It feels like it takes a week to get to where they’re all looking. And there it is, lying on an altar of broken glass and crushed Mickey’s malt-liquor cans. Eleanor’s belt buckle.
I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Eleanor. I should have known that the stunt in public with the flamethrower and the mad dash home to the theater weren’t accidental. You wanted to get caught. You wanted someone to find you and whatever it was you’d stolen and kill you for it so Mommy and the rest of the Sub Rosa would know what you’d done and what happened to you. That’s a lot of pain for a kid to be hauling around. It makes me not mind you frying my arm so much. I know what it’s like to want to cook the world. I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out sooner, but, for what it’s worth, I’m here now, and if I don’t end up a Quarter Pounder with cheese in the next few minutes, I’ll take your buckle and do something with it. If I do end up eaten, well, I’ll buy you a Happy Meal in Hell.
At the center of the crowd, the Drifters are so packed together I have to knock a zed on his face to squeeze through. I freeze, waiting for the crowd to lunge. But the zed on the floor just stands up and goes back to staring. I know they can smell me. I’m sweating like a three-legged racehorse, but even now when I’m about to pick up their holy grail, they ignore me.
I’m in too deep to back off now. I put the knife back in my jacket and hold the lighter close to the floor so I get the buckle without wasting time. Crouching, I touch the edge, ready to back off at the slightest reaction from the Drifters. Nothing. I get my hand around the buckle and slowly lift it a few inches, then a foot off the ground. Still no reaction. Either I was wrong about the buckle or Drifter brains are so slow to process information it’ll take them a while to notice that the family jewels are gone. I hope it’s the second one.
I slip the buckle into my coat pocket, but keep one hand under my coat. Slowly, I push my way through the Drifters back the way I came. They stay put, though the moaners are getting louder.
Without warning, they all step forward at once. They sense that the talisman is gone and want to get closer to where it was and soak up the residual hoodoo. There’s a hundred or more of them trying to squeeze into a space about the size of a phone booth. I lean forward and put my shoulder into them. I have to use all my weight to move forward. I’m getting through, but the farther back I go, the more they press forward.
The mood is changing. The place was a church when I got here. Cool and contemplative. Getting the buckle wasn’t much worse that pushing to the front of the stage at a hardcore club. Now the air is getting bad. Jittery with panic and confusion. I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming. Time to de-ass the premises.
Fuck close quarters. I pull the .460 from its holster and pop a shoulder-level shot between two zeds I want to move. The blast knocks one off its feet and rips the other’s arm loose, so it’s hanging by a few strands of tendon. With just the loose limb in my way, I push past them without slowing down. I need out of here ASAP and get into a rhythm about it. Take a step. Blow open a porthole. Take a step. Fire. Step. Fire. It’s working. I’m moving faster now. My only worry is slipping on corpse leakage or a severed arm.
Just as I’m about to step out of the circle, it tightens. Pins me where I am. I can’t even raise my arm to shoot.
Then the mob relaxes. The magic in the center of the room is gone and they have no reason to crowd there anymore. I break free of them and head for a wall. It’s taken me longer to get out than I counted on. Plenty of time for even these rotten brains to figure out that something is going on and look around for what. I have a bad feeling that if I turn around, a hundred pairs of dead eyes will be aimed straight at me and what’s in my pocket.
“Who the fuck are you, motherfucker?”
I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I turn and look.
So that’s what a Lacuna looks like. Cabal was right. I wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. He’s in a double-breasted gray suit, and if it wasn’t for all the dried blood on his jacket from the ragged bite mark in his neck, I wouldn’t look at him twice. He’s looking at me like a starving wolf. Like he’s trying to read the theater marquee through my chest. Blank-eyed shamblers behind him are turning this way.
“I said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
I take a step back and hold the lighter so he can see my face.
“You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.”
He rushes and the mob follows; a tsunami of black, broken teeth and putrid meat crashes down on me.
But chatty and bright as the Lacuna is, he’s still a dumb, dead piece of shit. When he rushes me, my back is already to the wall and I’m stepping through it. He’s not going to make it in time. He’s going to be the smartest deli slice in the slaughterhouse when those other hundred Drifters splatter him against the wall like a car crusher. Good thing he’s dead or it might hurt.
RITCHIE’S PLACE IS in Laurel Canyon. Back in the sixties, rich hippies, movie moguls, and famous bands lived up here. Between the dope, their biker friends, the Manson wannabes, and all the free love that was never really free, the place turned into The Killing Fields with a Jefferson Airplane sound track. Don’t you want somebody to love? They were Khmer Rouge in designer jeans, and when the dope and the money ran out the canyons and deserts bloomed over the bodies they buried there.
I drive up the winding road to the address Brigitte gave me. I’m in a stolen Lexus because I want to be boring tonight. And I don’t want to take Brigitte back through the Room if I can help it. Eventually she’s going to ask questions I don’t want to answer.
It’s about 2 A.M. when I stop in front of Ritchie’s gates. I can see the house at the end of a long circular drive. It looks like a claw machine in an arcade plucked an Italian villa off a hill in Rome and dropped it down in the middle of the manzanita and coyotes. The place is pretty, but looks ridiculous here. Like something you’d build to win a bar bet.
Brigitte is waiting for me in the shadow of a eucalyptus. She’s holding her leather jacket tight around her to keep out the canyon cold. She should have something heavier, but when you’re sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night like a teenybopper running off for backseat groping with your boyfriend, you can’t exactly take the time to squeeze into Lancelot’s armor.
She gives me a quick kiss when she gets in and immediately starts playing with the car heater.
“How does this work?”
“I have no idea. How is Ritchie not going to notice you’re gone?”
“I put a powder in his drink. An old family mix and not at all harmful. He’d probably approve if he knew. It’s all organic.”
I take her down the hill the way we came, then head for Springheel’s place. The heater is going and she starts to relax. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out the contents into her lap, like a kid going through her Halloween candy. I spot a pack of cigarettes.
“Score.”
“Take them. I quit before coming to L.A. Rich men like their girls pure inside and out.”
“Darlin’, purity has nothing to do with why Ritchie went for you.”