“We’re like a couple of school kids being summoned home.”
“For an egg-salad lunch.”
“I like egg salad.”
“You could have kept that ugly secret to yourself.”
“I know, but I don’t want any secrets between us. I love egg salad. It’s my boyfriend.”
“Stop. I have to go see fucking Sauron. I don’t need images of you with egg-salad teeth swimming in my head.”
“Where are my brass knuckles?”
“Carried away by flying monkeys.”
“Then you better get working on that banana gun.”
We gather up the paint thinner, rags, and cleaning supplies.
All we got off the windows is ER. Now the front of the store reads KILL. That ought to really bring in the customers.
THE 405 FREEWAY is the yellow brick road after the apocalypse. A winding stretch of paved bullshit choked with bumper-to-bumper demon drivers and banshee kids wailing away for the SpongeBob juice box Mommy and Daddy left on the kitchen counter. Road rage was invented along this cursed road. Murders and suicides are planned in the stinking miasma of stalled trucks and overheating Hondas, enough to fill all the graveyards in California and more. The 405 is one breakdown away from turning into the Donner Party. Starvation and cannibalism. Movie producers gnawing on starlets’ severed legs. School-bus Little League teams crunching on the coach’s skull. All I want to do is get to Marina del fucking Rey. Or die quick right here and now. I don’t really care which anymore.
A century or two later, I dump the Crown Vic in a parking lot near the Basin E harbor. The dock number Tuatha gave me isn’t hard to find, but it’s behind a locked gate. I jam the black blade into the lock and it pops right open. The walkway is lined with pristine boats like floating palaces. I don’t have to look for a slip number to find the boat Tuatha described. It stands out like a rotting pig carcass in a butcher-shop window. It just goes to show you how much pull the Sub Rosa has, parking this junk heap among the seafaring mansions.
You have to understand something about Sub Rosa aesthetics. While civilian blue bloods flaunt their inheritances buying the biggest, gaudiest Xanadus they can afford, the Sub Rosa go the other way. Their wealth and status get displayed by fronting their estates with hovels. Collapsed warehouses. Ransacked crack dens. Abandoned hotels. The current Augur has taken things a step further. His manor looks like the only things that are keeping it afloat are strong ropes and good wishes.
I don’t know shit about boats, but this looks like it was once a nice one, and fast. Maybe it was a fishing boat that took tourists out to catch whatever kind of fish sporty types like to kill and varnish for the den. It looks like it could hold a dozen people easy. Main deck, lower deck, and a raised area where the captain could pilot the thing like Ahab on coke and Red Bull. It was clearly very pretty at one point. Very sunny and merry. I can almost smell the white wine and gourmet box lunches. Just being here makes me miserable.
It looks like an engine fire took the boat out of commission. The lower deck and captain’s area are black, wood-charred, and plastic-melted into long brittle ribbons. I put one foot on the deck, not sure if the french-fried shit box will hold my weight. It does. Too bad. Now I don’t have an excuse to leave.
I look around for any nosy neighbors, don’t see any, so I duck down and climb into the burned-out lower deck.
And come out on the deck of a ship that would make Howard Hughes blush.
A spotless deck. Polished oak and gold fixtures. Also, a group of bodyguards. Big boys, puffed up on steroids and protein powder. I wonder why the Sub Rosa’s King Tut is working with civilian muscle and what kind of charms they’re carrying that would stop any self-respecting magician with ill intent from blasting them to charcoal briquettes? They’re probably p
art of an addled outreach program. The Augur’s office throwing a bone to a local security company, sealing some kind of mutual aid pact between the Sub Rosa and civilian worlds. Hey, we’re not better than you. We’ll let you into the Augur’s place, as long as you make sure the riffraff don’t drop any cigarette butts on the deck. They’re glorified hall monitors. Still, I’m not here to hassle anyone, so when one of the meatballs gets up, I stay calm and cool. Instead of coming for me, the flank steak slides open a glass door to an even lower deck.
“Welcome, Mr. Stark. Mr. Abbot is expecting you,” he says.
I wait a second to see if it’s a gag and someone is going to laugh. When no one does, I head for the open door. But I keep a hand in my pocket where I’ve stashed my na’at, my favorite weapon from when I was in the arena in Hell.
Tuatha is in a leather easy chair across from an annoyingly handsome guy. Sandy-blond hair, all-American-boy face with a movie-star nose idiots in Beverly Hills would pay a small fortune for. He looks young. The youngest Augur I’ve ever seen. He’s wearing jeans and a yellow polo shirt with expensive-looking deck shoes. Captain America at the yacht club. He jumps up when he sees me and puts out his hand.
“Stark—that’s what you go by, right?—it’s great to finally meet you.”
I shake Abbot’s hand and he hits me with a high-watt Cary Grant smile that could melt the polar ice cap.
“Nice to meet you too,” I lie.
When he lets go, I put my hand out to Tuatha. She takes it in a more placid way. Not ladylike really, but in a “there’s nothing you can do about the situation, so sit back and enjoy the show” kind of way. She’s still wearing mourning black.
“Hi, Ms. Fortune. Good to see you.”
“And you. I’m glad we could finally get you boys together.”
“Me too,” says Abbot.