Maybe this parade of chickenshit civilians knows more than the rest of us Vigil and Sub Rosa types determined to tough it out until the end. I mean, why should the Angra pick L.A. to be their launching pad? Then again, why not? Maybe Zhuyigdanatha wants to do an open-mic night at the Comedy Store. Maybe the Angra want to have a drink at the Rainbow Bar & Grill like real old-time rock-and-rollers. Maybe they want to stomp us into the dirt because L.A. defines reality for three-quarters of the world. Or maybe because Mr. Muninn used to live here and they fucking hate him and the rest of the God brothers.
The brothers make up what’s left of God. See, he had a little nervous breakdown a few millennia back and split into five pieces. He’s weak, and one part of him, the brother called Neshemah, is dead. Murdered by Aelita and cheered on by big brother Ruach. Like the Ramones said, we’re a happy family.
Maybe I’m making too much of it all. L.A. is turning into Atlantis, slowly sinking beneath the waves. If the rain keeps up, those Brentwood blue bloods will be chain-sawing their mansions into arks, loading up the kids, the Pekingese, their favorite Bentleys, and heading for warmer climes. Trust-fund pirates and showbiz buccaneers, sailing the briny to Palm Springs and Vegas, where it never rains and Armageddon can’t get through the guards at the gated communities without an engraved invitation.
WHEN IT COMES to showing off, the Sub Rosa aren’t like the civilian big-money crowd. They like anonymity more than kittens and cotton candy. While civilians compete for House Beautiful trophies, wealthy Sub Rosas like their places to come across as the most miserable shitboxes outside of the town dump. If they could live in a greasy Big Mac wrapper they’d do it.
Blackburn’s mansion is downtown, in an abandoned residency hotel on South Main Street. The bottom floor is boarded up, covered in aeons of graffiti and posters for bands and clubs that haven’t existed for a decade or more. The second and third floors have been gutted by fire. There’s something heroic about the utter devastation of the place. It probably says more about what the Sub Rosa have become than Blackburn ever intended.
The mansion is protected by more hoodoo than the gates of Heaven. So much that Blackburn didn’t have guards for years. Then I broke in that one time, and ever since, he’s stationed a private army outside. To fit in with the look of the street, his mercs are covered in grime and sporting the latest haute couture rags from Bums “R” Us.
Blackburn’s security chief, Audsley Ishii, and a dozen of his crustiest compadres surround me as I pull up outside the mansion. It takes me a second to recognize him under the moth-eaten wool cap and stage-makeup stubble. His raincoat is a plastic trash bag, which he’s cut open at the bottom for his head and the sides for his arms. He doesn’t pull a weapon. Neither does any of his crew, but if I sneeze I’ll have enough bullets and hoodoo thrown at me to knock loose one of Saturn’s moons.
Ishii says, “Stark. Don’t you even know enough to get out of the rain?”
“I like it. Makes this neighborhood smell less like a piss factory.”
“Well, you’d know all about living like a pig, would you?”
“Are you trying to insult me? ’Cause I can’t hear you over the sound of your garbage-bag tuxedo.”
One or two of his crew smile, but sober up when he throws them a look.
“What do you want here?”
“Don’t fuck around, man. You know I’m here to see Blackburn.”
He looks me and the bike over.
“I couldn’t help noticing you weren’t wearing a helmet when you drove up. You’re aware that the state of California has clearly spelled out helmet laws, aren’t you?”
He takes a couple of steps back and spreads his arms wide.
“And there’s no way this, whatever the hell this thing is, is street legal. It doesn’t even have a license plate.”
“So, write me a ticket, Eliot Ness. Just get out of my way.”
Ishii holds up a finger.
“Before I maybe let you in, I’m going to have to search you for weapons.”
“Try it and the last thing you’ll see is me pulling your skull out by the eye sockets.”
That does it. Ishii’s goons go on high alert, guns, hexes, and potions at the ready. It’s kind of fun really. Like a scene from some kind of hobo Power Rangers movie.
“Not smart,” says Ishii. “You know I can have you arrested this fast for making a terrorist threat.”
He snaps his fingers like maybe I don’t get it.
He says, “All Mr. Blackburn has to do is nod and you’ll be buried so far underground you’ll be sleeping on lava.”
“Yeah, but you still won’t have a skull. Your head’s going to look like a jack-o’-lantern a week after Halloween.”
He shakes his head in mock sorrow.
“I’m afraid under the circumstances I can’t allow you to see the Augur. And I’m forwarding your name to the local police watch list.”
“Do it. What are there, like a hundred cops left in L.A.? And they don’t want to be out in the rain any more than you do.”
“Maybe I won’t have to do anything if you turn this circus act of yours around and go home.”
“I’d love to, but I have an invitation from Blackburn himself.”
I reach into my pocket and Ishii’s crew goes rigid. With my fingertips, I slowly pull out Blackburn’s note and hand it to Ishii. He looks it over and crumples it up. Tosses it into a puddle.
“With your criminal associations it’s probably a forgery. Go home, Stark, before you fall on a bullet.”
