Aloha from Hell

“Kasabian still has access to Lucifer’s book, The Daimonion Codex. He keeps an eye on Downtown twenty-four/seven. If Mason makes a move, I’ll know about it.”

“Why not simply go yourself?”

“I’ve tried a few times. Even changing my face with a glamour, there’s always some Hellion or other who spots me and I have to de-ass the place fast. There’s got to be another way to get to him, but I haven’t figured it out yet.”

I’m lying. I’ve tried it a couple of times and I was so nervous that the glamour wasn’t even half-baked. I thought I could walk back Downtown like Patton riding a tank. But I can’t. The smell and the heat hit me and I’m back on the arena floor, ripped open and bleeding, hoping my guts don’t slip out into the dirt. Or I’m covered in thick Hellion blood, playing hit man for another Hellion while he tells me Alice will be safe as long as I keep killing for him. And then she’s dead and all I am is a murderer. So I close the door to Hell and I slink back home, sitting at my favorite bar long enough that the smell fades and Kasabian won’t know what a coward I’ve become.

What’s more useless than a weak-kneed killer?

“You’ll find a way in,” says Vidocq.

I nod and finish my drink, putting on my serious, thoughtful face.

“I hope it’s soon. Since I can’t play Hannibal Downtown, the angel in my head wants me to roam the streets at night looking for bad guys like Batman. I got so pissed one night that I actually did it. Know what happened? Exactly nothing. Looking to get mugged is crazy and bad guys walk the other way when they see crazy coming. What I need is angel Valium to shut this Boy Scout up.”

Muninn nods.

“I know how it feels to constantly be at odds with those closest to you. Eventually you reach the point where none of you can stand the sight of each other anymore. My brothers and I are like that.”

“Brothers?” says Vidocq.

That’s more interesting than a two-headed calf singing “Some Velvet Morning” in tight harmony. I have about a million questions, but most aren’t real discreet. I go with the easiest.

“Are they like you? Live in caverns and know everything about everything?”

Muninn shakes his head, lost in thought. He stares at the green liquor bottle.

“I have four brothers, and no, none live in caverns. None of us is even the slightest bit like the others. I haven’t seen any of them in years. Centuries. Occasionally I miss them, but the truth is that I have no real interest in tracking any of them down. I daresay they feel the same thing about me.”

No one says anything. We’ve hit into one of those weird silences that happen when someone drops something too real into the middle of a conversation that should just have been about drinking and patting ourselves on the back. Somehow, while we were talking, Muninn has opened the box and extracted a scroll from the scarab. I pick it up.

“What’s so special about this that we had to bust open Fort Knox to get it?”

Muninn’s eyes lighten. He smiles.

“Yes, that. The scroll is for a gentleman in, let’s say, investment banking. A man like that can do extraordinary damage to his soul. Maybe even several souls. He is always on the market for new souls to wear until he ruins them too. Even L.A.’s many soul mongers can’t keep up with him. The price of souls is going up for everyone. And Los Angeles is a town that needs all the souls it can lay its hands on.”

“So, the scroll is a soul?”

“No. It’s a bit like … What do you call the elixir that restores hair?”

“Rogaine?”

“Yes! Rogaine for the soul. It restores and replenishes the user’s original umbra. A re-souling will last him a year or two I hope. Buyers can become testy when they want a new soul and you have to tell them that the cupboard is bare.”

“Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about my life.”

Vidocq says, “If you feel so good, why not come take a trip with me tomorrow?”

“Another job?”

“That’s for you to decide. I sometimes do work for a private investigator. Today she called and asked about you. She has a job that she believes you would be perfect for.”

I finish my drink and smile.

“Get mixed up in a total stranger’s problems for no good reason? Sounds like a scream, but I think I’ll pass.”

“Maybe doing something for a stranger will settle down your angel,” says Muninn.

The moment he says it, the haloed bastard starts squirming around. It tickles the inside of my skull and not in a good way. I try to push him back into the dark, but he smells a hero moment and won’t budge.

“And there’s my poor, abused knee,” the old man says, patting his leg. “You owe me for tossing me through a window tonight.”

I turn from Vidocq to Muninn.

“Never save a Frenchman’s life. He’ll hold it against you for the rest of yours.”

I look at Vidocq and screw up my face into the least sincere smile I can make.

“What the hell? I haven’t done anything truly stupid in weeks.”

THE BEAT HOTEL is in a typically glamorous area, near the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and North Gower.

