“We were beginning with a little community theater, but with your connections... I have a screenplay. It’s called Son of Heaven, and it would be perfect for you.”
“Do I get to play Satan?”
“I was thinking the Antichrist, but really, the choice of roles would be up to you.”
“Incredible. I’ll take this to Mark, Tommy, Uwe, Zack... we’ll get this thing made.”
I was struck with a deep ambivalence. On one hand, I wanted to bring down the conspiracy and get Mina out of jail. On the other hand, that movie sounded so amazingly terrible I couldn’t help but want to midwife it into the world. I was in the kind of pickle that would normally be solved by Mina smacking me on the arm and telling me to focus. See, this is why I needed her around.
Safely out of sight from the Satanist conclave, I finally turned around and saw that Brady had followed me. “Was that Rodrick Rand?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I remember when he won the Oscar.”
“Right, yeah. For Shining Tall. He played the handicapped transgender Iraq War veteran.” I thought about it. “That movie sucked.”
“It did. And that woman who played his wife was far too fat to be in any Hollywood movies.”
“She was hospitalized for anorexia.”
“She’s doing it wrong.”
I realized then that arguing with Brady was a waste of both our time. I needed to ransack this place for anything that might help put this whole thing to bed. And while I hoped for a giant book titled The Entirety of My Evil Plan by Hollis Nguyen, I was unlikely to find something more damning than a couple receipts or an internet search history featuring some combination of “shaved,” “tanned,” and “bison.”
I passed the dressing rooms and kept opening doors. I found a maintenance closet and a bathroom before I got to an office tucked way into the back. It held a single cluttered desk, a bulletin board so full it looked more like the plumage of a very flamboyant bird, and a computer that had probably served its original Cro-Magnon owners well. This was how these idiots were attempting a Satanist coup?
Not just attempting, but winning.
There was literally no way this was their headquarters, no matter what anyone was saying. This was the place we were supposed to think was their headquarters. The public façade, while someone else directed things from the shadows. Give their enemies a convenient place to focus hostilities.
“Well? Aren’t you going to look for your clues?”
“There’s nothing here. You’re welcome to tear this place apart. It’ll only take you six or seven years, and when you discover the theater isn’t properly reporting its income, you can take that right to the IRS.”
“What are we doing, then?”
“I want to take a quick look in the other rooms. You should go out and get the car. Last time I had to get out of this place, I had to move fast. After that and the adventure at the police station, they probably won’t be so easy to give up.”
“Police station?”
“Do you really want to talk about my record right now?”
Brady’s fake mustache twitched, which was one of the funnier things I’d seen that day. She left. I gave the office a once-over to make sure my knee-jerk assessment had been accurate. There wouldn’t be an address lying around, would there? Probably not. A look through the bulletin board and the desktop didn’t yield anything of interest. At least not anything my brain could piece together. I needed Carrie Mathison to come in and pinch hit, but she’d probably just end up sleeping with Rand.
I poked my head into the dressing rooms. Empty. I went back upstairs, my next move still nebulous in my head. I felt like I had hit a dead end, forced to sit on my hands while the asshole in the shadows made his play. More time for Mina to be miserable in jail. More time to threaten me or Oana. Or Brady. She was sort of an ally.
I came upstairs and nearly jumped out of my skin. Mothman was right there, waiting for me. I was behind the second curtain, in the corner of the stage where they kept unused props, sets, and costumes for easy access. Someone had hung the Mothman costume up so that he was invisible when going downstairs, but would be the first thing you’d see when you came back up. I was impressed that Brady hadn’t yelped. I almost did, and I kind of knew the guy.
As my heart started to get back into its normal rhythm, a plan started to form in the section of my brain that was between Jason Statham and Morgan Freeman. The kind that actually thought about incredibly stupid ideas, debugged them, and put them into practice with the assumption that everything would work like aces.
