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  But! Not so fast, Quinn!

  While I’d been distracted by the bus and my reflections on the possible existence of a cosmic screenwriter, Father Rizzo had drawn one hell of a hunting knife from his work boot (yeah, cassock, white collar, and work boots), and it whizzed past my right ear close enough I figure he’d surely sliced off the upper half inch or so of skin. Then he drew an identical knife from his other boot.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Enough fun and games.” I pounced, and he lost his grip on the knife; it went spinning away across the sidewalk into another muddy slush bank of last week’s snow.

  Both my knees came down hard on his biceps, the toes of my Chucks slamming into his rib cage, one hand gripping each side of his hairy face. I politely waited until he was drawing breath again and had stopped gasping like a beached cod. I leaned close and whispered, my lips so near he could feel my icy breath in his ear.

  “Back in seminary, how much pain they teach you to endure in the name of the Lord?”

  Then there was this kid’s voice behind me. “Hey, you’re beating up on a priest,” it said. I looked over my shoulder to find this Asian guy, maybe nineteen, all earbuds and one of those colorful hats they ship in from Tibet or Ecuador or wherever. You know, dongley things, earflaps, hanging down on either side and the pom-pom on top?

  I bared my shiny piranha teeth.

  “So, go find a cop,” I told him. “Or get in line. Take your pick.”

  Needless to say, the kid did not get in line. I turned back to Rizzo, who was hurting plenty enough now he’d stopped struggling. I had an instant of satisfaction, thinking on how this scene was gonna look on the evening news, and splashed across the front page of the ProJo. B would go pale as a sheet, sure as shit, and that never gets old, watching him freak. This public dustup would be another mess he’d have to find a way to cover up.

  Sweet. No, double sweet. With a cherry on top.

  I stared down at Rizzo, who—gotta give the bastard credit—was staring straight right back at me.

  “Do your worst, hellhound,” he said.

  Is there a how-to manual aspiring “demon slayers” get these quips from? Maybe so, published by Pentecostals down in Mississippi or Georgia or somewhere equally vile, distributed like those ridiculous Jack Chick pamphlets.

  “I know I’m a few days early,” I said, smiling wide enough I hoped it was ear to fucking ear. “But Happy fucking Valentine’s Day, Father.” And then I kissed him. A big, sloppy kiss, tongue and all. He tasted like donuts and bad teeth, but it was worth it and back again.

  And then I stood up and walked away, leaving Rizzo retching on the frozen sidewalk. I’m betting he spent days after that gargling with holy water and chrism, saying Hail Marys because I’d felt his hard-on under me during that long and blasphemous kiss. So, hey, sure I could have killed him, but the continued existence of other nasties had never been high on my list of priorities, since most of my work for B involved their undoing (for everything but noble reasons). Let someone else deal with Rizzo.

  In retrospect, leaving him alive was merely the latest boneheaded move in Quinn’s Little Golden Book of Boneheaded Moves.

  • • •

  Returning now to the subject of Mr. B, or, as I tend to think of him, Mean Mr. B. Trust me. The moniker fits. See, some might aspire to be a son of a bitch; I’m pretty sure B was born that way. I imagine he popped out of his mama’s womb and immediately began trying to suss out the percentage in screwing over every single solitary soul in the delivery room. Hello. What can you do for me? Still, B, he’s nothing half so lowlife as a grifter. Maybe he was, long time back. Every now and then, I sit staring at him and wondering if he began his career as just another confidence fuck, hustling the short cons—pigeon drops, the looky-loo, pig in a poke, rocks in a box, et cetera and et cetera. If so, I gotta wonder when he fell in with the nasties and figured there was better money to be made as a more or less honest businessman brokering and mediating deals where few mortals had ever feared to tread.

  I ask myself those questions, but he’s never volunteered an answer, and I ain’t about to ask out loud. B frequently reminds everyone around him they’re disposable: I found you, made you, and you give me too much shit, I can find another tout de suite. Don’t you ever fool yourself into thinking any different.

  Which I don’t.

