Constantine

by John Shirley

  In the cab, Chaz stared at the broken glass, the smashed wood—and his dented hood.

  In the girl’s bedroom, Constantine was untying the bloody remnants of the straps when her mother came in.

  “Mama!” Her mother gathered the child up in her arms, rocking her.

  Constantine checked on the man who’d looked into the demon’s face: he was lying on his back, staring, twitching, muttering. Something broken in his mind.

  Hennessy had crowded in, too, and was clearing his throat. “Ma’am—about the money . . .”

  Constantine picked up the stub of his cigarette, no longer burning. Feeling like he might fall over if he didn’t keep moving, he put on his coat and went into the hallway, to the kitchenette. His stomach was churning, seething. He hadn’t eaten today. Just something, anything, so he didn’t throw up.

  There, a quart of milk in the fridge. He sniffed at it, drank deep. A soothing hand covered the interior of his stomach. He put it back, closed the fridge, and found himself staring at children’s drawings held by refrigerator magnets. All the same. A crude figure, arms outspread, another figure poking at him with a stick. Stabbing him in the side. More on the walls. The mother, though she must have been puzzled, had put the child’s obsessive art up as a point of pride. He pulled one of the images off the wall, tucked it in his coat, and pushed past the tenants again, out to the corridor, coughing as he went.

  Downstairs, Constantine leaned against the front wall of the apartment building, watching the scene: Chaz, cussing a blue streak, cleaning off the dented hood of the cab; people staring and pointing at the apartment window. Weak though Constantine was, his feelers were still out, and his perceptions heightened—he could see ghosts among the crowd. He didn’t like seeing ghosts. At least, not the ones trapped on this plane—the ones who hadn’t even made it to purgatory. Like that pasty-faced old man with the torn-open throat, his wife beside him, still clutching the butcher’s knife she’d used to cut that throat—and the bullet hole the old man had put in her forehead as he’d died. The two ghosts gazing mournfully at Constantine. Condemned to stick together, Constantine supposed. As he watched, a cop walked through the old man and his wife, oblivious to them.

  And that one, near the fire hydrant—Constantine nodded to the specter of the greasy-haired thin man with the pockmarks on his face. He tended to follow Constantine around. Probably because Constantine was the reason he was dead.

  The thin ghost nodded gloomily back and melted away, as Constantine made the effort to shut off his psychic vision. It was best to keep it shut down, most of the time. Sanity had to be protected.

  He lit the stub of the cigarette as Hennessy joined him.

  “Like I said, John, I found you something, didn’t I? Well, didn’t I?”

  Constantine shrugged and looked around for ghosts. Didn’t see any. But he knew they were there.

  “What happened up there?” Hennessy asked.

  Constantine just shook his head, coughing a little and trying to keep it from becoming a fit of hacking, and rummaged through his coat pockets.

  “Inside pocket, on the left.”

  Hennessy was right; that’s where the cough drops were. “Save your little psychic gimmicks for the customers,” Constantine said, popping a lozenge into his mouth.

  “Sorry, sorry. Right. Sorry.”

  Hennessy took a half-pint bottle in a brown paper bag from his inside coat pocket, glanced around, then took a long pull.

  “Going to a lot of meetings, I see,” Constantine said dryly.

  “It keeps them out. So I can sleep. I have to sleep.”

  Constantine knew just what he meant. “I need some help myself, Father Hennessy.”

  “You do?” Hennessy blinked in surprise. “From me? What kind of . . .” Instinctively, Hennessy touched an amulet around his neck.

  Constantine looked at it. The four intersecting crosses . . . Yes.

  Seeing the direction of Constantine’s gaze, Hennessy groaned. Constantine didn’t need a confession. “Oh. That. Oh, John, no, listen, I can’t—”

  “Padre, that exorcism just wasn’t right. I need you to do some . . . research.”

  “I just don’t like to do that anymore . . .”

  “Come on, surf the ether for me. A few days. You can do that for me. Anything unusual—anything—let me know.”

  Hennessy’s hands were shaking. He looked like he was thinking about bus tickets. Escaping town.

