"Mr. Slide. My name is Gideon Windemere, and I own that house behind us. I was wondering why you were showing such an interest in it?"
Yancey Slide didn't move. It was only when they were right up to him that he finally pushed back his wide-brimmed hat and Gibson saw his face for the first time. Wherever and however Yancey Slide had acquired his human form, he'd gone for dramatic impact. It had clearly been modeled on Clint Eastwood, except it was a Clint who had engaged in such a wealth of prolonged and elaborate depravity, both ancient and modern, that it hardly bore thinking about. There had been no attempt to disguise the eyes. They just weren't human. The narrow, ice-blue slits were like looking into the heart of some deep frozen hell.
"Gideon Windemere. I've heard of you. And Joe Gibson. You know, I saw you perform once? And the third gentleman I think I might know by sight. Didn't we once go kneecapping up the Falls Road? Or was that someone else, Paddy? I'm damned if I know. All you boyos look alike to me."
Slide's voice was little more than a ruined whisper, a dangerous reptilian rasp that sounded as though he might really be eighteen thousand years old. Gibson turned and looked at O'Neal. He seemed seriously taken aback. This surprised Gibson. He wouldn't have thought that the implacable Irishman had it in his repertoire of responses.
Windemere quickly tried to cover the disarray of the moment. "Perhaps we should all step onto the pavement."
It was a practical suggestion. They were standing on the off side of the Hudson with black London taxicabs hurtling past just inches from their backs.
And, with that, they were on the pavement.
With no movement or even a sense of discontinuity and in less than the blink of an eye, they were standing in another place some ten or twelve feet away. Slide was still leaning on the car in exactly the same thumbs-in-his-belt gunslinger posture, except he was now leaning on the other side of the car. His smile was a fraction less faint.
"Excuse the parlor trick, mis amgos. Sometimes I just can't resist."
Gibson was speechless. If the man-he was still thinking of Slide as a man, "demon" a hard word to use with conviction even after everything he had seen-could instantly move them through space, what the hell else could he do? Windemere, on the other hand, seemed completely undaunted.
"I'm suitably impressed. Now perhaps you'd like to tell me why you're taking such an interest in my house."
Slide fumbled in the pocket of his duster and pulled out a thin black cheroot. "You know who I am?"
Windemere nodded. "I know who you are."
"Then you're showing a hell of a lot of balls for a human, coming out here like this."
He held up his right index finger. A blue flame appeared at its tip. He lit the cigar from it and then extinguished the flame with a shake of his hand.
Windemere watched him without expression. "If you're trying to frighten us, you're not succeeding. We've seen magic acts before."
Slide slowly nodded. He tapped softly on the black glass of the front passenger window of the Hudson. The rear door swung open and a man and a woman climbed out. They were equally impressive. If Slide's human form had been modeled on Clint Eastwood's, the woman was a hybrid of Cher and Elizabeth Taylor with a liberal dash of heavy metal-a stunningly beautiful Amazon road warrior, over six feet tall with high, jet-black hair and, as Little Richard put it, "a figure made to squeeze," although anyone squeezing her right at that moment might find himself hampered by the chrome studs, the chains, the metal plates, and the reinforced, tuck-and-roll leather. The only truly feminine parts of her costume were the torn fishnet stockings and spike-heeled ankle boots. The man was a totally bald sumo wrestler in a suit that looked as though it had been constructed by a tentmaker. It was a yellow-and-black plaid, cut in a style that Gibson hadn't seen since the passing of Nikita Khrushchev.
"These are my traveling companions, Nephredana and Yop Boy."
Gibson wondered if these two had the same nonhuman eyes as Slide. It was impossible to tell since they were both wearing impenetrable Ray-Bans. Then Yop Boy let his coat swing open, and Gibson stopped wondering about the eyes. He, Windemere, and O'Neal were treated to a brief glimpse of an elaborate, ultralight assault weapon strapped to the huge man's massive thigh. It was a design that Gibson had never seen before. It looked something like a deluxe version of an Uzi that had been fitted with a weird set of gas ports under the ejector, finished in gold leaf, and then fitted with mother-of-pearl grips and a top-mounted laser sight. Gibson suspected that he was looking at a weapon that had been brought through from another dimension. He was also puzzled. Why should a demon, seemingly with all manner of supernatural powers, resort to such a temporal show of force?
Windemere seemed to be thinking the same thing. He faced Slide with an amused smile. "You want to watch that. This is London and people here are a little down on firearms."
Slide's smile had disappeared altogether, "I don't think we'll have any trouble."
Gibson wasn't so sure. He was surprised that they hadn't had trouble already. In daylight, on a street with heavy traffic and with the local police station just a block away down the hill, the Hudson alone should have been enough to cause comment. Combined with the appearance of the six of them, the sight should have been enough to stop traffic, and yet no one was giving them a second glance.
Windemere was still facing Slide. "I sincerely hope we won't."
Slide looked Windemere up and down. "There are places where walking up to a man and demanding to know his business is construed as a hostile act."
Again, Windemere wouldn't allow himself to be intimidated. "I believe there are other places where to watch a man's home is a way of making the man in question exceedingly paranoid."
Slide took the cheroot out of his mouth and spat on the pavement. "And this paranoia is the reason for all the firepower?"
Windemere's face was a picture of injured innocence. "Firepower? The only firepower I've seen is strapped to Yop Boy here."
Slide's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Don't bullshit me, Windemere. I know about the three streamheat inside your house, and your other bodyguard, standing in the doorway over there, undoubtedly has some sort of weapon under his coat. "
Both Windemere and Gibson looked across the road at the house. Cadiz was standing at the front door and there almost certainly was a weapon concealed under his loose combat coat. Gibson couldn't see anything inside the bay window on the first floor, but he knew that it was safe to assume that Smith, Klein, and French were inside watching.
Windemere shrugged. "These are troubled times. You can't be too careful."
Slide looked up and down the street and around at the nearby buildings. He flipped his cheroot away, and for some reason the butt vanished just before it hit the ground.
"I suspect that we could probably make a tolerable mess of this particular corner of merry old England if we were to fall to fighting. Is that what you want, Gideon Windemere?"
Windemere shook his head. "No, of course not,"
"So, having established the basic standoff, shall we start talking? You want to know what I'm doing here-what I want with you people-is that correct?"
"You can't blame me for being curious."
"Then you'll understand when I say that I'm here because I was curious myself. I wanted to see why the focus of so much attention should show up at your home,"
Gibson stiffened. "You mean me?"
Slide pushed himself away from the car. "Yes, you. Anyone who has what you people call a UFO chasing him across the Atlantic needs watching. I hate fucking UFOs."