“Let me guess. You’re the Lindbergh baby.”
“I’m the Devil. Lucifer went back to Heaven and stuck me with the job. I’m the new Lucifer. I just thought you might want to know who you’re hanging around with.”
She looks at me, her eyebrows slightly raised like she’s waiting for me to say something else. She cocks her head when I don’t.
“You thought I’d have a problem with you being devilish? Do you know me at all?”
“With things between us being complicated, I didn’t know.”
“Come here,” she says, and gives me a good long kiss. “There’s complicated and there’s complicated. Wanting to kiss you isn’t complicated.”
“Just everything else?”
“Just everything else.”
We walk over to the garage. When it’s clear we’re coming inside a couple of Lurkers drop their magazines and grab rubber mallets to start beating on the engine of a car that hasn’t moved in a good ten years. The Lurkers are vucaris, Russian beast men. Mostly wolves. They’re kind of like Nahuals, the local frat beasts. Like Manimal Mike’s half-assed front job these two look don’t look like much in the brains and ambition department.
“Is Mike around?”
“Who vants to know?” asks the taller of the two in a deep Boris Badenov accent.
“The Devil.”
Ivan the Terrible considers this for a minute.
“He’s busy.”
“Tell him I might be willing to do a deal where he gets his soul back.”
Ivan stares but the shorter vucari stands on tiptoe and whispers something in his ear.
“Vait here,” says Ivan.
“That’s okay. We’ll come with you.”
He weighs the rubber mallet in his hand but the little vucari says something else and Ivan backs down.
“This vay.”
“Why don’t you point to the door and we’ll make our own introductions.”
Ivan points to a grimy door with plastic “Cash Only” and “Protected by Smith & Wesson” signs tacked on the front. I open the door quietly and Candy and I go inside.
Manimal Mike is sprawled on a vinyl sofa with his back to the door. The sofa is patched with duct tape and smeared with enough grease to slick down the manes of all four presidents on Mount Rushmore. Across the room is a half-empty bottle of generic vodka on a worktable scattered with tools, gears, springs, and a sputtering half-finished mechanical python.
Mike has a little 9mm Kel-Tec in his hand and a shot glass on his head. I take Candy’s arm and pull her over by a tire rack. It’s lousy cover but it’s better than nothing.
Manimal Mike takes aim and fires at a steel plate mounted on the far wall. The bullet ricochets and hits an identical plate on the wall behind him. It ricochets again and hits the back of the sofa. This isn’t suicide. It’s Billy Flinch. A solo William Tell game where you try to shoot an apple off your head with a ricochet. I don’t think Mike is very good at it but you have to give him points for perseverance. There are at least a
