want you to walk through a murder scene with me. The victim was Sub Rosa. No rough stuff. Just observation.”
“You have forensics people. Why do you need me?”
“I don’t want them getting too deep into this one yet. I want you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been to Hell.”
“So?”
“I want you to take a look at a body and tell me what you think it means.”
“Are you sure it’s just one body and not five?”
“Funny.”
“I want my full fee.”
“Half. No one is asking you to kill anything.”
“You’re using up my valuable drinking and smoking time. I need compensation.”
“As you just pointed out, we’re government funded, which means that we work within a simple and predetermined pay structure. In other words, looking and pointing doesn’t pay the same as hunting and killing.”
“Tell you what, go down to Chinatown, find a club called the Owl’s Shadow, and hire yourself a Deadhead. Those gloomy necromancers are a bunch of low-self-esteem Siouxsie and the Banshees bitches. They’ll fall all over themselves to help a fed do a murder-scene magic show.”
Wells takes the phone from his pocket, looks at the caller ID, and frowns.
“Look, you can sprinkle some pixie dust around while you’re at the scene. Do some damn magic that won’t break anything and I can get you two-thirds of your normal fee. But that’s it.”
“Done.”
I put out my hand. He puts the phone to his ear so he doesn’t have to shake on it.
“We’ll meet at three A.M., when things are quiet and the bars are closed. I’ll call you with the address.”
“Nice doing business with you, Marshal. Give the missus my best.”
“Get out.”
I DECIDE TO skip the Ray and Huston show on the way out, so I slip through a dark patch on a wall outside the warehouse. Come out in the alley across the street from the Bamboo House of Dolls.
What I thought was a one-night blowout right after I saved the world on New Year’s has turned into a six-month running party. After I tossed Mason to the mob Downtown, it seemed like half the Sub Rosa in L.A. showed up at Bamboo House to kiss his ass good-bye. And they never left. Carlos is happy enough. Sub Rosa tip big at civilian places where they can hang out without ending up part of the floor show.
Most Sub Rosa, you’d never notice. They look boringly human, are human, and go out of their way to fit in with other humans, even if they sometimes dress like nineteenth-century dandies or Mayan priests. Others in the bar look like they stepped off a steam-powered zeppelin from Neptune. They’re the Lurkers, and good, upstanding Sub Rosa don’t like them soiling the furniture at their clubs so they come here. There are succubi and transgendered Lamia. Shaggy Nahual wolf and tiger beast men laughing like frat boys and stacking their beer cans in a pyramid until they knock it over. Again. A group of blue-skinned schoolgirls with pale blond hair and horns peeking out through their pigtails are playing some kind of betting game with ivory cups and scorpions.
Carlos is a big part of the reason Bamboo House of Dolls is still standing. He didn’t even blink when the crusty half of L.A.’s magic underground dropped in to get shit-faced. If Jesus was a bartender, He would still only be half as cool as Carlos. With all his newfound lucre, all the man has done to the place is get some new bar stools, a better sound system, and cleaned up the bathrooms so they’re a little less like a Calcutta bus station. It’s good to have one thing that hasn’t changed much. We need a few anchors in our lives to keep us from floating away into the void. Like Mr. Muninn said the one time he came in, “Quid salvum est si Roma perit?” What is safe if Rome perishes?
“Swamp Fire” by Martin Denny is playing on the jukebox. Carlos comes over with a cup of black coffee.
“You didn’t have to get dressed up just for me,” he says.
“Like the look? It’s from the Calvin Klein Book of Revelations line.”
“The crispy black arm is nice even if it is shedding dead skin all over my floor, but that burned-up jacket is un pedazo de basura.”
“Time to let it go?”
“One of you needs to be buried and my Dumpster has a lovely lakeside view of the alley. Give it to me and I’ll get rid of it.”
I push the charred pile of leather across the bar.
“Do me a favor and pour some salt and bleach on it when you put it out.”
“Is that a magic thing or a cop thing?”
“Both. Bleach for DNA. Salt for any leftover hoodoo someone can use in a hex.”
He nods and puts the jacket under the bar.
“I’m guessing since you haven’t even looked at that coffee that you want a drink.”
“Some of the red stuff.”
“You sure?”
“Does the pope live in a nice house?”
“At least have some food, too. I just pulled some pork tamales out of the steamer.”
“Maybe that and some rice?”
“You got it.”
“City of Veils” by Les Baxter comes on. Crazy trumpets and drums at the beginning, then it slides into old-fashioned strings and Hollywood exotica. I half expect to see Errol Flynn dressed like a pirate in a corner booth trying to get a hand job from Lana Turner. After some of the red stuff, maybe I will.
I haven’t heard that Alice song again since the night it came blaring out of the jukebox, like nails being hammered into my ears. I had Carlos check and the song wasn’t even on the machine. He had the company bring him a new box, just so I wouldn’t sit at the bar getting twitchy, waiting for it to come up again.
Later I knew that the song had never been on the machine. It was one of Mason’s hexes. He wanted to watch me go crazy. If he’d pumped me full of LSD and locked me in a spinning mirrored room full of rats, he couldn’t have done any better.
That was six months ago. Half a year since I sent Mason to be poached in Hell and waved bye-bye to his Kissi pals as they burned up and blew away on the solar winds. A hundred and eighty days since I watched Alice’s ashes drift away like fog into the Pacific. I’m doing fine, thanks. Maybe a little bruised around the edges, but I have all the medicine I need right here in this glass.
Carlos sets down the plate of tamales and pours a double shot of the red stuff into a heavy square tumbler, the way we used to drink it in Hell. Aqua Regia is so red it’s almost black, like blood under moonlight. It goes down smooth, like
