Hex-Rated

by Jason Ridler

  I focused on Nico. “How are you holding up?”

  “All right. Morris brought me something to eat.”

  Anger coiled. “That was nice of him.” And I’d pay off the tab. Last thing I wanted was any sense of obligation between them. He might feel sorry for her face, even some kinship because they were both mauled by life, but he was still a man and Nico, however scarred, was beyond his reach as a lay. Hell, she was beyond mine. “But Nico? I want to be clear, you can’t open that door again. Not for Morris. Not for the president. Unless it’s me. Our codeword is Blueberry Pancakes.” God, I hated that word from the Middle Ages. Edgar used to say it whenever he executed a new trick, so goddamn pleased with himself and his faux aristocratic act, dressing up the old Latin word glitter. But since the only people who used it were “dead” magicians and leather-patched English professors, I was confident we were jake. “Say it.”

  “Blueberry Pancakes.”

  Her voice stirred a hard longing, but I wasn’t done with work. “Good. Just watch Here’s Lucy or Laugh In, something fun to take the edge off this day. You must be bushwhacked.”

  She yawned as she spoke. “I’m tired but I don’t think I can sleep until I know Maxine is okay. Or have you back . . . Mr. Brimstone.”

  “James is fine.” And it was. I hated my last name. It crackled in my ear like a cop on the PA in the precinct, calling me to the line up or the front desk. No matter how pretty or sweet, any voice saying Brimstone raised one hackle. “And I will help her.” Though I had no clue how. I blinked, and the tumblers in my head fell into place . . . because I knew who could help.

  “Shit.”

  “James?”

  Fists banged on glass. “Better run, rent’s due, I’ll call you in an hour. Rest up, Nico.”

  When the handle rested in the cradle, I took a look at the hard case outside. A creeping amount of gray was etched his thick brown mass, his face scabbed and worn, and his beard was ragged and riddled with dancing dandruff that was likely not dandruff . . . about my height, less weight and more gnarled muscle from toughing it out on the street.

  If I had gone to high school, he could have been in my class. Maybe a track star. Maybe a class clown. But something had derailed him so hard he ended up here . . .

  . . . here, on the street, where death stalks every choice, and the man-made demons of drink, dope, and delirium are your co-workers and roommates, taking up lodging inside your skull, and you’ll do anything for warmth against the dark, in bottles and needles . . . maybe he was a vet like me, but what he saw he couldn’t swallow . . . maybe he was a rotten bastard who got what was coming to him via a karmic exchange played out in real time instead of waiting for reincarnation . . . maybe he made one bad choice, the worst choice, the kind that can’t be forgiven . . .

  “Get out of my house!”

  I nodded, put a dollar on top of the phone.

  He backed away as I slid I folded the door to the side and stepped out. “Sorry to mess up your abode. I put rent on top. Hope that’s fine.”

  His eyes were near feral. He shuffled inside, snatched the dollar, and examined it. He held it above his eyes. “Novus Ordo Seclorum.”

  I nodded. A New Order for the Ages had been on dollar bills for a long time. Someone knew Latin before their life crashed. But the eyes were still wild. “I’ve seen it! The dark spiders, the shadows, the grinning men and their mouthless women! Hell has frozen over and the party is about to begin.”

  “Thanks for the tip, friend,” I said, and gamely walked back towards Lilith.

  “Novus Ordo Seclorum!”

  The derelict’s mumbo jumbo dogged me as Lilith headed me where I did not want to go. But there was no choice. My knowledge of Shinto magic was not enough to explain the differences in a demon’s dental hygiene. I needed an expert. And that meant two things that made me squirm.

  I was going to Beverley Hills. To see my ex.

  CHAPTER 13

  NOT KEEN ON ANY MORE HIGHWAY SHENANIGANS, I GUNNED Lilith through the byways of Chinatown and Mid-City, shucking and jiving with one hand on the horn. A series of green lights through Mid-City almost made me believe in a merciful god until I headed into the evening funk of West Hollywood. Brown bags littered the gutters like the corpses of squashed rats. The air fluttered with the launching of a dozen different burger wrappers that danced in and out of traffic like kamikaze birds. Welcome to the Sunset Strip.

