A second gate opened on the side of the stage, and a being entered that looked like a young woman with teal skin and long, tangled hair the color of dark seaweed. She wore a leather corset and fishnets with garters. It was a sea nymph, and she was collared as well. Her shoulders slumped, and she shuffled instead of walking. She didn’t look up, and she almost cried when she looked at the unicorn and moved toward it, but I was pretty sure the sea maiden had no tears left in her. I glanced over to Joyce, his face bland contempt. “A fucking Tijuana donkey show? Really? Class.”
“Watch your fucking mouth, has-been,” Blue’s right-hand man said, pointing up the stairs. “You and your boyfriend can have a good cry after you see Mr. Blue. Move it.”
I looked back to Vigil as the crowd began to whoop and whistle. I had shaken hands with what I saw in his eyes many, many times in my life; he was close to a dangerous edge. “Vigil,” I said as calmly as I could. “C’mon, man. We got an appointment.” Burris began to climb the steps, his jaw tight, his muscles coiled.
We were ushered into Roland Blue’s office suite. The window behind his desk looked down into the arena where the nymph and the unicorn were beginning their performance. Blue stood as we entered with his men. The office was decorated in early-contemporary-street-thug-makes-good. Too much gilt, too much flash. The kind of tacky, expensive shit that someone who grew up on the street and got paid would pick out, someone so scary that no one would tell them their taste sucked. In keeping with his name, and his trademark attire, most of the room was done in shades of blue, with gold too, just to remind you he had it.
Roland himself hadn’t changed much since we’d last tussled. A few more lines around his eyes, which were always the color of whomever he was talking to, or an unnerving polychromatic if he was addressing more than one person. His hair was long and dirty blond, but the gray was catching up fast. He was dressed in a cobalt Kiton suit with a black dress shirt. The shirt had wing-tip collar blades. He wore a cerulean tie. Roland’s patron, a long-forgotten Persian demon, existed anywhere that the color cerulean was present. It was the reason for his street name, the only name he had left since he had undertaken a ritual to blot out his true name with innocent blood.
“Laytham Ballard,” Blue said, that too-wide, too-toothy grin spreading across his face. He said my name as “Balhard,” his voice pure Baws-ton. “You got a lot of fuckin’ balls to come beggin’ at my door. I could tell my boys to kill you right now.”
“You’d lose a lot of men, asshole,” I said, taking a chair in front of his Florence Knoll Table Desk topped with gold-veined black marble, “and you’d fucking die, too.” Blue’s men chuckled a little, nervously.
“You want we should take this bum outside and teach him some manners, Mr. Blue?” Joyce asked, his eyes red pinpricks of light. Blue waved him off.
“Allaya get the fuck outta here. I got old business with this skid, private business. Screw.”
Vigil, standing by my side, looked to me. “It’s cool,” I said. “They give you any shit, you do what you gotta do.”
“Gladly,” Vigil said, looking at Blue.
Vigil, Joyce, and the rest of Blue’s soldiers took it outside and closed the door. Blue walked over to his bar, dropped globes of ice from a bucket into a pair of short glasses and poured us each a finger of Jameson Rarest. “Nice, huh? I classed the joint up after I gave old Fifi the heave-ho.”
“Fifi was your best friend,” I said. “The way I hear it, you punched his ticket without so much as a sit-down.”
“Yeah,” Blue said. “Fuckin’ A, and look who gets a sit-down? Life’s a mystery, eh, Laytham? What the fuck you doin’ here? You outta your fuckin’ skull coming back to L.A.?”
“I came for a missing person’s job, Rolly,” I said, taking the offered drink. I sat it down on the edge of the desk. It seemed a million light-years away from my mouth. I could smell the whiskey, and I licked my dry lips. “It ended up complicated.”
“Yeah, no shit, I got ears,” Blue said, returning to his seat and sipping his drink. “You pissed on the maras, the fuckin’ Cambodians, even your own crew, the owls. They’re all gunnin’ for you, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna give you sanctuary. This ain’t no fuckin’ church, and I ain’t no fuckin’ priest.”
“Not looking, not asking,” I said.
“Good,” Blue said. “You still hate me. I can see it. You should. I know I still hate your cracker ass.”
“I think you had Nico killed,” I said, “cut in half with a fucking twelve-gauge in front of his wife and kids. I came for you the night he died. You ever hear that? You can thank the Maven and Dragon for saving your life, Rolly.”
“The Maven.” Blue laughed. “Well ain’t that a pisser!
