None of my justifications erased the fact that I’d killed him. None of them made me any less guilty. I’d failed, as both a lover and a detective. I hadn’t tried to find out what was bothering Danny. If I had, he might not have ended up in the motel room that night. I’d written off Bruno’s anger too easily. I hadn’t even told Danny, so foolishly confident was I that there was nothing to worry about. I hadn’t been alert, hadn’t questioned the tip-off or why the lights had gone out at such a convenient time. Being in love had made me soft, had cast humanity in a better light than it deserved. I should have seen that my personal contentment hadn’t made the slightest difference to how shitty people could be to each other. His death was my fault.
That was the genius of the punishment. With time and distance, people can justify or soften any act. We tell ourselves a story that casts us in a better light until it replaces the memory. There was no distance here, no other story to be told. You always knew exactly what you’d done. When Lost Angeles snapped back into solidity around you, so came the knowledge that you would have to suffer your sin again, and again, and again. If there had been some way to kill myself again for good and surrender to the void, I would have taken it, as would many others. I knew people who’d tried to obliterate their bodies in such a way so they couldn’t regenerate: grenades strapped to head and torso, a long dip in an acid bath, thugs paid to hack off limbs and heads and scatter them far and wide. The city reset them anyway, delivering them back to where they died, looking as they had the day they first woke up in Lost Angeles. Nobody I knew of had ever found a way to escape the Torments. Until now.
Laureen’s card lay where it had fallen, propped up against a used syringe. I crawled over and snagged it on the second clumsy attempt. The card was printed on thick embossed paper and read in black ink,
Laureen Andrews
Chief Administrator, Lost Angeles
7 Arcadia Drive, Avici Rise
244-3876
I slipped the card into my wallet and found enough strength to get to my feet. I staggered down the hill, making for Benny’s to gulp down the nightcap I always took in an attempt to rinse the foul taste of sin from my mouth. The city was remembering itself as I wobbled along Providence. The Penitents were out already, laboring under the weight of sandwich boards and placards exhorting sinners to repent. One of them stood in the middle of the street, flailing at his bare back with a whip no doubt purchased from one of Hrag’s stores. The doors were open at the Lucky Deal. Sid stood outside, trying to plaster the hard look back on his face. The first customers of the night were trickling in, ignoring the cries of the Penitents. Male and female hookers draped the lampposts like fleshy tinsel, exposed skin glistening sickly in the sodium light. Their glassy eyes looked through me. Benny stood outside the bar, staring at the shutter pole in his hand as if he’d forgotten its purpose. The whole street, the whole town, reeked of sour fear sweat. The smell would fade soon enough as the nostrils adapted and the citizens of Lost Angeles set about erasing old sins with new.
I didn’t get what they—Laureen and her associates—were trying to achieve. They were punishing us—that was clear from the Torments. On the flip side, we were free to indulge in every passion, vice, and sin the mind could conjure up. There were plenty of shameless assholes out there who seemed able to shrug off their transgressions and gleefully wade back into the human sewer. The Torments released us at midnight precisely. By two AM, the city would be back in full swing. This was supposed to be Hell, but for some it appeared to be Heaven. And I always wondered what the Torments showed the real monsters: the serial killers, pedophiles, and rapists. For them, reliving their sins would be a daily Christmas present. Lost Angeles made everybody worse; no matter the sin that brought you here, you had to learn new dirty tricks to survive. Give Franklin a few years, and he would be selling his sweet cheeks to the sodomites out in Astghik or toting a gun for one of the Trustees.