Across from the hotel is the Museum of Death, a fenced gray bunker with a ten-foot painted skull out front. Next to it is the long-dead Westbeach Recorders, an empty studio local acts used to record and where Pink Floyd recorded part of The Wall (I believe that like I believe Jesus invented chili dogs). Down the street a car dealership is dying in the desert sun, the parboiled cars like beached fish carcasses slowly cooking to squid jerky. A couple of strip malls and empty parking lots on the corner. The front of the Beat Hotel is painted a pale industrial green. Maybe green paint was on sale that day or maybe it’s supposed to be ironic. I’ve never been sure.

If any of this makes you think I don’t like the Beat Hotel, you’re wrong. It’s like a cross between a seventies swingers no-tell motel and the kind of hipster hot spot where rock stars stay when they don’t want to be seen bringing home good smack or bad strippers. The rooms are comfortable in a Zen halfway-house kind of way. But the kitchens are decorated in bright primary-colored vinyl like a Playboy-chic burger joint. The place looks like where David Lynch would meet Beaver Cleaver’s mom for secret afternoons of bondage and milk shakes. I love it.

Kasabian and I have been there about three weeks. I rented us a room for the month. At the end of the month I’ll probably do it again. You’re not supposed to stay for more than a week, but I pay the right people to change my name on the registry so it looks like someone new moves in every Saturday.

I had to get out of Max Overdrive for a while. All the rebuilding going on after the zombie riots—the saws and hammers and especially the stink of new paint—was making me feel kind of stabby. None of it bothered Kasabian, of course. He’d put on headphones, crank up the volume on Danger: Diabolik, and peck away on his computer. The smell didn’t bother him because he doesn’t have lungs, so he doesn’t breathe.

Kasabian and I have a lot in common. Like me, he’s a monster; only he wasn’t born that way. I made him one when I cut off his head with the black bone knife I brought back from Hell. The blade that didn’t let him die. Now he’s a chain-smoking, beer-stealing pain in my ass. To get specific, Kasabian is a head without a body. And he won’t shut up about it. He gets around on what to a civilian would look like a polished mahogany skateboard with a couple dozen stubby brass Jules Verne legs underneath. Really, it’s a hoodoo-driven prosthetic for a guy who’s wandering around with nothing but a bad attitude below his neck. It’s his own fault. When I came back from Hell, the idiot shot me, so I cut off his head. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I’m stuck with him. We’ve gotten as used to each other as a couple of monsters can be. But I’ll never get used to a roommate surfing around on a magic plank like a beer-swilling Victorian centipede.

And that’s the other reason we’re at the hotel. I don’t want some schmuck carpenter wandering upstairs and getting an eyeball-ful of Kasabian’s disembodied cranium. When the guy’s brain explodes, our insurance would go through the roof.

I go right to the game room set up for the guests. There’s an “Out of Order” sign outside. I rap on the door using the secret knock Kasabian insisted on. (He’s been watching too many spy movies.) Knock. Pause. Knock. Knock. Pause. Knock. A second later I hear something scrape behind the door and it opens a few inches. I look around to make sure no one can see me and slip inside. When I get in, Kasabian uses his little legs to wedge a wooden chair under the doorknob, then tells me to throw the lock.

I say, “You’re riding the paranoia pony pretty hard today, Alfredo Garcia.”

“Blow me, biped. I have to be security-conscious or I’ll end up freak of the month on YouTube.”

“Don’t sweat it. We’re both going to end up a couple of pickled punks in the Museum of Death someday.”

“Yeah, but I’m not looking for it to happen tonight.”

He clambers on top of the pool table and gives me a sometime-today-asshole look. I roll the cue ball and we lag for break. Kasabian wins. I rack the balls and step back to light a Malediction, Lucifer’s favorite cigarette. You can only get them Downtown, and since I haven’t seen Lucifer in a while, I’m running low. It might almost be worth chancing going back down to snatch and grab a pack or three. Almost.

Kasabian shooting pool is as graceful as a lobster playing soccer. He scuttles around the green felt tabletop, lines up his shot, and kicks the cue ball with his stubby metal legs. I’m not sure if him playing like that is fair, but you’ve got to pick your battles, so I let it go. Besides, it gets him out of the room and makes him happy and that makes him easier to live with.

“What’s that smell?” he asks.

“Me. I got parboiled by a demon when I was out with Vidocq.”

