The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim 8)

“What do I owe you?”

“You know you always eat and drink for free around here,” he says.

“Not for the food. The advice.”

“All you owe me is not fucking yourself up anymore. Do that and we’re square.”

I set down the rag I’ve been holding to my eye and pick up the food.

“I’ll work on it.”

“You do that. And tell Chihiro hi for me.”

“You got it.”

I got out to the car and set the food on the passenger seat. Donald Trump is halfway down the block showing his phone to anyone who’ll look. Showing my face to strangers.

I start the car and gun the engine a couple of times. If he moves just a little to his right, I could pick him off without hitting anyone else. The front of this Catalina is solid steel. He won’t even make a dent. I can just hose him off when I get home.

But I don’t do it. It would be too easy. Too Koyaanisqatsi. Something has got to change and it will start with me not killing a rich kid who’ll go on drinking shit Scotch and stealing photos with people because he’ll never know how close he came to frat-boy Heaven tonight.

I pull away from the curb and head home.

“I KEEP TELLING you,” says Kasabian when I come in. “If you just buy the Girl Scouts’ cookies, they’ll leave you alone.”

“That gets funnier every time you say it.”

“It’ll be even funnier next time.”

Kasabian runs things day to day at Maximum Overdrive, the video store where I live with him and Candy. Him downstairs in the back and me and Candy in the small apartment upstairs. This arrangement is best for everyone if for no other reason than Kasabian doesn’t really have a body. I mean, he has one, but it’s not his. It’s a retrofit from a mechanical hellhound body I stole when I could still shadow-walk Downtown.

“Keep going. You’re going to talk yourself out of tamales.”

Kasabian holds up a mechanical hound paw.

“Witness me shutting up.”

The paw creaks a little as he says it. Sometimes he clanks when he walks. That’s the other reason he spends most of his time down here and not upstairs in our palatial penthouse. I set the tamales on the counter.

“Smart man. How’s business?”

“We’re doing all right. Still making bank off the special stash. But we haven’t had anything new in for a while. The requests are piling up.”

The special stash are videos a little witch named Maria gets for us through her ghost connections. Movies that don’t really exist, at least in this time and space. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. Sergio Leone’s The Godfather. Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness.

“Do you explain that our movies come from another fucking plane of reality? It’s not like we’re rifling the bins at the Salvation Army.”

Kasabian lifts the edge of the tamales bag and looks inside. I close it and move the bag to the other end of the counter. He gives me a look.

“They’re customers,” he says. “They know what they want and they want it now.”

“Next time someone whines, tell them to fuck off home and watch Kindergarten Cop on Netflix.”

He slips a DVD into a case and holds it up in my direction.

“And that’s why you’re not allowed down here during business hours.”

“I have my own work these days. I don’t have to mingle with you rabble.”