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That was my first encounter with guns. And since, I’ve gotten a lot more experience, and none of it has been pleasant.

I parked the car, removing the case with the sniper rifle with one hand and sticking the pistol, ammunition, and new driver’s license in a canvas bag I used for groceries. I had delivered enough weapons in my day not to feel too nervous as I walked through the lobby, but the odd look still got to me. I pushed through it, hit the button for 23, and hoped Heather wasn’t about to kill me.

I knocked on her door.

Heather answered it. Her blonde hair was done up in a professional bun and her makeup made her look like the hottest lawyer in the office. She wore a suit, although the skirt seemed a tad short for strict professionalism. I looked at her face to avoid speculating on what the tops of her stockings looked like and how they were secured to her undergarments. Her smile widened slightly, like she could read my mind, happy she was finally eliciting the reaction she wanted. The really weird thing was her eyes were red and she was sniffling a little, like she’d been crying, but the smile was still plastered right where it had been.

“I got your things.”

“And you cleaned up. Very nice! Come on in.” Her voice was as chipper as ever.

She padded back in. She wasn’t wearing shoes. The bathroom door was open and the swirl of scents she had used to craft her personal one was wafting out.

“Put them on the bed,” she said.

I did, sitting down at the table by the window with my crumpled-up bag. Outside, late-afternoon LA sparkled under clear blue skies. Heather picked up the ID first, nodded, and put it back down. She picked up the pistol next, ejected the clip, checked the pipe, and reloaded it. I had a crystal clear vision of her leveling the pistol at me and putting two in my chest and one in my head. I tried not to look like I was expecting it, because that would mean on some level I thought I deserved it.

Then, with clockwork motions, she took the thing apart. Everything was present and accounted for, oiled and perfectly maintained because Rey took pride in his work. She put the pistol back together and laid it down. The rifle came next, and pretty soon it was back together, then in a few pieces and in its case. Finally, she seemed to remember I was in the room. “Good job, Jim! This is exactly what I asked for.”

“I aim to please.”

She smiled, putting the ID in a new leather wallet, which then went into a professional-looking purse along with the pistol. “Let’s get going.”

“Where are we going, exactly?”

“The courthouse,” she said.

I really hoped no one would recognize me there. Guess it depended on how much they knew about Nicky Z. I was planning to use my Scorpio ID, since that one had the best combination of government faith and no apparent connection to what was going on. The name on it, Caleb Merrill, had no criminal record, and large swaths of his fictional past had been wiped away, leaving a southern gothic tragedy that would have made a good bio for an Olympian.

I drove past the parking structure where I always had to park when one of my many aliases got jury duty and I couldn’t postpone or get out of it in some way. You want an unglamorous life, there it is, right there. I’ve served jury duties for literally dozens of people, and it’s not like I could get out of it by saying crazy stuff. Not unless the alias was crazy, like good old Brandon MacGruder, stooge for the Little Green Men. I loved that guy. Anyway, no. I tried to build a presence, a reality, for all my names. So law and order guys like Erick Levitt and Colin Reznick had to show up and back hard-ass penalties. Touchy-feely types like Jonah Bailey and Jim Dawson had to insist on not-guilty verdicts and hope for rehabilitation.

I had the feeling we were going to need to get away a little quicker, so I found a spot about a block away and fed the meter. “How long will we be here?”

“Hopefully not more than two hours,” Heather said, referencing the sign that told me when my car would be towed. I maxed out the meter while Heather left her weapons in the car. I made sure I wasn’t carrying anything too incriminating and followed her down the steep hill of 1st to the courthouse entrance on Hill. Waiting in line to pass through the metal detectors, I tried not to show what I was feeling. Only yesterday I had been in a similar situation, and this time, if things went badly, I had an emotionally unstable hitter right next to me. I kept my head down but not too far down; I was pleasant but not nice. I was doing my best to impersonate a shadow, to be one of those gray people nobody looked twice at.

Which is a challenge when you’ve got a big white thing on your nose.

