Sebastian was jigging in a circle, hands held aloft in triumph. His fake moustache was swinging from one side of his lip like a hairy spider leg. The missing finger was clearly visible. I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Monobrow was pushing his way through the throng, sidekicks coasting in his wake. His gaze was trained on the thief. We were looking for the same man after all. Monobrow was more stupid than I thought; it had taken him almost two hours to identify a guy in the world’s worst disguise sitting damn near on top of him. The revelation raised questions about what they’d been doing in Benny’s the other night, but I didn’t have time to consider them right now. I couldn’t let them get to Sebastian first. The cocky thief hadn’t even noticed he was in peril. My plan to follow him was ruined, but maybe I could work this wrinkle in my favor by playing the savior.
I was much farther away, but I got lucky when Monobrow grew too liberal with the shoulder. The offended party delivered a roundhouse punch that caught the goon on the side of the head. Monobrow’s boys retaliated. Within seconds, a good half dozen people were flailing at each other. I snatched the foam axe from the woman’s hand and ran down the aisle to the wall dropping into the ringside area. The axe had enough heft that it flew more or less in a straight line and bounced off the thief’s shoulder. He looked around and saw me waving my arms at him. I jabbed my finger to the right. His gaze followed, and the moustache fell off as his mouth dropped. Monobrow had clubbed his way through the brawl and was closing in. I couldn’t fault the thief’s decision making. He calculated that he would get snarled up if he tried to flee along the aisle and vaulted over the wall into the ring. He sprinted toward one of the gates, which had opened at the end of the fight.
Monobrow changed direction to follow, fumbling for his gun. I weaved back to the turnstile. I’d never outpace the athletic thief in a footrace, but he’d have to take a long circuit back around to reach the competitors’ exit. I had a shot at heading him off, particularly as the crowds had yet to start filing out. When I emerged onto the street, I made a beeline for the closest parked car and smashed the window to the disinterest of the hookers waiting outside to proposition those successful gamblers with money to burn. I hot-wired the car in less than thirty seconds and screeched off in the direction of the exit I expected Sebastian to use. I pulled up to the curb as he flew out, timing it so well that he had to put his hands out to stop himself from slamming into the bodywork.
“Alexis sent me,” I said out of the broken window, the lie slipping instinctively off my tongue.
He glared at me. For a moment, I thought he was going to trust his legs to get him out of trouble, no doubt weighing up whether he’d sooner face a savage and imprecise beating from three large thugs or a forensic thumping from Alexis. The bullet that pinged off the car roof made up his mind. He hauled open the back door and dove in. I was halfway up the street and around the corner before he managed to pull his legs in.
12
I drove erratically—taking random turns, weaving through lanes, accelerating and braking like a highly strung teenager in driver’s ed—until I cut off five of Hrag’s boys in an electric pink Pontiac Chieftain with a picture of their boss stenciled on the bonnet. They loosed off a few badly aimed shots but didn’t give chase. Sure we weren’t being followed and keen not to attract the attention of any more road warriors, I took the on-ramp to Route 666 and cruised in the slow lane.
I didn’t think the goons had spotted me. Sebastian’s body would have obscured their view of my face, and I’d burned more rubber than a week-long swingers’ convention before they hit the street. But it wasn’t worth taking the risk of going to Benny’s or my apartment in case they’d seen me. A less suspicious woman might have chalked up their appearance at Benny’s to coincidence. Not me. There were good odds the inside guy had discovered that Laureen was planning to hire me and that he’d instructed his pet humans to keep tabs on me. Not having enough brains to rub together to create even the tiniest spark, they’d arrived early and passed the time getting stabby on Franklin. They were on the hunt for Laureen’s trinket too; at least now I knew who to look out for along the way.
Having Sebastian put me one step ahead of the competition, but I didn’t want to start straight in with the questions. That would make it too obvious that I had a hidden agenda. I looked at the betting slip still clutched in his fist. “How’d you do in the last fight?”
