Sandman Slim (Sandman Slim #1)

Sandman Slim (Sandman Slim #1) Page 12

The guys are talking and laughing, passing a joint back and forth. Not a care in the world. I hate the idea of carjacking for one simple reason. It's a dog crime. A crime for morons and any little shitsack with the fifty bucks to buy a Saturday-night special. Still, I want the Escalade and I want it now. I look back at Max Overdrive, but Allegra's inside and I can't see her. As I turn back to the van, there's a glint from the rear driver's side window that I missed before. The glass is gone. The window is broken. The van is stolen. Hallelujah. I'm not carjacking. I'm regifting.

I go for the passenger first. He's so ripped that when I grab him, he's in full rag-doll mode, loose and relaxed. That's a good way to hit the ground if you're ever thrown-or pulled-from a vehicle. Only I toss him about ten or fifteen feet farther than I meant to. I've been boxing giant fire-breathing jellyfish and Hellions with skin like titanium. What do I know about fighting humans?

The driver is a pimply scarecrow with a Mohawk and a dirty Sex Pistols T-shirt ripped just so. He looks like a twelve-year-old dressed up like Sid Vicious for Halloween. When his buddy goes flying out of the van, his buzzed brain finally realizes that something is happening. He starts fumbling in his waistband for his gun, but his pothead reflexes aren't helping him. He might as well be wearing oven mitts. But I'd rather not get shot again if he manages to get all his digits working.

While he fumbles I grab the top of the door frame, kick off the edge of passenger door, and slide across the Escalade's roof, landing cat quiet on the driver's side. Speed Racer finally has the gun out, cocked and pointed at exactly where I'm not anymore. I lean in the open window, grab him by the neck, and haul him out, pinning his gun arm to his body. When he struggles, I bounce his head off the side of the van. Just once. Dazed and docile, it's easy to flip him over my shoulder, carry him around the van, and dump him near his friend. His gun I toss down a sewer grate.

Back at Max Overdrive, Allegra is on her feet, shaky as a newborn calf. I scoop her up in both arms, carry her to the Escalade, open the back, and lay her out flat.

"No hospitals," she says.

"I know."

"Where are we going?"

"For ice cream. What's your favorite flavor?"

"Fuck you."

"That's my favorite, too."

The two guys I tossed out of the van weren't complete idiots after all. They did a decent job of bypassing the Escalade's alarm and cutting into the van's keyless ignition. I twist a couple of exposed wires together and the Escalade purrs to life. Stepping on the accelerator, I cut the van across two lanes of traffic, twist the wheel, and aim the Escalade down Hollywood to where it crosses Sunset.

This isn't a situation where red lights, yellow lights, or anything that slows us down are acceptable. But what kind of a spell do you use to change the timing on traffic lights? If I wasn't such a freak-show attraction, I'd know something like that. Or I'd be able to fake it the way I faked my way through magic in the old days. All I can think of right now is a Hellion controlling spell, something I'd throw at an opponent in the arena to take control of their body and keep them from murdering me for a little while longer.

As the light turns yellow at the intersection ahead, I bark out the spell. Literally bark. High Hellion is mostly a bunch of low, guttural verbs and nouns strung together with growling adjective gristle. It sounds like a wolf with throat cancer.

I get the spell out as the light goes from yellow to red. As I finish the spell, it flips back to yellow. Then the light explodes, the housing suddenly white-hot shrapnel that hits the Escalade's roof like metal hailstones. The light's support pole is pretty much gone. So are the overhead lines that send juice to electric buses below.

Sorry, commuters. Tell your boss to fuck off tomorrow. Some terrorist asshole blew up all your vital crosswalk signals.

The second and third lights explode, too. The fourth just kind of sizzles, spits sparks, and goes out. I don't even look after that. It's flare guns and Roman candles all the way down to Sunset.

