We get Hunter inside and on the exam table. Allegra takes over, looking at Hunter’s eyes, shining a light into his blackened mouth. She turns and takes things out of a drawer. She presses one of them to Hunter’s forehead. A silver crucifix. Nothing happens. Then she touches iron. Gold. A mixture of garlic and holy water. Nothing happens with any of them.
“Good,” she says.
She rubs a yellowish salve on the inside of a mortar and tosses in thistle leaves, white ash bark, and things I can’t identify. She holds a match to the gloop and the whole thing goes up in a whoosh of fire, leaving only ash. She dumps it into her hands and rubs the ashes across Hunter’s forehead and eyes.
“Get me the glass, will you, Candy?” she says.
Traven is standing on his own now, so she leaves him and lifts several bundles of purple silk from a cabinet. Allegra takes one as Candy sets the rest on the exam table.
Allegra unwraps the first one and sets it over Hunter’s heart. It looks like a heavy white stone. She sets other pieces of glass on Hunter’s hands and diaphragm.
The stones are really pieces of ancient glass vessels saturated in divine light. Shards of the first stars. Kinski once used six of them to save Allegra. Now Allegra is the doctor, using them to save a kid she’s never seen before and has no reason to care about. But she does it like she’d die, too, if the kid doesn’t make it. It’s a funny world.
Hunter shudders and opens his mouth. Vapor drifts from his mouth again, but it’s the same gray now as the ash. Allegra nods.
“Whatever was in him is gone.”
“You sure?”
She looks at me.
“I know what possession looks like. This one took more stones than usual. What was in him?”
I don’t want to tell her. I’m feeling stupid and the last thing I want to do is have to hang around and explain anything.
“Candy and Vidocq can tell you.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“Good.”
She nods at Traven.
“What happened to him?”
“That’s Father Traven, the exorcist. No hoodoo injuries. The demon just grabbed his throat and squeezed like it was trying to make orange juice.”
Allegra looks past me at the father.
“Set him down in the lobby and let me get my instruments. I don’t want to move the boy for a while.”
Traven makes it to the lobby under his own steam, though Candy and I walk behind to catch him if he falls. He drops onto one of the plastic chairs. He leans forward, resting his face in his hands.
“I think I left my bag at that place,” he says.
“Don’t worry, Father. We’ll retrieve it for you,” says Vidocq.
I hand him Allegra’s car keys.
“Sorry. I’d like to go back and get it, but I have things I need to do.”
“I understand,” he says. He looks at me like I’m ice and someone is about to toss boiling water on me. Will I explode or just melt?
He says, “We all heard what the demon said back at Avila. Don’t do anything insane based on the word of a creature like that, Jimmy. They are masters of lies.”
I shake my head.
“That wasn’t the demon talking. That really was Mason. And he has Alice. I’m not going to do anything crazy. I’m going to do what I should have done all along.”
“What?” he says, but I ignore the question.
“Call Hunter’s parents,” I say. “Tell them he’s all right and give them the address. I need to go.”
I catch Candy’s eye and she follows me out into the parking lot.
“Where are you going?” she asks. There’s a little catch in her voice.
I get close and say, “I know this is the most fucked situation I could have dragged you into, but I need to talk to someone. Please trust me. I’ll meet you back at the hotel as soon as I can.”
She looks up at me.
“You’re coming back, right?”
“Of course.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
She kisses me. I kiss her back, though in the back of my mind I’m already going to do what I have to do.
She takes a step back.
“You’re going back, aren’t you? Back to Hell.”
“I don’t have any choice. They snatched Alice out of Heaven because of me. I can’t leave her down there.”
Candy nods.
“I know. You have to do the right thing. Ride into the sunset and do your Good, the Bad and the Ugly thing. I think that’s why I like you. You do the most fucked-up things for the best reasons.”
“I’ll see you back at the hotel. Scout’s honor.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to talk to Mustang Sally.”
