“Then what’s the problem? I once ate some greasy scrambled eggs at a truck stop near Fresno and puked and shit myself for two days. That was six months in Hell right there.”
Lucifer picks up a phone next to his chair.
“I’ll call room service.”
LATER, MY PHONE goes off. It’s Wells texting me the address of where I’m supposed to meet him. I go out the
I DRIVE EAST along Sunset. Cut south into what the chamber of commerce calls Central City East, but the rest of the universe calls skid row. The corner of Alameda and East Sixth is so boring and anonymous it’s amazing it’s allowed on maps. Warehouses, metal fences, dusty trucks, and a handful of beat-up trees that look like they’re on parole from tree jail. I turn right on Sixth and drive until I find a vacant lot. It’s not hard. A half dozen of the Vigil’s stealth supervans are parked by the curb, looking just a little out of place. Flying saucers at a rodeo.
The lot isn’t one hundred percent vacant. There’s a small house in the middle, an overgrown wood-frame shit box that’s so swallowed up by weeds, vines, and mold that I can’t even tell the original color. It’s not much more than a shack. A leftover from the days when L.A. was open enough to have orchards, oil wells, and sheep farms. Not that this place was ever any of those.
Rich Sub Rosas aren’t like rich civilians. Civilians wear their wealth on their sleeve. They get flash cars, like the Bugatti. Twenty-thousand-dollar watches that can tell you how long it takes an electron to fart. And big beautiful mansions in the hills, like Avila, far away from God’s abandoned children, the flatlanders.
Sub Rosa wealth works on sort of the opposite idea. How secret and invisible can you make yourself, your wealth, and your power? Big-time Sub Rosa families don’t live in Westwood, Benedict Canyon, or the hills. They prefer abandoned housing projects and ugly anonymous commercial areas with strip malls or warehouses. If they’re lucky or been around long enough, they might have scored themselves an overgrown wood-frame shit box in a vacant lot on skid row. Chances are this house has looked exactly this feral and miserable for the last hundred years. Before that, it was probably a broken-down log cabin.
I park the T-bird across the street and jog over to the house. Just a few streetlights and warehouse security lights. There’s nothing else alive. Not a headlight in sight.
There’s a tarnished knocker on the door. I use it. A woman opens the door. Another marshal. She’s in the female equivalent of Wells’s men-in-black chic.
“Evening, ma’am, I’m collecting for UNICEF.”
“Stark, right? Get in here. Marshal Wells is waiting.”
“And you are?”
“No one you need to know.”
She lets me inside. The interior of the place is as rotten and decayed as the outside. She leads me into the kitchen.
“Nice. Defensiveness and moral superiority in two-point-four seconds. A new land speed record.”
“Marshal Wells said you liked to talk.”
“I’m a people person.”
“Is that before or after you cut people’s heads off?”
“I only cut off my enemies’ heads. I break my friends’ hearts.”
“So, that’s, what, zero hearts broken?”
“The night’s still young.”
She stops by the door. Where the back porch would be, if it hadn’t collapsed back when Columbus took his big cruise.
“Wells is in the study.”
“Thanks, Julie.”
“How did you know my name is Julie?”
Her heartbeat just spiked. I’m here in the middle of the night and being underpaid because of Wells. I don’t need to take it out on her. I smile, trying to look pleasant and reassuring.
“It’s nothing. Just a silly trick.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“It’d be a little stupid guessing someone’s name twice.”
Marshal Julie listens to something coming through her earpiece.
She says “Got it” into her cuff and looks at me.
“Is that your Thunderbird across the street?”
“No.”
“But you drove it here.”
“Yes.”
“You came here in a stolen vehicle?”
“Define ‘stolen.’ It’s not like I’m keeping it.”
