SANDMAN SLIM

"I'm sorry. I don't think I can help you."

"How about this? Free drinks. Free food at night, too. Good burgers, ribs, tamales. You eat and drink free until the end of time."

"That's a really nice offer, but I don't think I can help you."

He looks away and starts wiping glasses again. "If you change your mind, they come on Thursdays, in the afternoon, when we're getting deliveries."

I get up and head for the door. When I'm halfway there he says, "Hey," and slides something down the bar at me. It's a pack of American Spirit browns, the nonfiltered kind. There's a pack of matches tucked under the cellophane wrap.

"Take them," he says. "I can't smoke in here, either."

Slipping on Brad Pitt's shades, I ask, "You have anymore of these back there?"

"No."

"You're a hell of a first date, Carlos." Damn. When someone gives you his last cigarette, you owe him.

Martin Denny bird chirps follow me to the door.

Turns out, I don't need the shades for long. It must have been later in the day than I thought when I went into the Bamboo House of Dolls. As I leave, the sun is almost down and lights are coming on all along the Boulevard. I've always liked Hollywood better at night. The streetlights, headlights, and flashing signs outside the tourist traps blur away the straight lines and hard right angles that ruin the place. The Boulevard is only ever real at night when it's both bright and black and there are promises hidden in every shadow. It's like it was designed and built specifically for vampires. For all I know, it was.

Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.

I count to eleven as I walk deeper into Hollywood. Eleven parking meters. Eleven hookers looking for their first post-Christmas trick. Eleven actors I never heard of on eleven stars in the sidewalk.

Eleven years. Eleven goddamn years and I'm home with a key and a pocketknife and a coin that won't buy me a cup of coffee.

Three, five, seven, eleven, all good children go to Heaven.

Gone eleven years and I make it back the day after Christmas. Is someone trying to tell me something?

I pull out one of Carlos's American Spirits and light up. The smoke feels good in my lungs. This body is starting to feel like mine again. Like me. I'm just not sure about the rest of the world.

Who the hell are all these people on the Boulevard the day after Christmas? How am I supposed to blend in with them? There's a nice guy at a bar a few blocks from here. He was just doing his job, but he had a knife in his hand and all I could do was count all the ways I knew to kill him.

It hits me then how unprepared I am for being back, how everything that made sense Downtown is strange here, wrong and ridiculous. All the skills I developed—how to draw an enemy in and how to kill, all the magic I'd learned or stolen—suddenly feels feeble and foolish in this bright and alien place. I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.

I finish off the first cigarette and light another. The world is a much louder and stranger place than I remember. I need to start doing and stop running around screaming inside my own head. Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.

I need to concentrate on what's important, like my sure and certain plans to find and kill, in as painful a way as possible, the six traitorous snakes who stole my life. And something worse. It makes me weak inside to think about it. It's a woman's face.

Her name is Alice. She's the only bright thing I ever loved, the only person I ever met worth giving a damn about. If Heaven ever meant anything, she should be married, probably now to some skinny leather-pants guitarist she has to support with temp jobs in those fluorescent-tube high-rise dungeons along Wilshire. Or she'd have gone straight, married a dentist, squeezed out a minivan full of crib lizards, and gotten fat. That would be okay, too. But none of those things are going to happen for her. Nothing nice happens to murdered women, except that maybe someone cares about how they got that way.

If Alice was still around, would she even recognize me under all these scars? There was a mirror inside the entrance to the Bamboo House of Dolls, but I'd been careful not to look at it. Walking along the Boulevard, I take quick glances at my reflection in the dim glass of dead storefronts. I'm bigger than I was when I went down, heavier with muscle and scar tissue, but still thin by human standards. I can still recognize the rough outline of my face, but it looks more like stone than flesh. My cheeks and chin are chiseled out of concrete; my eyes are dark, shining marbles above lips the color of dirty snow. I'm a George Romero zombie, except I've never been dead. Just vacationing in the land of the dead. Suddenly I want to get my hands around the throat of fat Alice's imaginary husband and squeeze him till he pops like a balloon.

That stops me cold.