Constantine (6 page)

Jumped? No. Isabel wouldn’t do that. Not with her beliefs. No.

“I know it’s hard to accept,” Xavier said gently.

“But she was sick… “

Isabel wouldn’t kill herself.

“Angie…”

“She wouldn’t. Period.”

“Detective,”
Xavier said. Reminding her, with his emphasis on that single word, to be objective. “There was surveillance…”

She looked at Isabel’s face, and then signaled the coroner to cover it again.

The job,
she told herself.
Hang on to that. You’re already under scrutiny for the shootings.

Don’t fall apart now.

“Surveillance? A security camera? Then… I want to see that tape.”

Xavier sighed. “You sure you want to put yourself through that?”

“Just arrange it. Please. Do that for me.”

“All right. We can do that right away. Security’s on the first floor, behind the foyer.”

Angela turned away and forced herself to leave her sister’s body behind.

But she couldn’t abandon her sister. Alive or dead.

--

Ravenscar had a comprehensive “mental hygiene” facility, where Isabel had died. But the rest of the hospital was devoted to cardiology and to oncology; to cancer and chemo and little rooms where terminal patients withered away, like waiting rooms for that final physician, Death Constantine walked past one of those rooms.

Through the open door he glimpsed a gaunt, bald woman propped up in bed, gazing sightlessly through a fog of heavy medication at the wall-mounted TV.

Once it was terminal, why couldn’t
it
just
take you? he wondered.
Why does God have to drag these miseries out?

He realized he’d unconsciously taken a cigarette from his coat. He was flicking it unlit from finger to finger in his right hand. It wouldn’t do for Dr. Archer to see that.

He put it away and went into the examination room to wait.

--

In another part of the hospital, the Security Suite, Angela sat in a swivel chair staring at a video monitor. Wishing she were heavily medicated.

She watched as the black-and-white tape from the security earn showed her twin sister stepping up on the rim of the roof. Looking around.

Throwing the patient’s bracelet. Gazing out into the night. Shaking her head. Glancing over her shoulder. Stepping off the edge - quite deliberately. Pitching forward. Tumbling. Gone.

The breath Angela had been holding forced itself out as she blurted, “Oh!”

A shudder went through her as a hand, intended to be comforting, settled on Angela’s shoulder.

Xavier said, “Hey, Angie? Talk to Foreman - he’ll tell you to take a few days off…Hell, a few weeks…”

Angela shook her head and brushed the hand off.

Then she turned - and saw that Xavier was on the other side of the room with two security guards. He’d spoken to her from there. So whose hand had been on her shoulder?

--

Constantine’s death was a black splotch in a glowing white box, like a spider waiting in its webby den.

The light boxes illuminated his chest X-rays with a ghostly objectivity, and a dark mass spread in both lungs. Constantine stared at it, and thought it was in the shape of a rune he could almost remember.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might be the victim of a psychic attack. One of his old enemies might’ve cursed him with this sickness. It could be an even more direct attack than that: an assassin spirit hidden away in his flesh. He protected himself, yes, but spells and blessed amulets were like computer firewalls. There was always a way to “hack” them.

But he’d sense it, if it were an attack. He’d know.

And he felt nothing like that. All those years of smoking was explanation enough.

“I wish I had something more encouraging to show you, John,” Dr. Archer was saying. She was a no nonsense woman in a white coat, a longtime acquaintance of Constantine.

“Things I’ve beaten,” Constantine said, slowly, looking at the X rays, “things most people have never heard of. And now I’m going to be done in by this?”

“You wouldn’t be the first, John.”

“Come on. You saved me before. You can do it again, right?”

“This is… aggressive.”

Meaning it was just too late. Constantine sighed.

“Not that simple, huh?”

Aggressive. Interesting term to use, considering Constantine’s life.

Maybe related to why, Constantine mused, his own magic could not save him. He kept himself walking around by drawing life energy from on high - but that would carry him only so far. To really destroy the cancer would take a miracle - and he was not on the right side of the Lord’s ledger, the side that gets the occasional miracle.

