Aloha from Hell

“Amen to that.”

WHEN WE’RE BACK in the car I call the Sentenzas. K.W. answers.

“K.W., it’s Stark. Did Hunter ever tell you where he got his drugs? Maybe give you a name?”

A slight pause.

“It was a girl. Not a girlfriend exactly, but someone he spent time with. Hang on a minute.”

Over the phone comes the sound of things being moved. Furniture scrapes. K.W. curses. Then he’s back on the phone.

“I knew he’d written it down somewhere. Her name is Carolyn. Carolyn McCoy.”

“Is there an address?”

He reads it to me.

“Okay. Thanks. We’ll be in touch.”

I call up the phone’s map app and punch in the address. It’s off the Golden State Freeway in Sun Valley.

Vidocq is in the backseat. I turn to look at him.

“How did you hear about Akira? Did you ever try it?”

He shakes his head.

“No. What Hunter’s father said at the house was wrong. Akira is nothing new. Like all drugs, it goes in and out of favor. I haven’t heard it mentioned for perhaps two years. It sounds as if it’s coming back. I’m a bit surprised.”

“Why?”

“It’s not an easy thing to fashion. The chemistry must be precise. Even a small mistake and you will not have synthesized Akira, but a very potent neurotoxine. Also, many of the elements are not readily available. Some of the plants and herbs required can only be cultivated in native soil. A mountaintop in China. A rain forest in Brazil. You must find a reliable source of the pure ingredients even to attempt to formulate Akira.”

“How is it you know so much about it?”

“I was once asked to manufacture it. I was offered quite a large sum of money, in fact. I refused, but they asked again. Each time they asked, the amount of money increased, but I still refused.” He turns and looks out the window. “Finally I said yes. Not because I wanted the money, but because I’m a coward, and when they grew insistent, I was afraid to keep saying no.”

“Was it Mater Leeds? I heard that she and her people are big dope suppliers to the Sub Rosa.”

He shakes his head and looks at me.

“No. It was Marshal Wells. The Golden Vigil wanted Akira.”

I frown and look at Vidocq. He nods.

“What would a bunch of Homeland Security Bible-thumpers want with Akira? Were their office parties better than I thought?” I ask.

“I suspect they were interested in the drug’s psychic aspects. They had many staff psychics, but mind reading has never been a precise art and subjects can resist. Now imagine that you had a drug that made a psychic link pleasurable. A drug that made the subject being interrogated feel as merry as New Year’s Eve.”

“Wells would love that. It sounds like something Aelita would love. Or Lucifer.”

They tried something like that on me Downtown. For a while I was fighting in the arena so much that they gave me quarters in the basement. They made a big deal of it. Really it was just another holding pen, but it had four walls and a door and I had it to myself. I was so grateful I kicked and punched my guards harder than ever when they came for me. It was worth taking a beating to keep them from knowing that the filthy room made me happy.

When I was in Hell a funny thing happened. Every time I got beaten, burned, stabbed, or impaled in the arena, it just made me stronger. When I discovered I was a nephilim, it all made sense. But at the time I didn’t know why it was happening. The Hellion fight masters and soldiers wanted to know why I didn’t have anything useful to tell them and they beat me more. Which only made me stronger. Hellions aren’t always clear on cause and effect.

Then they started the mind games. They’d spike my food with a kind of Hellion Ecstasy and send in the damned soul of a pretty murderess to play concubine. We’d work each other for a while, and when I was good and relaxed the questions would start. I didn’t even realize I was being interrogated, it felt so good talking to another human. But I still couldn’t answer their questions because I didn’t have any answers. They tried young women and old ones, boys and oiled-up beefcake. They still didn’t get any answers and by then my body had grown used to the drugs. But I could fake it. When the last devil doll didn’t get any answers, a gaggle of disappointed guards bum-rushed my cell and did the hokeypokey on my head. I’d been in my Folsom Prison mansion a few weeks by then. I’d found the weak bolt in the iron door on my second night. I’d worked it out with my nails and teeth and had been sharpening it on the stone walls ever since.

