“Nice. New scars to add to your collection. You collect getting fucked up the way old ladies collect state spoons.”
Kasabian takes a shot and sinks the nine, eleven, and four. Two stripes and a solid.
He says, “I’ll play stripes. Thirteen in the corner,” as he lines up the shot. He sinks it.
I puff on the smoke. I get the feeling he’s not going to leave me much else to do.
“So what kind of a demon was it?”
I shake my head.
“Damned if I know. I’d never seen one like it before.”
He creeps around the table, not looking up.
“What did it look like?”
“Not much. I mean, from a distance it looked like a guy in a cheap suit. But when it got closer, it was all Jell-O and acid. When it grabbed me, bang, I was burning.”
He takes one of the blue chalk cubes from the side of the table and uses it on his stubby legs.
“Sounds like a Gluttire.”
“A what?”
“Gluttire. A glutton. He wasn’t burning you. He was trying to dissolve you. Gluttons are pretty rare and mostly eat other demons. You been around any recently?”
“Yeah. The guy whose house we hit had a digger in the wall safe.”
“There you go,” he says, and sinks the fourteen. “He smelled the digger.”
“I need to start bringing cologne on robberies.”
“There’s a ton about demons in the Codex. There’s a lot more kinds of them thalis of than you think, but Gluttires are the rarest. Most people never get to see one.”
“Lucky me.”
Things get quiet for a minute. He knows what I’m going to ask.
“Talk to me about Downtown. Got any gossip? Marilyn Monroe dating the Antichrist? Is Lovecraft being tortured by sexy octopuses?”
“What makes you think Monroe’s Downtown?”
“Wishful thinking.”
Kasabian lines up another shot and sinks it. I’m not even paying attention to which balls anymore.
I say, “So?”
Kasabian doesn’t look up when he answers, keeping his eyes down on the table.
“The weather’s hot with a chance of chain saws and bullshit blowing up from the south.”
I walk over and put my hand over the cue ball. Kasabian looks up at me, not at all happy.
I’m bugging him about the one thing he controls. His one little domain. The Daimonion Codex. It’s Lucifer’s Boy Scout manual, Google search engine, and secret angelic ballbuster cookbook all in one. The most valuable thing in Hell besides the horned one himself. It contains every bit of dark, esoteric-stuff-you-don’t-want-to-know-about-if-you-ever-want-to-sleep-again knowledge in the universe. As far as I know, Kasabian is the only one on earth who can read it.
He glances down at my hand and I take it off the cue. He sinks another ball. The little prick has been practicing when I’m not around.