Summer 2007 (12 page)

Davy shook his head. “Ah dinnae get it. Are ye tellin’
me ye’re givin’ me a wish? In return for, for…bein’ radge a’ ma life?”

The Devil nodded. “Yes.”

Davy winced. “Ah think Ah need another
Deuchars–fuck! Haud on, that isnae ma wish!” He stared at the Devil
anxiously. “Ye’re serious, aren’t ye?”

The Devil sniffed. “I can’t discharge the obligation
with a beer. My Employer isn’t stupid, whatever Her other faults: she’d say I
was short-changing you, and she’d be right. It’s got to be a big wish, Davy.”

Davy’s expression brightened. The Devil waved a hand at
Katie: “Another Deuchars for my friend here. And a drop of the Craitur.” Things
were looking up, Davy decided.

“Can ye make Morag nae have…Ah mean, can ye make
things…awright again, nae went bad?” He dry-swallowed, mind skittering like a
frightened spider away from what he was asking for. Not to have…whatever.
Whatever he’d done. Already.

The Devil contemplated Davy for a long handful of
seconds. “No,” he said patiently. “That would create a paradox, you see,
because if things hadn’t gone bad for you, I wouldn’t be here giving you this
wish, would I? Your life gone wrong is the fuel for this miracle.”

“Oh.” Davy waited in silence while Katie pulled the
pint, then retreated back to the far end of the bar.
Whaur’s Tam?
he
wondered vaguely. Fuckin’ deil, wi’ his smairt suit an’ high heid yin manners…
He shivered, unaccountably cold. “Am Ah goin’ tae hell?” he asked roughly. “Is
that whaur Ah’m goin’?”

“Sorry, but no. We were brought in to run this universe,
but we didn’t design it. When you’re dead, that’s it. No hellfire, no
damnation: the worst thing that can happen to you is you’re reincarnated, given
a second chance to get things right. It’s normally my job to give people like
you that chance.”

“An’ if Ah’m no reincarnated?” Davy asked hopefully.

“You get to wake up in the mind of God. Of course, you
stop being you when you do that.” The Devil frowned thoughtfully. “Come to
think of it, you’ll probably give Her a migraine.”

“Right, right.” Davy nodded. The Devil was giving him a
headache. He had a dawning suspicion that this one wasn’t a prod or a pape: he
probably supported Livingstone. “Ah’m no that bad then, is that whit ye’re
sayin’?”

“Don’t get above yourself.”

The Devil’s frown deepened, oblivious to the stroke of
killing rage that flashed behind Davy’s eyes at the words.
Dinnae get above
yersel’? Who the fuck d’ye think ye are, the sheriff?
That was almost
exactly what the sheriff had said, leaning over to pronounce sentence.
Ye
ken Ah’m naebody, dinnae deny it!
Davy’s fists tightened, itching to hit
somebody. The story of his life: being ripped off then talked down to by
self-satisfied cunts.
Ah’ll make ye regret it!

The Devil continued after a moment: “You’ve got to really
fuck up in a theological manner before she won’t take you, these days.
Spreading hatred in the name of God, that kind of thing will do for you.
Trademark abuse, she calls it. You’re plenty bad, but you’re not that bad.
Don’t kid yourself, you only warrant the special visit because you’re a quality
sample. The rest are…unobserved.”

“So Ah’m no evil, Ah’m just plain bad.” Davy grinned
virulently as a thought struck him.
Let’s dae somethin’ aboot that! Karmic
imbalance? Ah’ll show ye a karmic imbalance!
“Can ye dae somethin’ aboot
the weather? Ah hate the cauld.” He tried to put a whine in his voice. The
change in the weather had crippled house prices, shafted him and Morag. It
would serve the Devil right if he fell for it.

“I can’t change the weather.” The Devil shook his head,
looking slightly worried. “Like I said–”

“Can ye fuck wi’ yon sun shield the fuckin’ Yanks stuck
in the sky?” Davy leaned forward, glaring at him: “’Cause if no, whit kindae
deil are ye?”

“You want me to what?”

