Devil Said Bang (23 page)

Laughing, the little girl runs behind them and out
the door.

They raise their rifles and move in on me but don’t
get two steps before the first one goes down. Candy has gone full Jade. Red slit
eyes. A mouth full of bone-white shark teeth and nails curled back into claws. A
second later Rinko does the same and charges at the hit man Candy has pinned to
the floor. Another hit man screams as a glass vial breaks against the side of
his head, and then another. The first potion Vidocq threw didn’t do anything.
It’s the second potion mixing with the first that has the hit man screaming as
his mask and skin melt down the side of his face, burning into his neck.

One of the hit men gets a bead on me but the
Incredible Melting Man falls on him, screaming for help. I grab the na’at from
inside my coat and snap it out like a whip, hitting him in the eye. With a
twist, spines open at the na’at’s tip, digging into his skull. Twist the other
way and his neck snaps. Unfortunately in all the fun I missed hit man four. He’s
off to my side. I know because his rifle crackles and the air feels like a
thousand needles as the lightning comes at me.

There’s another small earthquake. Something snaps
and the next thing I know I’m flat on my back looking up at the ceiling from a
hole in the floor. I get up covered in dirt and broken tiles and climb out.

Three of the four hit men are gone. The only one
left is the dead loser Candy and Rinko worked over. The bar patrons are piling
out the doors. I run over to Candy. She’s wiping the blood off her face with her
T-shirt and rubbing her nails on her pants leg to get out pieces of the hit
man’s bones. Rinko is licking blood from her fingers like a kid with an
ice-cream cone.

It’s not fun to look at but I’m grateful for the
backup.

“Thanks for the help.”

Rinko won’t look at me.

“I didn’t do it for you,” she says.

Vidocq, Allegra, and Traven are behind the bar.
Carlos is down. His shoulder and one arm are badly burned. He has a .44 Magnum
in his other hand. He must have been trying to pop off a shot when he got hit. I
pick up the gun.

“Who the fuck told you to turn Wyatt Earp?”

He smiles then winces as Allegra pulls scorched
bits of his shirt from around the wound.

“It got boring watching you fight all the time. I
thought I’d get in on it. I hope you don’t mind if I never do it again. This
shit hurts.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, you fucking idiot. Those
fuckers were pros.”

“At least now I know you’re you and not your
cabrón
brother.”

“I told you, he’s not my brother.”

Allegra says, “This is too severe to treat here. We
need to get him to the clinic.”

“Can you and Vidocq take him? I need to check out
the dead man.”

“Which one?” says Vidocq.

“Not the one the little girl got.”

“Do you know who she was?” asks Traven.

“I don’t care right now. I want to know who sent
the boys in black.”

“What should we do about the other dead man?”

“Leave him. Someone’s probably already called 911.
It’s better to give the cops a body than have them asking why there isn’t
one.”

“They’ll be able to find his next of kin too,” says
Traven.

“Right. That too. You can’t help being a good guy,
can you?”

“I suppose not.”

“Good. Someone needs to be.”

While the three of them get Carlos into Traven’s
car, I go to the dead hit man. Rinko’s carnivore tendencies have worked in our
favor. She’s gobbled up enough of the guy’s blood that there’s hardly any left
on the floor. That means the cops won’t be looking for two bodies and Carlos
won’t have to explain why he had a bunch of James Bond villains in his bar.

I carry the dead man into the bathroom and drop him
on the dirty tile. He doesn’t have any pockets, so I get out the black blade and
slice off his shirt. No dog tags, gang burns, or tattoos. I pull off his gloves
and find something even more interesting. He has no fingerprints. His fingertips
are smooth as the
Venus de Milo
’s ass. Only hoodoo
could take them off that cleanly. I check behind his ears and the inside of his
arms and there it is. Barely visible. I probably would have missed it without
the Lucifer eyes. It’s a faint laser brand, and like his fingerprints, it’s been
removed using magic.

Candy comes in.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

“A mark that’s rare and even rarer on dead
men.”

“What is it?”

“Those shit sacks were Sub Rosa. A Sub Rosa SWAT
team. I’m in town a day and my own people try to kill me.”

“Lucky for you you went through the floor.”

“That was lucky, wasn’t it? I’m not usually that
lucky.”

