I had the feeling we were going to need to get away a little quicker, so I found a spot about a block away and fed the meter. “How long will we be here?”
“Hopefully not more than two hours,” Heather said, referencing the sign that told me when my car would be towed. I maxed out the meter while Heather left her weapons in the car. I made sure I wasn’t carrying anything too incriminating and followed her down the steep hill of 1st to the courthouse entrance on Hill. Waiting in line to pass through the metal detectors, I tried not to show what I was feeling. Only yesterday I had been in a similar situation, and this time, if things went badly, I had an emotionally unstable hitter right next to me. I kept my head down but not too far down; I was pleasant but not nice. I was doing my best to impersonate a shadow, to be one of those gray people nobody looked twice at.
Which is a challenge when you’ve got a big white thing on your nose.
They were all staring at me. Or maybe I imagined it. I was working on no sleep, jittery from the sludge I’d made at Mina’s place, and it’s not like I was making this paranoia up from whole cloth. I put my wallet, keys, phone, and pack of gum in the little tray, moved through the detector, let them pass a patriot wand over my anatomy, and didn’t make eye contact while trying to look like I wasn’t trying not to make eye contact. Having Heather that close helped. Pretty blonde with a face just famous enough to seem familiar without the kind of baggage actual celebrity carried with it: she had the perfect combination to get through instantly. Add in her bizarrely chipper manner and she was a smokescreen in heels.
The guards were so apathetic, they didn’t even wave us through. They merely turned their attention to the next poor bastards in line, the lawyers, jurors, relatives of defendants, the bored and curious.
The Stanley Mosk Courthouse existed perpetually on the edge of antique and old. Used enough to become rundown, there was still a certain quiet dignity to the vaulted halls. The people in them might have changed, started dressing differently, started wearing earbuds or futzing with phones, but it was pretty easy to feel like I had stepped into a time machine.
Heather confidently led the way, her heels clicking on the old floors. We went up a level and around a few corners, until finally she found a doorway that looked exactly like all the other doorways. She never stopped, never consulted anything to see if she was in the right place. She went exactly where she intended.
The courtroom, despite its high ceilings, was claustrophobic. There were no windows, because it was shoulder-to-shoulder with other courtrooms, like a single theater in a multiplex. The walls were beige; the pews were scratched wood. It had the feeling of a high school classroom right after lunch when everyone was nodding off, only stiffer punishments than detention were on the table.
The audience was full of humanity. I barely looked as Heather picked a bench near the back and slid in. I kept my eyes front, reminding myself that she’d left the guns in the car and there was no way we were here to kill a judge.
Oh god, I really hope we’re not here to kill a judge.
I stole a peek at Heather, but she had retreated to her happy Buddha pose: totally still except for her gleaming sunny smile.
The door opened behind us and I reflexively glanced back. It took a ton of willpower not to snap my head back around, yelp, or tackle something.
Because the guy who walked in was the Archbishop of the First Church of the Antichrist.
He didn’t walk in alone. Guys of his stature—pardon the pun, which you’ll get in a second—never do. He had his standard entourage with him: a couple of heavies in dark suits with blood-red ties, three attractive-if-tired-looking bottle redheads, and a grinning jackass majordomo I’d once delivered goat’s blood to. In the middle of all this, easy to miss if your eyes didn’t go that far down, was Paul Tallutto, one of the Satanist bigwigs in the City of Angels.
Well, smallwigs. Paul was a primordial dwarf, meaning the guy was seriously tiny. Around two foot seven if the rumors were to be believed. The Armani he was wearing was tailored perfectly, and I was willing to believe his crimson pocket square cost more than my entire outfit. His miniature skull was shaved and shiny, his goatee dyed a deep Baroness black. I turned around, hoping he hadn’t seen me, and tried to remember how to breathe. As he entered, Heather glanced as well, and inhaled just sharply enough to let me know she recognized him.
Paul thought I was the Antichrist, or had at one time. Sadly, that meant he wanted to sacrifice rather than worship me.
