Sandman Slim with Bonus Content (24 page)

The guy in the suit says, “You naughty boy.”

“You stole our
na’at,
” says the kid.

“And after we invited you into our home so nicely and politely.”

“Some people have no manners.”

“No manners at all. That’s all right. We’ll do you a trade.” The man points to his chest, then mine. “Hold on to whatever that is in there for us. We’ll be back with a doggy bag.”

“Happy holidays,” says the kid. There’s blood all over the box of doughnuts. The kid opens it and takes out an apple fritter. “You really ought to try these. They make ’em fresh every morning.”

They stroll out the door like they just won the lottery. Behind me, an old lady is screaming. I hear cell phones beeping as people fumble with the keypads trying to make their fingers hit 911. I look over the counter at the green-haired girl. She’s dead. As dead as anyone I’ve ever seen.

Is that what Alice looked like?

Good-bye, green-haired girl. How many more of you am I not going to save?

THERE’S A GOLD
Lexus parked around the corner. Ten seconds later, it’s mine. I pull into a no-name indie gas station and buy a pack of cigarettes, two plastic gas cans, and a T-shirt with mann’s chinese theatre on the front. I pay for four gallons of gas in advance, fill the two cans, and get back in the car. I’ve always been pretty good with directions. Hell made me good with them even when I’m getting my ass kicked, so I know where I’m going. Fifteen minutes later, I’m parked down the block from the furniture warehouse where the skinheads party.

I slice the T-shirt in half and dip each piece into the can, letting them soak up the juice. Then I stuff them in the cans’ mouths and head for the clubhouse.

A fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts is walking the other way. As we pass I say, “You should call 911.”

He stops. “Has there been an accident?”

“Not yet.”

There’s no one outside the clubhouse. Why would there be? Who’s going to play games with a building full of methed-up headbangers?

I light the rags in each can with Mason’s lighter. I knock on the door politely. My other adolescent crush, Ilsa, the skinhead girl, opens up. She smiles at me like you smile at an old dog that can’t help shitting on himself.

She asks, “What the fuck do you want?”

I kick once, slamming the door open and her out of the way. I sling the gas cans underhanded, aiming at the opposite ends of the room.

They explode, one a fraction of a second behind the other. Flames splash across the walls like a flood of hellfire. It’s an instant riot inside. Screaming. Punching. Skin-heads and their white power girlfriends clawing past each other for the one exit. I pull the door closed and kick a garbage can in front of it.

The first one out is the big gorilla I stabbed in the leg at the Bamboo House of Dolls. He trips over the can and face plants just outside the door. The next few drowning rats trip over him. Fall in a screaming pile of bodies, blocking the door. It’s the Keystone Kops with third-degree burns.

Eventually, enough people inside push forward that the bodies and the door get kicked out of the way. The panicked, burned, and smoke-choked master race pours outside and collapses in the street.

Josef comes strolling out last. His clothes are smoldering and his face looks like a hamburger someone forgot to take off the barbecue. Ilsa and a dozen of Josef’s steroid lapdogs get up and follow him.

Josef doesn’t even look around. He knows who did this. He comes right for me. I can see the beast under his skin. I can’t tell if he was ever human.

When he’s a few feet away, he starts to say something. It’s going to be some Kissi threat or demonic one-liner. Who cares? I slash his throat with the black blade, giving the knife a little twist. Unlike Kasabian, when Josef’s head pops off, he’s totally, one hundred percent dead.

I pick up the head by its singed blond hair and push it into Ilsa’s chest. It takes her a minute to figure out that she’s supposed to take it. I wait for one of the big boys to make a move, but they’re mostly staring at the raspberry-colored lake forming around Josef’s body.

I say, “You tell the rest of these animals and any Kissi you run into to stay away from my doughnut place.”

I go back to the Lexus and floor it out of there before they come to enough to realize that there are fifty of them and only one of me.

IF YOU DO
it right, cleaning your guns is a form of meditation. There’s the precise disassembly. Attaching a cotton swatch to the end of a ramrod, soaking it in solvent, and passing it through the gun barrel from the breech end and out the front. Cleaning the nooks and crannies with a soft toothbrush. Carefully applying a few drops of gun oil. Then wiping the gun down and reassembling it before starting on the next gun, moving from smallest to largest. It’s a calm, quiet, and satisfying process. I’m ashamed that I’ve neglected the guns this long. I should have cleaned them the moment I dug them out from under the floorboards at Vidocq’s. Wild Bill would be ashamed of me.