  Haight-Ashbury may have been the Mecca for hippies, but their Medina was the Strip. As seven pm broke the day into a blazing pink evening, the streets were filled with bright orange, sweaty brown, and faded red shirts, Indian headbands, and beads. Burning joints tussled with tobacco and made the air so thick with resin and nicotine that breathing too long would turn you into a groovy casualty. But there was a change in the uniform of the peace-and-love brigade. T-shirts hung off figures so thin you wondered if being a junkie was the next big fad, like hula-hoops and Orphan Annie decoder rings.

  Watching the dopy smiles of LA’s love children, sadness crept up inside. Something had changed since Altamont. Their shadows . . . were wane. Their spirits a little paler. Woodstock hadn’t ended the Vietnam War. Kent State had shaken them. Split them. Some got militant and dropped out of the world and lived as if they were Henry David Thoreau’s poorer cousins, trying to make a crappy Walden into Shangri La. Others abandoned their beads for a corporate Monticello. That had bled their shadows pale. Once there had been a critical mass that could have had a chain reaction . . . instead they were scattered into a dozen Plan Bs. Some tuned in, turned on, and dropped out . . . and ended up here. Others had gone AWOL in America, living on communes and exploring lifestyles ranging from Roman to Puritan. Others sold their soul to rock and roll, caravanning behind buses filled with idols, hoping artists could be their life. And there were those who picked up a needle, and became wraiths of their former selves, or drank their way into a berserker rage, or popped enough pills to fade into a coma.

  “Zombies at worst, sheep at best,” Edgar had said once. But I liked hippies. There was so little malice, even if their leather headbands held back anger at injustice. I’d bashed through too much violence in East Oakland, the Iron Triangle of Richmond, the circuit and Korea not to wish, perhaps, that I could be one of them, a free flower child of abandon who made a life about living, feeling, being . . . but Edgar knew, as well as I did, that some of us are born to walk alone.

  The sidewalks were crammed. Fuzzy guitars and thick bass blared from storefronts while singers I didn’t know screamed and crooned and stole every possible emotional lick from the catalog of bluesmen whose names were every ounce as dangerous and cool as Black Sabbath. Howling Wolf. Lightning Hopkins. Big Mamma Thorton. Hell, those names sounded like mob bosses and escaped monsters from the Universal lot. I circled the block until a spot opened up in front of Pet Palace, one of the only clean storefronts on the east side of the Strip.

  The pennies between my fingers were hot as I pushed then into the meter, cranked the knob, and bought myself two minutes, Montague Summers in my left hand.

  “Hey, man,” said a twenty-something in hip huggers and a checkered top, wind caressing her hair like a web across her face. “You late for a wedding?”

  I smiled. “Yup, just need to pick up the bride to be!” I pointed at Pet Palace and swallowed a sob.

  “You marrying a dog?”

  “I won’t have you speak about my bride like that!” I said, gesturing as if I was an uptight Connecticut Yankee complaining about the nuts in his Waldorf Salad.

  She laughed, deep and throaty. “Well if doesn’t turn out, I love doggy style. So long as I keep the ring.”

  I read every ounce of her: young, starved, sexy, practiced, dressed like a hippie but working the daylight hours. She was a little drunk, comfortable being rude in public. And everything about her beauty being turned into this vulgar one act made me want to buy her a bowl of Ares’ lemon chicken soup, and a one way ticket back to wherever she was from, and no
t see the Strip suck the life out her . . . she’d be a crone on the street faster than Dalko, my favorite little league washout, pitched a fastball. “I’ll keep that in mind.” I tipped an imaginary hat, then pressed open the door to Pet Palace, abandoning a wife for thirty bucks a night, to talk to the one who’d actually said no.

  Screams from every corner of the earth filled my ears. Macaws screeched, dogs howled, and I swear somewhere in the back there was a gorilla making love to a vending machine. The stink of the place was a zoo crossed with bleach and the heady afterglow of incense, which likely pleased no one but Isabella, who was no doubt in the back working her own magic to heal the critters of the animal world.

