by Jason Ridler
Instead, I grinned. “I need you as the cavalry. I may need you to pull my ass out of the fire. Better to have you out here rather than where I’m going.”
Nico stood on the bed so that she was looking down at me with pure intent. “I don’t want to be alone. Stay!” It was as if she was talking to a dog that always did what it was told.
I turned my back, walked toward the door. “Don’t answer the door unless someone says the code word.” I turned to face Nico.
Those blue eyes shone like diamonds in the darkened light. Then, her lips were on mine and I was pulled in two directions. My hands went on automatic, securing a cup of her ass and neck while my two parts of my mind had a slugging match in my skull
“She’s a client.” JAB!
“Then do what she wants.” COUNTER PUNCH!
“That’s not what we do.” BODY BLOW!
“We help those who need it.” TIED UP IN THE CORNER!
“This is helping ourselves to trouble.” GUARD UP!
“She’s hurt!” BODY BLOW! “She’s scared!” BODY BLOW! “She thinks she’s ugly as shit!” JAB, STRAIGHT RIGHT, JAB. “If you don’t . . .” DANCING BACK.
“If I don’t . . .” STUMBLE FORWARD, GUARD DOWN.
“Then you’ll make her feel worse!” STRAIGHT RIGHT, LEFT CROSS, UPPERCUT-
KO!
Our mouths locked, and she gripped my face. She tasted of sunlight and fresh dew, and even the faint magic of her scars could not spit in the flavor. I pulled her ass with both hands and mashed against her as she gasped, still mouth to mouth, tongue wild and darting, her mouth on mind like she needed me to breathe. Legs wrapped, arms around my neck, she hung off me like a resplendent necklace, grinding her hips and bucking so hard the back of my knees smacked the bed and she tumbled on top of me, driving her mouth deeper onto mine. Before I could twist positions, she pulled back and sucked in air. “Stay.” It was a command. I was about to say something when she muttered, sad, dripping. “Please.”
I leaned up, and she gasped, expecting another kiss. “Okay,” I said, almost as soft as her. “Just for now.”
Lips locked, she tore at my belt and trousers while my fingers unhooked her button and pulled down her zipper. Urgency drover her motions, like a starved animal, needing something so desperately that to deny it would be to deny its survival. Before my hands could reach up her sweater, she had secured herself above me and slid down wet, working me until the friction eased and she opened deeper to receive all. Her hands lay on my chest as she rocked back in forth. “Stay,” she whispered, grinding with her legs hugging my sides. I looked up at her hooded visage as she rocked back and forth, warmth swelling through me and reaching for my heart. “Stay.”
Normally, I’d have twisted us into a new configurations, surprise and mystery flooding her as I took control, changing the dance, shifting who followed and led. But Nico’s day had been nothing but hell, other people pushing their will, so whatever she needed here was more important than me.
I laced my fingers in hers and she pressed my hands on my side, then lifted herself. She shook, riding me up, riding me down, and her eyes locked close, but the bliss pumping through us was growing.
“Oh God,” she said, but her voice was shaking.
“Nico? Are you?”
“Shhh!” she hissed, as she ground down on me, and I reciprocated with thrusts aimed where I could feel her rough spot, that abrasive button that most men couldn’t find with a spyglass and a map.
Her hands shivered as if she’d kissed a light socket. He elbows locked as her head twisted. “Stay,” she said, but weaker. I kept my rhythm. Her mouth gasped, then her back arched and she grasped my lapels like she was a cowboy riding a bronco before my thoughts bled into ecstasy—
We thrummed in simpatico like two rushing streams who become one river, and rich currents rippled from and to us, fast as flash flood swelling a creek, a feeling I’d never known, a depth of connection never dreamed, but without her lips on mine I was drowning for air, and so was she, head back, hair swinging shadows across the walls, as if refusing to come closer until we reached the precipice of grinding pleasure and I yanked her sweater and shot her down to me. We kissed, came and screamed as one.
Ten silent minutes later, Nico slid off me, pulled up her jeans, then used the washroom. When she came up, I was zipping up my fly.
