“Nice job.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you forward that to Julie? You’ll make her day.”
“I’m on it,” she says, punching numbers into her phone.
I heft the knife in my hand. It has good weight and balance. With enough strength you could easily ram this through someone’s ribs and pull out whatever the hell you wanted.
“I’m going to put this away upstairs. You still want that drink?”
“Hell yes, Agent Scully.”
“Wait. I thought Scully was the woman.”
“Stop being so heteronormative. You’d look good in a dress.”
“I don’t know what one of those words means, but okay.”
“I really do have to drag you into this century.”
“Drag away. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Not without me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Will you two please go the fuck away?” says Kasabian. “You’re giving me diabetes over here.”
We go upstairs and don’t come down for a long time. My phone rings. It’s Julie. I let her go to voice mail. Who’s Huck Finn now?
I CALL JULIE back an hour later. We set up a time for the next day when she’ll come by and see Sleeping Beauty. She says she might already have a line on another case and will call me when she’s sure. I guess this is how things are from now on. Business calls and meetings with clients. Jobs we get and jobs we lose. Time to shine my shoes and carry my lunch in a brown paper bag. Soon it will be heart-healthy egg salad on vitamin-enriched organic free-range whole-wheat bread.
I’m so doomed.
Here’s the thing: once upon a time I ran Hell. I didn’t break the place, but I didn’t exactly spruce it up. I don’t have a good track record with nine-to-five responsibilities.
I wonder how long it will take for me to fuck up so badly that Julie gives my job to a guy selling oranges by the side of the freeway? Maybe I can swap gigs with him. He can do the surveillance and the paperwork and I’ll stand by the off-ramp sucking fumes and selling oranges all day. It doesn’t sound like such a bad life. A little repetitive, but so was fighting in the arena. The freeway job would have less stabbing and more vitamin C, and that’s a step up in the world by anyone’s standards.
I’m on my way to the big leagues one Satsuma at a time.
KASABIAN HAS REOPENED the place when I come downstairs and a few customers are browsing our very specialized movies. Before Maria and Dash, Max Overdrive was doomed. Kasabian made a deal with them to find us copies of lost movies. The uncut Metropolis. Orson Welles’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. London After Midnight. Things like that. The problem was that a lot of the best of the bunch were silent movies, and in L.A. we like our gab, so those movies had a limited audience. They brought in enough money to keep the lights burning, but not enough to live on. The new, never-made movie scheme makes a lot more sense. Maybe we’ll be able to sleep at night without worrying that the next day we’ll be running the store out of the trunk of a stolen car. It’s this possibility that makes me even more pissed about the angel tagging the front windows.
Fuck waiting for paint remover tomorrow. I get the black blade, go outside, and start scraping.
I’m at it for maybe ten minutes when I see someone’s reflection in the glass. A tall guy in a brown leather blazer.
Someone is watching me from the street. I managed to get GOD off the glass, but now it reads KILLER, which really isn’t much of an improvement.
I turn around and give the guy a “move along, pilgrim” look. He gives me an irritatingly polished smile and comes over to where I’m working.
This day just keeps getting better.
“Someone really did a number on your windows,” he says. “Any significance to the word?”
“Some to him, I guess. None to me. What do you want?”
He looks around like he’s checking to see it’s just us chickens.
“You’re James Stark, aren’t you?”
“Who’s asking?”
He reaches around his back. I make sure he can see the knife in my hand. For a second he looks nervous, but he recovers quickly and flashes me that shit-eating grin.
He holds up his wallet and shows me an ID card from the L.A. Times. The name on the card is David Moore. I nod and he puts it away.
“Impressive. I bet you own a dictionary and a thesaurus.”
“Paper too,” Moore says. “Lots of blank printer paper.”
“And you want to print something about me. Why?”
He takes a step closer. He smells of adrenaline with a hint of fear sweat.
“We’re doing a feature—maybe a series—on the people who stayed here during the flood. The pioneers and eccentrics.”
“It sounds like you think I escaped from the Donner expedition.”
“Nothing like that,” he says.
He pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Taps out one for himself and holds the pack out to me like he’s throwing a bone to a ragamuffin refugee in a World War II movie. I don’t like the guy, but I take the cigarette. He lights it and then his own. It’s not bad. A foreign brand that burns the back of my throat pleasantly.
“Thanks.”
I go back to scraping the window.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, then, “How about it? Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Let me ask you one. Why me? Lots of people who stayed behind, including some of my customers. Why not interview them?”
He comes around where I’m scraping, so I get a clear view of his mug. Trying to establish eye contact and intimacy. Letting me know that even though he’s from the press I shouldn’t hold it against him. He’s one of the good guys. But he’s too eager to be convincing.
“You’re the only celebrity around here,” he says.
“And here I thought I was just another small businessman. Tell me, do all celebrities scrape their own goddamn windows clean?”
“We can start there. Why would someone paint ‘killer’ on your store?”
“Maybe they thought I was Jerry Lee Lewis. Look, I don’t like talking to strangers. Next thing, you’ll try to lure me into your van with promises of candy and puppies.”
He doesn’t react to the dig, so I keep on scraping. He watches me for a while before he speaks again.
“Maybe it said something else before. Maybe it said ‘Godkiller.’ ”
This time when I face him, I put the knife to his throat. There’s nothing behind him, so there’s plenty of room to move if he can get his brain and feet to function, but he can’t. That means he’s probably not one of Audsley Isshii’s crew, an assassin sent to settle a score. I don’t think he’s Sub Rosa either. That’s the first thing that would be coming out of his smug face if he was. He’s just a ridiculous civilian looking for a story or an autograph.
“Why would you say ‘Godkiller’?”
He puffs his smoke, trying to look like he’s rolling with the scene, but his hand is shaking. Not enough for most people to see, but I can.
“There are a lot of rumors about you. About your past. And what you did during the flood.”
“What do you think I did?”
“Some people say you saved the world and that it wasn’t the first time. Other people say you lost your mind and killed God, which is a big surprise to some of us.”
“You’re an atheist.”
“I guess you’re not.”
“I wish I had the luxury.”
A couple of people come out of Max Overdrive. A civilian guy and a female Lyph. Lyphs are generally a friendly bunch, but they freak out a lot of regular citizens because they look like what kids draw when they imagine the Devil. Horns and hooves. A tail. This one has rented from us for a while, but I can’t think of her name.
“What’s the matter, Stark?” the Lyph says. “He return a movie late?”
I take the knife from his throat, but keep it by my side.
“See? My customers are a lot more interesting than me.”
“Everyone’s more interesting than Stark,” says the Lyph. “He’s just a Mr. Grumpypants.”