“Really?” I said. “
“Hardly,” he said. “Bequest from an acolyte. So you’re the interfering little cunt who decided she’d piss on my parade?”
Whoa. Quite a mouth. And from
“Why didn’t you just make Anna an offer?” I said. “You probably could have got the damn single for less than a month’s worth of property tax.”
“Not an option,” he said. “The ritual has its rules.”
Christ almighty. Always with the rules and rituals, these dickheads. Flying the flag for transgression and the dark arts, but as prissy about it as a chapter of the fucking DAR.
“Esoteric as all get out, I’m sure,” I said. “Can I give you a piece of friendly advice? Payback for all those hours of televisual pleasure? If you have a gun handy, you might want to get it now.”
“Because?”
“Because sometime in the next five or ten minutes I’m going to relieve Cody of his and blow the top of his fucking head off, and I’d hate for you to be caught at a disadvantage.”
Cody bristled at that — big fucking deal, I’ve been bristled at before — but Frankie laughed. I think he was starting to like me.
I wondered why he’d sent his boys to grab
“Your friend was apparently so moved by its safe return that she’s keeping it about her person,” Frankie said. “Which wouldn’t be a problem, but her group is currently travelling.” He looked to Cody for details.
“They got a gig in Bakersfield tonight,” Cody said.
“Bakersfield?” I said. “Seriously, the Barbies? Buck Owens must be turning over in his grave.”
Frankie ignored the sidebar. “So, no
“I’m a girl of many talents,” I said. “But singing isn’t one of them.”
“Then how lucky we are that all you’ll be required to do is die. Let’s move the party down below, shall we?”
We were on the ground floor, in case I haven’t made that clear. “Down below,” I said. “That’s quite unusual for Los Angeles.” Look at me, being all up on my building codes and shit.
“What’s unusual?” Frankie asked.
“Having a basement.”
“Oh, I don’t have a basement,” he said.
He was right. He didn’t have a basement. What he had was a cavern. I’d have made the requisite Bruce Wayne jokes, except the sight of it didn’t really inspire humour.
It was huge, for starters, like the hill beneath his house and those of his neighbours lower down on the slope was absolutely hollow. And the hollowness was new. I don’t mean man-made new — there’d been no excavation here, at least not by natural means — but alarmingly, preternaturally new, like the hill was eating itself hollow in preparation for something. The hill was being rewritten, I thought, though I’d have preferred not to.
The cavern walls weren’t of rock, but of whatever primordial clay once hardened into rock. They were pale brown, and wet. Oozing wet, like the whole thing was sweating feverishly. The floor was the same, sucking at our feet with every step. That I could handle. It was the breathing that freaked me the fuck out.
It was slow and laboured and, apart from being a hundred times as loud and coming from everywhere at once, sounded like the melancholy and heartbreaking sound of someone on their deathbed. But this wasn’t the sound of something dying. It was the sound of something being born. And it bothered me. A lot.
But not as much as it bothered Cody.
We’d descended by rope ladder from a trapdoor in Frankie’ souvenir shop — the descent being, too bad for me, textbook smart; guy with gun first, unarmed chick second, creepy old guy third — and ever since we’d got here, Cody’d evidenced increasing signs of having got himself into something that wasn’t what he thought he’d signed up for.
Yeah, well too damn bad, Gangsta.
Once his awestruck and unhappy glances at his surroundings started to occupy more of each of his last minutes on earth than his glances at me did, I figured it was time to put him out of his misery.
I couldn’t even feel smug about it, guy was so out of his comfort zone. A slight hesitation, as if I was mesmerised by one of the clay-like excrescences that bloomed from the dripping walls like attempts at imitating local flora, a misdirecting glance back behind him, and then a well-placed heel and elbow, and he was on his knees, gasping for breath, and his gun was in my unforgiving hand.
“Say goodnight, Cody,” I said, and put one through the centre of his forehead.
I was swinging back towards where I’d last seen Frankie when I heard the click of his safety and felt his barrel at the back of my neck. Cargo pants don’t look that great on guys his age, but they do have a lot of pocket space.
“Leave it with him,” Frankie said, and I dropped the.38 on Cody’s dead chest.
“Watch,” Frankie said, trying for dispassionate but failing to completely mask the fascination and excitement.
So I watched. Partly because information is power, and partly because Mom always told me it’s a bad idea to piss off a crazy old fucker with a gun.
The blood jetting out of Cody’s shattered skull was being sucked into the liquid sheen of the clay like mother’s milk into the mouth of a greedy newborn. And it was a two-way street. Cody’s flesh was invaded by the faecal brown of the mud he’d died on until, inside of a minute, he looked like something somebody’d moulded from the wet and alien earth itself.
So much for any lingering hope that this could all be explained away by sedimentary settlement.
“It accepts the offering,” Frankie said, more out there by the fucking minute. “But don’t entertain any hope that this can replace your own sacrifice. There was no gravitas here. No ceremony. The unfortunate news for you is that your death needs to be both slow and somewhat spectacular.”
Fuck me. With the exception of his charming opening gambit with the C-word back in his trophy room, everything this guy said sounded like he’d lifted it from his back catalogue of crappy scripts. Case in point, his subsequent lurid description of what I had to look forward to before the day was much older.
“I’m going to blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, Kitty, blah blah blah.” On and fucking on. Use your imagination. I assure you it’s at least as good as his.
“That how you get it up?” I said, when he was finally done. “Telling girls what you’re going to do to them?”
“No, Ms Donnelly,” he said. “I get it up watching people’s eyes turn glassy with dread as they feel all hope of escape disappear.” TV’s Frankie Metcalfe, Ladies and Gentlemen. A real fucking sweetheart. “Now, let’s move on to the central chamber.”
We moved ahead through a curving anterior walkway. Only then, within its lower ceiling and narrower walls, did I pause to wonder where the hell the light was coming from. But it was a meaningless question. I could see perfectly well. And I had no idea how or why.
Another of those misshapen flowers was growing from the weeping wall to our left. This one was vanguard minded, attempting an impression of colour, its stalk and leaves blood red, its petals an eerie and bilious yellow. Frankie’s left hand plucked it from the wall with a flourish.
“Here,” he said, shaking some of its slime from his fingers and flinging it at me. “Pretend it’s Prom Night.”
“Thanks,” I said, catching it and pretending to sniff it before holding it to my wrist like a corsage. “Every time I smell it, I’ll think of you.”
He gave me a look that told me he was smart enough to know I’d stolen the line, but not sharp enough to remember from whom — let me save you the Google; it was my fellow Irish deviant, Oscar Wilde — and then, all done with our little time-out flirtation, waved me ahead impatiently, waggling the gun like a signalling device.
“Got it,” he said. “You’re un-fucking-flappable. Now get moving, or I’ll drag you there by the short-and-
