booth.
It was dark out there under the trees, but there was enough moon that he could see a handsome but worn- looking woman and her biker boyfriend in among the parked cars. They’d pulled up on a Harley shortly before the tourist wandered in, and started making out, looking like they were about to do the dirty right there on the hood of Ronny Cantrell’s twenty-year-old Town Car.
Batty had been doing his best to ignore them ever since.
But some things were impossible to ignore. As he contemplated ordering another boilermaker, their voices began to rise-muffled behind the window, but loud enough to catch his attention. He looked over and saw that the make-out session had abruptly ceased and the biker now had hold of his girlfriend’s wrist.
This was not, mind you, a little love squeeze. This was an all-out assault, fingers digging into the ulnar nerve, trying to elicit a reaction and not a favorable one. It was rough and mean and-window or no window-generally ill- advised in the presence of a gentleman like Batty. A gentleman who believed that you never lay a hand on a woman unless you intend to make her feel good.
Batty rose, feeling the booze sluice through him, but he didn’t let that slow him down. He called out a good- night to Bill, who was too busy to notice, then went outside, staggering only slightly as he approached the biker and his girlfriend.
The bearded bastard still had her by the wrist and Batty could see from the look on her face that she wasn’t enjoying it one little bit.
“Excuse me,” he said, moving in close. “I’d advise you to let this poor lady go, and don’t touch her again or you’ll be making an appointment with the dentist tomorrow, assuming you can still pick up a phone.”
The biker looked at him, annoyed. Not a man who liked to be interrupted when he was busy inflicting pain.
“Who the fuck are
She winced, trying to pull her hand away.
“No,” she cried, the terror in her voice clearly reflected in her expression. “I don’t know him.”
The biker’s eyes narrowed. “The hell you don’t, you little-”
That was when Batty swung, his fist connecting with a solid crack. He had warned the man, but the man hadn’t listened, and Batty was a big believer in following through on a threat.
The biker, however, was neither small nor flabby, and despite nearly toppling to the ground with a bloody mouth, he recovered from the punch much quicker than anticipated.
The next thing Batty knew, the asshole was upright and moving fast, and it was immediately obvious that he hadn’t yet had anything to drink-which, unfortunately, gave him an advantage. In the flurry of punches that followed, Batty came up two for seven, only one of which connected in any substantial way.
It all ended with Batty faceup on the ground between two cars, staring into the eyes of the man who might very well stomp him to death without even a twinge of guilt, as the girlfriend shouted, “Kill the sonofabitch!”
So much for chivalry.
The biker wiped at his mouth, looked at the blood on the back of his hand, then rolled his tongue over his teeth, checking to see if there was any damage.
“You may be right about that dentist,” he said thickly. “But they’re gonna have to carry you outta here on a stretcher, you little mother-” He froze as the barrel of a gun touched the back of his head. Batty was surprised to see the sweating tourist standing directly behind him.
“Time to call it a night,” the tourist said softly, looking considerably more confident than he had when he first walked into the bar.
The biker threw his hands up. “Easy, buddy. We just came here for a drink. He started it.”
“And I’m finishing it. Grab your skank, get on your bike and get the hell out of here. Now.”
There wasn’t any room for negotiation in the tourist’s tone, and apparently the biker wasn’t as stupid as he looked. He glared at Batty, then grabbed hold of his girlfriend’s arm, pulling her away, and a moment later, their bike was roaring down the street.
Batty got up on his elbows, squinting at the tourist, who tucked his gun away and crouched next to him, pulling him upright. “You okay, Professor?”
So it hadn’t been his imagination. This guy knew who he was. “Still alive, more or less. Who the hell are you?”
“Just a friend.”
“Well, I appreciate the help, friend, but I could’ve handled the sonofabitch just fine on my own.”
“That’s a debate we’ll have to save for another time. We’re running late.”
Batty furrowed his brow at him. “Late for what?”
“You’ve got a plane to catch.”
Then the guy quickly brought a hand up, and to Batty’s surprise, something sharp and hot stung his neck.
He grabbed at his throat and fell back, but before he could say a word, the world tilted sideways and the tourist started to double and triple right there in front of his eyes as the moonlight suddenly grew very dim.
Then it disappeared altogether as Sebastian “Batty” LaLaurie fell down a deep, dark hole.
BOOK IV
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep
13
He watched the girl get off the bus at the Greyhound station, her doe eyes taking in the world around her with obvious disappointment.
It was not, he imagined, what she had expected to find. The city wasn’t as clean as it looked on network TV-cars choking the boule-wasn’t as clean as it looked on network TV-cars choking the boulevard, trash clogging the gutters, the smog not as thick as it once was, but still smelling faintly of dirt and spit and sulfur.
There were no digitally enhanced blue skies here. And the only palm trees left were now victim to a slow- killing rot.
A homeless woman was huddled on the sidewalk near the bus station exit and the girl gave her wide berth, clutching her knapsack as she moved, looking as if she were afraid the old woman might spring to her feet and block her passage like a troll at the gates of Purgatory.
But the old woman remained still, only her eyes moving as the girl hurried past and made her way up Cahuenga toward Hollywood Boulevard, where surely things would look much better.
This was, after all, the land of dreams. Home to the stars.
But he knew that things would
