“Wishful thinking.”

Kasabian lines up another shot and sinks it. I’m not even paying attention to which balls anymore.

I say, “So?”

Kasabian doesn’t look up when he answers, keeping his eyes down on the table.

“The weather’s hot with a chance of chain saws and bullshit blowing up from the south.”

I walk over and put my hand over the cue ball. Kasabian looks up at me, not at all happy.

I’m bugging him about the one thing he controls. His one little domain. The Daimonion Codex. It’s Lucifer’s Boy Scout manual, Google search engine, and secret angelic ballbuster cookbook all in one. The most valuable thing in Hell besides the horned one himself. It contains every bit of dark, esoteric-stuff-you-don’t-want-to-know-about-if-you-ever-want-to-sleep-again knowledge in the universe. As far as I know, Kasabian is the only one on earth who can read it.

He glances down at my hand and I take it off the cue. He sinks another ball. The little prick has been practicing when I’m not around.

Kasabian used to look things up in the Codex for Lucifer when he was too busy, which was 90 percent of the time. Of course, nothing in Hell works the way it’s supposed to. That’s why they call it Hell. The magic gear down there is like buying Russian souvenirs. The samovars are pretty, but you know they’re going to leak all over your mom’s chintz tablecloth.

What that means is that Hell’s half-assed gear hacks pretty easy. Take the Codex. Kasabian’s supposed to get a peek Downtown just wide enough to read the book. But it doesn’t work right. He’s like one of those traffic surveillance cams that catch you running red lights. If he squints just right, he can see a lot more than the book. He’s like a whole series of traffic cams wired together and he can spyglass all over Hell. Not all of it, but a lot. It’s the one thing he has over me and he never lets me forget it.

He says, “The usual Chuck E. Cheese ball pit-party games. Since Lucifer pissed off back to heaven, Mason’s completely taken over. Lucifer’s generals are having slap fights over battle plans. MammoKasplans. n and Baphomet have been sabotaging each others’ troops. Poisoning their food and shit like that. All so they can suck up to Mason. Semyazah is the only general who refused to kiss Mason’s ass, so he’s had to blow town.”

“Smart move.”

“Mason’s getting ready for something. He’s pulling troops in from everywhere, but they’re scattered all over Hell, so it’ll take a while. In the meantime he’s got some other game going, but I haven’t figured out what it is.”

I can walk through shadows and come out almost anywhere I want, passing through the Room of Thirteen Doors, the still-central point of time and space. I can get into the Room because years ago one of Lucifer’s generals, the one who wanted me as his personal assassin, stuck a key in my chest. I’m the only one in the universe who can get into the room because I have the only key. But while the Drifters were tearing through town like graveyard locusts I found out that Mason was trying to make his own key.

“Is it the Room of Thirteen Doors? Has he found a way to get in?”

“I don’t think so. If he did, he’d be up here already gnawing on your skull.”

Kasabian is right. Mason isn’t shy or subtle. If he could escape from Downtown, even if it was just for a minute, he’d do it and try to kill me.

“So, what’s he up to?”

“You tell me. You talk to the guy every night. It used to be Alice, which was creepy enough, but now it’s Dr. Doom.”

He shoots at the twelve. It bounces off the cushions and doesn’t drop. My shot.

I set down the cigarette, lay the cue down on my thumb and index finger, and line up a shot.

“What does that mean?”

“Back at Max Overdrive you used to talk to Alice in your sleep. Since we got here, though, whenever you’re asleep you start spinning like a rotisserie chicken and talking to Mason.”

“What do I say?”

I bank the one off the rail and sink it in a corner pocket.

“Aside from ‘Fuck you’ and ‘I’ll kill you,’ you mumble a lot in Hellion, so it’s hard to tell.”

“Buy a dictionary.”

He walks around the edge of the table, a fleshy spider circling a fly.

“There’s something else. It doesn upse. It ’t really change anything, but you might want to know.”

“What?”

“No one’s all that scared of you Downtown anymore. You used to be the bogeyman who kept them up at night. Now they talk about you like you were the high school bully.”