BY THE TIME I make the corner, my hands are shaking. Even the angel is pissed, and that’s not easy to do. I want someone to try to pick my pocket or pull a knife. I want an excuse. All I need is an excuse.
No one comes near me. I’m somewhere south of sanity right now and people can tell. Fuck it. I let the angel’s senses reach out and read the street until they zero in on exactly the right car. It’s stopped at a red light in front of me. Second from the front. A couple of gangbangers inside. They’re either on their way to a drive-by or coming back from one. They’re too high for the angel to be sure. That’s good enough for me. I step into the stopped traffic and go around to the gangbangers’ car, a red midfifties Bonneville lowrider. I put the .460 to the side of the driver’s temple.
“Do you want to keep the car or your head?”
There are two tough guys in the back. Real bruiser types. As big as linebackers. One of them wants to go for his gun. He stinks of coiled tension. I cock the .460 pressed against the driver’s head and pull him out through the window. Toss him one-handed onto the hood of the car next to us. He leaves a nice dent as he hits and slides off. By the time I swing the gun back to the two toughs, they’re scrambling out the passenger side. I get in and rev the engine.
I don’t care that it’s broad daylight, that a hundred people are watching, and that the traffic cams on the stoplights are recording everything. I want witnesses. I want them to see so that when I drag them from their cars, put a bullet in the gas tank, and let the explosion torch the street, they’ll understand.
“This is the world. This is how it is,” I’ll tell them. “Jesus might have died for your sins, but a girl is burning for them. I’d trade every one of your fucking lives for one minute of hers. Don’t you dare pray for her. Twiddle your rosaries and pray for yourselves, because if she goes down, I’m the Colonel, the fryer’s hot, and you’re my barnyard chickadees.”
But I don’t say it. I take the car and go. There’s no way I could get the words out right now. I probably would have stood there hissing and twitching. Just another homeless schizo. Then I’d set the intersection on fire with some Hellion hoodoo and none of them would understand why.
The light turns green and I cut off the car next to me and pull a squealing and massively illegal left off Sunset, steering the Bonneville onto side streets and away from the cops.
The dinky little neighborhood streets with their speed bumps and stop signs are molasses-at-the-South-Pole slow, but eventually I get to Fairfax, where I stop for gas. When the tank is full I go inside the station to the little grocery. There’s nowhere else you can get food like this. The donuts taste like diesel vapor and you have to smother the microwave hamburgers with mustard and onions to cover the taste of cancer. I spent a fair amount of time in places like this before I went Downtown. They’re a solvent-stained oasis for people who drink till the bars close and are too brain-fried to find a Denny’s for the grease injection they hope will soak up the poison they’ve been swallowing all evening. Here everything is poison and so full of preservatives that it will live forever. This is junk-food Valhalla. I grab a plastic basket and prowl the aisles, filling it with the right mix of the sweetest, greasiest, most
guaranteed-heart-attack stuff I can find.
I should have dealt with this long ago. How to get back Downtown now that Mason has pretty much made it impossible for me to get in. I hadn’t counted on the little prick making friends so quick. He fast-talked his Hellion guards, their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses, clawing and hoodooing his way up the Infernal food chain until he got to some of Lucifer’s generals. With that kind of pull, it was easy for him to set up traps and guards at all my favorite entrances and exits in and out of Hell. And it’s not like I can just pick a new entrance at random. Hell is a complicated place. I might come out in a swamp or the House of Burning Ice. And it’s not like you can trust most of the maps of Hell. Lucifer was paranoid enough to put in fake landmarks and move mountains and towns around, so it’s damned close to impossible to navigate outside the cities unless you already know where you’re going. Or you have a guide. But I’m a little too famous down there to hop on a Gray Line tour bus and hope no one recognizes me.
I know every crawl space and backstreet in Pandemonium, but if Mason has Alice locked up in another city, I’ll need help getting there. Hellions can be very cooperative if you pull out enough of their teeth, so I know I can get a guide. What I really fucking need is a fucking way in. There’s only one person in L.A. who might know and who I trust enough to ask.