I shrug off the rifle frock coat Muninn gave me and show him the burns on my arms. I’m doing my best to ignore the pain, but I’m going to need a drink soon. Getting tossed in a meat grinder every now and then is part of what I do. I came back to earth to kill things, so I have to expect things to fight back occasionally.

“Nice. New scars to add to your collection. You collect getting fucked up the way old ladies collect state spoons.”

Kasabian takes a shot and sinks the nine, eleven, and four. Two stripes and a solid.

He says, “I’ll play stripes. Thirteen in the corner,” as he lines up the shot. He sinks it.

I puff on the smoke. I get the feeling he’s not going to leave me much else to do.

“So what kind of a demon was it?”

I shake my head.

“Damned if I know. I’d never seen one like it before.”

He creeps around the table, not looking up.

“What did it look like?”

“Not much. I mean, from a distance it looked like a guy in a cheap suit. But when it got closer, it was all Jell-O and acid. When it grabbed me, bang, I was burning.”

He takes one of the blue chalk cubes from the side of the table and uses it on his stubby legs.

“Sounds like a Gluttire.”

“A what?”

“Gluttire. A glutton. He wasn’t burning you. He was trying to dissolve you. Gluttons are pretty rare and mostly eat other demons. You been around any recently?”

“Yeah. The guy whose house we hit had a digger in the wall safe.”

“There you go,” he says, and sinks the fourteen. “He smelled the digger.”

“I need to start bringing cologne on robberies.”

“There’s a ton about demons in the Codex. There’s a lot more kinds of them than you think, but Gluttires are the rarest. Most people never get to see one.”

“Lucky me.”

Things get quiet for a minute. He knows what I’m going to ask.

“Talk to me about Downtown. Got any gossip? Marilyn Monroe dating the Antichrist? Is Lovecraft being tortured by sexy octopuses?”

“What makes you think Monroe’s Downtown?”

“Wishful thinking.”

Kasabian lines up another shot and sinks it. I’m not even paying attention to which balls anymore.

I say, “So?”

Kasabian doesn’t look up when he answers, keeping his eyes down on the table.

“The weather’s hot with a chance of chain saws and bullshit blowing up from the south.”

I walk over and put my hand over the cue ball. Kasabian looks up at me, not at all happy.

I’m bugging him about the one thing he controls. His one little domain. The Daimonion Codex. It’s Lucifer’s Boy Scout manual, Google search engine, and secret angelic ball-buster cookbook all in one. The most valuable thing in Hell besides the horned one himself. It contains every bit of dark, esoteric-stuff-you-don’t-want-to-know-about-if-you-ever-want-to-sleep-again knowledge in the universe. As far as I know, Kasabian is the only one on earth who can read it.

He glances down at my hand and I take it off the cue. He sinks another ball. The little prick has been practicing when I’m not around.

Kasabian used to look things up in the Codex for Lucifer when he was too busy, which was 90 percent of the time. Of course, nothing in Hell works the way it’s supposed to. That’s why they call it Hell. The magic gear down there is like buying Russian souvenirs. The samovars are pretty, but you know they’re going to leak all over your mom’s chintz tablecloth.

What that means is that Hell’s half-assed gear hacks pretty easy. Take the Codex. Kasabian’s supposed to get a peek Downtown just wide enough to read the book. But it doesn’t work right. He’s like one of those traffic surveillance cams that catch you running red lights. If he squints just right, he can see a lot more than the book. He’s like a whole series of traffic cams wired together and he can spyglass all over Hell. Not all of it, but a lot. It’s the one thing he has over me and he never lets me forget it.

He says, “The usual Chuck E. Cheese ball pit-party games. Since Lucifer pissed off back to heaven, Mason’s completely taken over. Lucifer’s generals are having slap fights over battle plans. Mammon and Baphomet have been sabotaging each others’ troops. Poisoning their food and shit like that. All so they can suck up to Mason. Semyazah is the only general who refused to kiss Mason’s ass, so he’s had to blow town.”

“Smart move.”

“Mason’s getting ready for something. He’s pulling troops in from everywhere, but they’re scattered all over Hell, so it’ll take a while. In the meantime he’s got some other game going, but I haven’t figured out what it is.”

I can walk through shadows and come out almost anywhere I want, passing through the Room of Thirteen Doors, the still-central point of time and space. I can get into the Room because years ago one of Lucifer’s generals, the one who wanted me as his personal assassin, stuck a key in my chest. I’m the only one in the universe who can get into the room because I have the only key. But while the Drifters were tearing through town like graveyard locusts I found out that Mason was trying to make his own key.

