by Jason Ridler
“I’m looking for Margarita Diaz.”
She smiled with a confidence that almost made me blush. “And you have found her in El Dorado.”
I smiled, nodding my head at Veronica, who was saddling up, stockinged-knees close together. “See that woman? I need to buy her a gift that won’t put me in the poor house.”
Margarita Diaz grinned, started to open her mouth, and I finished my thought. “But I’m also here at the direction of Isabelle Caylao.”
Seamlessly, Margarita switched to a knowing nod. “A friend of Isabelle is family. Which makes you James.”
“She called?”
“No, but she has spoken of you. There are only so many Americanos who fit her description of you. I take it you are looking for something not found in stores?”
“Unless you have a time machine to ancient Sumer.”
Her confident gaze almost shook. “Exotic.”
“And deadly. Black Lotus.”
She nodded if I’d said Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “Best we talk in the office.” She snapped her fingers twice. The two girls taking care of the three ladies stood and, lifting perfume bottles from trays at the ladies’ elbows, sprayed them each in the face.
And I tasted it.
Magic. Not strong. Not deadly. But real.
“They’ll be no concern to us for a few minutes.” All the woman were smiling. Veronica’s eyes were open, lips twitching.
“Is that real Spanish fly?”
Margarita smiled without showing her teeth, then tilted her head to the door.
The office was small, filled with a more serviceable desk, an ancient Meilink safe (“Guaranteed Fire and Water Proof”), and a brass coat hook. “Tell me, Mr. Brimstone, what do you know of Black Lotus?”
I dug into my pocket and held my specimen before her as she sat, legs crossed, in a plush, cream-colored leather chair.
“First, I have one.”
Her eyes finally betrayed something other than control: wild desire. She didn’t realize her hand had been reaching out until I put the flower back in my suit front pocket. “Now, now, looks are free, but touching is extra.”
She blinked away the bliss. “How do you know it is really Black Lotus?”
“The shape of the petals, the white skull of the center, and the way it tastes.”
She tilted her head. “Tastes? You tasted Black Lotus?”
“Not like regular people.”
“So, you’re not like regular people. No wonder Isabelle finds you amusing. And she’s not alone.” Funny how having something someone values raises your own stock by proxy. “Tell me all you know.”
I gave her the sit-rep of what I’d gathered and where, including the Legion Hall attack, Weasel’s rambles, and Jack Lumber’s death. “Can you tell me how in the name of all the gods and their bratty kids a flower that has not been seen since the days of Gilgamesh could be at in L.A. in the glorious year of Anno Domini 1970?”
She gripped her knee and pulled her leg in so I could see the slit of her skirt pull itself open. “People have searched for it for centuries. The last plant was said to be buried in the carcass of a Cimmerian warrior-king whose name was lost because all of his enemies were murdered, including all their wives and children and parents and siblings. There were no family lines left to immortalize his terror. Mr. Brimstone, this is astounding.”
“I hear that a lot. But I must admit you’re making me sad, Margarita. I thought you’d know more than I did, and it seems I’m the one telling stories of dead muscle men and crazed hippies. I need to know who was responsible for bringing it here.”
“You don’t care about the flower itself?”
“I don’t care about anything other than finding the man or men who did a job on my friend.”
“Then might I have it?” She shifted her knee, then rested it. “Please?”
Then I tasted it. Damn it, with all the perfume in the air, my senses were blinded and my tongue had lost its sense of direction, but there it was on my taste buds, as distinct as rotting gumdrops: deeper magic. Charm magic, no less. It was in the air. Thin and drenched in perfumes that scattered its scent. Smelling it late changed nothing. Thanks to Edgar’s tattooing of my aura with masochistic knifework and old sorcery called Aphrodite’s Tears, the charms here that led to massive sales of junk perfume and overpriced services meant jack shit to me.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t have fun.
“Of course,” I said, and pulled the petals from my pocket, offering it just out of reach. She stood, defiant and smug, as she reached for the Black Lotus.