THE ADDRESS CANDY gave me is in a strip mall that hadn't been there before I went Downtown. I pull the Escalade into the parking lot and help Allegra out of the back. She insists on walking on her own, which I choose to see as a good sign. Doc Kinski's office is tucked between a fried-chicken franchise and a nail salon with signs in Vietnamese and dyslexic English. I double-check the address. It checks out.

The office is a blank storefront with blinds covering all the windows and the words EXISTENTIAL HEALING on the door in gold peel-and-stick letters. I try the door, but it's locked. I start pounding and the door swings open almost immediately. A tiny shaggy-haired brunette in tattered black jeans and Chuck Taylors stands there.

"Candy?"

"Stark?"

From the way she talked on the phone, I was expecting a big blond Judy Holliday type, not Joan Jett's little sister.

"Bring her inside. Doc is waiting."

The inside of the clinic is as bare as the outside. A couple of junkyard desks, with a not very new-looking laptop on top of one. A file cabinet covered in real estate stickers, Half a dozen metal folding chairs and a pile of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitans, probably pulled from the Dumpster behind the nail salon.

This is the office of Vidocq's angel of mercy?

I'm seriously thinking about taking Allegra out of here and to a real hospital, no matter what I promised her. Then Kinski walks out of his exam room.

"What are you waiting for? Get the girl in here," he tells me. I do.

Kinski is as impressive as his office isn't. He's tall. A little taller than me. Like me, he'd been a lanky boy, but the years have added a few pounds to his middle and etched lines like a desert riverbed around his eyes. But he's still handsome. You can tell that when he was young he'd been the kind of good-looking that made girls forget about their boyfriends for the night and made guys want to punch him in the face on principle.

Allegra is too wobbly to walk anymore. I pick her up, follow Kinski into the next room, and set her down on a padded exam table.

He touches her head and cheeks. Takes her pulse at her wrist and her neck and moves each lid back for a look at her eyes. Allegra squirms on the table and tries to push him away.

"You hurting?" he asks.

"Yeah. My head."

"Anywhere else?"

Allegra shakes her head.

"Okay. I want you to try and relax. Just breathe in and out real deeply. Can you do that?"

She nods, takes in long breaths, and lets them out slowly. Kinski puts one hand lightly on her forehead and keeps it there. He pats himself down and finds something like a piece of blackened jerky from his breast pocket.

"Chew on this," he says, putting the jerky between her lips.

"What is it?" she asks.

"You'll like it. It's dried fruit. Tastes good."

She chews and he keeps his hand on her, staring down like he's listening for something. I hear it, too. Her breathing and heartbeat slow abruptly. Her body relaxes. Kinski shoots me a quick glance like he knows that I can hear it, too.

"She's out," he says to Candy, and turns back to me. "What really happened to her?"

"I don't know exactly. I came back and the place was broken into. I think by a guy named Parker. He's another magician. Some magic things were missing."

"What kind of things?"

"A guy. Part of a guy, really."

"Part of a guy. Okay. Are you fooling around with stuff over there that's going to make this girl's condition more complicated? Any potions or herbs related to necromancy? Are you playing with any resurrection rituals?"

"Never."

"Okay. But you come in here with an injured girl and tell me that some magic part of a guy that you don't want to talk about gets stolen and I start thinking zombies. And that is some serious stuff."

"It's nothing like that. The guy wasn't dead. I was real careful about that."

"So careful this girl's skull is cracked."

"Can you fix her?"

"I've fixed worse." He looks over at Candy. "You want to get me the things, honey? I want to make sure this girl is all the way dozing before I take my hand off."

"How many do you want?"

"I think six should do it."

Candy gets six fist-size objects from an old medical cabinet. Each of the objects is wrapped in dark purple silk. She sets them on the exam table next to Allegra and unwraps them. They're six shiny pieces of some milky-white stone.

Kinski lets go of Allegra, takes two of the stones, and places them on each side of her head. Candy places others over her heart and in her hands. Kinski puts the last piece, the smallest and nearly flat, between Allegra's teeth.

