Verse

Seven-oh-seven.

The Baron sat up upon his thinning cot. It was a bleak, cool evening, and he was alone.

Rodriguez shook off his sleep in an unhappy hurry and fumbled to kill the alarm. He'd smacked the thing off the bedside, which meant he had to stretch way out and grope for it, if he could make his hands work worth a shit. Noise did this to him. High, like a steam engine, or a storm siren—it stood his fine hairs up, made blood surge around his heart.

The Baron shut off and tossed the clock down, not bothering with the lightswitch. His eyes hurt. A winter sun sank half-hour ago, and with it there came the strange, restless feeling of early nights—nights that stung your face like wind, dried you out like old coals—nights that got everything seeming just a bit scarier. Winter on the desert made the air smell a little like fire.

So he kicked off his sad sheet, got both feet on the floor. Piece-of-shit mattress sat on a cheap, screechy springboard that routinely fucked up his back. Truth is Rodriguez had been meaning to find a new place for months, since right after his last displacement—a move made in two minutes because he saw a weird car on a weird street and got a weird feeling.

He moves every nine or ten weeks. It's more weirdness than anything else this time of year.

Current place was more of a basement than a hideout. You walked straight down eight concrete stairs from the sidewalk, under some wolf spiders, and into his undecorated living room, where you'd only have the flickering TV and a carpetless floor. Shitty color of wood. There was no couch—just a creaky breakfast table, a waterlogged desk he didn't need, two uncomfortable chairs. Rest of that space was empty air scowled in on by peeling, pinstriped green wallpaper—no windows—just the glum corner-kitchen with its cabinets that didn't close tight and its dim buttercream paint. The tiles under his shower and stove had been orange once, but now they were flat adobe. The radiator gathered dust at the end of a stunted, claustrophobic hall. Bathroom was first on the left and the light kept going out. He kept his bedroom door shut.

It's not that Nines didn't have any money, you've got to understand; what he couldn't afford was the time. You can make the other things, but you can't make any time.

You can make a lot of friends in a city like this, too, you're not too squeamish about the particulars. Look for an Anarch business and you'll find other people's orphans out there hustling a buck for the Cause—kids who got nothing but time. Course, it's all baby drugs these days; Rodriguez wasn't a kingpin, but he knew some guys who were. There were a few Culiacán runners leftover from Rochelle's days shipping product to Cali and bussing in illegals when they could for sixty-five-percent profit. Nines was getting ripped off, but you always are in a city; the question is how far you can make that rip-off thirty-five go.

It wasn't enough to ditch Isaac's investment, obviously, but it was a decent something. When Hollywood wouldn't pay its dues, they still had thirty-five-percent of cars, thirty-five-percent of guns, and a thirty-five-percent stockpile of automatics, grenades, and fireworks hidden under the floor in Griffith Park, hooked up to a fuse, waiting for Nines to say three-two-one.

Twenty-first century for you. It's easy meat; half of these kids had already been dealing before their Embrace. Easier than the kind it used to be, anyway, when he was one of those kids—when the meat didn't always come in crates or in plastic—but more often in longcoats, work visas, and imitation pearl.

Rodriguez spent next to zero time in a house, anyway. He didn't bring people here. He didn't want anybody to know here he slept. The landlord—some speedy, skull-capped gecko of a guy—would invariably come pecking at the doors, but usually left rent-collecting to his ma, who used kindergarten English and only when she absolutely had to. Pagué el lunes and él tiene el dinero was about the height of Nines's Spanish. So long he had bills in the sock drawer, and he did, nobody made inquiries about his odd schedule or noticed the unsettling quality of #1C's face. Nobody tried to speak with him. Rent Ma probably thought he was an undercover narc. This was absolutely fine with him. The whole address had a sizzling Agent Orange odor about it—Lysol, risotto and rat poison—which, go figure, must've deterred Camarilla snoopers, too.

Over the bathroom sink, his sinuses still hurting, the bad lighting made Rodriguez look to himself a little off-center from human. It was one of those nights, too. Waking up, coming in here, there's always that off-minute, that odd twang, when you'd catch the reflection of yourself. You identify the body, know intellectually that it's yours. You can see the lines and the birthmarks right where they ought to be. And yet you don't feel the relief, or the familiarity, or the realness. It's just a face. You don't quite recognize that body in the mirror as being you.

