by Jason Ridler
I grinned, enjoying this respite from a day of broken men, bloody bodies, and a friend in a coma.
But relaxation invited reminiscence. These kids coming back from the Mekong Delta are haunted. So are we Korea vets. We didn’t get a hero’s welcome either when we came home from the Korean “police action”—like Vietnam, they didn’t even call it a war. Mostly we were ignored. As were any nightmares we were dealing with . . .
A wrinkled hand with a heart-shaped ring waved in front of me. “Hey, Earth to James, Earth to James, you read me?”
I laughed. “Sorry, Harriet. Guess I just drifted off for a second.”
“Bored you into a coma, huh?”
A volley of cold hit my spine. “It’s not the company. Just thinking about a friend in the hospital.”
“Well, look at me being an inconsiderate slug. I haven’t asked you boo about yourself. Your friend down near the Boardwalk?”
I had to change the patter. I wasn’t going to share any of my life story with Harriet, though I hoped that when I was her age I wouldn’t mind being as free and easy as she was with her personal life. “No, just going to search down there for something that might cheer him up.”
“If his style is Venice Beach,” she said, “I like your friend already.”
I smiled, until I looked in her rearview.
It was a black Lincoln Continental. And behind the windshield was the face of a woman, skin taut, thin lips frozen in a rictus.
She wore a red bow tie. In its center was a voice box.
She rolled down the window and stuck out her head. The speaker sputtered to life with the voice of a damned bastard.
“Brimstone!” Shanks said. “Alicia Price sends her regards!”
Wonderful. Just what I didn’t need: an encounter with the undead putz of a powerful sorceress, both of whom had already made a few attempts to send me to oblivion.
Shanks was Alicia’s favorite heavy. She kept his brain in a jar and gave him a new corpse to re-animate when needed. Shanks was bad enough, but Alicia was pure evil.
She was the bitch who’d broken Lilith’s windshield.
8
DEL REY WAS AN EVEN WORSE PLACE FOR A CAR chase than Inglewood, since it was a tourist trap hiding a black hole. Plus, Harriet was an innocent, a bystander, and not touched by magic. But this secondhand zombie-brain-in-jar henchman was going to try and kill us both.
“What in the hell is that?” Harriet said, looking in the rearview mirror at the corpse lady with the male voice made out of static and frustration. “An ex-wife?”
“No way,” I said. “Harriet, just drop me off before he . . . she . . . it catches up with us. That driver is first-class bad news and you’ve been a saint.”
“Nope,” Harriet said, then swung a wide right that burned more rubber than napalm in the jungle. “I know good people, James. Mother was a fortune teller and was right nine times out of ten. And I’m my mama’s daughter.” She adjusted her bouffant as we jetted down Redwood Avenue. “I’d bet my back fillings that you need a friend who won’t bail on ya. Sound about right?”
I grabbed the oh-shit handle as she gunned the Ranch Wagon, feeding the distance as Shanks’s burning tires hit our rubbery shadow and came for us. “I can’t ask that of someone who I’ve just met.”
“You ain’t the one asking,” she said, taking another hard right at Washington Boulevard. “I’m asking you. James, will you let me show this two-bit gal who the real queen of Marina Del Rey is?”
My only other option was jumping out of the car and breaking my neck before Shanks ran over my ribs and tap-danced my skull to splinters. “Harriet, I’d be grateful.”
The next four-to-five minutes turned the blur of grays at my sides a whiter shade of death. Harriet’s plan, near as I could tell, was to screech as close to corners as possible while keeping all her turns right, and Shanks’s plan was to keep up with this woman who drove like she’d been born on the Indy 500.
“Damn you, Brimstone!” Shanks screamed. “Slow down and meet your certain fate!”
“James,” Harriet asked, spinning the wheel so we fishtailed, “why does that girl sound like a throwaway horror flick from Val Lewton?” She then peeled away and shot us toward Shanks’s car.
“Guess she’s a fan of the classics.” The danger of the situation suddenly hit me because I could see Shank’s mind working in that corpse face. “Uh, Harriet, don’t, he’s going to play chicken.”