Davy took a deep breath. He remembered what it had
looked like on TV, twenty years ago: the great silver reflectors unfolding in
solar orbit, the jubilant politicians, the graphs showing a 20% fall in
sunlight reaching the Earth…the savage April blizzards that didn’t stop for a
month, the endless twilight and the sun dim enough to look at. And now the
Devil wanted to give him a wish, in payment for fucking things up for a few
thousand bastards who had it coming? Davy felt his lips drawing back from his
teeth, a feral smile forcing itself to the surface. “Ah want ye to fuck up the
sunshade, awright? Get ontae it. Ah want tae be wairm…”

The Devil shook his head. “That’s a new one on me,” he
admitted. “But–” He frowned. “You’re sure? No second thoughts? You want
to waive your mandatory fourteen-day right of cancellation?”

“Aye. Dae it the noo.” Davy nodded vigorously.

“It’s done.” The Devil smiled faintly.

“Whit?” Davy stared.

“There’s not much to it. A rock about the size of this
pub, traveling on a cometary orbit–it’ll take an hour or so to fold, but
I already took care of that.” The Devil’s smile widened. “You used your wish.”

“Ah dinnae believe ye,” said Davy, hopping down from his
bar stool. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Tam dodging through the
blackout curtain and the doorway, tipping him the wink. This had gone on long
enough. “Ye’ll have tae prove it. Show me.”

“What?” The Devil looked puzzled. “But I told you, it’ll
take about an hour.”

“So ye say. An’ whit then?”

“Well, the parasol collapses, so the amount of sunlight goes
up. It gets brighter. The snow melts.”

“Is that right?” Davy grinned. “So how many wishes dae
Ah get this time?”

“How many–” The Devil froze. “What makes you think
you get any more?” He snarled, his face contorting.

“Like ye said, Ah gave ye a loan, didn’t Ah?” Davy’s
grin widened. He gestured toward the door. “After ye?”

“You–” The Devil paused. “You don’t mean…” He
swallowed, then continued, quietly. “That wasn’t deliberate, was it?”

“Oh. Aye.” Davy could see it in his mind’s eye: the
wilting crops and blazing forests, droughts and heatstroke and mass extinction,
the despairing millions across America and Africa, exotic places he’d never
seen, never been allowed to go–roasting like pieces of a turkey on a
spit, roasting in revenge for twenty years frozen in outer darkness. Hell on
Earth. “Four billion fuckers, isnae that enough for another?”

“Son of a bitch!” The Devil reached into his jacket
pocket and pulled out an antique calculator, began punching buttons.
“Forty-eight–no, forty-nine. Shit, this has never happened before! You
bastard, don’t you have a conscience?”

Davy thought for a second. “Naw.”

“Fuck!”

It was now or never. “Ah’ll take a note.”

“A credit–shit, okay then. Here.” The Devil handed
over his mobile. It was small and very black and shiny, and it buzzed like a
swarm of flies. “Listen, I’ve got to go right now, I need to escalate this to
senior management. Call head office tomorrow, if I’m not there, one of my staff
will talk you through the state of your claim.”

“Haw! Ah’ll be sure tae dae that.”

The Devil stalked towards the curtain and stepped
through into the darkness beyond, and was gone. Davy pulled out his moby and
speed-dialed a number. “He’s a’ yours noo,” he muttered into the handset, then
hung up and turned back to his beer. A couple of minutes later, someone came in
and sat down next to him. Davy raised a hand and waved vaguely at Katie: “A
Deuchars for Tam here.”

Katie nodded nonchalantly–she seemed to have
cheered up since the Devil had stepped out–and picked up a glass.

Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top
next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly.
“Neat,” he admitted. “Get anythin’ else aff him?”

“Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby.
Just these.” Tam looked disgusted for a moment. “Ah pulled ma chib an’ waved it
aroon’ an’ he totally legged it. Think anybody’ll come lookin’ for us?”

