The Perdition Score (22 page)

I look at her working. She puts the top on the vial of black milk and holds it up for me to see.

I nod.

“Now what?”

“Watch.”

She takes the vial and snaps it into place inside the drill.

“It's a syringe?” says Vidocq.

“Yes,” she says. Then lunges at my arm.

I back up, too fast for her reach.

Vidocq shoves her against the counter.

“Liliane. What is this?”

“Shut up, you oaf,” she says, and stabs the syringe into his throat. “Die like you should have died in Paris.”

Vidocq collapses, his face turning blue. Allegra screams. While I'm looking at him Liliane comes at me again. I grab her arm and toss her across the room back toward the door. She lands close to Allegra. Liliane swings the syringe at her, but Allegra sees it coming and ducks. She grabs a scalpel off the counter and jams it full force into Liliane's chest.

The syringe hits the floor and Liliane goes down with it. She's hurt, but pulls out the scalpel and throws it away. A stab in the heart didn't stop her before. Liliane throws herself at the syringe, but Allegra steps on her hand. Grabs the syringe and slams it into the side of Liliane's neck. She rolls away, gasps, and pulls the syringe out. But it's too late. She's turning as blue as Vidocq.

“Eugène!” Allegra shouts.

I grab him from the floor and put him on the exam table. His face has gone from blue to black.

I look at Allegra.

“What do we do?”

She scrambles to the cabinets, throwing bottles and boxes onto the floor until she finds what she's looking for. It's a bottle full of a pale liquid. With trembling hands, she takes a long heart syringe and sticks it through the top, drawing out
a large portion of the liquid. I tear open Vidocq's shirt and she slams the needle into his chest, hitting the plunger when it's inside. He convulses a couple of times. Breathes once and falls back onto the table. Allegra is crying.

I grab her arm.

“What was that?”

It takes her a second to get it out.

“I put him in the Winter Garden.”

The Garden is a kind of hoodoo coma. It stops all activity in a body pretty much indefinitely. It's good for poison and zombie bites. Anything where you don't have a handy antidote in your pocket.

I check Vidocq's eyes. They're all pupil.

“Is the Garden going to work?”

“How the hell do I know?” she says. “I couldn't think of anything else.”

I go over and put an arm around her. Allegra holds on to my coat.

The door opens up and Fairuza sticks her head in.

“Your two o'clock is here.”

She takes one look at Liliane on the floor, skin turning black and blood on her chest, and almost screams. I grab her and pull her into the room.

When Fairuza can look up from the floor, she sees Vidocq laid out.

“What happened to Eugène?”

I hold her by the shoulders.

“We can talk about that later. Right now you need to be very cool. Go out there and tell the two o'clock they have to reschedule. Can you do that?”

She nods and I look at her hard.

“And try to look a little less like you just saw Darby Crash's ghost. Got me?”

She nods again. Takes a couple of deep breaths.

“I'm okay.”

“Good. Go out there, tell them the story, and stay there until I come out for you.”

“Okay.”

I open the door and push her through.

Allegra is still by Vidocq with her hand on his chest, which is crisscrossed with blackened blood vessels.

Allegra isn't crying anymore. She looks at me. Her voice is raspy when she speaks.

“What the hell just happened?”

“I'm so fucking stupid. Liliane is with Wormwood.”

“How do you know?”

“She knew the thing wasn't a drill. Only one way she'd know that.”

Allegra looks puzzled.

“They sent her to kill Eugène?”

“No.
Me
. But Vidocq was the way in. She could get to me and use him to find out what we knew about black milk.”

She strokes Vidocq's brow.

“She was always going to kill him, wasn't she?”

“She came here for me.”

“Then she just did Eugène for fun.”

I nod.

“Yeah. A two-hundred-year-old grudge.”

Allegra's hands shake. I look at her.

“She would have done you too, you know.”

She ignores me.

“I just killed someone,” she whispers.

“You saved both of us. Liliane wasn't going to stop.”

She looks up at me.

“What do I do? Call the police?”

I go over to her.

“No. Too many cops are on the take. Let me handle the body. You stay with Vidocq.”

She looks down at him.

I put the syringe in my pocket. Straighten Liliane's body, then grab some paper towels to wipe her blood off the floor. I pile them on her chest and look back at Allegra.

“I'm going to need some garbage bags and duct tape. Also, your car. Mine is still dead.”

She goes to her purse and hands me the keys. I pocket them.

Fairuza knocks on the door. Opens it a crack and sticks her head in.

“Everyone is gone,” she says.

She looks at the bodies.

“Can I go too?”

“Of course,” Allegra says.

Before she can go, I take her arm.

“No one gets to know about this. You'll put yourself in danger. Understand?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I want you to go straight home. You're going to freak out in a while. That's okay as long as you don't tell anyone about this.”

She nods.

“Normally, I'd say call me, but I'm going to be busy. You can talk to Candy.”

“We're supposed to rehearse tonight.”

“Rehearsal is off. I'm going upstairs to get her.”

I leave them in the exam room and go up to Julie's office. Give Candy a quick rundown of what happened.

“Tell Julie you have a family emergency or something and come downstairs.”

“Right.”

I go back to the clinic. I don't want to leave Allegra or Fairuza alone with a body for too long.

Fairuza is standing with Allegra by Vidocq when I get back. She's pale and looks like she wants to throw up, but she's keeping it together.

Candy comes in a couple of minutes later. I go to her.

“Fairuza is in no shape to drive. You're her friend. You should probably take her home. I'll stay with Allegra and Vidocq.”

Candy tells Fairuza she's taking her home. Fairuza hugs Allegra before she goes. Then it's just the three of us.

“What happens now?” Allegra says.

“We wait until dark. Then I can move the body.”