“So they’ve forgotten about me.”

“I didn’t say that. What I mean is, Mason is the new scary human in town, and you’ve been gone so long, he wins badass title by default.”

I take a shot at the three, but hit it too hard and it rolls back into the center of the table.

I pick up my cigarette and Kasabian crawls back onto the table.

“First he sends me to Hell and then he won’t even let me keep my rep. The little prick wants everything.”

Kasabian lines up a shot.

“So go down there and kill something. Slit some generals’ throats. You’re the monster who kills monsters. Be creative.”

I shake my head.

“Everyone knows my face, and Mason’s put wards on all the entrances I use to get into Hell. He’d know the moment I stuck my big toe down there.”

“Worrying about shit like that doesn’t sound too Sandman Slim to me, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I do mind, but you already said it.”

“Just go down and kill him already! You’ve done lots crazier shit than that before.”

“It’s not the right time. I need to shut down everything he’s doing. Battle plans. Backroom deals with generals. All of it. I need more chaos. You murder someone at the Ice Capades and the place goes apeshit. You blow someone’s head off in a war zone, people step over the body and have a snack.”

“Maybe. A few months back you’d have John Wayne’d your way in there and started your own war. I think that angel in your head’s made you soft. You’ve been Glenda the Good Witch too long.”

He’s right. Mason talked to me once. He possessed other people’s bodies and talked to me through them. He’s getting stronger and he’s working on a key. He’s rallying troops. I should be Downtown murdering him and giving fallen angels new nightmares. I wasted the last six, seven months skipping rope with Wells and the Vigil, drinking myself stupid and losing my edge.

After all this timeer ll this, I still don’t understand this world. It’s soft and stupid and full of soft and stupid people. Why aren’t they all crazy and ripping each other to bloody confetti? They want to. I can read their eyes. Hear their hearts beating. Smell the fear sweat. The anger sweat. The fury inside they can never let out. I’m turning into one of them. It’s the price of living in this world and trying to fit in.

The angel in my head is part of it. On the other hand, is the angel even there? Maybe I’m going crazy and it’s my Tyler Durden. Maybe I’ve always been crazy, and coming back here let it loose. Hell was my Haldol and without it I’m slowly going schizo. Hearing voices. Taking orders from something that might not even exist.

Alice isn’t here and this place will never be anything but a desert without her. But I’m connected to people now. Vidocq. Allegra. Candy. Carlos. Kasabian. Even Brigitte, who dumped me. They’re the cinder blocks dragging me to the bottom of the ocean. Knowing them, giving a damn about them, sucks the marrow out of my bones. Makes me weak. They want me sane and clean, but the monster in me wants to hear Hellion necks snap and pop like champagne bottles on New Year’s.

Kasabian sinks one ball and lines up another. Am I playing stripes or solids? I can’t remember. I finish the last of my cigarette and drop the butt in an abandoned soda can under the plastic “No Smoking” sign.

“Maybe you should start something here. Go beat up some more skinheads. Fight a dragon. Or a Kissi.”

I look at him, trying to read him. He doesn’t breathe or sweat much, so it’s hard. He’s concentrating on his shot, so I can’t see his eyes.

“What made you say that? The Kissi are gone.”

I know it because I’d killed them, the whole race of deformed, half-finished angels. Well, almost the whole race. I saw one, he calls himself Josef, a few weeks back. He’s alive and he knows where there are other Kissi. We talked about that for a long time.

Kasabian stops and looks at me. We’ve lived together long enough that he knows when I’m being . . . well, deadly serious.

“Cool out,” Kasabian says. “It was a joke.”

He gives the fifteen a solid kick and it slams into the hole. He moves around fast, trying to get things back to normal. Back to the game. He sinks another.

I say, “Don’t joke about them. I don’t like it.”

“Whatever you say, man. If I hurt your feelings we can watch Fried Green Tomatoes and eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs.”

I can’t stand it anymore. I take out Vidocq’s pain potion and down the whole thing in one gulp.