  The front office was a tiny square with a handful of wooden chairs pressed against the back wall. Each held an owner who held a critter: a young girl with a macaw, an old lady with a snotty bulldog on her lap, but I was damned if I could see the love ape. At the counter was a fifty-year-old lady in a sweat-stained polo tee and red slacks with a freshly permed helmet of hair.

  “You’re incompetent,” said the snotty bulldog woman to the desk gal, a Thai girl named Franca. “I said I had to leave before seven. And it’s seven. I want to see Dr. Caylao. Now.”

  “She’s very busy,” said Franca, then saw me and her face soured. “Too busy, perhaps.”

  “I am not rescheduling,” said the bouffant in slacks, her voice betraying a real north London accent, dented by about fifteen years of living in the States: a quiet indignity rumbling with a sense of privilege you have to be born with. “You will get off that duff of yours, and summon your boss, or else I will give you a reason to be upset.”

  She wasn’t waiting on a pet. She was here for Dr. Caylao’s other efforts. Same here. And the kid and old lady in the seats were ahead of me. I’d lost too much time. “Excuse me?”

  The fifty-year-old turned and showed me a face so thick with pancake makeup and sculpted smears of blush and eye shadow that she reminded me of my old clown pals, Tick and Tock, sitting before each other, putting on each other’s make up because they were twins (it was against the Clown code to let anyone else do it or see it, but Electric Magic tents had a lot of holes in them). In comparison this woman looked like spilled dinner. “Am I talking to you? No? Then mind your own business.”

  I kept my face pure pedestrian. “It’s just that . . . isn’t that your Triumph outside? The dirty green one?”

  “So what if it is?”

  “It’s being lifted by the good folks of Peter’s Tow Jobs.”

  “What?”

  “Your meter must have run out.”

  “It did not!”

  “Well you better put a quarter in or else have to go down to the Pike in Long Beach to get her out.” I loved that bit. People in LA think going to Long Beach is the greatest inconvenience since the outhouse, and the Pike’s boardwalk was always crowded with tattooed bikers, exiles, and other assorted color that was being pushed out by the growing mass of hippies.

  Fury shook the woman’s eye, then her finger, which she wagged at Franca. “Tell the doctor I will be right back.” She yanked the door behind her, but it couldn’t slam, and she screeched under her breath.

  The tension in the room dropped like an anvil. I turned to the two women in their chairs. “Ladies, I apologize. She’s going to come in here twice as mad.” Lilacs filled the air before I heard her voice.

  “No doubt because she saw you, James.”

  I shuddered at the velvet voice that had just slapped me.

  In white coat, beige blouse, gray skirt and five-inch naked heels was all five-foot-five of Isabella, one arm on the door. Her black hair was styled and wavy and her face said forty going on twenty-five. The only tell of the hard life she’d known was in her hands: deep scars and grooves from a childhood of labor, violence, and war. She turned to the patients. “Mrs. Devon, Ms. Frausto, I apologize for his conduct.” Neither one of them spoke a word, just nodded at the strangeness before them. Meaning me in my prom/funeral outfit. “I will be with you in a minute, but I must see this gentleman out the back so that Mrs. Wentworth won’t have a fit when she returns. You?” she said at me. “Come.”

  And there wasn’t an ounce of joy in her words or actions. And that’s when I noticed. The animals’ screams had been reduced to panting. Down the short dark hall were waiting rooms, surgery rooms, and a bathroom, but the far back left was her office. Lilacs dusted the aromas of animals so much you’d be hard pressed to remember that it was also a place of mange, poop, and death.

  I enjoyed her backside, all the more pleasant as she tapped down the hallway . . . though it was also a rerun of our last moment together: me in the dark, her walking away. The office was small. Two chairs sat in front of medium-sized desk, and surrounding every wall like a layers of balconies were trinkets, charms and artifacts from around the world, lilacs making everything smell safe.

  She took her seat, crossed her legs, and held them fierce and tight like a judo master about to break someone’s neck, skin the color of crushed cinnamon. “Sit, James.” I sat. “Your hair looks like it was kissed by a hurricane.”

  “I’ve been blow drying it on the Ten.”

