Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

Candy puts her head out the window.

“Are you okay?”

“Great. Peachy.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

I shake my head.

“No one. Wrong number.”

I start across the street.

Getting through Blackburn’s wards is just like last time. Slow and steady wins the race. He’s added two more layers since I was here but I move through them just like the others. It’s all about concentration and channeling Lucifer’s hate through the armor so it radiates like hellfire. No earthly magic is going to stand up to that.

No one is in the front of the house, so I head straight into the parlor. Blackburn is sitting at his desk like he’s waiting for me. Tuatha, his wife, is in a chair across the room. She looks worse than last time. Like she gave up martinis for formaldehyde. Perched on the end of Blackburn’s desk is Brigitte.

“Hello, Jimmy,” she says. “I was hoping you wouldn’t come back here.”

She shifts her eyes from me to her right then back to me. I take a step into the parlor and snap out the na’at to where she looked. One of Cairo’s men drops to the floor.

I go over to Brigitte.

“What are you doing here? Tell me you’re not part of this shitstorm.”

She puts her hand on Blackburn’s arm.

“Saragossa is a friend. That’s all.”

Blackburn just sits there. Useless and staring at his wife. He puts his hand over Brigitte’s. It the gesture of an old man trying to find something to hold on to while his ship is sinking.

I pull Brigitte off the desk and push her into a chair. Drag my arm across Blackburn’s desk, knocking everything to the floor.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Killing dreamers? Playing with reality? Do you have any goddamn idea what you’re doing?”

“Please. My wife.”

He holds out his hand to Tuatha.

“Fuck you and your wife. You’re not just turning the sky the wrong color. You just killed a girl whose only sins were having an asshole for a boyfriend and wanting to keep the world from falling apart.”

Blackburn’s hand falls on a pen that was still on the desk. He delicately straightens it and then clasps his hands together.

“I’m sorry. It started well. We would replace the dreamers with our people and mold the world into our own image. A better place for Sub Rosa and civilians. No one was supposed to die.”

“That’s what every amateur killer says when they’re up to their elbows in blood. Not only did you kill all those people but you poked a hole in the universe. Opened us up to angry Godeating motherfuckers who want you and me and Brigitte and your precious wife flushed down the cosmic toilet.”

He shakes his head.

“I had no choice,” he says. “You see, they took her soul.”

“Who?”

Brigitte raises her eyes to something behind me.

He catches me with the first bullet before I can turn around. It shouldn’t go through the armor but it does. He must have used my Spiritus Dei trick. My back burns and my chest aches. It feels like a rib is cracked. When I turn to face him, Cairo empties the rest of a 9mm clip. Fourteen quick shots. I throw myself onto the floor and roll toward him. Even hurt, I’m fast and he’s hurt worse, so most of the shots miss. Still, he tags me three more times. It’s bad but not enough for this punk to kill me. When I’m close to him, I extend the na’at, knocking the gun out of his hand. Very suave, but when I try to sit up, the bullets grind in my chest, taking my breath away. I spit and there’s blood in it.

The next thing I’m looking at is the ceiling. Then Cairo’s grinning face. It’s covered in blood and road rash. There’s a nice chunk of radius bone sticking out of his right arm. One of his knees is ripped open but he’s still walking on it. That’s not healing magic. That’s Dixie Wishbone. He’s higher than the Goodyear blimp. He pushes a finger into each of the bullet holes in the armor when he talks. It feels exactly what you think having a junkie’s bony fingers in your chest feels like.