Like all gambling addicts, he couldn’t resist boasting about his good judgment, conveniently glossing over the preceding losing bets. “They gave me twenty-five to one on the midget.”
“Good move. Always bet on the little guy. Just ask Goliath. I think I saw him in the deli queue the other week.”
“Yeah. It’s like dogs. It’s always the tiny one’s gonna bite your ankles. I put fifty bucks down on him.”
Too late, he twigged he’d informed me he was holding a chit for over a thousand dollars. He pocketed the slip in a hurry, like I hadn’t already seen it.
“Don’t worry. I’m not after your winnings,” I said.
“I guess that means Alexis is tossing plenty fetti your way to find me.”
“You think she’s paying me in cheese?”
“It means money, dumbass. What gave me away? The finger? It’s always the fucking finger.”
He got that look I’d seen a million times around town: a thousand-yard stare back to the moment of his death. His light fingers must have stolen something, and being light one finger must have gotten him recognized and rubbed out. It seemed he had a habit of stealing from the wrong people.
“That and the pubic hair you glued to your face,” I said. “When you go back to pick up your winnings, get yourself a better disguise.”
“Who are you? Pistachio Disguisey?”
His cultural reference sailed over my head. That was the thing I hated most about talking to people who’d lived after I died. It reminded me the world had gone on without me.
“Try going in drag,” I said.
He curled his lip. “You serious?”
“The more flamboyant a disguise, the better it works. When you’re a big man in suspenders and a basque, nobody looks closely at your face.”
For once, I wasn’t being a smartass. In LA, Danny had once gone undercover to get close to a transvestite who was blackmailing those upstanding gentlemen availing themselves of his erotic services. The disguise even fooled me. I remembered the day he walked into my office in full drag, talking in a camp voice and pretending to be interested in hiring me. I only caught on because he was wearing one of my few dresses, a cute little red number I wore when we went dancing. I locked the door and made him take it off. I lost myself in the memory, recalling the way I’d had to wrestle the frilly panties down his erection (he was an all-or-nothing kind of guy) and the sweaty, giggling wrestle that had followed.
“What you grinning at?” Sebastian said.
I snapped back to the present, for a moment unsure where I was. Then it hit me. I’d remembered Danny as my lover, not as my victim. I felt an unfamiliar warmth swell in my chest. It could have been hope; it could have been happiness; it could have been relief. It had been so long since I’d felt any real positive emotion that I couldn’t tell the difference. I wanted more.
“I remembered something,” I said.
I got onto the off-ramp near Il Terzo Livello to double back down Route 666, the unblemished memory tucked away in my skull for replaying later. Now that I’d broken the ice, I could tease out what I needed to know on the move—it was safer that way. Sebastian, who’d been fidgeting the whole time, struck me as the kind of guy who needed to fill silences, so I decided to shut up for a while. Things would go smoother if he seemed to be leading the conversation.
“Alexis isn’t mad at me?” he said after a minute of my best stony-faced taciturnity.
“Oh, she’s madder than a hatful of hornets. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when she gets hold of you. Although I suppose the makeup sex would be spectacular.�
�
“She likes to stab a fork into my cojones when she comes. She’s a fucking psycho. Drop me off downtown. Tell her you couldn’t find me.”
“Can’t do that. She wants me to bring you in. I guess she’s feeling horny. And stabby.”
I’d hoped to avoid resorting to threats, but Sebastian tensed. His hand sneaked toward the door handle. If he was prepared to dive onto a highway from a car traveling at seventy rather than face Alexis, he wasn’t joking about her preference for violent sex. No wonder he’d vanished without telling her. I whipped out my gun, abandoning all plans to tease out the information.
“I’ll shoot your other fingers off if you make a move for the latch.” I could sense him calculating the odds as he looked at my hand. “You might be fast enough to grab the gun before I fire, but then we’re going to have ourselves a jolly little crash when I yank the wheel. That’s going to hurt. Besides, there’s no need for unpleasantness when we can cut a deal.”