I go to the hole and look inside. It’s a pit maybe
ten feet deep. The dirt around the edge is soft and fresh. It hasn’t been here
long. Almost like someone dug it right under my feet.

“What are you going to do now?” asks Candy.

“Me? I’m going to see a soon-to-be-dead man and
tell him he missed.”

“Cool. I’ll drop Rinko off and we can go.”

“No. Take her home. Give her the potion and keep an
eye on her. The last thing I want is her hurt or strung out because of me.”

“You bastard. You don’t want me to go with
you.”

“Hell yes I don’t want you to go. If I fuck this
up, I’m counting on you and Vidocq to bust me out of whatever dungeon he throws
me in.”

“Who?”

“The Augur.”

“Oh hell.”

T
he
Sub Rosa love anonymity more than candy and puppies. If they’re going to hit
someone, they’ll do it with poison so it looks like a heart attack or hoodoo so
it looks like the luckless slob slips on a plutonium banana peel. There’s only
one person who can drop the cloak-and-dagger policy for a blanket shoot-on-sight
order and that’s Saragossa Blackburn. The Augur. The high exalted godfather of
the California Sub Rosa.

In grand Sub Rosa tradition, Blackburn’s mansion
looks like a pathetic wreck. In this case, an abandoned residency hotel on South
Main Street. The first floor is boarded up. The second and third have been
gutted by fire and you can see the sky through the top-floor ceiling. Gang tags
and spray-painted naked ladies are like outdoor cave paintings. Aeons of stapled
ads and glued band flyers form a pale crust on the lower floors. Cut deep enough
into those things and you’ll find flyers for Babylonian death-metal shows
printed in cuneiform on papyrus.

The mansion is protected by more hoodoo than King
Tut’s tomb. It can hold off the armies of Hell, a Bigfoot horde, and a Martian
invasion all at the same time. In fact, Blackburn’s place is so loaded with
wards and mantrap spells that he doesn’t have a single security guard. Not even
a dog. The Augur is so high-and-mighty he thinks muscle is déclassé, which for
him is sort of true but it’s not polite to rub the world’s nose in it. Someone
should TP the place just to remind him he’s human. I’d like it to be me but
right now I don’t know how to get close enough to even hit the place with a
grenade launcher.

These Lucifer eyes can see the shimmering spells
surrounding the hotel. A series of crystal spheres set inside each other like
Russian nesting dolls. As far as I know, with the armor on, I’m as hard to kill
as ever, but that means I can still snuff it or get hurt and I don’t want to be
known as the Gimp Lucifer. I need to not fuck this up.

Most of my hoodoo is geared toward hurting people
and making things go boom. I’m pretty good at making up spells on the spot but
how many different ones will I have to wing if I try to hex my way through
Blackburn’s defenses? Only one thing makes sense if I want to get inside before
Santa takes a toy dump down everyone’s chimney. It’s really stupid but stupid is
sort of my specialty.

I take a few deep breaths and summon all the
heinous bastard Luciferness I can and wrap myself in
Lord
of the Flies
drag. When it feels right, I go to the first layer of
hoodoo and lay my hand on it.

When I first got back to Earth, Samael strolled
into my bedroom above Max Overdrive. At the time I was so shocked seeing the
Devil at my door I didn’t think about what it meant. By then I’d laid out wards
around the store and my own improvised protection spells. Lucifer walked right
through them. Is that one of the secrets the celestial types keep from us? That
most human protections don’t work on angels? My angel half is off somewhere
sipping Shirley Temples and reading
Parade
magazine
but I’m still Lucifer and wearing angelic armor. Maybe that’s angel enough to
keep me from going up like a refinery explosion.

I put my hand on the first layer of magic and
press. Blue flame engulfs me but it doesn’t burn. Beyond the fire, the layer
feels thick and liquid. I’m not dead yet, so I keep pressing. Slowly and
steadily, like stepping out of a warm glycerin bath, I pass through the first
layer. I do the same thing on the next layer. This one is full of wind and grit.
A sandstorm of razor blades. I press slow and steady, holding a “do not even
begin to fuck with me” mantra in my mind. The layer cracks and splits just
enough for me to pass through. Four more layers and I walk up to Blackburn’s
front door like the Avon lady. I reach out to test the door. The prick doesn’t
even bother locking it.