Ishii’s phone rings. He has to fumble under his trash bag to pull it from inside his tattered coat. He puts it to his ear and listens intently for a few seconds.
“Yes, sir. He’s here now, but he’s not behaving rationally. He’s made threats.”
Ishii listens.
“No. Not to you personally, but this is a highly unstable individual, with a history of violence. As head of security, I have to take these things seriously.”
He abruptly stops talking.
“Yes, sir. No, sir. I understand.”
He purses his lips as he fumbles the phone back into his coat. Waves his arm in my direction.
“Let him through, boys.”
His crew gets out of the way so I can roll the bike to the curb and heel down the kickstand.
Getting off, I say, “Your problem, Ishii, is that you like playing protector of the realm for the Augur because it gives you a power hard-on. But you really don’t respect the man. I mean, he peeks into the future. He probably knew exactly what you were going to do before you did. The only reason he waited this long to do anything about it is he wanted to give you a chance to pull your head out of your ass.”
Ishii looks at his watch, waves his people back to their posts. He doesn’t want to look at me.
“Stop talking, Stark. And go inside before my gun goes off by accident.”
“Have fun with the fishes, Noah.”
The door is open for me when I reach the hotel.
The outside of Blackburn’s house might be a wreck, but the inside is something else. The inner sanctum is a Victorian fever dream of potted palms, gaslights, silk settees, and arsenic-green walls. You half expect to see Dickens and Queen Victoria sipping laudanum in the living room. I know the layout, so I stroll through the place to the parlor, where Blackburn has his office.
The Augur is a scryer. A seer. All Augurs are scryers and Blackburn is supposed to be a good one. He’s an okay guy in an executive kind of way. His suit looks like it was cut by God’s tailor. His graying temples make him look like he’s in his late forties, but I know that he’s well over a hundred. The rich are different. He comes around from his desk and puts out his hand. I shake it.
“Thank you for coming,” he says, and gestures to a chair before going back to the iron th
rone.
“I don’t know why I’m here, so I’ll say ‘you’re welcome.’ For the moment.”
Blackburn’s heart beats faster than a powerful politician’s heart ought to. He’s nervous, but good at not showing it. He picks up a pen and sets it at a right angle to his papers.
“I asked you here in hopes of clearing up any differences there might be between us. In times like this, I don’t want us to be enemies.”
“I didn’t know we were enemies.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t. I saved your wife’s soul and got treated like a rabid dog.”
“You did break in here and terrorize my guests during your time as Lucifer.”
“I was just back from Hell and having a bad day.”
“You have a lot of those,” he says.
“You try coming back from Hell feeling springtime fresh.”
Blackburn pours himself a drink of something brown and whiskey-smelling from a crystal decanter. Holds up the bottle toward me and raises his eyebrows.
“Sure,” I say, figuring he has easier ways of killing me than poison. I take a sip and it takes me a minute to recognize it. A kind of rye called Angel’s Envy. There are whiskey-colored wings on the bottle and everything. The stuff is aged in rum barrels and has about twelve different tastes going down. It’s not Aqua Regia, but it will do.
I say, “Nasrudin Hodja sent a car full of punks after me a while back. They shot up the street and nearly killed a friend of mine. Were you in on that?”
He sets down his drink.
“No. I give you my word.”
His heartbeat doesn’t change. He’s not sweating. He’s telling the truth.
Tuatha Fortune, his wife, comes in. Perches on the edge of Blackburn’s desk. She’s in a white silk blouse and black pants. Old-money modest.
“He’s not lying,” she says. “I was there during the discussion.”
“He didn’t try to have me killed. He just talked about it. I’m all relieved now.”
“Nasrudin came to me and asked permission to right the insult after you tortured his nephews in that bar.”
A few weeks back, while looking for the Qomrama, I hassled some Cold Case soul merchants at Bamboo House of Dolls. Stripped them and made them think I was skinning one of them. It was just a spell, a Hellion hoodoo trick. Nothing bad happened except to their egos. Some people can’t take a joke.
“I didn’t torture anyone. They were as safe as baby chickens under mom’s wings. I scared them a little and sent them to bed without their supper. That’s it.”
Blackburn pours his wife a drink. It’s a little early in the day for whiskey, even for me. They really don’t like having me in their house.
I hardly know Tuatha at all. When I first met her she wasn’t much more than a walking corpse. I thought she might be on chemotherapy, but why would a high-class Sub Rosa be using civilian doctors? Turns out Aelita had hidden her soul somewhere in order to blackmail Blackburn. I convinced Mr. Muninn to find it and return it to her. However much she might be one of L.A.’s pampered rich elite, she didn’t deserve to get ripped apart by a lunatic like Aelita.
“You have a madcap definition of safe, Mr. Stark,” she says.
I raise my drink in her direction.
“It’s just Stark. And yeah, I’m all about the merry pranks.”
“Physical torture or not,” says Blackburn, “Nasrudin took what you did as an attack on the entire soul-merchant clan. He demanded satisfaction and I didn’t have any choice but to say yes. It was politics, pure and simple. As an ex-Lucifer, surely you understand that.”