His gaze never left my gun as he responded. “Alexis didn’t send you, did she?”
“You got me. She didn’t think you were worth my day rate. Doesn’t matter; I’m sure she’ll still whip out the cutlery when we get to her place. Maybe it doesn’t have to go that way, though. If you tell me what I need to know, I’ll let you slink off.”
“What’d you wanna know?”
“I want to talk about your job up at Avici Rise.”
His eyes narrowed. “How’d you know about that?”
“I know a lot of things I shouldn’t. Whereas you don’t know a lot of things you should. Like who you stole from and what a bad idea it was.”
“I’m not a pendejo. I checked it wasn’t Yama, Hrag, or Adnan.”
“You stole from somebody much worse. You stole from the Administrators.”
“You’re just trying to scare me,” he said, but his voice wobbled.
“Even the Trustees don’t have enough money or power to live up on Avici Rise. If not them, who?”
Again, it was a question I should have asked myself a long time ago. Laureen and her pals must have projected some kind of collective mental blind spot onto the general populace to keep themselves hidden. That was a smart move. The city seethed with resentment against the Administrators, and it wasn’t like we had much to lose. If they stayed out in the open, let everybody know they were lording it over us from a position of luxury, we’d have been over the walls waving pitchforks and burning torches long ago. The Jedi mind trick wasn’t working on me any longer.
Sebastian leaned to his right, but instead of going for the door handle, he beat his head against the window. “I knew something wasn’t right. You working for them?”
“I am, which means you’re in a world of trouble. You think the Torments are bad? They’ve got far worse up their sleeves.” Even though I was laying it on thick to spook Sebastian into talking, I thought of the cloud of newly born dust devils and shivered. “The good news is they don’t care about you. They just want what’s theirs. Answer my questions, and I can make it go away. Let’s start with who hired you.”
One of the negatives about working alone had always been the limitations it brought to my scare factor. If you were in a mob, intimidating people into talking was easy; all you had to do was drop the name of whichever sadistic loon you worked for and hint that said maniac would be displeased if he didn’t get what he wanted. All I’d ever had were a big mouth and a small gun, the former useless without the threat of the latter. When I was alive, my marks knew I couldn’t shoot them despite any threats I made, since I was a licensed investigator. In Lost Angeles, I could shoot as many people as I liked, but the threat didn’t carry the same impact. So it was remarkably gratifying to raise the specter of the demons and watch Sebastian’s defiance crumble.
“Those three machos you saw,” he said in a flat voice, “they came to see me a week ago. The big one called himself Jake. The others didn’t say much.”
“You never met anybody else?”
“No. But I could tell they were hired help. They gave me plans of Avici Rise and told me when and how to get in.”
“And how did you get in?”
“I climbed up from the desert. Somebody left a gate open.”
The gate through which the creature had descended upon its prey. It was definitely an inside job. “Did you see anybody, anything, inside? No big guard dogs, for example?”
“Place was deserted, like they told me it would be.”
“And did Jake give you the combination for the safe?”
“He didn’t know it. I cracked it myself.”
“Then what?”
“I was to meet Jake at a bar in Eleutherios, give him the goods.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I ran into some middleman looking for high-end shit after Jake gave me the job. I don’t know how he found out I’d been hired to break in to Avici, but he offered me four times what I was being paid for whatever I got out, no questions asked. So I sold him the box. Then I hid out.”
Sebastian’s explanation of the chain of events fit with what I’d suspected. If it had been a straight ransom job from the beginning, the thief would have left the note in the safe. Instead, the note had been delivered later, once Sebastian had sold the box on. I understood what the person who now had the box wanted, but I still had nothing other than guesses as to why Sebastian had been hired to steal it in the first place. That worried me. In my experience, it was the unknowns in a case that usually bit you on the ass.
“Who was the middleman?” I asked.