They were all staring at me. Or maybe I imagined it. I was working on no sleep, jittery from the sludge I’d made at Mina’s place, and it’s not like I was making this paranoia up from whole cloth. I put my wallet, keys, phone, and pack of gum in the little tray, moved through the detector, let them pass a patriot wand over my anatomy, and didn’t make eye contact while trying to look like I wasn’t trying not to make eye contact. Having Heather that close helped. Pretty blonde with a face just famous enough to seem familiar without the kind of baggage actual celebrity carried with it: she had the perfect combination to get through instantly. Add in her bizarrely chipper manner and she was a smokescreen in heels.

The guards were so apathetic, they didn’t even wave us through. They merely turned their attention to the next poor bastards in line, the lawyers, jurors, relatives of defendants, the bored and curious.

The Stanley Mosk Courthouse existed perpetually on the edge of antique and old. Used enough to become rundown, there was still a certain quiet dignity to the vaulted halls. The people in them might have changed, started dressing differently, started wearing earbuds or futzing with phones, but it was pretty easy to feel like I had stepped into a time machine.

Heather confidently led the way, her heels clicking on the old floors. We went up a level and around a few corners, until finally she found a doorway that looked exactly like all the other doorways. She never stopped, never consulted anything to see if she was in the right place. She went exactly where she intended.

The courtroom, despite its high ceilings, was claustrophobic. There were no windows, because it was shoulder-to-shoulder with other courtrooms, like a single theater in a multiplex. The walls were beige; the pews were scratched wood. It had the feeling of a high school classroom right after lunch when everyone was nodding off, only stiffer punishments than detention were on the table.

The audience was full of humanity. I barely looked as Heather picked a bench near the back and slid in. I kept my eyes front, reminding myself that she’d left the guns in the car and there was no way we were here to kill a judge.

Oh god, I really hope we’re not here to kill a judge.

I stole a peek at Heather, but she had retreated to her happy Buddha pose: totally still except for her gleaming sunny smile.

The door opened behind us and I reflexively glanced back. It took a ton of willpower not to snap my head back around, yelp, or tackle something.

Because the guy who walked in was the Archbishop of the First Church of the Antichrist.

He didn’t walk in alone. Guys of his stature—pardon the pun, which you’ll get in a second—never do. He had his standard entourage with him: a couple of heavies in dark suits with blood-red ties, three attractive-if-tired-looking bottle redheads, and a grinning jackass majordomo I’d once delivered goat’s blood to. In the middle of all this, easy to miss if your eyes didn’t go that far down, was Paul Tallutto, one of the Satanist bigwigs in the City of Angels.

Well, smallwigs. Paul was a primordial dwarf, meaning the guy was seriously tiny. Around two foot seven if the rumors were to be believed. The Armani he was wearing was tailored perfectly, and I was willing to believe his crimson pocket square cost more than my entire outfit. His miniature skull was shaved and shiny, his goatee dyed a deep Baroness black. I turned around, hoping he hadn’t seen me, and tried to remember how to breathe. As he entered, Heather glanced as well, and inhaled just sharply enough to let me know she recognized him.

Paul thought I was the Antichrist, or had at one time. Sadly, that meant he wanted to sacrifice rather than worship me.

That answered that: we had to be there for the littlest devil worshiper. I heard Paul and his entourage sliding into the pew behind Heather and me. The back of my neck felt like someone was running a French tickler over it. The few thumps coming from behind me said they were setting up Paul’s little cushioned high chair. That’s right when my whole body decided now was the perfect time to laugh.

Ever see chimpanzees laugh on a nature show? They do. And it’s not just at Charlton Heston. See, a chimp sees a stick it thinks is a snake, finds out it’s not, and laughs as a way to defuse tension. That’s what the laugh is for: when your whole body is filling up with steam, the laugh lets a little of it out so you don’t explode. Problem is, in really tense situations, your body will decide it’s in the middle of a Louis C.K. set and there’s not a thing you can do about it, except bite your cheeks, slump down, and hope for the best.

Which is what I was doing. I briefly wondered if Heather had noticed my mini-seizure and the thought touched off a fresh wave of hilarity. What would they put on my tombstone? “Killed by forgotten teen starlet”? Hell, what
name
would they use?

