Devil's Business

“Oi!” he shouted, and Sal shut off the sander, raising his goggles.

“Hey,” he said. “You Benji’s buddy?”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Jack said. Sal grinned. His teeth were even and startlingly white, considering how ugly the rest of his face was. Sal looked as if his features had been dumped into a sack, and then his maker had slammed the sack sharply against a cement wall a few times before letting things settle. His nose was a monument to how not to take a punch, and his cheekbones were uneven. A slick black pompadour, dented by the band of his goggles, topped off the look and added a touch of absurdity.

“Benji doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal skills,” Sal said. “Probably why he’s shit broke most of the time.” He winked at Pete. “Only giving you the car because he did me a favor a few months back. Some fuck rented one of my gals and returned her with the grill and bumper banged all to hell. Come to find out, asshole was in a hit and run out on Hollywood Boulevard, put some wannabe actress slash hooker in the hospital, all kinds of crap. I could’ve been liable.”

“Sounds like he’s a veritable superhero,” Pete said.

Sal’s grin widened until it was practically pornographic. “Love your accent, doll.” The grin abruptly ceased. “You do know what side of the road we drive on in the USA, right?”

“I’ll manage, although being a woman, the very idea of a combustion-operated vehicle frightens and confuses me,” Pete said. Sal laughed, and then coughed, and then pulled a Marlboro from a pack and lit it.

Jack took it out of his mouth. “Not in front of the lady,” he said. Sal sized him up for a second, and Jack stared right back. Sal considered for a minute longer, then shrugged.

“Sorry. Anyway, she’s out back.”

He led them down a narrow hall lit by a single bulb, and back into the hard-hitting sun, which now gleamed on a host of finned, chromed, detailed beasts that looked like nothing so much as a flight of especially decorative UFOs.

“Wow,” Pete said. Jack had to admit, the collection was impressive. Cherry red, powder blue, wasp yellow, the cars were all perfect, and all different. He recognized a few that aped famous sorts from films—James Bond’s Aston Martin, Steve McQueen’s Mustang, and the white Challenger from Vanishing Point, which was one of his friend Lawrence’s favorite films.

“I was going to sling you into whatever I didn’t have rented out today,” Sal said. “Paramount is eating up most of the fleet for this period movie they’re shooting over by the boardwalk. But you two need something special.” He considered, tapping one sausage finger against his troll jaw. His hands could have easily palmed Jack’s head, and Jack was glad he hadn’t pressed the cigarette issue. Too early in the day to get his face broken. You needed to at least have lunch and a proper drink first.

Sal led them between the rows until he came to the far back corner of the lot. “This one’s my baby,” he said. “Great gal, she’ll do whatever you need her to do. She’s famous, too—she was in Christine.”

“Great,” Jack said to Pete. “Fucking demon car to find a nonexistent demon spree killer.” That sounded about right.

Sal handed Pete a keyring with a grinning Dia de Los Muertos skull for a fob. “Be nice to her, and she’ll be nice to you,” he told Pete.

Jack looked at the crimson Plymouth Fury. “Fuck me,” he muttered, sliding into the leather bench seat.

Pete took it slowly until they were headed away from the beach. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “Handles nicely. It’s not the Mini Cooper but it’ll do.” Jack saw the huge grin on her face, and even though the windows were open and the LA air made him even more short of breath than inhaling an actual lungful of smoke, he had to return it.

“So, what’s your mad plan?” he said.

“Mayhew’s old partner from the LAPD agreed to meet with me and show me the crime scene,” Pete said. Jack whistled.

“How’d you manage that?”

“I think it’s my accent,” Pete said. “People around here listen to it and practically fall over their own feet.”

“I don’t think it’s just your accent,” Jack told her. Pete stopped smiling.

“You have anything to add? Anything you thought of?”

“I think this is all bullshit and that there’s nothing spooky going on,” Jack said. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes against the sun. “I’m just along for the ride, luv. Go where you will.”

CHAPTER 7

The hot wind was back, reaching right down his throat and clawing away all the good air. Replacing it bit by bit with tinders and ash. What he’d taken to be the howling of the air was in fact screams, his own and others. Screams as the vast plain before them shifted and changed, the red sands shifting and forming faces, which stared at him with lidless eyes before vanishing under the next gust.

He tried to shut his eyes and shut out the grit, close his mouth and gulp down a breath, but his eyes and lips were pinned back, fine hooks through his flesh. His blood turned to crystal the moment it hit the air, and all he could do was scream until he suffocated.

This was the first part of his time in Hell, the torture before the demon who’d pulled him into the Pit got down to the real business.

He was dead, and in Hell, and never going free.

“Jack.” Something poked him hard in his biceps. “I swear, you could sleep through a missile raid,” Pete muttered. The Fury sat at the foot of a driveway that snaked up a landscaped hill and ended at a small imitation castle.

“We here?” Jack stretched and consciously did not run his hands over his face. His old face, needing a shave, broken bottle–induced scar down his cheek, no flayed flesh or flowing blood.

“No, I liked the view and thought I’d sit a while.” Pete withered him with a glance and got out, slamming the door. Jack took his time.

If he was starting to remember Hell, that would just be one more fuck you from the Morrigan. One more bit of shit to heap onto his psyche. Well, he already had a mountain of it. What were a few more bad dreams?

That’s all they were. Dreams or, at the worst, faded memories he couldn’t be sure were ever real, or had happened at all.

Pete had made it halfway up the drive, and he followed. The house was, up close, even more of a horror. They were up in the hills now, looking down at the bowl of smog shot through with the tops of skyscrapers populating downtown LA. Plaster gargoyles glared down at Jack from every available flat surface, and the door had been made to look like the entrance to a particularly upscale sex dungeon. The knocker was a demon head, and you grabbed the tongue to shove the door to and fro.

A flash black car, the kind favored by plainclothes policemen, was parked in the circle drive, nose pointing toward the hillside. The demon door opened, and the selfsame policeman stepped out. His suit was cheap and his eyes were hard as the rock that made up the facade of the fake Gothic mansion.

“Ms. Caldecott?” he said.

“One and the same,” Pete told him, accepting his handshake.

“Detective Shavers,” he said. “Ben’s partner. Well. Used to be.”

He ignored Jack, and Jack mentally subtracted good detective from his mental checklist of Shavers. If he were a copper, he’d be all over shifty gits like himself.

“So Ben’s told you about his pet serial killer theory?” Shavers asked.

“He certainly has,” Pete said. “With visual aids and everything.”

Shavers flinched. “Sorry about that. You know, I don’t normally allow civilians to just wander around an active crime scene, but I want to make something clear to you, Ms. Caldecott.” He stood aside and gestured them inside.