  “And your outfit? Chaperoning a kid to prom? I swear, without a woman in your life and left to your own devices, I think you’d end up wearing garbage bags and a fedora. Do you know how bad you smell? You’re about one day away from looking like a vagrant. Where were you?”

  “A funeral.”

  Her wane smile ebbed. “I’m sorry.” The sarcastic lilt of a woman rearing up to read me the riot act on my flaws (an experience for which I did not have the time) dropped.

  “It was Edgar.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Then I rescind my apology and offer condolences. You stayed too long under his influence, James. It wasn’t good for you.” She tsk,-tsk,-tsked as only Filipinas can do, with a note of indignation and a mild amount of sympathy, all while wiping an imaginary bad smell away from her. Edgar had that effect on a lot of people. Izzy caught herself about to list all the reason Edgar was bad news, then tapped the edge of her pristine desk. “So what brings you here? Do you have fleas?”

  “Probably, but I more urgent problems.” My smile relaxed, and I raised Montague Summers. “Octopi. Of the Japanese erotic variety.” I lay Demons of the Orient upon her desk.

  She swore in Tagalog so sharp and fast it would have cut me to the quick if I’d been a hair closer. Her long, strong index finger pointed at the book with a short, sharp trimmed nail a hue of smoky red. “Are you still reading this racist anak ng isang asong babae?”

  “I’m currently without my usual resources.”

  “So where did you get this junk?”

  “The public library.”

  Izzy laughed like a firecracker going off and she never looked more beautiful. Most guys want to date or marry a still-shot, a cover of a glossy mag or a pinup model who is etched forever in a single lusty pose. An immortal moment, frozen in time. One that begins to rot as soon as it’s taken, unless you were related to Dorian Gray. But what made Izzy beautiful was how life crackled through her, gave her energy. Sure, if she stood stock still you’d say she was gorgeous, but it was her spirit that made her truly beautiful, a rare mix of brains, guts, and sense of humor that made you want to make her laugh. “Oh James, I shouldn’t laugh, but the library? You used a public library? You had such a good collection of dark folios.”

  If Izzy went down memory lane, I’d be here for every one of her cats’ lives. “I need help, Izzy. And that book lead me to you.”

  And the humor was replaced with the determined look of professor about to battle a war of words. “Summers never went to the Philippines. And if he had, he would have never found what he was looking for, and he would have ended up with his head on a stick in Mindanao.”

  “I know. But he did go to Japan.”

  She gripped her knee with both hands. Hard. “Then why are you here, talking to a Filipina? Shouldn’t you be sniffing around a Shi
nto temple or the Japanese consulate?”

  The next move would sink me if I played it too hard. “I’m helping someone.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s a client.”

  “That’s what you call it now?” Izzy stood, pointed at the door with a hand that had killed more Japanese soldiers than most American GIs. “Out. Now.” She grabbed the book and pulled back for a mighty toss. “And take your idiot boyfriend Summers with you!”

  I covered my face and pulled up my knee. “She was attacked by a demon.” My heart beat three times before I dropped my foot. “A serpent emerged from her friend’s mouth and slashed her face with fangs sharper than a barber’s straight razor.” My guard dropped. Izzy was still ready to throw a killer fastball, anger taut and muscles hard and hungry for combat. “Summers talked about Japanese women being possessed by sea demons . . . sexually.”

  Izzy raised an immaculately smooth and curved eyebrow.

  My hands lay at my sides. My voice was just loud enough to be heard and not one decibel more. “We both know you sell . . . sexual aides of the unique variety to these old starlets, and I don’t care about it except you’re an expert on the side of erotic that touches the fantastic.” I swallowed dust. “And I know you’ve seen the dark side of Shinto magic.” Izzy had no thousand-yard-stare. The war she’d seen as a child, fought as a child, killed in as a child, was part of her nervous system as much as carny instincts was part of mine. “What attacked my client, it wasn’t . . . normal. Something was done to warp even an oni.” I told her the details and she listened, holding back the tsunami of desire to smack my five o’clock shadow of with one swipe. “So, sexual demons. Plus, this book was published in Germany by the Thule Society.” She dropped the book on her desk as if it had been on fire. “I need your help, Izzy. I’m facing something a little bit outside my pay grade.”