“Is this my going-away party or a wake? ’Cause if it’s supposed to be a party, you’re doing it wrong.”

“We knew that you being you, you would just creep off into the night like a thief,” says Vidocq. “So we decided to force our company upon you for a little while before you left.”

I look at Vidocq.

“Yeah. You’re right. I would have—so you don’t have to watch me twitch until sundown.”

“What happens at sundown?” asks Allegra.

“I make like Robert Johnson and go down to the crossroads.”

Candy says, “Is that what Mustang Sally said?”

“Yes. I can find a back door to Hell there.”

“Who’s Mustang Sally?” Allegra asks.

“The patron saint of road rage.”

Vidocq puts a hand on her arm.

“A significant local spirit. I’ll tell you about her later.”

I’m standing in the middle of the room like an idiot. They’re all gawking at me like I’m made of peanut brittle and might fall apart any second. I want to toss everyone out. I need to get my brain wired tight for Hell. And the Black Dahlia. I’m trying not to think about that. I’ve been nearly killed a hundred ways, but never in a car, and I never had to actually die to pull off any hoodoo before. What if it all goes wrong? What if I end up just another tangle of ground meat and chrome on the side of the freeway? I’d get a great obituary. “A suspect in the murder of his longtime girlfriend Alice, a man who was declared legally dead seven yeredead seears ago, finally turns up really and truly dead in a stolen car wrapped around a freeway support while rushing to have tea with the devil.”

Mason would love to have me stuck in Hell. Just another damned dead asshole. So would all the generals and aristocrats I didn’t get a chance to kill and the friends and families of all the Hellions I did kill. If I end up dead down there, it’ll be one long endless Dante gang bang. Get out the chain saws and pass the mint juleps. It’s party time down south.

“Why don’t you sit down for a while?” says Candy.

Allegra chimes in, “Even Sandman Slim can’t make the sun go down faster.”

“I was going to stamp my feet and hold my breath, but you’re probably right.”

I sit down on the small bed.

“What happens now? Did anyone bring cake? Or is it a sleepover and we’re going to do each other’s nails?”

“Don’t be like that,” says Candy. “Your friends are just worried, is all.”

“I appreciate that, but if you want to help, we should switch beds. I need to get some stuff from under that one.”

Candy, Allegra, and Vidocq come over to the small one and I go around them to the big bed. It’s a clumsy little square dance, but we make it. Candy squeezes my arm as she goes by and whispers, “Don’t be a little bitch,” in my ear.

That’s the best advice anyone’s given me all year.

I take off my coat and throw it on the bed. I pull everything out of the coat and my pockets. I toss the cash aside. It won’t do me any good Downtown. A key to this room and Candy’s. Toss those. My phone. Toss. A pencil-thin piece of lead I sometimes use for drawing magic circles. Another toss. I carry a lot of crap.

I pull a silver coin and a smooth pea-size piece of amber out of my pants pocket. The silver coin is about the size of a quarter and is old. Like ancient old. The kind of thing Doc would have carried. And there’s the amber. It’s not big enough to be worth anything. I’ve never seen either of them before. Someone must have slipped them into my pocket. I get it. Silver is protection from evil. Amber is for healing. I don’t look over at Candy. I just put them back in my pocket.

Vidocq says, “Let me be sure I understand this. Your great plan is to do exactly what Mason told you to do?”

“Pretty much. I sneak in, grab Alice, stab Mason in the head, and I’m back in time to catch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.”

“Mason is a born liar and he hates you. Why would to. Why whe possibly tell you the truth?”

I push the mattress out of the way and start pulling out weapons from where I hid them in the box springs.

“Because the truth is worse than a lie. He took Alice away once when he killed her. Now he wants to show how much better he is than me by doing it again. It’s playground stuff, but that’s all this has ever been.”

