Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

“Are you sure it’s just one body and not five?”

“Funny.”

“I want my full fee.”

“Half. No one is asking you to kill anything.”

“You’re using up my valuable drinking and smoking time. I need compensation.”

“As you just pointed out, we’re government funded, which means that we work within a simple and predetermined pay structure. In other words, looking and pointing doesn’t pay the same as hunting and killing.”

“Tell you what, go down to Chinatown, find a club called the Owl’s Shadow, and hire yourself a Deadhead. Those gloomy necromancers are a bunch of low-self-esteem Siouxsie and the Banshees bitches. They’ll fall all over themselves to help a fed do a murder-scene magic show.”

Wells takes the phone from his pocket, looks at the caller ID, and frowns.

“Look, you can sprinkle some pixie dust around while you’re at the scene. Do some damn magic that won’t break anything and I can get you two-thirds of your normal fee. But that’s it.”

“Done.”

I put out my hand. He puts the phone to his ear so he doesn’t have to shake on it.

“We’ll meet at three A.M., when things are quiet and the bars are closed. I’ll call you with the address.”

“Nice doing business with you, Marshal. Give the missus my best.”

“Get out.”

I DECIDE TO skip the Ray and Huston show on the way out, so I slip through a dark patch on a wall outside the warehouse. Come out in the alley across the street from the Bamboo House of Dolls.

What I thought was a one-night blowout right after I saved the world on New Year’s has turned into a six-month running party. After I tossed Mason to the mob Downtown, it seemed like half the Sub Rosa in L.A. showed up at Bamboo House to kiss his ass good-bye. And they never left. Carlos is happy enough. Sub Rosa tip big at civilian places where they can hang out without ending up part of the floor show.

Most Sub Rosa, you’d never notice. They look boringly human, are human, and go out of their way to fit in with other humans, even if they sometimes dress like nineteenth-century dandies or Mayan priests. Others in the bar look like they stepped off a steam-powered zeppelin from Neptune. They’re the Lurkers, and good, upstanding Sub Rosa don’t like them soiling the furniture at their clubs so they come here. There are succubi and transgendered Lamia. Shaggy Nahual wolf and tiger beast men laughing like frat boys and stacking their beer cans in a pyramid until they knock it over. Again. A group of blue-skinned schoolgirls with pale blond hair and horns peeking out through their pigtails are playing some kind of betting game with ivory cups and scorpions.>“Ray, you okay?” Ray doesn’t hear him. He’s looking at me.

“Why?” he asks.

“’Cause you deserved it.”

Ray takes a key card from his jacket, waves it over a magnetic reader, and the gate swings open.

When I go through I turn back to them.

“I don’t have to do this, you know. I could come out of a shadow on this side of the fence and not deal with you assholes. But I’m trying to fit in a little better around here, so I’m polite and I try to play by your rules. You might consider cutting me the tiniest piece of slack.”

I head for the warehouse. Huston keeps asking Ray what happened and Ray keeps telling him to fuck off. I wonder if Ray is just a psychic reader or a projector, too, and what parts of the tour he’ll show Huston to shut him up.

WELLS YELLS AT me halfway across the warehouse floor so that everyone turns to see me looking like an executioner’s practice dummy.

“Damn, son. Did you stop to gut a deer on the way over or did that little girl do all that?”

I hold up my burned jacket with my blackened arm.

“Your little girl did this. Her four friends did the rest.”

“There’s a pod?”

“Was. Five of them.”

“That doesn’t jibe with our intelligence.”