Inside, the Men’s Room was packed to the lap-dance couches with civilians. I hadn’t seen so many people in the club since a celebrity porn star wiggled through on a special appearance tour. I’d been worried about the mental state of our wards based on what Chavez had said. The juice we were pumping into the club would have been enough to give them a case of the crazies, even without a zombie apocalypse to adjust to. So I was surprised when I walked in the front door and found a fairly respectable party going on.
Chavez had both bars humming like an assembly line. I glanced up at the ticker running over the main bar and quickly saw why-it was advertising free drinks all night. The sound system was cranked up to Armageddon and the stages were crowded ass-to-elbow with naked dancers. Judging by the standards of physical fitness and dancing prowess on display, none of them were professionals.
Adan pushed through the crowd and took my elbow. “You were supposed to gate me back in,” he said, leaning in and shouting in my ear.
“Didn’t really have the time,” I said. “Where are the boys?”
Adan blushed. “I took them back to the dressing room. Some of the girls are looking after them.”
I drew my head back and looked at him. “Are you shy, Adan? They’re just dancers. They’re working their way through college.”
“I’m not shy,” he said. “It’s just…not a lot of experience with human women. It’s different, somehow.”
“Just remember, the club is a lot like the Seelie Court. You got to be able to dance, lie and fight. Well, most of the girls can’t fight for shit.”
Adan grinned. “Let’s go see Chavez.” We walked to the back of the club and up the stairs to the office. Chavez had Rashan’s parchment map of Greater Los Angeles spread out on the desk, the corners weighted down with cell phones. Two dancers stood beside him holding cells in both hands, ready to speed dial or slap a phone against his ear if he got an important call.
“There’s got to be a better way, Chavez,” I said. “You could get one of those headsets. This is embarrassing- it’s like a guy buys a car and then hitches it to his plow horse. No offense, ladies.”
“Chola,” he said, glancing up at me, “we got a major concentration of Zeds moving south out of downtown.”
There were red dots scattered all over the three-dimensional profile of the city superimposed on the parchment.
The clump of dots at Santa Fe and Fourth Street was so large and densely packed it looked like Chavez had gotten a nosebleed.
I nodded at the map. “The bean-sidhe are feeding you the locations?”
“Yeah, we got ’em hooked right into the map. We’re getting updates in real time.”
“Okay, then just send some big hitters over there to clean it up. Where’s Amy Chen’s crew?”
“She’s over in Leimert Park, D. Fucking gentrification, we don’t have the juice boxes there we used to. The civilians are holed up in their churches, and Zed’s hitting them like fucking Oki Dog after last call.”
“Where are Jack and Honey?”
“With Ismail Akeem in Koreatown. The real problem is we got a Stag platoon down there.”
“Why is that a problem? Where are they?”
Chavez reached down and pulled the three-dimensional image toward him, zooming in on the intersection. There was a tiny clump of blue dots surrounded by all the red ones.
Chavez pointed to an old brick building with green freight doors. “They’re pinned down in the produce warehouse.
They were trying to pull some civilians out of the lofts across the street when Zed overran them. They lost a couple guys, but they were able to pull back in time. Lowell’s leading them and he doesn’t want to call in reinforcements.”
Looking at all the red dots surrounding his position, I couldn’t really blame him. “They can’t shoot their way out?”
“There’s less than thirty of them, chola, and at least five hundred Zeds outside.”
Guess not. “What about the sidhe?”
Chavez snorted. “Oberon is mostly staying in Hollywood and the turf you gave up in South Central. Says his people can’t hack it out in the cold. Anyway, it’s good because he’s taking care of business on his streets.”
I nodded. The fairy king had told me what I could expect. “Where’s Mr. Clean?”
“That scary motherfucker is everywhere, but he ain’t exactly checking in.”
“Okay, Adan and I can go pull the government out of the fire. How’s everything else look?”
Chavez opened his mouth to speak and then spread his arms over the map. “Hell if I know, chola. Maybe better than it was a few hours ago but still not too fucking good? It’s like you said-it’s a numbers game and I always copied off you in math class.”
“Fuck that, Chavez, we both copied off your girlfriend.”
“Oh, yeah.” His eyes drifted away and a little smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What was her name, chola?”
“Their name was Maria.”
“That’s right. Las Tres Marias. They were good at math.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know if we’re winning.”
“I’m telling you I don’t even know when I’ll know. When there’s no more red dots on the map, I guess. It goes like this for a while and you think you’re getting ahead of it, and then a Zed pack gets inside an apartment building or a hotel or something, and if we don’t get there fast enough the map starts lighting up again.”
“We’re doing everything we can, Domino,” Adan said. “It’ll have to be enough.”
“Or it won’t,” I said.
“It will. Are you ready to go?”
“Give me a few minutes. Mr. Clean makes me nervous and I won’t have a chance to check on him if I don’t do it now.”
Adan nodded. “I’ll go look in on the kids.”
A little tinge of jealousy snuck up on me from behind and squeezed my cheeks. I turned away, walking over to the leather couch and collapsing on the soft cushions. “You need some singles?” I said, digging in the front pocket of my jeans. Adan stared at me blankly. “For the dancers…you put a dollar in their…never mind, country boy.”
“I’m not going for a dance, Domino,” Adan said.
Chavez looked back and forth between us, grinning. “It’s a strip club, chola. It doesn’t cost anything to look.”
“Fuck you, Chavez. Go, Adan.” I waved him away and closed my eyes. Sarcasm and snark can be deadly weapons, but when they misfire they can really make you look like a clown-the goofy variety, not the scary ones. I didn’t even care if Adan wanted to take another peek at the dressing room. I might have worried about him if he didn’t. Why did I have to say something? Why couldn’t I have said something that was actually funny? Why did fucking Chavez have to hear it?
I took a deep breath and beat the moment of schoolgirl awkwardness back into the closet. Then I conjured an image of Mr. Clean in my mind, tapped the abundant juice pulsing through the club and spun my peekaboo spell. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” I said.
At first I thought my spell had failed. The image that sprang up behind my closed eyelids was a gray, color- streaked frenzy of motion-blurred chaos. Then the image froze, instantly, and I found myself looking down at an expansive pile of headless zombies. A massive scimitar of silvered steel extended into my view and dripped crimson from the razor-sharp edge.
“Get out of my head,” said Mr. Clean. “You know I hate that.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, technically, you don’t really have a head. You’re a spirit.”
“I do have a head, as I am at present manifest in the physical world, and indeed you demonstrate that my head possesses within it far more productive material than does yours.”
“That was a hell of a sentence, Mr. Clean. You might need to diagram that motherfucker for me.”
The jinn’s sigh murmured in my mind. “What do you want, Dominica? As you can see, I’m busy. I was about to set upon a strip mall where the dead are, as we speak, causing great distress to the locals.”
“Well, I’ll let you set upon it in a second. Seriously, what’s with all the verbosity? Are you feeling okay?”
