Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim 3)

“Why would you? She dosed the kid for you and that makes her too dangerous to keep around. What I want to know is whether you dosed Hunter Sentenza on your own or did someone pay you to do it?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t walk away either. He’s trying to decide if he wants to talk some more or fight.

“I’m guessing the second,” I say. “If you wanted Hunter dead, you’d have sent one of your monkey boys to do it. That means you did it for someone. I want to know who.”

Cale subtly shifts his weight, dropping it onto his back foot. He’s trying to be subtle, but I know a fighting stance when I see one. His crew is showing a lot of teeth. Candy is behind them in the street. She keeps an eye on them while they keep an eye on me.

Someone screams off to my right. Two drunk girls have fistfuls of each other’s coiffed hair and are rocking back and forth trying to hit each other. Drunk catfighting for the crowd’s amusement. Every town has its arena.

But I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off Cale. By the time I refocus, he’s throwing a hex at me. And it isn’t in the textbooks in Sub Rosa school. He’s been hanging out with a bad crowd. I bet he cheats on his spelling tests, too. But there’s no time to think about that. A buckshot hurricane of wasps blasts from his hands right at my face.

The first wave hits me square in the chest and face before I can throw up a shield spell. The wasps are coming so fast that most of them don’t have a chance to sting me. They splat and bounce off into the crowd. The young and the beautiful scream in pain and run. Fuck ’em if they’re too dumb to get out of the way of a hoodoo street fight.

I get a shield up, covering my front from ground to head. The stream of wasps is coming at me so hard that I hn="ard thaave to lean into them to keep from being blown onto my back. I expand the shield over and around Cale and his crew. Shouting in Hellion, I slam the shield shut, trapping them inside with Cale’s ballistic bugs.

There’s a couple of minutes of hilarious screaming and self-flagellation as Cale and his people crouch, crawl, and slap themselves silly trying to get the wasps off. Cale is barely in control of the hex, but finally turns off the bug spigot.

Cale is pissed. He shouts a string of hexes and chips away at the sides of my shield dome. I let him. I’ll give the kid some credit. He’s got some power and he’s on his way to learning how to use it, but he isn’t there yet. That’s a dangerous place to be. It can make you do stupid things. Like now, for instance.>“You’re telling me? I’m the one who got a knife in the back.”

She says it right after I light up. I try to move away, but she holds on to me.

“That’s really what happened?”

“Yeah. You’ve got to give Mason credit for that. Sending Parker to do it fast. The guy knew how to do it. I hardly felt a thing.”

“If you know that, then this isn’t a dream.”

“Maybe not a hundred percent. But it’s still a dream.”

“For a long time I was afraid of knowing what happened to you.”

“Gee, I hadn’t noticed. Now you do know. It’s time to get your ass past it.”

I take a drag off the cigarette. She takes it from my hand and puffs. Hands it back to me. Her fingertips are blue to the point of almost being black. They don’t look like a living person’s hands.

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“I don’t know what to do next.”

Alice punches me on the arm.

“Were you even listening to the crossword, dumb-ass? It’s all finally happening. What you knew was going to happen. You can either keep watching movies until the sun burns out or you can stop running from who you are. You’re Sandman Slim, goddammit. You’re that or you’re nothing. Your choice.”

“Isn’t there a curtain number three? I don’t mind a year’s worth of Turtle Wax.”

“Sorry. The money’s all down. Betting is closed. Play or walk away.”

I nod toward the crossword puzzle on the table.

“What’s with the hen scratching? I can’t read a damned word.”

She glances at the crossword and shakes her head.

“It’s a puzzle. You’re supposed to figure it out. That’s why they call it a puzzle.”

“How?”

“Once again, it’s called a puzzle for a reason.”