The Getaway God (Sandman Slim 6)

“You’re being boring, James. Keep it up and I’ll hurt you again. Do it twice and there won’t be any game at all tomorrow.”

Were the scorpions phantoms? A hoodoo hallucination? I look at my hand. Whatever just happened in here, my fingers really are swollen and they really hurt. I go over and knock on the cell door. It opens and a guard lets me out.

“Where’s my gear?” I say.

He hands me the Colt and my knife.

“I unloaded the pistol. It’s an unauthorized weapon. Rules.”

I put it in the waistband at my back and put the blade in my coat.

“I want to see Candy.”

“I’m not authorized to let anybody into those cells.”

I look at him. His heartbeat goes up. I’m tempted to lean on him. Or I can go into the cellblock through a shadow. But they’ll have surveillance in there. If I go breaking the rules it could mean they’ll move Candy somewhere I can’t find her. I could try taking her out of here, but with the mood she’s in, who knows if she’d go with me?

Wells comes out of an office and walks over to me. He’s the last person I want to talk to.

I say, “Where did you go?”

“I had to deal with a phone call from Washington. How did it go in there?”

I hold up my swollen hand.

“We played. I lost. He didn’t tell me a goddamn thing.”

“Language. What happened to your hand?”

“Scorpions. I think. You might want to be careful who deals with Mason. He had two of them. Or maybe I just imagined it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I lost and I have to come back and do this all again tomorrow.”

“Didn’t he tell you anything?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“It’s good to be king.”

I go straight home. In the end, it doesn’t matter if those scorpions were real or not. I just had my ass handed to me on a silver platter. A wasted day means I brought the Angra one step closer to Earth. I look out the window. I swear the rain is coming down harder than ever.

I TRY SOME healing hoodoo from the arena days, but I’ve always been better at breaking things than fixing them, so my improvised spells don’t work. Between the swelling from the scorpion and the last ragged remains of the scab from where I punched out the van window, my hand looks like I stuck it in a wood chipper and set it on frappé. I go downstairs to see if Kasabian has any aspirin.

He and Fairuza are sitting on some of the boxes outside his room, sipping beers. She sets hers down when she sees me.

“How’s Candy?”

I shake my head.

“Everything’s fucked. Candy’s crazy and I’m playing Chinese checkers with a psycho. Oh, Kas, you’ll be amused to know. Mason Faim is back from Hell.”

His beer goes down the wrong way. He coughs and it takes him a minute to catch his breath.

“Mason? I thought you buried him under the floorboards.”