  Constantine put his hand on Hennessy’s shoulder. “It’ll be like back in the day.” He reached around and unclipped the amulet from Hennessy’s neck . . .

  “No, John, I need that—”

  “A few days . . .” If Hennessy was going to quest for him, he’d need to keep the amulet off to get full access. He dropped the amulet into Hennessy’s coat pocket.

  Hennessy looked at him a moment, chewing his lip. Maybe there was a flicker of friendship there. Memory of the days they’d worked together—before Hennessy had started to crumble. Not too many could look Hell in the face, more than once, and just keep on, ignoring the fact that life was under siege by the demonic; that the world was like a fortress surrounded by an enemy horde, just waiting for a crack to open, a chance to get in. When you really realized that, it could break you.

  Hennessy swallowed and said, “Okay. Okay, for you, John. Like . . . back in the day. Right.”

  Hennessy took another swig.

  Constantine felt a tingle on the back of his neck. Someone was watching him, from up in the apartment building. Someone who flipped a gold coin, a very old gold coin, from finger to finger . . . Someone . . .

  Sensing the peculiar metaphysical quality of that scrutiny, Constantine turned and looked that way but that someone had gone.

  ~

  Constantine found Chaz punching out the dent in his opened hood, hammering it from below. Not improving it much.”

  “John, it’s not my cab. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I told you to move it.”

  “Well, maybe if you’d told me you were dropping a fucking three-hundred-pound mirror with a pissed-off demon in it, I would have moved it further . . .” Chaz slammed the hood shut and got into the car. Constantine got in beside him.

  “What you think they’ll call it this time?” Chaz asked, hearing the sirens approaching. “PCP? Crystal meth?”

  “They’ll call it something. They always do.” Coughing, chewing up another cough drop, Constantine poked a finger through the litter of books on the dashboard. Aleister Crowley. Eliphas Levi. Dion Fortune. Manly P. Hall. “Los Angeles . . . never ceases to entertain.”

  Chaz started the taxi and drove into the street, the sudden motion making books fall on Constantine’s lap, just as the cops and the ambulance arrived.

  “Take Alvarado . . .” Constantine said.

  “I know how to go, okay?”

  THREE

  Echo Park, Los Angeles

  Detective Angela Dodson, LAPD, was running, gun in hand, and she hated to do that. Hated to run with a gun, worse than running with a knife. You run with a knife, you probably only hurt yourself. Run with a gun and trip and it goes off, you might kill anyone. She wore flat shoes with her civvies, with her suit—skirt, white blouse and purse—but she could still trip.

  No time to worry about it. The guy who’d just shot three people at random, including her young partner, Xavier, was somewhere up ahead, she was sure of it—though she wasn’t sure how she knew. There—Xavier—she’d heard him right on the walkie-talkie: he was lying on his back in a pool of blood, near the base of a tree.

  “Get away from here!” Angela shouted at the onlookers, running toward the fallen man. She pulled the badge from her purse and waved it. “LAPD! Get out of here!” Xavier gasping, pale. Wounded in the left shoulder. “Get down—get under cover!” Angela shouted at a family gaping at her as she knelt.

  Where was her backup? There were supposed to be two bicycle cops in this neighborhood.

  The shooter,
serial killer, whatever he was—had he shot the bike patrolmen, too?

  She pressed an improvised compress against Xavier’s wound, and with her free hand reached to take away his gun. He wouldn’t let go of it.

  “You’re down,” she said. “Let go.”

  “ ‘Cold dead fingers’, Angie,” Xavier said hoarsely, ruefully quoting the old NRA slogan, fingers tightening on the .44.

  She nodded, scanning the crowd. Checking out the faces. Feeling that the shooter was still here. She stood, drawing her badge, on a slender strap, from under her shirt. “LAPD! Get down!” she shouted.

  He’s here. The shooter’s still here, Angela thought. She was sure of it. Xavier was still alive. And she could feel it: the killer wanted to finish him off.

