“Okay what?”
“I’ll help.”
“Thanks.”
What do you know? People can surprise you after all. I wonder if she’s been talking to Candy behind my back. Whatever it took, it will be nice not to feel like we’re enemies anymore. But there’s something else. Something she’s not saying. She’s tenser than before. She rubs a knuckle against her lower lip.
“I have something else I have to ask you.”
“What?”
“It’s awkward. You’re going to think I invited you here and I said I’d help just because I want something.”
“That depends on what you want.”
I tap out another cigarette and light it, waiting for her to collect her thoughts.
“Remember when we first met back at Max Overdrive? I said I wasn’t always a nice person. I had this boyfriend. He was a dealer, and when he went to jail I used his money to go to school because I didn’t want to be in that life anymore.”
“And now he’s getting out.”
She nods.
“He called me.”
She holds out two fingers to ask for my cigarette. I give it to her. I didn’t know she still smoked. She takes a tiny puff and about coughs her lungs up.>“I could barely see the pole.”
“Oh.”
He calls up Candy’s pole shots and puts one beside Moseley. He’s right. A lot of the badly cut and stitched symbols on his cheap robes match what’s on the pole.
“So, what do they mean?”
“I’m not done. Look at this. You’d have saved some time if you’d paid more attention to Traven.”
He pulls up the shot I took of Moseley’s half-crushed corpse. Zooms in on a tattoo half covered in blood. It matches one of the symbols on his robes and the pole.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Kasabian nods.
“Your boy Trevor’s last walk down the Yellow Brick Road was with an Angra cult. It was right there in front of you the whole time.”
“But I’ve only been going after tinhorn bad guys. I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for Angra worshippers.”
“Maybe you spooked them, running all over town pissing in everybody’s dream home.”
He puts the three photos side by side on the screen. The answer was in front of me the whole time. But it brings up another question. Why was a clockwork Trevor Moseley playing footsie with an Angra cult? Maybe the Trevor in the photo is real—I don’t know if an automaton can grow a beard—but now I’m surer than ever that the one that stepped in front of the bus wasn’t any more human than the ones we found with Atticus. It also explains why Samael didn’t see any sin sign on him. He wasn’t human, so technically nothing he did was sinful.
I light a Malediction.
“At least I’m getting through to someone. These gangsters are getting boring. By the way, don’t look for Trevor anymore. He’s not going to be in Hell.”
“Are you saying he’s in Heaven?”
“I’m saying he doesn’t have a soul.”
“Lucky duck.”