“Nae chance.” Davy raised
his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil’s mobile phone in it smugly.
“Nae a snowball’s chance in hell…”

Fiction:
An excerpt from One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King by Elizabeth
Bear

Part I

[In Las Vegas in 2002, Jackie, one of the city’s two
Genii, loses his partner in a fight with the Genii of Los Angeles. In San
Diego, simultaneously, the vampire Tribute destroys his creator. And in New
York City in 1964, two spies discover that they are targets for assassination,
and follow their would-be killer to Las Vegas.]

Tribute and the Scholar. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.

My plane taxied up to the gate at McCarran International
Airport a little after one A.M. I’m limited to short flights for practical
reasons; the good news is, the redeye is usually uncrowded.

I love Las Vegas.

Nobody ever notices me in Vegas. Now that I was on my
own, I was thinking of staying on permanently.

Don’t get me wrong. I never expected to survive. I
thought I’d go down into oblivion with Sycorax, red stain of my borrowed blood
on her lips and a fistful of my hair knotted in her hand. I never expected to
see another sunrise. Not that I’ve seen one in 25 years, mind, but you know
what I mean. But one minute my gut was clenching, twisting around my poisoned
dinner, and the next Sycorax was staring at me in glazed shock, her pale hands
fastened on her own wax-white throat as she sank to her knees.

If I’d known it would be that easy I would have handled
this
years
ago.

If I’d known Jesse would leave me alone for half an hour
if I did it….

Eighteen hours later, I was on a plane, and less than
two hours after that I was stepping across the band of desert heat between the
cool of the airplane and the air-conditioned jetway and following the cattle
through McCarran’s D gates to the tram.

There’s a funny thing about Las Vegas. You keep seeing
people you think you might halfway recognize. Some of them are minor
celebrities, lounge acts, washed-up actors and pop stars who were the Next Big
Thing twenty years back. And some aren’t.

So people turned to look at me, one or two, as I made my
way from the tram over the gaudy carpet and down the escalators. But they
weren’t surprised, not at all.

I had no luggage to claim; we learn to travel light. But
McCarran makes you exit through Baggage Claim whether you need to or not, and I
had “Go Down Moses” stuck in my head, somehow—you know,
Go down,
Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land. Tell ol’ Pharoah, Let my people go
—and
was concentrated on not singing it too loudly where anybody could hear me.
Which is how I almost tripped over the spy.

You have to understand, I wasn’t supposed to know he was
a spy. I was supposed to see an athletic, black-haired man in a polo shirt and
khakis, turning to hand a cased tennis racket to his companion. The other man
was black, broad-shouldered, wearing his hair parted on the side and greased in
ringlets in a style I hadn’t seen since I was a mortal man. They both reeked of
Brylcreem.

It smelled like 1965.

I wasn’t supposed to see the way their eyes met for a
moment before they glanced over each other’s shoulders, either, or to notice
that their three-dialed waterproof wristwatches matched. But I’ve shot up a TV
set or two in my time, and I noticed, and stepped wide to go around the pair of
them rather than bumping shoulders with the athlete. A little faster, a little
smoother than a mortal man should have managed, and the black man’s gaze locked
on me like a gunman’s sights.

And he blinked, and tilted his head to one side, and
then offered a wry, contemplative smile. “King,” he said. “I didn’t know you
were in the game.”

“I’m not,” I answered without bothering to fix my voice.
“I’m the real thing. More or less.” And I showed him the fangs.

He stepped back: one, two—the racket case raised
defensively in his hand—and I beat it for the exit while his partner was
still turning to see what had caused his dismay. There was a taxi waiting.

I took it.

There’s real, after all. And then there’s real.

And if I was going to spend any time in Las Vegas, I was
going to have to find out what was going on to bring two of those to the
streets of Sin City. And not its native media ghosts, either.

No, a couple of strangers in town.

#

The assassin and the man behind the curtain. Las Vegas.
Summer, 2002.

There were two men already in the office when the
assassin got there; one dead, and one alive. The dead one stood behind the live
one. The living one was hunched over a laptop computer. The dead one was
peering over the living one’s shoulder, trying not to drip brains down his
back.

Bugsy Siegel looked up when the assassin walked through
the door, and frowned. For a dead man, he had an effective stare. He hadn’t
died pretty, and it still showed.