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“I need to talk to Mustang Sally.”
BY THE TIME I make the corner, my hands are shaking. Even the angel is pissed, and that’s not easy to do. I want someone to try to pick my pocket or pull a knife. I want an excuse. All I need is an excuse.
No one comes near me. Iof near mex2019;m somewhere south of sanity right now and people can tell. Fuck it. I let the angel’s senses reach out and read the street until they zero in on exactly the right car. It’s stopped at a red light in front of me. Second from the front. A couple of gangbangers inside. They’re either on their way to a drive-by or coming back from one. They’re too high for the angel to be sure. That’s good enough for me. I step into the stopped traffic and go around to the gangbangers’ car, a red midfifties Bonneville lowrider. I put the .460 to the side of the driver’s temple.
“Do you want to keep the car or your head?”
There are two tough guys in the back. Real bruiser types. As big as linebackers. One of them wants to go for his gun. He stinks of coiled tension. I cock the .460 pressed against the driver’s head and pull him out through the window. Toss him one-handed onto the hood of the car next to us. He leaves a nice dent as he hits and slides off. By the time I swing the gun back to the two toughs, they’re scrambling out the passenger side. I get in and rev the engine.
I don’t care that it’s broad daylight, that a hundred people are watching, and that the traffic cams on the stoplights are recording everything. I want witnesses. I want them to see so that when I drag them from their cars, put a bullet in the gas tank, and let the explosion torch the street, they’ll understand.
“This is the world. This is how it is,” I’ll tell them. “Jesus might have died for your sins, but a girl is burning for them. I’d trade every one of your fucking lives for one minute of hers. Don’t you dare pray for her. Twiddle your rosaries and pray for yourselves, because if she goes down, I’m the Colonel, the fryer’s hot, and you’re my barnyard chickadees.”
But I don’t say it. I take the car and go. There’s no way I could get the words out right now. I probably would have stood there hissing and twitching. Just another homeless schizo. Then I’d set the intersection on fire with some Hellion hoodoo and none of them would understand why.
The light turns green and I cut off the car next to me and pull a squealing and massively illegal left off Sunset, steering the Bonneville onto side streets and away from the cops.
The dinky little neighborhood streets with their speed bumps and stop signs are molasses-at-the-South-Pole slow, but eventually I get to Fairfax, where I stop for gas. When the tank is full I go inside the station to the little grocery. There’s nowhere else you can get food like this. The donuts taste like diesel vapor and you have to smother the microwave hamburgers with mustard and onions to cover the taste of cancer. I spent a fair amount of time in places like this before I went Downtown. They’re a solvent-stained oasis for people who drink till the bars close and are too brain-fried to find a Denny’s for the grease injection they hope will soak up the poison they’ve been swallowing all evening. Here everything is poison and so full of preservatives that it will live forever. This is junk-food Valhalla. I grab a plastic basket and prowl the aisles, filling it with the right mix of the sweetest, greasiest, most guaranteed-heart-attack stuff I can find.
I should have dealt with this long ago. How to get back Downtown now that Mason has pretty much made it impossible for me to get in. I hadn’t counted on the little prick making friends so quick. He fast-talked his Hellion guards, their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses, clawing and hoodooing his way up the Infernal food chain until he got to some of Lucifer’s generals. With that kind of pull, it was easy for him to set up traps and guards at all my favorite entrances and exits in and out of Hell. And it’s not like I can just pick a new entrance at random. Hell is a complicated place. I might come out in a swamp or the House of Burning Ice. And it’s not like you can trust most of the maps of Hell. Lucifer was paranoid enough to put in fake landmarks and move mountains and towns around, so it’s damned close to impossible to navigate outside the cities unless you already know where you’re going. Or you have a guide. But I’m a little too famous down there to hop on a Gray Line tour bus and hope no one recognizes me. I know every crawl space and backstreet in Pandemonium, but if Mason has Alice locked up in another city, I’ll need help getting there. Hellions can be very cooperative if you pull out enough of their teeth, so I know I can get a guide. What I really fucking need is a fucking way in. There’s only one person in L.A. who might know and who I trust enough to ask.
I take my basket of donuts, candy, chips, refrigerated burgers, and barbecue sandwiches up to the clerk. He’s red-eyed and bored, trying to hide the Hustler he’s been thumbing through the whole time I’ve been in the store. I let him take the stuff from my basket. My hands could get diabetes and a stroke just from touching the wrappers.
I say, “Throw in a carton of Luckies.”
The kid sighs. I’ve ruined his day by asking him to turn around and pick up something.
“We don’t sell cartons. Just packs.”
“Then sell me ten packs and leave them in the box.”
He thinks this over for a minute. I can hear the gears turning. The factory that runs his brain is spewing copious amounts of ganja fumes. Finally, he thinks of something that won’t make him sound too stupid.
“You have any ID?”
“Do you really think I’m underage?”
He shrugs.
“No ID, no smokes.”
I take two twenties from my pocket and slide them across the counter to him.
“There’s my ID.”
He has to think again. The workers are fleeing the factory. The boiler might blow.
The kid holds up the bills to see if they’re counterfeit.
“Yeah, okay. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who am I going to tell?”
He considers this for a moment, like it’s a trick question, but it soon fades from his resin-clogged brain along with the state capitals and how to do math. He drops a carton of Luckies onto the pile of death snacks and rings them up, setting the well-thumbed Hustler on the counter as he counts out my change. Then realizes what he’s done. He freezes. It looks like he might stay like that for the rest of the day.
I pick up my bag and say, “Keep the change. I respect a man who reads.”
I go back to the Bonneville and set the bag on the passenger seat. Time to talk to the one person who might be able to help me get Downtown. Mustang Sally, the freeway sylph.