  Turning around, looking at the faces around her, muttering, “Where are you? Where are you?” Most of the people nearby on the pier had run off at her warning, but there were still gapers: a pleasant-looking blond man in a gray suit and a puzzled smile, standing behind a woman and her two children, near a vendor’s cart.

  Angela heard Xavier catch his breath at the pain and Angela realized caught up in the sense that the gunman was still at hand—that she hadn’t called an ambulance yet. She got her little walkie-talkie from her purse. “Officer down. One shooter. Officer down, need assistance . . .”

  The man with the pleasant smile, his hand moving below her line of sight . . .

  “Officer down . . .”

  And suddenly she was spinning, her gun up and aiming. Firing before she could think.

  All in a split second as some part of her was silently shouting: I can’t do this! Stop!

  But she felt something more powerful than instinct: a primal certainty and a conviction, from way down inside, that if she didn’t do this then she and Xavier and others would all be dead, before another word could be spoken.

  And so she shot the man with the puzzled smile right through the forehead.

  Have I shot the wrong man? Mary, Holy Mother of God, have mercy on me . . .

  The other people around him screamed and ran to the right and left—like a curtain of people parting to reveal the man sinking to his knees . . . with a silenced 9mm pistol in his hand.

  He flopped forward, facedown, not even twitching. Quite dead.

  Lowering the gun, she glanced down at Xavier, who was staring up at her, grimacing. “You scare me,” he said.

  Didn’t sound like he was kidding.

  She looked at the gun in her hand. She closed her eyes . . .

  It had happened again.

  ~

  “You know, Angela, this is starting to make a few people nervous,” Captain Foreman said, scratching in the short bristles that passed for his hair. He was an ex-Marine and he’d kept the haircut. He looked at her with his small, blue eyes, and the lines on his tanned face deepened with his frown. “Shooting four people in six months—doesn’t happen too often, Dirty Harry movies aside.”

  “Yes sir, but uh—it’s not as if any of it’s my idea,” Angela said.

  “You know, you can sit down in that chair there.”

  She was standing almost at attention in front of his desk, in his downtown office. Pictures of his kids on the wall, framed certificates of commendation, a smell of pipe tobacco. “No thank you, sir.”

  She knew she was being petulant, acting the martyr by refusing to sit, but she felt like she was being hauled on the carpet for just doing her duty.

  “You’re thinking you should get a medal and not a hassle,” Foreman said, leaning back, his chair creaking.

  She felt her face redden. “Not a medal, sir—but, maybe, not a hassle.”

  “Tell you what I think. I think it bothers you, too, all these shootings in a short time.”

  She let out a long breath. He had her there. All four shootings had been instinctive. All four had been one-shot-one-kill affairs, instantly lethal. All four had been people no one mourned, no one complained of losing. Murderers, every one. A child killer, a vicious enforcer for a drug gang, a bank robber who’d already killed a hostage, and now a lunatic, a random shooter.

  And in every case she’d just found herself in the vicinity. Just following a feeling. And every time she’d been right.

  She tried not to think about her sister. How what had happened to Isabel could be happening to her. She tried not to think about the voices she’d heard, the ghosts she’d seemed to see as a child. She couldn’t let herself believe all that was coming back. Because that had been madness.

  But how could this be madness? She’d been . . .

  “. . . right every time,” the captain was admitting. “That’s the damnable thing. They all checked out to the bone. You probably will get a commendation, when things quiet down. But we still have to suspend you pending investigation. It’s just routine. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “I know, Captain.”

  “Dodson—there’s nothing you want to tell me about this?”

  “Like . . . what?”

  “I don’t know. Just . . . next time you have one of these, you know, these hunches, call somebody before you . . . follow up. I mean—not if there’s a shooter right there, but . . .”

  “I know what you mean, sir.”

  “Okay. We’ll see you in the morning at the inquest.”

  She nodded, and walked out, thinking, He’s right. I’m scared by this thing, too.

  ~

  Chaz had just pulled up in a discreet, shadowy corner of Twenty Lanes’ parking lot. He took Constantine’s bag from the trunk of the taxi, followed him toward the door of the bowling alley. “Ever think if you told me more now and then, maybe I could help you out?” he asked Constantine.