“Is it the Room of Thirteen Doors? Has he found a way to get in?”

“I don’t think so. If he did, he’d be up here already gnawing on your skull.”

Kasabian is right. Mason isn’t shy or subtle. If he could escape from Downtown, even if it was just for a minute, he’d do it and try to kill me.

“So, what’s he up to?”

“You tell me. You talk to the guy every night. It used to be Alice, which was creepy enough, but now it’s Dr. Doom.”

He shoots at the twelve. It bounces off the cushions and doesn’t drop. My shot.

I set down the cigarette, lay the cue down on my thumb and index finger, and line up a shot.

“What does that mean?”

“Back at Max Overdrive you used to talk to Alice in your sleep. Since we got here, though, whenever you’re asleep you start spinning like a rotisserie chicken and talking to Mason.”

“What do I say?”

I bank the one off the rail and sink it in a corner pocket.

“Aside from ‘Fuck you’ and ‘I’ll kill you,’ you mumble a lot in Hellion, so it’s hard to tell.”

“Buy a dictionary.”

He walks around the edge of the table, a fleshy spider circling a fly.

“There’s something else. It doesn’t really change anything, but you might want to know.”

“What?”

“No one’s all that scared of you Downtown anymore. You used to be the bogeyman who kept them up at night. Now they talk about you like you were the high school bully.”

“So they’ve forgotten about me.”

“I didn’t say that. What I mean is, Mason is the new scary human in town, and you’ve been gone so long, he wins badass title by default.”

I take a shot at the three, but hit it too hard and it rolls back into the center of the table.

I pick up my cigarette and Kasabian crawls back onto the table.

“First he sends me to Hell and then he won’t even let me keep my rep. The little prick wants everything.”

Kasabian lines up a shot.

“So go down there and kill something. Slit some generals’ throats. You’re the monster who kills monsters. Be creative.”

I shake my head.

“Everyone knows my face, and Mason’s put wards on all the entrances I use to get into Hell. He’d know the moment I stuck my big toe down there.”

“Worrying about shit like that doesn’t sound too Sandman Slim to me, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I do mind, but you already said it.”

“Just go down and kill him already! You’ve done lots crazier shit than that before.”

“It’s not the right time. I need to shut down everything he’s doing. Battle plans. Backroom deals with generals. All of it. I need more chaos. You murder someone at the Ice Capades and the place goes apeshit. You blow someone’s head off in a war zone, people step over the body and have a snack.”

“Maybe. A few months back you’d have John Wayne’d your way in there and started your own war. I think that angel in your head’s made you soft. You’ve been Glenda the Good Witch too long.”

He’s right. Mason talked to me once. He possessed other people’s bodies and talked to me through them. He’s getting stronger and he’s working on a key. He’s rallying troops. I should be Downtown murdering him and giving fallen angels new nightmares. I wasted the last six, seven months skipping rope with Wells and the Vigil, drinking myself stupid and losing my edge.

After all this time, I still don’t understand this world. It’s soft and stupid and full of soft and stupid people. Why aren’t they all crazy and ripping each other to bloody confetti? They want to. I can read their eyes. Hear their hearts beating. Smell the fear sweat. The anger sweat. The fury inside they can never let out. I’m turning into one of them. It’s the price of living in this world and trying to fit in.

The angel in my head is part of it. On the other hand, is the angel even there? Maybe I’m going crazy and it’s my Tyler Durden. Maybe I’ve always been crazy, and coming back here let it loose. Hell was my Haldol and without it I’m slowly going schizo. Hearing voices. Taking orders from something that might not even exist.

Alice isn’t here and this place will never be anything but a desert without her. But I’m connected to people now. Vidocq. Allegra. Candy. Carlos. Kasabian. Even Brigitte, who dumped me. They’re the cinder blocks dragging me to the bottom of the ocean. Knowing them, giving a damn about them, sucks the marrow out of my bones. Makes me weak. They want me sane and clean, but the monster in me wants to hear Hellion necks snap and pop like champagne bottles on New Year’s.

Kasabian sinks one ball and lines up another. Am I playing stripes or solids? I can’t remember. I finish the last of my cigarette and drop the butt in an abandoned soda can under the plastic “No Smoking” sign.

“Maybe you should start something here. Go beat up some more skinheads. Fight a dragon. Or a Kissi.”

I look at him, trying to read him. He doesn’t breathe or sweat much, so it’s hard. He’s concentrating on his shot, so I can’t see his eyes.

