Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (12 page)

It was a massive hit.

With the money, Wood could finally afford some real drugs, and subsequent writings both expanded the scope of the original book, cleaned up a few of the odder ramblings (including an extended rant against drinking orange juice in the mornings, which, like a lot of his teachings, had something to do with the bowels), and added some more esoteric stuff.

It was around this time that one of the many Rosicrucian splinter groups got their claws into the guy, and his writing started adding elements of their mysticism into it. Before long, they supplanted him and had created the cult that we all know and love, lest their fleet of lawyers sue us back into the Stone Age.

I worked for the Rosicrusophists in many different capacities. They knew me as Jim Dawson, former agent. That’s agent in the actorly sense and not the double sense, which was sort of ironic since, due to my possession of a conscience, I was much closer to the latter. To make certain they’d want me, I included a lot of self-sabotage in the bio. I made sure it looked like I was a guy who was not living up to his potential. Toss in some close calls with success, a couple of later stars who had only succeeded after firing Jim Dawson, and a problem with alcohol, and I was all set. And do you know what? The teachings of Frank Wood were just the thing to put me on the right path. That’s some luck, right?

I had to take some of their classes to prove my bona fides. They were mostly harmless, but I could see how they might grab someone who wasn’t quite so bored. It’s not that I have a lot of willpower; I just have a keen bullshit detector and a lack of desire to improve myself. It’s a potent combination. The real irony was that they
did
teach me something, just not what they’d wanted to: watching their techniques helped me identify the weak points in the brain, which helped me deceive people on a regular basis.

I pulled up at the gate at the mansion. “Jim Dawson here to see Regina.”

The speaker barely crackled. They had tons of money, the Rosicrusophists, and weren’t shy about spending it.

After a moment, the carefully emotionless voice on the other end of the intercom said, “Miss del Monaco invites you to join her on the veranda.”

The gate opened with nary a creak and I drove up the semicircular flagstone driveway in front of the mansion. It was self-consciously English, with ivy climbing brick walls and cozy rooms stuffed with antiques and pretension.

I left my car out front and headed inside. The house was beautiful, with a few careful modern touches here and there. A flatscreen TV in a living room played the news to an audience of no one. A closed laptop sat on a desk looking out over an impossibly green garden. I could hear people lurking in the house, probably servants, but I didn’t see a single person.

I went through a set of large French doors leading out onto a stone patio. There I saw Regina del Monaco at her wire-framed breakfast table, eating like a bird. Initially, I mostly saw the huge hat and sunglasses she used to keep out of the sun. I swear, it was shit like that that made half the Information Underground think vampires were real.

She smiled when she saw me come outside, but it was a brittle, artificial thing. I didn’t take that personally. Rosicrusophists always came off a little phony. It was the fault of their obsessive need to control social situations: they lost the ability to be spontaneous.

Regina was an attractive woman, and had paid a great deal of other people’s money to stay that way. She employed several personal trainers, a cook, a dietitian, and an army of surgeons. Thirty years ago, she had been legitimately gorgeous, a freckly fresh-faced beauty with the perfect black Irish complexion. Now her skin was a uniform shade of ivory, stretched tight and crepe-thin. Her body had not a single bit of softness, and with her muscles, I was pretty certain she could kick my ass without really trying. Her hair was dyed an unnatural black, lacking the subtle auburn highlights of her youth. Her green eyes, behind the shades, were in delicate pits. Her lips were the only plump things on her.

I stopped at the edge of her table. She was eating egg whites and spinach, with a little melon and blueberry on the side. She was drinking something thick and green. Swamp Thing’s snot, from the smell of it.

She looked me over. “What on earth happened to you?”

I looked pretty bad. Other than my obviously broken nose, I was coated in yellow dust from the Santa Monicas, and abrasions covered my forearms and the heels of my hands. I had a few cuts on my face from brambles and some developing blisters from digging my own grave.

“Things got a little out of hand at the Bieber concert.”

She clucked her tongue. “Mr. Dawson, how do you expect to ever rise in degrees if you persist in lying?”

“Nepotism and intrigue.”

Regina didn’t bother to dignify that. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“Actually, yeah. I’m starving.”

