Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

He looks at Lula and brightens.

“Can I have his tongue? You can have the rest. I just want one little taste.”

“No,” she says. “The deal was you get the girl and I get the monster.”

She comes around next to Teddy, one hand on Traven’s arm and the other holding the gun.

“You know me now but do you remember me from before King’s place? Before Blackburn’s? Before I got these scars?”

“Didn’t I scrape you off my boots at a Fresno dairy farm?”

Teddy laughs. All worked up like this, he sounds creepily like the little girl.

“You killed Josef right in front of me. I loved him and you cut off his head and handed it to me like it was a big joke.”

All the birds do come home to roost. Cherry was right. The past catches up with us in Hell and in L.A.

I remember a girl. It was right before New Year’s at a skinhead clubhouse where Josef the Kissi had set up shop. His pretty-boy Aryan face and dominant personality made him a perfect White Power leader. He used the skinheads for muscle and cover. Lula was there but I didn’t know her name back then. She was just a pretty tattooed girl with a shaved head. It was right after I escaped from Hell the first time. I hadn’t been back on Earth very long and was still getting used to mortal women. I fell in love with her for the ten seconds I saw her in her white wife beater. A day or two later I burned the skinhead clubhouse to the ground. Probably killed a lot of them. Burned the hell out of others. I cut off Josef’s head that night. Of course, all I did was kill Josef’s human body. The Kissi part of him was fine but Eva Braun here never got the joke because she never copped to the fact that Josef wasn’t human. I’m going to die because a dumb little Nazi bitch had a crush on another monster. Maybe God has a sense of humor after all.

“Why?” I say. It’s all I can get out.

“Why didn’t I kill you when I met you at Blackburn’s? Why didn’t I feed you to King or send you straight to Teddy to die? Because I knew all I had to do was give you a little push and you’d find your way up the hill on your own. And it would hurt a lot more along the way. I hope it did. But not as much as what’s going to happen.”

“Mr. Osterberg,” says Traven. “When God threw Satan out of Eden, he said, ‘Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.’ Do you know how much lower than that you are?”

Good for you, Father.

Teddy raises his eyebrows in mock innocence.

“None of this is my fault. I was just hungry and King Cairo told Lula here my secret. All the men in my family have the hunger. If you want to blame someone, blame Great-Grandfather. He made a deal with . . .” Teddy leans down into my face and yells, “The Devil. Yes, Great-Grandfather made a deal for wealth and power and volunteered to become something abominable—an eater of the dead—to prove his loyalty to Satan.”

Samael must have laughed his ass off at that. He would have been happy with the idiot’s soul, but when the nitwit offered to eat corpses for the next fifty years, how could he say no to that? Some people are too stupid to even damn themselves properly.

“None of you will be as tasty as the kids but I’m forced to go on a child-free diet for a while. The Imp hasn’t killed all the parents of the ones I’ve already taken and until then I’m forced to subsist on dreary adults.”

I was right. He used the girl to kill for Aelita, then for himself when Aelita didn’t need her. A sweet deal for a guy like Teddy. I wonder if he used her to kill new food for his pantry? How could he resist? I think I finally know what Aelita wanted out of all this. Not that it matters down here on the floor.

I take a deep breath and cough up blood on Teddy’s shoes.

His face turns red and he kicks me in the teeth. Lula slaps him hard enough to leave a mark.

“You don’t touch this one.”

Traven says, “How do you control something as powerful as the girl? You barely seem to be able to control yourself.”

Lula hits him in the back of the neck with the gun butt.

Teddy goes to a table where a child’s skull sits under a bell jar.

“Isn’t she beautiful? The angel bought me the Imp’s cemetery for safekeeping. As payment, she gave me the skull. There was hardly any flesh left on her and it was as dry as paper. I soaked it in toddler fat and fried it brown and crispy. The Imp was exquisite. And after I said the words the angel gave me, her ghost was mine to command.”

“That’s it,” says Lula. “They’ve heard enough to know they’ve been fucked all along. Especially this one.”

She kicks me in my injured side. Teddy laughs.

“He pulled a gun on me, you know.”

Lula rolls her eyes.