“Oh God, look what you did.”
“God’s away on business, Kas. Talk to me.”
He looks up at me with big moon eyes. “I thought you were dead. When you disappeared, we all thought you were dead. I mean, what Mason did, it worked?”
“I was alive and in Hell for eleven years, so, yeah, you could say it worked.”
“How could you live through something like that? Mason was right about you.”
“What did he say?”
“That you were the only other really great natural magician he’d ever met.”
I have to smile at that.
“Sounds like Mason. I mean, it comes off like a compliment. But he calls me a great magician so he can call himself an even greater one.”
I turn away like I’m checking out the room, but really my gut is killing me. I’m burned and bruised where the slugs went in and I’m pretty sure I have a couple of cracked ribs. They’ll probably be all right by morning, but I’m not going to do much more walking around tonight. And I’m not about to give Kasabian the satisfaction of knowing I’m in pain.
“It must be true, though. You survived all those Hellions and you came back.”
“Wringing your neck is what brought me back. Yours and the others’.” The old anger comes boiling up, but I don’t want to lose control. It’ll scare Kasabian too much and he’ll be useless for information. I need to catch my breath. I can’t plan anything running around barking like a mad dog.
“For your information, I didn’t use any magic Downtown. Our magic is a joke down there. It doesn’t work. You might as well be shouting brownie recipes.” I take a calming drag off the cigarette. “I don’t even remember much of the magic we did in the Circle, but I did learn a trick or two down under. Hellion magic, and every bit of it is designed to make you cry all the way home.”
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Did you happen to notice me cutting off your head? If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Why did you come after me? Is it about the girl?”
“I don’t want to talk about her yet.”
I can’t talk about her yet.
“What do you want, man?”
“I want all of you. You were all in on it when Mason sent me down.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Right. You just stood there. You knew what was coming and you just stood there.”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“But you knew Mason was going to off me.”
Kasabian starts to say something, but he looks away.
“What did Mason promise you?”
“The sun and the moon. All our dreams come true, if we stayed out of the way and zipped our lips. It was hard stuff to refuse.”
“So, you said yes, then Mason screwed you and dumped you here. What a surprise. That’s why you’re about the last one in the Circle I need to kill.”
“Why?”
He frowns, like me not killing him first hurts his feelings.
“Because you’re a fuckup. You’re a third-rate magician and a second-rate human being. That’s why Mason and the others left you at the altar. You’re excess baggage.”
“You want to find the others from the Circle and you want me to help you.”
“I want a lot of things, but let’s start with that.” I shift around on the chair, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt my ribs. I don’t find one. “Where are the cool kids hanging out these days?”
“Are you crazy? Do you know what any of them would do to me if I told you?”
When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium. But you have to be careful with threats. Some Hellions and humans don’t know when to back down, and you might have to actually follow through. It didn’t happen often, but it was always a possibility.
“You know what I’m going to do to you?” I ask quietly and evenly. “You see that body over there? I’m going to drag it to the deepest, darkest part of Griffith Park and leave it for the coyotes.”
“Please don’t do that!”
“Then talk to me about the others. Where’s Mason?”
Mason had been the leader of our magic circle, which made me Mr. Green Jeans to his Captain Kangaroo. He was a talented magician and never passed up a chance to remind you of it. He came from money. At least he acted like he did. The truth is, none of us really knew much about his life outside the Circle. Parker did, though. They were tight. Parker was a thug with a boxer’s build and just enough magical ability to make him really dangerous. Mason saw the possibilities in someone like that and made the guy into his pet pit bull. Mason never got blood on his hands because Parker was only too happy to do it for him.
Mason also made a point of calling me Jimmy, James being my given first name. No one else ever called me Jimmy because I wouldn’t let them. I’ve always gone by Stark because the rest of my name had always been an issue in the family. I don’t know how Mason found out the rest of my name.
“Are you kidding? Does it look like I hang out with Mason anymore? I rent porn and Schwarzenegger to halfwits,” Kasabian says. “I’ve hardly seen him since that night and, to tell you the truth, I’m glad. After you were gone, those demons, or whatever they were, charged him up with power. Superman stuff. No, more like the Hulk. He changed, right in front of us. His skin, his bones, his whole body turned weird. It kind of glowed and it looked like there were things crawling around under his skin.”
“Sounds like they gave him an assload of nebiros.”
“What’s a nebiro?”
“A parasite. They live off the energy of whatever they infest. The only reason the host doesn’t drop dead immediately is that the nebiros excrete supernatural energy. They shit magic. It supercharges the host, keeping him and the parasite alive. Hellions eat those things like popcorn. I didn’t know they worked on humans.”
“Whatever happened, he wasn’t just Mason anymore. He was Mason and something else. Like God’s older brother, who takes God’s money, steals his car, and fucks his girlfriend. That’s Mason now. A guy who isn’t afraid to pants God. He took off and took Parker with him.”
