Page 20

Candy opens the eyeball and pulls out the record Alessa Graves gave her. She puts it on the stereo and cranks up the sound. The trembling rumble of surf guitar fills the room.

Reaching under the towel, she begins to massage my cock, then kisses me hard. I lean against her, smelling her hair and neck. She pulls off my towel and pushes me down on the sofa, keeps pumping me with her hand. I pull her on top of me and start to roll her over when she says, “Wait a minute.” She throws off her short dress and underwear and pulls me inside her.

“Fukaku hamekonde chodai,” she whispers.

I have no idea what that means, but I don’t think it has anything to do with tamales. When she wraps her legs around me, I have the strange feeling it’s the music more than me that’s driving her, but it doesn’t seem like the right time to ask.

THE GOOD NEWS is that we don’t break any furniture we care about, just a secondhand lamp that was here when I moved in. I know that if I get another lamp, Candy will conveniently lose it and replace it with something horrifying. Something that spins and has talking robots or waving tentacles.

Candy crawls into bed and we divvy up the tamales. I take some down to Kasabian, and when I come back upstairs, she’s propped against a pile of pillows digging into her dinner. I take my plate into the room and join her in bed.

“Hey, do you remember me bringing home a folder or packet of some kind when I went to work with Abbot?”

She nods, holds a hand over her mouth, and chews.

“It’s on the floor next to the bureau. You put it there and I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to ask about it.”

“You looked inside?”

She nods, looking a little guilty.

“Sorry. A big envelope from the augur. How could I not look? Besides, knowing you, it was a check for a million dollars and you forgot about it.”

I mix some beans with rice and swallow a mouthful.

“I guess I don’t have a good history with money.”

“It’s not money. It’s authority. Someone gives you a job and you take it, but then they give you an envelope full of stuff to read and it’s like homework. You leave it on the floor hoping the dog will eat it.”

“And it never does.”

“You’re mad at the dog we don’t have?”

“Can we rent one to clean up my mistakes?”

“It would have to be a pretty big dog.”

I poke her in the leg with my fork and she punches my arm. Candy isn’t exactly human. She’s a Jade, which is kind of like a vampire, only worse. It also means she’s strong. Her love taps are like a velvet-covered baseball bat.

“Abbot said there was stuff in the folder about insurance.”

“Mmm,” says Candy around a mouthful of food. She swallows and says, “Yep. Medical and dental. There’s 401(k) stuff in there too.”

“Now he’s just fucking with me. He knows I don’t have any bank accounts.”

“He’s the augur. He has pull. Just because there’s paperwork that says you’re dead, it doesn’t have to always be that way. Talk to him. Maybe the Sub Rosa can resurrect the late James Stark.”

I shake my head and eat my tamales. I’m very hungry and then very self-conscious. We’re in bed naked and I wonder if I have any bruises on my body from the fight. I should have checked myself when I took a shower. It’s a good thing I’m not a spy. I’d blow my cover story two minutes into enemy territory. I change the subject.

“Did Julie tell you about the kid I brought her?”

“Yeah. He’s a friend of the Abbot’s or something like that.”

“Abbot was cagey. I’ve been wondering about that, but I don’t know what to think.”

“There aren’t that many secrets men usually have about a missing kid. The kid is dead. The kid was snatched by the mother and he doesn’t want to say so. Or he snatched the kid and doesn’t want to say. There’s another more common reason.”

“Come on. Tell me.”