AFTER YESTERDAY’S DRINKING, I don’t wake up until the crack of whatever-the-hell o’clock. All I know is that I hear people downstairs and Apocalypse Now cranked up loud. It’s our special alternate-universe version with Harvey Keitel instead of Martin Sheen. It’s crack to our kind of customers.
I check my phone and find a message from Abbot. I don’t bother listening to it, just sit on the sofa with coffee and call him back.
“Stark. Did you get my message?”
“Yes. But I didn’t listen. What was it?”
“Why do you have voice mail if you don’t use it?”
“I don’t like talking to machines and I figure that if it’s important people will call me back.”
“That’s actually a more rational explanation than I expected.”
“I’m full of surprises. I once ate a salad.”
“That’s more the answer I was expecting. What I called you about was Nick.”
“What about him?”
“He’s all right. From all reports, he’s back at home with his mother.”
I take out a Malediction. Stick it behind my ear for later.
“Did you find out why Burgess had him in the first place?”
“It was a family situation that got out of hand. Apparently, the father was making demands and everyone thought it would be better if Nick spent some time away from home.”
“That’s very tidy. Do you believe any of it?”
“As far as I can trust my source—which I do—yes.”
“I don’t know. Burgess doesn’t do anything without an angle.”
“But what proof do you have? You’re obsessed with the Burgess family because Lucius was involved with the ghost-abuse situation last year.”
“For good reason. But that’s another thing that bugs me. The Golden Vigil shuts the thing down, but it never goes public. Then daddy Burgess has a heart attack and Geoff takes over the family business.”
Abbot doesn’t say anything for a second.
“Are you actually accusing Geoffrey of killing his father?”
“Not necessarily. I’m just saying I think he’s capable of anything.”
“Listen to me. You need to leave the Burgess family alone. I appreciate you finding Nick, but that’s enough for now. I want you to come back to council meetings for a while. At least until we can think of a new course of action.”
I get up and walk the room.
“I’ll do it, but I want one more night.”
“To do what?”
“Charlie Anpu. I want to follow him again.”
“In the current climate, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Maybe you’re right about Burgess and I’m out of my mind. But Anpu had one of the angel boxes. That proves he’s up to some nefarious shit.”
“Nefarious isn’t good enough. We have to link it back to Wormwood.”
“So, give me the night.”
“Is there any way I can trust you to do this quietly?”
“I’m quiet as a butterfly pissing in whipped cream.”
I can hear him sigh.
“See, when you talk like that it gives me pause.”
“I promise. No break-ins. No cops. No street fights or explosions.”
“One night. And you won’t get near him personally.”
“He’s hot lava. No tocar.”
“All right. But call me tonight, no matter how late.”
“It’s a date.”
I hang up and go to the window for a smoke.
I hope I can keep my word to Abbot. I’ll do my best. Move softly-softly. But if an angel shows up, I don’t care if we’re on the teacup ride at Disneyland.
I’m killing it.
OF COURSE, CHARLIE lives in a gated community all the way out in fucking Brentwood. Faux–Southern California charm meets Narnia with storm troopers on the parapets. If someone could bottle artisanal air, the residents of Brentwood wouldn’t permit ordinary peasant breezes to ruffle the blades of grass on their emerald lawns.
I should have stolen at least a Lexus to come out here. It isn’t easy being inconspicuous on a bike in this burg. Just as I’m about to head out to liberate luxury wheels, a silver Rolls Phantom cruises out of the gates. I recognize the license plate as Charlie’s and take off after him. It’s just like the other night at the Burgess place. Keep a safe distance. No lights until we’re back in the land of the living.
He heads into Hollywood. I wonder if he’s going back to Musso’s for another supervillain rendezvous when he turns on Highland Avenue and the only thing up that way is the Hollywood Bowl. Finally, some good news from this guy.