  Work for me, kitten, you’ll make enemies of a sort even the likes of a Mr. John Milton and a Mr. H. P. Lovecraft didn’t dare conjure up in their blackest, most fevery dreams. You fuck me over, little girl, or cock up a transaction more than I’m in the mood to get it sorted, I’ll feed you to the lot of them, arse and tits and all.

  Sweet guy, right? Real charmer.

  But, on the other hand, I’ve a feeling I’ve caused B more headaches and inconvenience than most of his lackeys. For my transgressions, I get scoldings, slaps on the wrists, threats, and extra shitty jobs, but he hasn’t yet cut me loose. And that’s another question I’ll never ask aloud. I figure the motherfucker’s got his reasons, and that’s good enough for me.

  Want me to paint you a picture of the man goes beyond his lovable personality? Fine. There he is, on the rough side of fifty, some stripe of Londoner or someone only affecting the accent and mannerisms. He’s sort of a shrimp, but I suspect if he ever has to he could hold his own in a brawl. Probably, he’s had to do that quite a lot over the years, but he also strikes me as one of those badasses who’s let himself get soft and a little complacent. These days, he’s got other folks to fight his battles. Mean Mr. B, he dresses like he’s a gangster in a 1930s or 1940s gangster flick. There is an effete and practiced dapperness about him. A proper dandy, is B, with his slicked-back hair the color and sheen of coal, the sharp edges of his suits, shiny wing tips, his fedoras, and the carefully folded breast-pocket handkerchiefs. And he’s a smooth talker. He could have put the s in suave. Could sell celery to a vampire. Hell, he probably has. More important, he’s ace at talking himself outta the tight spots that are an occupational hazard in his line of work. You deal with demons, dissatisfied customers and unreasonable clients abound. Folks decide they’re above (or below) paying his fee, once the task is done. So you have to give him the due in that respect.

  And he’s queer as they come, with an especially keen taste for jailbait drag queens and pre-op trannies. Hardly ever see the man without a cross-dressing morsel of top-shelf arm candy in tow. But I’m one to talk, unrepentant dyke that I am, she who has never once slept with a man in her life or undeath and never fucking will, thank you very much.

  Which brings us to one last salient point. If B has a legal name printed on a birth certificate somewhere, I’ve never yet met anyone or anything knows what it is. He’s B, except every night that B stands for le nom de jour. This would be funny, if it weren’t so annoying, trying to keep up. Oh, and all his aliases? All of them begin with B, naturally enough: Basil, Blythe, Benjamin, Buckminster, Barlow, and on and on and on. That February, I’d known him for those aforementioned six months, so you figure that’s close to two hundred names right there, and I’d never heard him use the same one twice.

  So, B holds court in this bar up on Wickenden Street—Babe’s on the Sunnyside. Not sure when Anthony “Babe” Silva first opened the doors and pulled that first pint of Guinness, but it had to have been half a century ago. The walls are crowded with black-and-white photos of Providence boxers—Rocky Marciano and Willie Pep, old-timers like that—and there’s a faded needlepoint mural of John F. Kennedy strung up over the billiard table. A rheumy air conditioner chugs in the summer, and the color TV offers up an endless variety of sporting events. Local color out the wazoo. But it’s the last place I’d expect to find this scary old queen with his pretty boys, sipping Cape Cods (and never anything else, mind you) in a booth at the very back of the joint. Likely, just to be contrary. Still, I’ve never seen anyone bat an eyelash at B. If anyone disapproves, they keep it to themselves, like here was a bona fide made wise guy from the Providence Cosa Nos
tra who’d taken up residence there in their midst.

  Okay, so now you know as much as I do about Mean Mr. B, which will have to suffice.

  Which brings us back to that snowy morning, me up to nothing more sinister than a walk home when I’m jumped by that defrocked pedophile priest motherfucker. So much for minding my own business and keeping my nose clean (both among Mean Mr. B’s prescribed virtues). Having not delivered a much-deserved coup de grâce upon my attacker’s person, I decided it was best I hunt down B. Always better he learn about this sort of shit from me than hear it through the proverbial grapevine. But Babe’s didn’t open until noon, and I had no idea what to do with myself for the intervening hour. There probably wasn’t time to drop by home for a shower and a change of clothes. For that matter, there was no guarantee this was one of the days B would even turn up early. He might leave me dangling anxiously for hours, during which time he might learn of the thing with Rizzo before I had a chance to break the news myself.

