The Getaway God

[Chapter 2]

MAX OVERDRIVE IS located on Las Palmas, right off Hollywood Boulevard. It sits midway between Donut Universe and Bamboo House of Dolls, the only junk-food place and bar that matters in L.A.

Kasabian used to run the store. When I came back from Hell I cut off his head. I might have been a little hasty, but he’d just shot me and I wasn’t feeling entirely reasonable at the time.

The trick with the black blade I used on him is that if you hold it just right it cuts, but it doesn’t kill. And that’s what I did to Kasabian. He’s spent most of the last year as a disembodied head and he hasn’t shut up about it.

Lately I started feeling sorry for him, so I had a Tick Tock Man called Manimal Mike attach Kas to a mechanical hellhound. Now he sort of has a body, even if it’s a little wobbly and whirs like a toy train when he moves.

Some Lurkers are in the store. A young Lyph whose denim jacket looks like it was mugged by a Bedazzler. All rhinestones and shiny bits on the back. Jim Morrison’s face in flames. Underneath it says light my fire. Lyph have horns and hooves and tails just like Halloween devils, but they’re as sweet as peach ice cream when you get to know them.

A couple of Tykho Moon’s boys are in the shop, dressed to the nines in the best leather and latex you can steal off a dead model.

Tykho is the boss of the Dark Eternal, the biggest, baddest vampire clan in L.A. Yeah, Dark Eternal sounds kind of like an eighties Goth band, but Tykho assures me the name is a lot scarier in Latin. The Eternal have been around for a long time. Tykho’s boys are arguing, bumping shoulders like a couple of young pups, and whispering to each other.

Kasabian isn’t anywhere in sight, which isn’t a big deal. It isn’t like anyone is going to shoplift any of what we carry. Max Overdrive used to be a regular video store. We rented movies, sold new and used discs. In other words, a money pit. BitTorrent and movie streaming were killing us. Thanks to Kasabian’s obsessive collecting, our impressive porn and horror collections kept us afloat for a while, but we were going down fast. Now we’re a boutique shop catering to a select clientele of Sub Rosas, Lurkers, and a few civilians with money and a taste for something special. Mainly, movies that don’t exist.

The taller of Tykho’s boys turns and spots me. He wears a patch over one eye. Sucks for him. He must have lost it while he was still alive and couldn’t regenerate it when he turned. He gives me a toothy smile and comes over. Leans on the counter, hooking his thumb at the rack of our specialty movies.

“Don’t get me wrong, Stark. I appreciate all the artsy stuff, but don’t you have anything that’s actually fun?”

What we rent mostly now are lost movies. Movies cut to pieces by the studios or lost in fires or time. Movies that literally don’t or shouldn’t exist anymore in this dimension of reality.

“London After Midnight is fun. It’s a murder mystery. Lon Chaney plays a creepy guy with a giant set of fangs and a weird beaver hat, who might be a vampire.”

Eye Patch leans back, frowning.

“Silent movies? Those are as scary as a damp sponge.”

“That means you wouldn’t like Metropolis. I have the only totally complete copy in the world with the original score, you know.”

He shakes his head.

“Not interested.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened. We only have one rack of special discs. We’re still building up inventory. You think it’s easy conjuring video and film from other dimensions? It’s not. And the young curandera I contracted with to get them charges a fortune for each one.

“What is it you want?”

“Action. Guns. Explosions.”

“Go home, crack open a light beer, turn on your TV, and find some Michael Bay shit.”

“Come on, man. You have any Clint Eastwood?”

“No special ones. You like his spaghetti westerns?”

The shorter vampire comes over when I mention westerns.

“Who doesn’t?” he says.

I point to an old poster on the wall.

“You know that gangster flicks are the natural descendants of those Italian westerns, right? Action. Crime. Lawless loners and gangs riding the range, only in cars, not on horseback. Antiheroes and ambiguous heroes who aren’t all good or all evil. You follow me?”

Eye Patch says, “Look at you. The philosopher.”

“Once Upon a Time in America is what you want. Leone shot it to run five hours. The studio cut it to ninety minutes. Later there was a three-hour version, but it still wasn’t the whole thing. If you like cowboys, you’ll like it.”

“Who’s in it?” says Eye Patch. His buddy goes over to the poster and reads off names.

