I felt it right on time: a shockwave of reset that made me blink and sent the cigarette smoke spiraling into a frenzied whirlwind. The kid spluttered and sat up, one hand clawing at his eye, the scream back on his lips high and girlish.
“Relax and have a drink,” I said.
He pulled his hand away and goggled at his blood-smeared palm. His blue eyes were as watery—and intact—as they’d been a few minutes before. “They killed me.”
“Don’t worry, death doesn’t take here.” I took a long draw on my cigarette. “The good news is you can drink, smoke, and eat as much crap as you like. It isn’t going to end you. The bad news is you’ll wish it would. Welcome to Lost Angeles, Franklin. Welcome to Hell.”
2
Franklin ran out of the bar, his wail receding into the distance. I helped myself to his whisky, which as far as I could tell hadn’t been contaminated by tears, blood, or dandruff. Normally I restricted myself to two a day. Drinking myself witless hadn’t helped a bit, and my wits were my main asset. At the moment, though, I was at a loose end between jobs and figured I might as well. Benny would make me cough up for the abandoned drink anyway and pour it back into the bottle when I wasn’t looking.
Franklin’s reaction was completely normal. I’d been stabbed, shot, strangled, bludgeoned, electrocuted, drowned, suffocated, run over, and burned alive (a salutary lesson about the perils of smoking drunk in bed) enough times to develop a certain sangfroid about kicking the bucket, but the first few times, I took it hard. It wasn’t dying that threw you into a tailspin. The real kicker was coming back from the few minutes of blissful nothingness and remembering where you were.
My first experience of Lost Angeles citizens’ stubborn refusal to lie down and die already had come the morning after my jaunt in the Buick. I’d woken up with a head full of nails and battery acid swilling around my guts. The hangover hadn’t been the only thing putting the hurt on me. Being blind drunk hadn’t spared me the visit to the motel or the sights it contained. The memories still burned in my drink-addled brain like neon lights fizzing bright and lurid through a dense fog. I set out for Benny’s to try again.
The powers that be had dumped me into a one-room flop in Desert Heights, a slice of urban squalor clinging to the northwest perimeter of the city like a boil and oozing up against the moat surrounding the Black Tower. That was where all newcomers started out. Nobody told me this was Hell. I didn’t have to pass under the drooling heads of Cerberus. I didn’t have to pay the ferryman to navigate the River Styx—you could cross the torpid, orange-brown water free of charge every day courtesy of the Route 666 bridge. There wasn’t even a welcome brochure. I’d opened my eyes to a squalid room, the shot still ringing in my ears, and known.
Heaven would have had air conditioning, leather sofas, and a panoramic view of the clouds. My pad had barely enough space for a mattress—which looked, felt, and smelled like it had been humped rigid by a hundred filthy hobos—and a floor lamp with burn marks on the shade. The cracked window looked onto the next block, which was so close I could lean out and touch the wall. The dim, ramshackle staircase down from the eighth floor stank of piss and unwashed bodies and echoed with sobs and shrieks seeping out from under hundreds of mildewed doors.
The picture didn’t get any rosier outside. My building was one of thousands, each shedding its leprous brickwork into piles of rubble. There were no street names, no numbers on the buildings. You could only recognize where you lived from the individual shapes of the crumbling tenements, which made it nearly impossible to get home after dark. The tower rose brutishly above the district, its smooth black surface gobbling up the sun’s morning rays. The streets themselves were steeped in gloom; the slum blocks were pressed so close that light only reached street level when the sun was directly overhead.
The damned were everywhere, bent-backed and shuffling, banging their foreheads bloody against walls, crying out for their mothers, lovers, children, or God to save them. I already knew better than to waste my breath. The despairing horde was small potatoes compared to the sand borne aloft by the desert wind, which gusted and eddied through the maze of alleys. The shifting red canvas coalesced into ephemeral shapes: half-formed creatures with screaming holes for mouths, grainy pits for eyes, and twisted fingers that seemed to pluck at your sleeve. Dust devils, the locals called them. Some people thought they were the collective product of our terrified imaginations. Some considered them another form of punishment. After a while, I developed my own theory as to what they were.
