“You might want to speak to your butlers or whatever kind of flunkies you have up there. Sounds like someone is pilfering your liquor cabinet.”
I close in to whispering distance.
“How easy will it be for whoever stole the bottle to find the note?”
He waves his hand dismissively.
“It’s sealed under the label. You’d have to look for it to find it, so I wouldn’t worry. And any future bottles I send your way will be rotgut. Feeding your demon staff is not my job.”
One more thing to worry about. One more reason to punch someone very hard.
“I’ll go through the staff offices with hellhounds and a flamethrower. I bet that will turn up the bottle. Hell, maybe the Holy Grail and Amelia Earhart’s bones too.”
Bill looks past my shoulder as he lights another cigar. I half turn and see legionnaires staring at us. I slap the cigar from his mouth, grab him, and push him hard around the side of the building.
“Move, drytt!”
When we’re in the dark, I let Bill go. He shoves me with his free hand and balls the other into a fist.
He yells, “What the hell are you playing at, boy?”
“We were being watched. Hellions and damned souls don’t have heart-to-hearts in public.”
He lowers his hand and uses it to rub the arm I grabbed, more out of annoyance than pain.
“I suppose you’re right. Still, I don’t care for being rough-housed.”
“Would you rather I shoved you and stopped or that one of those other assholes who’d mean it did?”
“I suppose you have a point. But it don’t make me any less aggravated.”
“So what did the letter say?”
He leans his back against the bar and feels around for another cigar. Pulling one out, he lights it and glances back at the one I knocked to the ground. Cigars and cigarettes aren’t easy things for the damned to come by. I’ll send him a box in the morning.
“It wasn’t much of anything,” he says. “You’re always concerned with how the local populace regards you. From what I’ve seen, the rabble takes you as the grand exalted master of the infernal hindquarters just fine. Though your boisterous days as Sandman Slim have left a deeper impression. You’re credited with every cutthroat murder and cracked skull in town, of which there are more than a few.”
“Lucky me. Most people don’t get hated for one life. I’m hated for two. If I get a part-time gig as a meter maid, I can probably make it three.”
I find Mason’s lighter in my pocket but nothing to smoke.
“Do you have any cigarettes? I left mine back home.”
Home. That’s a bad habit. Stop thinking that way.
“Sorry. My last smoke went down the shitter when you knocked it out of my mouth.”
“Liar.”
He half smiles and pulls a pack from another pocket. Bill’s been in enough saloons to know that a well-timed cigarette can calm an argument quicker than an ax handle.
“Was there anything else in the note?”
Bill takes a while tapping the Malediction out for me. At first I think it’s just how a man who spent decades rolling his own smokes handles premade cigarettes. Then it hits me that he’s stalling.
“No. I don’t suppose there was anything else that mattered in there.”
I check both ends of the alley for movement. Nothing.
More secrets. Just what I need. Is he changing sides? Bill isn’t the happiest saloonkeeper in the universe. Taking orders and abuse from drunk Hellions isn’t what he’s built for. Maybe someone made him a better offer. Is there anywhere in this fucking town I don’t have to look over my shoulder? Do I have to fill the Bamboo House with peepers now?
I turn and start away.
“I shouldn’t keep you from your bar, Bill. Thanks for the information.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I’m thinking about getting drunk and seeing if I can pick a fight at the arena. I still want some carnage tonight.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
I stop and look back at him.
“You can do that? Just walk around?”
He holds out Lucifer’s mark.
“This keeps me out of all kinds of trouble. These pig fuckers might stab each other over a nickel’s worth of beer, but they aren’t about to break the Devil’s toys.”
“Come on, then.”
“Give me a minute. I got saddled with a dim Hellion for help. Boy’d be a good thief if he ever actually took anything instead of losing it. He’s too dumb to steal and too clumsy for the legions, so they made him a barman, which, sadly, in my experience is just about right.”
I light the cigarette and watch Bill go inside. Johnny Cash singing “Ain’t No Grave” drifts out when he opens the door.
I hate not trusting him. It’s been nice being able to be human with him for a few minutes at a time. It’s one of the few things that’s kept me sane. If he leads me into another ambush, I’ll know what side he’s really on. If I’m on my own, that’s just the way it is. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Bill comes back to the side of the bar a minute later and cocks his head for me to follow him.
“Which way do you think is best?” I ask, giving him an opening to lead me down any blind alley he wants.
“Through the market, I reckon. There’s a lot of traffic and people are looking at the goods and not at faces.”
And crowds are good places to stick a knife in someone’s back and disappear.
“Sounds good. Let’s go.”
We walk in silence. I can’t hear his heart or his breathing, but I can see him fine and Bill’s movements are definitely tense.
We pass the site where the new City Hall will go up. This Convergence L.A. is solid but there are small places where the real Hell peeks through. Like these Hellion cranes. The cabs are rounded and covered in heavy wired mesh and they have six or eight big portholes instead of windshields. They look a lot more like giant bugs grabbing food with long chitinous beaks than construction equipment.
Bill says, “You’re quiet all of a sudden. Usually you’re the chatterbox and I’m the one waiting to get a word in.”
The market stalls cover the sidewalks and spill onto the roads where the original stores and businesses have burned or been abandoned. The big stalls sell anything a fine upstanding Hellion could want, most of it black market. Clean clothes. Jewelry. Health and hex potions. High-end Aqua Regia and wine.
“I was thinking about who I should flay alive for selling all of Hell’s goods to these Harry Lime pricks.”
“I see. Maybe you’ve got more of the devil in you than even I credited you with.”
“Maybe it’s time to see just how much.”
There are ghosts in the crowd. Not damned souls. Ghosts. A few of them follow us.
Bill says, “Back there at the bar, you might have noticed I didn’t want to say some things.”
“I noticed that.”
Bill looks at me.
“That’s a cold tone. You peg me for a bushwhacker now