She pulled on the strings of her hood as if were her hair. “I . . . I said—”
“I won’t be long. And I will save your friend, and keep you safe. I promise. Oh, and don’t forget the code, should anyone come to the door. It’s Blueberry Pancakes.”
I got to the door before that hope died.
“Where are you going?”
I opened the door. “To find someone who can help me fight a demon.”
Which sounded a lot more reassuring than “I’m going to the library.”
SCRUNCHED YELLOW BURGER WRAPPERS DANCED IN THE AIR above the cars shooting north on 38th and brown paper bags with greasy spots lined the curb like the gutter of a bowling alley. Across the street was a Shell station with the ungodly announcement that today gas was .86 a gallon. Beside it was Magic 8-Ball Billiards and Brazier. “Serendipity,” I said, then considered the prophecy of the toy I’d stumbled over in the cemetery.
“Outlook not so good.”
I shrugged off the prophecy until I saw the handful of hogs parked outside, detailed with a skull with bat wings.
Hell’s Angels.
I grinned. This would be fun.
CHAPTER 9
LILITH HAD COASTED ON FUMES TO HAPPY KNIGHT. NOW, SHE WAS empty, and I needed enough gas in a can to at least cash for a quarter-full tank. Only hope was a pit stop for the lousiest sacks of shit ever to ride across California. Some will tell you the Angels were born in San Bernardino, that the Berdos were the decedents of rogue veterans who had bombed Berlin and were now too jazzed by high octane travel and violence to settle down with a wife and kids and GI loan.
But I’m from Oakland. I knew the seeds that became Sonny Barger’s weeds when I was doing card tricks for lunch money in Temescal. And whenever I’d end up back in Cali with the circus, these fuckers would keep growing, sucking in the lost souls they could turn into tools. And within that gang, there was an inner circle so vile and secret that it reminded me hell is always one bad decision away from being made on this earth.
I unclenched my coiled fists.
A can and stretch of hose sat in Lilith’s trunk, waiting for an emergency. The sun was high and merciless, but in LA traffic it might be dawn before I found what I needed if I didn’t get going now. Say what you will about old wives tales and street myths, but the truth? Night is its own world, and with a modern demon hiding in the streets I didn’t much fancy getting a serpent’s kiss in the dark. But if I had to sweet talk my way onto a dirty picture set, best not do it with gas on my breath or looking like a baby blue nightmare in a sex-stained suit that was five o’clock funky.
No. I needed cash. Time to dust off the old Brimstone charm.
With Lilith sleeping behind me, I ran across 38th and headed for the Magic 8-Ball, hoping I could do what I needed quickly, easily, and without a result to the lowest form of entertainment. I dodged the dancing garbage and avoided my own funeral as Chevys honked at my transgression. And damn if I didn’t reach the other side wanting a Big Mac.
The Magic 8-Ball was a bunker-shack that shook with music. Garage bands I vaguely remembered pumped out from a poor speaker system inside a wooden door with a chicken-wire window. The hogs were all Harley Davidson originals. These were no new patches. These were established vets.
And I thought of that poor black man at Altamont. A man I couldn’t save.
The press had said he was dangerous, higher than then Empire state, and had a gun.
That the Angel had to stop him before he killed a lot of people.
None saw what happened.
That poor man had been hexed. A sigil was branded on his face from a pu
nch he’d received earlier, one laced with a ring whose face bore the plate of a dead Viking god that some of these Angels worshipped. The leader of this inner ring had the oh-so-clever name Low Key. He was a shithook of Babylonian proportions and key figure in the gang rapes that put the Angels in headlines some years back. Forget all the pomp from that hack journalist who rode with them and sold us only a sliver of the true story. The periphery may be outlaws, cowboys, and idiots, but the Inner Ring, as Edgar called them, were servants of a dark god who consumed lost souls. These fucks dosed a black man, stuck a gun in his hand, then threw him into the crowd with eyes as wide as a berserker full of woad. Edgar, for all his faults, saw the Inner Ring as a threat. And he knew that their actions through the sixties had been a series of escalating spectacles of violence that would send thousands into a panic of blood and violence, enough to resurrect a dead god . . .