I shoved it through one guard’s ankle and kept going north, peeling off his calf muscle. That caught the other guards by surprise and they stopped kicking me for a second. Just enough time for me to get hold of one and shove the bolt into his thigh, opening up an artery that painted my walls and the last two guards with glistening black Hellion blood. It looked like we’d struck oil in there. They didn’t try the pleasure principle on me again, which was nice, but a couple of days later I lost my private suite and got moved back to the bunkhouse with the other cattle. Moo, motherfucker.

“So you made it for them.”

Vidocq nods.

“Yes. To give myself just a little credit, I did it rather badly. After several attempts in which I produced mild forms of the drug and pure poison in one case, I convinced the marshal that the ingredients he had acquired were of too poor a quality. I suppose he believed me because I remained alive and unincarcerated.”

“That’s good news, then,” says Candy.

I look at her.

“If it’s so hard to make and there are so few dealers, that means it’s a small operation, right?”

“Or a bunch of lousy ones,” I say.

Vidocq shakes his head.

“No. If people had died from Akira, there would be rumors everywhere. Candy is right. Akira is a specialized business. Possibly as small as one or two labs.”

“See,” Candy says. “I’m a good detective too.”

“Just like Philip Marlowe. He’s the one with the robot glasses in The Maltese Falcon, right?”

Candy sticks her tongue out at me. The sight of it is more distracting than I want it to be.

“Thanks for the talk. I think I’ve got things clearer. Now both of you get out. I’m doing this thing alone.”

Silence. Then Vidocq pipes up.

“Do you think that’s wise? You’re not in the best frame of mind today.”

“That’s why you’re not coming. Call a cab.”

“Stark—” says Candy. I cut her off.

“I mean it. You’re both reasonable and I don’t want reasonable around when I talk to an Akira dealer.”

Neither of them moves. Candy’s up front with me. I reach across her and open the door.

“Go. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I’m calling you in one hour,” she says. “If you don’t like it, tough.”

Candy and Vidocq get out. I leave them on the curb and head for the 405.

I can already picture Carolyn as one of those seductive damned souls that used to hover around my room under the arena. Getting me high. Getting me talking. Treating me like the soft fool I was back then. I’m not soft now and I’m even less forgiving. I don’t know if Carolyn’s blood is red or black, but if things go right, I just might find out.

CAROLYN MCCOY LIVES on Cantara Street in a run-down tract home surrounded by a low metal fence and a half-dead lawn where patches of bleak grass break through the bare soil. Her house is right across the street from Sun Valley Park. Prime real estate for a small-time dealer.

I knock on her front door. It takes a while for anything to happen. I can hear someone banging around inside. I surprised her. She’s hiding her stash.

The front door opens. Carolyn doesn’t open the screen door, but stands there blinking in the sun like a not very bright groundhog. I’ve seen exhumed corpses with better tans.

“Who the fuck are you?” she says.

I lean close to the screen and smile.

“Hi. I’m a young college student trying to earn extra money selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Would you be interested in a ten- to twenty-year subscription to Possession with Intent to Sell, and its sister publication, I’m Going to Burn Your House Down While You’re Asleep in Bed Tonight?”

She stares, her mouth open a little, like she’s trying to form a question but forgot how to speak English in the last three seconds. I pull the screen door open and brush past her inside. She stands there, turns, and watches me invade her living room.

Carolyn has short dry hair that frames her face perfectly. She’d be pretty if she didn’t have deep bruise-colored rings around her eyes and her skin wasn’t the texture of sandpaper. There are red welts on the inside of her arms where she’s been compulsively picking at the skin. I can smell not-quite-metabolized meth in her sweat. Her heart’s jacked up and her eyes are pinpricks, but that’s the drugs and not me. The angel in my head wants me to go easy so the back of her skull doesn’t blow off and take her brain with it. That’s a good idea. On the other hand, she’s dealing DHS black-box psychic poison to teenyboppers who don’t have a clue that demons, Kissi, and other brain-sucking assholes are out there waiting to get a claw hold in their cortex.

Carolyn stands by the door, arms crossed. When the clockwork in her brain kicks back in, she follows me into an avocado-and-orange living room with overstuffed chairs, throw pillows, and a long rattan sofa. It looks like the set for a seventies snuff film. She stops a few feet away and looks at me with a jittery stare, trying to figure out if she should know me. If she owes me money. If I owe her.