I take my basket of donuts, candy, chips, refrigerated burgers, and barbecue sandwiches up to the clerk. He’s red-eyed and bored, trying to hide the Hustler he’s been thumbing through the whole time I’ve been in the store. I let him take the stuff from my basket. My hands could get diabetes and a stroke just from touching the wrappers.
I say, “Throw in a carton of Luckies.”
The kid sighs. I’ve ruined his day by asking him to turn around and pick up something.
“We don’t sell cartons. Just packs.”
“Then sell me ten packs and leave them in the box.”
He thinks this over for a minute. I can hear the gears turning. The factory that runs his brain is spewing copious amounts of ganja fumes. Finally, he thinks of something that won’t make him sound too stupid.
“You have any ID?”
“Do you really think I’m underage?”
He shrugs.
“No ID, no smokes.”
I take two twenties from my pocket and slide them across the counter to him.
“There’s my ID.”
He has to think again. The workers are fleeing the factory. The boiler might blow.
The kid holds up the bills to see if they’re counterfeit.
“Yeah, okay. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who am I going to tell?”
He considers this for a moment, like it’s a trick question, but it soon fades from his resin-clogged brain along with the state capitals and how to do math. He drops a carton of Luckies onto the pile of death snacks and rings them up, setting the well-thumbed Hustler on the counter as he counts out my change. Then realizes what he’s done. He freezes. It looks like he might stay like that for the rest of the day.
I pick up my bag and say, “Keep the change. I respect a man who reads.”
I go back to the Bonneville and set the bag on the passenger seat. Time to talk to the one person who might be able to help me get Downtown. Mustang Sally, the freeway sylph.
EVERY CITY HAS a Mustang Sally. Every town and jungle village with a dirt path. She’s a spirit of the road, an old and powerful one. If you add up all the freeways, the county and city roads, in and around L.A., it means Sally controls twenty thousand miles of intense territory. And that doesn’t even count the ghost roads and ley lines.
I steer the Bonneville onto the shoulder of the 405, the freeway that runs along Sepulveda Boulevard, the longest street in L.A. I break open the carton of Luckies, take out a pack, and slice it open with the black blade. I slide across the front seat and get out on the passenger side. This would be a lousy time to die.
Traffic blasts past at sixty per hour and no one even glances in my direction as I walk behind the car and scratch Mustang Sally’s sigil into the freeway concrete. When I’m done I stand in the center of the mark, take out a Lucky, and light up. Passing cars pull the smoke in their direction, like it wants to follow them down the road. I smoke and wait.
Mustang Sally has been cruising L.A.’s roads twenty-four/seven since they were nothing more than mud paths, horse tracks, and wagon ruts. As far as I know, she never sleeps and never stops except when someone leaves an offering. For the last hundred years she’s been through every kind of car you can name. Of course, she never has to stop for gas. Sally eats, but only road food. Things you can find in gas-station markets and vending machines. She doesn’t need to eat. She just likes it. It’s like me and stealing cars. Sometimes you just want to feel ordinary. Like a person. She eats. I drive.
Twenty minutes later, a silver-and-black Shelby Cobra pulls onto the shoulder a few yards behind me. I stomp out of her emblem and hold the Lucky out to her.
Sally is taller than I remember. Taller than someone who spent all day and night comfortably in a compact sports car. Her hair is dark. Maybe jet black with blue highlights. She’s dressed in a white evening gown and the highest spike heels this side of the Himalayas. I don’t know how she drives in those things. She walks over to me slowly, sizing me up. She’s running the show, and making me wait is part of it. She has on a pair of soft white calfskin driving gloves. From one hand dangles a small clasp purse rimmed in gold. She’s every bit a goddess except for one thing. She’s wearing what looks like a pair of round glasses with smoked lenses; the kind the blind wore a hundred years ago. They break up the goddess look. Like the Mona Lisa with a lip ring.
