Kill the Dead. Richard Kadrey
don’t have to do this, you know. I could come out of a shadow on this side of the fence and not deal with you assholes. But I’m trying to fit in a little better around here, so I’m polite and I try to play by your rules. You might consider cutting me the tiniest piece of slack.”
I head for the warehouse. Huston keeps asking Ray what happened and Ray keeps telling him to fuck off. I wonder if Ray is just a psychic reader or a projector, too, and what parts of the tour he’ll show Huston to shut him up.
WELLS YELLS AT me halfway across the warehouse floor so that everyone turns to see me looking like an executioner’s practice dummy.
“Damn, son. Did you stop to gut a deer on the way over or did that little girl do all that?”
I hold up my burned jacket with my blackened arm.
“Your little girl did this. Her four friends did the rest.”
“There’s a pod?”
“Was. Five of them.”
“That doesn’t jibe with our intelligence.”
I take four wallets from a jacket pocket and drop them on a table.
“Here’s your goddamn intelligence.”
Wells snaps, “Watch your language.”
“I took those off Eleanor’s pals. Their ash is still on them. Probably prints, too.”
“What about Eleanor?”
I take my cell out of my back pocket, thumb on the photo album, and hold it up so Wells can see the screen.
He frowns.
“What did you do to her?”
“Silly girl had a flamethrower. She fucked—I mean, messed up and set herself on fire. Then she ran out into direct sunlight. I would have been happy to quietly take her heart, but she had to turn it into D-day.”
“Are the remains still at the scene?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll secure the site for now. Clean up isn’t a priority if the pod has been cleared out.”
“I didn’t see anyone else there and they didn’t seem to be looking, so that was probably all of them, but I can’t be a hundred percent. Like I said, I went in thinking it was one girl.”
“I’ll need a copy of that photo. E-mail a copy to my account.”
“Just did.”
Wells isn’t looking at me. He’s put on Nitrile gloves and is examining the wallets.
He says, “They’re empty.”
“Are they?”
“Was there anything inside when you found them?”
“How do I know? I was killing vampires, not checking their IDs. I’ve seen plenty of Lurkers that don’t use money. They steal what they want.”
“Then why carry a wallet?”
Shit. Good point.
“Ask a shrink. I get paid to kill things.”
“Right.”
He turns to a female agent standing on his right.
“Bag these and take them downstairs for identification.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wells motions for me to follow him. We head out across the warehouse floor.
I kind of like the organized chaos of the Golden Vigil’s headquarters. There’s always something fun to scope out and think about stealing. A group of agents in Tyvek suits and respirators forklifting a massive stone idol onto the back of a flatbed truck. The idol is on its back, and from where I’m standing, it’s all tentacles and breasts, but I swear some of the tentacles move a little as they tether the idol down. Across the floor, welders are modifying vehicles. Agents are examining new guns as they’re uncrated. A guy as skinny, leathery, and looking as old as King Tut’s mummy wanders the floor sprinkling holy water on everything.
“What kind of a bonus am I getting for taking out those four extra bloodsuckers?”
“From the look of those wallets, seems to me that you already got your bonus.”
“Is that what it seems to you? If I happened to find anything at the crime scene, trust me, it’s barely enough to cover the cost of a replacement jacket. Besides, with intelligence as bad as that, I deserve extra money just on principle.”
“Do you?”
“Unless you knew what was inside that building.”
Wells stops and looks at me.
“Come again?”
“Unless you knew there was a pod in there, but sent me in looking for one inexperienced girl. Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing you’d tell someone if you were setting them up?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“How’s your lady friend downstairs?”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
Wells gets a little defensive whenever I mention Aelita. He’s got a thing for her but an angel is just a little out of his league.
“Okay. How is Miss Aelita? Healthy? Happy? I haven’t seen her since right after Avila.”
Aelita is a kind of drill sergeant angel. She runs the Golden Vigil, Heaven’s Pinkertons. She knows I’m a nephilim and has a cute nickname for me: “The Abomination.” I’m pretty sure she’d like to see me dead.
“Did you send candy and flowers on Valentine’s Day, 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