  But I had one option, a stopgap until the face-to-face. I sat down on the curb, reached into a pocket of my parka, and pulled out the iPhone he’d given me for Xmas. It was a bad joke. Probably, he’d given one of his mollies a credit card and sent the kid off to the mall. The backside of the phone’s case was a glittering mosaic of diamond rhinestones, arranged into the six-whiskered, mouthless, macrocephalic face of Hello Kitty, with a pink diamond rhinestone flower set at each corner. Yeah, ha, ha, fucking ha. I should have thrown the case away, but you never know what’s gonna piss the man off. What he’s gonna interpret as a failure to appreciate his overwhelming generosity.

  So there we were, me and Hello Kitty. I tapped in his number, and it rang eight times before anyone answered. Nothing unusual there. I was lucky when anyone bothered answering at all. It wasn’t Mean Mr. B, of course. He never answers the phone himself. It was one of the boys; their voices were as interchangeable to me as their faces.

  “Need to speak him,” I said.

  “Him?” the voice asked, drenched in indifference.

  “Yeah, him. Put him on the line, and stop fucking around.”

  “I take it you mean Bosco. You’re being very vague.”

  “Bosco? You’re shitting me. Bosco?”

  “Unless you mean someone else, Quinn,” the boy sighed, his indifference changing over into mild exasperation. “Maybe you have the wrong number.”

  “Fine. Yeah, I mean Bosco.”

  “Well, he’s not in at the moment. I can take a message, though. If you wish.”

  I wanted to punch the sidewalk. Sure, the cement would probably break my hand, but it’d have healed by the next day. I gritted my teeth.

  “No,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, ’cause B hates when anyone gets grumpy with one of his play pretties. “I don’t want to leave a message. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Call back later, or try Babe’s.”

  Nine chances out of ten, Bosco (probably the worst name I’d heard him use yet) was sitting right next to the boy, silently chuckling to himself. I knew it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he’d already gotten wind of the altercation and had decided to savor my discomfort for a while.

  He does shit like that, all the goddamn time.

  “Tell him I called. Tell him I’ll be around.”

  “That’s very vague, Quinn.”

  “Yeah,” I replied and hung up.

  Fuck me.

  So, as Willy Wonka said, strike that. Reverse it. I did have time to swing by home and clean up, after all. I stuck out my tongue and tasted the snow. The flakes take just a little longer to melt on the tongue of a dead girl. One flake, two flakes, three. Then I stood up, dusted snow off my jeans, and turned north up Hope Street. It was only four blocks to my apartment, the second floor of an old Victorian.

  This isn’t the dump I was living in when Mercy Brown and Jack Grumet the Werewolf made of me the pretty hate machine I am today, that shithole down at the south end of Gano that B rented for me just after he took me under his wing. By that February, I’d moved up in the world. Sure, the place was still a dump, but it was a way classier dump. There isn’t even a hole in the kitchen floor. And the ugly Play-Doh blue carpet doesn’t crunch when you walk on it, from all the roaches that are busy living and dying underneath. Nothing but the best for Mean Mr. B’s red right hand. Can’t have folks thinking he doesn’t take care of his own, not a classy gent like him. Demons talk.

  Walking those four blocks, I kept my head down, avoiding the casual glances of anyone else I passed. The night before, I hadn’t felt like bothering with the contact lenses and dental prosthetics and the layers of makeup I usually used to hide my true face from the living, breathing world. B had given me the contacts a day or two after I died, to conceal my shark-black eyes—no distinguishing pupil from iris—behind a lie of hazel green. Before Mercy Brown, my eyes had been blue, but what the fuck? He’d sent me to a cosmetic dentist a month or so later, after that mess with the Bride and Penderghast was over and done with, this dude up in Pawtucket who practiced a smattering of half-assed Enochian magic on the side and could generally be counted on to keep a secret in order to stay in the good graces of the nasties. That, and I figured Mean Mr. B had some dirt on him, as well.

