Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

“To make a public spectacle. To make us look like more than we are and yourself less.”

I hold up my glass like I’m toasting her.

“Give the people what they want. The ones who are after me. They want me weak and twitchy. I send a SWAT team to take out a storefront preacher and it comes off like a huge overreaction.”

“You get your shadow play and we get to sit in prison. Forgive me if I don’t applaud your cleverness.”

“If I thought you’d applaud me, you’d still be locked up.”

She sits on the sofa, relaxed but alert.

“Here we are. Two civilized beings having a drink. Tell me why you called me up here.”

“You know why. To make a deal. A deal where you get released with a pardon and something else.”

“What?”

“What do you want?”

“You know what we want. The old order controls the government and the brothers control the church. They treat us like drytts and chambermaids. We want the Tabernacle.”

I shake my head and sit down on the other end of the sofa.

“I can’t give you that. But I can give you your own church. We’re rebuilding Pandemonium from the ground up. You can have a tabernacle as big and oppressive as Merihim and his boys’.”

She sets her glass on the floor. Picks an invisible piece of lint from her robe.

“And what do I have to do for this indulgence?”

“You can get word out to your people from jail?”

“Of course.”

“I’m going to need a few. Especially cops or soldiers. Anyone who won’t get rattled when things get noisy. And a doctor or a nurse.”

“What will you be needing them for?”

“They’re going to help me get murdered.”

I take her over to the peepers and show her the one on the far end. A deep bowl in the desert floor glowing red from exposed lava pits.

“That’s where it’s going to happen.”

“What a fitting place for your demise.”

“I thought you’d like it. And don’t get too excited. I’m not aiming for supersized dead. More like a kid’s-meal-with-an-action-figure dead. That’s where you come in.”

“Tell me.”

“Let me pour you another drink.”

And I do.

Fifteen minutes later we have a deal.

Deumos is a preacher, so she has her own damned ritual to perform. She holds up a mirror so both of our faces are framed in the glass.

She says, “As we’re bound in the mirror, we’re bound in the compact we make here tonight. If either breaks the pledge, may she or he shatter like the faces captured here.”