“Robert De Niro. James Woods. Joe Pesci. Tuesday Weld. William Forsythe …”

“Sold,” says Eye Patch.

“Good choice,” I say, taking a disc from under the counter. I put it in a couple of plastic bags to keep it from getting wet.

“Your turn to pay,” says Eye Patch. His friend sighs, which always hits me as slightly creepy. I mean, vampires don’t breathe, so sighing is something they have to practice. Willing their diaphragms to move, sucking air in and pushing it out again. It’s a lot of work just to sound disgusted.

Short guy slaps a hundred-dollar bill on the counter.

“Your prices are highway robbery.”

“You can find any of our movies somewhere cheaper, go rent from them.”

Eye Patch puts the disc in the pocket of his PVC jacket.

“I always wondered about that. How do you keep people from bootlegging your wares?”

I get out another disc, an original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, and show him the runes inscribed around the edge.

“The discs are hexed. They know when they’re being copied and melt down like a nuke plant, killing themselves and whatever machine they’re in. We have an alarm rigged up that goes off when it happens. Store policy is that you kill my disc, well, you know.”

“You kill them?”

“Don’t be stupid. I can’t kill off my customer base. No, I just cut off their fingers and feed them to Kasabian.”

From the back room Kasabian yells, “I heard that. Fuck you.”

“See? A barely controlled beast.”

“Take it easy, Stark,” says Eye Patch. “How long do we have the movie?”

“Three days. After that, it’s a hundred-dollar-a-day late fee.”

The short vampire gets their umbrellas from the bin up front.

“You’re a fucking thief, you know that?” he says.

“Wrong. I’m P. T. Barnum. You want to see the Fiji mermaid, I’m the only one in town who has one and no one gets in free.”

“This movie better be fucking great.”

“If you don’t like it, come back and you can exchange it for one of these.”

I hold up my middle finger.

Eye Patch laughs. When his friend takes a step toward me, he puts a hand on his shoulder and he backs down. Yeah, the short one is new to the bloodsucker game. Anxious to show off his power. Good thing he’s got Eye Patch looking out for him. He might actually make it to New Year’s.

The Lyph comes over and asks for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part 3.

“You have good taste,” I say.

She lays down a hundred.

“You too,” she says. Her horns are still a little damp. Rain beads on them like she’s glued rhinestones there too.

“You okay getting home with your radar showing?”

She realizes I mean her horns and grins.

“I’m fine. The umbrella has a glamour on it.”

She picks it up and instantly looks like the kind of sweet old lady who spends her days baking apple pies for orphans.

“Nice trick.”

“Thanks,” she says, setting the umbrella against the wall. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you wear that one glove?”

I hold up my left hand. The prosthetic one. Flex the fingers.

“I paid good money for this manicure. I’m not messing up my cuticles around here.”

She hesitates.

“People call you Michael Jackson behind your back, you know.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

She purses her lips in embarrassment.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just, you hear stories.”

I hand her the disc.

“No problem. For a hundred dollars a movie, I guess you’re entitled to a question or two.”

She glances around the store.

“You have some really nice stuff, but you ought to expand into BBC shows.”

“Which ones?”

“In the early sixties they used to erase a lot of TV to save on videotape. They lost old Doctor Whos. The Avengers. Cool shows like that. I have friends who’d kill for those.”

“Tell you what, make me a list of what you want and I’ll see what I can do.”

From the back, Kasabian yells, “That’s TV. We don’t do TV.”

I shake my head.

“Ignore him. He’s a snob. Bring me the list and your next rental is free.”

“Awesome,” she says. She gets her umbrella, does her old lady trick, and heads out. Stopping by the door she says, “Merry Christmas.”

“Same to you, Mrs. Cratchit.”

She opens the door and a blast of wind blows rain inside. It’s coming down hard enough that the street out front is flooding again. I lock the door behind her.

“Cute girl,” says Kasabian, coming out of the back. His mechanical legs click with each step. He wears a loose knockoff Nike tracksuit. It makes him look like the movie version of a Russian mobster, if Russian mobsters were robots.

“Nice salesmanship with her,” he says. “Not so much with the guys you threatened.”

“The little guy annoyed me. Anyway, we need signs or warning labels or something on the discs. I don’t want to keep having that conversation.”

