I put the bike in gear and head up the ramp to one of the repair bays in back of the hotel. When I get the gate open and I’m sure the way is clear, I pop the clutch. The rear wheel screams and smokes and I blast off into the dark.
It takes my eyes a while to adjust to the night light. I hit the throttle and the bike tears over the city’s broken streets, bouncing and flying high over sudden drops, fishtailing in the curves. By the time I can see right, Pandemonium is a superhighway of light, streaks of color bounded by the blood reek of sinkholes and the bruised Hellion sky. I cut in and out of traffic. Around troop transports and pedestrians. I’m up on the sidewalk, and in the few places that have working traffic lights, I run every red I can find. I’m a menace. I’m a monster. I’m a stooge and I don’t care who knows it. I’m moving and for the first time in a long time everything is perfect. Hell can kiss my ass.
I hide the Hellion hog under the collapsed roof of an abandoned garage. On the way out I smooth over the dust to disguise my footprints and toss some cinder blocks inside to give the place an extra about-to-completely-collapse look.
I find Wild Bill smoking outside the Bamboo House of Dolls. When I walk over he shakes his head at me.
“Hop on by, froggy. You see this mark on my shirt?”
He shows me his sleeve. Lucifer’s bloodred sigil. He blows out blue cigar smoke.
“I’m bought and paid for by Mr. Scratch himself and he doesn’t appreciate simpletons manhandling his merchandise. It lowers the resale value.”
“Is that what you tell people? That I own you? I suppose it’s technically true, the way things work down here. I just never thought of it that way.”
Bill leans forward and squints. Shakes his head and spits.
“I swear to God, boy. Warn a feller when you’re going to come ’round looking like a goddamn hobgoblin. I was five seconds from tattooing your head with a shovel I leave out here for just that purpose.”
He’s telling the truth. There’s a solid old shovel in a half-dug hole by the side of the building. I’ll bet cash money that hole never gets any deeper or any more full.
“Next time I’ll wear a rose in my lapel so you know it’s me. I can’t stand another night locked in Gormenghast and thought I’d come by for a drink. Maybe let someone start a fight. It’s one of those nights when I want to break things, bones especially. You know the feeling?”
Bill eyes me and tosses the stub of his cigar.
“I’m acquainted with it but you’re not going to start any fights in my establishment. I don’t want it to become known as somewhere bastards can pay for drinks with the heels of their boots. Also, there’s some witches and other magical sorts from your palace inside. I don’t know that they could see through your Halloween mask but it seems a foolish thing to chance.”
I try to think of a good argument but nothing comes to mind.
“That’s too bad. I really want a drink.”
Bill shrugs.
“Speaking of drinking, did you get the trifle I sent your way? It’s a bottle of a local swill I discovered that’s not half bad by the standards of the Abyss. Tastes a bit like bourbon and turpentine. There’s a note in there too.”
“I haven’t gotten anything from you in weeks.”
Bill nods slowly.
“You might want to speak to your butlers or whatever kind of flunkies you have up there. Sounds like someone is pilfering your liquor cabinet.”
I close in to whispering distance.
“How easy will it be for whoever stole the bottle to find the note?”
He waves his hand dismissively.
“It’s sealed under the label. You’d have to look for it to find it, so I wouldn’t worry. And any future bottles I send your way will be rotgut. Feeding your demon staff is not my job.”
One more thing to worry about. One more reason to punch someone very hard.
“I’ll go through the staff offices with hellhounds and a flamethrower. I bet that will turn up the bottle. Hell, maybe the Holy Grail and Amelia Earhart’s bones too.”
Bill looks past my shoulder as he lights another cigar. I half turn and see legionnaires staring at us. I slap the cigar from his mouth, grab him, and push him hard around the side of the building.
“Move, drytt!”
When we’re in the dark, I let Bill go. He shoves me with his free hand and balls the other into a fist.
He yells, “What the hell are you playing at, boy?”
“We were being watched. Hellions and damned souls don’t have heart-to-hearts in public.”
He lowers his hand and uses it to rub the arm I grabbed, more out of annoyance than pain.
“I suppose you’re right. Still, I don’t care for being roughhoused.”
“Would you rather I shoved you and stopped or that one of those other assholes who’d mean it did?”
“I suppose you have a point. But it don’t make me any less aggravated.”
“So what did the letter say?”
He leans his back against the bar and feels around for another cigar. Pulling one out, he lights it and glances back at the one I knocked to the ground. Cigars and cigarettes aren’t easy things for the damned to come by. I’ll send him a box in the morning.
“It wasn’t much of anything,” he says. “You’re always concerned with how the local populace regards you. From what I’ve seen, the rabble takes you as the grand exalted master of the infernal hindquarters just fine. Though your boisterous days as Sandman Slim have left a deeper impression. You’re credited with every cutthroat murder and cracked skull in town, of which there are more than a few.”