For a minute, I think I’m in trouble when he heads in the direction of valet parking, but like so many Scrooge McDucks, he’s cheap when it comes to the small things. He leaves the Rolls across two spaces in the peons’ lot. I cruise by him and the blonde from the other night like I’m looking for parking. There are a lot of suits and evening gowns in the crowd. Either it’s some kind of symphony show or the blue bloods are expecting a starship to take them to the promised land and they want to look good.
I leave the bike in a space at the back of the lot. Stroll casually back to the Rolls. I get out the black blade and jam it into the driver’s-side lock. The knife will open anything, even a snooty wagon like this. Naturally, I take a lot of guff from the bumpkin crowd when they see me pulling out of two spaces, but what’s a guy to do? We aristocrats are used to a certain level of asshole luxury. I give them the finger and speed away before someone starts asking why a con is piloting a four-wheel Learjet.
Privacy is the first thing I need for my next move. If I can’t break into Charlie’s mansion, I can sure as hell spend some quality time pawing through his glove compartment or whatever kind of steamer trunk they use in a Rolls.
I drive across town to Sixth Street, back to the warehouse where Burgess’s dad used to run his spook-bum fights. We’re far enough from civilization that even winos don’t hang around here. It’s just us rats by the railroad tracks tonight.
The warehouse is still deserted. There’s ragged crime-scene tape and cop KEEP OUT signs stapled to the doors, but I’m not going inside. I pull the Rolls around the back.
I pop the glove compartment and start digging. Which yields nothing but the registration, an insurance card, a pen, and some of his lady love’s makeup. I check under the seats, but they’re cleaner than a surgery. Charlie might cheap out on parking, but he pays for a good cleaning service, which really pisses me off. Couldn’t the scrub and vacuum crew leave me one bullet casing or the guest list for a Black Mass?
I check between the seat cushions in the front and back. The leather padding the Rolls is soft as angel food cake. For a second, I consider keeping the heap for a day or two. Candy and I could mess the interior of this thing pretty nicely. But that’s not an option in this invisible man operation.
Outside, I check the spotless wheel wells for hidden keys and, again, come up with nothing. Finally, I go around to the trunk, jam the blade in the lock, and open it up.
You could move a family of four in here and have room left over for a kiddie pool. I know that the trunk is going to be pristine and, honestly, I’m just going through the motions at this point. There won’t be anything in the back of this idiot’s ride but the smell of soap and money. But I keep at it.
Check the sides of the trunk for hollow places where he might be smuggling out-of-state fruit. Take out the tire and shake it to see if there’s anything inside but air. It’s just one more disappointment. There’s more padding under the wheel because, of course, we can’t let the poor tire ride in less luxury than the driver. How else will you impress the tow-truck drivers and car thieves?
I pull up the floor mat and my heart does a samba. There’s a compartment cut into the metal body of the car. The cuts are ragged at points and there are small gaps between the lid and the body. No car dealer did this. It’s as crooked as a Capone aftermarket mod. I hook a finger in a
hole on the compartment lid and pull.
Oh, Charlie, my Charlie. What have you been up to?
The first thing that grabs my jaded gaze are the piles of neatly bundled hundred-dollar bills. I pull out a few. Then a few more. The compartment is deeper than I thought at first. There must be half a million in cash back here. As hard as it is, I put the money back and move on to the other goodies. Bags and bags of pills. I recognize a few. Civilian stuff. Pharmaceutical-quality amphetamines. Vicodin. Dilaudid. Some muscle relaxants and a fistful of blue Viagra tabs. Then there are the Sub Rosa goodies. Akira. Dixie Wishbone. Even some Red Sonja, a combination of dried blood and pituitary glands. Only vampires and their flunkies use that stuff, proof Charlie has been cheating on his Sub Rosa friends with bad kids from the other side of the tracks. There’s even a Glock 17 with six loaded clips. But it’s what’s in the secret compartment under the secret compartment that makes my night.
It’s an angel box. Maybe the one he had the other night, maybe another. Who cares? I take it out, then put it back in its padded cubbyhole. If Charlie is carrying it, the car is going someplace and I don’t want him to notice it’s missing. Instead of stealing the whole box, I open it and take the vial of black milk. Let him explain that to whoever the box is for.