The ghost feeling got worse over decades, and at this point, he didn't bother wondering if it was his problem or just one of those things. He turned on the spigot. The tap tasted like iron, but felt normal and OK against his tired face, caught there on the glass with glass-blue in deep sockets. It still didn't look right. Something off about the darkness of the eyelids and the whiteness in the eyeflesh; he had black lashes, the warlike sort of nose you'd expect him to have, and a mouth in which his canine teeth didn't sit comfortably. He looked like a guy who maybe had about six months left on his ticket; there was a vague suggestion of sickness under direct light, of somebody who might not be around too much longer. The single freckle on his left cheek tried its best to make him look like a person. He scrubbed hard to get some blood moving before twisting off the faucet; it protested in sharp, startled squeaks.

Scavenged clothes from the bedroom floor: a shirt, a knife slipped in the neck of a boot, jeans that were relatively unworn. Damsel had been harping him about bulletproof since the Nocturne last year, and she was probably right, but Nines didn't want to appear afraid. He put everything else on.

There was a lot of backlash to check-up on today. There was a lot that could have gone wrong.

The anemic yellow fridge-glow always turned him to ash; he tried not to look at his arm on the handle. Empty racks: a scattering of beer cans, one fogged half-bag of bagels (stale), and a carton of milk for appearances, just in case. In the crisper, three plastic skins of blood under a towel. Better not to use it up. He gave up his search and threw the milk out.

Then he grabbed for a coat, tucked in his wallet, and went through the door with a Colt pinned between his belt and his spine.

One scummy flight of stairs took Nines above ground and immediately onto the street. It was already climbing. Liquor stores; down-and-outs; some kids hanging around with gats, thought guns made them gangsters. This cholita he'd kind of had an eye on for a while was guarding the intersection, keeping tabs on the poor babies working the corner; she shot him the macho hello-frown that somebody with a five-buck pistol and a regular night shift shoots you. But he wasn't recruiting tonight, and wasn't looking for an elbow in the face or a fist full of keys. He was too big and too lazy to pick on the ones who fight back. Which was precisely why he got in his car and got off that block and was driving for Hollywood Boulevard on a quarter-tank of gas.

It was noisy out tonight. No particular noise—just a big, muddled, everywhere-noise: weather in the palms, chopping up the surf, hiccupping the tinny radio. Wind following a hot, thunderstorm day into a hotter, cloudy evening. These are the sounds that tend to give your mind wandering legs, let your concentration go to sleep. Nines was driving a secondhand Ford these days, a piece-of-shit pickup Kent had grabbed him; the silver paint was down to metal in some places and the axels squeaked; the AC, of course, was busted. The flatbed was currently full of ammunition that rattled in a spooky skeleton way.

You could try forgetting about that everywhere noise, but you would not succeed. Nines Rodriguez heard everything now. He had a drumming in his head. He'd stopped pointing out the gunshots. He drove with his windows down and had the low-burn paranoia of not being able to shake all this nonsense and listen to any one particular thing.

He can't remember a time when there had not been a city and he had not been in it.

St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and now The Angels; there comes a point in an animal's life where it knows it can't get out anymore. Cities are too many voices talking at once. Rochelle used to say that everywhere-noise reassured her. It made Nines sick and anxious.

But hey, you know what: Rochelle is dead-as, and Nines Rodriguez? Still here.

When you become an old Anarch, you begin to be sick a little differently. You start to taste something useful about the horror, something that could be tempered and stuck in an eye. Mixed with the tarmac is always that faint LA scent of something on fire. Avant-garde in Hollywood; Black Hand on the beachfront; Kuei-jin at the edges; Nosferatu in the sewers; Camarilla expansionism and Anarch resistance to that expansionism—everybody's here. It's a high-octane rumble. Nobody knows what anybody else really thinks.

For the Free-State, it's got to be a city; there's always the promise, and always the big, flashy boom at the end.

Nines has kept his hand on this Domain for six years now. Say what you want about him, but he had not auctioned his State away when the Camarilla sharks swam in. He held on. The farther away their boundary claims pushed him, the tighter he clenched. Angeltown wasn't whimpering away like the rest of them had—not Santa Monica, clambering to join the club like a used-to-be-somebody bitch; not Hollywood, limping into a corner with arms full of Camarilla cash. LA is unswallowable. LA would dig the fuck in until the python trying to eat them felt spurs hit its ribs, shred all the way down. LA would at least leave some scars behind.

He doesn't feel old. Not really, but he feels like he's been fighting the same people for a very long time, and Nines Rodriguez has to wonder if that fight is over in a time when he is really the best they have left.