I’d stopped them once before, at Golden Gate Park. And I’d seen Low Key, now chapter boss in San Francisco, eyes like burning magnesium. He had a reputation as a killer and an aura tasting of electric malice. While the Grateful Dead played “Ripple” for a donkey’s age, Low Key targeted another black man. He never saw me until the beer I’d bought drenched his greasy black locks and made me the target of his wrath. The beating he unleashed on me left my body so raw and broken I was pissing blood for a week. He moved like a mongoose, untouchable, graced with a body built and honed for violence, but when I abandoned offensive for defensive be became wild and infuriated as I blocked, dodged, parried . . . a circle grew around us and we may as well have been covered in the crimson sand of Rome as the plebes and Vestal Virgins cheered for their gladiator to stomp a mud hole in each other. Mano a mano, we went in circles, him landing only a third of his shots, me smiling, annoying him, and waiting for a big opening . . . until some internal clock in Low Key clanged midnight and he grimaced at me, saying with a ridiculously high voice, “Soon,” then running into the crowd.
I have seen stranger shit than Low Key, from the depths of the cosmos to celestial plains only wizards gaze upon before death, but the coldness of his word actually scared me.
When I heard the Angels were doing security for the Stones . . . and the crowd was even bigger . . . turned out to be Altemont..
I didn’t catch him until it was too late.
The kid was sigiled and armed. But Low Key was too busy gloating to see me come up on his hand, slip his ring off, and break the sigil’s spell. Meredith Hunter was free of the ring’s influence. But he was sapped, and when the crowd took the stage, he followed their collective movement, hoping rock and roll would save him . . . and Angel Alan Passaro took out his knife and stabbed twice. He was dead before he hit the ground, and before the ritual could be completed.
The crowd came between me and Low Key, denying me a chance at dropping a receipt on his face. He vanished that night, his ring hidden somewhere within Edgar’s archives, but I was willing to bet he’d left a few disciples of the Inner Ring in the wings to hold court until he returned to lead the flock.
I shook the memory, and pressed open the door to the Magic 8-Ball with my shoulder, fists still coiled: it took an act of will to unlock my fingers so I could play it cool. The last digit released itself as the Sonics played “Strychnine.”
The air was blue with fresh cigarettes and cigars smoke, but the stink was of a career dive haunted by a million dead butts, spilled PBR, and rusty old blood. Locals hunched at the bar on the right, barely noticing my existence. Three Angels were on the right next to a curtained windows and an old Seeburg with all four speakers shaking so conversation was a scream, racking up balls on the pool table. I walked to the jukebox as the Sonics dirged on about rat poison, and tried not to judge the poor souls here drowning in weak beers. From my periphery, the Angels considered me with sneers. Each was patched. The two on opposite sides of the pool table were waiting for the one with his back to me to make a shot. They stank, but not of magic. Just human grease and machine oil. The two waiting were the classic combo of Spaghetti and Meatball: thin and wiry blond with a dirty bandage around his left forearm, large and chunky brunette with gauze around bloody knuckles. Thin beards and weak mustaches dusted their countenance like a hastily dashed painting called “Trash by Afternoon Light.” Over the table a weak lamp in a tired covering hovered like a stray flying saucer that escaped from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The shooter was 180 pounds of well-backed muscle, but not the kind you see in Venice Beach—not cultivated, considered, scientific meat, but muscle from hauling, shoving, pushing, and throwing people and around, the muscle of the street that gets a layer of padding from bruises and cuts. His skin was scabbed and his knuckles filthy. His back featured the flying school and MC insignia, and his chapter: Oakland.
I just prayed to Zeus and company that this wasn’t some public school buddy of mine. They were a long way from home. Which meant going to a rally or muling Horse or weed. But below that were a stab of words in Latin. mors tua, vita mea: your death, my life.
The Sonics drifted off the airwaves. “Say, boys,” I said, “spare a quarter? I’d really like to hear ‘Dream Baby.’”