“Sit down,” I say.

She doesn’t. I take a step toward her.

“Sit down,” I say again.

She walks around me and sits on the sofa, knees together, hands folded in her lap like she just graduated from charm school. I sit across from her on a cushioned green chair. I pull it over to the sofa so we’re sitting face-to-face. The chair springs are long gone and my ass tries to sink below my knees. Not a good look when you want to come across as intimidating. I slide forward and sit on the edge of the chair.

“Are you a cop?” she asks.

“Do you think I’m a cop?”

“No.”

“Then maybe we should go from there and see where it takes us. Is that all right with you, Carolyn?”

“Fine. Whatever. If you’re not a cop, who are you?”

“I lied earlier. I’m not a college student.”

She starts picking at the skin on her left arm.

“Stop that. You dig that arm open and you’re going to get gangrene in a dusty shithole like this.”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t, but it’s annoying to look at.”

“What the fuck is it you want? You want money? Do I look like I have any money? Look around.”

She waves a hand at the general wreckage. It’s not so much that the place is a mess, it’s that nothing is where any sane person would put it. It’s like everything she owns, from furniture to coffee cups, she’s used once and then dropped where she was when she was done with it.

“I don’t have to look, Carolyn. I know that whatever kind of pig wallow you live in, you have money because you’re a dealer,” I say. “I can see it in your eyes and hear it in the tiny catches in your voice. You’re also strung out and about six months from a fatal stroke. You know you have high blood pressure, don’t you? That doesn’t mix well with meth.”

She lifts her head, still eyeing me.

“How do you know that?”

She gnaws on her thumb. Her fingernails have all been chewed down to the quick. There’s plaster dust on her fingertips.

“It’s just a trick I do. I know things about people. Like how all the money you say you don’t have is stuffed in a hiding place in the wall.”

The look she gives me is halfway between anger and dumb wonder.

“When did you come in my house?”

“I’ve never been here before. That was just to show you that lying isn’t going to get you anywhere fun.”

“If you want the money, take it. I’m sick. I can’t stop you.”

“I don’t want your money. I just want a name or two.”

“What name?”

“Before we get to that, did you sell Akira to Hunter Sentenza?”

She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees, jacked up and exhausted at the same time.

“I didn’t sell it to him. I gave it to him. We’re like, you know, friends. We’re going to get clean together.”

I look at her. Her brain is vibrating so fast I can’t read her. I go another way.

“Why not? You’ve got yourself a nice rich-boy client who was going to pay for your treatment. What was the plan? You take a walk your second day in and pocket whatever refund money you can con out of the clinic?”

She shakes her head and her straw-dry hair sways around her cheeks.

“It’s not like that. Hunter and me are friends. We’re going to do it together. For real this time.”

“Then you haven’t heard about him.”

She sits up. Alert and for the first time somewhat focused.

“Something happened to Hunter?”

“He’s missing. It was that last dose of Akira. His brain threw a rod. He jumped through a window and now he’s missing.”

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

She covers her face with her hands. That was dumb. Never tell meth heads the truth. The whole reason they’re high is they’re severely reality-phobic. I snap my fingers in front of Carolyn’s face. Lightly slap her arms.

“Come back to earth, Carolyn. We need you. Hunter needs you.”

“Will he be okay?”

“I don’t know. It depends entirely on what you can tell me. I need the name of your supplier.”

“Why do you need that? Why aren’t you out looking for him?”

“Do you know where to start looking?”

“No.”

“Neither do we. What we do know is that Hunter used Akira without any problems and then all of a sudden he went psychobilly. I have a bad feeling that maybe there was something wrong with that last batch. Hunter’s reaction wasn’t a regular OD. It was real specific, so I want to know what was in there, who put it in there, and why.”

She sits up and shakes her head. Draws her hands close to her body.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Yes, you can. You’re Hunter’s friend and you want him found so the two of you can get better together.”

“I can’t.”

I scoot forward on the chair and lean close to Carolyn. She freezes, trying to keep her eyes from meeting mine.

