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EVERY CITY HAS a Mustang Sally. Every town and jungle village with a dirt path. She’s a spirit of the road, an old and powerful one. If you add up all the freeways, the county and city roads, in and around L.A., it means Sally controls twenty thousand miles of intense territory. And that doesn’t even count the ghost roads and ley lines.
I steer the Bonneville onto the shoulder of the 405, the freeway that runs along Sepulveda Boulevard, the longest street in L.A. I break open the carton of Luckies, take out a pack, and slice it open with the black blade. I slide across the front seat and get out on the passenger side. This would be a lousy time to die.
Traffic blasts past at sixty per hour and no one even glances in my direction as I walk behind the car and scratch Mustang Sally’s sigil into the freeway concrete. When I’m done I stand in the center of the mark, take out a Lucky, and light up. Passing cars pull the smoke in their direction, like it wants to follow them down the road. I smoke and wait.
Mustang Sally has been cruising L.A.’s roads twenty-four/seven since they were nothing more than mud paths, horse tracks, and wagon ruts. As far as I know, she never sleeps and never stops except when someone leaves an offering. For the last hundred years she’s been through every kind of car you can name. Of course, she never has to stop for gas. Sally eats, but only road food. Things you can find in gas-station markets and vending machines. She doesn’t need to eat. She just likes it. It’s like me and stealing cars. Sometimes you just want to feel ordinary. Like a person. She eats. I drive.
Twenty minutes later, a silver-and-black Shelby Cobra pulls onto the shoulder a few yards behind me. I stomp out of her emblem and hold the Lucky out to her.
Sally is taller than I remember. Taller than someone who spent all day and night comfortably in a compact sports car. Her hair is dark. Maybe jet black with blue highlights. She’s dressed in a white evening gown and the highest spike heels this side of the Himalayas. I don’t know how she drives in those thiwaiin thosngs. She walks over to me slowly, sizing me up. She’s running the show, and making me wait is part of it. She has on a pair of soft white calfskin driving gloves. From one hand dangles a small clasp purse rimmed in gold. She’s every bit a goddess except for one thing. She’s wearing what looks like a pair of round glasses with smoked lenses; the kind the blind wore a hundred years ago. They break up the goddess look. Like the Mona Lisa with a lip ring.
When we’re just a couple of feet apart, she stops, peels off the driving gloves, and drops them into the clasp bag. She takes the cigarette from my hand and inhales deeply, letting the smoke drift slowly from her nostrils.>“Good,” she says.
She rubs a yellowish salve on the inside of a mortar and tosses in thistle leaves, white ash bark, and things I can’t identify. She holds a match to the gloop and the whole thing goes up in a whoosh of fire, leaving only ash. She dumps it into her hands and rubs the ashes across Hunter’s forehead and eyes.
“Get me the glass, will you, Candy?” she says.
Traven is standing on his own now, so she leaves him and lifts several bundles of purple silk from a cabinet. Allegra takes one as Candy sets the rest on the exam table.
Allegra unwraps the first one and sets it over Hunter’s heart. It looks like a heavy white stone. She sets other pieces of glass on Hunter’s hands and diaphragm.
The stones are really pieces of ancientanys of an glass vessels saturated in divine light. Shards of the first stars. Kinski once used six of them to save Allegra. Now Allegra is the doctor, using them to save a kid she’s never seen before and has no reason to care about. But she does it like she’d die, too, if the kid doesn’t make it. It’s a funny world.
Hunter shudders and opens his mouth. Vapor drifts from his mouth again, but it’s the same gray now as the ash. Allegra nods.
“Whatever was in him is gone.”
“You sure?”
She looks at me.
“I know what possession looks like. This one took more stones than usual. What was in him?”
I don’t want to tell her. I’m feeling stupid and the last thing I want to do is have to hang around and explain anything.
“Candy and Vidocq can tell you.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“Good.”
She nods at Traven.
“What happened to him?”
“That’s Father Traven, the exorcist. No hoodoo injuries. The demon just grabbed his throat and squeezed like it was trying to make orange juice.”
Allegra looks past me at the father.
“Set him down in the lobby and let me get my instruments. I don’t want to move the boy for a while.”
Traven makes it to the lobby under his own steam, though Candy and I walk behind to catch him if he falls. He drops onto one of the plastic chairs. He leans forward, resting his face in his hands.
“I think I left my bag at that place,” he says.
“Don’t worry, Father. We’ll retrieve it for you,” says Vidocq.
I hand him Allegra’s car keys.