I’d staggered through the alleyways, crunching on broken glass and dodging turds, until I cannoned off a skinny guy who had a scar in the shape of a question mark hugging his right eyebrow and a moustache so wispy that a stiff breeze could have blown it off. He was new, like me, or he wouldn’t have been in Desert Heights. I could tell from the sharp, hungry look in his eyes that he wasn’t going to be there long.
“What you got in your pockets?” he said.
I put my right hand in my trouser pocket and pretended to rummage. “I think I’ve got some fluff I could spare. Should help fill out your top lip.”
I was hoping my jibe would distract him long enough for me to kick him in the nuts and run. It didn’t work. Enterprising ratbag that he was, he’d already found himself a kitchen knife, which he gaily stuck in me without further preamble.
I wouldn’t recommend being stabbed in a vital organ. Reducing your brains to gazpacho with a nine-millimeter bullet turns the lights out instantly. Drowning is uncomfortable at first, but toward the end, it’s peaceful. Even being splatted by a truck is quick and relatively impersonal—provided the driver hasn’t mounted the sidewalk and chased you for a few hundred feet, as happened to me during one particularly messy case. A stabbing is intimate in all the wrong ways. He’d swung the knife in from the side and managed to slide the blade into my heart. The pain was bad, but the scrape of blade on ribs and the throbbing sense of violation were worse. I found myself flat on my back, choking on syrupy blood. My heart took one last heave, and I had long enough to hope I was gone for keeps this time before sweet nothing wrapped me in its arms.
When I perked up, his hands were in my pockets, searching for cash. He was out of luck on that score. The car had bought me booze, nothing more. I’d managed to eat the first few days thanks to the soup kitchens that the Church of the Penitent, the only functioning religion in the city, set up daily on the slum’s edge. I must have been the first person he’d killed down here, because he went into momentary lockdown when I sat up. I reacted first and brained him with a handy piece of masonry. I may have hit him more times than strictly necessary, adding my hoarse scream to the din of sinners’ voices as I did so. As I trip-walked away, two old women in rags scurried out of nowhere. They picked him clean in seconds and dissolved back into the dust.
I repaired on foot to Benny’s, caked in gore, shaking and obsessively fingering the ragged tear in my blouse where the wound should have been. Nobody gave me a second glance or offered to help, which told me a story I didn’t want to hear. The stolen car had bought me two weeks of free cocktails, so I set out to drink myself into the oblivion I couldn’t achieve any other way. This was to become a pattern in the early months—until I found out no amount of booze could blank out what came at nightfall.
So I wasn’t about to judge Franklin for flying off the handle. He’d get used to it eventually, or end up like one of the muttering loons roaming the streets, long skeins of saliva hanging from their chins.
I slipped out a last cigarette as the door flapped open to admit another customer looking to fortify themselves before going out to face the night music.
“Good evening, ma’am,” Benny said, his voice dripping smarm. “Welcome to my humble establishment.”
I was about to swivel to see who’d turned Benny into barman of the year when a flame ignited by my ear. It flickered at the end of a gold Zippo attached to a slender hand with purple manicured nails. I dipped my smoke into the fire befo
re turning to take in the woman lowering herself onto Franklin’s vacated perch. She wore a smart lilac jacket cinched around the waist and a hip-hugging skirt that advertised her curves. She had curly black hair and cheekbones so sharp that a man could kiss her and shave at the same time. Her eyes were almond in color and shape. I could see why Benny had undergone a personality transplant. Her lips were kinked into a smile that offered a potential lover damnation or salvation in equal measure. Despite the conclusions people drew from my penchant for trousers and close-cropped red hair, I didn’t swing that way. Even if I did, I already had damnation, and salvation was out of my reach. I wasn’t buying what she was selling.
“Good evening, Ms. Murphy,” she said. She was a Brit, tones polished to a lickspittle shine, voice high enough to retain its femininity but somehow still deep enough to resonate in the pit of the listener’s stomach.
“Do I know you?” I said.
“No, but I know you.”
That was the funny thing about reputations. You worked hard to build up a name for yourself, then when you had one, there was no escaping it. Everybody thought they knew you, when all they really knew was the tiny piece of yourself you put on show. Not that I really knew myself either. I’d spent so long being a cardboard cutout of a private detective that I’d forgotten how to be anything else.