“Good,” she said. “I don’t flinch!”
Then she gunned it.
But Shanks was undead. If we crashed and died, he’d get a new body and a full paycheck. “No, pull right! Trust me! Please, Harriet! Now!”
Slicing our chances of survival into shreds, we turned, but not hard enough. Shanks nailed the rear end of Harriet’s wagon and shattered the tail lights. Harriet turned with the impact, nerves and skill on autopilot. “She would have crashed into us.”
“Yes,” I said. “We need to lose her, not confront her, because she doesn’t care who gets hurt, including herself.”
“Goddamn, James. I thought you were smarter than that.” “Smarter than what?”
“Putting your willie in crazy chicks!” I laughed, but she was dead serious. “Suicidal lover, huh?”
“She has a hard time saying goodbye.”
“I can understand that.” She took a left that honest-to-god threw Shanks for a loop after all her right turns, and then punched the pedal. We sped like a bullet through a chamber, honking to keep the innocent bystanders and drivers out of harm’s way.
“Gangway! Hot stuff, coming through!”
“Who the hell taught you to drive?” I asked.
“Don’s best friend was a stunt driver.” She smiled, and let the implication hang like a dirty joke between old friends.
A garbage truck the size of the Hulk turned into our path and saw us coming at full strength before they hammered a foghorn to signal our doom.
“Brace for impact!”
Tires screamed before the beast of a car skidded toward the green monster. Behind us, Shanks revved up.
“Get out!” I screamed, but Harriet already knew the drill, and both of us piled out of the vehicle two seconds before impact.
Harriet’s car jolted forward and crashed into the garbage truck. Shanks’s car crunched like an accordion into the orange rear fins of Harriet’s once-pristine 1960 Ford Ranch Wagon. Harriet tucked herself into the dip of a shop’s doorway. The rush of wind from the crash puffed over my wounded back. Under the polyester, it was hotter than hell’s gate.
Shanks’s head smashed into his windshield, and a crackling spider web distorted the unmoving smile. I wasn’t a betting man, but even the Pope would put it all on Shanks’s rotting corpse body being broken but not done.
The driver’s side door opened.
I placed one wingtip on the accordioned bumper and leapt, then slid like I was stealing home base just as the .38 Special became visible heading towards Harriet.
“She’s got a goddamn gun!” Harriet said. That was more than the garbage gang needed to reverse engines and pull out.
My foot slammed the tiny wrist of the dead girl Shanks inhabited, and sent the revolver spilling behind.
The icy grip of the dead claimed my ankle. “Brimstone! You were foolish to get this close to me! You are now in my clutches!”
With a single yank, the monster from Staten Island pulled me inside the car. The taste of Shank’s magical nature, and that of his master Alicia Price, was like sucking smog made of spoiled milkshakes: thick and vile. I tumbled into the back seat like a sack of bruised potatoes. And when I saw the shattered windshield, I couldn’t help but think of Lilith, my stolen beauty, whose windshield I’d only recently replaced, and how trivial it is to attach so much importance to things, which, as the Fat Prophet of the Bodhi Tree says, is the root of all unhappiness.
And yet, watching Shank’s girlish head turn, rictus grin at a hundred watts and static laughter hissing from
that charmed bow tie, I decided it was all right to be petty when faced with the absurd. “Nice digs,” I said. “A dead chick’s body suits you.”
“Laugh all you want,” he said, hitting the ignition. “When I’m done with you, Alicia Price will give me any body I want to claim as my own, full possession. Including yours!”
The car reversed, which was good, because it kept Harriet out of the danger zone. Even if it brought me closer to hells of infinite suffering.
I snapped out a kick that jarred that once-living head and received only laughter for my trouble. “Try and fight me, Brimstone! Try and beat a dead man who—”
BANG!
The windshield shattered as a strong voice screamed.
“Duck!”
I rolled into the fetal position.
