by Bruce Talmas
I walked down to the car and noticed that it had been washed while I was inside the house. It must have been Silva’s way of thanking me for returning his daughter. Helluva guy. I’d have to remember to check for tracking devices when I left the estate.
“You’re leaving?” a voice asked from the far end of the front porch. I turned to see Katie sitting on a porch swing. She had showered. Her hair was wet and she was wearing a long nightshirt under a white terrycloth robe. Her legs were curled up underneath her, and I could see ugly purple bruises on her legs. She curled them up under her robes when she saw me looking. She didn’t look eighteen anymore. If anything, she now looked younger than her sixteen years.
“I’m done,” I said. “Jeung’s dead. You’re home. I did my job.”
She nodded in time to the rocking of the swing. “You’re different, aren’t you?” she asked.
“It depends on what you mean by different,” I replied.
“I mean you aren’t…you know…human. Or maybe you’re just crazy.”
I thought about it for a moment. It was a fair question. “Which part are you questioning: my sanity or my humanity?”
“Both, I guess.”
I walked over and sat down on the swing next to her. It was a big swing and there was plenty of room between us, but she scooted over and rested her head on my shoulder. It felt strange to have another person touch me without the threat of violence. I didn’t want to admit it, but it felt good.
“Then no, I’m not normal,” I said. She put her hand on my chest, as if she was expecting to find I had no heartbeat. Maybe she had a “Twilight” crush on me. Hoping I was a vampire or werewolf or something. I ignored it. “I mean, if you compare me to Jeung, I’m less sane, and technically I’m less human, but I didn’t rape a little girl. So judge me as you will.”
“I’m not a little girl,” she said.
“Sorry. I didn’t rape a young lady.”
“But you killed him. Brutally. And you killed all his bodyguards too. They were just employees.”
“You work for a man like that, you should expect it. Ask Sam how he feels about working for your dad,” I said, referring to the guard who showed such affection for her at the gate.
It was only then that I noticed my shoulder was wet, and I realized that she was crying. Her voice was still strong though.
“I don’t know how to get past this,” she said.
I grabbed her hand, mainly to stop her from touching my chest. Even so, it was still about the most intimate thing I’d ever done with another person. “There’s not really any getting past something like that. All I can tell you is that we all have things in our past that make us ashamed. Things that we’ve done, or things that were done to us. There’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s there and it’ll always be there. It’s just something that happened. It’s not who you are.”
We were both silent for a while after that. She intertwined her fingers with mine and we just sat there, staring into the night. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not talking down to me. For not just saying everything was going to be fine.”
“You’re welcome.”
She held up my left hand to the light and rubbed her fingers across the scar on the back of it. “What happened to your hand?”
I looked down at my wound. There was an identical one on my right hand. The wounds had been a part of me for so long that I rarely thought about them anymore. I held up both hands so she could see them. Each was scarred on the palm and the back of the hand.
“I pissed someone off,” I replied.
“Do they hurt?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
We sat there for a while longer. She kept holding my hand, her thumb tracing the edges of my wound. I was simultaneously uncomfortable and felt more at home than I ever had in my life.
“I have to go,” I said finally.
“Please don’t.”
I lifted her face up by the chin and looked her in the eye. She was still crying, but her tears were subsiding. I silently cast a minor Numbing spell. It would help her get through the first few days of the trauma. After that, it would slowly wear off and allow her to begin to deal with things on her own, but at least the initial shock and shame would be gone by then. It would act like a supernatural antidepressant, and she’d never even know she was under the influence. I wished I could do more, but that was all I had to offer her.
I got up and went to my car without another word. She called out to me as I was opening the door, “Is there any way I can reach you if I want to talk?”
I smiled at her.” You already know how to reach me.”
She opened her mouth to argue with me, to say, No, of course I don’t know how to reach you, but then she stopped. A smile slowly spread across her face.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“Magic.”
Chapter 7
The first thing I did when I left Katie was to make some calls to my remaining contacts in Pittsburgh. There were precious few of them. Most of the old crew cut ties with me as soon as I started killing their friends. The rest cut ties when Lucifer let it be known that associating with me was a one-way trip to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Nobody knew what happened in the Ninth Circle, but there wasn’t likely to be a golf course there. And they certainly weren’t going to risk finding out just to spend a little time basking in my presence.
I made a mental list of my remaining allies. It didn’t take long. I could think of four demons and one human that wouldn’t shoot me in the back if given a chance. The one human was pushing eighty and had a bad heart. Of the demons, one was insane; another one was, shall we say, unpredictable; the third was old and blind; and the fourth only made my list because he technically wouldn’t shoot me in the back: he would shoot me in the face because he’d want to be looking in my eyes when he pulled the trigger.
Unfortunately he was the one I needed most. The last I’d heard, he’d been in Vegas. That’d been a few years ago, but it was all I had to go on. I was beginning to see how being off the grid for so long was going to hinder my efforts.
I didn’t go straight there. Instead, I bought a plane ticket for Los Angeles. I could drive to Vegas from there, but I had something to take care of first.
