“Save it,” she said. “I don’t want you to pity me. I just want you to stop walking around like a kicked puppy.”
“Then stop kicking me,” Jack snapped. “I know your life plan didn’t include a kid, Pete. I know it didn’t include me, and I know you’re slagged off that you have to put up with either of us. I know you blame me. Fuck it,
Pete blinked, and Jack let himself imagine that for a moment, she’d wanted to deny what he was saying, but then she nodded. “Sounds good. We’re colleagues, nothing more.”
“Fantastic,” Jack agreed. He’d protect Pete until the baby came, and then he’d go his way and she’d go hers. And that would be that. No need for crying or hair-pulling on either end.
He knew he’d never believe that one, but Pete wasn’t leaving him much of a choice.
A long, low convertible, in a shade of yellow Jack would describe as “violent sunshine,” pulled up in front of them, and Pete took up her bag. “That’ll be Mayhew,” she said. “I told him to meet us here.”
“Christ,” Jack said. “If I’d’ve known he was bringing a boat, I would’ve worn a life vest.”
“Behave,” Pete muttered, moving to shake hands with the car’s driver. Mayhew was short, but not too short; fat, but not too fat; with a smile that was sincere, but only just. Completely average and utterly unremarkable. He must’ve made a hell of a cop.
“Pete, great to see you,” he said, although the words didn’t match his face, which was sweaty and pinched.
“Yes, same,” she said. “Shall we?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mayhew said. He chugged around the car and picked up Pete’s bag, noticing Jack for the first time. “Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks for coming, both of you.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jack said. He held out his rucksack until Mayhew took it. “Cheers,” Jack said, and slid into the back seat. Pete shot him the look, the one that meant he was being a cunt, but Jack ignored it.
The interior of the car smelled slightly sour, whether from Mayhew’s sweat or the plethora of fast food wrappers crushed under Jack’s boots, he didn’t care to speculate. Plush dice dangled from the rearview mirror and a small plastic hula dancer undulated her hips from the dash when Mayhew pulled away from the curb.
“So,” he said to Pete, “first time in LA?”
“For me,” Pete said. “Jack’s been.”
“Oh yeah?” Mayhew hooked a look back at him in the mirror. “You like it?”
“Not particularly,” Jack said, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Oh, sorry,” Mayhew said. “Can’t have you smoking in Lucille. The upholstery is original.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jack said, and got the look from Pete again.
“’Fraid so,” Mayhew said. “Believe me, I understand. I polished off a pack a day when I was LAPD. Quit a year ago and I’ve never felt better.”
As they drove past warehouses, used car lots, and cheap airport motels and merged onto a freeway roughly the width of the Thames, Jack felt a marked urge to reach over the seat and bang Mayhew’s head against the steering wheel.
He stabbed his fag out against the car’s door panel instead, then rubbed the sooty mark in with his finger. Small and petty, yes, but Mayhew was already up his nose and he’d barely spent ten minutes with the man. Jack bet with himself that Mayhew’s “problem” would involve teenage Satanists in store-bought robes and missing neighborhood pets.
“You named your car?” Pete said, sliding closer to Mayhew on the sofa-sized front seat. Mayhew immediately forgot about Jack’s existence.
“Sure did. This is my baby Lucille. Sixty-five LeSabre—restored her myself.” He ran his hand across the dash in the proprietary manner with which most men touch women’s thighs.
“Really,” Jack said. “You pick out the color?”
“Hey, this is LA,” Mayhew said. “Land of big tits, good teeth, and primary colors. Takes some getting used to if you’re from a place like London.”
Pete twitched but she jumped in front of the bullet again. “It take long? Fixing this thing up?”
Mayhew shrugged, an aw-shucks gesture that clearly implied yes, normally, but not when you were a special sort like him. “A while. Supposed to do it when I retired in twenty years, but what the hell? Being a PI is a lot of waiting around, and I like to keep busy.”
Jack slid down on Lucille’s slippery plastic seat and shut his eyes. Mayhew was trying to do the civilized equivalent of pissing a circle—his car, his city, his eyes all over Pete’s tits. Jack wished him good luck with the last one. Pete didn’t need white knighting—Mayhew would find out soon enough, with a knee in his balls if he was especially unlucky.
As to LA, he could have it. The sun penetrated Jack’s eyelids and made his head throb, and he threw his arm up as Lucille crested a rise and revealed a glimpse of the downtown before Mayhew veered off onto another freeway. Who needed a concrete-covered, haze-choked hellhole full of women with silicone sacks in their chests and men like Mayhew, whose biggest concern was his motor and getting into a dick-measuring contest with everyone he met?
“You’ll need a car,” Mayhew said to Pete. “I set it up with a friend of mine who runs a garage—you can drive American-style, right?”
“I’ll manage,” Pete said.
“Great,” Mayhew said. “We’ll go back to my office and talk business. I really am glad you’re here.”
There it was, the hook. Jack had no doubt that Mayhew’s real reason for gladness was that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t immediately peel his skin off his fat form and put it on toast. He’d actually gotten Pete to show up and proven himself a useful underling. Jack could put up with the git just as long as it took to see the big picture, the puppeteer rather than the puppet, and then he was going to give Mayhew a real reason to be glad for American dentistry.
He dozed on the drive, the rank air doing little to replace his need for a fag. When they finally bumped to a stop, he realized he’d been somewhere else, the freeway turning into a long, black road made of smooth obsidian, and the smog cloud becoming the ashes of things burnt alive, drifting down to catch in his hair and eyelashes like charnel snow.
Jack didn’t have many memories of his time in Hell. When the Morrigan had led him back from the Bleak Gates, she’d smoothed his mind over, picked out with her beak all of the time that Jack had lost when he went down to the Pit, and left plain gray nothing in its place.
He’d seen a few flashes in dreams, which was par for the course for a psychic who couldn’t shut out the feed on his best days. But nothing concrete. No flashbacks, no coming awake and screaming.
He still didn’t know the extent of what the Morrigan had done to him, besides the markings. He felt better than he had before he went to the Pit, but that wasn’t saying much. He’d been sick, using whiskey as a food group, and battered by his sight. It wasn’t as if he could suddenly lift cars and run five kilometers without hacking.
Pete stuck her head in his window. “You coming?”
Jack shook off the dream. That was what you did with dreams—his weren’t prophetic, as Pete’s had a tendency to be, and they certainly weren’t worth remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “Right along the yellow brick road.”
CHAPTER 4
Mayhew lived in Venice, so named by its city fathers in a startling fit of originality because Venice, California, also had canals. “You know, just like Italian Venice. Was a big tourist spot in the fifties.”
Jack could hear the swish of the ocean when he stepped out of the car, and the air was sticky with salt and carbon monoxide. Mayhew had parked in an alley, and he let them in a side door. “One of the guys on the force owned this pad and let it go for a song,” he said, flicking a light to life. “Got the hell out of the city, moved to Montana. I guess he’s a sheriff now or something.” Mayhew shrugged. “Miserable fucking existence, if you ask me, but some people can’t hack LA.”