I nudged Benny to snap him out of his torpor. He almost belted me with the pole before he realized he wasn’t under attack. I didn’t wait for him to get the shutters fully open, entering the bar and pouring myself a stiff one. The drink wet-slapped my brain, shocking me part of the way out of my daze and returning some color to my cheeks. I turned Laureen’s card over in my fingers. If I took the job, I would be making a deal with the devil, or at least one of his subordinates. Even though instinct still told me I was going to have to wade forehead-deep through a river of shit to see this one through, the payment was too big to turn down. Wounds needed time to heal, but the Torments ripped open the scab every night. If I could get some respite, maybe I could reclaim my memories of Danny as he’d been, not as I’d last seen him. I could never get him back, never wipe away what I’d done, but maybe if I remembered the good stuff, I could find as much peace as was possible to find. Maybe I could even find a way to forgive myself.
I would go see Laureen in the morning.
6
Avici Rise was a gated community—a fancy way of saying poor people weren’t welcome except to clean the houses and pools or dirty up the residents’ bodies and souls in exchange for a sliver of the money pie. The rise in question overlooked the Styx Delta, where the widening river foamed over rocks and boulders to spill into the sea, smearing the dark waters with an orange brush. The city hugged the curving shoreline, fading off into the shimmering heat haze. From up here, it was almost pretty. Shame nobody inside could enjoy the view. A twelve-foot wall topped with barbed wire ran around the perimeter, interrupted by the wrought-iron gate in front of which I now idled, looking like the sort of undesirable the barrier had been built to keep out.
The guard stayed put on the other side of the bars, giving my dented Chevy a look so hard, I was worried the fender might fall off. He was probably afraid my old jalopy would drop flakes of rust along the pristine driveway or pollute his crisp lime-green uniform with a cloud of gritty exhaust fumes. I could have afforded something swankier, but it would have been a waste of money. Unless you paid the right guys, and I didn’t, a nice car would last as long as a box of free doughnuts in a precinct break room. My Chevy looked like it could go a few hundred feet tops before coughing to a halt and belching flames from the hood, so nobody would steal it. Looks were deceptive, though. The powerful engine could propel the old hunk of steel close to one hundred, and the reinforced windscreen could stop a slug.
I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and tried to rearrange my features into a trustworthy expression. “I’m here to see Laureen.”
The guard sniffed and turned side-on so I could see his piece. Guns didn’t carry the same menace as in the world above, but a bullet to the forehead still caused inconvenience. And, depending on the patience of the gunman, he could always repeatedly shoot you dead until you got the message you weren’t welcome.
“Is Ms. Andrews expecting you?” he said, putting a great deal of emphasis on her second name to show how inappropriate he considered my use of her first.
I could have called her, but I’d chosen not to. She’d dropped in on me unexpectedly. I wanted to return the favor. “Not at this precise moment, but she told me to drop by anytime. We’re best friends, as of yesterday.”
I pulled out her business card, licked the back, and stuck it to the inside of the windshield. He leaned in close enough to eyeball the card through the gate.
“That could’ve fallen out of her bag,” he said. “You could’ve found it in the gutter.”
“Same place they found you, then. How about you call ahead and tell her I’m here, and I can let you get back to sleeping or picking your nose. In fact, you look like the kind of capable guy who can do both at once. Is that how you got the job? Told them you could multitask?”
He bit his lip and narrowed his eyes in concentration, searching for a response. When he didn’t find one, he left me hanging long enough to show he was still in charge. Security guards were the same everywhere. If this were the sea, they would be shrimp, so they took every opportunit
y to flaunt what scraps of authority they had. I found guards to be as useful as a toothbrush in a retirement home. I’d worked a lot of robberies, and half the time, the guard had taken a backhander to let the thief in. I could understand why. Put a working stiff on a stingy wage next to disgusting wealth, and he was bound to line his pockets when he got the chance; it was like a zookeeper asking the chimps to keep an eye on the banana stash. He finally took my name and disappeared into his booth. He emerged a few minutes later and grudgingly buzzed me in. The gate swung open soundlessly, and I cruised through.
