I don’t mind if you give me up. The woman might even believe you.”
“Tell you what,” I said to Meadows. “Give me a card. If I think of anything else, I’ll call you. I’m not going to leave town or anything. Promise.”
They looked at each other and Sullivan shrugged. Meadows nodded and handed me her card. “Do that, Ms. Riley. And if we need anything from you in the meantime, we’ll be back with paper.”
Sam was waiting by the door. “I believe I’ll kill one of them. Which one should I choose? Detective Sullivan can already smell his pension…that would either be horribly clichéd or deliciously ironic. What do you think, Domino?”
I opened the door for the detectives and forced a smile onto my face. “Look, thanks for coming by. I know you’re just doing your job. If I can help, I will.”
“Goodbye, Ms. Riley,” said Meadows. She held my gaze a long time, as if to remind me she was onto my game.
“Yeah, we’re going to need to get that wallet back,” said Sullivan, “it’s evi—”
I closed the door and pressed my back against it.
“I told you it wouldn’t be your best three days,” Sam said. He winked at me and disappeared.
In the old days, a sorcerer who needed to solve an arcane mystery might sift through dusty tomes of occult lore. I didn’t have any dusty tomes, but I did have Wikipedia. The site itself wasn’t much use—for real lore, I mean—but I could use it as a focus for divination magic.
I powered up the laptop in my office and brought the search window up on the screen. I typed Sam in the box and conjured an image of the spirit in my mind. Tapping the ley line running under my condo, I hit the enter key and triggered the divination ritual.
THERE WERE NO RESULTS MATCHING YOUR QUERY.
This was disappointing but not entirely surprising. It just meant that, whatever he was, Sam had enough mojo to block my efforts to invade his privacy. Fortunately, I had a backup plan. Unfortunately, I’d really been hoping I wouldn’t have to use it.
I went over to a low table by the window and flipped the power switch on a thirteen-inch black-and-white TV I’d had since I was a kid. It
’s where I kept my familiar, a jinn whose name was Abishanizad. I called him Mr. Clean. Long story.
It took a while for the tube to warm up, but the image of Mr. Clean’s thick neck and bald, round head gradually materialized. Specifically, the back of his thick neck and bald, round head—Mr. Clean appeared to be sitting with his back to me. This was new, and I took a moment to consider it.
The interesting thing was that Mr. Clean was a spirit, and so he did not strictly exist in any physical sense. He didn’t occupy any position in space by virtue of which his back would appear to me. He was merely an incorporeal entity magically bound to the television set.
Thus, by appearing with his back to me, Mr. Clean was making a statement, much like a gorilla at the zoo that sits with his back to the rubes come to gawk at him. I didn’t know enough about either spirits or gorillas to be sure, but I figured the statement translated roughly as “Fuck off.”
“You remind me of a gorilla at the zoo,” I said.
“Fuck off,” replied Mr. Clean in his rumbling baritone. He didn’t turn around.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “I need some information.”
Mr. Clean’s broad, muscular shoulders rose and fell as he sighed, but he didn’t respond.
“Yeah, so, this spirit has been, I don’t know, stalking me, I guess. I need to get the lowdown on him.”
“Why is this spirit stalking you?”
“I don’t know, for sure. It may be—”
“Maybe you imprisoned him in a box and he finally broke free, and now he wants to tear you limb from limb?”
“No, I just met this cat. He says it’s a contract.”
“What kind of contract?”
“The gangster kind. See, I had to kill this guy Benny Ben-Reuven, on account of he tried to kill me…”
“I’m not really interested in your desperate rationalizations,” Mr. Clean interjected.
“…and I think he put a death curse on me. So this spirit—says his name is Sam—is stalking me, claims he’s going to torment me for three days before killing me.”
“And?”
“And, I want to know what you might have on this guy—the spirit, I mean.”
Mr. Clean turned to face me, finally. “Tell me the curse.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, recite the words, meathead.”
“I can’t. It was in Hebrew, I guess.”
Mr. Clean chuckled. It was the kind of sound the universe might make if it was laughing at you. I didn’t like it.
“What’s so funny, gorilla-boy?”
“The murder victim, he was Jewish?”
“Yeah, Israeli.”
“I believe I can identify the spirit,” said Mr. Clean.
“Cool.”
“This knowledge has a price.”
It always does. Like I said, I hate dealing with spirits. I scored the grand prize in the familiar sweepstakes with Mr. Clean—he’s powerful, ancient and knowledgeable. Where the supernatural is concerned, it’s like having an informant on the inside. The downside is everything is quid pro quo: I have to offer the jinn some hypothetical future service if I want his help with anything. Really, it’s more like a karmic debt I’m accumulating, and Mr. Clean is holding my marker. Someday I’ll have to pay him off, plus the vig. So you could say the jinn is my familiar, but you could also say he’s my loan shark.
“I could wash your car.” I suppose I was thinking about the Lincoln. I’d been worrying about it all day.
“I don’t drive,” said Mr. Clean.
“What does it matter? It’s just hypothetical anyway.”
“Because this service is of no value to me, you could later claim that you’d only committed to perform an irrelevant service.”
Good idea. Wish I’d thought of it.
“What then? I don’t have time for this shit.”
“I will require a massage.”
I laughed. “Keep dreaming, genie. There’s no way I do anything even hypothetically equivalent to giving you a massage.”
