A little digging online by Grinner bore out that Glide was pretty successful and a fairly mainstream twenty-first-century pornographer. He owned numerous pay-to-view porn websites, each catering to a different fantasy or genre, but nothing too over the edge, as well as a legion of webcam performer sites. He owned sex clubs in Nevada and as far away as New Hampshire, a smattering of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, mostly with partners. Each adult enterprise had premium subscription content, pay-per-view events, and even fucking T-shirts and mugs you could buy. Glide paid his taxes and gave a living wage to his employees too.
“This guy gives smut peddlers a bad name,” I said as Grinner had given us an overview of his holdings.
“Hey, adult entertainment is big business,” Grinner said. “Legit business; it’s everywhere, and the stuff Glide finances is very, very mainstream. No mob connections I could find. Guy looks like he was born well-off, attended Harvard, picked up his MBA, and decided he wanted to make his own fortune off of people screwing. He’s done very well for himself with that.”
“Ah, the American Dream,” Anna said from a corner of the office, curled up with Dragon in a chair they were sharing.
“Ab-so-fuckin’-lutely.” Grinner nodded.
* * *
At Red Hat Productions, an office manager named Jennifer explained that Mr. Glide was on location for a shoot in Death Valley. Jennifer said she had been told to expect us to be coming by and that Mr. Glide could talk to us out there.
“How did Mr. Glide know to expect us?” Vigil asked.
Jennifer smiled.
“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “I spoke to Mr. Glide this morning, and he told me then. I guess you can ask him when you see him.” She gave us the GPS coordinates, and we gassed up Dragon’s jeep and headed northeast for about four and a half hours into the desert park.
Dragon’s radio was playing a cover of “Stripped” by Shiny Toy Guns as the city slid away and was replaced by wilderness, mountains, painful blue sky, and then eventually pristine wasteland, occasionally marred by roadside gas stations, fireworks, and souvenir shops. Lots of plastic rattlesnake skulls, leering with fangs, to be had with your Slurpee.
“Reminds me of where I first woke up,” Dragon said. She had on her round sunglasses with the green-tinted lenses. Her long hair was tucked under a floppy campaign hat that snapped and jumped in the wind. She wore a tan, military-style tank top, ripped and worn jeans, and her boots.
“I heard the stories about you,” Vigil said. It was a rare occasion; he was dressed in a yellow body-armor tee that complimented his build and black basketball shorts that fell below his knees. He wore a pair of black-and-yellow Air Jordan 5 Low athletic shoes that cost more than Dragon’s old jeep. His eyes were hidden by a pair of very expensive sunglasses. “I think everyone in the Life has,” he continued. “I just didn’t think they were true. Are they?” Dragon smiled and nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “A few of them anyway. Everything you hear in the Life has a slight seasoning of bullshit.”
Vigil glanced at me. I was slightly hungover, my old seventies cop-style sunglasses shading my bloodshot eyes, a burning cigarette dangling at the edge of my lips. I was in a wrinkled old black Pixies T-shirt I’d found at the bottom of my bag, faded jeans, and boots. My hair was tied back in a ponytail to keep it out of my face in the high wind of the interstate and now the desert. “So I have come to discover,” he said as he looked at me and then turned back to my old partner. “So you really are a … you know…”
“The D word?” Dragon said, enjoying this. “That word works about as well as any other. My natural form is big and reptilian, with wings and claws. I breathe fire. But the specific detail of what I look like seems to be based on the observer. I doubt you and Ballard would experience me the same way.”
“And you’re the last of your kind?” Vigil asked. I could feel Dragon stiffen a bit even though she gave no indication the question bothered her at all. “I’m sorry,” the knight said. I kept forgetting how good Vigil was at reading people. “I didn’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’m the last or not. I woke up in the deserts outside L.A. in 1946. I had a good sense of who and what I was but little memory of where I came from and how I had ended up here. I recall voices, two men, calling to me, some kind of spell or working, and a single word … ‘Babylon,’ but nothing else. I’ve never met another of my kind in all my years living among humans, but I like to think that I’m not the only one hiding in plain sight.”
“You’re not,” Vigil said, nodding. “The world sees what it wants to see and pretends the other inconvenient things away. It doesn’t make those unseen things any less real. I’m sure you’re not alone, Dragon.”
“Lauren,” she said. “I chose the name Lauren.”
“Pretty name,” he said. “It suits you.” Dragon smiled, and the sun came out from behind a cloud. We drove along for a long time to the sound of the radio and the desert wind.
It was late afternoon when we
