The name of the gang, Freakz and Yeakz, is actually a warning to anyone up on their Cambodian mythology. The Yeakz are Cambodian boogeymen, monsters like ogres or trolls. They show up in all kinds of tall tales and stories as shapeshifters with monstrous tusks, bulging, burning eyes, and superhuman strength. They always reminded me a little of the troll under the bridge in the old story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff that my granny used to tell me.
To join Samnang’s merry band, a Cambodian had to demonstrate that they were either pureblood yeak from the old country or still had enough nonhuman blood in their veins to shift. Vigil now found himself surrounded by eight-foot-tall, drooling, shaggy monsters. Vigil had the strangest look cross his face as he saw the gang transform. He looked … happy. It came to me then that this was a good fight for him now, a challenge. I could get that.
The guy grabbing me was getting his yeak on too. The giant monster tensed his leg muscles and launched skyward, holding me. Oh, yeah, they can fly too. I think I forgot to mention that. We landed on a building about half a block away from the fight. The yeak let me go and looked back at the rear of All-Star Lanes. His monstrous face, a cross between an Oni demon from Japanese myth and the faces of the dragons that were in Chinatown parades, looked shocked. His big-old bugging eyes obviously worked better than mine. “Oh shit,” he rumbled, “I gotta get back and help them!”
“Tell Samnang thanks,” I said to the yeak’s tattoo-covered back. He threw me a gang sign and launched off into the flushed, hazy L.A. demi-night. In a second, I lost sight of him.
I listened to the jangled murmur of traffic on the freeway—all day, all night—it was the constant rhythm of this city. Sirens punctuated by horns, the bone-vibrating thud of bass from car radios below me. L.A. was a champagne call girl with a razor blade hidden between her knuckles. I hated this fucking city, and I had missed her like a junkie misses what his veins scream for. I lit a cigarette, tipped it to the glittering sprawl, and got to work finding Caern Ankou.
EIGHT
Wilcox Avenue’s in Hollywood, right off the boulevard, where reality and dream began to get fuzzy. It’s the part of L.A. most people think of when they think of the city. It’s a little like what you see on TV, but they hose the less colorful and more fragrant street people off the sidewalks before the cameras roll.
I walked past the Sayers Club, where celebs, studio execs, reality TV stars whose names have Ks in them, music moguls, and their collective drug dealers chilled out like regular folk. I passed the lines of the faithful in their skintight, glittering vestments, their silicone stigmata, hoping to be allowed past heaven’s bouncers to get inside and become real by hanging with people who are mostly illusion.
“Hey, hey!” a voice, salami thick with a Jersey accent, called out. “Ballard! Laytham Ballard! Holy shit!” I paused and turned. A guy with greased-back hair, his chest fur spilling out of the V of his black silk shirt, sprinted up to me from the paparazzi lines behind the velvet ropes. He was clutching a camera. His sudden rush to me had gotten the attention of some of his peers.
“Do I know you?” I asked, flicking away my cigarette.
“Sonny,” he said and laughed; it sounded like an asthmatic weasel having a stroke. “Sonny Brozo? I did the paperback about the Westerland murders, Gotta Kill ’Em All? Remember your old buddy Sonny, now?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I sure do.”
There’s this game app where you run around in real time, in real space, hunting cute little animated Japanese monsters. You might have heard of it since it’s been downloaded more times than porn. A Japanese wizard, a rather nasty one, a Jaakuna hakkāu~izādo, created a computer-virus-spell that ended up on the cell phone of a twelve-year-old kid from Lansing, Michigan, named David Westerland.
David ended up possessed by the app. He used it to track down and kill twenty-seven people, sacrificing each victim to the avatar of the respective Oni, Japanese demons, that were hiding behind the adorable little animated critters on his phone. I stopped David and the other kids who had been possessed by the virus. All of them died in the process—big surprise there. A guy I know who works his magic through cell phones, a twittermancer, helped me. He tracked the app back to the psychopath who had created it before it could go out of “beta testing” and be transmitted across the world. Scumbag died too; that didn’t make any of it better.
In the aftermath of this shitstorm, it was all chalked up to the usual culprits, by the usual assholes: gaming, poor parenting, fluoride in the water, and, of course, a lack of family values. The press had a circle jerk with this sweet kid, a Boy Scout for chrissakes, murdering strangers and dismembering their bodies in an occult ritual.
My old buddy Sonny, here, had been working for some tabloid TV show at the time. He got pictures of me at the Westerlands’ home trying to say … something, anything that might comfort David’s mom and dad, that they hadn’t raised a monster, they had raised a sweet kid who got fucked over by fate, by God, whatever you wanted to call the rigged, cosmic lottery. Sonny made me the hero of his literary work, calling me an “occult hustler” in the book and tossing around some of the more well-known and nasty public stories about me. He dredged up every speck of dirt he could find to kick on the Westerlands and their boy too. David’s parents are dead souls now walking around in slowly rotting skin, waiting for time to