“Lucky me. Most people don’t get hated for one life. I’m hated for two. If I get a part-time gig as a meter maid, I can probably make it three.”
I find Mason’s lighter in my pocket but nothing to smoke.
“Do you have any cigarettes? I left mine back home.”
Home. That’s a bad habit. Stop thinking that way.
“Sorry. My last smoke went down the shitter when you knocked it out of my mouth.”
“Liar.”
He half smiles and pulls a pack from another pocket. Bill’s been in enough saloons to know that a well-timed cigarette can calm an argument quicker than an ax handle.
“Was there anything else in the note?”
Bill takes a while tapping the Malediction out for me. At first I think it’s just how a man who spent decades rolling his own smokes handles premade cigarettes. Then it hits me that he’s stalling.
“No. I don’t suppose there was anything else that mattered in there.”
I check both ends of the alley for movement. Nothing.
More secrets. Just what I need. Is he changing sides? Bill isn’t the happiest saloonkeeper in the universe. Taking orders and abuse from drunk Hellions isn’t what he’s built for. Maybe someone made him a better offer. Is there anywhere in this fucking town I don’t have to look over my shoulder? Do I have to fill the Bamboo House with peepers now?
I turn and start away.
“I shouldn’t keep you from your bar, Bill. Thanks for the information.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I’m thinking about getting drunk and seeing if I can pick a fight at the arena. I still want some carnage tonight.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
I stop and look back at him.
“You can do that? Just walk around?”
He holds out Lucifer’s mark.
“This keeps me out of all kinds of trouble. These pig fuckers might stab each other over a nickel’s worth of beer, but they aren’t about to brea
k the Devil’s toys.”
“Come on, then.”
“Give me a minute. I got saddled with a dim Hellion for help. Boy’d be a good thief if he ever actually took anything instead of losing it. He’s too dumb to steal and too clumsy for the legions, so they made him a barman, which, sadly, in my experience is just about right.”
I light the cigarette and watch Bill go inside. Johnny Cash singing “Ain’t No Grave” drifts out when he opens the door.
I hate not trusting him. It’s been nice being able to be human with him for a few minutes at a time. It’s one of the few things that’s kept me sane. If he leads me into another ambush, I’ll know what side he’s really on. If I’m on my own, that’s just the way it is. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Bill comes back to the side of the bar a minute later and cocks his head for me to follow him.
“Which way do you think is best?” I ask, giving him an opening to lead me down any blind alley he wants.
“Through the market, I reckon. There’s a lot of traffic and people are looking at the goods and not at faces.”
And crowds are good places to stick a knife in someone’s back and disappear.
“Sounds good. Let’s go.”
We walk in silence. I can’t hear his heart or his breathing, but I can see him fine and Bill’s movements are definitely tense.
We pass the site where the new City Hall will go up. This Convergence L.A. is solid but there are small places where the real Hell peeks through. Like these Hellion cranes. The cabs are rounded and covered in heavy wired mesh and they have six or eight big portholes instead of windshields. They look a lot more like giant bugs grabbing food with long chitinous beaks than construction equipment.
Bill says, “You’re quiet all of a sudden. Usually you’re the chatterbox and I’m the one waiting to get a word in.”
The market stalls cover the sidewalks and spill onto the roads where the original stores and businesses have burned or been abandoned. The big stalls sell anything a fine upstanding Hellion could want, most of it black market. Clean clothes. Jewelry. Health and hex potions. High-end Aqua Regia and wine.
“I was thinking about who I should flay alive for selling all of Hell’s goods to these Harry Lime pricks.”
“I see. Maybe you’ve got more of the devil in you than even I credited you with.”
“Maybe it’s time to see just how much.”
There are ghosts in the crowd. Not damned souls. Ghosts. A few of them follow us.
Bill says, “Back there at the bar, you might have noticed I didn’t want to say some things.”
“I noticed that.”
Bill looks at me.
“That’s a cold tone. You peg me for a bushwhacker now too?”
“I’m tired of being surrounded by people with secrets. If you have something to say, just say it.”
“All right. But I’ll do it my way.”
“Fine.”
He puffs on his cigar. A red legger elbows Bill out of the way. Bill elbows him right back. The legger whirls around and grabs Bill’s arm. I reach for my knife but the raider sees the mark on Bill’s arm and backs away.
Bill turns and starts walking again like nothing happened.
“They tell me that back home I’m more notorious than John Wesley Hardin, which is a hoot, as he had more fights and killed at least twice as many men as I ever did. On the other hand, it pleases me no end that Broken Nose Charlie Utter, who so violently disrupted my final card game, is known to very few. Men with restless lives—and I’m including you in this—we don’t seem to get much say in who’s remembered and who’s forgotten and with what amount of affection or derision.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I’m sure you have, Sandman Slim.”
Bill puffs his cigar and thinks.
