Richard Kadrey: Kill the dead

"I have a feeling something has happened to my son. I heard that you do things other people can't or don't want to do. There was a crime in the city earlier this year. I believe a cult was planning on sacrificing a group of kidnapped women. You stopped it."

Is that what the tabloids are saying happened now? It's annoyingly close to the truth. Couldn't they have worked in some ETs?

"Listen, Evelyn."

"How did you know my name was Evelyn?"

"Listen, Evelyn, I know you need help, but not from me. I'm not what you think I am."

"What are you?"

"I'm a monster."

I let that sink in for a second. She's a nice woman, but Ziggy really fouled my mood. I kill off the tumbler of Aqua Regia.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but if your husband really is Sub Rosa, why isn't he out here with you doing locator spells? Or echo tracing? Sloppy teenybopper magic usually leaves a fat shiny trail of residue all over the aether. Easy to follow."

"My husband is dead. It was very recent and sudden. That's why I was trying to get in touch with Aki. Now I might have lost both of them."

She looks down at the coffee cup. Her heart is slowing, but not because she's any more relaxed. My blackened arm is starting to heal. It burns and itches. I can't help this woman. I don't want to be here.

Carlos says, "I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself. Why don't you go to the cops or hire yourself a private investigator? You don't need magic for this kind of thing. And from what I've seen around here, magic doesn't really help anything. It just makes everything more confusing."

She puts her hand on my arm.

"You saved all those people. Why won't you help me?"

"Carlos is right. You need to go to the cops or hire yourself a detective. I'm not Sam Spade. That's not what I do."

"But you saved all those people."

"I didn't save anyone. I just killed the bastards who needed killing. Get it? I don't save good people. I murder bad ones." I wish I was saying this quietly and reasonably, but really, I'm way too loud.

Evelyn straightens and turns to ice. She puts her kid's photo back in her bag and gets up.

"I'm sorry to have taken up your valuable time."

"Wait a minute."

This time I grab her arm. I look around for someone who was here a minute ago.

"Titus. Come on over here."

A whippet-thin black guy in a purple velvet suit and glasses with round, yellow-tinted lenses walks cautiously to the bar. I hold a hand out at Evelyn.

"Titus, this is Evelyn. Evelyn, this is Titus Eshu. Titus is a Fiddler. Do you know what that is?"

"He reads objects by handling them."

"Right. He plays around with things, then tells you all about the owner. He can even use them like a divining rod. Do you have any of your son's things?"

"I have his high school class ring."

I look at Titus.

"That good enough?"

Titus nods.

"It's a good start," he says to Evelyn. To me he says, "And after I do this, you're going to owe me a favor, right?"

"Right."

He smiles, takes Evelyn by the elbow, and leads her to his table.

"This way, ma'am. Let's see if we can track down your wayward child."

Carlos says, "You were a real world-class prick there for a minute. Then you turned it around right at the last second and came out sort of looking like a person."

"I've gotta get out of here."

"I'm kidding, man. You did fine with the old lady."

"No, I didn't. This is my punishment for not killing Mason. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. There's no reason for me to exist. I kill things I don't care about for people I hate. I yell at old ladies. And now I'm going to owe goddamn Titus a favor."

"I'm going to wrap up this food so you can take it home with you."

I turn in my seat and look at Evelyn and Titus. He has Aki's ring in one hand and the photo in the other. His eyes are half closed and he's whispering an incantation. Evelyn hangs on his every word. She doesn't look happy, but maybe a little more hopeful.

I'm suddenly aware that while I'm watching Titus, pretty much everyone else in the bar is watching me. I'd like to think they're staring because of my white-hot animal magnetism, but I know I'm not Elvis. I'm Lobster Boy, hear me roar. Carlos gives me the tamales in a Styrofoam carrier. Thanks and good night. Be sure to tip your waitresses. I leave through a shadow near the fire exit in back. YOU KNOW HOW they put out oil well fires by setting off an explosion that's so big it snuffs out the first fireball with a bigger one? Sometimes the only way to get past something impassable is to smash it with itself. Like kills like. When you live with a dead man's head that won't shut up and smokes all your cigarettes, the only way to deal with the awfulness is to make it so unbelievably awful that it becomes kind of weirdly beautiful. Like an exploding giraffe full of fireworks. (Hellions really know how to throw a birthday party.)

Kasabian calls it his "pussy wagon," but I can't go there, so I call it the "magic carpet." Really it's a polished mahogany deck about the size of a dinner plate, supported by a dozen articulated brass legs. When I brought it home from Muninn's-partial payment for a quick smash-and-grab job-one end of the deck was loaded down with prisms, mirrors, and gears that must have meshed with another long-lost machine. The top is covered in what looked like teeth marks and stained with something black. I don't want to know what used to drive the thing or what happened to it.

After I unscrewed and sawed off all the extra hardware, I let Kasabian take it out for a test drive. What do you know? His low-rent, third-rate hoodoo was just powerful enough to keep the brass legs in sync, so he can move around on his own now. It's nice not to have to carry Kasabian everywhere anymore, but it means that every day I come home to a chain-smoking Victorian centipede.

He's standing on what used to be the video bootlegging table and using his brass legs to tap numbers into a PC. Ever since he got mobile, Kasabian has been doing Max Overload's books again. He and Allegra set up a little in-store wireless network so he can do the banking and buy new inventory online. Race with the Devil, a decent piece of mid-seventies trash with Warren Oates and Peter Fonda trying to outrun a bunch of rural devil worshippers, plays on a monitor next to the PC. Ever since his visit Downtown, Kasabian has been on a devil movie kick. He doesn't look up when he hears me come in.

"So, how did it go?" He turns and looks at me. "Oh, that bad."

"Just about that bad, Alfredo Garcia."

"I told you not to call me that."

"I had to go Wild Bunch in the theater. Left me in a Peck-inpah state of mind."

"Did you get paid, at least?"

"Yeah, here's the big money. Plus the usual deductions."

I drop the check next to the keyboard. Kasabian pinches the ends of the check between two of his brass legs and holds it up to read it.

"That prick. He just does this to humiliate you. It makes him feel better about not being able to do the stuff you can do and needing you for his dirty work. It's pure envy."

"Yeah, it's a glamorous life here in Graceland."

I pick up the bottle of Jack Daniel's from the bedside table and pour some into the same glass I've been using for three days.

"And he's trying to keep us on the hook by starving us. You know that, right? You ought to let me hex his ass."

I sip the Jack. It's good, but after the Aqua Regia, it's about as potent as cherry Kool-Aid.

"Save your hoodoo for real work. And, technically, he's only starving me. If he knew about you, he'd shit his heart out."

"Great, get him up here. I'll video it and put it up on YouTube."

"Aelita would be the fun one to get on tape. I'm an Abomination, but I don't even know if angels have a word for you."