“Was Cairo trying to kidnap you back there?”
She sips and rolls her eyes. Just holding a glass in her hand relaxes her.
“Don’t be stupid. I’m King’s girlfriend. If you can call it that. When he’s not playing Gene Simmons and trying to fuck every other girl in the room. I think he’s doing that Aelita bitch.”
I wasn’t expecting that. Her face is smudged with a moderate amount of sin signs but nothing special. A lot less than I’d expect from someone involved with Cairo.
“What were you arguing about?”
She shakes her head. Stabs the air with one finger.
“Fuck him and all his coked-up crew. They’re disgusting. Have you met them? They’re like animals.”
“They can’t help it. He’s taking a drug that drives them insane. What were you and Cairo arguing about?”
“My job. What drug?”
“It’s called Dixie Wishbone. Try to concentrate.”
She finishes the glass and gives a little shiver.
“Sorry. I might be in some kind of shock, you know? Post-traumatic stress. That prick saved his own skinny ass and left me hanging, didn’t he? Fuck that guy. Okay. Ask me anything you want. If it’ll hurt that feather-wearing pussy dickbag, I’ll tell you. You know, he has the tiniest balls of any guy I ever dated. Isn’t that weird? Tiny balls.”
“That’s not really the information I was looking for. What were you arguing about?”
“I told you. My job.”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m a dreamer.”
“What is that?”
She looks at me.
“You’re that Sandman Slim guy, aren’t you? I’ve seen you at Bamboo House of Dolls.”
Blood trickles down my arm. I rewrap the towel and lean on the wound. It really should have started healing by now. Goddamn ghost wounds.
“You’ve been to Bamboo House? Do you like the jukebox?”
“Yeah.”
“Who do you like better, Martin Denny or Arthur Lyman?”
“Martin Denny.”
“Yeah. I’m Sandman Slim. What’s a dreamer?”
“I thought you were supposed to be some hot-shit rock-star superhero. How is it you don’t know about us?”
“Just because you know my name doesn’t mean I’m on the Sub Rosa clubhouse mailing list. I spent my whole life running from that world.”
“Looks like it did you a lot of good. You’re bleeding and you don’t have a clue how anything works.”
“Figuring out Hell was easier than figuring out L.A. What’s a dreamer?”
She waves her hand. Picks up her glass and goes back for more Aqua Regia. It’s impressive.
“Stuck-up old people call us a real, real old name. Surgeons of the Night Sky. You know what we call ourselves?”
“Tell me.”
She flops down on the couch, grinning. The Aqua Regia is hitting her hard.
“The Mile High Club.”
“That’s great, but I still don’t know what you do.”
“We dream. We make reality with our dreams.”
Outside, smoke is blackening the sky from what I swear is the cone of a small volcano. Ash falls from the sky like dirty snow.
She raps her knuckles on the table. She pats the couch.
“See this? And this? We did this. There wouldn’t be anything here without us.”
“You’re telling me you’re God.”
“Don’t be stupid. Okay. We don’t actually make reality. We just dream the forms and give them substance so they don’t blow away.”
A jet turns from the volcanic plume, heading out to sea, trailing thick smoke from one engine.
“You’re telling me that the world is run by a bunch of catnapping party girls and club boys?”
She sets down the glass and lets her head loll back.
“Not all reality. And some of the dreamers are old. There’s houses all over the world. But ours is the biggest. Duh. Hollywood. The big dream machine. This is where the world’s imagination lives. The power spot for collective unconscious. All that crap. Anyway we’re here and it works, so why fuck with it, you know?”
“I’ve never heard of you. Does everybody know?”
“Of course not. Just the right ones.”
“How long have you been around?”
“How many birds on a wire? That long.”
I hate these grade school history lessons. They’re embarrassing and they’re my fault. I didn’t want to know how the world worked when I was young. Didn’t want to know about the Sub Rosa or anything they cared about. Then, when I wanted to know, it was too late and I was busy just trying to stay alive Downtown. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Probably always will be.
“Okay. You’re a dreamer and there’s other dreamers and the whole nondreamer world will lose its Rice Krispies if you stop dreaming. Why were you arguing with Cairo about the job?”
“ ’Cause we’re dying. That crazy little ghost bitch has something against us.”
“The Sub Rosas being killed are all dreamers?”
“Mostly.”
“You’re why the sky is like a broken kaleidoscope and Catalina went AWOL.”
She rolls her eyes, trying to be sarcastic, but she just looks drunk and scared.
“Now you get it. Murder is a downer and people get scared. Sometimes there aren’t enough of us in any one place to hold reality together right.”
“Does Cairo blame you for reality breaking down? Is that what the fight was about?”
“No.”
She gets up and goes for more Aqua Regia. I cut her off and pour regular wine into her glass.
“Ooh. A gentleman.”
“I don’t want you to melt your brain too soon.”
“Whatever, dude.”
She drops onto the couch.
“King wants me to quit or leave town. I tried telling him what I do isn’t a job. It’s like a vocation. It’s what I am. I dream. That’s it. But he says he’s working for people who want to get rid of us regulars. Take over and put in their own dreamers. I thought he was just talking big. He does that sometimes.”
What do you know? Cairo isn’t a complete monster after all. Just a coward.
“Maybe he was trying to protect you by telling you to get out of town. If someone is using a ghost to kill dreamers, when the little girl appeared, he probably knew he couldn’t fight her.”
“He knew she was going to kill me and he left me to that little bitch? That fucker.”
“Who runs the dreamers?”
“Big wheels in the Sub Rosa. Who else?”
“What happens if you stopped dreaming? If all of you in L.A. stopped completely.”
“If we go down, the dominoes start falling. Ping. Ping. Ping.”
She flicks her fingers, knocking over imaginary dominoes in the air.