I palmed it and made the flower disappear.
“Bendejo!” Her hands drew back as if I’d been made out of sparks.
“Lovely scents,” I said as she leaned down with her hands on the desk. “Bet the normal gringos and gringettes are just fools for it. I love it. Please, keep up the work and drain their Fort Knox. Like you, I’m pretty fed up with rich white people.” I leaned down and mirrored her stance. “But try and play me like a puppet and I’ll make sure Izzy knows about your influence among the rich and damned. You know how she loves people who abuse her friends. Hell, there are folk tales in Manila about the little girl with the red left hand.”
Margarita’s hands trembled, once. “I’d very much like to avoid that.”
“Then talk. If I like what I hear, Izzy will have no reason to think you tried to charm her old boyfriend.”
Margarita stood up, head back, arms crossed. “My family has been hunting Black Lotus for generations.”
“The Spanish part of Sumeria?”
“Turks by way of Anatolia,” she said, voice now commanding from a stance of defiance. “Warriors turned herbalists and healers.”
“Every family needs a trade. Could you skip a few centuries so I can leave before my lady’s done in the Scent Lounge?”
“I almost forgot.” She tapped her desk three times, as if steadying her nerves. “My apologies. The trail of the Black Lotus was lost on the Silk Road in the eighteenth century. We hoped to find it when we discovered the research on ley lines.”
I gritted my teeth. “You believe in ley lines?”
“If something’s real, you don’t have to believe.”
“I don’t have time to debate the secret lines of magic that supposedly cross the Earth. Suffice to say I spent two years running around old rocks and desert wadis and found they meant nothing except to those who believe in the Loch Ness monster and that aliens built the pyramids, and some kids who thought Elvis was dead and replaced by a lost god of Egypt. Imagine the king of rock and roll, dead already.”
She sneered. “You never found anything because you don’t know how to look. Only one man did.”
“Oh god, not Alfred Watkins.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to talk or listen?” I shut my trap.
“Watkins was a fool, but he was also right in one regard: Ley lines are real, but they move, as surely as we move through space and time. The only way to find them is with a device of his own making. An encoder.”
I crushed my molars together. “Don’t tell me. You have one.”
“Yes. And it only works with a sample. Hence, it’s been useless.”
“And your price?”
“One leaf. Just one.”
“No chance. You’ll use it to find the plant it came from and I’ll never see either one again.”
“Mr. Brimstone, if you cannot find the Black Lotus plant, you will not find the men using it to hurt your friends. Just allow me to test what you have. If it is true, and you are a friend of Isabella, then you are worthy enough to fetch the plant.”
I felt the itch of having magic in my pocket. “Why do you want the whole damn plant?”
“It is ours by birthright.”
“What will you do with it? New deodorant for maniacs? This stuff is lethal, like LSD mixed with Sterno.”
“It is a great elixir for healing those hurt beyond the reach of common root
and herb lore. Who would you rather see have Black Lotus: the men who tried to kill your friend, or little old me, sole proprietor of a perfume shop?”
My jaw tensed, then relaxed. “When can you get me the encoder?”
“After work. Are you at the hotel?”
The weight of the bag in my hand seemed to triple. “I’ll be at the Olympic. I have a show to do.”
She grinned. “Oh, are you a wrestler? Will you be in the ring? I love wrestling. It keeps so many simple people happy.”
“Let’s just say I’m part of the show. Meet me there. Bring the encoder.”
“We have a deal. So long as you give me one petal. Now.”
My lips shook, then I snapped my fingers and made the flower appear between thumb and index as if to say things were okay, which was a lie of epic proportions. She gasped. “A wrestler and a magician. You are, indeed, a jack of all trades.”
I plucked off a black petal. “Swear our deal is jake.”
She put her hands together. “I swear on the graves of my elders.”
I released thumb from index finger and held out the single stygian petal.
