Agents Of Light And Darkness (5 page)

I was one of the very few people she’d ever trusted with the correct entry codes. I looked around to make sure no-one was too close, or showing too much interest, then I bent over the hidden keypad and grille. (No point in knocking or shouting; she wouldn’t respond. She never did.) I punched in the right numbers, and spoke my name into the grille. I waited, and a face rose slowly up out of the door, forming its details from the splintered wood. It wasn’t a human face. The eyes opened, one after another after another, and studied my face, then the ugly shape sank back into the wood again and was gone. It looked disappointed that it wasn’t going to get to do something nasty to me after all. The door swung open, and I walked in. I was barely out of its way before it slammed shut very firmly behind me.

The empty hallway was lit by a single naked light bulb, hanging forlornly from the low ceiling. Someone had nailed a dead wolf to the wall with a rivet gun. The blood on the floor still looked sticky. A mouse was struggling feebly in a spider’s web. Suzie never was much of a one for housekeeping. I strode down the hall and started up the rickety stairs to the next floor. The air was damp and fusty. The light was so dim it was like walking underwater. My feet sounded loudly on the bare wooden steps, which was, of course, the point.

The next floor held the only two furnished rooms in the house. Suzie had a room to sleep in, and a room to crash, and that was all that mattered to her. The bedroom door was open, and I looked in. There was a rumpled pile of blankets in the middle of the bare wooden floor, churned up like a nest. A filthy toilet stood in one corner, next to a battered mini-bar she’d looted from some hotel. A wardrobe and a dressing table and a shotgun rack holding a dozen different weapons. No Suzie. The room smelled ripe, heavy, female, feverish.

At least she was up. That was something.

I walked down the landing. The plastered walls were cracked, and pocked here and there with old bullet holes. Telephone numbers, hexes, and obscure mnemonic reminders had been scrawled everywhere in lipstick and eyebrow pencil, in Suzie’s thick blocky handwriting. The door to the next room was closed. I pushed it open and looked in.

The blinds were drawn, as always, blocking out the lights and sounds of the street outside, and for that matter, the rest of the world as well. Suzie valued her privacy. Another naked light bulb provided the main illumination. Its pull chain was held together by a knot in the middle. Takeaway food cartons littered the bare floor, along with discarded gun magazines, empty gin bottles, and crumpled cigarette packets. Video and DVD cases were stacked in tottering piles all along one wall. Another wall held a huge, life-size poster of Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel, from the old
Avengers
TV show. Underneath the poster, Suzie had scrawled
My Idol
in what looked like dried blood. Suzie Shooter was lying sprawled across a scuffed and faded green leather couch, a bottle of gin in one hand, a cigarette in one corner of her down-turned mouth. She was watching a film on a great big fuck-off wide-screen television set. I strolled into the room, and into Suzie’s line of view, giving her plenty of time to get used to my presence. There was a shotgun propped up against the couch, ready to hand, and a small pile of grenades on the floor by her feet. Suzie liked to be prepared for anyone who might just feel like dropping in unannounced. She didn’t look round as I came to a halt beside the couch and looked at the film she was watching. It was a Jackie Chan fight fest; that scene towards the end of
Armour
Of God
where four big busty black women in leather gang up on Jackie and kick the crap out of him. Good scene. The sound track seemed to consist entirely of screams and exaggerated blows. I glanced around me, but nothing had changed since my last visit. There was still no other furniture, just a big standard computer set up on the floor. Suzie didn’t even have a phone any more. She wasn’t sociable. If anyone needed t contact her, there was e-mail, and that was it. Which she might not get round to reading for several days, if she didn’t feel like it.

As always when she wasn’t working, Suzie had let herself go. She was wearing a grubby Cleopatra Jones T-shirt, and a pair of jeans that had been laundered almost to the point of no return. No shoes, no make-up. From the look of her, it had been some time since her last gig. She was overweight, her belly bulging out over her jeans, her long blonde hair was a mess, and she smelled bad. Without taking her eyes off the mayhem on the screen, she took a long pull from her gin bottle, not bothering to take the cigarette out of her mouth first, then offered me the bottle. I took it away from her and put it on the floor, carefully out of her reach.

