“I’m not addicted. I just want to be able to inject these directly into my brain.”
“We didn’t come to the house so you can loot it, did we?”
“No. I did a demon reading where Springheel died. I just want to make sure I was right.”
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
“It was crowded and noisy. Good distractions if you want to keep someone from finding something.”
“Why would you be invited and asked to examine something if you weren’t supposed to find the truth?”>Just as I’m about to step out of the circle, it tightens. Pins me where I am. I can’t even raise my arm to shoot.
Then the mob relaxes. The magic in the center of the room is gone and they have no reason to crowd there anymore. I break free of them and head for a wall. It’s taken me longer to get out than I counted on. Plenty of time for even these rotten brains to figure out that something is going on and look around for what. I have a bad feeling that if I turn around, a hundred pairs of dead eyes will be aimed straight at me and what’s in my pocket.
“Who the fuck are you, motherfucker?”
I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I turn and look.
So that’s what a Lacuna looks like. Cabal was right. I wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. He’s in a double-breasted gray suit, and if it wasn’t for all the dried blood on his jacket from the ragged bite mark in his neck, I wouldn’t look at him twice. He’s looking at me like a starving wolf. Like he’s trying to read the theater marquee through my chest. Blank-eyed shamblers behind him are turning this way.
“I said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
I take a step back and hold the lighter so he can see my face.
“You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.”
He rushes and the mob follows; a tsunami of black, broken teeth and putrid meat crashes down on me.
But chatty and bright as the Lacuna is, he’s still a dumb, dead piece of shit. When he rushes me, my back is already to the wall and I’m stepping through it. He’s not going to make it in time. He’s going to be the smartest deli slice in the slaughterhouse when those other hundred Drifters splatter him against the wall like a car crusher. Good thing he’s dead or it might hurt.
RITCHIE’S PLACE IS in Laurel Canyon. Back in the sixties, rich hippies, movie moguls, and famous bands lived up here. Between the dope, their biker friends, the Manson wannabes, and all the free love that was never really free, the place turned into The Killing Fields with a Jefferson Airplane sound track. Don’t you want somebody to love? They were Khmer Rouge in designer jeans, and when the dope and the money ran out the canyons and deserts bloomed over the bodies they buried there.
I drive up the winding road to the address Brigitte gave me. I’m in a stolen Lexus because I want to be boring tonight. And I don’t want to take Brigitte back through the Room if I can help it. Eventually she’s going to ask questions I don’t want to answer.
It’s about 2 A.M. when I stop in front of Ritchie’s gates. I can see the house at the end of a long circular drive. It looks like a claw machine in an arcade plucked an Italian villa off a hill in Rome and dropped it down in the middle of the manzanita and coyotes. The place is pretty, but looks ridiculous here. Like something you’d build to win a bar bet.
Brigitte is waiting for me in the shadow of a eucalyptus. She’s holding her leather jacket tight around her to keep out the canyon cold. She should have something heavier, but when you’re sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night like a teenybopper running off for backseat groping with your boyfriend, you can’t exactly take the time to squeeze into Lancelot’s armor.
She gives me a quick kiss when she gets in and immediately starts playing with the car heater.
“How does this work?”
“I have no idea. How is Ritchie not going to notice you’re gone?”
“I put a powder in his drink. An old family mix and not at all harmful. He’d probably approve if he knew. It’s all organic.”
I take her down the hill the way we came, then head for Springheel’s place. The heater is going and she starts to relax. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out the contents into her lap, like a kid going through her Halloween candy. I spot a pack of cigarettes.
“Score.”
“Take them. I quit before coming to L.A. Rich men like their girls pure inside and out.”
“Darlin’, purity has nothing to do with why Ritchie went for you.”
“You know what I mean. Trophy girlfriends have to make you look good in front of your friends. Here that means no smoking. The next place I go hunting, it will be somewhere like France or Japan. Somewhere they don’t believe they’ll live forever if they give up everything that gives them pleasure.”
“Speaking of you hunting, I still don’t know much of anything about you. You’re like Van Helsing in drag, but you have a whole public life on video. How does your life go that way?”
“What don’t you understand? The revenants or the pornography?”