“Finally, the truth.”

No idea where the guy came from. Maybe Regina employed breakfast ninjas, trained to slink from the bougainvillea and provide eggs to hungry people in the mornings.

“Get Mr. Dawson a plate, please.” When she spoke, she always met the other person’s eyes. Though hers were practically invisible through her owl-glasses, I could feel them whenever they settled on me. She had the kind of palpable attention usually reserved for grade-school teachers and creepy uncles.

The man, dressed rather nattily in a stylized Salvation Army uniform—the Rosicrusophists had a thing about the Salvation Army—nodded and left. Regina gestured at the chair, which looked like it was made out of metal vines, across from her. “Please, sit.”

I obeyed, settling down on the cold metal.

“Where have you been, James?” she asked.

“Here and there. You know, working on my spirit self. That kind of thing.”

“You disappear for a full year, and that is what you have to say for yourself?”

“I’m here now.”

“Indeed you are. I heard you were in the city last night. I also heard you had a rather... unfortunate encounter with a rough element.” She was filling every word with distaste, trying to make it sound like anyone in the organization would be sullying their path toward enlightenment by frequenting such a place. But the fact was, she heard from a high-level operator who
lived
in places like that. And the Rosicrusophists didn’t have a single leg to stand on when it came to worshiping the Almighty Dollar.

“Yeah. Little misunderstanding. He thought I was dating his sister, and I reminded him he doesn’t have one.”

“Your lies should be a little more convincing if you want me to believe them.”

“Small debt. It’s worked out now.”

“Much better.” She speared a blueberry. “I don’t need to remind you that I still hold your contract.”

No, you hold the contract for Jim Dawson, who is a figment of my imagination and still has a Blockbuster card because he has trouble letting go of the past. And you’ll hold that contract for another trillion years, since the terms outlast my existence in corporeal form.

“You do.”

A plate slid in front of me. It was—I hesitate to call it an omelet, but that appeared to be the intent—an egg white omelet shot through with slimy strands of spinach and smaller objects I later determined to be capers. Artfully arranged slices of fruit gave me a splash of color contrasting with the lump of bran muffin on the side.

“Make certain you eat the muffin, James. Your bowels could use the assistance.”

“Good to know.” I wanted to turn my nose up at the whole thing, but the fact was I hadn’t eaten since Dan’s office. I horked down the contents of my plate while Regina pretended not to notice.

“As I said, you disappeared quite suddenly and with no explanation, leaving me holding the proverbial bag.”

I had the feeling she was trying to make me feel guilty. I played along. “I’m really sorry about that, and believe me, it will not happen again.”
After this next time, as soon as Mina’s out of jail and I never have to look at the creepy way your skin bunches up under your jaw when you chew.

She smiled, beginning to resemble a really well-preserved iguana. “Fortunately, you have a way to make it up to me.”

“I do?” I tried to sound more hopeful than I felt. Which shouldn’t have been hard, considering that how little hope I was presently feeling could be found only with the assistance of very advanced electron microscopes. Regina was a powerful woman, and turning her down was a bad idea. She needed to be handled, and quickly, so I could get back to my real job without her looking over my shoulder.

Regina raised a bare arm that looked like it was made from white chocolate jerky. I heard the French doors opening and turned my head.

I recognized the woman striding through them, but I couldn’t remember from where. I started running through secret societies in my head. She was in her late twenties and very pretty in a way that only the very deluded would call “Girl Next Door.” Her coloring was all California: golden tan, sunbleached blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders, and big brown eyes I could see from across the room. She was dressed casually but stylishly—I’d hung around with Mina long enough to recognize expensive style when I saw it. It was killing me that I couldn’t place her, and I realized I was staring. Instantly, I turned back to my food, not wanting the woman to mistake my brainfart for romantic interest.

“James, this is Heather Marie Tooms, 16th Degree. Heather, this is James Anthony Dawson, 3rd Degree.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Heather said with a sunny smile that showed off a mouthful of flawless, gleaming white teeth.

And just like that I knew where I knew her from. “Uh, hi! Nice to meet you. I’m a big fan.”