Four shots rang out, accompanied by Shanks screaming “no!” each time bullets smacked his chest and neck, propelling out that gray-green ooze Alicia’s patchwork resurrection man used to provide Shanks with one of the bodies he’d been hoarding since Edgar first set me against him. Shanks head dipped over the seat, hands shaking. “No! No civilian can stop—”
I shot my hand up, grabbed his bowtie, and yanked.
“NO!”
Tearing off the magical contraption killed the body from being his ride, but it didn’t eradicate the sound of Shanks’ annoying voice.
“HOW DARE YOU!” the box screamed. “I WILL RIP OUT HER EYES, BRIMSTONE! I WILL EAT HER BRAIN AS YOU WATCH BEFORE I—”
“Shanks?” I said to the bow tie. “Nap time.”
I smashed the receiver against her skull and static slashed through the air before dissipating.
I reached for the passenger side door, but it opened.
Harriet, with a smoking .38 in one hand.
“Thank you,” I said.
She shook. “You were not kidding.” She sneered at the mess of the body that was Shanks’s no more.
“Don’t look, Harriet.”
“I was a WAAC, James,” she said, giving me her hand. “Let’s go before we’re blamed for this mess.”
We abandoned the crash site, which was sure to bring heat because city trucks (as opposed to the workers) might have been hurt. While running, Harriet tossed the gun onto a rickety pickup filled with fence posts, a far better destination for our innocence than a sewer or a garbage can, which even greenhorn recruits straight from the academy would put under the magnifying glass. Under the awning of a fruit shop, the fresh taste of strawberry skin parching my lips, I caught my breath, “What about your car, Harriet?”
She dropped a dollar into the shopkeeper’s hand, said “Gracias,” and took a pound of strawberries. “My car? It’s in Long Beach. I’ll pick up another one for the ride home or rely on the kindness of strangers.”
“Kind strangers are starting to be a rare breed in this city, my dear.”
She tore a strawberry apart with a single bite. “Beautiful, everything has a price. You could have been some master pervert. Could have passed you by and missed one hell of an event, James. Life is too precious to be spent playing it safe all the time.”
She held out a strawberry before her face.
I leaned forward, and found her red, rich lips instead. She gave a hell of a passionate kiss with my adrenals still on fire, and I pulled back for air before she KO’d me in the first round. I gulped air and realized that her five o’clock shadow was peeking out of her makeup. Once immaculate, the pancake had now started to melt.
“Does that bother you?” she said.
I smiled. “No, Harriet. It takes all kinds. And I’m glad the world has your kind in it.”
I kissed her again, and she received me with relish before pulling back and handing me the strawberries. “See you around, James,” she said, then cut her way down the street with the bearing of a queen, her shadow long and true.
I ate three strawberries as cop cars drove past without sirens or lights, hazy black-and-white Belvedere beetles running down the street. If Shanks’s hijinks had caused a stir with the police, there were no evident signs.
I looked west. It was a long walk to Venice Beach, where I hoped to find a link to whoever hurt Cactus.
I tossed in a strawberry. It was overripe and melted like soggy cotton candy as I handed the box to the shopkeeper. He threw up his hands and shook his head, thinking I was trying to return them.
“I want to share one with you, Uncle.”
Shock widened the eyes of his weathered face. “You speak Cantonese?”
“Poorly. These are good. Please?”
He plucked one out, bowed slightly, then took a very small bite, the kind of bite that said he’d had to split a handful of rice for a lot of mouths over the years, the kind of living that says a whole strawberry is only fit for gods and emperors. I realized my appetites, no matter how varied or expansive, how much they sang from the gutters, were quintessentially American and bloated.
He handed the strawberry back, and I took it, bit a small piece, and handed it back.
We did this, smiling, as if it were a game, and as good as those first four were, the last tiny bite, green stalk and all, was delicious.
“Thank you, Uncle.”
He nodded, a gentle smile on his face, then waved me off. He was a working man.
And so was I. Venice Beach, I thought, I’m going to work your Boardwalk until you spill your secrets about the Black Lotus and skateboards and hippies that use grenades. The Boardwalk was still a good half-hour walk away.