“If it’ll calm you down I’ll print out something.”

“Yeah, it would.”

Kasabian has lost more hair in the year since I’ve been back. His face is still as round as it ever was. Must be the hoodoo keeping him alive. He eats plenty, but the food drops right through a tube in his mechanical body, so it’s not like he’s taking in any calories.

“You’re in a mood,” he says. “You and the other Johnny Laws have a busy day arresting jaywalkers?”

“It was a funny day, now that you ask. I cut off a guy’s head, and when he died I followed him into limbo. Sound familiar?”

Kasabian touches his throat.

“You and cutting people’s heads off,” he says. “You’re like an alcoholic, only with a guillotine.”

I think about getting a drink, but the moment has passed. I don’t want it anymore. I’m worried about Candy.

“You notice anything about Candy recently?” I say. “She wasn’t feeling well at work.”

“Was she there when you started lopping heads off, because regular people aren’t exactly used to that?”

“Candy isn’t regular people. She’s seen a little blood in her time.”

Candy is a Lurker. A Jade. They’re kind of like vampires, only scarier. More like spiders, really. They don’t drink their victims’ blood. They dissolve them from the inside and drink them dry. Candy has been clean for years. Doc Kinski came up with a potion that curbs her appetite for human milk shakes. After he died, Allegra stepped in and took over his practice and has been giving Candy all the Jade methadone she needs.

“How’s the swami biz?” I say, wanting to change the subject.

“This is how it is,” says Kasabian, dropping a pile of printouts on the counter.

“What are these?”

“Requests from potential clients.”

Kasabian started a little side business a few weeks back and it’s taken off like a bottle rocket out of a carny’s ass. He can’t go to Hell like I can, but he can see into the place. He set himself up as an online seer. For a fee, he’ll tell you how the dearly departed are getting on in the Abyss. Seeing as how most people seem to end up down there, he doesn’t lack for clients.

Kasabian riffles the pages with his pointy hellhound claws.

“All these people have family or friends Downtown. And all want more than I can give them. Paying clients don’t want to hear about sweet Aunt Suzy up to her eyeballs in a river of shit.”

“And this concerns me how?”

“Most of these people want to, you know, talk to the departed. Hear a story about redemption, maybe. Mostly, they want to know where they hid the good silver or did they really love them. You know. Normal family bullshit.”

“And you want me to go Downtown and play twenty questions with damned souls because they don’t have enough problems.”

“Yes. That’s what I always want. Come on, man. Look at the streets. This city is going to be empty soon. Empty and underwater. It’s no-shit Ragnarök. People want to know what to expect on the other side.”

I shake my head. Push the papers back across the counter.

“Not my problem. And I told you. Mr. Muninn is still pissed at me for stealing Father Traven’s soul. He doesn’t want me back in his petting zoo playing with the animals.”

“It doesn’t have to be all of them,” says Kasabian. “Just for a few of the high rollers. We need the money.”

That much is right. We are severely on the rocks. Kasabian squirreled away a few grand from a payoff I got from the Dark Eternal when I put down some pain-in-the-ass zombies. But we blew the last of that fixing up Max Overdrive so we could live here and reopen the store. The special video section is bringing in cash, but barely enough to pay for beer and utilities.

“Okay. Cash is a good incentive, but seriously, Hell is kind of off-limits for me right now.”

“What about Samael? Would he do it if you asked nice?”

“You think you’re going to bribe Samael with money? He’s a fucking angel. He doesn’t carry a lot of pocket change.”

Kasabian picks up the paper. Taps it on the counter to straighten the edges.

“Maybe Muninn would be happier to see you than you think. Hell isn’t looking too pretty right now.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing, that’s the problem. All the public-works projects, fixing the place up after you broke it …”

“That wasn’t my fault. Samael fucked it up when he was still Lucifer. I just let it get a little worse when I was running the place.”

“Whatever you say, man. Well, it’s all stopped. They’re not even pretending to put the place back together again.”

“That doesn’t sound like Muninn.”

“You so sure he’s still in charge?”

“I’d know if anything changed.”

“How?”

“I just would.”

“Okay, Cassandra, there’s something else. Did it rain much when you were down there?”

“No. I don’t remember it raining at all.”