She reached into the desk, pulling out tweezers and a small bottle. She plucked the bladed petal and put it in the bottle. When she capped it with a squeeze bulb and tube, I realized it was an atomizer like those used for her fancy perfumes. Well, she had plenty available.
“You should see how your lady is doing, shouldn’t you?” she asked.
“She’s not my lady.”
“Even better.”
What did Margarita mean by that? Puzzled, but pleased to realize I’d soon be getting out of this aromatic emporium, I made my way back to the scent lounge to find Veronica the only woman left sitting. Her knees were together, pumps on the edge of a stool, pressing up and down, handing over a wad of twenties to the woman at her feet. “I cannot fathom how I didn’t buy more of this fragrance before, but I will take whatever you have in stock.” Then she noticed us. “James, you are missing the moment of the century.”
Charming. Veronica equated her vapid, doped joy with the Nineteenth Amendment, passage of the Civil Rights Act, and man walking on the moon. “Seems like you’ve had enough fun for the both of us.”
“Now where is my gift?”
Damn it. I forgot.
“It’s here, Mrs. Veronica.” Margarita had emerged from her office behind me. “A very special blend.” Then she squeezed the bulb of an atomizer she held and elbowed my side. I inhaled out of instinct.
Raw magic hit the air between me and Veronica, who inhaled deeply.
When we exhaled, desire seethed to life like a dormant dragon being electrocuted. This was magic strong enough to affect even me.
Veronica’s wrist was clenched in my right hand and all I could see in her eyes was the mirror gaze of lust that wouldn’t be denied.
“Get up.”
She did.
Margarita said something about thanking her, but all I could feel was a bottomless pit of fucking that I needed to fill.
And the old James Brimstone was back in the saddle like a bandit with a badge.
21
WHAT WE DID COULD NOT BE UNDONE.
I’d slept with another man’s wife.
Savagely. Give and take brutality and lust. The kind in tawdry paperbacks. What they didn’t describe was the bottomless pit of guilt that sawed through me with the serrated edges of a feral child’s teeth.
Good guys didn’t do that. I’d avoided it with Mandy Jefferson. I’d turned down offers for key parties from some of the regulars at the Thump & Grind. Some lines, once crossed, become scars you carry into every minute of every day and long into the dark night. They itch, wanting to be reopened, torn off like a scab so you can feel the transgressive thrill.
But then comes the bleeding.
Because what we did wasn’t sex, and sure as hell wasn’t love. It was all thanks to Black Lotus. Margarita had somehow quickly distilled the petal’s essence—magic? chemistry? physics? all three?—and we’d inhaled. Mucho mojo was definitely involved for the fragrance to work so effectively on magic-resistant me.
Evidently Black Lotus was a hell of an aphrodisiac. We’d devoured each other with power, dominance, submission. Her skin was beneath my nails. Blood from my lip reddened her mouth. Adversaries trying to break each other’s bodies and will, to make them submit. Until she’d won, hands around my throat, choking me out as she rode me on the slashed and dirty floor, clenching my neck as she came and growling at me with disgust and calling me a “dirty peasant fuck” and “slave cock” until the thunder stopped. I took what I wanted in her afterglow, hammering her against the wall as she swallowed the scream of lust I’d reignited in her, breathing in her ear that “no matter who fucks you next, all you will think of is me.”
We dressed in silence, blood moving from boil to simmer to one degree above ice as she slid on her pumps with her ring hand. The one she used to tend her husband’s broken body.
I choked back bile. She spat on the floor. “I can’t wait to wash you out of me.”
I nodded. But it would take more than a hot shower to clean the stink of the old James Brimstone out of my scared and gutted aura. Black Lotus may have released him, but he vanished as the guilt of being a shithook ate my conscious. He’d never stuck around for the cost, just the benefit, until I’d exiled him years ago. But I could hear his voice whistling past the graveyard of my heart, letting me know “banished” didn’t mean “dead.” And as much as I wanted to blame Black Lotus, it only made me do what I wanted. I just had to keep what I wanted locked inside a deeper casket.