I’d picked up the cleaning kit at an upscale gun club in West Hollywood on the way back to Max Overdrive. Also a can of WD-40 to clean the
na’at
. On the night table next to the bed is the bottom half of a Coke can I ripped in half. There’s an inch of Spiritus Dei floating in the can and I dip each bullet into it before reloading the guns.

That encounter with the Kissi back at Donut Universe woke me up. I need to be more careful now that I don’t have any real backup.

I can’t get the bloody image of the green-haired girl out of my mind. Every time I think I’ve pushed her away, Alice drifts in to take her place.

No wonder I’m so popular.

There’s a knock at the door. I stay sitting on the bed, but hide the reassembled .45 under one leg, where I can get it quickly. I don’t say, “Come in,” but she comes in anyway.

Allegra only takes a couple of steps into the room, like she’s afraid there are snakes under all the furniture. She sits on Kasabian’s old bootlegging table, knocking over a couple of stacks of DVDs that I’d stolen from the racks downstairs. I soak another cotton patch in solvent and go back to cleaning the guns.

“Why didn’t you tell me before about what happened to you? What Mason did?”

“Vidocq told you my little secret? Is he in some contest I don’t know about? Rat out your friends three times in a day and win Springsteen tickets.”

“He just wanted me to understand why you’re the way you are.”

“And now everyone knows. Did you come up here to gloat? I give up. You win. You and Vidocq showed me up for the chump I truly am.”

“That’s not what this is about and you know it.”

“Princess, I only know two things. One is that I’m going to kill Mason and Parker, and nothing human or inhuman is going to stop me. And two, I’m on my own.”

“Don’t play that martyr shit with me. I’ve seen how you are.”

“You don’t get it. You think I’m saying this because I’m still mad. I’m not. I just understand things better now. A friend laid it out for me. I’m not one of you. The only thing I live for now is to kill as many people and break as many things as I need to, to get what I want. By the standards of most sane people, that makes me a monster. I’m fine with that. And, if I’m alive when this is over, I’m going back to where the monsters live.”

“Hell?”

“It’s where I belong. It’s where I want to be.”

Allegra reaches down, picks up one of the piles of DVDs, and begins to straighten them.

“Eugène loves you,” she says.

“That’s nice. My father loved me. He tried to shoot me once.”

“What?”

“We were out deer hunting. It was just after sunup and cold enough that I could see my breath. I’d spotted a six-point buck ahead in the tree line. I led the way, up front a few yards, with my father right behind me. I spotted the buck in a clearing, signaled my father to stop. I raised my rifle and took the shot. Just as I pulled the trigger, I heard another gun go off and something hit me on the side of the head. My father’s shot had missed me by maybe an inch and hit the tree where I was leaning. I looked back at him, blood coming down my face where flying bark and splinters had hit me. He came running up apologizing, saying it was all an accident, asking if I was okay. But behind all the panic in his eyes, there was nothing but fear and loathing. He hated himself for taking the shot, but he hated me more for still breathing.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Just because someone says they love you doesn’t mean they’re not going to fuck you over the first chance they get.”

“What about Alice? Did she fuck you over, too?”

“No. She’s the one who didn’t.”

Allegra empties a couple of overflowing ashtrays into a metal trash can on the floor.

“Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“No. I told her I loved her about a million times. It didn’t save her. It’s what got her killed.”

“But you both loved each other. You still have that.”

“You loved your drug-dealer boyfriend. I bet he told you he loved you every day. How’d that work out for you?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“You’re right, it’s not. So, why don’t you run along back to Vidocq and let me finish my work so I can get all of you and this town behind me?”

She shakes her head, pushes more junk from the table into the trash, and starts for the door.

“After I’m gone,” I tell her, “as far as I’m concerned, you can have Max Overdrive. Parker’s killed Kasabian by now, so he’s not going to want it back. I’m sure Vidocq can come up with some kind of glamour that’ll make it look like you owned the place all along.”