“I don’t know that the other houses can keep the whole world together without us. Next thing you know, nothing is what it used to be and then I don’t know. Maybe we all just disappear. No one knows because it’s never happened.”
“Who in the Sub Rosa is in charge? Blackburn?”
“Do I look like Google? Go buy a fucking laptop.”
My arm is starting to hurt. I get my own glass of Aqua Regia and walk around until I find some Maledictions. I take the pack back to the table, tap one out, and try to light it one-handed. Patty snickers at me. Takes the cigarette, puts it in my mouth, lights it, and hands it back to me.
“Thanks.”
“No worries. I’d’ve done it for a dog.”
My head is spinning a little. Not with pain or liquor but with all that’s going on. Not to mention worrying about Candy. I check the time. Too soon to call the clinic, goddammit.
“So someone is trying to replace the current dreamers or kill them off. Cairo is working with them but he can’t use his muscle because that would bring down the heat and whoever is running him knows he’d squeal like a piglet. That means whoever is behind all this also controls the girl. You can’t arrest or kill a crazy ghost. She’s a good cover. And maybe you kill a few nondreamers to make the killings look random. It’s all for the greater good, right?”
“If you say so.”
“I say so because I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind this. The question is why does an angel care about our reality? Tell me this. If you’re walking around with your boyfriend, then dreamers must work in shifts, right?”
“Yeah. Two days on and three days off so we get our heads back together.”
“Where do you do your dreaming?”
She sits up, almost spilling her wine. She points to what she thinks is north. It’s not.
“There’s a place in Universal City. Near the movie studio. It looks like a regular office building. Really boring on the outside. Like camouflage, you know? The tour buses go right by it. We’re in there.”
“Has anyone been attacked around there?”
“No.”
Good. That means the building has good protection against spirits.
“You should go there and stay and get the others to do the same. As long as you’re inside, the girl can’t get you or she would have done it already.”
“Anything you say, Sir Galahad.”
“Goddamn arm.”
I need both hands to tie the towel tighter, but if I hold the cigarette between my lips, the smoke goes straight up my nose and I can’t set it down now because the towel will come off completely.
Patty comes around the table.
“Let me help you. Goddamn men. They can tie you to a bed but you can’t do up your own shoes.”
“Thanks. I’m usually a fast healer. It should have stopped bleeding by now.”
“Shoulda woulda coulda,” she says. “Since like you said we’re all BFFs now and I can ask things I always wanted to know, what the hell kind of name is Sandman Slim?”
“Well, I’m not fat.”
“I grasped that.”
She gets the knot good and tight. Then sits back to admire her handiwork.
“They used to watch a lot of old movies in Hell before the cable went out. A Sandman is an old B-movie word for ‘hit man.’ ”
“Oh. Okay. Wait. They have cable in Hell?”
“Now they do. It was out but we got it working again.”
Patty doesn’t hear or has lost interest in what we’ve been talking about.
She says, “This looks like a nice hotel. Don’t they have a doctor or something?”
That’s what happens to you when you spend eleven years in the arena tending your own wounds. When you’re hurt, you look around for rags and string to hold whatever part of you is falling out on that particular day. A doctor is way down on the list of things you think about when you’re a gladiator slave. Lucifer, on the other hand, wants a whole team of neurosurgeons flown in from Switzerland and he wants them now.
I dial the hotel phone.
“Yes, Mr. Macheath.”
“I need the hotel doctor. Do you have one?”
“Not one to tend your, um, special needs.”
“I’ll take a seamstress and a nurse right now. Send up whatever you’ve got. Tell them to keep their eyes closed. I’ll bring them in the clock.”
“Very good, sir.”
I’m bleeding all over the nice furniture and Candy is hurt and L.A. is being buried in volcanic ash. I wonder what’s going on in the rest of the world. I’m formulating a new mantra. WWWBD. What Would Wild Bill Do? I can’t burn down Cairo like I did when I set Josef and the skinheads on fire. I’ll have to kill him later. And I don’t know where Aelita is. The little girl is the only clear line to anything I’ve got, and if she isn’t out slicing and dicing, I know where she’ll be. That’s what Bill would do. If he couldn’t find the head of the bad guys, he’d find the arms and break them. It’s time to say hola to the Imp of Madrid.
“When the doctor leaves, we’ll get you to the dreamer safe house.”
“Okay. Is it all right if I take a nap while we’re waiting?”
“I’ll get you some aspirin. You’re going to need them.”
After the hotel doc stitches me up, I take Patty downstairs and we catch a cab just like regular schmucks. No limos today. I don’t want anyone at the hotel knowing where we’re going. All the cabbie will see is me taking my half-tanked squeeze to Universal to throw up on the big plastic shark.
The hotel is practically empty. Even in L.A., the Apocalypse is bad for business.
The freeway north is a joke. Angelinos and tourists are fleeing the city, locking traffic in a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic like a university experiment demonstrating just how impossible it is to flee L.A. And it’s not like the sky is any closer to normal up here. Clouds shoot overhead at double speed, like the whole sky is on fast-forward. The volcano and ash have disappeared as cleanly and thoroughly as Catalina but it seems to have made an impression on the unwashed. If that wasn’t enough, the cabbie’s radio explains how as part of its clever plan to panic even the nonpanicked population, the powers that be have shut down both LAX and the Burbank Airport.
I have the cabbie drop us off by the office buildings at the edge of Universal City. Instead of heading back in to town, the cab gets on the freeway north with the other abandon-the-ship types.
Patty leads us into the heart of Universal City, past huge glass buildings and to a squat four-floor building hidden behind a row of trees, just off the regular tourist route. There’s a guard station but it’s empty. I get the feeling the big office towers are deserted too.