When we’re just a couple of feet apart, she stops, peels off the driving gloves, and drops them into the clasp bag. She takes the cigarette from my hand and inhales deeply, letting the smoke drift slowly from her nostrils.
“Unfiltered. You sweet boy.”
I wonder what’s behind those dark glasses. I swear, even in daylight I can see a faint glow from underneath the lenses. She could be sporting twin suns or headlights back there. You would not want to aim your road rage at this woman.
Mustang Sally cocks her head and stares at me for a few seconds.
“I know you. The charming Frenchman introduced us.”
She has a low, purring smoker’s voice, the kind you can almost feel in your chest when she speaks.
“You’ve got a good memory. That was my friend Vidocq. He was looking for Mickey the Hammer’s grave and figured that since you’d been everywhere and see everything, you might have noticed where he was buried.”
“Yes. He’s an alchemist and Mickey was . . . what? A tracker? He left me a few offerings, too.”
“Mickey was a scoria hound. He could trace anyone or anything through its trail in the aether. I guess he found the wrong person because he ended up dead. People said he was buried with a scroll explaining how to do it. You told Vidocq where to find his grave.”
“And did he find what he was looking for?”
“The body was where you said it would be, but someone got there before us and picked it clean. It cost Vidocq a lot of donuts to find that body.”
She shrugs and gazes out at the traffic.
“That’s the way of the road. It’s gas, gab, or food. Nobody rides for free.”
I go back to the bike and bring her the bag of snacks. Sally smiles when she sees it. I hold it out to her. She doesn’t take it. Just pulls the edge of the bag with a fingernail and looks inside.
“My. You must be looking for a diamond as big as the Ritz.” She smiles a tiger’s smile. “Put it in the car and ask your question.”
I go to where she’s parked. The Cobra’s seats are perfect. They look brand-new, but she must have logged thousands of miles in the thing. The only thing that gives away she lives and eats there is the trail of litter that stretches out behind the car for as long as I can see. Cookie boxes. Cellophane from around snack cakes. Cru
shed cigarette packs. Sally marks her territory and no one stops her. Not CHP. Not cops. No one.
I get back just as she grinds out the cigarette with the toe of one delicate shoe.
“I need a back door into Hell,” I say. “A way in that no one will notice.”
She curls her lips into a half smile.
“Sneaking into Hell. That’s old magic. Beginning-of-the-world stuff. Back when the different planes of existence weren’t so far apart that the residents of one don’t even believe in the existence of the other.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It depends on how you want to go in. There are places where this twelve-lane Möbius strip is the Hell parents tell kids they’ll end up in if they don’t behave. There are other places where this is Heaven.”
She smiles.
“You don’t want to go in that way. It’s too unpredictable.”
“Are there other ways in?”
“Don’t be in such a rush. Give a lady a moment to think.”
She takes another Lucky from the pack. I light it with Mason’s lighter. As she breathes in the smoke, I swear the glow behind her sunglasses brightens.
“Nice car,” I say.
“Thanks. It’s pretty but it might be time to trade it in. It’s getting too noticeable. These days, if you own something long enough, it becomes vintage and everybody wants one. In my day, when something was old, it was just old.”
“I bet it handles these roads well.”
She shrugs, unimpressed.
“Each road has its own way of going. You should have seen those few scratches in the dirt in the Fertile Crescent. The first roads that called me into being. Back then a decent pair of sandals was high tech.”
She holds out the Luckies. I hesitate.
“It’s all right,” she says. “Half the job of being a spirit is knowing when to share.”
I take the cigarette. She pulls a gold lighter from her bag and sparks the Lucky for me.
When she drops the lighter back in the bag, she says, “Do you know what it is you’re asking? Do you have any concept of what Hell is?”
“I spent eleven years Downtown, so, yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”
Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim) Page 16