It’s funny seeing the guns and other toys all laid out. The old Navy Colt revolver, great-great-granddad Wild Bill Hickok’s gun. The LeMat pistol. Kind of huge and useless, but I like it. There’s a cut-down Clyde Barrow–style “Whippit” gun. There are souvenirs I’ve taken off Lurkers and lowlifes. A farmers’ market of pistols. Tasers. Brass knuckles with valentine hearts on the business side. Chinese butterfly knives and weirdly shaped Lurker daggers shaped for nonhuman hands. A sharpened goat horn. My favorite is a silver stake made by a wannabe high school vampire slayer. She made it by sharpening a flat-head screwdriver and dipping it in a pot of melted dimes. The perfect weapon against shroud eaters. Only the little idiot didn’t know that modern dimes are mostly copper covered in nickel. All she did was ruin a perfectly good screwdriver and prove that L.A. schools truly suck.

“You have nothing but his word. It isn’t possible.”

“Of course it is. Mason has Hell and now he wants Heaven. Aelita wants to murder God. Neither of them wants me stumbling around and maybe getting in their way.”

“Searching for Alice will keep you busy while they carry out their plans.”

“Right.”

Traven says, “I understand how a mortal man might come up with a mad plan to rule the universe, but how does an angel fall so far from grace?”

“You’re the preacher. You tell me.”

He shakes his head.

“I suppose if I knew the answer, I’d still be part of the Church.”

“Come on, Father. Angels have been going crazy since the beginning of time. They’re another one of God’s great fuckups. Look at me. I wouldn’t even be in this world of shit if an angel hadn’t fucked my mother.”

“They didn’t cover any of this at the seminary.”

“It’s comforting to know that God’s schools are as rotten as the regular ones.”

As fun as my weapon collection is, most of it’s useless where I’m going. I have my na’at and the black blade. They kept me alive Downtown for eleven years. They’ll probably do it again. I always feel better with a gunYour with on my belt, but getting shot with any of these would just make a Hellion giggle.

I look at Kasabian.

“You want to jump in here sometime with any new info?”

He looks at the bed and says, “I’m going to have a motherfucker of a garage sale if you don’t come back.”

“Thanks for your support. Is it possible that Mason is armed up enough to attack Heaven in the next three days?”

“Troops are still coming in from all over. There are a lot of deserters, but not enough to make a difference.”

“You said Mason couldn’t attack without Semyazah’s troops. Did he go over?”

Kasabian shakes his head.

“He’s not there, but that doesn’t mean some other general hasn’t been able to turn his troops. Like I said, there’s enough fallen angels in Pandemonium to start a thousand boy bands.”

I get out Muninn’s Singularity and the funny bird egg, Mason’s lighter, and the small white stone Lucifer gave me back at Max Overdrive and set them with the na’at and the knife.

Father Traven says, “If all this is true, then you can’t go down there alone.”

I look at him and then at Kasabian.

“You’re having a weird day, aren’t you?”

Traven’s eyes flicker to Kasabian and away again.

“It’s hard to say. I think I’m becoming immune to weird.”

“Damn. You’re one of us already. Well, welcome to the Grindhouse Rodeo, Father, where it’s monster triple features all the time. The popcorn’s stale and the drinks are watered down, but we’re open all night and deities have to sit in the balcony with the winos and rubber-raincoat types.”

Traven does his half smile.

“Thank you, I suppose.”

“There used to be a secret handshake, but only Kasabian knows it and he’s not talking.”

“Fuck you, Susan Vance,” he calls from across the room.

“One more thing,” I say. “Nobody starts with the you-can’t-go-alone stuff. That subject is dead and buried.”

The angel in my head is telling me to be calm, but it’s not trying very hard. It always wants me to slow down and consider all the angles, but it knows that the clock is ticking on Alice, and now that I’m tying up loose ends on earth, I need to move faster than ever. Momentum is my best strategy. Slowing down and considering the consequences of what I’m doing is doom.

Vidocq and Allegra are holding hands on the small bed. I don’t need to listen to their hearts or breathing. They’re radiating tension like a microwave oven. Kasabian has gone back to his computer, trying to ignore all of this. Traven looks a little lost. Candy’s not much better.

