Niko strangles the phone. Somehow he feels it’s all that’s holding him upright. “Oh that isn’t necessary. We’re fine.”
“Fine, sir. If I could just get your password.”
“Password.” Niko feels thick and stupid. “It’s eight oh one—”
“Not your alarm code, sir. Your secret password.”
Niko looks helplessly at the cabbie. This is just too fucking absurd. Here in his house in the Hollywood Hills there’s a dead body, a demon, a messenger of death, a mythic ferry operator, and a leaking mason jar containing his girlfriend’s soul, and he has no idea how to stop a bored security dispatcher on a telephone from sending armed rentacops to his door.
“I can’t recall the unit without your password, sir,” the dispatcher says into the silence.
“I’m sorry, I’ve just never had to use it, hold on a second.” Something thuds upstairs.
“Sir?”
Niko feels an absurd urge to command the dispatcher by one of the old Keys. Leave me alone, this has been willed where what is willed must be. But that won’t play here.
“Sir, I’m afraid I have to—”
“Lyre. It’s lyre, L Y R E.”
A pause. Niko hears taps on a keyboard. “That’s correct, sir. Sorry to trouble you.”
“No um trouble. You’re just doing your job.”
“You have a nice night now, sir,” says the dispatcher.
“Too late.” Niko drops the phone to the marble floor. “You all right?” the cabbie asks.
“Fuck no.” He nods at the stairs. “Let’s go.”
The cabbie helps him climb the stairs. Every step a gardenclaw embedded in his ribs and lower back and pulling. By the top of the sweeping curve his compress feels hot against his back and he suspects his wound is bleeding freely again. They pull up short at the top of the stairs and Niko grabs a newel to keep from falling down.
“Darn,” the cabbie says.
Down the hall stands Nikodemus, back to them and tattered wings outspread and trembling taut to fill the corridor. Niko starts to call out to him but suddenly the wings retract and Niko sees his demon holding the fractured mason jar and glaring sliteyed at the Driver who stands calm and confident between Nikodemus and the door to Jemma’s sickroom. Wearing his perpetual halfsmirk and waiting for the demon to make his move. With Jemma seeping out into the mortal night and Jemma’s body soon to pass all hope of resurrection time is on the Driver’s side.
The cabbie touches Niko’s arm. “Even if he gets by him he won’t have time to put her back.”
Niko tries to make what the cabbie says mean something but he’s having trouble making words connect. He feels he’s looking out through eyes not quite his own. But he understands that once again the game has changed and that their hastily concocted plan must be abandoned.
Just to drive home his point the Driver lights a cigarette and blows smoke in Nikodemus’ face. The demon whipcracks the air in frustration.
The sound goads Niko to action. “Give me a minute. Stall the Driver any way you can and then send Nikodemus my way when you hear me honk out front.”
She nods. Niko glances once more at the silent power struggle in the hallway and then struggles back down the staircase. He clumps through the living room and master dining room and into the big kitchen hung with copper pots. On the tiled wall a green-painted pegboard hung with several sets of keys. He snatches up the black keychain embossed with the winged B and hurries back as best he can through the living room. His lower back throbs in time with his heartbeat. Pain lances his ribs and flares his twisted ankle with every step. I am held together now with paperclips and duct tape. I believe my clock is winding down.
He clutches the keys and heads for the door. How strange to be back among his comforts and accumulations. He hadn’t expected to see them again when he left. An hour I’ve been gone. All this traveling encompassed by a single sweep of any clock. This time he feels no pang of loss at leaving them behind forever once again, and when he leaves he doesn’t look back.
THE BENTLEY CHIRPS and flashes and unlocks itself. The burgundy GT Speed looks almost black in this light. Niko nearly falls into the seat. It hurts but the pain is somewhere far away, a noise in another room. He touches his back and his palm comes away red. Well beyond panic at the sight of his own blood he merely shakes his head and wipes his palm on his filthy pants leg. The dealership’s gonna love me.
He starts the car and half expects it won’t turn over, thinking it must have been months since he drove it, but it starts right up and Niko realizes it has in fact, only been a few days since he took the Bentley out.
Niko drives out of the garage. Rounding the fountain in front of the house he sees the cabbie trotting down the driveway toward the front gate. What gives?
She glances back at the sound of his car and waves and then gestures for him to stay put. He stops before the front door. When he honks the horn he half expects to hear the bellow of some prehistoric beast. But no. It’s just a carhorn and the Bentley’s just a car.
What seems like a long time is less than ten seconds before Nikodemus rushes from the house in a blur of wings and tendrils and sees Niko in the Bentley and runs toward him with one tendril wrapped around the mason jar and the other reaching for the door. The demon lifts the latch but nothing happens. The automatic locks engaged when Niko put the car in gear. Past Nikodemus the Black Taxi Driver appears in the doorway of the house. Niko blindly stabs the control panel and his window whines down. Nikodemus is about the tear the door off when Niko stabs another button and the doors unlock. Nikodemus piles in and Niko peels out.
Nikodemus holds the mason jar in one coiled tendril. “I tried.”
“I know you did.” Niko speeds down the drive past soulless blind statues and surges to a halt before the gate. They wait an eternity for the automatic gate to clatter open. Niko glances at the jar. Does it give forth light or mere reflection now?
Beyond the gate the Black Taxi still faces the pummeled Checker Cab, but the black sedan’s bonnet hood is folded up. There’s no sign of the cabbie. In the rearview Niko sees the Driver strolling down the driveway toward them.
When the gate is open wide enough Niko glides forward twenty feet and punches an overhead button and the gate begins to slowly rattle shut as Niko stops beside the Franklin. The black car’s hood folds down and the cabbie looks at Niko with a big old shiteating grin. Her hands are smudged with grease and a smear of it warpaints her forehead beside the streak of Niko’s blood. The cabbie glances up the driveway at the Driver coming toward them. “Goodbye, good luck, get going.”
“One question.”
“Better be quick.”
“Black Cab test question.”
Her eyebrows raise. “Shoot.”
“Shortest distance from point A—” Niko indicates their surroundings “—to point B.”
And points up.
Her mouth opens in surprised delight. “Dang I like you. You got brass.” And quickly she gives Niko the directions he needs.
He can only shake his head when he hears where he is bound. Doesn’t that just goddamn figure? He glances in the rearview and sees the Driver at the gate now. “Thanks,” he tells the cabbie. “I’ll marry you next time around, I swear.”
“You already did. Now get out of here.” She squeezes his arm and nods farewell to Nikodemus and slaps the rear of the Bentley as if spurring on a horse as Niko speeds away. She watches the car speed round the corner and listens to the throaty engine dwindle down the hill. Good car, the Bentley. Rich man’s car.
She closes her grease-stained fingers over an object in her hand and smiles. Then she straightens her thin tie and turns toward the gate to face the enemy she has faced so many times so many places, the enemy she so truly deeply loves. “I think you dropped this, Sparky,” the cabbie says, and holds out the magneto wire she tore loose from the Black Taxi.