Which is why I was glad they didn’t know I was an angel. I dropped to my knees where the smoke was thickest, opened a Zipper in the air, and then crawled inside.
See, the great thing about Zippers is that the bubble into no-Time that they open can only be seen by angels and other similar types of beings. As far as the Black Sun boys were concerned, I’d just vanished.
On the other side of the Zipper, I crouched in clouds of motionless smoke that were as resistant to my touch as cotton candy, and I waited. It’s never an exact thing, the slippage between Outside and real-world time, so I had to give it long enough to make sure Baldur and his men had gone looking for me. If I came back out too fast I’d find myself in the middle of several angry, ear-damaged Nazis with guns, and my life would become painfully ugly.
I couldn’t hear or see what was going on outside my little bubble, so I counted until I was pretty sure I’d lasted three or four minutes, then I stepped back through the Zipper and let real time catch up with me. To my great happiness, I’d managed it correctly. The room was empty except for the remaining traces of smoke. Behind the screen of iron bars the window was now open; chill November breeze was clearing the room. I grabbed my gun and other weapons off von Reinmann’s desk, and when I noticed a flash drive sticking out of his laptop, I grabbed that too. Then I slipped out the door into the third floor hallway as discreetly as I could.
The Black Sun people had no idea what I’d done, so they had scattered through the building looking for me. I could hear a couple of them shouting from the fire escapes at either end of the corridor, which had been my first choice for a getaway, so that wasn’t going to work. Instead, I hurried down the stairs to the second floor where the receptionist was still sitting at her desk, no doubt wondering why her co-workers were running all over the building shouting and waving guns.
I stopped in front of the desk. Her eyes went wide with fear even though I didn’t point my gun at her. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know if you’re one of these Kool-Aid drinkers, but if you’re not a racist monster, I suggest you grab your purse and your coat and get the hell out of this building and never come back. There’s a severed head on the desk upstairs. Police are going to be here soon and things are going to turn, well, difficult.”
I didn’t wait to see what she did, because I could hear the street-level door bang open below and footsteps mounting the stairs. I dashed into the stairwell and halfway down, then opened another Zipper, not to dodge them this time, but just to give myself a couple of seconds to think about how this could play out. Then I stepped out of it again and smacked the first guy coming up the stairs with the butt of my automatic, right between the eyes. He went down like a cow hit with a captive-bolt gun, and tangled his comrade so that the second guy’s gun discharged right over my shoulder. I jumped over them both and hit the door running. Embarrassingly, I forgot about the steps outside and almost broke my leg, but when I got up I hadn’t done anything worse than skin my knee and ruin my pants.
I was trying to decide which direction gave me the best chance of escape without a public firefight when the second guy from the stairs (who’d only fallen down) came crashing out the door after me. I think it was the brown-haired missionary Timon, still holding his gun and looking distinctly unhappy. By then, of course, I was running.
Pow! A shot flew past me and snapped off the brick facing, sending chips everywhere, including into the skin of my face. I turned to shoot back at him as I was running, trying to find an angle where I wasn’t going to hit anyone on the street if I missed, and ran right into a fucking parking meter. It was like being whacked with God’s three-iron. My gun flew out of my hand, and I went stumbling, falling, rolling into the street.
By the time I got myself sitting up, Timon knew he had me and had slowed to a walk, his gun leveled at me. I was calculating the ridiculously small odds that I could hit him with my one throwing-knife while lying on my back thirty feet away, when my pursuer suddenly stumbled and let out a shriek like a man getting a surprise, no-anesthetic appendectomy. He dropped onto the sidewalk and lay there screeching hoarsely, rolling from side to side, something long and thin sticking out of him like a misplaced chopstick.
A car screeched to a halt next to me. The door opened and before I knew it someone was trying to pull me in. I started to fight until I recognized Oxana. I shook her off, crawled back to retrieve my gun, then scrambled into the back seat. Before I even had the door closed, Halyna pushed down the accelerator and threw the boxy little car into a broad u-turn that had oncoming traffic honking and swerving. Timon was still wailing on the sidewalk when we turned the corner.
“I shoot him!” said Oxana proudly, waving a competition crossbow at me from her place in the passenger seat.
“You were supposed to stay away,” I said, but mostly I was trying to catch my breath.
“He was try to shoot you, so I shoot him!” she said, ignoring me.
“Pretty good aim,” I admitted. “Right in the knee. I guess he’ll have to quit the Aryan University track team.”
“Knee?” She sounded disappointed. “I was try to shoot him in testes.”
“You know what?” I said. “You girls are fun. But scary.” I leaned back in the seat, still sweating. “Before we reach the freeway, let’s find a pay phone, if such a thing even exists any more. I need to call the cops and make an anonymous report about some really bad people on Centennial Avenue.”
nineteen:
karma comedian
THE WOMEN were still talking excitedly about arrowing people in the balls when we pulled into the garage at Caz’s apartment.
“I wish my mother still alive,” Oxana said suddenly.
“What?” I was examining the bottom of my shoe. The explosive packed in the heel had melted half the sole, which explained why the back of my foot felt sunburned. “Your mother?”
“Yes. She very church, very religion. I tell her I save angel, she is so proud!”
For about half a second it was silent in the car, like someone had loudly passed gas. “You two know I’m an angel?” I said at last.
“We know, of course,” said Halyna as she turned off the engine. “You think we run away with some normal man to fight Anahita? She is much bigger, stronger angel even than you!”
I was a little hurt that I hadn’t won them over with just my swagger and charm, but I had to admit it would save me the long, embarrassing lecture I had been planning about how when a Deity loves a planet very much, they get married and make little cherubs.
“Okay,” is what I said instead. “Glad you’re cool with it.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m always kind of wired after people have been shooting at me. As for the Amazons, they were pretty high on the whole adventure, so after we got back I let them take my car and go over to Junior’s Catering to pick up some food while I did some strategic thinking.
The Junior Burger, which you can only get there, and only when Junior wants to make them, is one of the great inventions of modern cuisine. He puts the cheese and grilled onions and hot peppers between two patties, then crimps them into one big patty and slaps it on the fire. When it comes off, it’s magic. I sometimes think that Junior props up the entire economy of the Ravenswood district. Certainly the place is always crowded, with a dozen people waiting outside just to get in and order, and about three-quarters of them are from the rich side of the freeway.