I know carrying a gun is stupid, but I feel naked without one. For sentimental reasons I’d like to take great-great-granddad’s Navy Colt, but it’s too big. I look back at the pile of guns on the bed and find a small-frame .357 revolver. I can’t even hit the ground with the thing if I’m more than ten feet away, but it’s better than nothing. I get a roll of duct tape from a drawer and pull my pants leg up a few inches.

“Want to give me a hand?” I say to Candy.

She comes over and I hand her the tape.

“Wrap it around my ankle a few times to hold the gun. Don’t be shy. Make it tight.”

She squats down in front of me and runs the tape around my leg a few times. Tests to see if the gun is secure and tears off the end with her teeth.

She slaps me on the ankle.

“You’re ready to go, Wild Bill.”

She leans up, puts her hands on my face, and kisses me. It feels good and it’s a relief. I was half expecting a gone-baby gone-death kiss, like the kiss you give a corpse before it rolls into a crematorium. But it’s a normal kiss. A have-a-nice-trip, see-you-soon kiss. For once, even the angel in my head is happy.

“Can you hold on to the stuff in that pile?” I ask her. “The phone and keys and cash and whatever.”

“Sure.”

In the closet there’s a box of Alice’s things that I took from Vidocq’s apartment. I pop the top and start taking things out. What’s the appropriate trinket from a murdered girlfriend to wear to a suicide?

From the bed Candy asks, “What are you looking for?”

“I’m supposed to bring something from a murdered person with me. Alice qualifies there, and I figure if I bring the right thing, it might help convince her it’s really me. I have a feeling they’ll have been messing with her brain by the time I get to her.”

A 000000"01C;I wasn’t murdered, but I’m a girl. Maybe I can help.”

“Okay.”

She sits down beside me as I pile Alice’s things onto the floor. There’s a pair of her favorite shoes. Some dime-store bracelets and necklaces from when she was a kid. An Altoids tin with fortune-cookie fortunes and buds of eleven-year-old pot. I set everything on the floor and Candy examines each object. I don’t know if she’s helping me or trying to figure out who Alice is.

I hear Kasabian putting a DVD into the player by his computer.

“What are you putting on?”

“The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “It’s about a dumb broad who flies off to somewhere weird and dangerous so she can wander like an asshole down a road she doesn’t know and get attacked by monsters and fucked over by a magic man. It sounds strangely familiar.”

I pull out more of Alice’s things. A brush. A Weirdos T-shirt. Photos of a ruined motel by the water, part of Salton City, an abandoned town in the desert. We were going to take a trip there.

From behind me I hear Traven say, “I wanted to thank you for saving me today and taking me to Allegra’s extraordinary clinic.”

“How’s Hunter doing?”

“Much better. He can go home tomorrow.”

“Good for him.”

“Is there anything I can do to help besides tape things?”

I get a pen and paper off Kasabian’s desk and scrawl lines and shapes. My memory isn’t a hundred percent on how the seven symbols Alice was writing looked, but I draw them as well as I can. I hand Traven the paper.

“Do you know what these are?”

He carries the paper over to a lamp and stares at it for a minute.

“This is a very rare script. It’s a kind of cipher combining pictograms and letters. Each letter has a numeric value, but their meaning changes in relation to their position in relation to the other characters. Where did you see this?”

“A friend showed it to me. What is it?”

“It’s the secret language the fallen angels used to plan their rebellion in Heaven.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“May I borrow your pen? I’ll need to do scenneed toome calculations.”

I toss it to him and he starts scribbling on the paper.

I’m on my knees next to Candy with Alice’s life spread around me on the floor. It’s like I’ve fallen into a Hank Williams song. I push the T-shirt, underwear, jewels, and address books around like I’m looking for the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Candy upends a pair of green dress shoes with one broken heel and something falls out. It’s a small toy, a plastic rabbit with beard stubble and a cigarette jammed between its lips. Candy holds it up.