Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

Mike is on his feet when I look back at him, the vodka cradled in his arms like a newborn baby.

“Let me get this straight. All you can tell me about Saint James is that he’s someplace you don’t know about and that you don’t know how to get to. A dead girl tried to kill him but you don’t know why or who the girl is or where she’s from. Does that sum things up?”

“That’s everything, man. I swear. Can I have my soul back now?”

“That’s not even a postcard, Mike. That’s not even a phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin. Do you really think that’s worth a soul?”

Mike shifts his weight from foot to foot like he has to go to the bathroom. By now he probably does.

“Yes?” he says.

“Wrong,” says Candy.

“Wrong. It’s worth shit. The closest thing you can get to nothing without being nothing.”

Mike shrugs.

“Sorry. I mostly deal in gossip. Stuff like Blue Heaven isn’t my specialty. Hell, I didn’t even know how to get in touch with you to sell my soul.”

No. A guy like Mike wouldn’t, would he? He’d have to go to someone. A name pops into my head.

“Do you know Amanda Fischer?”

“That Hollywood devil-worshipping bitch?” says Mike. “I mean. Sorry.”

“Forget it. So you know her.”

“I built her a peacock and a Persian cat. One of her crowd did my soul conjuration. It cost me a wolf.”

Mike takes an anxious sip from the bottle.

“I want to get in touch but I lost my address book. Do you have her number?”

Mike goes to a desk as filthy as the sofa and as crowded with junk as the worktable. It reminds me a little of Mr. Muninn’s cavern, full of centuries of obsessive collecting. Mike finds an old gray metal Rolodex, pulls a card out of it, and brings it to me. It says FISCHER, AMANDA. Below that is a Beverly Hills phone number.

“Nice work, Mike. You pulled things out there at the last minute. I thought I was going to have to feed your bones to my associate but you came through.”

“So now I can have my soul back?”

“Not a chance. But I’ll tell you what you can do to get it back. I have a friend, really just sort of a yammering bastard. He’s stuck on a mechanical body, only it’s not finished. You finish him off and you’re halfway home.”

“What’s the other half?”

“I need you to build something else. A Hellion-to-English translator. And it needs to read lips.”

Mike sits on the sofa and sets the bottle between his feet.

“Is that all?”

“You do that and you can have your soul back.”

He looks up at me. Big fat tears in his dumb, red eyes.

“You promise?”

I take out a pack of Maledictions and tap him out the last one.

“If you can’t trust a man who gives you his last cigarette, who can you trust?”