That answered that: we had to be there for the littlest devil worshiper. I heard Paul and his entourage sliding into the pew behind Heather and me. The back of my neck felt like someone was running a French tickler over it. The few thumps coming from behind me said they were setting up Paul’s little cushioned high chair. That’s right when my whole body decided now was the perfect time to laugh.
Ever see chimpanzees laugh on a nature show? They do. And it’s not just at Charlton Heston. See, a chimp sees a stick it thinks is a snake, finds out it’s not, and laughs as a way to defuse tension. That’s what the laugh is for: when your whole body is filling up with steam, the laugh lets a little of it out so you don’t explode. Problem is, in really tense situations, your body will decide it’s in the middle of a Louis C.K. set and there’s not a thing you can do about it, except bite your cheeks, slump down, and hope for the best.
Which is what I was doing. I briefly wondered if Heather had noticed my mini-seizure and the thought touched off a fresh wave of hilarity. What would they put on my tombstone? “Killed by forgotten teen starlet”? Hell, what name would they use?
“All rise,” said the bailiff. I got up and somehow avoided doubling over.
The judge came in and for a single moment, I thought it was Lance Ito. That stuck me with another gale, and when I realized I was literally surrounded by murderers who’d probably get off after killing someone in Judge Ito’s presence, well, that didn’t help much either.
They ran through the opening procedure while I tried to think of the least funny things I could. I ran through the usual: genocide, human trafficking, sex crimes, season eight of The Office. Nothing worked. Not until they brought in the defendants.
I really should not have been surprised.
She stuck out, even in prison orange, cuffed hand and foot. I have no idea how she managed to look gorgeous, either. Despite what I learned about women’s prison from Roger Corman, I highly doubted there was enough time for beauty regimens, pillow fights, and exploring one’s sexuality. Her hair was hanging lank around her shoulders, but it was still that pretty shade of copper. She looked tired, her shoulders were slumped, and she was peering around the gallery like a hunted animal. My girlfriend, Mina Duplessis, recently accused of murder.
Her eyes met mine and widened ever so slightly. I tried to send her a psychic message: Don’t recognize me. Whatever you do, you don’t know me. I flicked my eyes to the side and she figured what I was doing instantly, looking over my shoulder. She knew Paul Tallutto, knew who he was, and knew how dangerous. She looked away then, like she had no idea who I was.
I kept still, hoping nothing showed on my face, knowing with my luck, something had. The best I could hope for was that Heather wasn’t looking.
Paul Tallutto had a thing for redheads. Because Satan supposedly preferred women with red hair and green eyes, Paul thought sleeping with them gave him occult powers. He was more stuck on the hair than the eye color and was just fine with dye jobs, which made me suspect it wasn’t really about magic. In any case, it hadn’t made him any taller. I was fairly certain he knew Mina—he’d popped up at one of her fashion shows, and he saw her when she saved me from a Black Mass that was about to go very badly. Even if his motives were pure—well, if “pure” meant “adding Mina to his harem”—I didn’t like having Paul there.
Then again, Neil had been a Satanist. Maybe they were there for the same reason Stan Brizendine had sent me. A little payback. That didn’t make it any better.
> I scanned the gallery as well as I could without turning my head. I saw the back of Dan Onanian, the lawyer I’d hired for Mina, rising like a mound made of cologne. I hadn’t noticed him earlier because I’d been too focused on the Satanists behind me.
I waited, watching Mina sitting on the bench with the other prisoners. Different parts of the gallery watched as well, picking whichever was the friend or the family member, communicating with little gestures and expressions. I wanted to do the same for Mina, if only to show her that I was thinking of her. Let her know she wasn’t alone. I couldn’t. And more than anything, that bothered me.
The court was arraigning a series of people busted for violent crimes. Every one of them had been booked on assault or murder. I didn’t know if any of them were innocent, and I’d wager at least one of them was some poor lady who finally gave an abusing asshole what he had been begging for, but it was pretty clear Mina did not belong with any of them. Despite her size, she looked delicate. Scared.
