'Just drive, babe. One bark means next right, two means next left, three means turn around. If I lick my balls, that means stop.'
'Jesus, Moonie.'
'I'm just fucking with you, Domino. If I growl, that means stop.'
I nodded.
'I can, though, lick my balls.'
'Too much information, Moonie.'
'Okay, babe, time to unleash the beast within.'
I nodded and went outside for a smoke. I'd seen Moon Dog shift before, and it didn't bother me, much, but he would have to ditch his clothes. It turns out a naked sixty-year-old double-amputee bum is a far more horrific sight than the shapeshifting process.
Inside the building, clothes were discarded, the wheelchair creaked, skin stretched, bones popped and hair sprouted faster than Honey's cannabis plants. It took a couple minutes.
Moon Dog nosed open the steel door of the building and padded outside. In the movies, werewolves are always pony-size monsters with six-inch fangs and hell in their eyes. Moonie looked like a wolf. He was large for a wolf- probably a buck-twenty, buck-thirty-but he was still a wolf. He'd have been a popular attraction at the zoo, but he wouldn't have sent people away screaming. He was black, with a silver ruff and muzzle, and his eyes were a shining lupine-yellow.
He looked up at me and his tongue lolled out one side of his mouth. I crouched and offered him the card, and he sniffed at it. Then he raised his head and sniffed at the air. He turned in circles a couple times and then sank down on his belly, looking at me, and whined.
'Okay, you need a ride I guess,' I said.
Moonie chuffed.
I got my car and brought it around. Moon Dog loped over and vaulted into the car. Just a girl and her wolf out for an early-morning drive.
I headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard. Moon Dog sat in the passenger seat, head out facing into the wind, tongue flapping like a wet flag. There wasn't much traffic at this time of the night, and we made good time. After about fifteen minutes, Moonie barked twice and I pulled into the left lane and stopped at the light. A young woman on a crotch-rocket wearing bright blue leathers pulled up beside us. She raised the visor on her full-face helmet.
'Nice dog,' she said.
'Thanks,' I said. Moon Dog chuffed at her.
'What's his name?'
'Moon Dog.'
'That's cute,' she said and smiled. Moonie whined. 'What kind of dog is he?'
'Mutt.'
Moon Dog swiveled his head around and looked at me. He growled.
The woman laughed. 'He doesn't like that.'
'He thinks he's a wolf.'
'Aw, is she mean to you, puppy?' the woman crooned. Moon Dog whined and lowered his head.
'Don't feel sorry for him,' I said. 'He can lick his own balls.'
The woman glared at me. 'Bitch,' she said. She smiled at Moonie, the light changed and she sped off, riding a wheelie down to the next light.
Moon Dog glowered at me and bared his teeth.
I shrugged. 'See? Women just aren't that impressed with the ball-licking.'
We got on the Harbor Freeway and drove into Watts. We exited at East Century and took a right on Compton and a left on East 108th. We drove past the graffiti-clad security doors of storefronts locked down for the night. We drove past rusted-out cars on blocks and brothers drinking forties around trashcan bonfires. I wasn't surprised we were heading deep into Papa Danwe's territory. It was late, and while the Haitian's juice was still raising hell in the streets, most of the civilians had retreated to their homes and barred the doors to wait for morning.
We were cruising through the ghetto version of a light industrial area when Moon Dog growled. I saw junk piled high beyond a line of corrugated fencing. A sign on the double chain-link gate read Luther's Salvage.
'This the place?' I asked. Moon Dog chuffed.
I parked on the street and got out of the car. I popped the trunk and fetched the Mossberg pump-action clipped in next to the tire jack. Usually, I don't bother carrying anything heavier than my forty-five, but I was behind enemy lines and the junkyard had the look of a place where a shotgun might keep you out of trouble. I pulled a handful of shells out of a tackle box and dropped them in my jacket pocket.
Then I closed the lid, perched on the trunk with the Mossberg across my knees and waited for dawn. Moon Dog hopped out of the car and sat on his haunches, staring at the junkyard.
'You don't have to go in with me, Moonie,' I said. 'That's not really what you signed on for. Anyway, once it gets light, Fred won't be much more than a corpse. I guess I can handle it.'
Moon Dog turned and looked at me, yellow eyes shining like lanterns. He chuffed and turned back to the junkyard.
Another hour went by like that. The sky brightened, the ghetto went to sleep and the sun came up.
The salvage yard wasn't due to open for another three hours and it was quiet. I spun the B amp;E spell on the padlocked gate, and Moon Dog and I slipped inside. Luther apparently wasn't much on organization, and there was no apparent pattern to the shapeless piles of rusting junk scattered around the yard. Narrow, ragged paths cut between the twisted stacks, and the rising sun painted them orange.
Moon Dog found a path he liked and padded down it, his nose low to the ground. I went after him. We followed a bend around a tangle of rusting rebar and Moon Dog stopped, crouching low and raising his nose to the air. He sniffed and growled.
I don't speak wolf, but I guessed he was telling me we weren't alone. I didn't see the vampire out there taking a sunbath, so I expected we had company of a different sort. I spun the eye in the sky spell, then closed my eyes and pushed it up over our heads about twenty feet.
Up ahead, there was a clearing in the junk piles and a low concrete building squatting in the middle of it. It had a two-tone paint scheme at one time, light blue on the bottom and white on top, but now the building was mostly the color of graffiti. They were juice tags-I recognized some of the patterns from the factory site.
Two bangers were out in front of the building with submachine guns. Two more were lying on the flat roof with AKs. I spun the eye three hundred and sixty degrees and then circled it in a perimeter around the clearing. I spotted three more covering from the junk piles with open lines of sight to the building and the clearing around it.
Even in Watts, armed thugs don't hang out in junkyards at dawn just in case someone shows up for them to shoot at. They were waiting for me. Even if I hadn't known whose turf I was on, the tags and colors would have told me they belonged to Papa Danwe. That fit-Fred knew he had to have protection, and who else could he turn to?
The real question was what I should do about it. I could probably take them all out before they knew I was there, and I could probably do it without killing anyone. On the other hand, cooling things out with Terrence was about the only productive thing I'd really accomplished since this whole thing came down. I didn't really want to fuck it up by shooting in the dark.
'Hang back, Moonie,' I said. 'I'm going to try to talk these guys out of getting hurt.'
I thumbed off the shotgun's safety, dropped it to my side and walked out into the clearing.
It turned out the bangers weren't really guarding the Vampire Fred. What they had working was more in the way of an ambush, and I walked right into it. They let me get about ten feet into the clearing and then they opened fire.
As soon as I saw the two out front raise their submachine guns, I triggered the defensive shield in the gold crucifix I wear around my neck. An invisible, spherical barrier winked into existence around me. Bullets rattled against the shield like hail against a storm window, and the shield spat raw blue energy like electrical discharges as it vaporized them.
The shield doesn't make me bulletproof forever, because I can't draw that much juice from a spell talisman. It gives me about ten seconds, and that's usually more than enough time to deal with a guy who's decided to take a