“Or maybe you’re not Hunter’s friend and you gave him a hot shot. Is that what you did, Carolyn? Did someone give you a special dose of Akira just for Hunter?”

Stop digging, boys, we struck oil.

Carolyn’s brain is still humming like a tuning fork, but at least she’s focused on something now. It’s there in her eyes. She’s beating herself silly trying to make all the contradictions and lies in her life add up to something sane. She really believes she’s Hunter’s friend, but the meth fog she lives in lets her justify giving Hunter drugs she knew were bad because someone up the food chain promised her more drugs or more money or the chance to settle a long-standing debt. Whatever her reasons, she feels guilty as hell. The addict self-pity tears start pumping out of her red and bruised eyes. I want to smack her to see if it snaps her brain back into gear, but I just pat her lightly on the shoulder. I keep my voice low, like I’m speaking to a child.

“Who gave you the special Akira?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Sure you can. Just give me a name, I’ll go, and you can get back to turning your brain to fish food.”

“Fuck you.”

She practically spits the words. Her whole body changes. She was a limp jellyfish a second ago and now she’s ready to put her fist through the wall. We’re on to the next step in this soap opera. She’s not thinking like a tame little user now. She’s moved into dealer mode. Hard-core. Defiant.

“Do you believe in magic, Carolyn?”

“Get out of my house, faggot.”

“I don’t mean kid-party magic. I mean the real thing. Witches on brooms. Love potions. Hexes and demons. Do you believe in that?”

“You know, one phone call and you’ll be smoked before you get back to Hollywood.”

I run through some ideas. There are a lot of scary things I learned in the arena, but I only used them on Hellions and Lurkers. Ninety-nine percent of what I learned I’ve never tried on a civilian and I don’t particularly want to because I’m pretty sure they’d go off like a gerbil in a microwave.

Her hands are shaking from the drugs, but she’s past scared and is deep into gangster territory.

She puts on her best Scarface sneer and says, “You just going to sit there staring at me? I know you. Pussies like you talk and talk, but you won’t do anything. You don’t know the kind of people I know. They have balls.”

She sniffs and wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her hand.

I take out Mason’s lighter, thumb it open, and spark a flame. Her eyes flicker to mine and then zero in on the lighter.

“I’d like to show you a magic trick. Would you like to see a magic trick, Carolyn?”

She gets up. I grab her arm. She twists and tries to sucker punch me. Puts her whole body into it. I don’t try to stop her. I’m faster than any civilian, so she’s moving in exquisite slo-mo. When she’s a few inches from making contact, I lean back slightly and let her fist sail past. Grab the wrist and twist so her arm bends out like a chicken wing and every muscle and tendon in her shoulder feels like it’s going to snap. Carolyn goes down face-first onto the sofa and rolls herself into a little ball, squeezing her aching shoulder. I wait. Eventually, she sits up. There’s a half-finished cigarette in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. She takes it, puts it between her lips, and starts looking around for matches. I’m still holding the lighter. I hold the flame out to her. She leans forward. I pull the lighter back and she follows a few inches. When she realizes I’m fucking with her, she stops and gives me a dirty look.

I say, “Let me get that for you for real.”

There’s one thing you have to remember about threats: when you make one, mean it. This is especially true with addicts. Their brains aren’t designed to absorb new information and they’re used to being slapped and stomped, so that doesn’t scare them anymore. If you need to impress upon an addict the gravity of their situation, you need to make a threat that doesn’t seem like a threat, but more like God pissing on them from a mountaintop.

I hold the lighter to my hand and my skin bursts into flames. Fire is fire and this isn’t fun hoodoo, but I can stand the pain long enough to make my point.

Carolyn jumps back at the sight of my burning mitt. I play it up. Let the meat cook black until it flakes, and crispy skin drifts onto the carpet. I could let it get down to the bone, but I really don’t want to do that. I move my hand toward Carolyn. She presses herself against the back of the sofa, trying to put as much distance as she can between us. I touch the tip of a finger to her cigarette until it glows.