“Almost six years since I was last here, Suze,” I said, just loud enough to be heard over the television. “Six years, and the old place hasn’t changed a bit. Still utterly appalling, with a side order of downright disgusting. Garbage from all across the country probably comes here to die. I’ll bet the only reason this building isn’t overrun with rats is that you probably eat them.”

“They’re good with fries, and a few onions,” said Suzie, not looking round.

“How can you live like this, Suze?”

“Practice. And don’t call me Suze. Now sit down and shut up. You’re interrupting a good bit.”

“God, you’re a slob, Suzie.” I didn’t sit down on the couch. I’d just had my coat cleaned. “Don’t you ever clean up in here?”

“No. That way I know where everything is. What do you want, Taylor?”

“Well, apart from world peace, and Gillian Anderson dipped in melted chocolate, I’d like to see some evidence that you’ve been eating sensibly. You can’t live on junk food. When was the last time you had some fresh fruit? What do you do for vitamin C?”

“Pills, mostly. Isn’t science wonderful? I hate fruit.”

“I seem to recall you’re not too keen on vegetables either. It’s a wonder to me you haven’t come down with scurvy.”

Suzie sniggered. “My system would self-destruct if it encountered anything that healthy. I eat soup with vegetables in. Occasionally. That sneaks them past my defenses.”

I kicked an empty ice cream tub out of the way and sighed heavily. “I hate to see you like this, Suzie.”

“Then don’t look.”

“Fat and lazy and smug with it. Don’t you have any ambitions?”

“To die gloriously.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette and sighed luxuriously.

I sat on the arm of the couch. “I don’t know why I keep coming back here, Suze.”

“Because we monsters have to stick together.” She finally turned her head to look at me, unsmiling. “Who else would have us?”

I met her gaze squarely. “You deserve better than this.”

“Shows how much you know. What do you want, Taylor?”

“How long have you been lounging around here? Days? Weeks?”

She shrugged. “I am currently between cases. Bottom’s dropped out of the bounty-hunting business lately.”

“Most people have a life apart from their work.”

“I’m not most people. Just as well, really, considering most people depress me unutterably. My work is my life.”

“Killing people is a life?”

“Stick to what you’re good at, that’s what I always say. Hell! When I do it, it’s an art form. I wonder if I could get a grant… Shut up and watch the film, Taylor. I hate it when people talk during the good bits.”

I sat with her and watched quietly for a while. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing Shotgun Suzie had to a friend. She wasn’t much of a one for getting out and meeting people, unless it involved killing them later. She only really came alive when she was working. In between cases, she shut down and vegetated, waiting for her next chance to go out and do the only thing she did well, the thing she was born to do.

“I worry about you, Suzie.”

“Don’t.”

“You need to get out of this dump and get to know people. There
are
some out there worth knowing.”

“Men have been known to walk into my life, from time to time.”

It was my turn to sniff loudly. “They usually leave running.”

“Not my fault if they can’t keep up.” She shifted her weight on the couch and farted unselfconsciously.

I glared at her. “They usually leave because you made them watch
Girl On A Motorcycle
one time too many.”

“That film is a classic!” Suzie said automatically. “Marianne Faithful never looked better. That film is right up there with
Easy Rider
and Roger Corman’s Hells Angels movies.”

“Why did you shoot me, six years ago?” I didn’t know I was going to ask that until I said it.

“I had paper on you,” said Suzie. “Serious paper, backed by serious money.”

“You knew that paper was false. The whole thing was a setup. You had to know that… but you shot me anyway. Why?”

“You were leaving,” she said quietly. “How else could I stop you?”

“Oh, Suze…”

“Why do you think you were only wounded? You know I never miss. If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“Why was it so important for you to stop me leaving?”

She finally turned to look at me. “Because you belong here. Because … even monsters need to feel they’re not alone. Look, what do you want here, Taylor? You’re interrupting a classic.”

“Bruce Lee again?” I said, just to tease her. And because I knew I’d got as much honesty out of her as both of us could stand.

“Don’t show your ignorance. This is Jackie Chan.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Blasphemer. Jackie’s got some great moves, but Bruce Lee is God.”