She laughs a little. “‘Move the body.' You're moving a body for me.” She looks at me. “Hell of a coffee date, huh?”

“It's going to be a hell of a night too. You ready for that?”

“Guess I have to be.”

“I'm going to fix this. We're going to get him back.”

“How?”

I go over and put a hand on Vidocq's shoulder. It's rock hard, like rigor mortis.

“We don't know exactly how black milk works, but my guess is regular drugs aren't going to affect it.”

“What will?”

“Angel blood. It's the only thing I can think of with those kind of healing powers.”

“Can we use yours?”

“I'm just a nephilim My blood might make things worse.”

“What are we going to do, then?”

I bring a chair to Vidocq's body so Allegra can sit down.

“I'm going to find an angel. They're going to give me their blood or I'm going to take it.”

“It's that simple, is it?” she says, shaking her head. “What's going to happen with Wormwood?”

“You let me worry about that.”

“Are you going to hurt someone?”

“I'm going to do a lot worse than that.”

She looks at me.

“Good.”

Candy comes back an hour later. She sits with Allegra.

It's a long wait for sundown.

T
HE
L
A
B
REA
Tar Pits are on Curson Avenue between Sixth Street and Wilshire.

I wait until three thirty in the morning before taking Liliane to Allegra's Prius, where I dump the body in the hatchback and drive across town. I stop for all red lights. I drive the prevailing speed of the other traffic. I'm as solid a citizen as L.A. has ever seen.

I stop the Prius at Curson and Wilshire, out of sight of the streetlights and any security cams at the Tar Pits. After
I whisper some Hellion hoodoo, the lights along the whole stretch of Curson blow out. I pop the hatch and grab Liliane's body. The Prius I leave on Wilshire. There's enough traffic on the street that the car won't look too funny if cops come by.

With the body over my shoulder, I sprint to the Tar Pits. She's heavy. There are a couple of stolen cinder blocks in the garbage bags with Liliane's body.

The fence around the pits is about eight feet high. I toss the body over and climb in. The problem with tar is that bodies sink slowly. You have to toss them far enough out that they won't get stuck on shallow ground and so they'll look as inconspicuous as possible until they disappear.

I spin around like a discus thrower and toss Liliane into the middle of the pit. Before I left the clinic, I sliced a few holes in the garbage bags to let the tar in so the bundle would sink faster. I wait behind a palm tree until only the feet are left showing, then climb the fence and head back to the car. This isn't the first time I've dumped bodies at the Tar Pits, but I hope it's the last. I wish I could have had a few more minutes with Liliane to talk things over. Maybe I could have followed her into the Tenebrae if I had some Dream Tea, but I didn't and I thought all the blood from the Metatron Cube ritual wouldn't be good for Allegra to see. Anyway, I know where I can find more information and it will be more fun to get it that way.

B
ACK AT THE
clinic, Candy and I go upstairs to the detective agency office. I have her run Charlie Anpu's license plate. When I have the address, she goes back down to stay with Allegra.

“How is she doing?”

Candy takes a long breath.

“As well as you think. We can't leave Vidocq here. We have to move him so they can be at home.”

“Kasabian can help. He won't like it, but tell him I wasn't asking politely.”

“What if
I
ask politely? He can be sweet if you talk to him right.”

“I'm not sure if we're talking about the same guy, but do whatever you have to. Have you spoken to Fairuza?”

“She called a couple of times, but I got her to take some tranquilizers, so she's out cold.”

“What did you tell the rest of the band?”

“I told them that Fairuza and I were both sick. They believed me.” She half smiles. “Alessa wanted to bring me chicken soup, but I told her it wasn't a good time.”

“Smart. I have a lot of running around to do before sunup, so I'm going.”

Candy kisses me.

“Be careful.”

“See you soon.”

A
T
B
URGESS
'
S PLACE
in Beverly Hills, I throw some Hellion hoodoo and all the cars on one of the streets explode into flames. The concussion sets off the alarms in all the cars across the street. The security Burgess hired to walk the grounds rush the front of the place. That lets me get around the back. I whisper some Hellion hoodoo to get me through the wards and open the door with the black blade. After looking out the windows for security, I head upstairs.

At least one thing goes right for me today. When I get upstairs to where Geoff is looking out the window, Elsabeth isn't there.

Burgess freezes when he sees me in the room. I point the Colt at him.

“Where's the missus?”

“Gone. I sent her away after the other night. I had a feeling it was you.”

“But you weren't sure? Who else did you think it might be?”

“That's none of your business.”

I take a couple of steps toward hm. He's too scared or too dumb to move.

“Is everything okay in Wormwood land? No one is looking for a way out, are they? Or maybe a change in management?”

“You're way out of your depth here,” he says.

“I usually am. Sit down.”

He does.

“What's black milk?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

“It got into a friend of mine, so it does.”

“Undiluted? My condolences.”

I put the Colt away. I was never going to use it. Too noisy. I take out the na'at, my favorite weapon back when I fought in the arena Downtown. Burgess sits back, not sure what to make of it. I extend the na'at into a whip shape. Snap it a couple of times.

“What's black milk?”

Burgess gets a funny look on his face.

“Are you going to kill me? Torture me?”

“The second thing, then the first.”

“My security team will be checking on me soon.”

“They're not going to like what they find.”

He says, “You know that every second you're here, we're making a profit, right? Just you breaking in here triggers all sorts of wonderfully complex financial and celestial mechanisms.”

“Is it all just money with you people?”

“Of course not. It's power. It's eternity. It's fun. In this world and the next.”

I snap the na'at at his head. He twitches back from it.

“You've had a good time poking me with a stick lately, haven't you? All the weird shit that's been going on.”

He brightens.

“You actually watch the news? Good. We had a bet about that too.”