“All rise,” said the bailiff. I got up and somehow avoided doubling over.

The judge came in and for a single moment, I thought it was Lance Ito. That stuck me with another gale, and when I realized I was literally surrounded by murderers who’d probably get off after killing someone in Judge Ito’s presence, well, that didn’t help much either.

They ran through the opening procedure while I tried to think of the least funny things I could. I ran through the usual: genocide, human trafficking, sex crimes, season eight of
The Office
. Nothing worked. Not until they brought in the defendants.

I really should not have been surprised.

She stuck out, even in prison orange, cuffed hand and foot. I have no idea how she managed to look gorgeous, either. Despite what I learned about women’s prison from Roger Corman, I highly doubted there was enough time for beauty regimens, pillow fights, and exploring one’s sexuality. Her hair was hanging lank around her shoulders, but it was still that pretty shade of copper. She looked tired, her shoulders were slumped, and she was peering around the gallery like a hunted animal. My girlfriend, Mina Duplessis, recently accused of murder.

Her eyes met mine and widened ever so slightly. I tried to send her a psychic message:
Don’t recognize me. Whatever you do, you don’t know me.
I flicked my eyes to the side and she figured what I was doing instantly, looking over my shoulder. She knew Paul Tallutto, knew who he was, and knew how dangerous. She looked away then, like she had no idea who I was.

I kept still, hoping nothing showed on my face, knowing with my luck, something had. The best I could hope for was that Heather wasn’t looking.

Paul Tallutto had a thing for redheads. Because Satan supposedly preferred women with red hair and green eyes, Paul thought sleeping with them gave him occult powers. He was more stuck on the hair than the eye color and was just fine with dye jobs, which made me suspect it wasn’t really about magic. In any case, it hadn’t made him any taller. I was fairly certain he knew Mina—he’d popped up at one of her fashion shows, and he saw her when she saved me from a Black Mass that was about to go very badly. Even if his motives were pure—well, if “pure” meant “adding Mina to his harem”—I didn’t like having Paul there.

Then again, Neil had been a Satanist. Maybe they were there for the same reason Stan Brizendine had sent me. A little payback. That didn’t make it any better.

I scanned the gallery as well as I could without turning my head. I saw the back of Dan Onanian, the lawyer I’d hired for Mina, rising like a mound made of cologne. I hadn’t noticed him earlier because I’d been too focused on the Satanists behind me.

I waited, watching Mina sitting on the bench with the other prisoners. Different parts of the gallery watched as well, picking whichever was the friend or the family member, communicating with little gestures and expressions. I wanted to do the same for Mina, if only to show her that I was thinking of her. Let her know she wasn’t alone. I couldn’t. And more than anything, that bothered me.

The court was arraigning a series of people busted for violent crimes. Every one of them had been booked on assault or murder. I didn’t know if any of them were innocent, and I’d wager at least one of them was some poor lady who finally gave an abusing asshole what he had been begging for, but it was pretty clear Mina did not belong with any of them. Despite her size, she looked delicate. Scared.

Mina doesn’t scare easy.

It was finally Mina’s turn, dead last, and Dan stood up to represent her. They were reconsidering bail. The prosecutor started listing a litany of arrests on Mina’s record: drugs, assaults, you name it, painting her as some kind of queenpin in the LA underworld. I had seen Mina’s record, or lack thereof, just yesterday. Which meant all of this had been added very recently, and all of it was a lie. None of the actors present, other than Mina, seemed to know that for certain. This frame job was
thorough
.

Paul and his entourage were up as soon as the gavel fell, denying Mina bail. The judge dismissed everyone right after and Heather murmured, “We have to go. We’re following the midget.”

Duh.

I glanced at Mina as she went through the door, shuffling along with her ankles cuffed together. It was that look that doomed me. My eyes slid off her and met Dan’s. I turned, hoping he hadn’t had time to recognize me. I sped up, almost pushing Heather up the central aisle toward the back of the courtroom. Maybe Dan hadn’t placed me. Maybe I’d get out of this.

Paul’s people were at the door, ready to make it out into the hall.

Then I heard Dan, behind me. “Bob! Hey, Bob!”