There was a junkie out there that needed to learn a lesson in what happens when you sell out a friend.
Especially when that friend was me.
********
I sat on the plane with a chip on my shoulder that could threaten our takeoff. Los Angeles and New York in the same day. I might as well just let the Devil have me. Either way I’d end up in Hell, at least with Lucifer I could spare myself the frustrations of air travel.
I didn’t do well in crowds. I didn’t do well on planes. I did exponentially less well on crowded planes. First class had been full, so I was stuck in coach. This was much how I’d always pictured the Ninth Circle of Hell, and damned if there wasn’t a noticeable lack of golf courses.
For me, planes were a control issue. Crowds were an “I hate people” issue. Combined, the two issues made the entire five-hour-and-forty-six minute flight an exercise in self-control. I visualized different ways of killing everyone on the plane: I pictured ripping out the windpipe of the fat lady sitting next to me and shoving it down the throat of the young man in front of me that insisted on reclining his seat thirty seconds into the trip. I imagined what it would be like to bash in the skull of the flight attendant that scowled at me every time she passed by. For each person on the plane, even the crew members I couldn’t see, I conjured up a scenario that allowed me to slaughter them and still calmly walk off the plane in LAX. All of which kept me occupied for a little while. Once I was done with that mental exercise though, I still had another five hours and forty-four minutes to go. Roughly.
I didn’t dare go to sleep. I suffered from a very severe sleeping disorder: one which, worst case scenario, could cause the plane to burst int
o flames and go down somewhere over the Midwest. I passed a good thirty minutes counting the fat rolls on the woman next to me, and another thirty minutes with my eyes closed trying to imagine how a woman could possibly develop six rolls of fat just between her tits and her waist.
Looking around, I tried to take in everything: all the people I’d been daydreaming about killing, all their worthless little lives. I looked at the woman next to me, her gelatinous neck threatening to suffocate her with the product of her own gluttony. Fuck it, I thought, Would anyone really care if this plane went down?
I still stayed conscious for as long as I could. Force of habit. Eventually, boredom and indifference caught up with me. Finally, with as much bile and hatred of mankind as I could muster, I took a nap.
I dream dark dreams. They’re always similar, but never exactly the same. Each one a variation on a theme. This one starts like all the others: I am in a desert, standing beneath a blazing hot sun that I can only assume is there, because in the dream I never look up to see the sky. Never raise my head to see anything beyond the suffering around me. Miles upon miles of crosses planted into the ground, each cross bearing a penitent suffering his or her own unique torment. There are women, but the vast majority is men.
I start to walk. Always in the same direction. Something beckons to me from across the fiery landscape. I don’t want to go there, but I know I must. It is my destiny to be there. When my time has come, this is where I’ll end up.
I look to my left. On the nearest cross is perched a very large woman; if what she is doing can be called perching. More like barbecuing. If a pig could perch, this is what it would look like. I see her body sag under its own weight. She starts to choke on the gelatinous flesh that forms her many…
…Wait a second. It’s the fat bitch from the plane. I’m not far enough into the dream. I’m still sitting on the goddamned plane, aware of the people all around me; the fat woman wheezing out another painful breath in the seat next to me; the sick man behind me, coughing into his hand and thumbing through a magazine, inflicting his germs on me and everyone else. Son of a…
"Bitch!” I woke up yelling. The words sprang from my mouth before my conscious mind could stop them. The bitch next to me looked at me in alarm.
Absently, I rubbed the wounds on my hands, both of which were burning and had started to bleed.
I just stared at the woman, daring her to speak. I'd used up all my apologies on Katie the night before.
The man behind me coughed again, wet and phlegmy. I was pretty sure I felt moisture on my head. “Go to the fucking doctor, would you?” I said. “Who gets on a plane in your condition?” I said it quietly enough, but he and everyone around me looked at me like I’d grown a third eye, and that it was protruding from the second penis sticking out of my forehead.
I realized I was drawing too much attention to myself, which was unlike me. It was out of character and stupid, which just made me angrier. Angry at myself and at everyone else on the plane. I spent the rest of the trip biting my tongue. By the time we landed in L.A., I could taste the blood in my mouth as I stood up and knocked people over to get off that fucking plane.
********
I didn’t check any bags. Rule number one of being a killer-for-hire, supernatural or otherwise, is to not wait at baggage claim for your stuff. Actually, rule number one was to not pack a samurai sword in your carryon, but a little magic took care of that one. Instead, I was out of the airport within fifteen minutes of landing and on my way to Gardena in the back of a cab that smelled strongly of weed and patchouli.
Junk’s old dealer Laslo lived in Gardena, but I didn’t know the area well. There weren’t a lot of people that needed killing in Gardena; or, if they needed killing, they couldn’t afford my rates. I’d only been there once, and I honestly hadn’t been paying attention when Junk took me there. I’d dealt with enough drug dealers in my line of work to not get too excited at the prospect of meeting another one. They were all the same: just like their clients, except with enough brain cells left to make a profit off their addiction. At least, they started that way. The addiction always outpaced the profit in the end.