Arcadia Drive spiraled inward through bungalows and mansions set in acres of bright-green grass upon which sprinklers revolved, throwing up minirainbows in the morning sun. I could almost have kidded myself that I wasn’t in Lost Angeles were it not for the Black Tower, which split the sky every time I made a circuit and faced back to the west. At first glance, Avici Rise looked like a standard millionaire’s ghetto. I’d seen plenty such places up top. When I was younger, I’d always considered money something that would, in the unlikely event I ever made enough, buy more freedom. As I grew older, I saw that money built a gilded cage. The more people amassed, the greater the fear of losing their wealth grew, and so they locked themselves away from the impoverished hordes. It never seemed like much of a life to me. I’d always preferred to live amongst the filth, noise, and vibrancy of the real world. The kids who rolled in the muck had the most fun. Things were different in Lost Angeles; I found myself envious of the peace of this slice of cut-grass suburbanity.
Avici Rise was the sole place in the city I hadn’t explored, which now struck me as weird. Rich people needed detectives as much as the poor—probably more—yet I’d never been called up there. In fact, I’d never met anybody who professed to live there—the Trustees, the richest people in town, lived in their districts. Somehow it had never occurred to me to probe the mysterious residents of this prime real estate. I wasn’t the only one. We all knew Avici Rise existed. You couldn’t really miss it. But we only talked about the place in vague terms, if it all. Avici had a way of slipping out of your mind. Now that I was through the gates, this inability to focus seemed more than weird; it seemed downright suspicious, especially since I now knew an Administrator lived here.
I’d always assumed the shadowy figures running the city resided in the tower, where we could never see them or get to them. Maybe they all lived in Avici Rise. Mind you, if the residents were demons, they didn’t look or act particularly demonic—unless the Bloody Mary I saw one purple-haired old lady drinking on her porch contained real blood from a real Mary. The only unusual element became visible as I circled inward: a miniature replica of the tower, around thirty feet high, set in a communal garden. I’d never seen another like it. Either these people so loved exclusivity that they had to have their own tower in order not to have their posh Torments mingling with those of the scumbags, or this was a sign my strengthening hunch about the community was correct.
The moat around the Black Tower served as a barrier to approach—not that anyone in their right mind wanted to get close—but you could walk right up to this one through sculptured flowerbeds teeming with red, white, and yellow roses. I parked the car by the curb and waded through the blooms. A lot of people would have hesitated, but life had taught me that opportunities to learn things you weren’t supposed to know rarely cropped up twice. Those who recognized this and acted accordingly tended to succeed. Mind you, sometimes they also found themselves drifting to the bottom of the river in concrete slippers.
As I approached, my legs grew heavy. A cold, invisible hand seemed to press against my chest. The sun faded like a light on a dimmer switch. The scent of the flowers, which had been sweet and heady a few seconds before, turned dark and cloying like a bouquet left to rot on a grave. A sick bubble of dread rose in my throat, shortening my breath, but I pushed on until I stood within touching distance. The surface was as black as it seemed from a distance. I couldn’t tell what materials had been used in its construction—there seemed to be no joins or welding marks—and I couldn’t persuade my hand to reach out and touch it.
I circled the thing, suppressing the growing conviction that I needed to scoot before I woke something nasty. Around the back, the flowers were trampled flat in a trail leading between two houses and toward the west of the compound. I saw faint markings etched into the base of the structure. They were a slightly lighter shade of black, so I had to hunker down and tilt my neck to make sense of the carving: a line drawing of a long-snouted creature with sharp teeth, reptilian eyes, a mane, forelegs that appeared to end in paws, and a fat hind section with dumpy feet. It looked nothing like a Torment. In fact, it looked ridiculous, like some mad surgeon had stitched together a crocodile, a lion, and some other random animal parts from around the lab. Something about the drawing set my skin crawling, and I thought I heard furtive movement from within the structure. I gave in to my body’s primal response and hurried off on the verge of a run. Once I’d reached a safe distance and the sun had dialed back up in brightness, the dread backed off, and my heart rate started to drop. As my mind began functioning properly again, I realized what this tower and its big brother were. They were kennels for pet monsters, nothing more. And the demons holding the leashes lived around me, here in Avici Rise.
