"What the hell is this place?"
"Bamboo House of Dolls. L.A.'s greatest and only punk-tiki club."
"Yeah, I always thought L.A. needed one of those." I'm in a bar, but something's missing. "I forgot my cigarettes. Think I can borrow one?"
"Sorry, man. You can't smoke in bars in California."
"When did that happen? That's ridiculous."
"I agree completely."
"At least I'm home for Christmas."
"Close. But you missed it by a day. Didn't Santa bring you anything?"
"This trip, maybe." I sip my drink. So, not Christmas, after all. Just Christmas enough to keep the streets deserted so no one saw me crawl home. Lucky me.
I ask, "You have today's paper?"
He reaches under the bar and drops a folded copy of the L.A. Times in front of me. I pick it up, trying not to look too eager. Can't even read the headlines. Can't focus on anything but the date at the top of the page.
Eleven years. I've been gone eleven years. I was nineteen when I went Downtown. I'm practically an old man now.
"You have any coffee back there?"
He nods. "That's how you missed Christmas. A lost weekend. I've had a few of those."
The coffee is beautiful. Hot. A little bitter, like it's been brewing for a while. I pour the last of the Jack Daniel's into it and drink. My first perfect moment in eleven years.
"You from around here?"
"I was born here, but I've been away."
"Business or pleasure?"
"Incarceration."
He smiles again. A normal one this time. "In my reckless youth, I did six months for boosting cars. What were you inside for?"
"I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth. Mostly wrong place, wrong time."
"That'll put a smile on your face." He refills my coffee cup and pours me another shot of JD. This bartender might be the finest human being I've ever met.
"So, why'd you come back?"
"I'm going to kill some people," I tell him. I pour the Jack into the coffee. "Probably a lot of people."
The bartender picks up a rag and starts wiping glasses. "Guess someone's got to."
"Thanks for understanding."
"I figure that at any given time, there's probably three to five percent of the population that are such unrepentant rat-fuck pendejos that they deserve whatever they get."
He's still wiping the same glass. It looks pretty clean to me. "Besides, I get the feeling you might have your reasons."
"That I do, Carlos."
He stops wiping. "How did you know my name was Carlos?"
"You must've said it."
"No, I didn't."
I look over his shoulder, at the wall behind the bar. "That trophy on top of the cash register. 'Carlos, World's Greatest Boss.'"
"You can read that from here?"
"Apparently." The thing with his name popping into my head? That was weird. Time to go. "What do I owe you?"
"On the house."
"You this nice to every aspiring assassin who wanders in here?"
"Only the ones who look like they just crawled out of a burning building and didn't even get their jacket dirty. And I like repeat business. Maybe now you'll come back sometime."
"You want someone who, like you said, just fell out of the devil's asshole as a regular?"
"I'd love it." He looks away, like he's trying to think of the next thing to say. "There are these guys. White boys. All tattooed, like Aryan Nation or some shit. They're coming around, wanting money for protection. A lot more money than I can afford with a little bar like this."
"And you think I can do something about them."
"You look like someone who might know what to do in a situation like this. Who wouldn't be…" That look again, groping for words. "You know… afraid."
I could tell it was really hard for him to say that. Is this why the Veritas sent me here? I'm back a couple of hours and already I'm into karmic payback? And with the carnage I have planned, but haven't even started? No, that didn't make any sense."I'm sorry. I don't think I can help you."
"How about this? Free drinks. Free food at night, too. Good burgers, ribs, tamales. You eat and drink free until the end of time."
"That's a really nice offer, but I don't think I can help you."
He looks away and starts wiping glasses again. "If you change your mind, they come on Thursdays, in the afternoon, when we're getting deliveries."
I get up and head for the door. When I'm halfway there he says, "Hey," and slides something down the bar at me. It's a pack of American Spirit browns, the nonfiltered kind. There's a pack of matches tucked under the cellophane wrap.
"Take them," he says. "I can't smoke in here, either."
Slipping on Brad Pitt's shades, I ask, "You have anymore of these back there?"
"No."
"You're a hell of a first date, Carlos." Damn. When someone gives you his last cigarette, you owe him.
Martin Denny bird chirps follow me to the door.
Turns out, I don't need the shades for long. It must have been later in the day than I thought when I went into the Bamboo House of Dolls. As I leave, the sun is almost down and lights are coming on all along the Boulevard. I've always liked Hollywood better at night. The streetlights, headlights, and flashing signs outside the tourist traps blur away the straight lines and hard right angles that ruin the place. The Boulevard is only ever real at night when it's both bright and black and there are promises hidden in every shadow. It's like it was designed and built specifically for vampires. For all I know, it was.
Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.
I count to eleven as I walk deeper into Hollywood. Eleven parking meters. Eleven hookers looking for their first post-Christmas trick. Eleven actors I never heard of on eleven stars in the sidewalk.
Eleven years. Eleven goddamn years and I'm home with a key and a pocketknife and a coin that won't buy me a cup of coffee.
Three, five, seven, eleven, all good children go to Heaven.
Gone eleven years and I make it back the day after Christmas. Is someone trying to tell me something?
I pull out one of Carlos's American Spirits and light up. The smoke feels good in my lungs. This body is starting to feel like mine again. Like me. I'm just not sure about the rest of the world.
Who the hell are all these people on the Boulevard the day after Christmas? How am I supposed to blend in with them? There's a nice guy at a bar a few blocks from here. He was just doing his job, but he had a knife in his hand and all I could do was count all the ways I knew to kill him.
It hits me then how unprepared I am for being back, how everything that made sense Downtown is strange here, wrong and ridiculous. All the skills I developed - how to draw an enemy in and how to kill, all the magic I'd learned or stolen - suddenly feels feeble and foolish in this bright and alien place. I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.