“Well, it is now. Raining cats and dogs and little imps with pitchforks. I mean, there’s doomed. There’s screwed. And there’s monsoons-in-Hell fucked. And we’re at fucked o’clock.”

Suddenly I want a cigarette. I take out the Maledictions. I go to the back door and open it, blowing the smoke outside. Candy doesn’t like me stinking the place up with cigarettes that smell like a tire fire.

“I don’t get it. Could the Angra be doing it?”

“Who cares? It’s happening and whoever’s in charge down there can’t stop it. What makes you think I can?”

“You were the Devil,” says Kasabian.

It’s true. I got stuck with Lucifer’s job for three miserable months. And what do you know? I wasn’t good at being a bureaucrat or a diplomat. I fucked Hell up worse than it was when I got there, and barely made it out with my hide intact.

“You know God,” Kasabian says. “Get him off his backside. Or better yet, hide us in your magic room. You’ve always said that nothing can get in there. It’s the perfect fallout shelter.”

I puff the Malediction, cupping it in my hand so the rain doesn’t put it out.

“So your solution to the end of the universe is to hide for the next billion years in the Room of Thirteen Doors? A room with nothing in it and nowhere to go.”

“Okay. It doesn’t sound great when you say it like that. But we could fill it up with food and water and movies. Everything we need.”

“There’s no electric outlets in the Room, and more important, no toilets. Get the picture?”

Kasabian comes over to the door and sticks his fat face into the rain, looking up into the black sky like maybe if he stares long enough God will part the clouds and give him a thumbs-up.

“If we can’t hide, then fix this shit. My business is going to fall apart when people realize they don’t need me to find their relatives because they’re going to be Downtown soon enough themselves.”

He wipes the rain off his face with his sleeve and heads to the back of the shop where his rooms are.

“If anyone wants me I’ll be having a Béla Tarr festival in my boudoir.”

“Bullshit. You don’t watch gloomy Hungarians when you’re depressed. You’ll be watching porn all night.”

He gives me the finger without turning around and closes the door to his Batcave. I head upstairs.

Yeah, we’re broke now, but it was money well spent. We got Max Overdrive up and running again, at least on a small scale. And we fixed the place up so it’s less like a crash pad for a crazy person and a dead man and more like a place where actual people might live.

Kasabian has the ground floor, in three small rooms built behind the video racks. Candy and I have the upstairs. Three rooms like he has, with a little kitchen area. When we were building the place, all I insisted on was a bed with an extra-strong frame, the largest flat screen humanly possible, and a dishwasher. I would have been happy eating off paper plates with plastic forks for the rest of my life, but Candy said I should stop pretending that the world is a squat and that I’m just passing through. I’ve stuck around for almost a year, so maybe she’s right. After losing room service and our cushy life at the Chateau Marmont, there was nowhere else for us to go but Max Overdrive. I don’t think Candy ever lived anywhere very long before Doc Kinski took her in. She doesn’t talk about her life before that. If playing Ozzie and Harriet makes her happy, then it’s all right with me. But I’m still not folding fucking pillowcases. Good thing for everyone there’s a laundry down the block.

Why has she been moody and off her feed lately? Today wasn’t the first time she’s been mad enough to snap. What if she feels like she got in too deep with the domestic bliss stuff? She dumped me once before, back when I disappeared for three months in Hell. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if after getting sheets and plates and all kinds of kitchen trinkets, she decides she can’t handle it? It wouldn’t exactly surprise me. Most of my luck revolves around breaking things. If every day was car chases and sawing people’s heads off, I’d be the Pope of Lucky Town.

[Chapter 3]

CANDY COMES HOME about an hour later. I have Spirited Away going on the big screen. Her favorite movie when she’s feeling down. She sticks her head around the door and raps on it with her knuckles.

“Knock, knock,” she says. “I brought a peace offering. Burritos from Bamboo House of Dolls.”

“Then you may enter.”

“Thank you, sir.”

She puts the burritos on the table. She left her jacket downstairs, but her jeans are soaked through. She’s even given up her Chuck Taylor sneakers for shin-high rubber boots with skulls and stars. She takes them off and tosses them in the tub, then comes over and flops down next to me on the secondhand sofa.

“What are we watching?”

“If you don’t remember it, Allegra needs to check you for a brain tumor.”