With the last button done up, she was already out the door to the suite, making it damn clear that whatever happened in this timeless zone of dark lust, she was never anything but herself. I’d been alone my whole life, but it had been a long time—the dark days of my youth—since I felt so empty.
Minus, of course, a full glass of shame.
22
VERONICA’S BLACK BENTLEY SUCKED AT THE DWINdling sunset as she pressed her foot down on the gas, adjusting herself in her seat every now and then as we kept a steady sixty-five on Washington Boulevard. She drove as if she was playing a game of chicken. We were headed to the Olympic, back to the case I needed to solve before Cactus’s tubes were ripped out in the morning and I became haunted, hunted, and otherwise in debt for my failure to find his assailant while he was alive.
But that was functional information.
Neither one of us could escape what we’d done. What we’d said.
As a rule, my first inclination with women is almost always wrong. I wanted to tell Veronica about magic perfumes and Black Lotus and the horrors it can render and how I was going to have a stern talking to with Margarita for why she dosed me with lust-tinged magic derived from Black Lotus, why she’d waste a petal—surely it would have taken the entire petal to produce a perfume that potent?—on me instead of holding it for herself and her family’s thousand-year journey to reclaim a drug that fed the soldiers of the lost ages who fought dragons and demons like Batman fought villains.
So, I said nothing.
Because I’d fucked another man’s wife.
Worse, a good man.
And the words I’d uttered with such confidence in the dark now stabbed me in the back during the dying moments of sunlight: “No matter who fucks you next, all you will think of is me.”
“He doesn’t have to know.”
Veronica kept driving. I was astounded when she’d told me to get in her car and asked where to drop me off. It wasn’t kindness. Perhaps fear of being alone.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
The sunset flared in her rearview. Her chin rose, and she plucked a pair of bug-eyed sunglasses from the visor above her head. “I don’t regret it.” She slid them on, voice as calm as a spring breeze, ignoring what I’d just said.
“What about Alan?”
“As you said, he doesn’t have to know. So, what do you wa
nt?”
I leaned forward and turned to face her. “Blackmail? You’ve got me confused with someone else. I don’t want anything.”
“Don’t be naive, or presume I am, either. I wanted you. I had you. What do you want? A man of your means must have a litter of needs.”
“Thanks for reminding me why I find you abhorrent.”
“Except when inside me,” she grinned. “Then I was everything you needed.”
Veronica had also been dosed with the sexified Black Lotus. Veronica—always in control—wanted someone else to take the wheel. I just happened to be going the same direction.
But the image of dominating and having and taking was pissed upon by the dark clouds above: a vision of Izzy stretched across the sky and tsking at the little boy who proposed. The little boy heard “no,” and then spent two decades making women say “yes” before he cleaned up his act. He got good with his feminine side just as the sixties filled with the smoke of burning bras and he tried to be a stand-up mensch.
“This lift is payment enough,” I said.
“Not good enough. Why do you even need a lift?”
“Someone stole . . . it doesn’t matter.”
“I can have a new car to your office by tomorrow. Name the make and model.”
I wasn’t driving around in a vehicle that screamed Hush Money for Fucking a Mogul’s Wife. “A bus pass would be just fine.”
Her cheeks flushed with annoyance as we dodged a pile-up in the left lane and gunned it through a yellow. The hulking concrete block of the Olympic Auditorium would soon be in view.
“You can trust me, Veronica.”
She huffed. “You even say my name like a slob.”
“And you took my dick like a pro.” I closed my eyes. “Sorry.”
“I’m not. I did. You know what you are? Meat. Good meat. Fit for a Sausage King Party Pack, which I hear the denizens of the suburbs consume by the truckload under the fireworks of Independence Day. But that’s it. You’re a miserable detective. You have no resources. You have no intellect. And that’s why your apology doesn’t mean anything. Your life no longer means anything, other than how it impacts mine. So be a good boy and pick out a toy you’d like and let me buy it for you, then I’ll know you won’t come back begging like Oliver Twist for more.”