The only other thing in the compartment is a complete mystery. It’s kind of, well, dildo-shaped, but made of a dark, heavy metal. There’s a thumb-size recess on the thing’s blunt end. When I push it, the body of the dildo retracts, exposing a thin, sawtooth-ended tube. I relax my thumb and the thing snaps back into its original shape. Is it something new that an angel gave him? If it’s important, why didn’t my angel give me one? I bet if I got Charlie high enough on his Dilaudid and some Dom Pérignon, he’d come around, but Abbot doesn’t want me to have that kind of fun.
I’ll have to console myself with stealing it instead.
I stuff it in my pocket with the black milk and put everything else back where it was. I even wipe the dirt off the tire from where I set it on the ground. Last thing, I wipe my prints from every flat surface.
Back in the driver’s seat, I give the dildo one more look-over, and it confirms my instincts. There’s a maker’s mark by the thumb recess. I can’t read it well, but I know the look. The thing was made by a Tick Tock Man.
I start the engine and ever so gently drive the car back into the city. Park it in the lot of a twenty-four-hour Denny’s on Sunset and wipe down the interior. Just as I step out of the Rolls, a couple of L.A.’s finest walk out of the Denny’s to their cruiser on the other side of the lot. The only thing more conspicuous than my ugly face next to this high-end car would be my ugly face running away from it. So, I just stand there and light a Malediction, like I do it every night.
The cops glance at me and keep walking. They get in the cruiser, head around the corner onto Gower, and disappear. I start breathing again. The only thing worse than punching Charlie Anpu I could have done tonight is punch a couple of cops. The fact they ignored me makes me wonder if I just got lucky or if Abbot pulled strings with LAPD like he said he would. Whatever it was, I’ll take it.
I take a drag off the Malediction. The Denny’s is just a block from Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, where Candy and I first went out together. If it wasn’t so late I’d call her for a midnight rendezvous. But she’s probably still rehearsing with Alessa and I’m not going to get in the way of her music. Besides, I have plenty left to do myself, so I let the thought go.
I walk deeper into Hollywood, where I’ll have a better chance of finding a cab. I still need to get back to the Hollywood Bowl and pick up the bike. While I walk I call Abbot and tell him what I found.
But I leave out the part where I stole Charlie’s car.
A TICK TOCK Man is halfway between a garage mechanic and a true hoodoo artist. He makes mechanical familiars for rich Sub Rosas. Some use them for abracadabra purposes and others just keep them around for show. Manimal Mike is a Tick Tock Man, and a good one. He lives over the hill in the San Fernando Valley. It’s a bit of a drive after going all the way to the warehouse, but with luck it will be worth it.
I pull up outside the small auto repair place he runs in Chatsworth. Not that he actually repairs cars. He just keeps a few junkers around for show so that no one will guess what he’s really doing inside.
It’s late and Manimal Mike has locked the metal sliding gate to the garage. I bang on it and shout until someone opens the door to the back room. All I can see is a silhouette lit from behind, but I can tell it’s a big man with an even bigger wrench in his massive mitt. He heads for the gate and I take a step back into the light outside the garage where he can see me. The mobile-home-size silhouette stops for a second and cocks its head. I hold out my arms and give him a stupid little wave.
“Stark!” he says through a Russian accent thick enough that you could chisel it into bowling pins. “How are you?”
“Great, Pavel. Is Mike home?”
“Of course. Of course,” he says, tugging at a ring of keys attached to his belt by a thin chain. A second later, he pushes the gate aside and lets me in. Gets me in a big bear hug when I come through. Pavel is one of Manimal Mike’s cousins. It’s not that Pavel loves me so much. He treats everybody he likes this way. He and his little brother, Ilya, are Vucaris. Russian beast men. Imagine a wolf or bear in human skin. They’re nice to have on your side in a fight, but if they’re not on your side, you’ll want to make sure your life insurance is paid up.