The smell of the city was messing with my wits and throwing off my internal GPS. I didn’t know if it was the noxious odors of the people from the plane, or the city itself. Whatever the case, I was feeling lightheaded and short-tempered. Previous experience told me that was a bad combination. People tended to die when I felt that way. In this particular case, though, it could come in handy.
California had always had a particular smell. All cities smelled, but Los Angeles was the worst, and it was a smell that seemed to waft from the state as a whole. It wasn’t just corruption. I knew that smell and accepted it as an everyday part of human existence. But California had the sugary sweet stench of Liberal self-righteousness on top of it. It rankled something in my demon nature. It reminded me of the bathroom at Jeung’s bar, and of the cab I was currently sitting in: One offending agent trying to mask another.
The cab passed a lounge with a flamed-out neon and a picture of a fisherman on its un-illuminated sign. I told the driver to stop and threw a fifty at him. I had no idea what a cab ride in L.A. cost, but if fifty bucks didn’t cover it, fuck him.
The sign was familiar, so I had to be close to Laslo’s apartment. I got out and started walking the boulevard. I didn’t know what street I was on, but I didn’t need to. I wasn’t looking at street signs. I was looking at the buildings. They were all variations on a theme. The theme was shit. The variation was color. All I saw were shitty multi-colored apartment buildings everywhere, but that was enough. After a few blocks I found a blue apartment building with hideous orange doors for each apartment. There was no way two buildings in the same neighborhood could be that tacky.
His was the first apartment on the second floor. Or it had been, years before. He could have moved since last I’d visited, but that didn’t stop me from kicking in the door and stepping inside. If he had moved, this was going to be a tough one to explain to the new tenants. Two pit bulls started barking in the other room and came skidding out in full attack mode. I growled at them once and they went back from whence they came with a whimper. I liked dogs. They knew their place. In that way, and many others, they were often smarter than their owners. And I always held them in higher esteem than their owners.
Laslo was passed out on a foldout bed in a room that doubled as a bedroom and so-called “media room.” A sixty-five-inch LCD TV was mounted crookedly on the wall to the right of the bed. The plaster was cracked and chipping apart. It was a wonder it could hold the weight of the monster TV. Surround sound speakers were nailed to the wall every five feet or so. A gaming computer was set up next to the bed on a foldout steel table.
Laslo must have been doing pretty well for himself. The last time I’d been here, his media room consisted of a thirty-two inch TV and a stack of DVD porn.
I kicked the bed, but he was out cold. Something stained the front of his shirt. It looked like vomit, but I wasn’t about to go in for a closer look. Rather than wake him, I took the opportunity to search his apartment undisturbed. Within five minutes, I found his weapons stash, his drug cache, and his money roll. All hidden in the same false bottom in his dresser drawer. The money roll was mostly tens and twenties, but it still added up to about two grand. I pocketed it and moved on to the guns. I scowled at them. They were Glocks. Some people liked them, but to me they were just ugly little things meant to be used by lowlifes who couldn’t afford nor knew how to use real weapons. Or cops. Same difference. There was no art to them. It offended my aesthetic sensibilities. A couple bricks of heroin rounded out his inventory. I took one, left him the other. You never knew when drugs would come in handy. I stuffed it all in my pockets and went back to the bedroom.
This time, I didn’t bother with the pleasantries, I simply pistol whipped him with one of his own guns to wake his ass up.
“Aaah! Shit man!” He started making a keening sound, like
a cat in heat.
“Get up,” I told him.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, and then went back to the keening. He was holding his head. It was bleeding a little, but nothing too severe.
“Jacob. Junk’s friend. We met once before. Remember me?”
The blood draining from his face told me he did. It also stopped the horrible sound he’d been making.
“Oh, hey Jacob. How you doing?” Like we were old friends.
“Where’s Junk?”
“Shit man, I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
I hit him on the other side of the head with the pistol.
“Fuck! Goddamit!” He fell off the bed and was writhing on the floor in front of me like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. While he was down there, I gave him a solid kick in the ribs.
“I’m on a bit of a schedule,” I said. “The next time you make me use this gun on you, I’m gonna use it properly.”
He looked at me blankly.
“I mean I’m going to shoot you,” I clarified.
He put up his hands. “Okay. Relax man, relax.” I was actually completely relaxed. Entertained, even. But I did step away to give him some breathing room. Finally, he struggled to his feet.
“Junk’s been hanging at this local strip joint the past few months. Called the Honeycomb,” he offered. It took way less cajoling than I thought it would. “I’ve only been there once or twice myself,” he continued, “but I know he’s there just about every day.”
“You two have a falling out or something? I never knew Junk to go weeks without seeing his dealer.”
Laslo shook his head. “Nah. He’s just been doing his own thing for a while. Not my kind of scene.”
“Yeah. You got principles, right?”
He didn’t say anything, so I changed the subject. “The Honeycomb? Where is it?”
“You get on Redondo Beach Boulevard…”
“I’m not from around here, fuckhead. Draw me a map.”