Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

“Can you honestly say you don’t miss the Room of Thirteen Doors? The quiet. The perfection. Knowing you’re at the still silent heart of the universe and that no one can touch you.”

“I miss it like a junkie misses the needle. But it’s like Herodotus said—and that guy I know is Greek: ‘Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all.’ ”

“How does that even apply?”

“ ’Cause you’re a day late and a dollar short, so fuck off.”

He leans on the top of the Volvo.

“Without the Key you can’t get to Blue Heaven and you’ll never see me again.”

“You can travel with the Key but I have people who watch my back. What do you have besides frequent flier miles?”

“Everyone who watches your back gets shot, stabbed, or punched. How long will they put up with that?”

I get in the car. Talk to him through the open window.

“Good-bye. Say hi to Amelia Earhart for me.”

Saint James steps into a shadow and is gone.

“You know, I had to kill myself a little in Hell a few days back.”

“Maybe you’ll get it right this time,” says Kasabian.

When someone asked Willie Sutton, the safecracker, why he broke into so many banks, he said, “Because that’s where the money is.” When you want to find a ghost who tried to kill your girl (okay, not technically mine but I like her a lot), you go to the Tenebrae because that’s where the ghosts are.

I stick the tip of black blade into my arm until the blood flows.

“This is the funniest thing you’re going to see all day.”

Kasabian looks at me and turns abruptly away.

“Jesus. Give a guy some warning. Why are you doing that? You don’t have enough pain in your life?”

“It’s not the cutting that’s funny. It’s that I’m cutting the nice clean stitches the hotel doctor just put in. I need some blood.”

“What for?”

Don’t think for a second that just because I’m hard to kill, getting hit or burned or cut doesn’t hurt. It feels the same to me as it does to anybody else. It’s just that I get over it faster. When it’s happening, though, I feel every little twitch and twinge of pain. Cutting into a recent wound is an especially interesting experience. There’s a lot of internal “What the hell are you doing?” screaming.

“Remember when you tried to shoot me with that booby-trapped weapon? The Devil’s Daisy that Mason gave you?”

“Yeah,” says Kasabian. “Damn thing ruined a perfectly good surrogate body.”

“Remember that I talked to you in the deadlands when you were gone but not in Heaven or Hell yet?”

“Yeah? Is that what that’s about?”

I nod. Grimace when I dig down too deep and hit bone.

“Shit. I’m going back to the same neighborhood to talk to another ghost. She gave me this little paper cut, so I figure blood from the wound will get me close to her.”

“You cut yourself up when you came to see me?”

“Worse than this. Usually you have to slit your wrists and be at death’s door for this trick. I’m hoping I can get away with a little less blood this time.”

He takes a chance and sneaks a look in my direction. The blood is flowing and I’m dripping it around a Magic Circle I’ve carved in the tile floor. Thirteen interlocking circles and lines meeting at seventy-two points. Metatron’s Cube. The Flower of Life.