“No. Let’s watch The Wild Bunch and pay strangers to bring us Korean ribs.”

“Well, fuck me with Lloyd Bridges’s dick. You’re still alive in there after all,” he says. Then, “Corner pocket.”

He lays down a solid kick, bounces the eight ball off the far rail, and sinks it in the corner pocket at my end.

“You pay,” he says.

“I always do.”

I PUT KASABIAN in his bowling bag so I can carry him to the room without the other hotel residents having a nervous breakdown. I close the bag all the way, but he always unzips it a few inches so he can see out.

On the way across the parking lot I spot a Nahual beast man grab a little blonde’s arm. She sounds Scandinavian when she shouts at him. She has on the traditional surfer tank top and shorts all foreign exchange students seem to wear. The Nahual isn’t showing his beast face, so she has no idea that the guy she’s arguing with isn’t human.

I set Kasabian down on a bench and walk over. The Nahual lets the girl go when he sees me. I shove his head through the windshield of a shiny rental car and bounce his face off the dashboard a few times. When I stop hurting him he runs like hell. The Scandy girl hasn’t moved an inch. Her eyes are fixed on the broken windshield. She doesn’t say thanks when I go past, but I don’t expect her to. Between the Nahual and me, she’s too shell-shocked to say anything at all. Welcome to L.A., darlin’.

As I carry Kasabian upstairs he says, “That’s exactly what I was talking about.”

IN THE MORNING it feels like my brain ran away to join the circus, got mauled by a lion, and rolled over every bump and boulder coming home. The pain juice Vidocq gave me doesn’t mix well with Jack Daniel’s, unless you enjoy feeling like someone parked a Saturn V on your eyeballs.

Weird whiskey dreams last night. I dreamed about the old Faces of Death movies. Sideshow pseudo-documentary mash-ups of real and obviously fake footage of people being killed in interesting and creative ways. A real carnage rodeo. And each of my dream segments starred Alice being mangled in wide-screen Technicolor.

After all this time I still don’t know how she died. I know that Parker, a magician, professional asshole, and Mason’s favorite hoodoo thug, murdered her and that Mason ordered it. But I don’t know how Parker killed her. The question always hovers at the back of my mind whenever I think of her. When I’m asleep my dreams play out different scenarios. Everything from a quick bullet in the back of the head to being stabbed and bleeding out. Her death scenes get mixed up with dreams of being back in the arena. Whatever beast I kill morphs into Alice dying at my feet.

I know it’s a kind of betrayal to hide from the truth of how she died, but I know Parker’s mind and I doubt that he made it quick. Parker’s the kind of guy that makes you want to believe in reincarnation. I already murdered him once, but if I had the chance I’d never stop killing him. Killing Parker would be my circuit training. My racquetball game. I could build a whole new healthy lifestyle running him to the ground and snapping his neck three times a week.

VIDOCQ COMES BY with a cab around ten. On my best days, the sun isn’t my friend. This morning, hungover and still wearing yesterday’s clothes, all I can do is cover my head and run from shadow to shadow like a vampire that forgot to wind its watch.

When I get to the cab, Vidocq is waiting by the front passenger door, which is weird. We usually ride in the back so we can talk. I look through the window into the back and see why he’s up front. Candy is inside.

“What, are you playing matchmaker?”

Vidocq grabs the door and starts into the cab.

“Oui. You need to talk to someone besides me and that chattering jack-o’-lantern in your room.”

Vidocq slides in next to the driver. I get in the back with Candy.

She’s in her usual ensemble of white T-shirt, a beat-up and just a little too big leather jacket, Chuck Taylors, and black jeans about to completely give up at the knees. She looks like Joan Jett’s little sister. She’s got on a pair of kid’s sunglasses, like something you’d pick up in Little Tokyo. The frames are white with blue flames and there are flying robots down the sides. When I sit down she doesn’t say hello. She touches the middle of the frames just above her nose. The sunglasses start singing the theme song to some Japanese kiddie cartoon in a tinny robot voice. It makes my skull throb.