He had thought to feel a kind of barrier, when he’d tried healing himself through magic. But he’d thought the obstacle might be psychological - the sorcerer’s psychology was a constant problem in magical workings. You had to have your mind in precisely the right state to make magic. And he had been in a self-destructive mood for a long time. Too many people had died around him. He thought of that lean, pockmarked ghost on the street. He’d failed him. And all the others who’d died. Feeling like a failure made him depressed - and that left him with his guard down. Vulnerable.

But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe the dark powers couldn’t attack him directly - but they could block the spirits who healed, once he got sick.

And he had every reason to believe Hell wanted him dead. Hell hungered for John Constantine. It owed him an eternity of torment for frustrating so many of its plans…

He stared at the dark mass in his lungs, until Archer switched the light off. Then the diseased lungs vanished. He just sat there, on the edge of the exam table, staring into space.

“Twenty years ago you didn’t want to be here, Constantine,” Dr. Archer said, smiling sadly.

“Now you don’t want to leave. You should have listened to me.”

Constantine lit a Lucky Strike. If Archer was going to needle him…

Archer snorted, glaring at the cigarette.
“That’s
a good idea.”

A long vengeful drag of smoke. It felt good - and it spurred him to an ugly wet fit of coughing.

He found the Vicks bottle in his coat pocket, swigged right from it, twice. The coughing eased. He took one more drag, blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling, and stubbed out the cigarette on a stainless steel instrument tray.

Archer waved the smoke away, coughing herself.

“John - you need to prepare. Make arrangements.”

Constantine managed a dreary chuckle as he got up and headed for the door. “No need. I know exactly where I’m going.”

--

Angela strode through the hallway, looking for the elevator. She just wanted
out
of the hospital - if she could only find the way. She’d been here many times, but now it all seemed strange to her. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed-they seemed so horribly loud. One of them flickered, in a kind of semaphore. A steel table on wheels, covered with a white cloth, waited beside an operating room door. She had a feeling if she looked under the white cloth something terrible would be there.

Ridiculous.

Where were the goddamn elevators? She couldn’t get oriented. She forced herself to stop and take a slow breath.

She remembered when her mother had died she’d felt nothing at first, or so she thought, but for weeks afterward she was clumsy, forever dropping things. Forgetful, distracted. At last she had realized that she’d been caught up in high emotion all along and that trying to stop it had overwhelmed her, so that she couldn’t live an ordinary life until she faced her grief.

It was happening again - lost in the hospital because…

Isabel was dead. She was really gone. She’d heard the coroner say,
It was the glass that did it, really. It cut her throat. She bled to death in the pool.

Angela shuddered. God, but she wanted out of this place.

An elevator door chimed, and Angela dashed around the comer, looking for it. There it was - a man was stepping into the elevator, a pale man with a rumpled black coat, two days’ growth of beard, a haggard, inward expression.

“Wait!” she shouted. “Hold the door!”

She was a few steps away. He just stared at her, blinking. Put his hand to his mouth to smother a cough.

“You going down?” she asked, almost there.

“Not if I can help it,” he said, as the doors closed in her face.

--

There was a drunk transsexual on Hollywood Boulevard that bright afternoon; and there were seven laughing Japanese tourists, a busload of German tourists getting out to take photos of the stars in the sidewalk, two punk rocker girls begging with their flea-bitten dog, a man juggling tied-off condoms filled with water, a young black man freestyling rap, teenagers from a youth hostel in JanSport packs sharing a pot pipe and not caring who saw it. And there was a blond, tanned, breast-enhanced starlet-wannabe in hot pants and a belly shirt rollerblading in a graceful weaving pattern between all these people…

But it was Father Hennessy who was getting the stares.

The Mexican lady in the purple scarf, shooing her little boy inside her husband’s souvenir shop, stared at Father Hennessy and crossed herself as he passed, and somehow he knew that if she crossed herself it was not because he was a priest - but because he was a priest who didn’t seem
right
somehow. A Japanese girl took a photo of him. The drunken trannie staggered away from him, looking fearfully over her shoulder.