Inside, Blackburn’s mansion is an old Victorian
manor house with stained glass, potted palms, and a curiosity cabinet in every
room. The kind of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to see Sherlock Holmes
shooting coke in the guest room.

On one side of a sweeping staircase is Blackburn’s
office. On the other side is what looks like a parlor. The sliding doors are
open a crack. Inside are maybe twenty people listening to him ramble on about
cost-benefit projections and which state political offices to keep and which
corporate investments to kick loose. First someone tries to assassinate me and
now another budget meeting. Where do I have to go to get away from this
shit?

It looks like I walked in on a synod, a solstice
meeting where Sub Rosa heavyweights get together to figure out what nefarious
party games they’re going to play in the New Year.

Blackburn is a scryer, a seer who gets glimpses of
the future. The Sub Rosa Augur is always a scryer and Blackburn is supposed to
be a good one. If he’s predicted me coming, I’m in trouble. With any luck he’s
blind to Lucifer’s tricks. Of course, this could be a trap and he wants me in
close quarters where I can’t run. Okay. I haven’t killed any humans in
months.

It’s tradition at official meetings that the Sub
Rosa sigil floats at the front of the room like the Super Bowl blimp. The sigil
is a caduceus, snakes wrapped around each other in kind of a figure eight. A
symbol of knowledge. In the first crossing, the top hole of the eight, is a
circle surrounded by a square surrounded by a triangle. The squared circle. An
alchemical symbol for the work. The work is magic and the secret things you can
learn to expand your mind and perfect the world. The bottom crossing is a black
circle with three lines radiating outside the snake like the sun. The alchemical
symbol for gold. In the old days, gold stood for enlightenment. These days gold
just stands for gold. I kick one of the doors out of the way, pull the Glock,
and put a bullet through each end of the caduceus. The thing flares and drifts
onto the carpet like ashes.

“Looks like a party. You busted in on mine, so I
thought I’d return the favor.”

Blackburn storms over, not the tiniest bit afraid.
He’s a good-looking guy with a primo Italian suit and a wide politician’s face
that looks like it should be on a hundred-dollar bill. His graying temples make
him look like he’s in his late forties but I know he’s well over a hundred.

“How did you get in here? You’ve invaded my home
and interrupted classified Sub Rosa business. If you weren’t a wanted criminal
before, you certainly are now, Stark.”

Blackburn gestures past me at someone I can’t
see.

“Get some security . . .”

I swing the Glock behind me and fire without
looking. Something hits the carpet. I put the still-hot muzzle under Blackburn’s
chin.

“If that sentence is headed where I think it is,
you better say it pretty because it’s going to be your last words.”

“Pretty please, Mr. Blackburn. Let me do it. I’ve
wanted to put the boot to this rude boy for a long time.”

It’s King Cairo’s hoarse voice. Hoarse because
screaming at the top of his lungs is as quiet as he ever fucking gets. He’s head
of a family specializing in freelance hoodoo muscle, stuff both on and off the
books. He’s a skinny Mohawked shirtless rat in a floor-length velvet coat
trimmed with ostrich feathers. He thinks shrieking and jumping on furniture
makes him a punk. Really it just makes him a Dixie Wishbone addict.

Wishbone is a kind of hoodoo meth. It makes you
jittery and paranoid, but guys like Cairo get off on it because it doesn’t fry
them like regular meth. It burns out the people around them. A heavy Dixie
Wishbone addict will end up surrounded by a pack of jaundiced, black-toothed
psychopaths. Rumors are that’s how Cairo’s family got started down Alabama
way.

He’s standing on a heavy mahogany settee. Leaps off
and tries to kick it at me. He almost makes it too, but it catches on the edge
of Kyzer Navarro’s chair and knocks him in his face. Navarro is head of the big
South American Sub Rosa syndicate. Not someone you want to hit with a dining
room set. Cairo’s high-drama moment turns into Three Stooges dope-fiend high
jinks. He goes over to apologize to Navarro and a woman’s voice quiets the
room.

“Calm down, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Stark might
be guilty of many things but look closer and you’ll see he’s not who you think
he is.”

I recognize the voice. It belongs to one of two or
three people I hate most on this planet. I pocket the Glock, grab my na’at and
get ready for a hoodoo attack, but when I turn she’s just sitting off by herself
at Blackburn’s desk looking at me like I’m the soggy banana at the bottom of her
bag lunch.