At least the assassin had enough common sense to know a fait accompli when he saw one and he stopped struggling. As Jim pushed himself off, he was surprised to find his hands making contact with a full breast and a narrow waist. “Holy shit, it’s a woman!”
Doc pushed him out of the way. Now that they were able to see a little better, Jim’s tactile discovery was a little more obvious. It was indeed a woman-a very good-looking young woman-dressed in a black cape and a kind of one-piece ninja leotard. Her face was hidden behind a black bandanna, and she was wearing an extremely elaborate pair of boots with dozens of tiny buckles. As Jim straightened up, Doc leaned down and pulled away the bandanna. The face that was revealed had dark coffee-colored skin, large angry eyes and a red caste mark exactly in the middle of the forehead. Doc whistled under his breath. “A thugette.”
“A what?”
“A thugette, one of Kali’s killer virgins. The distaff version of the thugee.”
“You mean like in Stranglers of Bombay?”
Doc nodded. “Right, if you must equate everything with some low-budget movie to get a handle on it. They kill for the goddess with the knotted scarf.”
The Virgil was helping a coughing Semple, who, despite the obvious discomfort of a nearly crushed windpipe, moved quickly to where Doc and Jim were standing over the prone assassin. Picking up the knotted scarf on the way, she took one look at the buckled boots and went whiter than she already was. “Goddamn it. I saw that homicidal bitch in the coffee shop at the Mephisto. We sat at the same table. I even spoke to her.”
Doc glanced up and down the street. “She must have been one of Kali’s minders, waiting for her mistress to get out of Lucifer’s poker game. I guess she’s been following us ever since we left the hotel.”
Semple frowned. “The question is, what do we do with her now? We can’t let her go and report back.”
She glanced significantly at the gun in Doc’s hand, but Doc shook his head. “I can’t shoot a woman in cold blood.”
Semple glared at him. “Why the fuck not? She tried to waste me, didn’t she?”
Suddenly the women spasmed briefly, gasped out a choking gurgle, stiffened, and then went limp. Doc quickly knelt down beside her and felt the side of her neck for a pulse. “She’s solved the problem for us.”
“She’s left for the pods?”
“Or wherever her kind go. She must have had a cyanide tooth.”
By this point, the Virgil had also joined them and he looked very unhappy. “Good sirs and lady, did I overhear you correctly? Is it Lucifer and Kali from whom you flee?”
Doc nodded grimly. “I fear it is, altissimo poeta.”
“Then I must respectfully terminate our agreement. I am a Virgil and it is implicitly understood that I leave at the first sign of danger.” He gestured to the thugette’s inert body. “And that is a more than contractually adequate first sign.”
Doc gestured with the Gun That Belonged to Elvis. “I’m sorry, altissimo poeta, but we are going to have to impose on you over and above the terms of any implied agreement. You will lead us to the start of the Dragon Ride, or I will, with the greatest regret, send you after this young woman here.”
The Virgil looked at Jim and Semple, but they gave him no sign that they were in anything but total agreement with Doc. “I must protest this, good sir. I will lead you, but this is no way to treat a Virgil.”
Doc lowered the pistol to his side, but didn’t return it to its holster. “Your protest is noted, altissimo poeta.”
***
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m the only one left, aren’t I?”
The very last thing Mr. Thomas needed was the sudden appearance of Aimee McPherson, five nuns, and two angels right in the Louis XVI Suite of Semple’s domain. Since Aimee had totaled her sister, the environment had been shaken by what he could only think of as a series of violent earth tremors, bringing down plaster and mosaic tiles from the ceilings, shaking objects from shelves, causing paintings and artworks to come crashing down, and creating jagged structural cracks in the floors and walls. He knew the earth tremors weren’t truly seismic disturbances. They were a symptom that Semple, as the Afterlife knew her, was history, and her environment would progressively collapse as her residual energy dissipated and ebbed away to chaos and entropy. What would become of him when that happened was highly debatable. In the aftermath of Aimee’s trashing of Semple, he had managed to slip away and windwalk back to the domain under his own power. That, unfortunately, was about as far as he was able to make it unaided, and without help he wasn’t going any farther.
Right then, though, Mr. Thomas hadn’t been thinking too much about the future. While Semple’s real estate remained more or less real, he had resolved to get drunk and stay drunk. To this end he had formed an alliance with Igor, who had discovered that the wine cellar and liquor cache had remained pretty much intact through the upheavals. The only unfortunate part was that Igor showed absolutely no inclination to leave. His fealty to Semple was such that he wanted nothing more than to go down with the sinking illusion. Mr. Thomas hoped that, as the place started to come more unglued, the Peter Lorre–looking butler might reexamine his devotion to a woman who was long gone; perhaps the two of them would join forces and attempt to get away. In the meantime, the goat had resolved to let the martinis flow and face the hangover when it came.
In Mr. Thomas’s opinion, Aimee McPherson, with her crew of nuns and angels, pretty much qualified as an early and unwanted hangover. He couldn’t imagine why they should come bursting in, but he knew he was going have to deal with it, and since Igor seemed to have pulled a vanishing act, he was going to have to deal with it on his own. His first tactic was to go for open hostility. He might be a little unsteady on his four legs, on account of how recently he’d forsworn glasses and taken to drinking his martinis from a galvanized bucket, but he had a full head of resentment to use as fuel. He planted himself squarely in front of the blond McPherson sister and looked her up and down with as much Welsh contempt as he could muster. “So what’s the big idea, toots? You come here with a team to loot out your sister’s domain before it falls apart?”
One of the nuns advanced angrily on him. “How dare you talk to our Holy Shepherdess like that? You can’t address the Lady Aimee as ‘toots.’ ”
Aimee motioned the nuns back. “Leave him be. He’s probably upset.”
Mr. Thomas nodded. “Damn right I’m upset. And I’m also shit-faced drunk. Ever since I fell in with you McPherson sisters, it’s been nothing but trouble, but right now we’re not talking about me. You still haven’t explained why you’re here.”
“We came here looking for a sanctuary.”
“A sanctuary? Don’t make me laugh. There’s no sanctuary here. The place is on the verge of coming apart. You might as well look for refuge in the House of Usher.”
“The other nuns-”
“Turned on you, did they, now?”
Aimee was still spent from the wind-walk out of Heaven, coming as it did on top of the huge amount of energy she had expended on Semple. Explaining herself to a goat was more unnecessary effort than she really cared to squander. “The militant one, Bernadette, she’s started calling herself the Hammer of God.”
“So you thought you’d hide here from her and her gang?”
“We didn’t know what else to do.”
“Didn’t occur to you that this might be the first place she’d come looking?”
“It was the only thing we could do.”
“So now I’m going to wind up sharing whatever nails this Hammer of God wants to drive into you and yours?”
Aimee started to get angry. “Don’t you think of anything but your own miserable self?”
Mr. Thomas drew back his goat lips in a mirthless sneer. “Lately, I seem to be all I’ve got.”
A sudden wheezing sound behind him told Mr. Thomas he was no longer facing Aimee and her nuns and angels alone. Three of Semple’s rubber guards tottered slowly into the reproduction of Versailles, moving like a trio of Frankenstein monsters in a cheap Universal horror movie, and breathing like Darth Vader. Since Semple’s departure the rubber guards had become increasing slow and cumbersome, but it seemed that they could still make an entrance. Ignoring Mr. Thomas, they lumbered toward Aimee and her people, with the leader issuing his formal challenge in a voice like a slowed-down phonograph record. “You-are-unauthorized-intruders. You-will-remain-exactly-where-you-are-or-we-will-open-fire.”