The Sandman Slim Series Books 1-4. Richard Kadrey

Wells? It’s okay, you know. He was a saint.”

      His phone goes off. He walks away and speaks quietly into the receiver. I think an angel’s ears are burning.

      Wells nods and pockets the phone.

      “You get a twenty percent bonus added on to your next check.”

      “Twenty percent? What am I, your waiter? I got you five vampires, not a BLT.”

      “Twenty percent is what I’ve been authorized. Take it or leave it.”

      “I’ll take it.”

      He takes a white business envelope from his jacket and hands it to me. The check for my last Vigil hit. A bunch of suburban Druids in Pomona were trying to resurrect the Invidia, a gaggle of transdimensional chaos deities. The Druids were hilarious. They looked like extras from The Andy Griffith Show trying to call up the devil in matching white housedresses. What’s even funnier was that their plan almost worked. Their scrawny Barney Fife leader was one murdered infant away from annihilating Southern California.

      I wonder if I’d just held back a little and Barney did get to unleash the Invidia, would we really be able to tell the difference?

      I look at the check and then at Wells.

      “Why do you always pull this shit?”

      “Do what? Obey the law?”

      “I’m a freelancer and you’re deducting things like taxes and Social Security.”

      “You don’t strike me as the type who files his taxes on time. I’m doing you a favor.”

      “I don’t pay taxes because I don’t exist. You think I’m going to apply for Social Security when I’m sixty-five?”

      “You’re going to want to wait until you’re seventy. The extra benefits are worth it.”

      “I’m not waiting for anything. I’m legally dead. Why am I paying any of this bullshit?”

      “I told you to watch your language.”

      “Fuck you, Miss Manners. You get me to kill for you and then you screw me out of my money.”

      “That money belongs to the government. It funds what we do here. You don’t like it, run for office.”

      I don’t want to run for anything. I want to shove this miserable cheap-ass check so far up Wells’s ass he can read the routing number out the back of his eyes.

      But Max Overdrive is just limping along these days and I don’t want to have to find someplace else to live. Landlords in L.A. don’t want you to have pets. What am I going to do with a chain-smoking severed head? Dignity is nice but it’s money makes the lights and shower work.

      I watch the welders working across the warehouse so I don’t have to look at Wells while I fold the check and slip it into my pocket.

      “At the end of time, when your side loses, I want you to remember this moment.”

      Wells narrows his eyes.

      “Why?”

      “’Cause Lucifer doesn’t expect you to thank him when he fucks you over. That’s why he’s going to win.”

      Wells looks down at the floor for a minute. Puts his hands behind his back.

      “You know, my mother watched a lot of Christian TV when I was growing up. Hellfire-and-brimstone hucksters telling Bible stories and yelling about damnation to get fools and old people to send them their welfare checks. I never paid much attention to ’em, but one day out of nowhere this one wrinkled old preacher starts telling what he says is a Persian parable. Now, that’s weird for a Baptist Bible-thumper.

      “You see, there was once a troubled man in a little village near Qom in ancient Persia.”

      “This is the story, right? ’Cause I don’t want to hear about you and your dad going off-roading.”