The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim 8)

“You know how to drive one of these?”

She gives me a look.

“If you’re asking me, ‘Can the girl drive the truck?,’ you can get out and walk, Tiny Tim.”

“You might shut your yap, before you get us both booted,” says Bill.

I nod.

“My apologies, ma’am. Drive on.”

Candy grinds the gears a couple of times before gritting her teeth and finding first. We lurch forward, then move smoothly, weaving around the abandoned cars.

“Call me ‘Tank Girl,’ motherfuckers,” she shouts.

Bill and I don’t dare say a word.

WE TRAVEL WEST for maybe twenty minutes, then north on Los Feliz Boulevard into the park. Back home, they have kiddie pony rides around here. I don’t know what they used to keep in the fetid, boiling pits in these ruined Hellion stables, but I don’t think it was ponies and I don’t think they were for granola-and-kale-fattened L.A. cherubs.

The drive through the park skirts the crumbling 5 freeway, then turns inward, bringing you past the park’s famous merry-go-round. The ride is a gruesome thing in L.A., the way all merry-go-rounds are. They’re the definition of both staggering boredom and ruthlessly enforced merriment. They’re the amusement-park equivalent of sticking your hand in fire as a kid. You have to try it once, just to see what it’s like. After that, you never want to do it again. All those prancing, leering horses, with their frozen rictus smiles are most kids’ first introduction to Hell. Those horses, they think, must have been some murderous bastards to be captured and displayed in such a humiliating way. The wee ones picture themselves in the horses’ place, skewered through the gut by a brass pole and yanked up and down—suspended between Heaven and Hell—for all eternity. Parents who’ve forgotten or repressed their own terrifying merry-go-round memories snap shots of the kiddies in their torment, passing their traumas on to the next generation. Merry-go-rounds are a great shared lie of childhood. Cruelty masked as fun. Tedium cloaked as adventure. A great spinning vessel of torment getting the tykes ready for the damnation most of them will richly deserve, all because their minds were permanently twisted by this parade of pony horrors. I bet Charlie Manson and Ed Gein loved merry-go-rounds. In some weird way, I bet Wormwood was born around here. There is where all those tots first developed a taste for death, and their crimes were just them inflicting their memories of that eternally spinning Perdition on the world.

Luckily, Candy drives us straight past the ride and I don’t have to explain my amusement-park terrors.

From there, it’s just a few more minutes to the grounds of the old park zoo.

Bill was right. Where empty leaf-and-weed-filled animal cages once stood, is a sprawling Spanish colonial mansion. The moment it’s in sight, Candy pulls the Unimog off the road and into a thick grove of moss-heavy trees. Now we just wait to see what happens.

A smart guy once said that war is boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Stakeouts are like that, only they’re boredom punctuated by moments of ennui, monotony, and finally, an utter indifference to your own survival. If death was any less awful than a stakeout, there would be about six cops left on the planet.

Maybe an hour later, something comes over the rise from where we’ve driven up. Bill takes out a collapsible telescope and aims it at the road.

“Got a whole caravan coming this way,” he says.

“Can I have a look?” says Candy, and Bill hands her the telescope.

“It looks like three SUVs. I can’t see who’s inside them.”

The vans spread out across the grounds of the old zoo. Out of the first van, six Hellion Legionnaires emerge with weapons. Three angels step out of the second van. Out of the last van come six humans.

I put out my hand.

“Bill, let me see the telescope.”

He gives it to me and it takes a second to adjust.

I don’t recognize everyone from the lead van, but I know enough of them.

“See anyone you like?” says Bill.

“Not a single one. But I see a bunch I want.”

“Is that Quay feller there?”

“Yeah. And Geoff Burgess and Charlie Anpu. A couple of other men I don’t recognize. Probably more Wormwoods I never met.”

“I think there’s a woman down there,” says Candy.

“There is, but I don’t recognize her either. She looks cozy with Quay.”