“I did.”
“Good. Call me or I’ll hunt you down like a dog.”
Flirting has been fun, but now I’m starting to not like it so much.
“I should be straight with you. I don’t normally look like this. At all. These aren’t my clothes. Hell, this isn’t even my face. I know that sounds weird, but it’s the truth.”
Alyx folds the twenty the long way and holds it to her upper lip like a mustache.
“So, you’re in disguise. We’re all in disguise.”
“But I’m really in disguise.”
“Okay, Danger Man,” she says, folding the twenty into a paper airplane. “Just remember one thing.”
“What?”
“I’ll hunt you like a dog.”
I hold up my orange juice.
“Thanks for the caffeine cure.”
I take my time with the juice and sandwich. When I’m done, I’m feeling better. But Rose still hasn’t shown up and I’m getti
ng sick of looking at his damn BE BACK SOON sign. I look at the café’s boomerang clock. I’ve been here almost two hours. If I stay I’m going to feel obligated to keep eating and drinking just to pay for my seat, and it’s hard to be scary during an interrogation when you have to piss.
I wipe my mouth on a paper napkin and get up. Stare at the store for one more minute hoping for some kind of activity.
Nothing.
Fuck this.
Alyx intercepts me on my way to the door.
“Going to do some unbodyguarding?” she says.
“That’s the plan.”
She looks away, then back at me.
“Look, I hope I wasn’t too weird or anything earlier. It’s just that, believe it or not, we don’t get that many interesting people in here. I mean, yes, we get lots of artists and musicians and stuff, but they can be such a pain in the ass. And anyway, it was nice meeting you.”
I look at her with my fake face and want to tell her that she didn’t meet anything like the real me.
“Thanks. It was great meeting you too. And, no, you weren’t too weird. You’re about as charming as it gets, which, now that I say it out loud, sounds like something an idiot would write in your high school yearbook. That means I should get going.”
“As far as idiots go, you did all right.”
“Thanks. See you around, Alyx.”
“You know you will. Hunt you like a dog, Stark. Like a dog.”
The sun is high in the sky as I jaywalk across Sunset to Angelic Bazaar. There’s a Japanese restaurant next door with a small parking lot. At one end of the lot is a billboard. Behind the base of the billboard, there’s a nice shadow. I step through and come out in the back of Angelic Bazaar. Atticus Rose’s office is nearby.
It’s like the shop. All old furniture and plush sofas, maybe a little more worn than the stuff out front for sale. There’s a too-large statue of the archangel Michael on a corner of his desk. I never liked Michael, and since he tried to kill me, I like him even less. I climb on Rose’s desk and turn Michael around so that he’s facing the wall. I don’t like staring at his rear end much either, but it’s better than that smug face. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with archangels? They’re all crazy in one way or another, and I’m saying that as the son of an archangel—Uriel. At least he never tried to kill me. Hell, in his own fucked-up way, he even tried to help me understand who I am. But like the mortal father who raised me, he didn’t stick around long. Although he had a better excuse. He was murdered. The whole archangel thing depresses me. This whole store depresses me. But Atticus Rose is a Tick-Tock Man. He’s not just selling end tables to the Martha Stewart crowd. Where’s his workshop? I know that whatever he’s making for the faction will be awful. Maybe awful enough that it’s an excuse to kill him. But not until he tells me where to find his bosses. My time is running out. Howard better be as good as Sandoval says he is. If I end up back in Hell for good, I’ll wait for them until they die and, like Alyx said, hunt them down like dogs.
On a table, there’s a crystal dish full of dried rose petals. I dump them on the floor and light up a Sherman, flicking the ashes into the dish. Candy taught me that kind of civilized behavior. I might still be a monster, but I can be a tidy one.