Nico had picked me up at my apartment after we caught the call at around three. My partner looked pissed, but then he usually did. Nico Flores was half-Cuban, half-Mexican, and all badass. He was thirty-eight, gaunt, with thinning black hair he kept slicked straight back. Ever-widening gaps of scalp showing through the combed-back hair often reminded me of rows in a garden. Nico had a mustache that was Magnum P.I. meets Ron Jeremy. He wore a rumpled, Hawaiian shirt that was so bright it could keep you from getting shot in the woods by hunters. Around his neck were several short beaded necklaces, Ilekes, Santeria charms of protection and power made from different colored eleke beads, to represent different Orisha. He had a cigarette dangling at the corner of his dour mouth. I knew how much Nico hated working these late night cases now that Doris was so far along. In spite of his often public and vocal bitching about his family, I knew how much he cherished them, and that he was with the Nightwise in large part because he wanted to keep the monsters of the world away from his beloved wife, little girls, and soon-to-be-born baby boy. This close to the birth, he wanted to be there for his wife and the girls, but most of the things the order needed us for only came out at night. I had offered to go out on the call alone when he picked me up, but he had just grunted. “Get the hell in the car,” he said, and that was pretty much that when it came to Nico.
As we were leaving the city, headed out to the 111, Nico began to tell me about the girl. “Imperial County sheriff’s department found her a little after two,” he said. He pulled out a pack of unfiltered Chesterfields, lit one up, and offered them to me.
“How long you going to keep doing that?” I said. “I don’t smoke anymore, okay?” Nico laughed and put them away.
“Right, right,” he said. “You fucking jog now, right?”
I shook my head as he laughed again.
“I run. Those things are going to kill you, man,” I said.
“When Charles Bronson fucking quits, I’ll quit,” Nico said, invoking his patron saint. “Okay, so this girl, she’s a Jane Doe at this point. Basket Cayce gave the Maven the tip that the death was our kind of case.” “Basket Cayce” was a very powerful divinator, a homeless man who wandered the streets of L.A. living off garbage and handouts. He had foreseen otherworldly threats to the world that no one else would have ever seen coming, and he had saved the world more times than you could count. The prevailing theory was that his mind was a fulcrum point, a prism upon which countless alternate realities balanced and tipped. He was hopelessly insane from living with that, but at his core was a decent, selfless person who fought the madness to help the Nightwise. I saw him as a noble figure. Nico pitied him and had told me he wondered why the poor, suffering bastard hadn’t offed himself a long time ago. Nico saw the world in such dark tones, it often worried me, but I knew the man under all that scar tissue, and he was a good man, an honorable man, one of the best I’d ever known.
“Your girlfriend wants us to check out the crime scene,” Nico continued. “It’s a section of Bombay Beach, hard as hell to get to, apparently.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call the Maven that,” I said. “It’s disrespectful.” Nico laughed. It was a rare, raucous sound, but it was infectious. “You jerk,” I added.
“Hey, she practically creamed herself when you agreed to join the order,” he said, checking the notes he’d taken as to the exact location of the section of beach. He reached back behind the seat and pulled out a large ADC map book and dropped it in my lap. I clicked on the dome light and flipped pages. “All the rumors and shit about you, kid.” Nico raised his voice to a falsetto in a feeble attempt to sound like the Maven. “Ballard raised the dead, Ballard saved a family from the Goatman of Beltsville, Ballard sealed the gate to Hell in the house of four hundred demons in Iowa … Ballard actually made me feel sensation below my waist for the first time since 1963…” He guffawed.
“Watch your mouth,” I said. “The Maven’s a great lady and a hell of a wizard. She hear you saying any of that, and she’s liable to spot-weld your mouth shut. You know most of that stuff about me is crap anyway.” I told Nico to slow and pull off the road about three hundred yards up. Nico grunted an affirmative. I clicked off the overhead light and put the map book away.
The Maven was named Gida Templeton, and she was one of the most powerful mages in the world. She commanded the resources and agents of the Order of Nightwise for the entire western seaboard of the U.S. She had met me during some bad business in San Francisco back in 1982 and had finally convinced me to join the order last year. She was a beautiful woman, and I had fantasized about being with her many times since I met her, but I couldn’t imagine that ever happening. She was completely out of my league and about twenty years my senior.
“Laytham,” he said, “at the end of the day, the Maven is just like the rest of us, a human being. She gets paid just like we do, by the Builders, to do a job. Wash away all the fancy titles and reputation and stories, and she’s