He gets old, unglazed clay jars from under the table, pours several oils onto his hands, rubs them together to mix them, then smears the dark potion on Allegra's face. The oils smell like jasmine and wet pavement after a rain.

Candy gives Kinksi a carved wooden stylus and he draws symbols, strange letters, and runes into the oil. I lean in to get a better look at the markings. He's drawing a spell on her, but I don't know what kind. I've never seen one like it before. I recognize the characters surrounding the central circle and seven-pointed star, however. The symbols are an old angelic script. Enochian. Azazel taught me some spells from ancient books written in that script. Kinski can't be a Hellion because only Lucifer can walk out of Hell. But Hellions have plenty of human lapdogs. Lurker groupies and satanic assholes. Kinski can't be one, though. Vidocq would know and he'd never send me to the guy. Still. I slip my hand under my coat and touch Azazel's knife.

Kinski sets down the stylus. He's finished the spell and the stones around Allegra begin to glow. They shine right through her. I can see the outline of her veins and arteries, muscles and bones, and her beating heart. Kinski is chanting quietly. I try to listen to the words, but all I want to do is cover my eyes. I put one arm over my face and get hold of the knife with my other hand.

I can feel someone pressing against me from behind. It's Candy. She leans against me and lightly touches my arm, the one holding the knife.

"It's okay," she whispers. "Relax. Everything's going to be okay."

Her voice is like honey and heroin. Sweet and sleepy. My shoulders unknot. My legs get weak. My whole body relaxes. But I don't let go of the knife.

The stones' light fades suddenly. The room is back to normal. I turn, expecting to see Candy behind me, but she's over by the table, helping Kinski wrap the stones in silk and put them back in the cabinet. He pushes up each of Allegra's eyelids and takes her pulse like a regular doctor.

"She's going to need to rest awhile before she can be moved. Candy, can you stay with her? I want to speak to this young man."

"Sure, hon."

I follow Kinski out through the waiting room to the parking lot.

"You have any cigarettes? I'm out," he says.

I hold out the pack for him to take one. Light it for him. He looks older and more tired under the streetlights.

"So, you're Eugene's fair-haired boy."

"And you're his Florence Nightingale. Nice light show back there."

"It gets the job done."

"Nice office, too. Did you get that stuff at one garage sale or did you shop around?"

"Eugene said you had a mouth on you."

"Look, thanks for what you did back there, but what do you want? I'm expecting to see a hospital or a clinic and I walk into a peepshow booth full of stuff that fell off a garbage truck."

He chuckles. "Yeah, sometimes I think we might take the humble-healer thing too far."

"Is Allegra going to be all right?"

"She'll be fine. Her head's probably going to hurt for a day or two. It's not the injury, it's just something that happens to civilians when you blast their bones back together like that."

"It's my fault she's hurt."

"I assumed that. Eugene said there were some ugly people looking for you. Guess they found her instead."

"I'm going to find them. And no one's going to blast their bones back together."

"You take care of that girl in there first. You might be hell on two legs, but she needs taking care of. Throw a sheltering spell on her. Get Eugene to give her some protection charms."

"I should have done that when I first moved into the store."

"You fucked up. So fix it. Here."

He pulls a pencil-size piece of lead from his side pocket and puts it in my hand.

"Now you don't have any excuse. You can draw the circle and do any spell you want."

"I haven't done that kind of magic in a long time."

"What kind of magic have you been doing?"

"Killing things, mostly."

"That'll make you friends. Try a shielding spell later. Maybe having the lead in your hand will trigger some muscle memory and it'll come back to you. If you can't make it work, call me. I'll talk you through it."

"Okay."

"You should call me anyway. Let me take those bullets out of you. Five, isn't it? Maybe they won't kill you, but they can still cause an infection."

"If they do, you can just fix me with your rocks."

"Rocks? Oh. Those. No. Those are glass."

"I've never even heard of glass like that."

"That doesn't surprise me. Those are some of the rarest objects in existence. I don't suppose you'd let me take those slugs out tonight?"

"No thanks. Maybe when I'm done."