"I'll walk them straight in. If there's a shadow anywhere, I can get in through it."
"Show me."
"I'm not going to do magic tricks for you. Do you want my help or not?"
He stares at me. Chews the inside of his cheek. He wants a cigarette. He's a secret smoker. I can smell it in his sweat.
"Know what, Tex? I don't need you giving me the pig eye. You need me a lot more than I need you. I can wait until you and the cavalry charge in through the front door and get blown to rags. I'll stroll in after and use your corpses for shields. Have fun getting slaughtered."
"Okay," he says. "This one time." >And if Kasabian's boomerang corpse is here on the floor, where are Vidocq and Allegra?
My phone rings. I thumb it on.
"Boo. Fooled you with your own dead guy." It's Parker. "I bet right about now you're wondering where your friends are."
"How are you seeing me?"
"Look around you, shit for brains. There's eyes everywhere."
"The paintings."
"There's this thing called magic. Maybe you've heard of it."
"Where are Vidocq and Allegra?"
"Relax, sweetheart. They're fine. In fact, we're having a New Year's party tonight and you're invited."
"At Avila?"
"How do you walk around with that big brain? Yeah, Avila. It'll be a blast. We're gonna raise a little hell. Get your ass there before midnight."
"I'll be there."
"This is a personal invitation. No guests. No plus ones. If I see a cloud of dust behind you, Senor Frog and that little slice of cherry pie go right in the wood chipper."
"I'll be there."
"Before midnight. That's twelve. When the big hand and the little hands are straight up."
"Either one of them gets hurt, I'm going to personally teach you the Tombstone Dog Paddle."
"That another scary trick you learned in Hell?"
"No. Wild Bill told my great-granddad about it. It's where I take you down the river. Someplace the ground is soft and wet. I break your arms and legs. You fingers and toes. Your neck and back. I dig a hole in the wet, soft ground, put you inside, and fill it back up. Then I have a cigarette and wait for you to dig your way out."
"Before twelve," says Parker, and hangs up.
IF I LEARNED anything Downtown, it's this: the only real difference between an enemy and a friend is the day of the week.
I go back to where I abandoned the Jag, jam the knife in the ignition, and aim the car west, then south, heading back along the same surface streets I traveled with Wells once before. A good sense of direction can get you into or out of a lot of trouble.
Who's higher on the food chain? The Golden Vigil or Homeland Security? The feds are probably picking up the tab for the operation, but that probably has more to do to with Washington control freaks and politicians who want their names next to supersecret intelligence groups. Wanting to put Ran CIA or Busted terrorist cell on your resume when you run for president seems obvious, but would telling people that you run angels and G-men who keep the world safe from chaos creatures on the edge of the universe help your political career or get you a syringe full of Thorazine and a lifetime supply of adult diapers? What does whoever runs the Vigil back in D.C. put on their quarterly work reports? At least, the people that person reports to must know what the Vigil does. But what do you tell oversight committees and budget fascists? "We need that extra billion for a gun that will turn vampires into dog food and dark angels into the filling for Bavarian cream doughnuts." Who runs this sideshow and what do they want?
If what I'd read was right, it was all a joke anyway. Before the morning herd came into Max Overdrive this morning, I looked up the Golden Vigil on an occult encyclopedia Web site. The Golden Vigil has been around at least since the First Crusade in the eleventh century. That's when the Brits and the French started writing about it.
According to some of those stories, the Vigil was a splinter cell of the original Hashishin, the frat-house assassination cult that was the Al Qaeda of its day. While the regular Hashishin stuck to Dirty Harry jihadist political power-structure attacks, the Golden Vigil went after invisible enemies.
The French chroniclers insist that the Vigil is much older than most people realize, and that its origins might actually explain how and why some of the first tribes stopped chasing game up and down the Fertile Crescent and settled down to build the world's first trailer parks along the Euphrates. If the Kissi have been here for as long as Aelita said, it makes sense. It means that the Vigil has been around for at least eight to ten thousand years. Even longer, if the tribes were negotiating with the Kissi when they first wandered up out of Africa. That would push the Vigil's origins back to around seventy thousand years, according to another encyclopedia site.