  But the contacts hurt my eyes, the fake teeth made it difficult to talk, and the makeup . . . well, it was all just too much trouble, and I’d taken to forgoing all that subterfuge when I went out at nights. Especially the nights I went out to eat.

  I was on my way up the front steps when a silver Buick LaCrosse pulled up in front of the house and the driver honked its horn. I turned and stared at the car a moment, pretending I didn’t know it was B come around to collect his troublesome hired gun. The horn honked a second time. Fortunately, my downstairs neighbors were out of town (a situation that would soon grow increasingly fortunate). I haven’t mentioned how Mercy and Grumet had left me with the ability to hear a mouse fart from three states away, but they had, and I heard clearly the whir of electronics as the backseat window on the passenger side of the Buick descended, revealing the grinning face of B, smirking out at me. He was wearing a gray-and-white seersucker suit, as if he’d dressed to blend in with the weather. I rubbed my eyes another moment before walking over to the car.

  “Wanna go for a ride?” he asked, all cordial as cordial can be. He patted the seat beside him.

  “Not especially,” I said. “More in the mood for a long hot shower.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “That’s not what you indicated just a few minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, well, you snooze, you lose.”

  These sudden, unexpected spells of pushing my luck? Just another wrinkle in the bottomless charisma of me that B has always—well, usually—let slide.

  “You sound rather put out, kitten,” he said, making an attempt at seeming concerned. “Whatever in the whole wide world has you in such an unpleasant disposition, this fine winter morning?”

  I very briefly calculated the potential expense of punching the motherfucker in the face.

  “Must have been sod all, to have you so at sixes and sevens. Climb in and tell me all about it.”

  I ignored the second invitation. Not as satisfying as punching him in the face, but infinitely less hazardous.

  “Sure some little birdie or another hasn’t already told you, Bosco?”

  “Now, now. Bosco is a fine and noble name—”

  “For chocolate syrup.”

  “—of Italian origin, from the Piemonte region. Have you truly never heard of Father Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco? Don Bosco, as he’s more popularly known. Canonized in 1934 and, as it happens, the patron saint of magicians.”

  “See? You know it was Rizzo, and you’re just fucking with me for shits and giggles.”

  “Be that as it may, I’d like to hear of this misadventure from you, Quinn, my sweet. Now, please stop wasting my time and get in the car.”

  Now, B almost never says please, not even
when speaking to his more infernal, perfidious, and perilous clients. I shut up and got in the Buick. The inside of the car smelled of aftershave lotion, the rainbow-colored Nat Shermans B smokes, and black coffee. At least, those three formed the uppermost stratum of smells. I could list dozens of subtler odors. Like my hearing, Mercy Brown’s ministrations had cranked up my nose to eleven. I glanced at the rearview mirror and the chauffeur, who was watching me with a mix of suspicion and boredom. He was Filipino, no more than nineteen, and, I have to admit, subtler and less garish in his gender bending that Mean Mr. B’s usual bill of fare.

  “He started it,” I said, keeping my eyes on the driver (who was still sizing me up).

  “I’m very sure that he did,” B replied. “It was only a matter of time before the good father expanded his ambitions. Fancy a fag?” he asked, offering me my choice of a red, blue, or green cigarette.

  “I’ll pass.”

  The driver narrowed his eyes very slightly, as if he wasn’t so keen on my having refused B’s offer.

  “She thinks she’ll pass,” B sighed, and the boy finally turned away from the rearview mirror. He shrugged and laughed very softly.

  “Frankly,” said B, “I don’t entirely understand the silly git’s problem with you. After all, in a sense, you’re both in the same line of work. True, you’re more discriminating, and less zealous—”

  “And only kill what and who I’m told. I’m hardly on a goddamn holy crusade.”

  “I trust you do know the meaning of the word zealous, don’t you?” he asked. Then he motioned at the driver, and the silver Buick pulled away from the curb.

  “Maybe he’s pissed about the competition,” I said, ignoring the question.

  “Possibly. But surely he’s aware there’s plenty of victims to go around. No, I fear it’s more personal.”