She drops the trash can by the door. Lets it fall over and spill food wrappers, empty cans, and cigarette butts on the floor.

“You know what? You’re not a monster. You’re just a motherfucker. Eugène should have let Aelita put you out of your misery.”

“Good-bye, Allegra. Go tidy up at Eugène’s.”

She kicks the can out of the way and slams the door. I can hear her stomp down every single step, like she’s punishing the staircase, like God’s tiniest tyrannosaurus.

WHEN ALLEGRA IS
gone, I finish cleaning and reassembling the guns. When that’s done, I take old newspapers and paper bags from under the bootlegging table and lay them out flat on the floor.

When you stretch out a regulation
na’at
to its full length, it’s ten feet of very sharp Hellion steel teeth, spikes, and spines. Some are spring-loaded and ready to go whenever you pick up the
na’at
. Others only open up when you trigger them from the grip.

Traditionally, you use a
na’at
like a spear or a staff, but there’s another trigger that collapses the central shaft. Suddenly the
na’at
is as loose as chicken chow mein, a metal whip that can strip the skin off a rhino like peeling a grape. Not that I’ve ever peeled a rhino or a grape, but you get the idea.

I only mention this to explain that your basic
na’at
has a lot more intricate mechanical parts than anything any human has ever manufactured. When you decide to WD-40 your
na’at,
you need a lot of room and a lot of newspapers to soak up the excess oil. You should also open a window before you start spraying lube and solvents around your bedroom, something I almost always forget to do.

I drag the newspaper and the
na’at
across the room and out of the way. I stash the guns under the mattress and wash the WD-40 off my hands in the bathroom. I’ve trashed enough clothes that I’m back down to video-store T-shirts and jeans. I throw on the silk overcoat I’ve been avoiding and slip the knife inside. On the way out, I push open the three big windows on the wall opposite the bed.

The short walk to the Bamboo House of Dolls clears the stink out of my nose and head. A drink and a cigarette later and I’m happy to be back on Earth. When Carlos brings me my food, I drink to his health. I haven’t done much for him lately, except maybe cooking and decapitating some skinheads, but I can’t exactly talk to him about that. He brings up sports and I try to say something that doesn’t sound stupid, but I didn’t know much about sports before I went Downtown. Finally, he gives up and walks off to serve other customers.

I haven’t talked to him much lately. I haven’t wanted to talk much at all. It seems like a good idea to let the guy know that I appreciate him, his bar, and his food. Right now Carlos is about the closest thing I have to friend on this planet. With Cherry, Jayne-Anne, and Kasabian gone, so are all my ties to Mason, leaving me right in the middle of downtown with nothing to do and nowhere to go. When you’re in that neighborhood, you need at least one person on your side. Preferably one with a bar.

I finish off two more drinks before it becomes dangerously clear that if I hang around much longer, I’m going to have to talk to someone.

I time the walk back to Max Overdrive perfectly. I get to the door right on the last puff of my cigarette. Flicking the butt into the Dumpster, I let myself in the back way.

Inside, the oily solvent smell is gone, but now there’s something else. Alcohol? Disinfectant? The staircase smells like a hospital waiting room.

I find out why a minute later. By then I’m already on the floor and the world is a shivering Slip and Slide, so there’s no chance of me getting up. I have a feeling that the robot ghost in the dirty trench coat that’s waving a baseball bat in my face might have something to do with it.

Pieces of the world start falling back into place enough for to me to see that the robot ghost isn’t really a robot or a ghost. It’s Kasabian, and he’s held together with a lot of metal rods and screws. There’s a metal band bolted around his head, held in place by steel dowels that are attached to a brace on his chest. A traction halo. It holds his head onto his body well enough for him to stand up, but the rig makes him move like a rusty windup toy. Still, for a kid’s toy, he’s doing a pretty good job tuning up my ribs.

I deflect a couple of the blows with my arms, which feels just as good as it sounds. Kasabian is so stiff, he has to stand in one place to work me over. Lucky me. I swing one of my legs around and catch him behind the knee. He goes down on the knee, but refuses to fall over. Just keeps smashing me with the bat, teeth gritted, sweating and red-faced. But he’s working from close range now, so the shots hurt a lot less than before.