SANDMAN SLIM

"No. Wild Bill told my great-granddad about it. It's where I take you down the river. Someplace the ground is soft and wet. I break your arms and legs. You fingers and toes. Your neck and back. I dig a hole in the wet, soft ground, put you inside, and fill it back up. Then I have a cigarette and wait for you to dig your way out."

"Before twelve," says Parker, and hangs up.

IF I LEARNED anything Downtown, it's this: the only real difference between an enemy and a friend is the day of the week.

I go back to where I abandoned the Jag, jam the knife in the ignition, and aim the car west, then south, heading back along the same surface streets I traveled with Wells once before. A good sense of direction can get you into or out of a lot of trouble.

Who's higher on the food chain? The Golden Vigil or Homeland Security? The feds are probably picking up the tab for the operation, but that probably has more to do to with Washington control freaks and politicians who want their names next to supersecret intelligence groups. Wanting to put Ran CIA or Busted terrorist cell on your resume when you run for president seems obvious, but would telling people that you run angels and G-men who keep the world safe from chaos creatures on the edge of the universe help your political career or get you a syringe full of Thorazine and a lifetime supply of adult diapers? What does whoever runs the Vigil back in D.C. put on their quarterly work reports? At least, the people that person reports to must know what the Vigil does. But what do you tell oversight committees and budget fascists? "We need that extra billion for a gun that will turn vampires into dog food and dark angels into the filling for Bavarian cream doughnuts." Who runs this sideshow and what do they want?

If what I'd read was right, it was all a joke anyway. Before the morning herd came into Max Overdrive this morning, I looked up the Golden Vigil on an occult encyclopedia Web site. The Golden Vigil has been around at least since the First Crusade in the eleventh century. That's when the Brits and the French started writing about it.

According to some of those stories, the Vigil was a splinter cell of the original Hashishin, the frat-house assassination cult that was the Al Qaeda of its day. While the regular Hashishin stuck to Dirty Harry jihadist political power-structure attacks, the Golden Vigil went after invisible enemies.

The French chroniclers insist that the Vigil is much older than most people realize, and that its origins might actually explain how and why some of the first tribes stopped chasing game up and down the Fertile Crescent and settled down to build the world's first trailer parks along the Euphrates. If the Kissi have been here for as long as Aelita said, it makes sense. It means that the Vigil has been around for at least eight to ten thousand years. Even longer, if the tribes were negotiating with the Kissi when they first wandered up out of Africa. That would push the Vigil's origins back to around seventy thousand years, according to another encyclopedia site.

Which brings us back to the question of who's the big meat eater along this food chain, Homeland Security or the Golden Vigil? Whoever controls the money is in the driver's seat. The gray-suit guys back east might pony up the money now, but I have a hard time believing that if Washington pulled the plug, the Vigil couldn't support itself. You can stuff a lot of loot into the cookie jar over seventy thousand years.

WHEN I PULL into the parking lot of the Vigil's warehouse, a couple of G-men dressed like rent-a-cops hold up their hands for me to stop. Being highly trained security professionals with keen powers of observation, they leap and lurch out of the way when they see that I'm not slowing down. By the time I'm up to the warehouse entrance and out of the Jag, six of them have surrounded me and each one of them has an identical Glock 9mm pointed at my head. I hate Glocks. Guys who love Glocks love Corvettes. Not because it was a hot car, but because it was cool forty years ago and they once saw a picture of Steve McQueen in one. Their dad probably had a Vette when he was young, but he was never cool. But if they have a Vette, maybe they can forget the fat man who made them mow the lawn when they should have been out with their friends sneaking into R-rated movies, and who embarrassed them in front of their first girlfriends. Maybe their dad was the guy driving fast and locking lips with Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair. Maybe their dad was cool after all and maybe that made them cool, too. That's what Glocks are. High-precision killing machines that scream "Daddy Issues."

They come on attack-dog fierce, but no one seems eager to pull the trigger. Lucky me. I don't want to get shot. Lucky them. I know these guys are just the hired help, but right now I really want to hurt someone.