I know that he’s telling the truth. In the same weird way that Carlos’s name popped into my head back at the Bamboo House of Dolls, I know that Kasabian is telling me the truth. It’s not reassuring to know something without understanding why you know it, but I’ll figure that out later.
I flick ashes off the cigarette and place it between Kasabian’s lips. He puffs on it a few times and that seems to calm him down. When he’s done, I set the cigarette down in an ashtray on the table. I don’t want to finish it after he’s touched it.
“I’m going to have a lot more questions for you over the next few days. Maybe weeks. However long it takes to settle this. Be straight with me, keep telling me the truth, and I might just give you your body back.”
“Sit here and wait for Mason to get me. What a sweet deal.”
“Work with me and he won’t be around to get you.”
Kasabian’s expression goes blank, like he’s staring off into the distance at something I can’t see.
“You’re right, you know. I am a fuckup,” he says. “All the rest of them, they got power, money, and cushy jobs. But they cut me out. I got nothing.”
“Then you have every reason to want some payback, too.”
“Don’t you think I would have if I could? Look at me! I even had to steal this stupid store just to earn a living. Then a dead guy comes in and cuts off my head. Yeah, I’m the one who’s going to put down Mason Faim.”
“No, I am. You just point me at him.”
“I told you, I don ’t know where he is. He’s gone. He’s Kayzer Soze.”
“What about the
others?’
“You’re asking a lot, man.”
“No. I’m asking for exactly what I’m owed.” I take a smoke again. I don’t want to get into the next thing. “Tell me, Kas, like your life depended on it. Who killed Alice?”
Kasabian’s eyes dart back and forth in his head like they’re looking for the eject button. I recognize the look of panic. It almost feels like I can hear his heart speed up. But he doesn’t have a body, though maybe he’s still somehow connected to it.
“You know about that? All the way down there and you know about that?”
“Talk to me, Kas. The coyotes are calling.”
I look at the floor, but I don’t move. If I move, I’m going to break like glass. I can’t stand talking about her. I raise my gaze to meet Kasabian’s. If he had a body, he would have bolted.
“I don’t know much. It’s not like Mason or anyone stops by to talk over old times. I get the same rumors as everybody else. I heard Parker did it.”
“Mason sent him?”
“Parker doesn’t shit unless Mason tells him it’s okay, so yeah, Mason must have told him to do it.”
“Why? After all these years, why would he do that?”
“I don’t known, man. Seriously.”
I stare into Kasabian’s eyes and know he isn’t lying. He’s absolutely panicked as I come over to him. When I take the burning cigarette out of the ashtray and let him finish it, he looks so relieved I think he’s going to cry.
My Alice is dead and I’m alone.
“Tell me about the store,” I say. “How many employees are there?”
“Four or five. College kids. They come and go. It changes with classes and holidays. Allegra is the only one with any brains.”
“Who’s she?”
“She manages the place. I don’t like being down there with the customers.”
“She runs the place so you can stay up here and bootleg movies.”
“We do what we have to do to get by. I bet you did some dirty trick or two when you were in Hell.”
“You have no idea,” I tell him. “What time do you open in the morning? Does Allegra open the place?”
“Ten. Yeah, she does.”
There’s a closet behind the door to the stairs. I push the stairs door closed and open the closet. It’s mostly empty, except for waist-high metal storage shelves. I drag the body into the back of the closet, then bring in Kasabian’s head. I set him on top of the shelves. He says, “I’m a little claustrophobic.”
I look around the room. He can’t stay out in the open, in case someone comes up here. There’s a small bathroom, but there’s no way that I’m having Kasabian share my morning pee. Sitting on the bottom of one of the shelves is a small portable TV. I plug it in and turn it on while fiddling with its old-fashioned rabbit-ear antenna. A local news show comes on and I put the set on the shelf with Kasabian.
“Maybe this’ll ease your pain.”
Kasabian frowns. “You’re a real prick, Jimmy.”
“But I wasn’t always, was I?” I close the closet door halfway and stop. “You ever call me Jimmy again, I’ll nail this door shut. You can complain about claustrophobia for the next fifty years in the dark.” I close and lock the closet door.
I sit down on the bed, exhausted and in pain. It’s been an eventful day. I landed here with nothing and ended up with a nice new jacket and a pocket full of cash. I even have somewhere to crash and wash my face. The American dream.
I stretch out full on the bed and something else occurs to me. “I guess I’m in the video biz.” Damn, I even have a job.
I want to go and wash off the blood that’s drying on my belly and chest, but when I try to stand, my cracked ribs shoot to the top of my pain threshold and convince me that I can wait until morning. I shrug off Brad Pitt’s jacket and lie back carefully. The moment my head hits the pillow, I’m out.
Alice had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We’d been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, “I can do magic. Want to see?”
“Of course.”
She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom.