“It’s not sexual. It’s therapeutic.”
“It’s not very therapeutic, either, because it’s never going to happen. What else you got?”
“You can pick up my dry cleaning.”
“You live in a Zenith.”
“For the moment. When I gain my freedom, I’ll be able to take physical form. I prefer my shirts starched and pressed.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“Then we have a—”
“Wait! I’ll pick up your dry cleaning once.” Like a wireless provider, Mr. Clean is always angling to trap me in an open-ended service agreement.
Mr. Clean grunted. “What I’ve already told you is worth more than that. You will perform this service ten times, at my request.”
“Three.”
“Ten.”
“Five.”
“Ten.”
“Done,” I said, thankful there were no witnesses to my negotiating skills. “Give it to me. What is Sam?”
“His real name is Samael.”
“Never heard of him.”
“The Angel of Death.”
I’d been wisecracking with the “life of my firstborn” bit, but it turned out I was right on the money. “Benny Ben-Reuven called in a fucking angel to hit me? He doesn’t have the juice…didn’t have the juice…whatever.”
Mr. Clean shrugged. “Your victim believed this entity was Samael, the Angel of Death. Whether it actually is that being, or whether any such being actually exists…there may be a definitive answer to this question, but it is not one that hairless apes are given to know, even those who play at magic tricks.”
“That was an insult, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Sticks and stones, Smokey. Your theory still doesn’t explain how Benny was able to bring in that kind of hitter. He wasn’t much of a sorcerer. He tried to cap me, for fuck’s sake. With a gun.”
“This was a death curse.”
“Yeah?”
“You were in the process of murdering this man. You were taking all he was and all he would ever be. That’s a lot of juice, even for one with little talent for sorcery. He took that power, before you could, and he used it to summon this being.”
“Damn, I need something like that.”
“I could teach you a death curse. It would be costly.”
“How costly?”
“The massage would have a Happy Ending.”
“Oh, hell, no. Tell me how I get out from under this thing.”
“You don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“No. You can’t weasel your way out of it. The contract was paid in blood. Ben-Reuven purchased your death with his own.”
“What an asshole.”
“You’re hardly in a position to throw stones.” Mr. Clean shrugged. “All’s fair in love and black magic.”
“Okay, I can’t get away from the contract. What are my other options, assuming I’m not interested in dying?”
“What do you offer for this knowledge?”
“I’m already picking up your laundry five times.”
“It’s ten, and anyway, that was payment for the identity of your assassin. If you would know how to stop Samael, you must offer some further service. It had better be good.”
My life was on the line and I figured it was time to make the jinn my best offer. “Rashan runs some massage parlors,” I said, choking down the nausea that rose in my stomach. “I’ll hook you up.” The parlors were juice boxes, arcane dens fronting for sex-magic rituals. But despite this secret purpose—or rather because of it—they were also the place to go in L.A. for a world-class rub-and-tug.
“Done!” Mr. Clean said with an unwholesome gleam in his eye.
“Okay, Desperado, make with the knowledge. How do I stop Samael?”
“If this entity truly is Samael, the Angel of Death, you’re boned, to use the popular vernacular.”
“That vernacular really
isn’t popular anymore.”
“Do you want to hear this?”
“Yeah.”
“You do not have the power to defeat one of the Host, and Samael—the real Samael—is a badass even by the standards of the Seraphim.”
“What if he’s not a real angel?”
“Then you can simply kill him.”
“But if he is a real angel, he’ll wipe the floor with me.”
Mr. Clean glowered. “Your surfeit of intellectual capacity is truly remarkable.”
“I was smart enough to put you in that box.”
“The point is,” Mr. Clean growled, “if this entity is truly Samael, he must follow the rules. He will not take your life until three days have passed. Even if you try to kill him.”
“So I get a free shot at him,” I said, nodding. “If he’s a poseur, maybe I take him out. If he’s the real deal, no harm no foul. He still has to wait until the stars are right.”
“The moon, actually.”
“That’s actually pretty clever, Snowball.”
“It goes without saying.”
“Fine, next time I won’t say it. So what’s my first move?”
Mr. Clean’s eyes grew wide momentarily, and then he sighed. “I suggest you develop a plan of attack on your own. It would be a tactical error for me to advise you on this.”
“Why’s that? You want your Happy Ending or not?”
Sam’s head popped up behind Mr. Clean and he grinned at me over the jinn’s shoulder. “Because if you keep running that pretty mouth, I’ll know exactly what you’re planning to do.”
I switched off the Zenith and unplugged it for good measure, and then I went into the bathroom to grab a shower. I didn’t like the idea of Sam popping in for one of his unannounced visits, but I also didn’t like the idea of spending the next three days with that not-so-fresh feeling. Besides, I do some of my best thinking in the shower.
Sam’s appearance in Mr. Clean’s TV didn’t exactly inspire confidence in my plan. If nothing else, the stunt made it clear that even if he wasn’t a real angel, Sam might still be able to take me to school. Hell, maybe he already had taken me to school when he introduced himself out in the desert. My circle hadn’t seemed to bother him much. The truth was, I didn’t know a lot about spirits or what they were capable of. I’d only ever summoned the one, Mr. Clean, and that had mostly been an accident. And besides, so far the results of that play were decidedly mixed.
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