The stereo was mostly growling static, so he turned it off. Nines tried to check the time. He found five unanswered voice-messages from Damsel instead; they splintered into straight profanity roundabout the third, and he stopped listening halfway through.

Damsel was a last-minute Den Mother. She'd joined on seven, eight years back in San Fran; 'joined,' anyway, meaning he'd dragged that kid out from a rubbled building and her predecessor's dust pile thirty minutes after they met. Jackie'd been an alarming intelligence, a stand-up talker, and a comfortable personality whom Rodriguez had always admired. Red had been quiet as a chapel mouse. She didn't have a clue. So, after the Sabbat bombs had gone off and they were full of soot and gasoline and bits of glass, Nines took Damsel home. Hadn't said a word the whole way—just sat in the back of his car with a glazed look and a busted nose, reading highway signs count down to Los Angeles. She'd a shard of mall window the size of a dinner plate wedged in one cheek and soon as they got to the city—soon as she shook off that shellshock quiet—she yelled at everybody who talked at her, never really stopped.

There were some pretty good reasons Nines Rodriguez had never wanted anything to do with making a Childe—but in the way most things happened to him, he got saddled with one anyway.

Jackie had been Damsel's first hero, so goes the story. This college-town Jewish girl, faraway from home, opens her mouth and gets stomped on by skinheads, has to be rescued by a nice Motor City vampire with a bleedy heart. Now the leftover kid's on Hero Number Two—which means she's in the army, barking doctrines until Skelter'd heard enough and those two ended up at one another's throat. Nines took the tagalong with a try-to-be-tolerant calm. "Little girl, little girl, where do you think you are?" he used to chide her, until Damsel cold-cut stopped answering to it. But he can't afford to be choosey. A Baron needs somebody to stand a little behind him and cover his tracks.

And he needs a Den Mother, since their former one—a statuesque, sweet-voiced blonde who called herself Houlihan and largely kept away from Rodriguez—disappeared shortly after he took charge. Might've bit it, but Nines had a feeling Houlihan ran off because she'd been afraid he would take over and kill her. Funny he'd been worrying exactly the same thing. MacNeil used to let his two lieutenants cat-eye each other and brush shoulders like that. They'd make different friends, gather rival bids, try to get popular; they'd act real nice face-to-face (hey sweetheart how you doing? you OK? how's your people?); then they'd glare nasty at each other's backs. Now, Rodriguez didn't bear Houlihan any ill will, but it is what it is in LA, and he doesn't let a sweet voice get one cent of love from him.

Guess you know how that all turned out.

Damsel was too green for the position, truth be told. He'd appointed her because she was available, she was Brujah, and she wasn't going to speak a word against him; for all that yelling, Red was easy to control. You knew when she'd be where she'd be and what she'd be doing there. She was a good kid. Pissed him off sometimes, but that's the way it goes.

He deleted the messages, and then he looked up, and like nothing's ever changed in this city he's in Hollywood. It's a slum with nice cufflinks. But it's one of two hunting zones open to Anarchs these days, and you probably shouldn't feed where you live. A drive by Ash Rivers's pouty little club was usually enough. Rivers himself was a teenage rebel, but once, not too terrible long ago, Baron Angeltown had started some shit in a townhall—didn't matter what that shit had been about anymore—and Ash was the second one out of his seat. It was probably a fluke and it was undoubtedly more about pissing off Isaac than supporting Nines, but Rodriguez didn't plan on actually stepping into the building. He had other places to be tonight. He was just going to sweep on by.

The parking garage around back of Ash's place was a fucking mess, full of crunched bottles and spilled beer smell. Nines flashed his high beams to look around, then got out. This many cars made him uneasy, but the Camarilla hadn't condescend to assassinate him for a while. They tried once, got their Nosferatu hitman taken out at thirty-five yards, and realized making a martyr was maybe not all that wise.

He picked up his phone and dialed and said hello who is this, is this Skelter, mhm it's me, I'll be there in an hour or so. Will you let Damsel know. No, just do it. Because I don't want to hear a motherfucking monologue right now, how's that? Oh you know she is. Uh-huh, OK, that's what I said, see you.

To tell you the truth none of this shit is even hard.

