“Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“Hell no. With a friend like you, no one expects to sleep more than a few hours a night.”
“Is Brigitte under yet?”
“Yeah. Eugène is watching her. Making sure the potion took and she’s doing all right.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. But you owe me a story about how you hooked up with Pussy Galore.”
“Sure. Listen, I need to read someone’s meter. Do you have an animascope?”
“A couple of different kinds. But I thought you were off chasing zombies. Why do you need the scope?”
“I’m meeting someone new and I need to know if he’s dead or alive. If I have the scope, you don’t need to come along. It’ll be safer that way.”
“Fuck that. You and Eugène are going to protect me to death. If you want the scope, I’m the one who’s going to work it. That’s the deal.”
“Okay, but you have to tell Vidocq. And don’t leave out the part where I said you could stay home.”
“When should I expect you?”
“I’m supposed to meet the contact in Hollywood at nine-thirty this morning. I’ll come by a few minutes before that.”
“I’ll be ready.”
The Grand Central Market doesn’t open until nine, which is still a few hours away. I lie back on the bed, close my eyes, and sink back down into the angelic dark. It already feels like home. The place I should have been my whole life. If I’d seen and felt like this when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have grown into someone who let Mason play him for such a fool. I wouldn’t have lost a third of my life in Hell. I wouldn’t be living with a dead man in an attic and covered in scars. Normally, going over all the ways I’ve fucked up my life turns my brain to swamp gas and bleeds my vision red. I need a cigarette and a drink to keep my heart from gnawing its way out of my chest. But now my heart beats fine. I don’t want a glass of the red stuff or a smoke. The world is a perfect white diamond. Transparent. The facets glowing with internally reflected light. And it takes just one tap in the right place to shatter the whole thing.>“Not enough to matter. And all it means is I have a migraine. You don’t look any more appetizing to me now than when I first met you.”
“You’ve always been my dream date, too, Penelope. Just stay over there on the bed, dead man.”
“Do you remember where I hid the belt buckle?”
Kasabian rolls his eyes.
“You really are in good shape. It’s under the mattress at the foot of the bed.”
I move the mattress and pull it out. Toss it onto my coat. I don’t know what to do with it, but I want it nearby.
“Did you ever figure out what the writing on this thing was?”
“A little. Lucifer can read it and I used the bits and pieces I grabbed out of his head to find more stuff like it.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s a warning and a blocking curse. It’s keeping something from getting in somewhere. But I don’t know who or where.”
“Drifters?”
“Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or census takers. Or the Fuller Brush man.”
“When you figure it out let me know.”
“Sure.”
I go to the nightstand and find some aspirin in the top drawer. I pour out four and sit there for a minute.
“Your JD is under the bed, in case you forgot.”