Devil Said Bang

“They’ll be able to find his next of kin too,” says Traven.

“Right. That too. You can’t help being a good guy, can you?”

“I suppose not.”

“Good. Someone needs to be.”

While the three of them get Carlos into Traven’s car, I go to the dead hit man. Rinko’s carnivore tendencies have worked in our favor. She’s gobbled up enough of the guy’s blood that there’s hardly any left on the floor. That means the cops won’t be looking for two bodies and Carlos won’t have to explain why he had a bunch of James Bond villains in his bar.

I carry the dead man into the bathroom and drop him on the dirty tile. He doesn’t have any pockets, so I get out the black blade and slice off his shirt. No dog tags, gang burns, or tattoos. I pull off his gloves and find something even more interesting. He has no fingerprints. His fingertips are smooth as the Venus de Milo’s ass. Only hoodoo could take them off that cleanly. I check behind his ears and the inside of his arms and there it is. Barely visible. I probably would have missed it without the Lucifer eyes. It’s a faint laser brand, and like his fingerprints, it’s been removed using magic.

Candy comes in.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

“A mark that’s rare and even rarer on dead men.”

“What is it?”

“Those shit sacks were Sub Rosa. A Sub Rosa SWAT team. I’m in town a day and my own people try to kill me.”

“Lucky for you you went through the floor.”

“That was lucky, wasn’t it? I’m not usually that lucky.”

I go to the hole and look inside. It’s a pit maybe ten feet deep. The dirt around the edge is soft and fresh. It hasn’t been here long. Almost like someone dug it right under my feet.

“What are you going to do now?” asks Candy.

“Me? I’m going to see a soon-to-be-dead man and tell him he missed.”

“Cool. I’ll drop Rinko off and we can go.”

“No. Take her home. Give her the potion and keep an eye on her. The last thing I want is her hurt or strung out because of me.”

“You bastard. You don’t want me to go with you.”

“Hell yes I don’t want you to go. If I fuck this up, I’m counting on you and Vidocq to bust me out of whatever dungeon he throws me in.”

“Who?”

“The Augur.”

“Oh hell.”

The Sub Rosa love anonymity more than candy and puppies. If they’re going to hit someone, they’ll do it with poison so it looks like a heart attack or hoodoo so it looks like the luckless slob slips on a plutonium banana peel. There’s only one person who can drop the cloak-and-dagger policy for a blanket shoot-on-sight order and that’s Saragossa Blackburn. The Augur. The high exalted godfather of the California Sub Rosa.

In grand Sub Rosa tradition, Blackburn’s mansion looks like a pathetic wreck. In this case, an abandoned residency