Think what you want about the Brujah. In politics, it is always going to be about personality, and he does the play-dumb-speak-soft thing pretty well. Nines is not what you'd call a man's-man, so he knows what he needs to do is make everyone and their cousin fall in love. With a person or a cause—same difference, same thing, one-and-the-other. So Nines Rodriguez is awful serious. He honors the American Dream. He sounds like an average joe white guy with a sweet mother back in Wichita and a shotgun in his closet, except when he doesn't—when he talks like it's moment in history, right now, and you are a part of it, too. He calls everybody honey. He is just unavailable enough. He does not do auditorium speeches. He won't use your name until you think he's forgotten what it is. Then he says Carlos, Natisha, Jessica, Ahmed, Katie, believe me. I know where you come from and I've been who you are.

People have always liked Nines Rodriguez. Most of the time more than they should have. He'd be lying if he claimed not to notice and lying worse if he claimed not to know why.

Play-dumb, talk-soft. Old boy MacNeil walked the man's-man walk; look at what that got him.

In the city, you don't need to have much time, because you never have to wait long. You get animal eyes and you stop seeing things people care about. You stop seeing bodies, and gender, and the picture a bunch of features make up. You see empty expressions; the side-eye, the tired mouth; the prey-look; the lostness of direction, the headphones in, the difficult shoes. You see a limp in the left leg and somebody who probably doesn't have a gun. He waited maybe ten minutes, looking like an unsuspicious guy on his phone until somebody came out of the bar, then he tilted his head and shot a smile filthy in its innocuousness and it's play-dumb all over again. This is the part everybody panics about on their first weird nights, but it's not hard anymore a few weeks in, once you transition past the moral squirming and the painful flailing of the those first inevitable fuck-ups. You just fake it, frankly, and frankly, in that sense, predation isn't too different from the sleazy shit you did when you were alive.

"Hey, you didn't see my Bug, did you? I lost it." She tried to be cute but by this point you don't really notice kids' faces, do you? "It's blue. It's a blue Bug. A Beetle."

That's all this is. If you're a certain type of person, that's all anything ever is.

He said I don't know where your car is honey but this one runs pretty well, do you need a ride home? She said why should I trust you, you're just some guy. He said I'm a cop, which was a cheap lie, but Nines knew he had a face women want to trust. She said really well where's your uniform; he said I'm off-duty; she said oh, so a cop, huh, but only when the sun's up right? He said that's right.

When Rochelle first noticed him—weird night, October of 1924, noisy and too cold—she'd been waiting maybe ten minutes for a meeting, standing around a rival's product warehouse in a rainwet peacoat with a Bugsy fedora and white gloves. She walked right up to the new kid and made him smile. That is to say she made him smile—stuck a finger in and pried his bottom jaw from the top, said, "You got pretty teeth, baby." She said you a talker, slick? Huh? Speakuh the English, angel? Got a tongue in your head? Baby, she said, let me get you a cool hat and a tie. How are you with that gun? You enjoy this door job, sugar? You getting fairly compensated? Getting your dues? Because I see a couple of little-leagues mobsters wasting you in this muscle gig, boyo. If you ask me. Good-looking young kid. Nice smile, girls like you? Want to make some easy money? She said well, I am a talent hunter and I am looking to hire a few kids like you. She said I am in the people business. She said honey, I say this as a businesswoman and in your best interests: you ought to put teeth like that to use.

November 1924, weird night and some mafioso class act is handing him a gun, always smiling, saying follow my lead and put this in your pocket, kiddo, case one of ours girls pulls a runner. Sometimes the foreign kids come in with less than a full appreciation of what they got hired for.

1925 and some kid with his face is doing the smiling, baring those teeth hard as he can, saying, "Excuse me, miss; miss, hello; were you on that train? Welcome to Chicago; where are you from? you Irish? Polish? Czech? Italian? Oh yeah? all the way from Warsaw, huh? Oh yeah? my best good buddy is from St. Petersburg. Oh yeah? I just moved here myself. Honey, let me help you with that suitcase. Say, is there any chance you're looking for a job?"

Twenty-first century and he says kid, come here and let me tell you the real story.

What Nines remembers does not frighten him. It's what he can't remember that gets him worrying like this. Noisy nights, sometimes you'd think you could almost recall what daylight was, a tepid orange glimpse blinking closed over crumbling corn in east Missouri. He'd had a baby-face back then and he always needed a haircut. Jaunty elbows, stupid shy, smashed under a brimmed hat that tried to be tough. Back-when it wasn't a number but an honest-to-god name. His mother couldn't decide how to say it; she'd swap dah-víd for day-vid and swap back just as fast, culture erasure she never trained her tongue for. He still didn't know which way it was meant to be pronounced. Now Nines's hair grew so fast he just took kitchen scissors to it. Black tendrils stuck on the sink, city water, and there's something he's supposed to be remembering, here, but then he wakes up and twists the faucet on and splashes his eyes and the suggestion of that something is gone.