Which is why, a minute later, I was inside that sweaty, bulky monstrosity, waddling out onto the stage. “I am your lord!” I boomed from inside the Mothman outfit.
[21]
IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME I’D IMPERSONATED A DEITY. Through the eyeholes, which were probably around where Mothman’s mouth would have been if he’d had one of those, I could see Nguyen and Rand getting up. Nguyen stood smoothly, more confused than frightened. Rand jumped away in terror, his eyes huge, sending his chair thumping across the stage. He scrambled to his feet. The rest of the Satanists backed away to either side of the stage.
“Holy shit,” Rand whispered.
“I don’t know who—” Nguyen started.
I cut him off. I had to. The human brain, if allowed to work, naturally arrives at a distrusting place. If it continually gets interrupted, especially with things it already sort of believes, it can be strung along. “I am your lord!” I boomed again. “It is I, Lucifer, known as Asmodeus, come to save and also doom the world.”
This is where I was going to have trouble with orthodoxy, and if that isn’t a universal concern, I don’t know what is. The problem was, in the room I had members of all three sects of Satanist, and they had some widely varying views on what made a good Adversary. The Asmodeans would be expecting someone so ridiculously evil even Serpentor would tell him to tone it down a notch. The Luciferians were all about the misunderstood rebel thing, treating the devil like he was a combination of James Dean and Che Guevara. And to top it all off, I was in the nominal headquarters of the one goddamn cult in LA whose bullshit I didn’t know backwards and forwards.
So I was going to have to wing it.
“You have called! I have answered!” Seemed nice and vague. “I have come to guide you to... the kingdom!”
At that moment, with a metallic thud, the house lights went dark. I could see, because the lights in the false eyes of the costume shone with a red glow, washing across the front of the audience and the two heads of the Satanist conspiracy presently onstage with me. I’m sure I looked much more impressive now, a looming shape in the dark with hypnotic eyes. A lot like the real Mothman. Ominous music, so quiet as to be almost subliminal, grew behind me.
Brady. She had gotten to the control booth and she was backing my play. Three cheers for teamwork.
“Ask! Ask your lord what you will of him!” I managed, needing a little assist.
“Lord? Are we working Your will?” Nguyen asked, now cowed a bit by my performance.
“That’s a good question!” I yelled. “Remind me what that is again?”
“Lord?”
“I’ve been in Hell!” I glanced at the Asmodeans in the crowd. “Torturing the unjustly condemned!” And then the Luciferians. “Which includes me! So I’ve had a lot on my plate recently!”
“Well...” Nguyen said, chancing a look out of the corner of his eye to see if anyone else was buying my act. Rand was weeping openly, so that answered his unspoken question. “Yes, well, we’re uniting all the devoted under one roof, of course. And then we will begin spreading Your message far and wide.”
“...which is?”
“Now that You are here, You can tell us.”
“Right! Well, for one thing, no more eating high fructose corn syrup! It causes obesity and diabetes! Satan has spoken!”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Also, you should shower every d
ay! And really wash under your armpits! Deodorant is a supplement, not a substitute! Satan has spoken!”
“Of course. Should I be writing this down?”
“Every Friday shall henceforth be known as the Day of the Dance! You will dance everywhere! Walking is forbidden on Friday! Satan has spoken!”
“Someone get me a pad and paper!” Nguyen hissed. “It’s unfortunate the prophet is not here to receive your teachings, Lord. He will be so disappointed.”
“I, too, am disappointed! I hoped to meet my prophet in the flesh! Up until now, I could only speak to him through pictures of kittens wearing bonnets!”
The Asmodeans murmured angrily.
“...who are participating in ethnic cleansing!”
The Asmodeans calmed down. The Luciferians murmured now.
“...for really good reasons you’d find out if you just talked to them for a second!”
“Lord, if you can manifest whenever you choose...”
“You dare question Satan? I am here now!” Nguyen was trying not to cower. I was getting really good at this. “So, remember, lot on my plate lately, but could you remind me who the prophet is?”