“What made you say that? The Kissi are gone.”

I know it because I’d killed them, the whole race of deformed, half-finished angels. Well, almost the whole race. I saw one, he calls himself Josef, a few weeks back. He’s alive and he knows where there are other Kissi. We talked about that for a long time.

Kasabian stops and looks at me. We’ve lived together long enough that he knows when I’m being … well, deadly serious.

“Cool out,” Kasabian says. “It was a joke.”

He gives the fifteen a solid kick and it slams into the hole. He moves around fast, trying to get things back to normal. Back to the game. He sinks another.

I say, “Don’t joke about them. I don’t like it.”

“Whatever you say, man. If I hurt your feelings we can watch Fried Green Tomatoes and eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs.”

I can’t stand it anymore. I take out Vidocq’s pain potion and down the whole thing in one gulp.

“No. Let’s watch The Wild Bunch and pay strangers to bring us Korean ribs.”

“Well, fuck me with Lloyd Bridges’s dick. You’re still alive in there after all,” he says. Then, “Corner pocket.”

He lays down a solid kick, bounces the eight ball off the far rail, and sinks it in the corner pocket at my end.

“You pay,” he says.

“I always do.”

I PUT KASABIAN in his bowling bag so I can carry him to the room without the other hotel residents having a nervous breakdown. I close the bag all the way, but he always unzips it a few inches so he can see out.

On the way across the parking lot I spot a Nahual beast man grab a little blonde’s arm. She sounds Scandinavian when she shouts at him. She has on the traditional surfer tank top and shorts all foreign exchange students seem to wear. The Nahual isn’t showing his beast face, so she has no idea that the guy she’s arguing with isn’t human.

I set Kasabian down on a bench and walk over. The Nahual lets the girl go when he sees me. I shove his head through the windshield of a shiny rental car and bounce his face off the dashboard a few times. When I stop hurting him he runs like hell. The Scandy girl hasn’t moved an inch. Her eyes are fixed on the broken windshield. She doesn’t say thanks when I go past, but I don’t expect her to. Between the Nahual and me, she’s too shell-shocked to say anything at all. Welcome to L.A., darlin’.

As I carry Kasabian upstairs he says, “That’s exactly what I was talking about.”

IN THE MORNING it feels like my brain ran away to join the circus, got mauled by a lion, and rolled over every bump and boulder coming home. The pain juice Vidocq gave me doesn’t mix well with Jack Daniel’s, unless you enjoy feeling like someone parked a Saturn V on your eyeballs.

Weird whiskey dreams last night. I dreamed about the old Faces of Death movies. Sideshow pseudo-documentary mash-ups of real and obviously fake footage of people being killed in interesting and creative ways. A real carnage rodeo. And each of my dream segments starred Alice being mangled in wide-screen Technicolor.

After all this time I still don’t know how she died. I know that Parker, a magician, professional asshole, and Mason’s favorite hoodoo thug, murdered her and that Mason ordered it. But I don’t know how Parker killed her. The question always hovers at the back of my mind whenever I think of her. When I’m asleep my dreams play out different scenarios. Everything from a quick bullet in the back of the head to being stabbed and bleeding out. Her death scenes get mixed up with dreams of being back in the arena. Whatever beast I kill morphs into Alice dying at my feet.

I know it’s a kind of betrayal to hide from the truth of how she died, but I know Parker’s mind and I doubt that he made it quick. Parker’s the kind of guy that makes you want to believe in reincarnation. I already murdered him once, but if I had the chance I’d never stop killing him. Killing Parker would be my circuit training. My racquetball game. I could build a whole new healthy lifestyle running him to the ground and snapping his neck three times a week.

VIDOCQ COMES BY with a cab around ten. On my best days, the sun isn’t my friend. This morning, hungover and still wearing yesterday’s clothes, all I can do is cover my head and run from shadow to shadow like a vampire that forgot to wind its watch.

When I get to the cab, Vidocq is waiting by the front passenger door, which is weird. We usually ride in the back so we can talk. I look through the window into the back and see why he’s up front. Candy is inside.

“What, are you playing matchmaker?”

Vidocq grabs the door and starts into the cab.

“Oui. You need to talk to someone besides me and that chattering jack-o’-lantern in your room.”

Vidocq slides in next to the driver. I get in the back with Candy.