“I don’t know his name. He never told me.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Fat. Goatee beard. Wears three-piece suits. Big flappy ears like an elephant.”
There were plenty of other brokers and middlemen operating in town apart from Enitan. I knew a lot of them, but Sebastian’s description didn’t ring any bells. “Do you know who he sells to?”
“The money he deals in, the things he’s looking for—has to be a Trustee. I don’t know which one.”
I slapped the wheel, almost sending the car swerving into a truck. I’d had a feeling the Trustees would end up involved, but I’d been hoping I was wrong. If one of them had the box, that complicated matters. I briefly considered using my freedom of movement during the early evening to search for the box but discounted the option. I had eight Trustees to get through, and they owned hundreds of premises between them. The box could have been stashed in any of these locations. I would need months to comb them all. One week remained on Laureen’s deadline. I needed to narrow the field. Then I would have a chance of stealing it back, which would be easy enough considering I could carry out my break-in while everybody was with their Torment.
Even so, I was nervous. Once the box went missing, the guilty Trustee would try to find out who took it. They would question Sebastian, which would lead to me. I hoped Yama didn’t have the damn thing. I didn’t fancy having one torture canceled only to be consigned to another involving electrodes and my nipples. I’d have to be very smart and very, very careful. My mind was turning to how to track down the broker, something I hoped Enitan could help with, when I remembered something Sebastian had said.
“You mentioned there was a hinky element to the job. What exactly?”
“Jake gave me a bag to carry the box in. He told me to wear gloves, not to touch it. But I took the gloves off to break the safe and forgot to put them back on.”
“And?”
“It was some freaky shit. The box was small but crazy heavy. When I touched it, I heard this whisper in my head. It was my own voice. But not.”
He paused, getting the distant stare on again and hugging himself.
“What did the voice say?”
“It told me humanity is drowning in sin. I can’t be saved. Nobody can. It told me it would end my suffering, give me peace. I wanted to open it. I never wanted anything more.”
“I’m assuming you didn’t.”
He
shook his head, more to clear it than to answer in the negative. “I couldn’t. There was no catch, no lid, nada. I put it down to get a knife and force it open. The moment I let go, the voice disappeared. I put my gloves on, stuffed it in the bag, and ran.”
I looked at him incredulously—not because I didn’t believe his story. This was Lost Angeles, and it had already become clear that this was no ordinary box. I was amazed at how dumb he’d been. “And you still sold it on. Didn’t you stop to wonder who might own a psychic talking box? Didn’t you think you were in over your head?”
He shrugged. “Four times the price. I told myself I’d imagined it. Who hasn’t thought we’d be better off with nothing than this place? If there was a way to end it all, wouldn’t you take it?”
I didn’t answer. I’d already tried to end it all, which had turned out to be a mistake. But if there was a way out, some means to escape into the void, would I take it? Four days before, the answer might have been yes. If the box really did contain canned suicide, a final extinction for the opener, I could see how it would seem desirable to many—a reward more than a punishment. Now, with my Torment held at bay and Danny slowly coming back to me, I felt different. Besides, the questions I’d somehow never asked myself were crowding in, demanding to be answered. The scales had fallen from my eyes when Laureen had revealed herself, and I intended to find out as much as I could about the keepers of this zoo.
13
Franklin was waiting at Benny’s when I straggled in bleary-eyed and fifteen minutes late for our appointment the next day. It had been almost four AM when I dropped off Sebastian. I’d returned the car to where I’d stolen it, popping fifty bucks in the glove compartment for the gas and broken window. There was a chance another thief would whisk away the car, and the money with it, before the owner reclaimed the vehicle, but I’d long ago decided not to live my life in relative terms. Many times, above and below, I’d witnessed the tendency of humans to excuse their own bad behavior by pointing to somebody who was a bigger shit than they were. I followed my own code of conduct, not one set by the lowest common denominator.
Hell's Detective Page 11