“And he’s trying to keep us on the hook by starving us. You know that, right? You ought to let me hex his ass.”
I sip the Jack. It’s good, but after the Aqua Regia, it’s about as potent as cherry Kool-Aid.
“Save your hoodoo for real work. And, technically, he’s only starving me. If he knew about you, he’d shit his heart out.”
“Great, get him up here. I’ll video it and put it up on YouTube.”
“Aelita would be the fun one to get on tape. I’m an Abomination, but I don’t even know if angels have a word for you.”
“One does. ‘Hey, shithead.’”
“Lucifer always had a way with words. He’s just like Bob Dylan, but without all the annoying talent.”
“That’s hilarious. He loves it when you say stuff like that. Every time you do, he turns up the temperature Downtown ten degrees.”
“Then he should be able to cook biscuits on his tits by now.”
“I’ll ask him for you.”
“No, you won’t. When you download your brain or play video highlights or whatever it is you do for the old man, you’ll only show him what you want him to see. You hold back crumbs ’cause when you know something he doesn’t it gives you power. Just like you hold back things from me. And I hold back things from you and he holds back things from both of us. We’re a little clusterfuck of liars.”
Kasabian nods to the Styrofoam container I set on the bed when I ditched my weapons.
“Do I smell tamales?”
“Yeah, you want them? I lost my appetite.”
Kasabian kneels down on six of his legs and hangs over the edge of the table. He uses four of his free legs to open the door of the minifridge I installed and uses two more legs to grab a bottle of Corona. He pops the top off the beer while pulling himself back onto the table and waggles a bunch of his other legs at me like a horny lobster.
“Slip me some crimson, Jimson.”
I hand him the container.
“Don’t forget your bucket.”
“Have I ever?”
“I just don’t want a first time.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s already diving into Carlos’s spicy tamales, working a plastic fork with two of his front legs. After each bite of food, a glob that looks like white-orange putty oozes from the bottom of his neck, through the hole I drilled in the magic carpet and into a blue kid-size plastic beach bucket. There’s a pop-top trash can at the end of that table. Kasabian is good about dumping his scat when he’s done, but he’s short, so he needs me to step on the pedal to open the top. It’s nice to be needed.
I’m not in the mood for Cirque de Puke right now, so I find a pad and pencil and try to remember what Eleanor’s monster belt buckle looked like. Alice was the artist in my family. Even my handwriting made my teachers weep. When I’m done, I have a sketch that’s pretty good if I was a half-blind mental patient in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. I hold it up so Kasabian can see it.
“You recognize this?”
“I’m on my lunch hour, man.”
“Just look at the goddamn paper.”
He doesn’t move his head from the food, just swivels his eyes and squints at the image.
“Nope. Never seen it before. What is it, some monster you’re supposed to kill or have you started dating again?”
“It’s something I saw today. Like a belt buckle or an icon or something. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it’s been bugging me.”
“I don’t recognize it.”
Plop goes the tamale putty.