Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

“Does Kasabian know about all this?”

“Why would I tell him my business? His job is to send me information.”

“What’s he been telling you about me?”

“That you’re at loose ends. That you’re depressed. That you’re drunk much of the time. That ever since you locked up Mason, all you’ve done is kill things, smoke, and drink. You need to get out more, Jimmy. This will be the perfect job for you. You’ll meet lots of exciting new people to hate.”

“I hope you’re a better salesman when you’re buying suckers’ souls.”

He pours us both more Aqua Regia. When he holds out the pack of Maledictions, I take one and he lights it for me.

“I’m not a salesman. I don’t have to be. People offer me their souls every second of every day. They bring them to my door ready to eat. It’s like having pizza delivered.”

“You’re making me hungry. There any food around here?”

“You want to eat with me? You don’t know much mythology, do you? Persephone’s story?”

“Who’s she?”

“She was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld, where she ate a single pomegranate seed. She was able to return home, but for the rest of her life she had to spend half of the year with her husband on earth and half of the year with Hades in the Underworld.”

“Was she hungry when she ate the seed?”

“I expect so.”

“Then what’s the problem? I once ate some greasy scrambled eggs at a truck stop near Fresno and puked and shit myself for two days. That was six months in Hell right there.”

Lucifer picks up a phone next to his chair.

“I’ll call room service.”

LATER, MY PHONE goes off. It’s Wells texting me the address of where I’m supposed to meet him. I go out the Alice in Wonderland clock and down to the garage, where top-of-the-line cars are laid out like Christmas morning on repo-man island. There’s a white ’57 T-bird with a white top. I pop the knife into the ignition, fire it up, and head outside. On my way out of the lot, I nod to the valet I gave the Bugatti to. He raises one arm and gives me an unsure little half wave. He won’t be able to keep the Veyron, of course, the cops and insurance company will make sure of that, but I hope he gets to have some fun before he has to ditch it.

I DRIVE EAST along Sunset. Cut south into what the chamber of commerce calls Central City East, but the rest of the universe calls skid row. The corner of Alameda and East Sixth is so boring and anonymous it’s amazing it’s allowed on maps. Warehouses, metal fences, dusty trucks, and a handful of beat-up trees that look like they’re on parole from tree jail. I turn right on Sixth and drive until I find a vacant lot. It’s not hard. A half dozen of the Vigil’s stealth supervans are parked by the curb, looking just a little out of place. Flying saucers at a rodeo.

The lot isn’t one hundred percent vacant. There’s a small house in the middle, an overgrown wood-frame shit box that’s so swallowed up by weeds, vines, and mold that I can’t even tell the original color. It’s not much more than a shack. A leftover from the days when L.A. was open enough to have orchards, oil wells, and sheep farms. Not that this place was ever any of those.

Rich Sub Rosas aren’t like rich civilians. Civilians wear their wealth on their sleeve. They get flash cars, like the Bugatti. Twenty-thousand-dollar watches that can tell you how long it takes an electron to fart. And big beautiful mansions in the hills, like Avila, far away from God’s abandoned children, the flatlanders.

Sub Rosa wealth works on sort of the opposite idea. How secret and invisible can you make yourself, your wealth, and your power? Big-time Sub Rosa families don’t live in Westwood, Benedict Canyon, or the hills. They prefer abandoned housing projects and ugly anonymous commercial areas with strip malls or warehouses. If they’re lucky or been around long enough, they might have scored themselves an overgrown wood-frame shit box in a vacant lot on skid row. Chances are this house has looked exactly this feral and miserable for the last hundred years. Before that, it was probably a broken-down log cabin.

I park the T-bird across the street and jog over to the house. Just a few streetlights and warehouse security lights. There’s nothing else alive. Not a headlight in sight.

There’s a tarnished knocker on the door. I use it. A woman opens the door. Another marshal. She’s in the female equivalent of Wells’s men-in-black chic.>“Would you like a drink?”

I don’t turn right away.

“That sounds great.”

“I have some Aqua Regia, but I hear that’s not such a rare thing for you these days.”

“No. Are you the one sending it up?”

“Don’t be stupid. I pay you enough to take care of your own vices. I’d like to know who is importing the stuff.”

“You don’t know?”

“I have a fairly full plate at the moment what with your friend Mason trying to turn my armies against me. Or hadn’t you heard?”