Tuatha says, “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it coming. You understand revenge, if nothing else.”
“I understand fine. I just get testy when it’s aimed at me.”
Blackburn waves his hand, dismissing everything that’s been said.
“Let’s put that behind us. I’ve made it clear to Nasrudin that he overstepped when he tried to gun you down. It won’t happen again.”
“And he’s such a reasonable guy. I’m sure he keeps his promises.”
“To me he does.”
I can believe that, actually. Sounds like I’m clear of one source of immense bullshit for a while.
Tuatha says, “You know, you did a lot of people a lot of good when you dispatched Norris Quay. I can tell you truthfully, he won’t be missed.”
Old, decrepit Norris Quay was the richest man in California, but not anymore. He’s severely dead.
“I bet. But I didn’t dispatch him. He was killed by crazies in the basement of Kill City.”
“Naturally,” says Blackburn, humoring me but not believing a word of it. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out an old book. It’s battered, like one of the heretical books in Father Traven’s library.
“However it happened, it’s given us access to his considerable collection of occult objects and texts. My great-grandfather wrote this one. One of the first set of bylaws and family trees for the American Sub Rosa. Would you like to see it?”
“Thanks. But I’m afraid I’ll spill my drink on it.”
“Of course,” he says, disappointed I didn’t want to be dazzled by his family roots.
“In any case,” he says, “I’ve sent a particularly interesting book to the Golden Vigil. I understand they have an actual Buddhist priest helping with them with research.”
“They do.”
“You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that those old fundamentalists were consorting with Eastern heathens,” says Tuatha. When she smiles there are lines at the corners of her eyes. I like that unlike a lot of Sub Rosa elite, she’s not trying to glamour away her age. “Have you met him? What’s he like? I’ve heard those old monks can be quite the pranksters. Fun workmates.”
“ ‘Fun’ isn’t the word I’d use. And I haven’t worked with him much, so I don’t know how good he is. Wells seems to think he’s the bees’ knees.”
“You must tell me more about him the next time you come by,” says Tuatha.
“I’m coming back?”
“I hope so,” says Blackburn. “I offered you the job of my security chief before and I’d hoped that since then you’d reconsidered it.”
“Actually, I hadn’t. Listen, I was bodyguard for the first Lucifer and was lousy at it. I’m not being modest. I got us ambushed and him cut up. I’m good at hitting things, not keeping things from getting hit.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
I finish my whiskey and start to set down the glass. Blackburn smoothly slides a coaster under it before it touches down.
“You’re a scryer. Shouldn’t you know I was going to say no?”
He shakes his head.
“It doesn’t work like that. I see probabilities, some more likely and some less. In a case like you, where someone has to make a yes-or-no choice, I see both outcomes and some of the consequences of each decision.”
“So, no lottery numbers, then?”
“Actually, he’s very good at lottery numbers,” says Tuatha.
“But I’m not going to give you any,” he adds.
“See? The rich are no fun. They get everything and then wag their fingers at us proles for wanting a taste.”
“Is that why you won’t take the job? I never took you for a Marxist. A Situationist, perhaps.”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean. And I’m not going to argue about it. A politician like you, you’ll have me convinced I wanted the job, that it was my idea, and that I wanted to be paid in candy corn.”
“There’s nothing I can offer you to change your mind?”
“It’s nothing personal. I have a job to do, even if I have to do it with the Vigil. A friend died looking for the Qomrama. I’m not going to let that happe
n again.”
Tuatha stands up and goes around to the back of the desk.
“My husband is afraid, Mr. Stark. He won’t say it. He’s seen dark days ahead, for the Sub Rosa and for us personally. Please reconsider.”
“You have a whole army outside and you can get a bigger one. Talk to Wells. He doesn’t like us pixies, but I bet he’d send people to protect the Augur.”
Tuatha looks at Blackburn.
“That might not be a bad idea. And it will give Mr. Stark—excuse me, Stark, a chance to think things over.”
To Tuatha I say, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“All this rain. Do you have something to do with it?”
She cocks her head to the side like she’s telling a kid there are no monsters under the bed.
“That’s a common misconception about the art of brontomancy. I’m a thunder worker,” she says, and looks up as a monstrous clap of thunder rattles the windows. “I use thunder and even lightning for purposes of divination and spell casting. Brontomancers don’t have anything to do with rain.”
Her heart and breathing are steady. She’s telling the truth too. These people are no fun.
“Do you know any rain workers who might be doing this?”
“Believe me, I’ve asked,” she says. “I’ve even offered a reward to anyone who can tell me who or what is causing it.”
“Okay. You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”
“Of course.”
“If you won’t work for me now, maybe you will when this matter is settled?” says Blackburn.
“If we make it, I’ll think about it.”
Blackburn stands. He and Tuatha come around the desk.
He says, “I have every confidence that you and Marshal Wells will get us through this.”
“I wouldn’t put too much money on that horse.”
“You don’t think Marshal Wells is confident?”
We start walking to the front door.
“Wells is a believer. In God and the feds. He’s morally obligated to believe that we can win. But I don’t think he’s any more confident than I am.”
The Getaway God Page 8