Pavel leads me into the back, where Manimal Mike has his workshop. The place is full of half-constructed mechanical animals. Everything from squirrels to Bengal tigers. It’s a beautiful place in its way, part zoo and part mad scientist’s lair. Pavel calls to him and Mike looks up. He puts down his tools and comes over.
“Stark. How are you doing?” he says, and we shake hands.
“Just fine, Mike. It looks like you’re getting along all right.”
It’s true. The first time I was in Mike’s workshop, not only was it a chaotic grease pit, but he was playing Billy Flinch, a kind of one-person William Tell game where you try to shoot a glass off your head with a ricochet. Aim wrong and you’ll blow a hole in the wall. Aim wronger and you’ll blow your brains to Fresno. But Mike isn’t into that anymore. He’s not in the very top tier of L.A. Tick Tock Men, but he’s on his way. All he needs are a few more of the right customers.
“Things are going pretty well,” he says. “Did you know I’m making a Persian cat for Tuatha Fortune?”
“That’s great news. A couple of more clients like her and you’ll be setting up shop in Beverly Hills.”
He wipes machine oil off his hands with a rag.
“That’s why I have to make this cat perfect. Want to see it?”
“Another time. This isn’t actually a social call.”
He nods. “This time of night, I had a feeling.”
I take the dildo from my pocket and hand it to him.
“Any idea what that is?”
He turns it around in his hands. Looks at it from all angles. When he finds the recessed button, he pushes it. The thing slides open and he lets it close again.
“Beautiful work,” he says. “Did you notice there was no sound? That’s some ace engineering.”
“Yeah, wonderful. But what is it?”
He takes it to his workbench and examines it under the big magnifier attached to an adjustable metal arm.
“The metal is cold iron,” he says. “High quality. Beautiful workmanship. The teeth at the end of the boring mechanism are in perfect alignment.”
“Boring? So, it’s some kind of drill.”
“It could be,” he says, and brings the dildo back to me. Opens it up and points to small clips inside the body.
“They hold something. My guess is it’s for seating small mechanical parts in a larger mechanism.”
“Any idea what?”
He shakes his head. “It could be anything.”
“Maybe a box? C
ould you use it to make a small box? Something with delicate metal parts?”
“Definitely. If you want to leave it with me for a while, I can play with it and tell you exactly how it works.”
I take it out of his hands.
“Can’t do it. I liberated it from the car of one of our betters, so you don’t want to be caught with it.”
“No, I do not,” he says, walking back to his workbench.
I follow him over and show him the bottom of the drill.
“What’s this?”
“It looks like a maker’s mark,” he says.
He puts it back under the magnifier and shines a light on it.
In a minute he says, “Damn.”
“What?”
He hands it back to me.
“Whatever that is, it cost someone a fortune. Atticus Rose made it.”
There’s a familiar name. Rose was one of the most famous Tick Tock Men in L.A. At least until me, Candy, and Brigitte busted up his workshop. No one has heard much about him since, but it looks like he’s far from retired.
“Do you have any idea where he might be? Any rumors in the Tick Tock world?”
Mike picks up a tiny saw. Plays with it while he talks. I don’t need to see his eyes or hear his heart to know he’s nervous.
“Nothing. Personally, I think if he’s still around—and it sure looks like he is—he’s got one full-time private client.”
I put the drill back in my pocket.
“Thanks a lot, Mike. I owe you for this.”
“If you want to pay me back, forget you were here. I don’t need trouble right now.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going and I won’t.”
“Cool,” he says. Then quietly, “Still, I’d love to see the workshop that came out of. Rose always had the best of everything.”
“It would take someone with heavy money to set him up, I bet.”
Mike’s eyes widen a little.
“The kind of work he does, just his equipment is going to run four or five million dollars. That doesn’t include the workshop itself, materials, and maybe an assistant.”
“I’ve got the picture. Thanks again.”
“How’s the arm skin working out for you?” he says, touching his left arm.