  “Nope,” Constantine said, without so much as a glance at Chaz, as he led the way inside.

  Anyplace else, this much noise and clatter, the sounds of things crashing down, would be a sign to take cover from a landslide. But in a bowling alley it was normal. Most of the lanes were going strong at the Twenty Lanes as Constantine and Chaz crossed the lobby, walking past the pimply young man renting shoes, past rows of the house balls in cabinets, all in bright primary colors.

  “Bowling shoes—what a scam that is,” Chaz remarked.

  “Just get me Beeman, now please,” Constantine said, looking down the lanes at somebody curving a ball in for a perfect strike. He could shoot a gun straight as Buffalo Bill, he could punch like a son of a bitch, he could summon fire sprites and wind elementals, he could trap a demon in a mirror, and he could see the astral world—but for the life of him, he couldn’t roll one of those hooks to get a strike. Bowling technique was an esoteric mystery to Constantine.

  Drive me here, get me Beeman, blow my nose, Chaz thought. Aloud he said, “Question: How much longer do I have to be your slave?”

  “You’re not my slave, Chaz, you’re my very appreciated apprentice. Like Tonto or Robin or that skinny fellow with the fat friend from the old movies.” They’d crossed the bowling alley to the exit on the far side.

  “When do I apprentice something besides driving?” And, he thought, signaling eccentrics who hide out in the back of bowling alleys?

  But Constantine had already slipped through the exit door.

  Chaz growled to himself. “No. Really. Great. We’ll do lunch.”

  He sighed, went to the ball rack for lane thirteen, as always, and ran his fingers across the house balls. Only one was bright pearly white. He held it in one hand, took a grease pencil and wrote NEW GAME on the overhead, then stepped onto the polished wood, prepping for a bowl. He winked at a pretty brunette girl watching from the next lane. Her buff young boyfriend didn’t like it. Chaz bowled, and the hook was perfect. The strike was a mathematical inevitability, every ball going down just when it should. The brunette grinned.

  He returned the smile and, resignedly, went back out to the cab.

  ~

  Constantine’s apartment was small—but not as small as it looked. He pulled a chain hanging down the right-ha
nd wall as he came in, and the far wall shuttered open, revealing a farther room and making the whole as long as a bowling lane—and indeed, it used to be one. The rumble of the pins came steadily from next door. At the far end from Constantine was a bed enclosed by a metal cage. Mostly to keep things out.

  On the floor along all four walls were lots and lots of big Sparklett’s bottles, each adorned with a small hand-marked cross. Holy water. It discouraged certain entities. Others didn’t give . . . a damn.

  Constantine checked the seals on the window. No indication of invasion, material or astral.

  He grunted to himself and took a small black box from his jacket, set it carefully on a little shelf made for it, near the window. He looked around, thinking he’d settled for too little.

  “Home sweet home,” he murmured. He lit a cigarette, took off his coat, and sat down at the table to wait for Beeman. Didn’t take long. Maybe a quarter inch of cigarette.

  “ ‘New game,’ John?” Beeman said, coming into Constantine’s apartment without knocking.

  Constantine inhaled cigarette smoke, and almost immediately suffered a fit of coughing.

  “The big one, the mother lode—the one you’ve been waiting for?”

  Constantine managed to get his racking coughs under control. He spat blood into a tissue and said, hoarsely, “Humor me.”

  Turning to glance at Beeman: A small man. Prissy. Arch expression. Clothes as neat as Constantine’s were rumpled.

  “Don’t I always?” Beeman said as he set his custom bowling bag on the counter of the kitchenette near the front door.

  John gestured to a small can with the image of a cow on it, waiting on the table. Beeman picked it up. The novelty can went mooooo.

  Something Beeman had requested. Taste is relative.

  “Much obliged,” Beeman said, putting the moo can in his pocket. He unzipped the bag, took out some water balloon-like ampules of holy water and a couple packs of Lucky Strikes, put them on the table. Constantine scooped them up, tucked them into his coat, which was lying over the chair. “How you feeling, John?” Meaning: Been back to the doctor? Diagnosis?