Richard Kadrey: Kill the dead

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"How's your lady friend downstairs?"

"Don't talk about her like that."

Wells gets a little defensive whenever I mention Aelita. He's got a thing for her but an angel is just a little out of his league.

"Okay. How is Miss Aelita? Healthy? Happy? I haven't seen her since right after Avila."

Aelita is a kind of drill sergeant angel. She runs the Golden Vigil, Heaven's Pinkertons. She knows I'm a nephilim and has a cute nickname for me: "The Abomination." I'm pretty sure she'd like to see me dead.

"Did you send candy and flowers on Valentine's Day, Wells? It's okay, you know. He was a saint."

His phone goes off. He walks away and speaks quietly into the receiver. I think an angel's ears are burning.

Wells nods and pockets the phone.

"You get a twenty percent bonus added on to your next check."

"Twenty percent? What am I, your waiter? I got you five vampires, not a BLT."

"Twenty percent is what I've been authorized. Take it or leave it."

"I'll take it."

He takes a white business envelope from his jacket and hands it to me. The check for my last Vigil hit. A bunch of suburban Druids in Pomona were trying to resurrect the In-vidia, a gaggle of transdimensional chaos deities. The Druids were hilarious. They looked like extras from The Andy Griffith Show trying to call up the devil in matching white housedresses. What's even funnier was that their plan almost worked. Their scrawny Barney Fife leader was one murdered infant away from annihilating Southern California.

I wonder if I'd just held back a little and Barney did get to unleash the Invidia, would we really be able to tell the difference?

I look at the check and then at Wells.

"Why do you always pull this shit?"

"Do what? Obey the law?"

"I'm a freelancer and you're deducting things like taxes and Social Security."

"You don't strike me as the type who files his taxes on time. I'm doing you a favor."

"I don't pay taxes because I don't exist. You think I'm going to apply for Social Security when I'm sixty-five?"

"You're going to want to wait until you're seventy. The extra benefits are worth it."

"I'm not waiting for anything. I'm legally dead. Why am I paying any of this bullshit?"

"I told you to watch your language."

"Fuck you, Miss Manners. You get me to kill for you and then you screw me out of my money."

"That money belongs to the government. It funds what we do here. You don't like it, run for office."

I don't want to run for anything. I want to shove this miserable cheap-ass check so far up Wells's ass he can read the routing number out the back of his eyes.

But Max Overload is just limping along these days and I don't want to have to find someplace else to live. Landlords in L.A. don't want you to have pets. What am I going to do with a chain-smoking severed head? Dignity is nice but it's money makes the lights and shower work.

I watch the welders working across the warehouse so I don't have to look at Wells while I fold the check and slip it into my pocket.

"At the end of time, when your side loses, I want you to remember this moment."

Wells narrows his eyes.

"Why?"

"'Cause Lucifer doesn't expect you to thank him when he fucks you over. That's why he's going to win."

Wells looks down at the floor for a minute. Puts his hands behind his back.

"You know, my mother watched a lot of Christian TV when I was growing up. Hellfire-and-brimstone hucksters telling Bible stories and yelling about damnation to get fools and old people to send them their welfare checks. I never paid much attention to 'em, but one day out of nowhere this one wrinkled old preacher starts telling what he says is a Persian parable. Now, that's weird for a Baptist Bible-thumper.

"You see, there was once a troubled man in a little village near Qom in ancient Persia."

"This is the story, right? 'Cause I don't want to hear about you and your dad going off-roading."

"Shut up. One day the troubled man got out of bed to work his fields and maybe he was killed or maybe he just kept walking, but he was never heard from again. The sun was shining through the door as the man left and threw his shadow on the wall by the hearth or whatever it is you call it over there. When the man's wife and children came home and found the house empty, the wife sees her husband's shadow and asks who he is. The shadow says, "The man is gone and become a shadow to this house. I am the shadow of the man who did not go, but will remain here." The shadow stayed and over time became a man and he and the woman and her children lived there happily together for many years."

Wells puts his hands together almost like he's praying. It creeps me out seeing this side of him.

"Later, when I heard that the Golden Vigil was founded in Persia, I knew it was God speaking to me through the TV that day. He was telling me that here is where I'm supposed to be."

"That story doesn't even make sense, and what exactly does it have to do with anything we're talking about?"

"It means we've done our job for more than a thousand years, so you can shove your disapproval."

"That sounds like the sin of pride, Marshal. Better run downstairs and let Miss December flog it out of you. Webcam it and charge by the minute. You won't ever have to take government money again."

Wells looks at me. His phone goes off. He ignores it.

I want to tell him to go fuck himself.

"You done whining? You ready to work? I have something else for you."

But I need this.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to walk through a murder scene with me. The victim was Sub Rosa. No rough stuff. Just observation."

"You have forensics people. Why do you need me?"

"I don't want them getting too deep into this one yet. I want you."

"Why?"

"Because you've been to Hell."

"So?"

"I want you to take a look at a body and tell me what you think it means."

"Are you sure it's just one body and not five?"

"Funny."

"I want my full fee."

"Half. No one is asking you to kill anything."

"You're using up my valuable drinking and smoking time. I need compensation."

"As you just pointed out, we're government funded, which means that we work within a simple and predetermined pay structure. In other words, looking and pointing doesn't pay the same as hunting and killing."

"Tell you what, go down to Chinatown, find a club called the Owl's Shadow, and hire yourself a Deadhead. Those gloomy necromancers are a bunch of low-self-esteem Siouxsie and the Banshees bitches. They'll fall all over themselves to help a fed do a murder-scene magic show."

Wells takes the phone from his pocket, looks at the caller ID, and frowns.

"Look, you can sprinkle some pixie dust around while you're at the scene. Do some damn magic that won't break anything and I can get you two-thirds of your normal fee. But that's it."

"Done."

I put out my hand. He puts the phone to his ear so he doesn't have to shake on it.

"We'll meet at three A.M., when things are quiet and the bars are closed. I'll call you with the address."

"Nice doing business with you, Marshal. Give the missus my best."

"Get out." I DECIDE TO skip the Ray and Huston show on the way out, so I slip through a dark patch on a wall outside the warehouse. Come out in the alley across the street from the Bamboo House of Dolls.

What I thought was a one-night blowout right after I saved the world on New Year's has turned into a six-month running party. After I tossed Mason to the mob Downtown, it seemed like half the Sub Rosa in L.A. showed up at Bamboo House to kiss his ass good-bye. And they never left. Carlos is happy enough. Sub Rosa tip big at civilian places where they can hang out without ending up part of the floor show.