Heather Marie Tooms, written in Papyrus across a dark screen while this same woman, five years younger and playing five years younger than that, was fighting demons with the rest of her all-girl band. Yeah, I knew her, but it was as Summer Frye, the lead singer of the Demon Eyez. Surfer girl cruelly turned into a vampire, she had used her powers to fight all the creatures of darkness. The girl who played the punky drummer had been nominated for an Oscar last year for playing George Clooney’s age-inappropriate love interest, and the Asian keyboardist had her own TV show where she was a computer programmer who solved crimes with the internet or something. I don’t remember Heather Tooms being in anything after the CW cancelled
Demon Eyez
.

“It’s always nice to meet a fan,” she chirped, although I swear there was a flash of rage in her eyes.

“I didn’t know you were a Rosic... uh, one of us,” I said, trying to regain my equilibrium after coming face to face with someone who would no doubt feature prominently in a “Remember the Early Aughts?” piece on Buzzfeed soon.

“Oh yes. Rosicrusophy helped me turn my life around.”

I nodded eagerly, not voicing what I desperately wanted to:
Yeah, weren’t you a successful actress before you joined?

“I’m so glad you two are getting along,” Regina said, though there was no sign of any actual gladness in her voice. “James, your assignment is to drive Heather wherever she wishes to go.”

I blinked. That wasn’t going to work. I had a girlfriend to clear of murder charges and some unknown person to stick those charges to. Not that I could say any of this. I settled on a guttural noise of abject confusion.

“I can’t wait to work with you, James,” Heather said to me, her relentless eye contact going far beyond intense into serial murderer and door-to-door evangelist territory.

“What are we doing now?” I managed, my perfectly engineered breakfast moshing in my innards.

“Whatever Heather needs you to do. Beyond that, I can’t get into specifics with someone of your rank. Perhaps if you work on purging your negative eidolons and harnessing our technosis, you will be privy to more details later.”

“Come on, James!” Heather grabbed my hand, pulling me up and out of my seat. “Can I call you Jim?” she asked, her hand settling into a far more romantic position, like we were strolling through a park together. I was acutely uncomfortable.

Heather towed me through the house. I stopped in front of the television, where the news was showing a helicopter shot looking down at a section of the Golden State Freeway. A smallish bus with barred windows was on its side, a huge hole almost cracking it in half, with smoke billowing from the cab. Other cars had plowed into it and several were burning with the greasy smoke of oil fires.

“This was the scene yesterday in Burbank,” the anchor said. “Vassily Zhukovsky, alleged head of a criminal conspiracy...”

Vassily’s mugshot popped up on the screen, and the anchor kept jabbering on about the man’s resume, of which he had less than half. Turned out Vassily escaped shortly after I arrived in town.
Thanks, K-PLOT
, I thought at the TV.
Could have used this information
before
that same maniac put me in his trunk. Good job.

“Who’s he?” Heather asked, abruptly noticing my interest.

“Some gangster, I guess.”

“Looks scary to me.” She flashed me a smile. “Stay here, okay?”

She scampered off, returning quickly with an overnight bag, which she handed to me without thinking twice about it. I was getting even more nervous. “Let’s go!” She led the way outside, the smile pasted across her face never wavering once. “Which one is yours?” she asked, gesturing to the luxury cars and single dusty hybrid like she couldn’t tell.

Just to mess with her, I pointed at a Rolls. “That one.”

She put her hands on her hips, giving me the scolding schoolteacher pose. “Regina said I’d have to watch you.”

“Yeah, I’m a stinker.”

I led the way to my little car and nearly put her bag in my trunk before remembering if I did that, there would be moonrock growing over it and I’d have to explain why I had two ridiculously important artifacts in my trunk. I put the bag in the back seat instead. She got in on her side and we drove through the gate onto the street. “All right, where to?” I asked.

She rattled off an address on the Avenue of Stars in Century City. As it happened, it was an address I knew quite well. It was the local office for Quackenbush Security, a truly terrifying group of ex-spooks, soldiers, and general murderers. It was also a group I had recently pissed off when I led one of their top guys, an operative named Burt Shaw, to his death. Well, technically, I wasn’t positive he was dead, but I was pretty sure. Regardless, he wasn’t coming back from wherever he was.