Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

I chose my Browning Gold, a semiautomatic and autoloading shotgun and not called Goldy . . . as tempting as it might be. As I clattered back downstairs, Zeke’s gaze was so raw and naked that I wanted to look away, but then it focused on what I was carrying. “Goldy.”

All right. Not sick. Different. Never had a pet when he was young—human young. Didn’t have action figures or toys. Nothing to name in those foster-kid days. Zeke could call my shotgun whatever he wanted.

“Goldy.” I kissed his cheek. “Now, let’s get Griffin. Did you try Bubba?”

“Beelzebub.” There was enough of Zeke with me, barely, to wrinkle his lip at that. “What could he possibly know? Demon wannabe. Stupid shithead.”

“Exactly,” I said. “A wannabe follows the real things. He listens. He could know things precisely because they have the same opinion of him that we do. He’s a nut job. They wouldn’t pay attention to him.”

“Beelzebub” was a rare exception in the demonic sense. He was just a guy. He’d played around with a lot of things in his time, I’m sure. Rocker who couldn’t sing or play an instrument. Goth who didn’t have the ennui down quite right. Emo when emo was so very last year, A satanist who really wasn’t a satanist. After all, Those books are thick . Reading is hard . The Necronomicon isn’t even real. Who knew? Patterning yourself on a bad late-night TV movie is easier than doing actual research. And, to give credit where it was due, the real satanists, who are rare and far between . . . the genuine ones, the down-and-dirty ones—they get their desire sooner or later. Off to Hell they go. A Twinkie or bag of chips to be devoured whenever the torture becomes boring for the demons. I didn’t think that’s what they had planned when they were butchering Wilbur the pig or Foghorn Leghorn the rooster on their altar while trying to say the Lord’s Prayer backward . . . which would be the satanic DUI test. Instead of ZYXWVU, while touching your nose with a fingertip, you had to pull off “Amen. Ever and ever for glory the and, power ...” while chopping off a chicken’s head. They could chant and chop all they wanted. They still ended up as a TV dinner.

Bubba didn’t go that way though. He was such a thoroughly slobbering, pathetic, slimy wannabe that the demons did the absolute worst thing they could to him.

They ignored him.

When you ignore someone for so long you forget they’re even there, whether you’re a con artist demon or not. You say things you shouldn’t, and Bubba, although he couldn’t do jack shit with the information, heard it all. And now we would go find out if anything he’d picked up today had to do with Griffin. And while Zeke couldn’t find Griffin, I knew precisely where to find Bubba. . . . I had his pamphlet. Tours of Satanic Sin City . . . because when the sun goes down, it all goes down. He should’ve given up the satanism and become a copy-writer. There was slightly more money in it and a whole lot less demon-on-human mutilation.

“Fine. Let’s get the satanic shithead and ask him some questions. Only you’d better ask them.” He closed his eyes and ground the heel of his hand against his forehead—still trying to find Griffin, on the inside if not out. “Because right now, I want to hurt someone. I really, really want to hurt someone. Too much.”

“Trust me, Kit. I won’t be walking on any eggshells around him, but I’ll leave enough of him to do some talking.” If he knew anything. When you’ve pinned your first and last hope on a satanic school bus-driving demon wannabe, you knew it was going to be a bad night.

We caught up with him at Carluccio’s Tivoli Gardens. It was a restaurant next to the Liberace Museum and whether Liberace was a tricked-up demon, an angel of blinding light, or only an entertainer who thought rhinestones were the greatest invention of God and Man and wanted to outshine the sun itself, I didn’t know. I was always curious, yes, but at times it was best to let some things go. Keep a little mystery alive.

Keeping Bubba alive . . . Well, we’d see.

His old school bus, painted black, naturally, with wispy white ghosts and staring, bloody red eyes, was idling by the Gardens, hoping to pick up some tourist action. There were reputable ghost tours in Vegas. Fun in the absent sun pointing out the gangster Bugsy Siegel’s hotel, the Flamingo, the “Motel of Death” where many celebrities had died—I’d never caught exactly who those celebrities were—a haunted park with a “demon” child, and the Gardens, where Liberace’s ghost occasionally had a snit fit. A phantom rhinestone wedgie was nothing to mess with, I was sure.

Bubba’s tour, on the other hand, was not reputable, not licensed, not legal, and not especially hygienic—all of which kept him on the move, trying to pick up tourists on the go. The Gardens were his second fishing stop of the night and we caught him there just as he was leaving. I didn’t bother to look for a parking spot, pulling up on the sidewalk and ditching the Cobra. It would either be towed or stolen. I didn’t give a damn either way. If we could find Griffin, a lucky thief could keep the car.

I caught the bus door as it was closing, pushed it back open, and went up the two steps to stand just behind and right at Bubba’s ear. “You weren’t trying to leave without us, were you, Beelzebub?”

Zeke sat in the first seat, forming the point to our triangle. “Bastard.” He had one of his guns out, a sawed-off Remington, and a white-knuckled grip on it. He wasn’t worried about any threat from Beelzebub . . . a hundred Beelzebubs would barely get a yawn out of him. He was worried for Griffin, which might be Beelzebub’s fall after all, threat or no threat.

“Go on and drive, Bubba.” I leaned an elbow on his shoulder and smiled at our shared reflection in the long rearview mirror. “You don’t look happy to see me. You don’t look happy at all. But that’s all right. I have a theory about people. Happy people aren’t made; they’re born . . . like golden retrievers—bouncy and cheerful and full of love and play. And then, sugar”—I nipped his ear hard, enough to draw a single drop of blood—“there are the rest of us. We aren’t happy. We aren’t bouncy. But we do like to play. Only I’m not sure that you want to play the kind of games I do.” I tossed my Browning to Zeke and had a knife at Beelzebub’s neck in an instant.

Bubba—I could think of him as Beelzebub with a straight face for only so long—was a thin guy. He had the requisite long hair dyed so black that it looked like the world’s worst Halloween wig. He had multiple piercings, some of which I was sure were hidden and I didn’t want to see, and what he thought were satanic tattoos ringing his neck, but what I was almost positive said “I suck Cthulhu’s dick” in Latin. The tattoo artist had seen him coming a mile away. Bubba wasn’t solely a wannabe demon. He was a wannabe anything . He was almost worth feeling sorry for if I hadn’t thought he tortured animals as a kid, pulled wings off flies, killed birds with a BB gun. He had that look, that smell, that taste to the air around him. A trickster should’ve made him a pet project a long time ago, but like some projects, he wasn’t worth it. When a chemistry project went wrong, you poured it down the lab sink and started over. Bubba had “Do over” written all over him.

“Bubba,” I said softly, “some people say the fastest way to a man’s heart is a hollow point. One nice explosion and then a pile of mush that no one wants on a Valentine’s Day card. But I honestly don’t care about the fastest way myself. I like the fun way.” I moved the knife and suddenly the point sank into the flesh over his heart . . . not much. Only a fraction of an inch, but enough that he understood the seriousness of my play. “When a woman like me breaks a man’s heart, we like to do it slowly.” I smiled again at him in the mirror, wider, and showed my teeth in a flash of white. His dark brown eyes went a little more glassy. “Thoroughly. And keep it whole enough so that it looks pretty in a jar on my bedroom dresser.”