“A lot of people know me,” I said.
“My name’s Laureen,” she said, offering up her hand. “A friend told me I’d find you here. He also told me you have an aptitude for solving problems.”
I let her hand hover. “Everybody else’s but my own. Which friend put you on to me?”
My snub didn’t seem to bother her. “Oh, somebody you did a job for a while back. You probably wouldn’t remember him.”
She could have been right. I’d done a lot of jobs, in the Angeles both Los and Lost, and most of them had slipped into the haze of time—although one job, my last in the real world, I would never forget. Still, I didn’t like the way she brushed off my question. Prospective clients liked to name-check the mutual friend who’d recommended me, mistakenly thinking it would earn them a discount. There was something else I didn’t like about her, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t how she was dressed, the way she so clearly used her looks to get what she wanted; a smart operator used every tool at her disposal.
No, my disquiet went deeper than that. She hadn’t even gotten to the proposition, and I already knew my answer would be no. When you worked enough cases, you developed a nose for when a job was going to be a heap of trouble—the kind of assignment you only took when the rent was long overdue and dumpsters outside restaurants were beginning to look appetizing. I’d been on a run the last few months, so I had a modest stack of cash tucked under the loose tile behind my toilet. I didn’t need any more grief in my life.
“Cut to the chase. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I’d like you to find something for me.”
“It’s always in the last place you look. I advise you to look there first.”
“Let me clarify. I’d like you to retrieve a stolen item.”
“Somebody pinched something in Lost Angeles? My flabber is gasted.”
“This isn’t a run-of-the-mill theft. It’s a very significant item.”
As she sat there, composed in the face of my hostility, I worked out what was bugging me. One shaft of sunlight still penetrated the bar; in a short while, that too would be gone. The other drinkers were shuffling their feet and drumming the tables, avoiding looking out the window to where the Black Tower loomed above the skyline. Yet she looked like she was ready for a night of dinner and theater, maybe followed by a few cocktails and some giggles with her pals. Something wasn’t right.
“There’re other investigators out there,” I said, my voice strained. “Go ask one of them.”
“I’ve been led to believe none of them are as good as you. I’ll pay twice your normal daily rate.”
“I don’t need the money.”
“You’re drinking in this pigsty, and you tell me you couldn’t use a few more dollars?” She turned to Benny. “No offense meant, you understand.”
“None taken,” Benny, the lecher that he was, said. “Fancy a toot on the house?”
“I choose to drink here,” I said. “Don’t you know down-market’s all the rage these days? You just missed the furs-and-diamonds set.”
For the first time, her composure wilted. A frown crinkled her forehead, and her clutch purse endured a particularly firm clutching. “Playing hard to get? I can respect that. How does four times sound?”
Now I knew for sure that the job stank. She’d told me how valuable the stolen object was, started high on my fee, and jacked the price up too quickly. Sure, she clearly had money, but I’d dealt with enough wealthy clients to know they were the biggest misers. Whatever Laureen had lost was undoubtedly important, to her at least. She wanted it back bad—way more than I wanted the money.
“Sorry, I’ve got a previous engagement. Don’t you?”
I looked over her shoulder, toward the tower, and raised my eyebrows. I gave it the finger surreptitiously, my version of the sign of the evil eye. In my experience, even the most hardened assholes did something similar, or at least flinched, when you made the smallest reference to the city’s most prominent landmark. She didn’t react.
“Do forgive me,” she said. “I lost track of time. Please don’t let me hold you back from your lovely evening.”
I threw a twenty on the bar to cover the drinks and headed for the door. At the exit, I glanced back, expecting her to follow me and try to persuade me to take on her case. Every person is the king or queen of their own realm; their problems are urgent matters of state, their loved ones nobles, the tawdry goods that accumulate in their lives the crown jewels. They have difficulty understanding why nobody else gives a crap about their problems, forgetting others have their own kingdoms to worry about first.
Instead, she sat there—once again the picture of composure—and gave me a breezy wave. “Give my regards to your date.”
Her nonchalance riled me, but I was damned if I was going to show it. I clicked the door closed behind me.