The shooter turned. Under his right eye was a burn mark the size of a silver dollar where someone had stubbed out a cigar. “Does it look like I care about your shit, faggot?” Spaghetti and Meatball stepped closer, flanking me on my left, the leader on my right.
“Funny you should use that word, though I’m not gay, since faggot is an old Anglo Saxon word for kindling, and they used to burn gays like witches for their eerie powers. But seriously, if any of you had a quarter, I’d be grateful.”
The leader’s burned face was close enough for me to taste the day’s ride he’d taken from Northern Cali. “You will be grateful if you leave now before I crack every rib in your body and leave you in a dumpster to feed the rats.”
I smiled bigger. “Tell you what. If you beat me in a game of Eight-Ball, which I assume is this establishment’s claim to fame, you can do just as you say, and brag to all your buddies how the Oakland Angels need to fight three to one to beat a single faggot.” His pupils pinned and he was a breath away from violence. “Or, you can give me a chance to win a song on the jukebox. Unless you think you can’t win, mano a mano.”
“Don’t fight in here, Fife,” said the bartender, an old Mexican man with a wide face and tired eyes. “I just redid the floors.” Through the haze, I hadn’t noticed. But indeed, new hardwood floors sat beneath our heels. “If you kill him, do it outside?”
“Seems fair,” I said. “You game?” Fife was itching to drive his skull against my nose. Then it happened—
The balls were racked. Spaghetti gave me his cue. Fife and I stood like dueling fiends as Meatball lifted the rack. “Would you care to break?” I asked.
He took a step back. “Ladies first.”
I tsk-tsked as I set up my cue. “You sure have a lot of hate for people who hurt no one.”
“Less talk, more shots,” Fife said.
I stood up. “You know, junior, you’re really starting to bug me.”
The hot, quick sounds of blades snapping from their handles made a chorus as Fife brought his up to my nose. “You’re stalling, dead man. Make this shot, or I’ll bring you down here.”
I smirked. “Tell you what. If I can win in one shot, you boys hand over your knives and wallets, and let me go enjoy Bobby Darren somewhere where hate doesn’t drip off the nicotine stained curtains. If I lose, well, you’re going to break me into a dozen pieces anyway, right?”
I played my smile just a little bit more loopy than usual.
“Let him fail, Fife,” Spaghetti said, sitting on his stool. “You got this.”
“I want to see this magic trick,” Meatball said, leaning against the Seeburg.
I sprinkled a little Irish on my cue, pulled back, and adjusted my stance: I gave the ball a “one inch punch” I’d learned from Dr. Fuji. The white ball came alive, and I played the billiard surface like a pinball
machine with one stroke, the solids racing to their resting homes until all that was left where stripes and the eightball, on the edge of the side pocket, reminding me of Edgar’s funeral. The white tapped it like a whisper and it dropped.
“Magic trick,” Fife muttered, then his eyes narrowed. Fife swung his cue so fast it nearly caught me off guard, but my instincts snapped into survival mode and I moved with the speed of a prisoner down a rope.
I ducked the blow. The cue swung above the pool table, and Fife’s vest flapped. There, tucked under his arm, was a holster. It was the last thing I saw before the cue crashed into the light above the table. Sparks, a hiss of action from the patrons behind me, my night eyes flashed on, and I was off to the races.
I tackled Fife and hugged him close, pinning his arm across his chest before we crashed into the Seeburg with a cacophony of broken glass. Fancy footwork and Jane Tarzan’s wrestling tutorials allowed me to pop with my hips as I lifted Fife in the air, twisted, and drilled him to the ground hard enough to make him gasp.
The cavalry showed up in the form of a forearm around my neck, though I tucked my chin to my chest to avoid hearing the words good night, sweet prince. Meatball dragged me off Fife, just like I hoped he would. I resisted enough for show, Fife’s left arm madly pinned against his chest, then let go, my arm sliding by Fife’s side as Meatball pulled me back like a sardine tin.
On my feet, the darkness was sweet. Fife moved jaunty, covered in a dozen small cuts. Then Spaghetti was before me, hunting knife up.
Fife scrambled for his holster. “Where’s my—”