He didn't want to fight. Really, but he ended up plucking plastic nails out of his tricep and getting a high-heeled bruise in his knee. Then she clonked her head hard on the floorboard of the truck and passed out and he had to put her somewhere. There was a keyring in her purse, so he found the blue Bug and locked her in the backseat. He scrubbed at a bloodstain on the collar of his shirt.

There was still a lot to do tonight; Nines went home.

A streetlight had been shot out in front of The Last Round. It was Preacher's fault, Skelter said. And no, the measly fuck had not stuck around to apologize. I'm charging for damages, he added, then led Rodriguez to a smoky booth inside.

Damages? Nines said. Really. Have you taken a look around here lately? Flaking wallpaper, squeaking bar stools, ripped upholstery; it was a dive, but there was no Anarch corner in the Angels more well-established than right here. When Baron Rodriguez became Baron Rodriguez and took charge of their old place, the he'd torn down a ratty dartboard hanging above the mantle, plastered over the nail holes with a badly-creased portrait of Rochelle, and let that black-eyed canvas christen the growing wall of dead photos they'd since begun to call Memorial Row. Nines wasn't sentimental, but it worked. All those ghost eyes staring down at them day-in, day-out kept kids sober—kept them full of hate and ready to be remembered. He'd had it for years, that portrait, but couldn't stand to look at the face, couldn't stand to be seen by her anymore, and so stuck it in a book that got stuck on a shelf and carried that way a long time. Now he dressed that woman up like an everyman's war chief who'd faced down Big Men with a serious mouth and a curt, romantic, fast notion of justice.

Truth is Rochelle was a fucking monster. She was a Big Man who sold clean suits and pistols to lost boys so they'd go out and sell some poor babies to other Big Men. She hadn't done jack shit for the Cause, and he hated her guts right up until the day she died, but Brujah need martyrs when monsters are all they have.

Skelter didn't stand a chance tonight. The damages rant had him frowning, committing heavy hands into perpetual fists, pulling old scar tissue over militant angles. His left brow had been split decades ago by a Viet Cong carbine that broke the socket, and you could never approximately tell what expression it wanted to make. He was glad to have that scar, so the old soldier told him once; it was a memento now, demarcating something he'd survived. It was a good lesson for children. If the toughest guy you know can be hurt, then what did you suppose might happen to you?

"Sorry to say that streetlight is not even the first layer of shit I've got to deliver to you," Skelter said, brow furrowing, as Nines perched on a table edge. Slow nights like the one they were in, you could taste the bad news coming, hanging low and simmering in the silence of scattered kids smoking and sleeping and drinking. Damsel was nowhere around.

"Where's Red?" Nines asked. Skelter did not seem to appreciate the question.

"Hell if I know. Getting into something, probably. I'm not her keeper." He stayed standing while the Baron sat—arms crossed over his chest, copper winking in his right ear, eyes unmoving. Skelter was always standing. Skelter was Nines's best man. An officer, not a riot kid with a too-big mouth; he could make his own decisions; he could get quiet and wait something out. He was the only one genuinely worth having around when you needed to ask for a real opinion. "There's something else, anyway. You know I hate to bear all the doom and gloom around here, I really do, but better I tell you upfront. Oh—actually, before I get into that: Jack says Christie sends her thanks." It wasn't enough to make those grim eyes move. "She asked to speak to you directly, but I said you had business and would call back some other time. Which was true. And if it wasn't, it's about to be. Now, I don't know too much about this yet, but you ought to be aware."

Rodriguez's elbows propped themselves on both his dangling knees. "Just say it, Skelter."

"I'm getting there. Fucking Cam." There was startling clarity to that angry look through the smogginess in here. Nines thought Skelter made for a better Brujah than he-himself did. "Again, I have yet to fact-check, so you'll have to take anything I tell you about this for what it's worth. And we haven't been able to confirm if this is an official response or not. Or if it has shit to do with de Luca. That's just my guess."

"Then tell me your guess." Nines scratched at the stain on his shirt. The younger Anarch bit his lips.

"Look, it's probably not going to amount to anything. But I suspect there's a reinforcement bid going in the ivory tower. To what end, I have no idea. Which is half the reason why I recommend we keep an eye on it. We learned last night that—"

A thump-thump from the back door sliced him off.

