Alejandro nodded silently, and drew an automatic from his shoulder holster. “I am,” he said. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I can’t say the same for you two.”
“Hey, man,” Mushroom Daddy said, “that’s so not-cool.”
“I don’t want to do this,” Alejandro said, “but blood must sometimes be spilled in the service of the Lord.”
“What are you talking about?” Jerry asked. “You’re a Secret Service agent!”
Alejandro nodded. “I am. I am also a perfecti in the service of Our Lord, a somewhat higher master whom I am even more tightly bound to serve.”
Shit, Jerry thought. What—
Mushroom Daddy moved. He swiveled on one foot, lashing out with the other, catching the turncoat secret service agent on his gun hand. The agent lost his grip on the automatic, and it went clattering down the stairs. Alejandro went after it like a cat after a fleeing mouse.
“Run!” Daddy said, and for once the hippie made sense.
He and Jerry turned and fled back up the staircase. Jerry hit the steel fire door just as a bullet ricocheted off it near his head, reverberations from the gunshot pounding his eardrums like tiny hammers. He and Mushroom Daddy pushed through the door, then closed it behind them, leaning against it and breathing deeply.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Jerry panted.
“Bruce Lee movies, man,” Mushroom Daddy said. “He’s the king.”
“Well, thanks,” Jerry said.
“No problemo, man,” Daddy said. “Even a pacifist has to kick ass sometimes.” He paused to take a deep breath. “What do we do now?”
Jerry shook his head. It was clear that the plan to go back to the city to get a dose of the Trump has no longer feasible. There was nothing much they could do, now, that seemed remotely helpful.
Peaceable Kingdom: The Angels’ Bower
Angel was still sufficiently self-conscious to dress in the bathroom.
Pity, Ray thought. He loved watching beautiful women get into clothes. And out of them, for that matter. He was particularly interested in seeing her in the underwear he’d picked up. Though he was sufficiently realistic to get her a plain, boring sports bra to wear under her new jumpsuit, he’d also picked up a few rather more lacy numbers for casual wear. He stuck with thong panties all around, though. You couldn’t beat those for looks and all-around wearability.
Angel came out of the bathroom, a concerned look on her face.
“Don’t you think this is a little low cut?” she asked, gesturing at the front of the new outfit.
Ray shook his head in admiration. “No,” he said. “I’d say that it’s just about right.”
“And a little too bright?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “Nope. It’s about time you got out of black, babe. It has its place in a wardrobe, but it can get depressing if you wear it all the time. Red suits you.”
“If you say so,” Angel said uncertainly.
Ray nodded enthusiastically. “I do. Now let’s eat. I’m starved.”
She smiled. “Me too.”
Ray’s room was on the first floor above the lobby and shop level. When possible he always took rooms on the first floor. He didn’t like to deal with elevators in either emergencies or on an everyday basis. They went down a flight of stairs that led from the room block to the hotel lobby, and Ray immediately knew that something was wrong. He could smell it even before he saw it. It was an odor he knew well, a mixture of blood and gunpowder residue.
“What in the bleeding Hell?” he asked aloud.
He and Angel stared at each other, then gazed around the lobby. It was deserted, except for a couple of bodies laying in pools of blood. Some were moving feebly or groaning, most were not.
“We’ve got to help them,” Angel said.
Ray grabbed her arm as she started forward. “First we have to find out what the Hell is happening,” he said. “Split up. Look around outside. I’ll check the lobby. Don’t go far, and if you see anything that might explain this, for Christ’s sake, come and get me.”
Angel nodded. “Don’t blaspheme,” she told him.
“Right.” He grabbed her by the upper arm. “And whatever you do, be careful.”
She smiled briefly, dazzling him, and was gone. He turned and headed for the shops lining the lobby.
The only person in the first one he went into was a gray-uniformed security guard who was bravely defending the deserted store from non-existent looters. The guard was a badly shaken youngster with badly shaking hands. Ray was glad he didn’t have a gun or else he would have shot someone, probably himself, out of fear-induced ineptitude. He flinched when Ray marched up to him and tried to duck under the counter by the cash register, but Ray hauled him up.
“Get a grip, Howard,” he said, reading the kid’s name off his tag above the fancy badge pinned to his shirt pocket. He reached for his own identification wallet, flipped it open, and shoved it into the kid’s face. “My name is Billy Ray. I’m a federal agent. You got that Howard?”
The kid stuttered a frightened, “Y-y-y--yes s-s-s-sir,” that Ray almost interrupted three or four times out of sheer impatience.
“What’s going on out there, Howard?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the kid said. “But there’s dead men out there in the lobby. Some of them are security guards.” He said that as if it were the most shocking thing imaginable, and started to cry. Ray shook him by the collar until his teeth rattled.
“Snap out of it, goddamn it,” he said. The Allumbrados had come after them. Again. It had to be them. The persistent bastards. But no one would believe the story if he told it the way it really was. He let go of Howard’s collar, took out a pen and scribbled a name and a phone number on the back of a card he took out of his wallet. “I want you to call this number,” he said in clear and precise tones. “Tell them Billy Ray told you to report to Nephi Callendar. Tell him that a gang of aces are trying to assassinate ex-President Leo Barnett under the guise of robbing the hotel. Tell him to get help out here, pronto, or else the Secret Service will have a dead ex-President on their hands. You got all that Howard?”
The security guard nodded.
“What’s my name, Howard?”
“Uh. Leo Barnett?”
Ray slapped him once across the face, fairly hard, then grabbed his shirt before he could fall down. “Wrong, Howard. My name is Billy Ray. It’s on the other side of the card. The man I want you to call is named Nephi Callendar. I’ve written his name on this side of the card. Now, what’s the story?”
“Uh, Leo Barnett is, uh, robbing the hotel, and—”
Ray sighed. “Just tell them Billy Ray said to get their asses down here or else there’ll be a dead ex-President on the five o’clock news. You get that right, and there’ll be a promotion for you. You fuck up, Howard, and I’ll hunt you down myself and kill you. You got that?”
“Yessir,” Howard managed.
Ray sighed. It was the best he could do. If he made the call himself they’d only want him to stay on the other end of the line and answer useless fucking questions. The odds were, anyway, that help wouldn’t arrive in time. Whatever was going down here was going down fast. But there was always the slim chance that the Feds could show up in time to be useful.
Now, Ray thought, to collect Angel and get up to Barnett’s office, fast. That was where the bad guys would be headed, after the kid who was ensconced in Fortunato’s suite on the floor below Barnett’s HQ. If Barnett, or Fortunato, or somebody was on the ball, they’d have already stopped the elevators, maybe catching some of the bad guys in frozen steel cages. He couldn’t count on that, though. He could count on the fact that the Cardinal probably sent a shit load of bad guys on this little adventure. He was probably really pissed by now.