“You can find any of our movies somewhere cheaper, go rent from them.”
Eye Patch puts the disc in the pocket of his PVC jacket.
“I always wondered about that. How do you keep people from bootlegging your wares?”
I get out another disc, an original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, and show him the runes inscribed around the edge.
“The discs are hexed. They know when they’re being copied and melt down like a nuke plant, killing themselves and whatever machine they’re in. We have an alarm rigged up that goes off when it happens. Store policy is that you kill my disc, well, you know.”
“You kill them?”
“Don’t be stupid. I can’t kill off my customer base. No, I just cut off their fingers and feed them to Kasabian.”
From the back room Kasabian yells, “I heard that. Fuck you.”
“See? A barely controlled beast.”
“Take it easy, Stark,” says Eye Patch. “How long do we have the movie?”
“Three days. After that, it’s a hundred-dollar-a-day late fee.”
The short vampire gets their umbrellas from the bin up front.
“You’re a fucking thief, you know that?” he says.
“Wrong. I’m P. T. Barnum. You want to see the Fiji mermaid, I’m the only one in town who has one and no one gets in free.”
“This movie better be fucking great.”
“If you don’t like it, come back and you can exchange it for one of these.”
I hold up my middle finger.
Eye Patch laughs. When his friend takes a step toward me, he puts a hand on his shoulder and he backs down. Yeah, the short one is new to the bloodsucker game. Anxious to show off his power. Good thing he’s got Eye Patch looking out for him. He might actually make it to New Year’s.
The Lyph comes over and asks for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part 3.
“You have good taste,” I say.
She lays down a hundred.
“You too,” she says. Her horns are still a little damp. Rain beads on them like she’s glued rhinestones there too.
“You okay getting home with your radar showing?”
She realizes I mean her horns and grins.
“I’m fine. The umbrella has a glamour on it.”
She picks it up and instantly looks like the kind of sweet old lady who spends her days baking apple pies for orphans.
“Nice trick.”
“Thanks,” she says, setting the umbrella against the wall. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Why do you wear that one glove?”
I hold up my left hand. The prosthetic one. Flex the fingers.
“I paid good money for this manicure. I’m not messing up my cuticles around here.”
She hesitates.
“People call you Michael Jackson behind your back, you know.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
She purses her lips in embarrassment.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just, you hear stories.”
I hand her the disc.
“No problem. For a hundred dollars a movie, I guess you’re entitled to a question or two.”
She glances around the store.
“You have some really nice stuff, but you ought to expand into BBC shows.”
“Which ones?”
“In the early sixties they used to erase a lot of TV to save on videotape. They lost old Doctor Whos. The Avengers. Cool shows like that. I have friends who’d kill for those.”
“Tell you what, make me a list of what you want and I’ll see what I can do.”
From the back, Kasabian yells, “That’s TV. We don’t do TV.”
I shake my head.
“Ignore him. He’s a snob. Bring me the list and your next rental is free.”
“Awesome,” she says. She gets her umbrella, does her old lady trick, and heads out. Stopping by the door she says, “Merry Christmas.”
“Same to you, Mrs. Cratchit.”
She opens the door and a blast of wind blows rain inside. It’s coming down hard enough that the street out front is flooding again. I lock the door behind her.
“Cute girl,” says Kasabian, coming out of the back. His mechanical legs click with each step. He wears a loose knockoff Nike tracksuit. It makes him look like the movie version of a Russian mobster, if Russian mobsters were robots.
“Nice salesmanship with her,” he says. “Not so much with the guys you threatened.”
“The little guy annoyed me. Anyway, we need signs or warning labels or something on the discs. I don’t want to keep having that conversation.”
“If it’ll calm you down I’ll print out something.”
“Yeah, it would.”
Kasabian has lost more hair in the year since I’ve been back. His face is still as round as it ever was. Must be the hoodoo keeping him alive. He eats plenty, but the food drops right through a tube in his mechanical body, so it’s not like he’s taking in any calories.
“You’re in a mood,” he says. “You and the other Johnny Laws have a busy day arresting jaywalkers?”
“It was a funny day, now that you ask. I cut off a guy’s head, and when he died I followed him into limbo. Sound familiar?”
Kasabian touches his throat.
“You and cutting people’s heads off,” he says. “You’re like an alcoholic, only with a guillotine.”
I think about getting a drink, but the moment has passed. I don’t want it anymore. I’m worried about Candy.
“You notice anything about Candy recently?” I say. “She wasn’t feeling well at work.”
“Was she there when you started lopping heads off, because regular people aren’t exactly used to that?”
“Candy isn’t regular people. She’s seen a little blood in her time.”
Candy is a Lurker. A Jade. They’re kind of like vampires, only scarier. More like spiders, really. They don’t drink their victims’ blood. They dissolve them from the inside and drink them dry. Candy has been clean for years. Doc Kinski came up with a potion that curbs her appetite for human milk shakes. After he died, Allegra stepped in and took over his practice and has been giving Candy all the Jade methadone she needs.
“How’s the swami biz?” I say, wanting to change the subject.
“This is how it is,” says Kasabian, dropping a pile of printouts on the counter.
“What are these?”
“Requests from potential clients.”
Kasabian started a little side business a few weeks back and it’s taken off like a bottle rocket out of a carny’s ass. He can’t go to Hell like I can, but he can see into the place. He set himself up as an online seer. For a fee, he’ll tell you how the dearly departed are getting on in the Abyss. Seeing as how most people seem to end up down there, he doesn’t lack for clients.
Kasabian riffles the pages with his pointy hellhound claws.
“All these people have family or friends Downtown. And all want more than I can give them. Paying clients don’t want to hear about sweet Aunt Suzy up to her eyeballs in a river of shit.”
“And this concerns me how?”
“Most of these people want to, you know, talk to the departed. Hear a story about redemption, maybe. Mostly, they want to know where they hid the good silver or did they really love them. You know. Normal family bullshit.”
“And you want me to go Downtown and play twenty questions with damned souls because they don’t have enough problems.”
“Yes. That’s what I always want. Come on, man. Look at the streets. This city is going to be empty soon. Empty and underwater. It’s no-shit Ragnarök. People want to know what to expect on the other side.”
I shake my head. Push the papers back across the counter.
“Not my problem. And I told you. Mr. Muninn is still pissed at me for stealing Father Traven’s soul. He doesn’t want me back in his petting zoo playing with the animals.”
“It doesn’t have to be all of them,” says Kasabian. “Just for a few of the high rollers. We need the money.”
That much is right. We are severely on the rocks. Kasabian squirreled away a few grand from a payoff I got from the Dark Eternal when I put down some pain-in-the-ass zombies. But we blew the last of that fixing up Max Overdrive so we could live here and reopen the store. The special video section is bringing in cash, but barely enough to pay for beer and utilities.