“What’s that line from The Maltese Falcon?”
“Excuse me?” asks the guard. His name tag reads Huston.
“Bogart says it. ‘The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.’ You ever think about that when you’re patting people down?”
“We’re just doing our jobs, sir.”
“Trust me, I know. I’ve been coming here about every week for six months. You’re doing a really thorough job of looking at my fingerprints for the four-hundredth time and talking to the same guy inside you always talk to, the one who always gives you the same answer. I mean, I always get invited in, right?”
“We have to establish your identity, sir. It’s procedure.”
“You know who I am. Or do a lot people show up here covered in blood and goofer dust?”
That last bit sets off the Shut Eye. An unsubstantiated claim of identity. Catnip to psychic snoops. I can feel it when they’re slipping their ghost fingers into my skull. It tickles behind my eyes.
There are two basic ways to deal with a peeper. You can back off and go blank. Name all the presidents or run through multiplication tables.
The other way to deal with psychics is to welcome them in. Throw open all the doors and windows and invite them deep inside your mind. Then grab them by the throat and drag them straight down to Hell. Well, that’s what I do. It’s not mandatory. The point is that once you’ve led them deep enough into your psyche, you’re the one behind the wheel and they’re strapped in the kiddy seat in back.
I give them the grand tour of Downtown, starting out with a quick jolt of the early days in Hell when it was all nausea and panic. Give them a quick taste of psychic rape. Experiments and Elephant Man exhibitions. Being the fox in a mounted hunt through forests of flayed, burning souls. Then some highlights from the arena. Killing, eleven years of killing. I let them see exactly what being Sandman Slim is all about. Most of them don’t get that far.
This Shut Eye doesn’t make it past my first week Downtown, when a drunk Hellion guard slit me open and tried to pull out my intestines because he’d heard that’s where humans hid their souls. But I don’t let the Shut Eye off that easy. I hold him inside long enough to feel me running away from the neighbor’s dog and getting my leg chewed up.
When I let go, Criswell flies out of my head like a goose through a jet engine. He gasps and is on the verge of tears when the connection finally breaks.
Huston grabs him by the shoulder.
“Ray, you okay?” Ray doesn’t hear him. He’s looking at me.
“Why?” he asks.
“’Cause you deserved it.”
Ray takes a key card from his jacket, waves it over a magnetic reader, and the gate swings open.
When I go through I turn back to them.
“I don’t have to do this, you know. I could come out of a shadow on this side of the fence and not deal with you assholes. But I’m trying to fit in a little better around here, so I’m polite and I try to play by your rules. You might consider cutting me the tiniest piece of slack.”
I head for the warehouse. Huston keeps asking Ray what happened and Ray keeps telling him to fuck off. I wonder if Ray is just a psychic reader or a projector, too, and what parts of the tour he’ll show Huston to shut him up.
WELLS YELLS AT me halfway across the warehouse floor so that everyone turns to see me looking like an executioner’s practice dummy.
“Damn, son. Did you stop to gut a deer on the way over or did that little girl do all that?”
I hold up my burned jacket with my blackened arm.
“Your little girl did this. Her four friends did the rest.”
“There’s a pod?”
“Was. Five of them.”
“That doesn’t jibe with our intelligence.”
I take four wallets from a jacket pocket and drop them on a table.
“Here’s your goddamn intelligence.”