For each of them, the developer was listed as Walter Dumas.
I clapped Gio on his borrowed shoulder, and fought the urge to do a little end-zone dance. His meaty face broke into a grin. “Nice work, Gio —this is perfect.”
“So what now?”
“Print it. Print it all.”
It was dusk when we arrived back at the squat, and the house was submerged in shadow, the nearest working lights over two blocks away. The second we pulled into the driveway, I heard Roscoe screaming “HELP!” over and over again, to no one. He must’ve been carrying on like this a while; his voice was hoarse, and his calls sounded more rote than plaintive, as though his heart wasn’t really in it anymore. He picked up a bit when he heard us coming in, but when he spotted me through the open bathroom door, he slumped against his restraints, and his shouting ceased. Seeing him there, glaring at me in petulant defeat from atop the unplumbed toilet, he looked for all the world like a child sentenced to a time-out.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“You been shouting like that the whole time?”
“No,” he said, too quickly.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Don’t worry —it doesn’t bother me any. It’s just there’s no one around to hear —you really could’ve saved your breath.”
“You two are gonna kill me, aren’t you?”
I laughed. “Roscoe, if we were going to kill you, you’d be dead by now —if only to save ourselves the trouble of carrying your ass around. Look, I know this sucks, OK? But tonight, I’ve got some business to attend to, and once that’s done, me and Gio will be on our way. So just sit tight a while, and everything’s gonna be just fine.”
“Fine. Right. Says the guy who thinks he’s a Grim Reaper.”
“Roscoe, look at me. Whatever it is I think I am, I’m telling you, it ain’t your time to die. Now, maybe I’m nuts, or maybe Gio was just fucking with you, but either way, I promise you you’ll be just fine, OK?”
He locked eyes with me a moment, and then he nodded. “Shit,” he said, though it sounded more like SHEE-it. “I guess I believe you. And it ain’t like I got nothing better to do, I suppose. But do an old man a favor, would you?”
I smiled. Roscoe had no way of knowing it, but I had a few decades on him easy. “Name it,” I said.
“Whatever damn-fool thing you’re fixin’ to do tonight, you be sure to get it done and come back in one piece. Last thing I need is to die strapped to a toilet ’fore my divorce is even finalized —then that thieving devil-woman would wind up with everything insteada just half.”
I smiled. “It’s a deal.”
“Oh, and one more thing —if it ain’t too much trouble, that is.”
“Yeah?”
“I could sure as hell use another beer.”
“So what’s the plan?” Gio asked, once I got Roscoe settled down.
Gio and I were in the midst of a convenience store feast, polishing off the last of the junk food we’d picked up that morning and washing it down with lukewarm beer. Truth be told, it was making me kind of queasy —or maybe that was the thought of what I was about to do.
“The plan?”
“Yeah —like, are we goin’ in guns blazin’, or what?”
“Last I checked, Gio, we didn’t actually have any guns.”
“You know what I mean. Whaddya use to take down a demon, anyway? You stake ’em or some shit? Hit ’em with holy water? There some kinda prayer you gotta say?”
I shook my head. “None of that stuff works.”
“Then what does?”
“Aside of a mystical object designed specifically to kill a demon? Pretty much nothing.”
A pause. “You got one of those?”
“Nope.”
“Know where we can find one?”
“Nope.”
“So what the hell’re we gonna do then?”
“We’re not going to do anything. You’re going to stay here and babysit Roscoe, while I go out there and see what I can find out.”
“So lemme get this straight: I’m supposed to sit here on my hands while you go pokin’ around a demon crack-house fulla scary monsters that want you dead with no strategy, no backup, and no weapons of any kind?”
“Yup.”
“Actually, you know what? My end of this plan don’t sound half bad.”
“You sure?” I asked. “Because it’s not too late to trade.”
Gio laughed. I took a pull of beer, and wished that it were something stronger.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s a damn good chance I won’t come back from this–”
“Aw, come on, man, don’t talk like that.”
“– and if I don’t, you let him go and then you run, you hear me?”
But Gio shook his head. “No need, man. You’ll come back. And Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Make sure you come back.”
21.
Plumes of red-brown dust billowed outward from beneath the Caddy’s wheels as it barreled through the hilly landscape north of town. I hadn’t seen a paved road in over twenty minutes, and the steering wheel struggled against my grasp like a living thing. Storm clouds gathered over the mountains to the east, blotting out the rising moon, and the breeze was thick with the heady scent of creosote resin —a sure sign of coming rain. As darkness descended over the desert, my world shrank to whatever was illuminated by the jitter of my headlights as I jounced along the uneven dirt drive.
Even with my map, I damn near missed the entrance to the box canyon. A stand of cottonwoods obscured its entrance, their thick foliage creating the illusion of a solid mass of rock when really it was cleaved in two. But something in the way the breeze disturbed the leaves gave me pause. A rock shelf should have sheltered them, but instead, they whipped about as though they were in a wind tunnel —which, upon closer inspection, they were.
I ditched the car behind a thicket of tamarisk and plunged into the canyon. Lightning flickered in the distance, providing snapshots of the world around me. The entrance to the canyon was maybe twenty yards across. The canyon floor sloped downward, dense with scrub brush and mesquite, and strewn about with massive hunks of rock. A narrow ribbon of dirt, more trail than road, wound through it all, and disappeared into the nothingness beyond. And, without so much as a flashlight to guide my way, so did I.
Mindful of the fact that the darkness that enveloped me would provide me little in the way of camouflage to the keen eyes of any watching demons, I clung to the edge of the trail, taking shelter among the underbrush. It was slow going, and I stumbled more than once, tearing the knee of my suit pants and scraping the hell out of my palms. An hour in, the rain began, plastering my hair to my scalp and my clothes to my weary, borrowed frame, but I pressed onward, grateful that the noise of it would serve to mask my stumbling gait.
Eventually, the ground began to rise, and above, the pitch-black shadows of the canyon walls gave way to the softer purple-black of storm clouds. A smell like rotten eggs hung in the air, mingling with the scent of desert rain. My pulse quickened, and I scanned the darkness for any sign of sentries or booby traps or the like, but as far as I could tell, there weren’t any. Doubt crept in, and I wondered if I’d been wrong in coming here —if I was wasting my time chasing down a flimsy, dead-end lead as all the while the clock ticked down to Nothing.