“You don’t know?” Nguyen asked.
“We do not deal in names! I know him as Swirly Plaid Aura Man! It is likely he has a different, more human name for use with trifling mortals!”
“Of course, Lord. We know him as Jonah Bailey.”
“Wait, what?” Surprise made the question come in my normal voice.
“Lord?”
“Did you say Jonah Bailey?” I boomed.
“Yes, Lord.”
Jonah Bailey was the name I used with V.E.N.U.S. I had never used it to start a Satanist cult. Never once, no matter how many times I had been tempted.
“Where is Jonah Bailey now?”
“He’s making sure that traitor Sam Smiley gets what’s coming to him.”
Sam Smiley, the name the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist thought was mine. Now there was an eerie feeling: one of my aliases was trying to kill another one of my aliases. I did a quick mental calculation and determined there was absolutely no way I set all this in motion. No, this time Mr. Blank was real and he was out there trying to fuck me over.
“And how is Jonah Bailey going to do that?”
“He’s getting...”
The opening chords of Boston’s “Peace of Mind” rang out through the theater. First Nguyen, then everyone else in the theater was looking around in confusion. Only Rand was not. “The music! The infernal music!” he blubbered.
“Hold that thought,” I said, snaking one arm out of Mothman’s wing and fishing the phone from my pocket.
“Bob? It’s Dan Onanian.” Mina’s lawyer.
“Not really a good time, Dan. Can I call you back?”
“Uh, sure, but this is...”
“Thanks.” I ended the call. “All right, where were we?”
“It’s just a costume! He’s an impostor!” Nguyen screamed with the righteous hatred only the truly religious can muster.
“Blank! Hold still!” Brady’s voice, from across the theater.
I obeyed, and was rewarded with gunshots popping from the back. Nguyen fell, a hole blooming in his shoulder. The other Satanists dove for cover. I unzipped the Mothman suit and threw the head at Rand, who screamed in terror.
“Satan has no head!”
I hopped out of the costume and ran for the side door. A moment later, Brady pounded down the aisle. The Satanists were beginning to get up, but Brady waved the pistol at them. “Stay down!”
From the stage, cradling his bloody shoulder, Nguyen pointed at us. “Get them! Any who fall will have rewards in Hell!”
Some of the Satanists charged immediately. Others, the ones who weren’t a hundred percent into this whole “worshiping the devil” thing, were a little slower. But soon there was a room full of pissed-off religious fanatics coming at us, and though I wasn’t sure how many bullets Brady had in that gun, there weren’t enough. She came to the same conclusion after shooting a couple, following me to the door while the great mass surged after us. Brady and I burst out into the alley, with her white Porsche waiting at the mouth, nose out to the street.
The door popped open for a second, a sea of enraged faces on the other side. All of a sudden I was in a zombie movie, and me without a Louisville Slugger. Pushing my back against the door, bracing vainly against the tide of lunatics, I knew we had no shot to get to the car. I was going to get torn apart by Satanists.
“Brady! Help me hold this thing closed!”
“Hold on,” she said, running to the Dumpster.
“What are you doing? That’s way too—”
I was going to say “heavy,” especially for someone who considered ninety pounds to be obese. I had forgotten that weird Ana monk strength of Brady’s. She put her back into it, and with a deafening scrape like a giant running his fingernails over a blackboard, the Dumpster inched toward the door.
The door popped open, and for a heart-stopping second my feet were off the ground. I think it surprised the angry mob of true believers behind me, because they faltered, and when my feet hit asphalt, I leaned back and the door slammed into their howling faces.
The Dumpster, throwing out metallic grunts like an over-the-hill robot getting up from a recliner, inched over the doorframe. I stepped away. The door slammed open again, only to smack into the metal hide of the Dumpster. A deep clang echoed down the narrow alleyway, while the hands of pursuing Satanists, turned to claws by religious fervor, reached through the barely open door.
