“I’m going to look you up when I get back to L.A.”
“You’re not the first person to say something like that.”
“Yeah, but I’m the first one who means it.”
She gestures impatiently toward the river.
“Go.”
I glance down at the bloody waves and turn back to her.
“I don’t have time for one last smoke, do I?”
“Jump or I’ll throw you.”
I put my arms out and take a breath.
“As a great man once said, ‘I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.’ ”
I lean back and let myself go over the edge, tumbling through the air and slamming into the red river.
I hit flat on my back. It feels just as good as falling fifty feet into blood sounds. I hold my breath and try not to breathe in anything.
I sink and keep sinking, like the gravity in the river isn’t the same as the gravity outside. I’m pulled down into soft mud at the bottom. At least I hope it’s mud. Another gladiator once swore to me that he’d sailed to Pandemonium on a river of shit. I hope there wasn’t any backwash down here.
I’m instantly engulfed in the muck. My lungs want to crawl up my throat and hitch a ride back to Hollywood. The angel in my head chants a serenity prayer. If I could punch my own brain, I would. The angel stops long enough to remind me that everything has a bottom, even Hell.
I’m being squeezed down through sediment that gets harder every inch I go. The sucking soon turns into pushing, like a hydraulic press is pounding me down into the riverbed. This must be what pasta feels like coming out of a spaghetti extruder.>“Shit,” she says.
I lead her back to the manhole and we climb the ladder out.
I WALK ALICE up the garage ramp, skirting the crazies and the squatters. She can’t take her eyes off them. I get the feeling Aelita dropped her straight into the cell, so she hasn’t seen much of Hell. Lucky girl.
Neshamah is on the roof looking through Muninn’s crystal like a jeweler checking a diamond for flaws. He shoves it back in his waistcoat when he sees us.
“The prodigal son returns. I wasn’t sure you had enough fingers and toes to count to three hundred. I see you’ve brought back a friend and that you have a hole in your chest. Just another day at the office,” says Neshamah. He turns to Alice. “Was he this clumsy on earth or is all this blood a Sandman Slim thing?”
“A who?”
“Alice, this is Neshamah. Neshamah, this is Alice. Neshamah is the one who told me how to get into the asylum.”
“Thanks for helping Jim get me out of that place. I would have gone crazy if I’d been in there much longer.”
Neshamah holds out his hand to Alice. She looks at it like he’s holding out a dead squid. But out of a kind of doomed sense of politeness, she puts her hand out, too. She looks at their hands and then at him when they touch. She starts to say something, but Neshamah cuts her off.
“If it’s any comfort, you wouldn’t have been in there much longer. Probably just a few hours. A day at the most. Wouldn’t you say?”
He looks at me.
“If I don’t get to Pandemonium in about seven hours, the Kissi are going to come down hard on the place. The way Josef is acting I don’t know if they’re going to start a war down here or join up with Mason’s boys and make a play for Heaven.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The angel in my head squirms like something is trying to get inside. I think he’s losing.
“I noticed Kissi lurking about. What exactly are they getting out of all this?” Neshamah asks.
“They’ll get what I give them. Nothing more and nothing less.”
His eyes narrow.