I finish off the first cigarette and light another. The world is a much louder and stranger place than I remember. I need to start doing and stop running around screaming inside my own head. Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.
I need to concentrate on what's important, like my sure and certain plans to find and kill, in as painful a way as possible, the six traitorous snakes who stole my life. And something worse. It makes me weak inside to think about it. It's a woman's face.
Her name is Alice. She's the only bright thing I ever loved, the only person I ever met worth giving a damn about. If Heaven ever meant anything, she should be married, probably now to some skinny leather-pants guitarist she has to support with temp jobs in those fluorescent-tube high-rise dungeons along Wilshire. Or she'd have gone straight, married a dentist, squeezed out a minivan full of crib lizards, and gotten fat. That would be okay, too. But none of those things are going to happen for her. Nothing nice happens to murdered women, except that maybe someone cares about how they got that way.
If Alice was still around, would she even recognize me under all these scars? There was a mirror inside the entrance to the Bamboo House of Dolls, but I'd been careful not to look at it. Walking along the Boulevard, I take quick glances at my reflection in the dim glass of dead storefronts. I'm bigger than I was when I went down, heavier with muscle and scar tissue, but still thin by human standards. I can still recognize the rough outline of my face, but it looks more like stone than flesh. My cheeks and chin are chiseled out of concrete; my eyes are dark, shining marbles above lips the color of dirty snow. I'm a George Romero zombie, except I've never been dead. Just vacationing in the land of the dead. Suddenly I want to get my hands around the throat of fat Alice's imaginary husband and squeeze him till he pops like a balloon.
That stops me cold.
It's the first time I've fantasized about killing anyone outside the Circle. What a stupid and dangerous thought. Exactly the kind of thing that will steer me away from the real job and maybe get me killed. Then I'd be right back in Hell with nothing to show for it and wouldn't that be a lot of laughs?
That leads me back to the $64,000 question: Why did the Veritas send me this way? It's interesting being back on familiar turf, but I could have brooded back at the cemetery. That's why it's called a "cemetery." And I didn't need a bartender to offer me a job or give me free smokes. With a pocketful of Brad Pitt's hundreds, I'm Richie Rich with a knife in his boot. So, why am I here?
I'm walking and smoking on a block that's two open liquor stores, an empty secondhand bookstore, a dead record store, and a shuttered sex shop. As I'm speculating on how fucked up a town has to be when it can't even keep a dildo-and-porn shop open, the inside of my skull lights up like God's own pinball machine.
I have my answer. I know why I'm here.
He's turning off the Boulevard onto Las Palmas, waddling on his little legs a short way up the block to a place called Max Overdrive Video. At the front door, he has to juggle things for a minute - transfer a cup of coffee to one hand, grip the top of a bag of doughnuts in his teeth, and do a little ass dance so he can work the keys out of his pocket and let himself into the store.
I watch him from across the street, just to make sure that I'm not imagining things. As he enters the place, I get a nice backlit shot of his face.
It's Kasabian, one of my friends from the old magic circle. One of the six on my list.
Santa brought me something, after all.
Max Overdrive Video occupies both floors of an old Hollywood town house, the kind of weekend getaway kept by the gentry back in the forties and fifties, when this area was the most glamorous place in the known universe. Kasabian is moving around inside Max Overdrive like he owns the place. I think I should go and ask him if he does.
It's full-on night now and I'm surrounded by fat, ripe shadows. I cross the street and pick a plump, dark one around the side of Max Overload, next to a health food restaurant. I glance over my shoulder to make sure the street is clear, and when I'm sure I'm alone, I slip into the shadow. The key tickles inside my chest and I emerge into the Room of Thirteen Doors.
I cross to the Door of Ice and quietly step out of the shadow on the other side.
I'm in the far back of the store, in the porn section. The lights are off back here, so I get a good look at the rest of the place.
There's a door to an employee restroom on my right, tucked back behind the porn. Just beyond this section is a chained-off stairway leading upstairs. Neat racks of DVDs and bins of VHS tapes fill the rest of the store. I guess that's something that's changed in the last eleven years. Even the porn in the back is all discs. The only tapes I can find are piled carelessly in the sale bins. VHS is dead. This is something good to remember since I don't want to sound like the Beverly Hillbillies when I'm talking to regular people. I should sit down and make a list of everything I missed while I was gone. If you can't smoke in bars anymore, what other atrocities has the world committed?
Kasabian is up front, behind the counter, going over the day's receipts. He lost some hair while I was away, but he's made up for it by getting fat. He'd always been a little chubby, but now he'd taken on a truly odd shape. Not like one of those guys who grows a big belly and man boobs. He just seems to have expanded horizontally, like a balloon filled with too much air. It's admirable in its own weird way. His chin and gut are defiant in the face of gravity, making him look more like Frosty the Snowman than Orson Welles.
I walk slowly down the main aisle toward the counter, checking the corners of the room, making sure we're alone. Kasabian is deep in thought, crunching numbers. When I'm halfway to the counter, I take Brad Pitt's stun gun from my jacket pocket and hold it behind my back.
"Evening, Kas. Long time no see."
He starts and knocks a pile of receipts to the floor. I stop where I know he can see me, but also where the lighting is weak enough that I'm pretty sure he can't see my face.
"Who the fuck are you? Get out of my store. I don't want any trouble."
"It's right after Christmas, Kas. Don't you ever take a day off?"
"Everybody's on vacation. Who are you?"
"Did you have a merry Christmas this year? Did you sing 'Happy Birthday' to baby Jesus? Maybe pick up something at Baby Gap?"