keep them from knowing that the filthy room made me happy.
When I was in Hell a funny thing happened. Every time I got beaten, burned, stabbed, or impaled in the arena, it just made me stronger. When I discovered I was a nephilim, it all made sense. But at the time I didn’t know why it was happening. The Hellion fight masters and soldiers wanted to know why I didn’t have anything useful to tell them and they beat me more. Which only made me stronger. Hellions aren’t always clear on cause and effect.
Then they started the mind games. They’d spike my food with a kind of Hellion Ecstasy and send in the damned soul of a pretty murderess to play concubine. We’d work each other for a while, and when I was good and relaxed the questions would start. I didn’t even realize I was being interrogated, it felt so good talking to another human. But I still couldn’t answer their questions because I didn’t have any answers. They tried young women and old ones, boys and oiled-up beefcake. They still didn’t get any answers and by then my body had grown used to the drugs. But I could fake it. When the last devil doll didn’t get any answers, a gaggle of disappointed guards bum-rushed my cell and did the hokeypokey on my head. I’d been in my Folsom Prison mansion a few weeks by then. I’d found the weak bolt in the iron door on my second night. I’d worked it out with my nails and teeth and had been sharpening it on the stone walls ever since.
I shoved it through one guard’s ankle and kept going north, peeling off his calf muscle. That caught the other guards by surprise and they stopped kicking me for a second. Just enough time for me to get hold of one and shove the bolt into his thigh, opening up an artery that painted my walls and the last two guards with glistening black Hellion blood. It looked like we’d struck oil in there. They didn’t try the pleasure principle on me again, which was nice, but a couple of days later I lost my private suite and got moved back to the bunkhouse with the other cattle. Moo, motherfucker.
“So you made it for them.”
Vidocq nods.
“Yes. To give myself just a little credit, I did it rather badly. After several attempts in which I produced mild forms of the drug and pure poison in one case, I convinced the marshal that the ingredients he had acquired were of too poor a quality. I suppose he believed me because I remained alive and unincarcerated.”
“That’s good news, then,” says Candy.
I look at her.
“If it’s so hard to make and there are so few dealers, that means it’s a small operation, right?”
“Or a bunch of lousy ones,” I say.
Vidocq shakes his head.
“No. If people had died from Akira, there would be rumors everywhere. Candy is right. Akira is a specialized business. Possibly as small as one or two labs.”
“See,” Candy says. “I’m a good detective too.”
“Just like Philip Marlowe. He’s the one with the robot glasses in The Maltese Falcon, right?”
Candy sticks her tongue out at me. The sight of it is more distracting than I want it to be.
“Thanks for the talk. I think I’ve got things clearer. Now both of you get out. I’m doing this thing alone.”
Silence. Then Vidocq pipes up.
“Do you think that’s wise? You’re not in the best frame of mind today.”
“That’s why you’re not coming. Call a cab.”
“Stark—” says Candy. I cut her off.
“I mean it. You’re both reasonable and I don’t want reasonable around when I talk to an Akira dealer.”
Neither of them moves. Candy’s up front with me. I reach across her and open the door.
“Go. I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’m calling you in one hour,” she says. “If you don’t like it, tough.”
Candy and Vidocq get out. I leave them on the curb and head for the 405.
I can already picture Carolyn as one of those seductive damned souls that used to hover around my room under the arena. Getting me high. Getting me talking. Treating me like the soft fool I was back then. I’m not soft now and I’m even less forgiving. I don’t know if Carolyn’s blood is red or black, but if things go right, I just might find out.
CAROLYN MCCOY LIVES on Cantara Street in a run-down tract home surrounded by a low metal fence and a half-dead lawn where patches of bleak grass break through the bare soil. Her house is right across the street from Sun Valley Park. Prime real estate for a small-time dealer.
I knock on her front door. It takes a while for anything to happen. I can hear someone banging around inside. I surprised her. She’s hiding her stash.
The front door opens. Carolyn doesn’t open the screen door, but stands there blinking in the sun like a not very bright groundhog. I’ve seen exhumed corpses with better tans.
“Who the fuck are you?” she says.
I lean close to the screen and smile.
“Hi. I’m a young college student trying to earn extra money selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Would you be interested in a ten- to twenty-year subscription to Possession with Intent to Sell, and its sister publication, I’m Going to Burn Your House Down While You’re Asleep in Bed Tonight?”
She stares, her mouth open a little, like she’s trying to form a question but forgot how to speak English in the last three seconds. I pull the screen door open and brush past her inside. She stands there, turns, and watches me invade her living room.
Carolyn has short dry hair that frames her face perfectly. She’d be pretty if she didn’t have deep bruise-colored rings around her eyes and her skin wasn’t the texture of sandpaper. There are red welts on the inside of her arms where she’s been compulsively picking at the skin. I can smell not-quite-metabolized meth in her sweat. Her heart’s jacked up and her eyes are pinpricks, but that’s the drugs and not me. The angel in my head wants me to go easy so the back of her skull doesn’t blow off and take her brain with it. That’s a good idea. On the other hand, she’s dealing DHS black-box psychic poison to teenyboppers who don’t have a clue that demons, Kissi, and other brain-sucking assholes are out there waiting to get a claw hold in their cortex.
Carolyn stands by the door, arms crossed. When the clockwork in her brain kicks back in, she follows me into an avocado-and-orange living room with overstuffed chairs, throw pillows, and a long rattan sofa. It looks like the set for a seventies snuff film. She stops a few feet away and looks at me with a jittery stare, trying to figure out if she should know me. If she owes me money. If I owe her.
“Sit down,” I say.
She doesn’t. I take a step toward her.
“Sit down,” I say again.
She walks around me and sits on the sofa, knees together, hands folded in her lap like she just graduated from charm school. I sit across from her on a cushioned green chair. I pull it over to the sofa so we’re sitting face-to-face. The chair springs are long gone and my ass tries to sink below my knees. Not a good look when you want to