“The point is, whatever you do, whether you’ll turn out to be the Antichrist, the prince of killers, or perhaps nothing at all, it’s time, not men, that will be the judge.”
He stares off at nothing for a second.
“Sometimes I think that last one might be the most preferable state. To be nothing and erased from eternity strikes me as a fine thing some days. But, of course, that wasn’t offered to me and it won’t be offered to you.
“Where are you going with this, Bill?”
“Where I’m going is that neither of us is predisposed to backing down from a fight, so you need to pick and choose yours better than I did.”
Ghosts trail us on both sides of the street. They’re not threatening, but any more and they’re going to start attracting attention.
“If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that all shed blood, yours or your enemy’s, stains Creation forever and there’s no washing it away,” says Bill. “That lesson came to me too late and I killed at least one good man, a Wichita deputy, because I was too free and easy with others’ lives. If I’m in this wretched place for anything, it’s that.”
I flash on the pictures of dead faces tacked on the walls in Mason’s hidden room. I glance at the ghosts. Dead Hellions used to go to Tartarus but I destroyed the place and released them. Now they have nothing better to do than wander Hell’s streets until the end of time. I was proud of destroying Tartarus. Now I’m not sure I did anyone a favor.
“I’m not really in a position to turn pacifist at the moment. People want to kill me or take over my mind. I’m not going to lie down and let either of those things happen.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is this. This moment right here. People are after you and you’re off to the arena looking for trouble. There’s more than a normal load of troubles on your back, son. You don’t need to go adding to them with this sort of doltish behavior.”
“Goddamn. Are you telling me to take the Middle Way, Buddha?”
“If that’s a fancy way of saying not being a slave to your baser instincts, then yes. Or were you planning on returning here when you’re dead and washing my dirty glasses until Judgment Day?”
I flick the Malediction butt into a puddle.
“If I have to choose between being the Devil and your bar back, I might choose bar back. There’s free drinks and better hours. Besides, no one ever tips the Devil.”
“I thought I just did,” drawls Bill.
I look at him as he puffs his stogie.
“Maybe you did.”
He stops and looks back the way we came.
“I should head back. That donkey of a helper will’ve given away half the liquor and probably set the bar on fire by now.”
Bill puts out his hand. I shake it.
“Take care of yourself tonight, boy. Try not to be too stupid.”
“Thanks, Bill. I’ll see you around.”
He turns and heads back to the bar, the ghosts trailing along behind him. After seeing a damned soul shove a Hellion and get away with it, I think he’s their new hero.
Everything Bill said makes sense but I’m still in the mood to hightail it to the arena and draw blood. So that’s what I don’t do. I breathe. Count to ten and back down again. Over and over. I read about it in one of the Greek books. It’s a kind of meditation to focus the mind, only mine is already focused. What I need is a good, strong unfocuser.
The Devil doesn’t carry cash, so I make a deal to trade my practically new overcoat to one of the hawkers for a beat-up surplus trench coat and a bottle of good Aqua Regia. He looks a little suspicious when I agree to such an obvious rip-off but what do I care? I can have tailors run up a dozen more coats by lunch tomorrow.
It takes a few contortionist twists to get the overcoat off and the trench o
n without giving the market a full frontal of my prosthetic arm. Scaring monsters with scarier monster parts isn’t the best way to keep a low profile.
When I’m done do-si-doing with myself, I toss the hawker my coat and take the Aqua Regia before he can change his mind. I open the bottle and take a couple of long swigs. I’m being good and I deserve a drink.
I kind of like what Bill said about picking and choosing fights but my fights always seem to have a habit of choosing me. Or is that just an excuse? I’ve been getting and giving scars for so long I don’t know anymore. I need my own surveillance satellite to follow me around for a few months. Hire statisticians to count the punches, bullets, and blades and who blinked first. I don’t want to be a cosmic shit magnet drawing trouble to me, but maybe that’s how it is with nephilim.
In my new old coat and my fake face, I stroll down the long line of stalls checking out the goods. Is the market growing or is it that I never get out to see what’s happening at street level? I take a couple of long pulls on the bottle.
If the market is growing, I know why. I try to count all bottles of black-market potions, ammo, and boxes of food. After a block, I give up and take another pull from the bottle.
Bill is right about one thing. I have plenty to deal with right now. I know his advice makes sense because it’s what Alice would have said. She was always the smart one. Pick and choose the skulls you crack and when you do it. No skulls for me tonight, thank you very kindly. I’m as cool as a cat napping on a pint of Rocky Road. At the corner I’ll head back for the bike.
I keep seeing red leggers in the crowd. That’s new. No way raiders could be strolling around Pandemonium right out in the open without someone getting paid off. I should come down here more often. It’s like a parade of the city’s sins. Kind of like every boutique on Rodeo Drive.
I take another pull from the bottle. I’ve already killed half of it.
Devil Said Bang ss-4 Page 7