I kicked the Dumpster as a “fuck you” and got my karmic just desserts in the form of a stubbed toe. “Goddamnit!”
“Well, then,” Brady said, dusting her hands off.
We hopped, me quite literally, into her car and she gunned it onto Hillhurst before the cultists realized there was another exit.
“So you got nothing from them,” she said.
“Nothing worth mentioning.”
“I’m beginning to think you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Only beginning? Listen, could you take me to Griffith Park before you throw me out of the car?”
She grunted what I took to be assent. I took my phone out and called Dan back.
“Dan Onanian, attorney at law.”
“Dan, it’s Bob.”
“Bob! Hey, where were you just now? It sounded like you were in a tunnel.”
“Giant monster costume. What’s going on?”
He paused for a second, but decided to press on. “I was calling about your girlfriend’s case. Something weird happened. All the charges were dropped. Apparently someone else confessed to the crime, produced evidence, knew the kind of things only the cops and the killer knew. The whole nine yards.”
“They released her? Is she with you?”
“No, her cousin picked her up. Bob... she didn’t mention any family in the city when I talked to her. This stinks.”
“You’re right about that. Let me ask you something. The killer, he have a shaved head and goatee?”
“Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“Lucky guess. Dan, you’re off the hook. Thanks for the help, and if I need you, I’ll call.”
“No problem. We have to stick together against the Reptilians, right?”
“Oh yeah. Rule number one.”
I hung up and turned to Brady.
“I’ve got good news for you. You’re going to get that payback for the assassination attempt.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“Just trust me.”
“You’ve said that, too.”
“I need you to contact Vassily the Whale.”
“Zhukovsky is dead.”
“Is he?”
[22]
I EXPLAINED THE SITUATION TO BRADY. She was dubious, but listened anyway. I told her to set the meeting at Leo Carrillo Beach and she agreed. It was a hell of a situation I had found myself in. I couldn’t trust my
only ally, not really, and her powerbase had all but entirely eroded. She had lost her connection to Quackenbush Security, and the Anas would be dealing with the fallout of the attack on their temple. She was still a dangerous woman, especially in close quarters, who had once attempted to kill both me and Mina. A blast of paranoia shook me. Maybe she had been lying and really was behind the whole thing.
No. I’d put the pieces together again and they’d fit. In retrospect, it had been right in front of me the whole time, from the minute I looked at the crime scene photos. Something had been off, and now I knew what that was. I had thought the city was out to get me. I was partly right.
Brady dropped me off in the same parking lot I had been arrested in the night before, then spun her car in a redlined three-point turn and floored it like she had seen Evil Dead too many times and had developed a tree phobia. I went to the little dirt divider where the three pine trees grew. Beyond was a screen of greenery, and beyond that would be the driving range.
I approached the right tree and stood on my tiptoes, hunting around for the car keys I’d stashed there. I was hoping no one had spotted them, or even worse, some curious bird was now using them to line a nest in the vast wilderness of Griffith Park. There was nothing there. Panicking, I boosted myself up for a better look. Still nothing, except a line of ants marching down a branch. I cursed. I should have asked Brady to stick around until I had the keys in hand, or at least had another way to contact her. Had I just stranded myself in Griffith Park? And would I be a big enough asshole to get Lara stuck deeper in this thing?
I jumped down, still swearing, when something glinted at the corner of my eye. Oh. Wrong tree.
I grabbed the key with the green rabbit’s foot and set off toward VC’s car. The golf course was eerie after the previous day. It was Friday, and the rolling lawn was free of any golfers. There was no sign of the shootout that had happened either. I wish that kind of thing surprised me anymore, but it didn’t. There were too many groups with a vested interest in keeping things quiet. Unless whoever controlled the cops these days had a specific mad-on for the cabals involved, there would likely only be the odd mention in News of the Weird or a story buried in the back of the Times saying nothing of import.
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