“Speaking of whom,” I said casually, “I have a case I could use some help on.”

Suzie sat up and gave me her full attention for the first time. “You have a case involving Bruce Lee?”

“No. God. There are angels in the Nightside.”

Suzie shrugged and gave her attention back to the television screen. “About time. Maybe they’ll clean the place up.”

“Maybe. But there’s a distinct possibility there might not be much left of the place by the time they’d finished with it. They’re looking for the Unholy Grail. I’ve got a client who wants me to find it first. Thought you might like to help. The money really is extremely good.”

Suzie produced a remote control from somewhere underneath her and put the film on hold. Jackie froze in mid kick. Suzie looked at me. “How good?”

“I’m offering fifty thousand, out of my fee. You get twenty-five up front, and the rest when the job’s done.”

Suzie considered, her face impassive. “Is the job very dangerous? Will I have to kill lots of people?”

“Odds are … yes and yes.”

She smiled. “Then I’m in.”

And that was it. Suzie didn’t really care about the money; she never did. She just went through the motions, so people wouldn’t think they could take advantage of her. With her, it was always the job that mattered, the challenge. The only feelings of self-worth she had came from testing herself against forces that could destroy her. I took the money out of the envelope Jude had given me, peeled off half, and dropped it onto the couch beside her. She nodded, but made no move to pick it up. She didn’t have a safe, or even a strongbox, on the unanswerable grounds that no-one was going to be stupid enough to steal from her. There were less painful ways to commit suicide. She turned off the television, stubbed out the last half inch of her cigarette on the leather couch, flicked it away, then fixed me with a steady stare.

“You have my full attention. Angels … and an Unholy Grail. Kinky. Bit out of our usual territory. Would silver work against angels?”

“Not even if you loaded it into a bazooka. You could probably strap an angel to a backpack nuke and set it off, and he wouldn’t even blink. Angels are major hard-core.”

Suzie looked at me for a long moment. It was always hard to tell what she was thinking, behind the cold mask she used for a face. “You religious, Taylor?”

I shrugged. “Hard not to be, in the Nightside. If only because there are no atheists in foxholes. I’m pretty sure there is a God, a Creator. I just don’t think he cares about us. I don’t think we matter to him. You?”

“I used to tell people I was a lapsed agnostic,” she said easily. “Now I tell them I’m a born-again heretic. I hung out with this bunch of Kali worshippers for a while, but they said I was too hard-core, the wimps. Mostly … I believe in guns, knives, and things that go bang. All of which we’re probably going to need if we’re going after the Unholy Grail. I take it there will be competition?”

“Lots and lots. So you don’t have any problems, about going up against angels or devils?”

She smiled coldly. “Just give me something to aim at and leave the rest to me.” She frowned thoughtfully. “There was a weapon I heard of once … The Speaking Gun. Created specifically to kill angels. The Collector tried to bribe me with it one time, to get into my pants…”

“I think we’ll save that for a last resort,” I said, diplomatically.

She shrugged. “So, where do we start?”

“Well, I thought we’d go and have a word with the Demon Lordz.”

“Those gangsta wannabes? I have seen puppies in toilet paper commercials that were more threatening than that bunch of poseurs.”

“There’s more to them than meets the eye.”

She sniffed. “There would have to be.”

I stood up. Time to get the show on the road. “Grab what you need, and let’s get moving, Suzie. Above and Below have already tried to lean on me. I’m pretty sure we’re working against the clock on this one.”

Suzie lurched ungracefully to her feet and stomped out of the room, heading for her bedroom. I waited patiently while she threw things about, looking for what she wanted. When she came back, she looked like Shotgun Suzie again. The grubby T-shirt and faded jeans were gone, replaced by gleaming black leather jacket, trousers and knee-high boots, generously adorned with steel chains and studs. She wore two bandoliers of bullets across her impressive chest, and the hilt of her favorite pump-action shotgun peered over her right shoulder from its holster on her back. A dozen assorted grenades hung from her belt. She’d even brushed her hair and slapped on some make-up. She looked sharp and deadly and very alive. Suzie Shooter was on the job, heading into deadly peril, and she couldn’t have been any happier.