SANDMAN SLIM

It's a man's body. Naked. Nailed face-first to the wall about six feet off the ground. Someone has carefully peeled back the outer layers of skin. Let them fall back like pale, fleshy leaves on a plant, leaving the muscles and bones untouched. There are only two or three drops of blood on the floor. At least I know where the blood for the frescoes came from. And that whoever peeled and drained a body that cleanly really knew what he or she or they were doing.

The body is nailed the wrong way around for me to see the face. I can tell from here that it's the body of a middle-aged man. Vidocq has been in his fifties for two hundred years. Is that still middle-aged? I wish the old bastard had some tattoos I could look for. The body is too badly beaten up to look for scars.

I know I should take the body down. All I have to do is stand on a chair, yank the nails from the hands, and it's taken care of. But I don't want to get near it. I can't look away, either. I had the same reaction seeing my father at the funeral home. I couldn't get near him and I couldn't move away. My brain knew that I needed to react, but my body wouldn't go along with any of it. I only got over it by forcing myself to go to my father's body and touch his face. Looking just vapor-locked my brain. I had to feel that he was dead.

There's a stepladder next to the refrigerator in the kitchen. I bring it to the living room and open it up right below the body. Before I can start the dirty work, out of the corner of my eye I see the nosy neighbor sticking his nosy face in where it shouldn't be.

"Oh God. Oh my God. I'm calling the cops."

I move fast. Fast enough that I scare him more than the body does. Before he can finish dialing, I snatch the cell phone out of his hand and perp-walk him to a window. Lean him out and make him watch as I drop his phone into a Dumpster several floors below.

I say, "Go get it. Then you can call."

Nosy Neighbor looks at me like I just told him that I'm Darth Vader and I fucked his sister, but he doesn't say a word. He heads straight for the stairs.

Back at the body, I pull the nails from the feet first. They're some kind of heavy concrete nail. Perfect for going through muscle and bone and into a wall stud.

With the feet free, I can get the body down on the ground. I climb onto the top step of the stepladder. Yank one nail out of one hand and the other out of the other. Suddenly free, the body drops heavily into my arms. The limbs flop. The head tilts, snaps, and falls off.

Too much. I let go and it hits the ground.

I should have seen it the moment I started to move the body, but I was distracted, trying to decide between collapsing into a queasy heap or pulling a John Wayne to see what was right in front of me.

Kasabian's corpse is lying on the floor. That's why the body is so beaten up. The Kissi didn't torture Vidocq. They just stitched back together what Parker blew apart last night.

How do you steal and clean a body from the bottom of a ten-thousand-year-old tar pit? Why do you steal and clean a body from the bottom of a ten-thousand-year-old tar pit?

And if Kasabian's boomerang corpse is here on the floor, where are Vidocq and Allegra?

My phone rings. I thumb it on.

"Boo. Fooled you with your own dead guy." It's Parker. "I bet right about now you're wondering where your friends are."

"How are you seeing me?"

"Look around you, shit for brains. There's eyes everywhere."

"The paintings."

"There's this thing called magic. Maybe you've heard of it."

"Where are Vidocq and Allegra?"

"Relax, sweetheart. They're fine. In fact, we're having a New Year's party tonight and you're invited."

"At Avila?"

"How do you walk around with that big brain? Yeah, Avila. It'll be a blast. We're go

"I'll be there."

"This is a personal invitation. No guests. No plus ones. If I see a cloud of dust behind you, Senor Frog and that little slice of cherry pie go right in the wood chipper."

"I'll be there."

"Before midnight. That's twelve. When the big hand and the little hands are straight up."

"Either one of them gets hurt, I'm going to personally teach you the Tombstone Dog Paddle."

"That another scary trick you learned in Hell?"

"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.