I jumped into my car and gunned the accelerator, the roar of the engine in the quiet green space as appropriate as a belch in church. I didn’t care. These shitheads didn’t deserve peace, not when they were visiting so much suffering on the city below. I made the last two circuits around the spiral at pace, squealing the tires and attracting dirty looks. Laureen’s pad was near the center, a two-story real estate agent’s wet dream of white wood panel, gold trim, and sun-facing windows. I screeched to a halt and gave the engine one last rev before killing it. Now wasn’t the time for anger. This was the most important case I’d taken on; I needed a clear head. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped out to where Laureen was waiting for me in the driveway, dressed in a yellow summer frock that showed more shoulder than an all-you-can-eat Sunday roast.
“Ms. Murphy,” she said. “I’m surprised it took you so long to get here from the gate considering you appear to enjoy a second career as a drag racer.”
“Better than being a drag queen, like you.”
“I see your social skills haven’t improved.”
“You’re not hiring me for my social skills.”
“True. Nonetheless, I’m glad you decided to join me.”
If I’d had balls, she would have had me by them, and we both knew it. But my talkative gut informed me that she needed me more than she was letting on, despite throwing me back into the Torment’s embrace. She’d done that to make a point. I’d been nothing but rude to her from the moment we met, yet here she was, still smiling and taking my lip. I decided to push it further and see what I could find out about Lost Angeles from the horse’s mouth. I’d read all available material on the city, which was hardly extensive, and had tried to pick the brains of the Trustees I knew personally. They wouldn’t talk, and nobody else knew more than I did. Now that I had the opportunity to dig deeper, I wasn’t going to waste it.
“Is that what you always look like?” I said.
“You don’t approve of my dress sense? I thought this was a fetching outfit.”
She gave me a twirl, skirt billowing up to expose thighs so taut that they could each have held a degree in nuclear physics.
“I meant your face. Your body.”
“I see what you’re getting at. You were expecting something in scales and sharp teeth, perchance?”
“It had occurred to me.”
“Scales are so last year, plus it’s very impractical when one wishes to power dress. Nothing ladders a good stocking like an unclipped claw,” she said with a sly grin.
“You’re yanking my chain.”
“I am indeed. We aren’t monsters. Nothing is what you think it is, Ms. Murphy.”
“Yeah,
I’m beginning to get that feeling. And call me Kat. Ms. Murphy makes me sound like a brothel keeper.”
“Kat it is. Shall we proceed inside?”
She turned, closing the door on further questions. I trotted along obediently. The interior was blissfully cool, the open windows and doors channeling a light breeze through the spacious interior. I had to hand it to her; she had taste. The walls were sunflower yellow, the hand-carved furniture artfully and sparsely arranged over the white tiles. What really lit my lemon were the rows of shelves dominating the far walls. On them sat books. Hundreds of them. I could almost smell the vanilla tang of aging paper. I may have dribbled.
I was a book whore, always had been. Many of my early memories of my father were of sitting on his lap and turning the pages as he read. When my mother was home, he stuck to stories appropriate for a little girl: anthropomorphized animals and princesses longing for a prince to sweep them off their feet. When she went out drinking with her friends, he read me pulpy novels filled with tough cops and world-weary detectives, cigarettes and gun smoke, and dames with abnormally long legs. As I grew up, I expanded my reading to books of all stripes: history, philosophy, biographies, politics, whatever. Most cops and detectives passed the time on stakeouts with a hip flask, a pack of smokes, and a headful of dreams. I stuck my nose in a book. I’d even created a modified flashlight, taped around the edges so the beam narrowed down to a thin point and allowed me to plough through my latest read without anybody seeing the glow of light in the car or bush I’d set up in. No matter what or when I read, I always imagined my father’s warm breath on the back of my neck and the vibration of his chest against the small of my back.
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