People know the cursed,
he thought.
On some level, they know.

He sighed, going up the narrow steps crammed between a souvenir shop and a discount electronics shop, that led to his studio apartment. He really should find somewhere else to live.

But it’d taken him a long time to properly shield the place and they wouldn’t let him do it at all in the priest’s housing.

He heard his Filipino landlady talking in Tagalog to her husband on the flight above. He hurried to unlock his door and get inside his apartment before she should catch him out here and demand the rent. He was almost two weeks late again.

He intoned his usual prayers on arrival, but it was hard to concentrate with the noise from the television - he always left it on.

The television on the end table by the bed, surrounded by a litter of bottles, sizzled with a snowy image of the
Jerry Springer
show. People shrieking at other people for the camera, their fast-food-jowly faces contorted with rage. Those shows seemed to him as demonic, in their way, as any average possession case. But the case of the girl Consuela - that’d been something else again.

Funny that John Constantine, no priest at all, could succeed where he’d failed. But then few priests could have succeeded on that one. Constantine was right. Something had been even stranger than usual there.

He took out his carrying pint, found it empty, and dug another bottle from his dresser’s sock drawer. He took a long pull of Early Times as he looked around the silvery, trashy box of a room, thinking he’d have to come up with the rent or his landlady would be in here again bitching about what he’d done to her property. Every inch of the walls was covered with aluminum foil, double thickness; the moldering, yellowed stacks of newspapers and magazines teetered at four and five feet high; the furniture was covered in crosses and mystical symbols he’d scrivened himself with a Magic Marker.

John would want him to remove the foil. It blurred the astral signals. It all had to come down.

He had a bad feeling about this. He should tell Constantine to go to-

Well, no, he shouldn’t tell him that. But he should just say no to surfing the astral planes, scrying for occult significance in the papers - it’d bring the Snufflers down on him. And he was very much afraid of seeing the Snufflers again…

“Got to do it,” he mumbled. “Owe John. And he’s gonna give me money. Pay the rent.”

There was another reason to. Low as he had sunk, Hennessy still sought ways to serve God. He suspected that Constantine was one of God’s chess pieces - counterintuitive as that might seem at times.

Dreading the thought of removing his protections, Father Hennessy put his hand to the amulet around his neck - and then remembered it wasn’t there. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, and reluctantly set it aside, hanging it on the television’s rabbit ears. He turned the TV off, took one last pull on the bourbon, then went around the room, tearing down the aluminum foil.

The voices of the damned began almost immediately.

T
here’s something about a Sunset Boulevard motel room,
Constantine thought, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking a judicious swig from the Jack Daniel’s bottle,
especially coming up to dawn: furnishing semiotics saying that life
is
short and everything is trash - except how you feel. That’s what matters. So make yourself feel good and do it now.
He chuckled, feeling the sweat cool him as it dried on his naked flesh. How did he get all that from a cheap seascape, a chipped dresser, a TV set showing MTV without the sound on, a butt-scarred blue carpet, blue curtains, bedclothes in a rumpled heap? But that was the message.

“Oh shut up,” he said aloud. “You’re drunk.”

“You talking to someone I ain’t aware of?” Ellie asked, passing the cigarette they were sharing.

She wasn’t asking it jokingly. She looked like she was in her early twenties, though of course there was no telling what age she really was. Lying on her belly beside him, her big eyes reflecting the Li’l Jon and the East Side Boyz video on the wall TV, she was naked too, but more casual in it, like a cat comfortable in its fur. She was slender and curvaceous both; she was a vixen and a sylph both. She was tautly muscular and languid both.

He managed a short drag without coughing and handed the cigarette back. She got up on her knees and took the fifth of Jack.

“Lung cancer, huh?” she said. She drew deep, deep on the cigarette, and laughed softly - the smoke jittering out with her laughter as she exhaled. “That’s funny as shit, John.” She drank from the bottle and put it on the floor.