I nod.
“Sure. I’ll tell him.”
WHEN I GET back to the hotel, I find Candy in the room and Kasabian holding forth on Terrence Malick’s Badlands.
“See, what Malick did wasn’t tell us the story of a couple of kids on a cross-country murder spree, but to tell us a dream about it. Like the whole thing is a shared fantasy in the kids’ heads and ours, which, from what I’ve heard, is pretty close to what it was like for Charlie Starkweather to kill all those people.”
She smiles up at me from the foot of the bed as I come in.
“Hey there. I’m getting Film 101 from your boss.”
“My boss?”
“That’s what he said.”
I look at Kasabian.
He says, “What do you know about accounting, insurance, inventory control, and, you know, running a video store besides watching movies all day?”
“Not much.”
“Then I’m the boss.”
I sit down next to Candy.
“You can’t argue with that logic,” she says.
“I could, but it would end in tears and divorce lawyers, and I can’t stand paperwork.”
Candy leans gently into me so our shoulders are touching.
I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to her.
“Why don’t you get us another room where we can talk? If the night manager gets weird, use my name and give him too much money. He’ll set you up.”
She bounces off the bed onto her feet and goes to the door. On her way out she blows Kasabian a kiss.
“I’ll be back for your master class on Monte Hellman.”
He beams at her as she leaves.
“Now that’s the kind of girl you shoplift beer for.”
He whizzes around on his skateboard to face me.
“Good thing you got here when you did. I was going to rock her world with some surfboard moves. She would have been mine.”
“You’re the boss and I don’t surf. You could probably have her in Mexico by now with a preacher and a cut-up fishnet stocking for a wedding veil and a donkey for the witness.”
“Badlands was probably too cerebral for a first date. I should have gone with something sexy and scary like Suspiria. Next time.”
“Sure. Next time.”
I start to say something about delusions of grandeur, but keep my mouth shut. I haven’t seen Kasabian this happy in probably ever.
I’m out of cigarettes. I reach into the nightstand and get a fresh pack of Maledictions. There aren’t too many packs left. Kasabian’s happy. He doesn’t need to know that. I light two and stick one between Kasabian’s lips.
“I need you to look up something for me in the Codex.”
“That sounds like work. Didn’t you see the sign? I’m closed for the evening.”
“You may be the boss, but I pay the beer bills a
Kasabian puffs on his cigarette and frowns. His little legs take the Malediction out of his mouth and tap ashes onto the floor.
“What do you want to know?”
“I need to know about a . . . Qlifart? Qlifuck? Screw it. Demon. This one is different. It’s confident. Maybe even smart. It does possessions, but it doesn’t automatically attack unless it feels threatened. I thought for a while it might be a Kissi, but I know them, and this doesn’t feel like their work.”
He shakes his head.
“That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a demon, it’s dumb. All demons are dumb. Which means they have an inferiority complex that makes them trigger-happy.”
“If it made sense, I wouldn’t ask you to look in the Codex.”
“Why are you dragging me into this thing? I don’t like demons. Just because you’re feeling magnanimous doesn’t mean I am.”
I sit on the end of the bed and smoke. I flick the ashes onto the carpet, too. Got to give the maid something to do when she comes in so she won’t notice the dead man on the skateboard.
“Yes, you are. Candy’s working with me on this. Do it for her. Dazzle her with your kung fu.”