It was a pleasant enough stroll but would have been faster without the wounds in my back. At least I had plenty to think about. I was almost to Shell Avenue when I saw something a half-block away that jarred me back to the here-and-now: there, preaching next to a crate of stacked grapefruit, stood Weasel.
9
AT ALMOST THE SAME INSTANT, WEASEL SPOTTED me and abandoned his citrus. The homeless prophet was fast. He’d obviously been building up the capacity to sprint short distances thanks to endless desperation and the law of the street.
We cut through a gaggle of tourists and locals, the buildings’ shadows getting longer and the vista of the ocean like blinding gold on the horizon. Parents with long sideburns pulled their kids close while freaks and pushers with maps to the stars swore under their breath for screwing up their sales. A handful of kids whose faces were a blurry mess of hair and braces screamed for me to “kick his ass!” as if fighting the homeless was some kind of spectator sport. I hoped I’d never live to see the day when beating the unfortunate became common.
I was lamenting signs of a new dark era, just like Weasel.
“Weasel! Wait!”
“Herald of DOOM!” he screamed, leaping over a poodle with a rhinestone collar. The dog’s platinum blond owner yanked its leash to pull Fido out of my way, but I jumped all the same. Didn’t want to slow my momentum toward the fleet-footed critter who could speak ancient Babylonian. And, as if reading my wish list to Santa, Weasel actually pumped his legs straight toward the shimmering ocean.
“I just want to talk!” I said.
“You speak doom! Go back to the Abyss that sprung you!”
“How dare you say that about Oakland!”
Weasel threw back his hand and I raised my guard, but he was aiming lower.
Marbles slid under my wing tips and I tap-danced with gravity, trying to get my bearings before falling down like a career failure at the roller rink. Shouts from others joined the chorus of swears in my head as Weasel threw another handful of Vacor Trébols, straight from Mexico, causing havoc on the streets of Venice Beach.
“Hey, these are classics!” I yelled. “Why not save them for your collection?”
“Doom!”
“Am not! You are!”
We ran until I could see the haze of shadows on the horizon . . . the Boardwalk. Packed with people paying attention to nothing but novelty. Weasel would vanish like tears in the desert.
The street was filled with screeching tires as we ran through traf
fic. I closed some of the distance I lost thanks to his fistful of marbles. (A trick I would remember in case I ever found myself in the role of L.A.’s most hunted.) Brief slices of shade from palm trees and telephone poles cut across us as the street curved like a racetrack, and I wondered if anyone was betting on the contest between the Gray Disaster and the Polyester Nightmare.
“Weasel, please. I need your help!”
“You help no one, Beast of Lies!”
“Black Lotus is back.”
For a second, he slowed down to a trot.
“Do you know where it grows?”
He shot a look back, then bolted faster than I could breathe.
On we went, until the sidewalk thickened with the crowd for the Boardwalk, locals coming home for a respite, and hand sellers looking for a better corner for this time of day. The strawberries were now ashes in my mouth as I sped up to match Weasel, who clearly knew more than he let on about Black Lotus. He either knew where it was, or why it had come back, and that was a hell of a lot more than me this fine day.
“Save me, Tiamat! I will do your bidding! Just save me from this human monster!”
And, as if a genie were granting the last wish from a lamp-rubber, Weasel started to slow. His breathing was labored. The miles of life on the street seemed to catch up with him as I got closer and closer.
A curious sound curled in my ears. It took a second to place it.
Behind me, the gritty grinding of wheels on pavement neared.
Wheels.
Skateboards.
I looked back and saw an inverse-V formation: three shirtless kids, beach-bronzed skin, muscles taut and toned, slamming their feet against the pavement to push their boards like waves propelling surfboards. The concrete was their ocean and, judging by the litter of white scars and bruises against the tan, just as cruel a mistress as the sea.
Effortlessly, I was flanked by two cinnamon-haired boys. Behind me was a blond kid with wide eyes . . .
. . . one of the protesters who’d been outside the Legion Hall.