Mina doesn’t scare easy.
It was finally Mina’s turn, dead last, and Dan stood up to represent her. They were reconsidering bail. The prosecutor started listing a litany of arrests on Mina’s record: drugs, assaults, you name it, painting her as some kind of queenpin in the LA underworld. I had seen Mina’s record, or lack thereof, just yesterday. Which meant all of this had been added very recently, and all of it was a lie. None of the actors present, other than Mina, seemed to know that for certain. This frame job was thorough.
Paul and his entourage were up as soon as the gavel fell, denying Mina bail. The judge dismissed everyone right after and Heather murmured, “We have to go. We’re following the midget.”
Duh.
I glanced at Mina as she went through the door, shuffling along with her ankles cuffed together. It was that look that doomed me. My eyes slid off her and met Dan’s. I turned, hoping he hadn’t had time to recognize me. I sped up, almost pushing Heather up the central aisle toward the back of the courtroom. Maybe Dan hadn’t placed me. Maybe I’d get out of this.
Paul’s people were at the door, ready to make it out into the hall.
Then I heard Dan, behind me. “Bob! Hey, Bob!”
Paul’s people—the grinning asshole who knew me and the two monsters who probably got their jobs by strangling inspirational cancer survivors—innocently turned. Forcing me to turn around, right into Dan’s face.
His grin got bigger. “Hey, Bob. It is you.”
[9]
I WANTED TO SWEAR OUT LOUD. Dan looked about ready to say something else that might doom me with any number of killers who were within arm’s reach. I stuffed my hand into my pocket, pulling a stick of gum out of the pack and unwrapping it one-handed. I started walking back towards Dan, and when I had the gum unwrapped, I stooped and scraped the wrapper along the floor. “Sorry about that, sir,” I said, holding out the wrapper to him.
Getting closer, I growled, “Take the goddamn wrapper and you do not know me.” I smiled, handed him the wrapper, and headed back to Heather, who was watching me in confusion.
“What was that about?”
“He dropped his parking stub,” I said.
“But he said ‘Bob.’”
“Did he? Sounded like ‘stub’ to me.”
The tiniest crease formed between her eyes, which was probably the equivalent of a serious frown on anyone else.
“The midget is getting away,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Paul’s people were halfway down the hall, so we both picked up the pace. We spotted him by the massive wall of his goons, the redheads fluttering and bobbing around the perimeter. Paul would be in the middle of them, looking as pleased with himself as it was possible to look. With her targets in sight, Heather slowed down a bit.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
We both turned. The grinning asshole I’d delivered goat’s blood to was leaning against the wall next to the john, smirking like he’d just pulled off a coup. Paul’s majordomo, who thought that having the same shaved-head-and-goatee combination would lead to Satanic favor. Or possibly some kind of intergalactic royal title. He pushed off, ready to confront us while his boss got away.
Without hesitation, Heather shoved him through the bathroom door and followed him in. I didn’t hear anything for the approximately three seconds they were in there together. Then Heather emerged, fixing her hair and flashing her brilliant smile at me. “All right, let’s go.”
“Yes. Let’s.” I glanced back at the bathroom, wondering what the hell had just happened, and realized, more than anything, I did not want to know. My overactive imagination supplied a scene from an Alexandre Aja movie, which was a dick move by it.
We followed Paul’s group out onto the street where, naturally, the little bastard had a limo waiting. He took his sweet time loading the entourage, and I hoped it would be long enough.
We walked quickly to the corner and were reduced to sprinting up 1st Street. It wasn’t entirely vertical, but it sure felt like it. My legs and lungs were both burning and I kind of wanted to throw up at the top, but didn’t even have time for that. I jumped into the car, Heather following, and turned back down 1st and then onto Hill. I knew where Paul’s route would probably take him: the Hollywood Freeway, only a couple blocks from the courthouse. I gunned the engine, driving a little recklessly, knowing I had to put Paul’s brake lights in my sightline if I wanted to tail him.
