Sandman Slim

"Are you talking about killing yourself?"



"Nah. I'm not the suicide type. I just mean that if I get to pick my moment, it might not be so bad. That was the problem last time. I wasn't ready. I didn't get to pick the moment. I could this time."



"I hate to break it to you, but planning your own violent death, whether it's you murdering yourself or letting someone else do it, is still suicide."



"You think so?" I shake my head and lean against the wall, suddenly out of breath. "Ignore me. I'm babbling. I'm tired. My only friends narced me out to Norman Bates's mom. And every time I get up close to death, I think about Alice."



"You know she's not down below. You let yourself be killed and you'll be farther away from her than ever, and it will be forever."



"Point taken. Truth is, enough people want me dead that I'm probably never going to have to make that choice."



"See? Things are looking up already."



"Let's see if my cab's here yet."



I WAKE IN the early afternoon, wander into the bathroom, and see myself in the mirror. Candy was right. Aelita's sword has given me one of my best scars. It looks like a rattler set itself on fire and did a GG Allin stage dive into my chest. This scar is a work of art. It deserves an Oscar and a star on Hollywood Boulevard. It deserves its own power ballad. Now I sort of know how Lucifer must have felt when that last thunderbolt hit and he fell out of Heaven's cotton candy clouds and into the deep, deep dark.



Aelita seems to have given me something else, too. Back in Hell, each new scar was a gift. Protection against a new attack. That attack in Aelita's chapel seems to have left me with something besides a new scar. She's given me some part of her angelic vision. Or maybe she just tore open my third eye, the one that's been sensing other people's moods and heartbeats. Whatever it is, I see with different eyes now and I see what she was trying to tell me. The Kissi are everywhere.



There's graffiti on the alley wall behind Max Overdrive. It's painted on the buildings and street corners. Store windows and telephone poles. The marks aren't in any language I know, but I can almost understand them. Like a name on the tip of your tongue that just won't come. The marks are greetings, warnings, and messages. Hobo signs for eldritch hicks.



The Kissi wander the streets ghosting the holiday merrymakers. Giddy families window-shop, trying to fill some of their desperate hours together with anything that gets them out of having to talk to each other. In some of those families, Mom or Dad is a Kissi. Or possessed by one. A little Kissi girl follows her parents, holding her big brother's hand, literally draining the life from him as the family stops to admire a blinking LED wreath outside a Burmese restaurant.



There are Kissi as pale and tenuous as vapor from a car exhaust. They whisper lies into people's ears. Slip hotel receipts into a husband's wallet. A phone number into a wife's jacket pocket. They merrily plant little cells of paranoia that grow like a melanoma, because what's more fun at this time of year than a holiday family slaughter?



I have to get off the street. I can't stand looking at this. Regular people are bad enough, but regular people being made worse by chaos-sucking bottom feeders is something I can't take right now.



What's going on in the street doesn't look much like a detente to me. The Kissi don't care who sees them. The Vigil might be right about the Kissi breaking the treaty, but they don't seem to have a clue how to do anything about it.



There are plenty of cops out, too. Unis and plainclothes. More than I'd expect around Christmas. Aren't people supposed to be nodding off on tryptophan, eggnog, and fascist Santa's order to be merry? Maybe the cops know something the rest of us don't know. Maybe they just feel the undercurrent of craziness in the air. They try to blend in with the holiday wanderers, but they're as inconspicuous as spiders on a birthday cake.



I just want quiet, a cup of coffee, and no one talking to me. I head for Donut Universe.



Some genius has installed a TV on the wall behind the doughnut counter. Those of us stupid enough to want to sit and drink our coffee inside get a complimentary twenty-four-hour-a-day slice of weather, sports, and genocide with our glazed old-fashioneds. When the local report comes on, it confirms more of what Aelita told me. Robbery. Murder. Rape. Arson. They're spiraling up and out of control. The local politicos and law dogs don't have a clue why or what to do about it. Sounds like someone moved Devil's Night to December and forgot to tell the rest of us to duck and cover.



