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Vidocq slides in next to the driver. I get in the back with Candy.
She’s in her usual ensemble of white T-shirt, a beat-up and just a little too big leather jacket, Chuck Taylors, and black jeans about to completely give up at the knees. She looks like Joan Jett’s little sister. She’s got on a pair of kid’s sunglasses, like something you’d pick up in Little Tokyo. The frames are white with blue flames and there are flying robots down the sides. When I sit down she doesn’t say hello. She touches the middle of the frames just above her nose. The sunglasses start singing the theme song to some Japanese kiddie cartoon in a tinny robot voice. It makes my skull throb.
“Did you wear those just to torture me?”
She touches the frames and the robot song starts again.
“Not everything is about you, but yeah, pretty much. And I always wanted a robot sidekick.”
“Can it be a quiet robot?”
The song stops. She holds a finger over the frames.
“Don’t make me use my super-awesome robo powers on you again.”
Candy is like me. A monster. Specifically, she’s a Jade. Jades are sort of like vampires, only worse. They dissolve your insides and drink them like spiders. But she’s a good girl and is trying to kick the human milkshake thing with a special potion. Blood-and-bone methadone. Besides being cute and dangerous, she saved my ass from joining thdivm joinie living dead after a Drifter bit me. I was far gone and didn’t want to take the cure, so she stabbed me with a knife coated in the stuff. Yeah, it hurt. And yeah, I’m glad she did it.
I throw up my hands.
“You win. Take our lands and gold but leave me my virtue.”
“Those are my only choices?”
“If you’re going virtue hunting, you better bring a backhoe and dynamite. You’re going to have to dig deep.”
“I’ll bring a strap-on.”
I look at Vidocq in the front seat.
“Make her stop. I’m hungover and she has a robot. It’s not fair.”
“Life is fair only in the grave and in the bedroom. This, you will notice, is neither.”
“That’s why I don’t take cabs.”
I look out the window. The cabbie takes us down Hollywood Boulevard for a few blocks and then U-turns on Sunset and heads back the way we came.
“Where are we headed?”
“The Bamboo House of Dolls.”
“What the hell, man? It’s just a few blocks. We could have walked.”
“But then you might have walked away. You’ll notice I told our driver to take the long way so that I could talk to you. The woman we’re going to meet thought you’d be more comfortable discussing business there.”
“What woman?”
“Julia Sola.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Marshal Julie, you used to call her. One of Marshal Wells’s agents. You liked her. You said she was the only one in the Golden Vigil who treated you like a human being.”
I sit up.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Just cause she didn’t ice-pick me doesn’t mean I want to work with her. Or any other Homeland Security. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”
“Keep going,” Vidocq says to the driver. He turns back to me.
