“What a morbid little bastard. Your poor mother.”
“Mom was worse than me. She saw angels everywhere. She looked for them like other women in the neighborhood looked for two-for-one sales at the booze warehouse by the freeway.”
“Charlie’s Angels.”
“Forget it. Charlie’s Angels is three people and none of them are Charlie.”
“I was going to say your girlfriend Mason is Charlie Manson, but that’s too good for him. He’s Charlie Douche-bag.”
“That’s exactly who he is.”
She kisses me. I can taste the cigarette and her lips and tongue.
“When you thought you saw Mason the other night, it wasn’t him. But he’s still looking for you. You should find him first.”
“Am I really talking to you?”
“I doubt it. Not with the whole being-dead thing and all.”
“Yeah.”
“But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell you real things.”
“Like what?”
“That something bad is coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something really bad.”
“She’s right.”
Brigitte is sitting in the doorway of the bedroom on one of Carlos’s bar stools and cleaning her gun with one of my old T-shirts.
“Something bad is coming,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
Alice says, “Just remember who you are.”
“What the fuck are you two talking about? Why are all dreams and prophecies so goddamn obscure?”
“Because, dumb-ass, if any one of them flat-out told you what was coming, you’d try to stop it or change it. Some things you can’t stop. You just have to go through them. At least with a clue, you’ll be able to recognize it when it gets there.”
“If a bus hits me I’m pretty sure I’ll notice. But it would be more help if you told me when to get out of the way.”
“You ask a lot, James,” says Brigitte.
“Sometimes you need to get run down,” says Alice. “It could keep something worse from happening.”
“Now you’re both trying to piss me off, but that’s okay because I feel a lot less guilty than when this dream started. Thanks for that.”
“See you around, Charlie.”
“Dobrou noc, Sandman.”
I KICK THE sheet down by my feet and roll out of bed the moment I wake up. I’m still naked from the long shower I took last night. Kasabian stares at me from the desk, his little legs poised over the keyboard.