3
There was never a safe time in Lost Angeles, but the closest you came was in the golden hour before nightfall, when those who had homes rushed back to lock themselves in, and the bums wrestled for the right to burrow to the bottom of the deepest dumpsters. I didn’t know why they bothered; doors, windows, and slimy potato peelings couldn’t stop what was coming. They were kids hiding under the bedcovers as the bogeyman’s claws grated on the floorboards.
It was a touch after seven when I came out of Benny’s, and the flight for the false comfort of shelter was in full swing. Shutters were slamming down on the casinos, bookies, fighting dens, and bars that ran the three miles of Providence Avenue—the main strip in the gambling district of Cajetan. Faces of every shade, hue, and shape bobbed around me, but for all the differences, they could have been related. Nothing creates resemblance more than the expressions painted on the human face—the crinkle of a nose or an asymmetrical smile passed down from parent to child—and these people wore identical looks. Foreheads pinched, lips tight slashes, and eyes unfocused as thoughts turned to making it through the ordeal ahead. Everybody hurried along in silence; even the car engines, throbbing as the drivers sat in the rush-hour traffic, seemed muted.
Only Flo’s crew weren’t making themselves scarce. They roamed this, his heartland, each day, collecting protection money and policing the streets—if shaking down passers-by, making lewd comments, and ignoring everything that didn’t threaten Flo’s business interests qualified as such. They needed to be back on station by midnight, which meant taking their punishment where they worked. You could tell his crew by their uniforms: men and women alike wore brown linen suits, buttons undone to allow rapid access to holstered weapons, and black open-collared shirts; a tie was too easy for an opponent to yank on as an aid
to a head butt. My clothes were similar, except I went for shades of royal blue rather than brown, and I only wore a jacket in the cool of the night. I didn’t wear a tie either, and my blouses were generally black as a matter of expediency. I needed to give off the impression of ready-for-anything calm to clients. The sopping-wet armpit rings and visible nipples a white blouse put on display didn’t fit. Wearing white against the sun was pointless anyway—the heat was too intense for a reflective scrap of cloth to make any difference.
I nodded to Sid, a square-faced hood with eyes like pinpricks, as he leaned against one of the gold-painted pillars flanking the faux marble steps leading into the Lucky Deal Casino. He nodded back in that affected I-see-you, you-see-me way the hard boys were so fond of. I had an odd relationship with Flo’s gang. I’d stomped on their toes during a couple of earlier jobs. In such situations, payback was supposed to follow. Another downside of not dying permanently was that you could be tortured to death time and again or encased in concrete and buried in the desert to enjoy a living death, so most people were careful not to poke the lions. For some reason, Flo’s mob went easy on me. Sure, I got a talking-to and some finger wagging, but nothing more. Somewhere down the line, I must have inadvertently done Flo a big favor. I didn’t want to find out exactly how far my line of credit extended, though; these days I was careful to keep my roaming feet off Flo’s tootsies.
I’d never met the man himself. Few people had. He took over the racket not long after I arrived. All the other Trustees—the mob leaders who ran the moneylending, weapons, drugs, gambling, prostitution, booze, food, and gas rackets—were high profile, none more so than Hrag Chanchanian, the Armenian American gangster who controlled the sex trade. You could get anything you wanted in his fleshpots: men, women, transvestites, hermaphrodites, and any permutation of the above. There were no laws in Lost Angeles. There was only what you could afford. The sole demographic who missed out were the pedos, although Hrag dressed up his younger hookers in school uniforms in an effort to fill the gap in the market. Hrag spent his time glad-handing the big spenders in his brothels, screaming from the blood-spattered front row of the Colosseum, and swanking around town in furs and a gold-toothed grin. Flo preferred to maintain a layer of mystery. Nobody even knew his second name. He remained permanently cloistered away in his private apartments on the top floor of the Lucky Deal. There were rumors the previous incumbent, a surly Bostonian who’d been unpopular with his crew, was still up there. The tittle-tattle said he spent his days having sundry parts detached from his body in payment for some slight against his successor. I didn’t give this story much credence. Flo wasn’t known for his savagery. It sounded like the kind of fairy tale a smart gang boss spread to intimidate his competitors.
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