The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim 8)

“The car is in my name. I can’t afford to have cops tracing anything back to me.”

“Why did you buy this heap, I mean?” says Kasabian. “You’re still an asshole, but at least when you were stealing them you had a little self-respect.”

“I know.”

Candy comes up and puts her arm around my Kissi arm, politely avoiding my raw meat one, but nothing is very comforting right now.

“I’m working for the augur. I was trying to be—”

“A whipped dog,” Kasabian says. “Oh, and smart move coming out here with that burned chicken wing out for all the world to see.”

“Maybe he’s right about the arm,” says Candy. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”

We go into Max Overdrive and Kasabian locks the door.

“This is what trying to be Joe Citizen gets you,” he says. “More scars and a shitmobile you can’t drive to Fatburger without attracting a SWAT team.”

I drop down on the stairs and Candy sits next to me.

I look at her.

“What would you do?”

She rests her arms on her knees and laces her fingers together.

“Well, you can’t drive it like that. Maybe you can do like me when I go to work. Take taxis.”

“Sandman Slim saving the world from the back of a yellow cab. That’s beautiful,” says Kasabian. He goes to the till and tosses a twenty at me. “Here. Buy a fucking bus pass.”

Candy scowls at him.

I lean back, resting my elbows on the stairs, but my burned arm feels like someone stuck it with a boning knife. I sit back up.

“I’ll use the bike.”

“Really?” says Candy.

“That’s stupid,” says Kasabian. “I mean, it shows you’ve got some balls left, but it’s stupid.”

I shrug and turn to her.

“What choice do I have? Kasabian’s right. I can’t take cabs everywhere and I can’t just run out and buy another car. They cost actual money.”

“But the Hellion hog,” she says. “It will stand out worse than the car.”

“Not if I do some modifications.”

“What kind of modifications?”

The Hellion hog is a one-off. A custom monster bike built by Hell’s finest mechanics back when I was Lucifer. The wide handlebars taper to sharp points like something you’d normally find on a longhorn’s thick skull. It doesn’t run out of gas because it runs on pure Hellion hoodoo. The pipes are like something you’d find at a power plant. They’ll turn cherry red when I open up the accelerator. I don’t know how fast it will go. They don’t have speedometers in Hell.

“If I replace the light on the front with a regular one, change out the handlebars, and only ride it at night, I think I can get away with it.”

“What about a license plate?” says Candy.

“I’ll steal a plate.”

Kasabian holds up his metal hands like a preacher looking to Heaven.