I had an idea of where he was going, of course, but I couldn’t exactly reveal to the killer next to me that I knew where the Satanist temple was in Malibu. That would definitely provoke an awkward conversation.
On the stereo: “Kundalini Express” by Love and Rockets.
Come on. Do I really need to walk you through that one?
I trailed him to the Santa Monica Freeway and from there to PCH, where I had been that morning after walking out of the wilderness with Bigfoot. If I paid attention, I could have probably pinpointed the exact spot where I came out of the undergrowth to stumble along the gravelly shoulder. But I had more important things to worry about, like the carload of Satanists in front of me.
“You planning to tell me what we’re doing?” I asked her.
“I’m afraid you don’t have the eido—”
“Oh, cut the bullshit. You killed that guy back at the courthouse, and now we’re following the midget, and I want to know what’s going on.”
She stared out the windshield, not at Tallutto’s car, but right through it. Finally, she whispered something.
“What?” I asked.
“Primordial dwarf.”
“What?”
“He’s not a midget. He has Meier-Gorlin Syndrome... it’s a form of primordial dwarfism. It means, among other things, that he doesn’t have kneecaps.”
“How does he walk?”
“He has prosthetics.”
I let that sink in. “Okay, I knew that. Not the formal diagnosis, or the kneecap thing, obviously, but the point stands. Why are we following the world’s smallest galactic overlord?”
She finally turned to me, and her big brown eyes had gone all scrunched and parenthetical. She was about ready to have The Talk with me. I’d had The Talk, most recently with the woman I was presently trying to free from incarceration. See, in the Information Underground, your relative age is determined not in years, but in secrets. The more you know, the older you are, and by that kind of reckoning I am Gandalf. Problem is, they’re called secrets for a reason. No one really knows how much anyone else knows, and generally assumes that they know more than everyone else because this big movie called Life is their story. They’re the protagonist, so they’re older. And thus, everyone else is a thirteen-year-old who just learned that his wang gets hard when he watches Jennifer Connelly ride the mechanical horse in Career Opportunities. Life in the Information Underground is like being constantly surrounded by parental figures who want to explain your changing body in the most condescending way possible.
&nbs
p; Heather Marie Tooms, star of the late, unlamented Demon Eyez, was about to have The Talk with me. She had her Sincere Face on, concern radiating from every pore, trying to make sure she didn’t shatter my fragile mind while I was winding along the highway.
“There are other groups out there, Jim.”
I had to play along, too. That’s the part that made me feel bad for both of us. “What? No!” God, I sounded like an asshole.
She nodded solemnly. “And none of them are as committed to raising the spiritual consciousness of all mankind as we are.”
You mean not all of them will do literally anything for a buck, officially making you less discriminating than every prostitute in Los Angeles. I didn’t say that. “But why not?”
“They’re Misguided.” In Rosicrusophy, “Misguided” was capitalized at all times, mostly because it had more of a sinister connotation than in normal society. If you were truly Misguided, you had a subconscious desire, rooted in past-life evil, to keep doing bad things. It was also a convenient club to beat members with. Fail on a task? Must be Misguided! Don’t tithe properly? Misguided! Steal from the Temple? Misguided!
I mean, in their defense, I was Misguided. “Oh,” I said. “Who are they?”
“Many different ones. All kinds, many rooted in the kind of occult nonsense Dr. Wood tried so hard to eradicate from modern thought.” Sometimes their lack of self-awareness was a tad grating.
“No, I mean, who are they?” I pointed at the brake lights of the limo.
Heather took a deep breath. “They’re devil worshipers.”
I ignored that this was technically inaccurate and tried instead to think of what a normal—and I use the term loosely—Rosicrusophist would say when confronted with this new information. “That does sound Misguided.” Then, because I could not stop myself, “Why would they worship the devil? If there’s a devil, there’s a God, and they’re choosing to be condemned!”
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