“Well,” Billy says. “Thanks. And it’s good to hear your voice. But I should go.”
“Billy,” says the Ghoul. “One last thing.”
“What’s that.”
“You should call Denver. She’s been really worried about you since the reading last night. I think it would mean a lot to her if you gave her a call.”
“I don’t — I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Billy says. He imagines seeing Denver one final time, saying goodbye. Tries to imagine what function that would serve. For him, for her, for anyone. Comes up with nothing. Total blank. He’d rather she remember him as what he was than as what he is now. He’d rather she remember him as some goofy fuck-up who liked her movies, who found beauty in the movement of water, than as a killing machine.
He tries to come up with some way to explain this to the Ghoul, who has fallen into a pensive silence, but after a few seconds of trying out wordings in his head he just gives up and puts the phone back in its mount. It’s time to go.
He shakes a set of keys out of Jørgen’s pants. “I’m taking the van,” he says. Jørgen seems to have slipped out of consciousness and he doesn’t say anything.
“You’ll tell him?” Billy asks Elisa.
“I’ll tell him,” Elisa responds.
“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I guess it’s time to hunt a motherfucker down.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. RIDGEWAY VS. CIRRUS
GESTURES OF OPTIMISM FANCY CHAIRS • FIST-FORMATION OPTIONS • REALLY GOOD FOOTAGE • BACKSEAT KISSES • THE THING WITH FEATHERS • UNO • THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING GOOD • APOLOGIES AND PRAYERS
Billy remembers the address.
He’s not the best at urban driving, and he gets turned around in traffic and heads the wrong way for a few minutes, eventually needing to correct with an astonishingly brazen U-turn. But finally he gets to the right block. He double-parks and punches on the hazard lights, the universal sign for I’ll be back in a minute. Wresting a satanic world-destroying doodad from the clutches of a gun-wielding maniac does not seem like an errand that will conclude as tidily as, say, delivering a pizza, but he thinks it’s important to make the occasional gesture in the direction of optimism.
The building that houses Bladed Hyacinth is a three-story thing, squat and ugly. From the label on the intercom, Billy gleans that the offices are on the second floor, up a flight of stairs that he can perceive dimly through the smoked glass of the street entrance. He tries the door; it’s locked.
He glares at it, wondering if he can blow it to pieces. But nothing. He remembers Elisa saying that she could will herself into the wolf form; she just needed to really want to kill someone. And so Billy thinks of all the reasons why he wants to kill Anton Cirrus. He thinks of Anton Cirrus firing bullets into Jørgen, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor of a Starbucks. He thinks of Anton Cirrus’s stupid write-up. The storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Billy grimaces.
Come on, Lucifer, he thinks. Make me a goddamn monster.
Nothing. He stands there with his fists clenched for a long second. He releases them.
He contemplates just using the intercom and seeing if someone will buzz him in.
And then he thinks: Fuck this. He returns to the van and pops open the back.
He rummages until he finds a tire iron.
The glass in the door is treated with some kind of safety film, so the first blow just spiderwebs it, albeit with a satisfying crunch. Nobody’s around to see this except a few Honduran guys pushing a wheeled cart stacked with a half-dozen Igloo coolers. They give Billy a look for all of about half a second before they write him off as part of the scenery: just another insane white dude. It’s a classification that Billy can live with.
He takes four more swings and the sheet of pulverized glass begins to crumple, detaching from the doorframe along one side. Enough that Billy can get a shoulder into the gap and push his way through.
He climbs the stairs, the tire iron dangling at his side, and as he climbs he imagines taking that piece of reassuringly weighty metal and swinging it at Cirrus’s skull, imagines the shudder it would make when it connects.
But you don’t do that, he thinks. You don’t just kill people.
Shut up, he tells himself. You can kill these people.
And that ends the debate for the moment, because he’s on the second floor landing and he’s kicking the door open, and right behind it is Anton Cirrus with a gun, pointed directly at Billy’s face.
“You’re trespassing,” Anton says.
“Call the fucking cops,” Billy says.
“I could,” Anton says, looking Billy up and down. “You’d go to jail. You killed a man. You’re covered in blood.”
“Like you’re so clean,” Billy says. “You shot my fucking roommate. I have a witness. You want to call the cops? Go ahead. I would love to see what happens.” Given the lack of subtlety of his entrance, he’s a little surprised that the cops aren’t here already.
“Drop the tire iron,” Anton says.
When someone has a gun in your face, you feel compelled to do what they say. And so he does it.
“Get inside,” Anton says.
And Billy enters the Bladed Hyacinth offices, basically a single room, dark at this hour, lit only by the light of Macintosh Thunderbolt displays running Cupertino-bred screen savers. The room contains six fancy Aeron chairs, each one stationed at a desk with a MacBook and a surprising amount of jumbled paper. On one desk, Billy notes, is also Anton’s duffel bag.
“Face the wall,” Anton says. “Hands up.” The wall that faces the door is all bookshelves, loaded with literary magazines and proof copies of novels, and Billy dutifully reaches out and gets a grip on the edge of a shelf at eye level.
“So, what, you’re just going to shoot me now?”
“Maybe,” Anton says, pressing the barrel of the gun behind Billy’s ear.
“Anton,” Billy says. “That’s not going to help you. You can kill me. You can kill my friends. But you can’t kill Lucifer. You can’t kill him, you can’t hide from him, and you can’t stop him. You already lost. All you should be thinking about is how to minimize your losses.”
“And how do you recommend I do that?”
“Give me the Neko,” Billy says. “Give me the Neko and I walk out of here. You never see me again. You shot my friend, but you know what? Give me the Neko and I’ll just look past that. We’ll call it even. I won’t tell the cops. You get to keep your shitty little literary empire; you get to keep your book contract; you get to basically go on being yourself, which seems to be something you enjoy. All you have to do is hand over the Neko.”
“Do you know what the Neko is?” Anton says.
“Some piece of bullshit,” Billy says. “Why do you want it, anyway? You can’t get the sixth seal off it and even if you could—”
“Billy, it’s a perpetual motion machine. Get your mind around that for a second. What that would mean for the people who discover it. How much people would pay for it.”
“Look,” Billy says. “I don’t give a shit about the thing. I just want it to go away. Deep down, you want the same thing. I mean, honestly, do you really have some fantasy where you’re the guy who breaks the laws of physics once and for all?”
“Deep down inside?” Anton says. “You know what I believe deep down inside? I believe I’m intended for great things.”