Richard Kadrey - Sandman Slim

But Alice wouldn't want me to disappear. She didn't like me stealing or breaking other people's things, so I won't do any of that tonight.

See? Even dead she makes me a better whatever-the-hell it is I am. A less stupid person. A more considerate monster.

I step out of a shadow and onto Venice Beach. Alice is under my arm in a brown plastic box. There are bonfires fifty yards down the sand. A boom box pumps out something that, at this distance, is just beats and the buzz of overloaded speakers. People cop drugs on the street behind me. Couples grope and sweat in the dark.

I knew a drug dealer from Marin County. A hippie, but the kind who slept with a.45 under his pillow. When he got into organic pot farming, he stopped using the toilet. He'd shit on a black plastic tarp behind his house, staked out in the sun, so his droppings would dry out and he could use them to fertilize his plants. He told me that he got the idea from a friend who made sun dried tomatoes.

He did the fertilizer experiment for a year. Collected each dried-out nugget after a month in the sun. He told me that at the end of that year, everything he dropped on the tarp fit inside one shoe box.

I don't know why I think of that, except that the only person I ever loved now fits into something about the same size as that dead hippie dealer's shit box.

There's a crescent moon out. Does that mean it's a good night to let Alice go or a bad one? If I was better at magic than murder, I'm sure I'd know.

The water is cold and calm. Low tide. I have to walk out a good ten or twenty yards to feel the waves on my legs, boots sinking into the wet sand all the way out. I wade into the sluggish waves until I'm in waist deep.

Pop the top of Alice's plastic sarcophagus. Her ashes are in a plastic bag, like something you'd put your lunch in. I hold out the bag so that the bottom is about an inch underwater. Pull the black knife and slit the side.

The waves lap at the bag, washing out her ashes. Alice floats on the surface of the ocean, a white cloud spreading out in all directions. When the bag is empty, I drop it and the box into the water. I wade out, following the ash cloud as it's drawn away with the tide.

I want to follow her all the way out, over my head, and keep on going. But she wouldn't like that, either.

I stop when the water is up to my chest and watch Alice spread out into the black Pacific. Scoop up a handful of her ashes, but they wash away when the water runs between my fingers. That damn song is stuck in my head again.

"It's dreamy weather we're on

You waved your crooked wand

Along an icy pond with a frozen moon

A murder of silhouette crows I saw

And the tears on my face

And the skates on the pond

They spell Alice."

My legs are good and numb when the last of her drifts out of sight. I'm not even cold anymore, but I can't stop shaking.

Good-bye, Alice. I know you probably don't like the idea of me killing, but it's all I have left to give you. And I've gone too far to stop now. When I'm sure about Mason, this thing is done. I'll go back down where I belong and dream about you in Hell. Till then, sleep tight.

WHO WOULD HAVE guessed that Kasabian had his act wired tight enough to have accident insurance? Allegra found the papers in the bottom of the safe when she was closing up the one night a week she still works at Max Overdrive.

Drop cloths, ladders, and paint cans are stacked along the edge of the staircase leading to my bedroom. The broken walls and ceiling have new drywall. In the morning (not too early; I tipped the foreman not to show up until after eleven), the crew will start plastering one end of the room and start painting the other.

I'm lying in bed after a shower, staring up at streaks of drywall tape and mud, the long white scars that hold the new ceiling panels together. I'm trying to talk myself into getting my ass out of bed and down to the Bamboo House of Dolls for some decent food.

"Knock. Knock."

I have the Navy Colt up and cocked in a fraction of a second. Lucifer is standing in the doorway, holding a red-and-white-checkered bowling bag. I lower the Colt's hammer and set it back down on the bedside table.

Lucifer says, "Don't get up. This is just a social call."

The Prince of Darkness is dressed in a tailored charcoal-gray suit that looks like it cost more than this building. He sets down the bowling bag on the bootlegging table and leans back against the door frame.

"Careful. That might not be dry," I say.

"Thank you." He stands up and checks his jacket for spots. "I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I'd drop by and congratulate you on outfoxing Mason. I honestly didn't think you had it in you."

"Up until he was gone, neither did I."

"It was clever how you tricked him into following you to Hell. It's just too bad that when you locked him in, you probably gave him exactly what he wanted. You don't really think that ritual at Avila was to let me or my kind out of Hell, do you?"

"No, it was to let him in. I didn't figure that out until later. So, the mob didn't rip him to shreds?"

"Of course not. Mason won't die that easily. And now he's free to crawl around down below, like a viper at my bosom, and conspire with my generals to overthrow me."

"It's going to be a lot harder for him now that he doesn't have the Kissi to back him up."

"Maybe."

"You telling me that the Prince of Darkness can't handle one lousy human? You've done it before."

"Not when he's protected by my entire general corps and the aristocracy. Things were chaotic enough before his arrival. I could gather the troops who remain loyal to me, find and kill him tomorrow, but I'd have to destroy half my kingdom to do it."

"That's not my problem."

"Not yet."

Lucifer takes out a pack of thin black silver-tipped cigarettes.

"Do you mind?" he asks.

"Damn. Are those Maledictions?"

"Right. You can't get these up here." He tosses me the pack. "Keep them. I have more."

"Thanks."

I tap a Malediction out of the box, fire it up, and puff. It tastes like a tire fire in a candy factory next door to a strip club. The best cigarettes in the universe.

"I heard a funny story the other day. Doc Kinski told me one about angels and human women and something called a nephilim. He says I might be one. You know anything about that?"

"I know all about Uriel and his disgrace. Do you think an archangel could fall without me knowing? I'd hoped that Heaven would cast him all the way down to me. I would have thrown him a ticker-tape parade."

"So, he was telling the truth?"

"Of course. I'd heard stories about the nephilim over the centuries, but I'd never seen one. I wasn't sure they even existed. When the Kissi dropped you down with us, I wasn't terribly interested. Unlike my brethren, I'd seen more than my share of humans. Then days passed and you refused to die. That's when you got interesting. I moved you from household to household. Put you in direct conflict with powerful Hellions. Decided who you would fight in the arena."

"I was your science project."

"You still are."

"What does that mean?"

Lucifer looks away and picks up an import DVD of Lucio Fulci's Zombi.

"This looks fun. May I take it?"

"Happy New Year. It's yours."

He throws back the drop cloth and starts going through the stacks of discs on the table.

I say, "I've been wondering, just how much of everything since I got back was your doing?"

Lucifer keeps going through the stacks of movies.

"The Veritas aimed me straight at Kasabian. Then some mysterious buyer wanted Muninn to get something for him, only Muninn needed my help and that sent me to Jayne-Anne and Avila, which led me to the Golden Vigil and Mason. Don't you think that's an awful lot of coincidences?"