The green-haired pixie counter girl I've seen before is working today. She's good at her job. Chats up the customers. Smiles and listens without looking fake or like a mental patient. At another time and place, I'd steal a car for her every night and leave it in the parking lot with the keys in the ignition. But here and now I can't keep falling in instant love like this. It's embarrassing and distracting. If Vidocq was around, I'd ask him for a potion. A temporary lobotomy, please. Just something to get me through the holidays, and maybe kill off this idiot nineteen-year-old who still lives in my head.



I look up from the pixie girl to burning houses in East L.A. Crying mothers. Screaming kids. There's blood in the water, so the TV reporters swim up with blank eyes and a mouthful of shark's teeth. They stick microphones in the faces of new widows and ask, "How does it make you feel?" I love L.A.



I wonder if things have always been this way. Are the Kissi the devils on our shoulders? Or do they just like us because our devils are so loud and hard to miss? I see why Heaven and Hell want to control the Kissi. They can't ever let regular people hear about them. After the panic, it'd be too easy to pin all of humanity's bad habits on them. Plus, someone would have to explain where they came from. That means people finding out that God is a fuckup and the devil doesn't matter. Neither side wants that.



I wonder if the Kissi are strong enough to jack an angel? Maybe. If they really are anti-angels. Muninn said someone was dragging angels up the hill to Avila. That sounds like urban-myth bullshit to me. Like that kid down the street who made a funny face and it stayed that way, so his family had to move away. If someone is snatching angels, it's probably the Kissi. I don't think even Mason could mug Aelita.



Two guys come in from the parking lot. I can feel them from all the way across the room. Heat and crazy breathing. Their hearts are going off like machine guns. But they look boring. An older guy in a gray suit. A junior high boy with a skateboard under his arm. They're bent over the counter ordering doughnuts. I can't get a look at their faces. They order a few dozen. A whole box full. The green-haired girl rings them up, and when she tells them the total, the guy in the suit pulls a .44 from his jacket and shoots her. And he keeps shooting her. He has to lean all the way over the counter to get off the last few rounds.



I'm up while he's still concentrating on the girl. Junior drops his deck, pulls his own piece, and aims it at me. I stop. They're both Kissi.



This isn't a good time. I'm weak. I don't want to get shot right now and they know it. They laugh at me.



The guy in the suit says, "You naughty boy."



"You stole our na'at," says the kid.



"And after we invited you into our home so nicely and politely."



"Some people have no manners."



"No manners at all. That's all right. We'll do you a trade." The man points to his chest, then mine. "Hold on to whatever that is in there for us. We'll be back with a doggy bag."



"Happy holidays," says the kid. There's blood all over the box of doughnuts. The kid opens it and takes out an apple fritter. "You really ought to try these. They make 'em fresh every morning."



They stroll out the door like they just won the lottery.



Behind me, an old lady is screaming. I hear cell phones beeping as people fumble with the keypads trying to make their fingers hit 911. I look over the counter at the green-haired girl. She's dead. As dead as anyone I've ever seen.



Is that what Alice looked like?



Good-bye, green-haired girl. How many more of you am I not going to save?



THERE'S A GOLD Lexus parked around the corner. Ten seconds later, it's mine. I pull into a no-name indie gas station and buy a pack of cigarettes, two plastic gas cans, and a T-shirt with mann's Chinese theatre on the front. I pay for four gallons of gas in advance, fill the two cans, and get back in the car. I've always been pretty good with directions. Hell made me good with them even when I'm getting my ass kicked, so I know where I'm going. Fifteen minutes later, I'm parked down the block from the furniture warehouse where the skinheads party.



I slice the T-shirt in half and dip each piece into the can, letting them soak up the juice. Then I stuff them in the cans' mouths and head for the clubhouse.



A fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts is walking the other way. As we pass I say, "You should call 911."



He stops. "Has there been an accident?"



"Not yet."



There's no one outside the clubhouse. Why would there be? Who's going to play games with a building full of methed-up headbangers?