"There the fuck you are!" it said. Damsel had stomped in from the garage and was across The Last Round's entire first floor in ten short-legged lunges, scowl intensifying with each footfall. Nines already knew earful he knew he was about to get.

"Why don't you check your fucking phone sometime?" she snapped. Red was all bristling color moving right at you—Army Surplus, stout shoulders, low browy brim of a stupid hat. She was maybe five-foot-two. "Can't stay on top of this shit if no one can get a fucking hold of you. Baron LA my ass. Do I have to come banging your goddamn door down every time I need to find you, or what?"

"You found me."

"Fuck you, Nines. I can't believe I put up with you."

And right there, out of the blue, the whole thing kind of tickled him. It kind of pleased Nines, kind of made him smile in the way of something that'd happened before, over-and-over-and-over, so he socked her arm. Red cussed again. It was a lovetap hard enough to make her hop but not enough to actually hurt. She was mean and compact and could take it. She had a pistol stuffed in her cargo pockets and a mouthful of vicious little teeth.

Skelter didn't look too happy about losing Nines's attention so fast. He shot Damsel a sub-zero glance that had no power on her. "I was just telling him about Venture's mail-order hit."

"So you're wasting his time with unverified bullshit. Pfft. Not like this is a new story: stomp one patsy and the Prince overnights five."

The glance went glare. "You don't overnight a patsy. You overnight an eyewitness. Or a deputy."

"Deputy dogcatcher, maybe. Whatever," she chuffed. "Doesn't mean he's got shit to actually bring to court, and it doesn't mean we have to freak everyone the fuck out about it. Tell me, honestly. What's another porker? To this place. Who the fuck even cares? There's barely a Board up, not anymore; nobody important gives a shit; and obviously the new admin isn't pent up about birth certificates. So you're going to have to explain something to me before I get scared enough to bother with this. Explain to me what the hell LaCroix could possibly expect to do with some junior-sheriff teabag that he couldn't do with Bitch-Boy de Luca, Childe of the Headless Woman?" Malice lit her up—pea-green, caustic, full of unsatisfaction. "I read the report. I read it, Nines, and it's not a real problem. Torched his shoe-polisher, so he sends in a lawyer. A lawyer. Are we scared of lawyers now? I mean, are you serious with this shit? Don't make me laugh."

"Doughie called a few hours ago," Skelter cut in. He saw the confusion start to darken their Baron's face. "Lawyer all the fuck you want. Looks to me like the Prince flew in a hatchetman. And the specifics are real fucking suspicious. Doesn't line up right with what I've seen from him in these other trials—shit, he scrounged his last man out of a late-night execution; now he red-eyes somebody from halfway across the world? Son-of-a-bitch has something on the back-burner. I've got a feeling he's setting up his jury here; like I said, it's not clear for what. We do not know. I wish I had intel on her years ago, but what LaCroix would need a fall guy for? Who would he be hatcheting at? Hmm, I wonder."

Skelter didn't need to finish. Nines looked up from the top of his eyes. "I maybe have a couple ideas."

"You can make your guesses same as I made mine. Which is that you should be careful—more so than usual. At least for the next few weeks, until I can get a read on what closed-doors bullshit they're trying to pull."

"Please," Damsel ruffed, her style of coping: I dare you. Skelter ignored the bait. His eyes were that soft, fatal kind of concerned.

"Just a feeling," he mumbled, but Baron LA had plenty of just-feelings himself over these years. "I hope I'm paranoid. But if I'm not: we will be prepared for this."

Same old soldier he's always had at every point of this life: Chester, Don, Casey Jane, a cap and a gun and a casket kind of loyalty. They all held themselves this way. Skelter wasn't slushy enough to actually talk about it but he didn't have to be. They all got that I know my price look.

"What a fucking joke. Don't even worry about it, Nines. We can take care of a deputy just like we did a poster child. That's how we handle pigs in LA. And if they can't get with the goddamn game-plan, then they're going to keep losing their—"

Rodriguez, now irritated in earnest, frowned. "What the hell are we talking about?"

The soldiers stilled.

Damsel rounded the bar and produced from a storage locker one sloppy portfolio. Inside: Foundation documents, travel dates, disposable photographs, certifications, and a solitary passport scan.

"I told you first. Hatchetman," Skelter said.

Nines Rodriguez flipped open a folder and read the name beneath the unkind face.