I wrote down my cell number on the receipt and pushed it across to her.
“I gotta go. I’ve got a crap-ton of math homework. Thanks for the milkshake!” She slid out of the booth and out the door, trundling her backpack on wheels behind her, just another tenth grader who could read ancient Akkadian and tell a genuine Stone of Giramphiel from a realistic fake at twenty yards’ distance.
• • •
Just as I was pulling up next to my apartment, my phone rang. This time it was my frequent co-conspirator, Sam. Finally.
“Sorry I couldn’t make lunch today, B. Things to do, people to irritate. What’s the good word?”
“The good word is gudeg, boychik, and you missed it.”
“Yeah, I know. Next time.”
“But I still need to talk to you. The shit is getting thick around here. And now, on top of everything else, my apartment is haunted.” I gave him the five-cent tour of my recent spectral happenings.
“Are you sure it’s not just a couple of your one-night stands still knocking around the place?” he said. “Judging by your past habits, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to call an exorcist.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you too.”
We passed a few more lazy insults and agreed to make a new lunch date in the next couple of days. As I went up the stairs toward my second-floor rooms, I was feeling like I might actually be making some headway with the four or five thousand critical issues hanging over my head. Then I got to my apartment, and even as I reached into my pocket for the keys, I noticed that the door wasn’t entirely closed.
You know how those alarms blare when a sub starts diving? That’s what I felt up and down my spine—danger, danger, danger! I left the keys where they were and pulled out my gun instead, then ducked down and slid through the door as quietly as I could.
I didn’t have to go far. Two young, pale guys in suits—yep, the same two I’d seen following me downtown—were pulling stuff out of my cheap pressboard book shelves, making a big old mess in the process. Worse, they had actually painted a big ragged swastika on the wall above the television set.
“Freeze!” I stepped in, gun up and braced, and swung it back and forth between the two of them. Both were young, probably mid-twenties. One had dark hair, one had light, but both were as Caucasian as Betty Crocker’s firstborn. They looked like student athletes, maybe a little older, but certainly less than thirty. And though they were equally wide-eyed as they looked at my gun, neither of them seemed particularly frightened, which was not a soothing thing. These weren’t just thugs or thieves, although I was pretty sure they were both human.
“So,” I asked, “you Jehovah’s Witnesses need to supplement your income these days, huh? You’re not going to get much for those old issues of Car and Driver.” I gestured to the swastika, but didn’t take my eyes off the men. “Or are you something else? The local Neo-Nazi Welcome Wagon?”
One of them started to lower his hands, but I gestured angrily for him to put them back up.
“If you just tell us where it is,” he said in a calm voice, “there’ll be no need for trouble.” He sounded American, that’s all I could tell you.
“And if you lie face down on the floor with your hands where I can see them, I won’t have to send you to Jesus with a bunch of holes in your face,” I pointed out.
Several things happened in the next second or so. I heard a noise behind me, then something hit me hard on the back of the skull. I staggered, and the only shot I took went wide and high of both the guys in suits. I fell forward onto my hands and knees, my head suddenly feeling like a broken cabin window at thirty-five thousand feet, all my thoughts rushing around and being sucked out into darkness. Also, and I realize I wasn’t a very reliable witness at that instant, but I swear that the swastika painted on my wall ran away.
As I crouched there in the silence following the echo of my shot, swaying, trying to find the strength to get up, I heard my upstairs neighbor start pounding on the floor again, as if a gunshot was no different than playing the stereo too loud. Then somebody kicked me in the head—yes, the same, hurting head—and I went off to sleepy-bye land, which was very, very dark.
six:
black sun
YOU CAN tell it’s not a good day when you get coldcocked, and then you regain consciousness and they’re still hitting you.
Two guys had my arms, one on either side of me. I couldn’t see them very well through the blood running down into my eyes, but I was pretty sure it was the two missionaries, because the guy in the black t-shirt currently punching my face was a new player in the game. He was a muscular, bald-headed thug a little shorter than me, with forearms like premium hams. Unlike the other two, he seemed like someone who hit people for money. Instead of just beating my face into hamburger, he was working the body as well, softening up my ribs (well, turning them into the bottom of a snack bag, to be precise) and then going back to the head every now and then just when I started to be able to think straight. He’d already opened cuts above my eyes, judging by all the blood, and my nose cartilage definitely felt bendy and wrong.
He paused when he saw me looking at him.
“Okay. Now we can get down to business.” Bald Thug looked like he might be local muscle. I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought I might even have seen him in Oyster Bill’s once or twice, on the ass-end of a Saturday night. He finished up with one last, solid punch into my breadbasket, doubling me up.
“How’m I . . . s’posed . . . talk?” I grunted, trying not to puke Javanese food all over my shoes.
“Shit, I don’t care whether you talk,” said B-Thug. “Just point. Where is it?”
Man, I was getting fucking tired of that question. I’d gone through a long stretch earlier in the year of being asked that by an animated corpse with a long knife. That had been about the feather. Since Eligor had taken the feather back, I was pretty sure this was about the horn. That worried me almost more than the beating, because there was no way anyone should know already that I was looking for it. So I played dumb. “Where’s what?”
He hit me again, a quick, straight right that split my lip and sent a generous dribble of blood down the front of my shirt. “Don’t bullshit me. Where’s the thing? Some important people want to know—now.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”
An open-handed shot from his left rocked me back. I couldn’t help wondering where my gun was: I’d dropped it when I first got hit and I couldn’t see it anywhere.
Who were these people, why did they want Eligor’s horn (if I was right about what they were hunting) and why did they think I had it? I was pretty certain they were all human, which meant they might be uninformed enough to think I really was holding out on them, and that was a scary thought. The young guys on either side of me, although hanging on to my arms with grim determination, didn’t look or act like pros, but Bald Thug definitely seemed capable of killing me, or at least killing this particular body. I really hate dying at the best of times, and at the moment I wasn’t absolutely certain that my bosses would give me a new body afterward.
I let myself go slack so that the two guys holding me had to pull harder to keep me upright. While I pretended to a moment’s grogginess—even more believable if they didn’t know I was angel-strong, because their muscle guy had absolutely knocked the crap out of me—I glanced at their positions on either side. As I did, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the missionary boys’ had an unusual tattoo on his wrist. I couldn’t make out the whole thing, but it was enough to catch my attention.
Then, as they set themselves to haul me up straight again, I smashed my foot down on the instep of the guy on my right, then back-kicked the other guy in the shin. Even as they both let go, howling in pain, I lunged forward and rammed my head right into Bald Thug’s gut. I drove him backward, doing my best to knee his face as he fell. I didn’t catch him solid anywhere, but I knocked the breath out of him long enough to throw myself onto the floor. I scrambled to the couch as fast as I could, because I could already hear B-Thug climbing to his feet behind me. If I’d been planning to make a run for it, I wouldn’t have made it. I wasn’t, though. I was just trying to get to my sofa gun.