I light the rags in each can with Mason's lighter. I knock on the door politely. My other adolescent crush, lisa, the skinhead girl, opens up. She smiles at me like you smile at an old dog that can't help shitting on himself.



She asks, "What the fuck do you want?"



I kick once, slamming the door open and her out of the way. I sling the gas cans underhanded, aiming at the opposite ends of the room.



They explode, one a fraction of a second behind the other. Flames splash across the walls like a flood of hellfire. It's an instant riot inside. Screaming. Punching. Skinheads and their white power girlfriends clawing past each other for the one exit. I pull the door closed and kick a garbage can in front of it.



The first one out is the big gorilla I stabbed in the leg at the Bamboo House of Dolls. He trips over the can and face plants just outside the door. The next few drowning rats trip over him. Fall in a screaming pile of bodies, blocking the door. It's the Keystone Kops with third-degree burns.



Eventually, enough people inside push forward that the bodies and the door get kicked out of the way. The panicked, burned, and smoke-choked master race pours outside and collapses in the street.



Josef comes strolling out last. His clothes are smoldering and his face looks like a hamburger someone forgot to take off the barbecue. lisa and a dozen of Josef's steroid lapdogs get up and follow him.



Josef doesn't even look around. He knows who did this. He comes right for me. I can see the beast under his skin. I can't tell if he was ever human.



When he's a few feet away, he starts to say something. It's going to be some Kissi threat or demonic one-liner. Who cares? I slash his throat with the black blade, giving the knife a little twist. Unlike Kasabian, when Josef's head pops off, he's totally, one hundred percent dead.



I pick up the head by its singed blond hair and push it into lisa's chest. It takes her a minute to figure out that she's supposed to take it. I wait for one of the big boys to make a move, but they're mostly staring at the raspberry-colored lake forming around Josef's body.



I say, "You tell the rest of these animals and any Kissi you run into to stay away from my doughnut place."



I go back to the Lexus and floor it out of there before they come to enough to realize that there are fifty of them and only one of me.



IF YOU DO it right, cleaning your guns is a form of meditation. There's the precise disassembly. Attaching a cotton swatch to the end of a ramrod, soaking it in solvent, and passing it through the gun barrel from the breech end and out the front. Cleaning the nooks and crannies with a soft toothbrush. Carefully applying a few drops of gun oil. Then wiping the gun down and reassembling it before starting on the next gun, moving from smallest to largest. It's a calm, quiet, and satisfying process. I'm ashamed that I've neglected the guns this long. I should have cleaned them the moment I dug them out from under the floorboards at Vidocq's. Wild Bill would be ashamed of me.



I'd picked up the cleaning kit at an upscale gun club in West Hollywood on the way back to Max Overdrive. Also a can of WD-40 to clean the na'at. On the night table next to the bed is the bottom half of a Coke can I ripped in half. There's an inch of Spiritus Dei floating in the can and I dip each bullet into it before reloading the guns.



That encounter with the Kissi back at Donut Universe woke me up. I need to be more careful now that I don't have any real backup.



I can't get the bloody image of the green-haired girl out of my mind. Every time I think I've pushed her away, Alice drifts in to take her place.



No wonder I'm so popular.



There's a knock at the door. I stay sitting on the bed, but hide the reassembled .45 under one leg, where I can get it quickly. I don't say, "Come in," but she comes in anyway.



Allegra only takes a couple of steps into the room, like she's afraid there are snakes under all the furniture. She sits on Kasabian's old bootlegging table, knocking over a couple of stacks of DVDs that I'd stolen from the racks downstairs. I soak another cotton patch in solvent and go back to cleaning the guns.



"Why didn't you tell me before about what happened to you? What Mason did?"



"Vidocq told you my little secret? Is he in some contest I don't know about? Rat out your friends three times in a day and win Springsteen tickets."



"He just wanted me to understand why you're the way you are."



"And now everyone knows. Did you come up here to gloat? I give up. You win. You and Vidocq showed me up for the chump I truly am."



"That's not what this is about and you know it."