“This is what I meant by magic. I know worse tricks than this, but let’s focus on this one for the moment. What do you think would happen if I held you with this hand and used you to mop up this messy, messy house? Does that sound like fun? I think it would hurt. Maybe as much as it hurt Hunter when that shit you gave him turned him into a demon’s chew toy. I’m going to ask you one more time, and if you fuck with me, things are going to get drastic. Who gave you the Akira for Hunter?”

“Cale,” she says.

She takes a long breath after she says it. Rubs the sores on her arms. She wants to pick at them, but she knows I don’t like that.

“Cale what?”

She shrugs.

“I don’t know. Just Cale.” She nods at my still-burning hand. “I’ve seen him do weird shit like that, too. Like magic and shit.”

“Where can I find Cale?”

“Downtown. At Dead Set. It’s a club on Traction Avenue near Hewitt. You can’t miss it. At night they show old zombie movies on the side of the building.”

“What’s Cale look like?”

“Tall. Skinny. He wears big boots to look taller and he wears one of those, like, Nazi-officer trench coats. His hair is bleached all white and there’s like these runes or some kind of voodoo shit tattooed on the sides of his head.”

I whisper some Hellion and the flames on my hand flutter and disappear. There’s most of a flat can of beer on the floor next to the sofa. I pour it over my aching hand. The beer bubbles and steams away. I hand Carolyn the empty can. She clutches it to herself like it’s a holy relic. I wipe the beer off my hand on the sofa and get up.

“Remember what I said, Carolyn. Go see a doctor about your blood pressure. You’re about to lose your supplier, so your job is going to evaporate. The good news is that Cale won’t be asking for any of that money you have in the wall. Take it and use it to clean yourself up. Dying isn’t the worst thing in the world, but dying because you’re stupid is.”

I head out the front door. I’m halfway across the doomed lawn when I hear Carolyn yell something. I go back to the house. Behind the bright mesh of the screen door Carolyn looks like a ghost child.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She leans forward so that her face is almost touching the screen and whispers, “Tell Hunter I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … you know.”

I nod.

“Sure. I’ll tell him.”

WHEN I GET back to the hotel, I find Candy in the room and Kasabian holding forth on Terrence Malick’s Badlands.

“See, what Malick did wasn’t tell us the story of a couple of kids on a cross-country murder spree, but to tell us a dream about it. Like the whole thing is a shared fantasy in the kids’ heads and ours, which, from what I’ve heard, is pretty close to what it was like for Charlie Starkweather to kill all those people.”

She smiles up at me from the foot of the bed as I come in.

“Hey there. I’m getting Film 101 from your boss.”

“My boss?”

“That’s what he said.”

I look at Kasabian.

He says, “What do you know about accounting, insurance, inventory control, and, you know, running a video store besides watching movies all day?”

“Not much.”

“Then I’m the boss.”

I sit down next to Candy.

“You can’t argue with that logic,” she says.

“I could, but it would end in tears and divorce lawyers, and I can’t stand paperwork.”

Candy leans gently into me so our shoulders are touching.

I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to her.

“Why don’t you get us another room where we can talk? If the night manager gets weird, use my name and give him too much money. He’ll set you up.”

She bounces off the bed onto her feet and goes to the door. On her way out she blows Kasabian a kiss.

“I’ll be back for your master class on Monte Hellman.”

He beams at her as she leaves.

“Now that’s the kind of girl you shoplift beer for.”

He whizzes around on his skateboard to face me.

“Good thing you got here when you did. I was going to rock her world with some surfboard moves. She would have been mine.”

“You’re the boss and I don’t surf. You could probably have her in Mexico by now with a preacher and a cut-up fishnet stocking for a wedding veil and a donkey for the witness.”

“Badlands was probably too cerebral for a first date. I should have gone with something sexy and scary like Suspiria. Next time.”

“Sure. Next time.”

I start to say something about delusions of grandeur, but keep my mouth shut. I haven’t seen Kasabian this happy in probably ever.

I’m out of cigarettes. I reach into the nightstand and get a fresh pack of Maledictions. There aren’t too many packs left. Kasabian’s happy. He doesn’t need to know that. I light two and stick one between Kasabian’s lips.

“I need you to look up something for me in the Codex.”