Not that they were going to be my neighbors much longer, I felt pretty sure—some tenant must have called the police by now. Even in this part of Jude, indoor gunshots were unusual. Sorry, Temuel, but it looked like I was about to be driven out of another shitty apartment by work-related mayhem, whether the folk Upstairs liked it or not.
“What the genuine fuck . . . ?” said Sam. He grabbed me and kept me from collapsing. I seemed to be dribbling blood everywhere.
“Oh, yeah.” I paused to listen. Our Bald Thug was not a small man, and I could hear him caroming down the stairs like a two-hundred-fifty pound pachinko ball. “Yeah, you definitely took the words right out of my mouth, Sammy-boy.”
• • •
Sam opened the windows to ease the lingering sting of the pepper spray, then kindly filled a towel with some ice for me. Since I didn’t have a towel big enough to cover all the bruised areas, I concentrated on my face. While I lay on the couch, revolver still in hand in case any of my new friends came back, Sam scavenged the pantry for something non-alcoholic to drink and finally found one of the warm cans of Vernors that I kept around just for him.
When he popped the tab, tiny little bubbles flew out the hole like angry wasps. Sam took a long swig. “Ah,” he said. “The Scotch Bonnet pepper of ginger ales. Nice fit with your new air-freshener.” He pulled up a chair beside the couch and handed me my Belgian-made.45. “Found it on the kitchen floor. Somebody probably kicked it out of the way.”
I gave him a quick rundown on what had just happened, along with the rest of the recent news, including the Spook Train ride I’d been on even before I’d found B-Thug and friends in my apartment, scratchings and spiders and disembodied monkey-paws. “Which reminds me,” I said as I finished. I didn’t want to come off all suspicious with my only real friend, but the timing of his arrival had been strange. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was in town, and since I missed the lunch . . .” He got distracted by the design of the missionaries’ tattoos that I’d scrawled on the back of a Chinese delivery menu so I wouldn’t forget. “This is the ink they had, huh? Never seen it. Looks kind of Eastern—Indian, maybe.”
“Yeah, but they sounded like local junior college students, and they were dressed like the kind of guys who travel in black helicopters.”
“You always meet the most interesting people, B. Then they try to kill you.” Sam frowned at the drawing. “We should look this up online.”
“If I knew what it was called, I would. But since I don’t, I have other ways to get information.” I took a picture of the drawing and emailed it to my friend George, aka Fatback, researcher par excellence. “Shit,” I said, catching a glimpse of the clock. “He won’t even be human for hours.”
“Don’t be a hater. You and I haven’t been human for years.”
“You know what I mean.” My main researcher happens to be a were-hog, which isn’t all that common, whatever some single women may tell you. “While he has pig-brain, he’s not going to be able to do anything.”
“We can wait. What were you planning to do this evening, anyway, sport? Your face looks like ground beef, and from the way you’re breathing you’ve got a couple of cracked ribs, too. I recommend you settle back, hold that ice against the meatloaf on the front of your head, and let me bring in something to eat.” He held up the menu with the tattoo scrawl. “How about Happy Buddha?”
“I just had Asian food,” I said. I felt my jaw and groaned. “But you get what you want. I think it’s going to be nothing but broth for me until at least tomorrow.”
• • •
At about eleven I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing Sam had said in the last half an hour. I needed to crash so badly I couldn’t hold my head up. I told Sam he didn’t have to watch me all night.
“Naw, I’m staying. What if those assholes come back, B?”
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not moving off this couch because all my bones are broken. You can sleep on my bed.”
He got up to examine the tangle of not-washed-lately sheets. “Never mind. I’ll sleep in my car downstairs.”
“Don’t be such a pussy. Just pull that stuff off and get my sleeping bag out of the closet. Or there’s even some clean sheets and blankets in there, I think.” Actually, I wasn’t too sure of that at all.
“Yeah, I’ll take the sleeping bag. Can’t be any worse than some of the places I’ve slept.” He leaned in through the bedroom doorway and called out, “Don’t take that as a challenge, you weird organisms that live here in Bobby’s filthy room.”
“Fuck you, Sammy.” I sank back into the couch and pulled the blankets up, but I wasn’t ready to relax. I really wanted a drink, but I wasn’t going to ask my teetotal buddy to pour it for me, even though he would have. I got up and staggered across to the cabinet where the vodka bottle was and brought it back to the couch. “Don’t wake me up for anything short of Judgement Day.”
But I didn’t get to sleep anywhere near that long. Sometime between eleven and midnight my phone rang.
“Hi, Mr. Dollar? It’s me, Edie. You said to call. I hope it’s not too late.”
By now my entire skull felt like a flower pot that had been dropped from a third story balcony, so I just said, “No, ’s fine.”
“Okay, that’s good. Doctor Gustibus says he’ll talk to you.”
“Who?” I wasn’t entirely awake.
“Doctor Gustibus? You know, the guy I was working for at Islanders Hall? He says he’ll talk to you if you want. At his house. I’ll give you the directions if you have a pen.”
Sam was snoring contentedly in my room, so I got up and walked my throbbing head around until I found something to write with. “Shoot.”
When Edie had finished and hung up, I stared blearily at the scrap of paper to be sure it made some kind of sense, then I put it in my wallet and slid back into dreams of marching columns of Disney cartoon characters, who each stopped to punch me in the head before goose-stepping past. There were a lot of them.
Man, that was a long night.
seven:
world’s edge
THE PHONE woke me again about quarter to five. It was a client. Well, to be more precise, it was Alice informing me I had a client. Alice has been working for the main office as long as I’ve been an angel. She’s efficient (in an at-least-the-trains-run-on-time sort of way) but she has a voice that could strip paint and the personality of an itchy Komodo dragon. Choosing her to be our dispatcher, like the Hallelujah Chorus ringtone, shows that somebody in the heavenly hierarchy has a third-grade sense of humor.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked her.
“Can’t. I lie awake feeling bad about having to wake up hungover bums like you.”
See? The milk of angelic kindness positively drips from that woman.
Sam was asleep on top of my bed, sprawled like an elephant seal on the sand and making similar noises. I took a quick shower, doing my best not to scream when the soap got into all the scrapes and cuts, then rang my friend Fatback to see if anything was happening on the research front.
“Morning, Mr. D!” He sounded quite cheery for a man who was going to turn back into a brainless beast in a man’s body at any moment. “I’m just sending out that stuff you asked about.”
“Thanks, George. Anything interesting?”
“Nothing out of your normal range of weirdness. That design’s called the Sonnenrad, the sun wheel. It’s always been big with racial pride groups in Europe, but the occult boys in Hitler’s SS picked it up, too, and it’s associated with some of their black rituals. That means modern neo-Nazis love it, of course, and there’s a pretty nasty group these days named the Black Sun Faction—“Black Sun” is another name for that Sonnenrad design. I can’t find much about them, but they look spooky.”