Richard Kadrey - Killing Pretty

Candy leans back and smiles. The black lipstick with the short pink hair looks good. But I’m not sure she gets that I’m as frustrated by all this clandestine crap as she is.

“A Scully and Mulder thing? Yeah. I can handle that,” she says. “Does that mean I get to move back home?”

Julie gets her bag and stands up.

“This is getting a bit personal. I think I’ll go.”

“So, can I have a job?” says Candy.

Julie thinks for a minute.

“You can work with him as an unpaid intern. We’ll see from there.”

“Awesome.”

Julie slips the bag over her shoulder and looks at me.

“I’ll call you. Keep an eye on our guest.”

“My guest.”

“Call me if anything changes.”

“Bye. Thanks,” says Candy as Julie weaves her way through the crowd.

When she’s gone, Candy finishes her drink.

“Seriously,” she says. “We have to talk about some kind of timetable for me coming back to Max Overdrive. I love Brigitte, but I can’t live without a plan.”

“Trust me. I know how you feel.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I wasn’t sure for a while there.”

She pushes her leg against mine under the table. I look around, making sure no one can see. I think we’re okay and she feels good, so I don’t try to stop her.

“Look,” I say. “If we work together we’ll see each other all the time. Aside from that, give it until the later part of the month before you come back. Okay? Maybe by then I’ll have Sleeping Beauty out of the store.”

“Can I come over now?” she says. “Seeing as how we’re colleagues, I should have a look at the dead man.”

“I don’t see why not. But we can’t leave at the same time. I’ll go. You go and order another drink. Take off in, say, twenty minutes.”

She picks up the shot glass and rolls it between her palms.

“Twenty minutes is a long time to be all on my own. What if someone asks me for a date?”

“Do what you think is best, but remember that your guitar amp is still at Max Overdrive.”

“What do I have to do to get it back?” she says.

“Awful things. Depraved things.”

“You bad man.”

I get up from the table.

“Forget twenty minutes. Make it ten.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

She heads back to the bar. I go out the door.

LOS ANGELES IS a busted jukebox in a forgotten bar at the ass end of the high desert. The city only exists between the pops, skips, and scratches of the old 45s. Snatches of ancient songs. Lost voices. The jagged artifacts of a few demented geniuses, one-­hit wonders, and lip-­synching frauds. Charlie Manson thought he was going to be the next Beatles and we know how that turned out. This city is built on a bedrock of high crimes and rotten death. The Black Dahlia. Bugsy Siegel. The Night Stalker. We’ve buried and forgotten more bodies than all the cemeteries of Europe. Someday the water is going to run out and the desert will strip this town down to its Technicolor bones. Even the buzzards won’t want it and the city knows it. Maybe that’s why I like it.

It’s not a long walk back to Max Overdrive and I can let my mind wander.

It’s funny to be thinking about the desert when there’s still so much water around, cutting off streets with blocked sewer drains. Signs of the weird floods that nearly drowned the city at Christmas are fading fast, but not completely gone. L.A. doesn’t have the luxury of hundred-­year flood warnings. We don’t have that kind of relationship with water or the past. And this flood wasn’t anything to do with global warming or El Niños. It wasn’t real weather. It was the symptom of a disease. An organism worming its way into our world from another.

The Angra Om Ya were old gods. Older than the God most good little girls and boys think about. That God, sneaky bastard, stole the universe from the Angra and walled them off in another dimension. When they broke out and headed back into our space-­time, they brought the floods with them. One long golden shower of hate. I fought the Angra, if fight’s the right word. I danced around until I foxed them into the Room of Thirteen Doors and locked them in forever. If you live in this universe, you’re welcome, and could you spare some change for a fellow American who’s down on his luck? Okay, Bogart said it better than I did, but you get the idea.

The city was still underwater when we killed Candy. No choice. The feds were trucking Lurkers out into the Mojave to a hoodoo Manzanar. So, Julie helped us out. We staged a scene where it looked like she shot and killed Candy. What was another Lurker stiff to the Vigil jackboots? And now I owe Julie and will be working off the debt until she dies or I die or the oceans turn to Jell-­O and Atlantis rises.

You’d think after that, things might smooth out a little. What could be worse than your city underwater, pissed-­off elder gods, and killing your girlfriend? Nothing, you’d say, but if you bet me the farm on it, I’d be asshole-­deep in cotton. You see, a bum wandered into my life around New Year’s. He called himself Death, and who was I to argue? Someone had ripped out his heart and he was still walking around. He wasn’t a zombie because I destroyed all of them (seriously, how about that spare change?) and he definitely wasn’t an ordinary angel. The fucker, who or whatever he is, came to me specifically and asked me to find out who killed him. Me. Like I need more bullshit in my life. Between BitTorrent and video streaming, Maximum Overdrive is about dead. Now I have to drop all that to wet nurse another supernatural shit heel because why?

Because I’m a freak. A nephilim. Half human and half angel. Heaven hates me because I shouldn’t exist and the world hates me because, well, I’m really good at killing things. Yet for some reason, the schmuck asleep in my storeroom thinks I’m a Good Samaritan. When he wakes up, despite what Julie wants, I’m going to skate his ass out the door as fast as I can. I simply do not need crap like this in my life.

What I need is a drink, a week in Mexico with Candy, and tickets for Skull Valley Sheep Kill when they reopen the Whisky a Go Go. I’m not betting on the last two, but I can magically conjure up the first by reaching into my pocket and taking out my flask.

Which is almost empty.

Story of my life. Thanks for listening. Be sure to tip your waitresses on the way out.

PAUL NEWMAN AND Steve McQueen are jumping off a cliff when I get back to Max Overdrive. I recognize the movie immediately. It’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but not any version I’ve seen. Robert Redford is nowhere in sight.

“You like it?” says Maria. Her voice cracks a little, like she only takes it out on special occasions.

Maria is about my height, her skin darker than Allegra’s. She reminds me of a young Angela Bassett if she’d grown up with alley-­cat gutter punks. She’s got a heavy-­gauge ring through her nose and a smaller one in her lower lip. A muscular neck with tattoos of the four elements—­air, earth, fire, and water. Her hair is about shoulder length, dyed sky blue, but with black roots showing, and pulled back in a ­couple of ragged pigtails. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.

“It’s great, right?” says Kasabian. He’s drumming on the front counter like a beatnik with a pair of new bongos, his metal hand bouncing like silver spiders.

“McQueen was originally supposed to play the Sundance Kid, but the deal fell through,” he says. “Get it? This is the future for the store. Movies that never happened. Dirty Harry with Frank Sinatra instead of Eastwood. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. Brando in Rebel Without a Cause. The right ­people will pay a fortune to see this stuff.”