She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. When she came back to bed, she had a top hat and a deck of cards. She sat down and put on the hat, straddling me on top of the covers.
“Pick a card,” she said. I took one. It was the jack of diamonds. “Now put it back in anywhere you want. Don’t let me see it.” She made a point of closing her eyes and turning her head away.
“It’s back in, Merlin,” I said.
She waved a hand over the deck and mumbled some made-up magic mumbo jumbo and fanned out the deck across my stomach.
“Is this your card?” she said, holding up one of the cards.
It was the jack of diamonds. “Right as rain,” I told her. “You’re the real thing, all right.”
“Know how I did it?”
“Magic?”
She flipped the deck so that I could see the cards. It was fifty-two identical jacks of diamonds.
“That’s not real magic,” I said.
“Fooled you.”
“Cheat. You distracted me.”
“I have the power to cloud men’s minds.”
“That you do.”
She slid under the covers still wearing the top hat and mustache and we made love that way. The top hat fell off, but she wore the mustache until morning.
The night after her card trick, I told Alice about magic. I told her it was real and that I was a magician. She liked me well enough by then not to fifty-one-fifty me to the cops, but she looked at me like I’d just told her that I was the king of the mushroom people. So, I pinched the flame off one of the candles she’d lit and made it hop across my fingertips. I charmed old magazines, dirty shirts, and Chinese-restaurant flyers up from the floor, formed them into a vaguely female shape, and had them strut around the apartment like a fashion model. I made my neighbor’s yowling cat speak Russian and Alice’s tattoos move around like little movies under her skin.
She loved it. She was like a kid, shouting, “More! More!” What she didn’t want was anything serious. Every civilian I’d ever shown magic to had the same response—how can we use it to get rich? Let’s manipulate the stock market. Turn invisible and rob a bank. Throw on a glamour so that cops can’t see us.
Alice didn’t ask for any of that. I showed her magic and that was enough for her. She didn’t instantly wonder what the magic could do for her. She loved the magic itself, which meant that she could love me because I wasn’t likely to make anyone rich. We hadn’t been going out that long and she wasn’t sure about me yet. It didn’t matter. I was already nine-tenths in love with her and could wait for as long as it took for her to come around.
It took two more days.
She showed up at my door with a box from a run-down magic shop in Chinatown.
“I can do magic, too,” she said.
“Let’s see.”
The magic box was about the size of two matchboxes. She lifted the top off. Her middle finger lay inside the box, wrapped in bloody cotton around the bottom. The finger wiggled. Stiffened. She held up her hand so the severed finger flipped me the bird, the cheapest of cheap gags. Of course, she hadn’t chopped her finger off. She’d slid it up through a hole in the bottom of the box that already had cotton and fake blood inside. It was about the stupidest thing I’d ever seen.
I kissed her and took her inside. We never talked about her moving in. She just came in and never left, because she knew this was where she should be.
Later, when Alice and I were in bed and still drunk from our one month a
nniversary party, I told her that I had a dream where we were on a road trip, eating lunch in some anonymous little diner. She told the waitress that we were driving to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator and held up her engagement ring for everyone to see. It was the magic store box, still on her finger. When I finished telling her the story, she bit me lightly on the arm.
“See?” she said. “I told you I can do magic.”
I SNAP AWAKE at the sound of the door slamming downstairs. I sit up, relieved that the pain in my ribs is gone. The good feeling is short-lived, however, when I realize that the room looks like a bad night in a slaughterhouse. The bloody jacket and shirt are still on the floor where I dropped them. I’m covered in dried blood, a lot of which I’ve managed to smear in a crimson Rorschach blot all over the bed while I was asleep.
I toss the jacket and shirt onto the dirty sheet, pull it off the bed and onto the floor. In the bathroom, I use up most of a roll of paper towels scrubbing the blood off me. The bullet wounds are just black welts surrounded by psychedelic-blue-and-purple bruises. If I twist the right way, I can feel the .45 slugs nestled inside me, like marshmallows in Jell-O salad. I’ll probably have to do something about getting them out, at some point, but not now.
The wet paper towels I toss on the sheet with the bloody clothes. In a little storage cabinet under the sink, I find a roll of black plastic garbage bags. Tear one off and stuff the bloody remains of last night’s square dance inside.
It hits me then that I still have a problem. I’ve just thrown away half of my clothes, leaving me with nothing to wear but taped-together boots and scorched jeans, which are starting to crack and come apart in places. For a second, I consider stealing the shirt off Kasabian’s body, but that’s too disgusting even for me. Plus, opening the closet door will just start his head screaming again.
I toss the room, tearing open boxes, looking for a lost and found or something one of the college kids might have left behind. I hit the jackpot—a whole box of store T-shirts is stuffed in the back, under the worktable. The shirts are black, with max overdrive video printed in big white letters on the back. Printed on the front is a fake store name tag that says Hi. My name is Max. Cute.