And Billy turns, and sees Anton Cirrus, standing there with a small duffel bag in one hand, and a gun in the other.
“Hands up, fucker,” says Anton. Billy complies. He wishes he had his orange jumpsuit: it can’t stop a bullet, but being naked in front of the barrel of a gun doesn’t exactly make him feel less vulnerable.
“Everybody just hold still for a second,” Anton says.
These are clear instructions, and even though Anton’s voice is choked with rage and maybe even something like sorrow, he nevertheless says them loudly enough for all to hear, and if everyone in the room was human everyone in the room might even be willing to obey. But Jørgen is still a massive hell-wolf, and massive hell-wolves don’t particularly care for human instructions or for the nuances of hostage situations. He gathers himself up and prepares to spring.
Anton, for his part, is smart enough to perceive that shooting Billy won’t protect him, so he turns the gun onto Jørgen.
He fires twice.
The first shot misses. The other shot hits Jørgen in the joint of his right shoulder, causes him to lose his footing for a second, although he still looks like he might leap.
Anton fires two more times.
Both hit Jørgen in around the same area, which is enough to cause his front legs to crumple. His eyes flash angrily: it looks like he’s trying to muster the hate-stare, but Anton has taken advantage of the moment, has sprinted through the vestibule and is already out into the streets of Chelsea.
Jørgen’s wolf body leaks blood, shudders, begins to undergo the weird flesh-morph that changes it back into a human body.
Elisa finds a dish towel in the rubble and tries to maintain pressure on the wound while Jørgen’s body shifts shape. She looks up at Billy. “Call an ambulance,” she says.
Billy looks around, finds the phone mounted to the wall. He lifts it and is a little surprised to find that it has a dial tone. He dials 911 and gives the dispatcher the address of the tower, hopes the EMTs will be able to find the door now that Ollard is dead and the cloak has, presumably, fallen.
“How is he?” he asks, once he hangs up.
“Hard to say,” Elisa says.
“Okay,” Billy says. He feels worried for Jørgen, but the sensation is distant somehow, abstract; it is as though some mechanism in his psyche has lost a pin during the long battering of the day’s events. He tries slowly to assemble an argument for doing something — anything — and it’s then he remembers that his obligations to Lucifer are not yet concluded.
“The Neko,” he says, wearily. “I know where it is. I’m going to go get it.”
Elisa gives one short, curt nod.
Billy remembers the route: the long avocado corridor, the brick stairwell, the room with the file boxes. But when he gets to the room where the Neko should be, and opens the door, he sees that it is gone. The sawhorses are there, the chalk marks on the floor, but the Neko itself? MIA, or AWOL, or something.
He makes himself undergo the effort of thinking. He stands there, naked and bloody, and thinks.
He remembers Anton Cirrus’s duffel bag.
He stands in the dark, chalky room, breathing hard, and thinks about where Anton Cirrus might have gone. He considers where he, himself, ended up choosing to go when he was in the portal, with the opportunity to go anywhere. He went to work. Because that’s where you go when it feels like your whole life has been upended. At least there you know what’s expected of you. And work, for Anton Cirrus, is Bladed Hyacinth.
Billy doesn’t know where the Bladed Hyacinth office is, but he has a pretty good idea of how to find out.
He retraces his steps back to the Starbucks. Elisa is there, still applying pressure to Jørgen’s wound. Jørgen raises his heavy, hairy head and gives Billy a pained grin.
“Hey, buddy,” Billy says.
“Did we win?” Jørgen says.
“Not yet. But I’m gonna take care of it. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jørgen says.
“You hang in there. In a couple of days we’ll be back home, drinking beers and getting high.”
He suspects that this will not, in fact, be the case. They belong to the Devil now, and Billy’s pretty sure that that means they’re going to spend the rest of their lives leashed up in Hell, to be brought out into the world every now and again when someone needs terrorizing. When someone’s throat needs rending. Nevertheless, he carries on, hoping Jørgen will be able to take some solace from the promise of this false future.
“One day we’re going to look back on all this and it’s just going to be a funny story,” Billy says. “You feel me?”
Jørgen winces, nods. “I feel you.” His eyes close again; his head drops slowly back to the floor.
Elisa looks up at Billy. “No luck with the thingamajig?” she says. “The cat?”
“Not really, no,” Billy says. “But I have a guess for where it is. I think I can get it.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Elisa says.
“You okay here?”
“Uh, I guess. I mean, this situation is going to be a bitch to explain to the EMTs and I’m pretty sure the presence of a shot-up dude and a motherfucking corpse means that I’m going to have to be talking to cops for the rest of the night. Now, I can pass myself off as somebody who doesn’t know shit about shit but you know what would really help me out?”
“What?”
“Clothes.”
“Ah,” Billy says. “Right.”
He makes a passable kilt out of a discarded Starbucks apron and he goes out to the van, changes back into the orange jumpsuit, brings everybody else’s clothes inside. They can’t get Jørgen into his clothes without moving him, and although neither of them really knows the first thing about first aid they seem to recall that you aren’t supposed to move people who have suffered grievous injuries, so instead they fold his pants into a kind of pillow and stick them under his head, in the hopes of giving him at least a little relief.
Billy starts to wonder why the fuck the EMTs aren’t here yet, and then he realizes that he’s still half covered in incriminating forensics, so it’d probably be good for him to be gone before they arrive. If he can figure out where to go.
“I have to use the phone,” he says.
His memory hasn’t improved. Out of all the phone numbers he’s ever known, he can still only remember one. Fortunately it’s the one that he needs.
He calls the Ghoul.
“I heard tell that you had emerged,” says the Ghoul, when he hears Billy’s voice.
Billy processes this. “You talked to Anil?”
“Correct. He didn’t sound well, you know. And he made it sound like you were in — something of a bad situation.”
“It’s all right,” Billy says. “I’m just doing my job.”
Silence on the other end of the line. Billy gives it a second, but he can’t really wait. Forward motion. Forward motion is good.
“I need your help,” he says.
“Tell me. What can I do?”
“I need the address of the Bladed Hyacinth office.”
A pause. Billy can hear an unspoken why hovering over the conversation. But the Ghoul has never been able to resist a direct request to look something up on the Internet.
“One moment please,” he finally says. Billy can hear the Ghoul’s bony fingers clacking across a keyboard. “I’m pulling that up now.”
He gives the address to Billy. It’s also in Chelsea, close enough that someone could flee there on foot.
Bingo, Billy thinks.
He looks around for something he can use to write the address down but can’t find anything. Well. He’s sure he’ll remember. This one time he won’t get distracted and forgetful and fuck it up. That’s all I ask, he thinks. Just this one time.