She’s in her usual ensemble of white T-shirt, a beat-up and just a little too big leather jacket, Chuck Taylors, and black jeans about to completely give up at the knees. She looks like Joan Jett’s little sister. She’s got on a pair of kid’s sunglasses, like something you’d pick up in Little Tokyo. The frames are white with blue flames and there are flying robots down the sides. When I sit down she doesn’t say hello. She touches the middle of the frames just above her nose. The sunglasses start singing the theme song to some Japanese kiddie cartoon in a tinny robot voice. It makes my skull throb.

“Did you wear those just to torture me?”

She touches the frames and the robot song starts again.

“Not everything is about you, but yeah, pretty much. And I always wanted a robot sidekick.”

“Can it be a quiet robot?”

The song stops. She holds a finger over the frames.

“Don’t make me use my super-awesome robo powers on you again.”

Candy is like me. A monster. Specifically, she’s a Jade. Jades are sort of like vampires, only worse. They dissolve your insides and drink them like spiders. But she’s a good girl and is trying to kick the human milkshake thing with a special potion. Blood-and-bone methadone. Besides being cute and dangerous, she saved my ass from joining the living dead after a Drifter bit me. I was far gone and didn’t want to take the cure, so she stabbed me with a knife coated in the stuff. Yeah, it hurt. And yeah, I’m glad she did it.

I throw up my hands.

“You win. Take our lands and gold but leave me my virtue.”

“Those are my only choices?”

“If you’re going virtue hunting, you better bring a backhoe and dynamite. You’re going to have to dig deep.”

“I’ll bring a strap-on.”

I look at Vidocq in the front seat.

“Make her stop. I’m hungover and she has a robot. It’s not fair.”

“Life is fair only in the grave and in the bedroom. This, you will notice, is neither.”

“That’s why I don’t take cabs.”

I look out the window. The cabbie takes us down Hollywood Boulevard for a few blocks and then U-turns on Sunset and heads back the way we came.

“Where are we headed?”

“The Bamboo House of Dolls.”

“What the hell, man? It’s just a few blocks. We could have walked.”

“But then you might have walked away. You’ll notice I told our driver to take the long way so that I could talk to you. The woman we’re going to meet thought you’d be more comfortable discussing business there.”

“What woman?”

“Julia Sola.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Marshal Julie, you used to call her. One of Marshal Wells’s agents. You liked her. You said she was the only one in the Golden Vigil who treated you like a human being.”

I sit up.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Just cause she didn’t icepick me doesn’t mean I want to work with her. Or any other Homeland Security. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”

“Keep going,” Vidocq says to the driver. He turns back to me.

“Stop behaving like a child. The Vigil is dead and Homeland Security isn’t here anymore. You know that. Julia has opened her own private investigation business. Trust me. Do you think I’m so stupid that I would work for someone without investigating them?”

“With who? Your little thief pals?”

“Who better to know who works for law enforcement and who is a free agent?”

I’m not sure what to think. Vidocq has a nose for cops. He knows how they think, how they work. A hundred years ago he taught the French police forensic analysis techniques he’d picked up from his science and alchemical books, and transformed them from a bunch of medieval thumb breakers into actual cops that could do real criminal investigations.

The cabbie has the radio on. Patti Smith is singing “Ask the Angels.”

Pounding devotion, armegeddon, and rock and roll. A song to die to.

“This situation is total bullshit.”

Candy looks at me, presses the button, and her robot glasses are singing over the radio. I’m back in Hell.

WHEN WE GET to the Bamboo House of Dolls, Vidocq comes around to my side of the car and opens the door fast like he thinks I’m going to bolt. Hands the driver a twenty and doesn’t wait for change. The three of us go inside, where it’s dark and cool. Carlos is behind the bar setting up glasses for the night’s business. He nods at me when we walk in. It’s weird seeing the bar at this time of day with no music playing. The tiki dolls and coconuts look as bleary as I feel.

Carlos says, “Funny seeing you awake. I thought you’d melt like the Wicked Witch if someone tried to wake you up before dark.”

“You, too. Are you part of this conspiracy, too?”

“I’m just the hired help. Ask the pretty lady in the bathroom what’s going on. She booked the place at this unholy hour. Is it your birthday or something? You should have told me.”

“No. This is just me being shanghaied, is what it is. If that’s coffee I smell, I don’t want any. I’m not staying long.”

Julia comes out of the back. Her dark hair is longer than I remember and she’s wearing it up. She has on a sensible black skirt with a power-color bloodred blouse. She looks like a sexy librarian, but moves like someone who could casually dislocate your knee or crack some ribs with a tactical baton.