1

I CHECKED THE REARVIEW JUST IN CASE AN ANGRY member of the California Magi Rocketeers Sex Club had any funny ideas about leaving their clubhouse in upscale Inglewood and following me. But the reflection held only the tired wheels of Los Angeles on a Friday morning. I eased off the gas so Lilith hummed down Slauson at an easy thirty miles per hour, her brand-new paint job, detailed interior, and spotless windshield making her look like a million dollars, despite the fact that Dodge Darts weren’t exactly in vogue.

Yet another reason I loved her. About the only advice my former mentor, the diabolical Edgar Vance, had given me that seemed to hold true once I was outside his thrall was: if you care what people think, they own you.

“Heinous,” said the uptight voice in the passenger seat.

I put a little more heat on the gas because Cactus Hayes would never forgive me for missing a Legion event I promised to attend . . . even if I was finishing a case en route. I just hoped my suit from the good folks at Goodwill—a subtle orange and brown windowpane plaid—wasn’t too wrinkled. Knowing Cactus, his dress greens would be starched to perfection.

“Sickening,” said the lady’s voice from the passenger seat. I tapped the scab on my right palm like Spider-Man slinging a web. The callus had hardened from where I’d stopped a bullet two months ago, when I’d nearly become a catalyst in a ceremony of dark magic and pornography. Sure, I’d saved L.A., but man, this callus was—

“Unbelievable.”

Mandy Jefferson sat with photos in her lap, my straightest client since the nightmare of Tabitha Vance had come to life and attempted to birth a Nazi kraken on a pornographer’s epic movie set. Mandy was normal. Normal looking. Normal pretty. Normal fears. But her husband—

Mandy’s burgundy-nailed fingers plucked through pictures of Peter dressed in “wizard” robes: getting his prick sucked by a woman in black lace, hands tied behind her back, his glasses on the tip of his nose; next, he is anally penetrating another male wizard against a Stonehenge backdrop and wearing what appeared to be a fighter-jock’s helmet, complete with oxygen mask that had been gimmicked to have its tube reach his sub-missive’s mouth; and lastly, my personal fave, a third-class Jane Fonda in full Barbarella outfit, on all fours, receiving two gentleman in deep sea diving helmets at the same time. They looked like stills from a sexed-up version of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

“This is just sick.”

I grinned. Lying to your wife about your time in a gonzo science fiction sex cult? Sure, that’s wrong, and maybe even sick. But enjoying one? I chalked that up to personal taste, but that wasn’t what Mandy needed to hear right now.

“The truth is weirder than fiction,” I said. “That’s how you know it’s true.”

Her lips pursed as she tossed the photos to the floor by her very practical stack-heeled brown shoes. “But this is twisted, perverted. Like some bad pulp novel.”

“Wouldn’t know; never read them.”

I loved this case. Sure, it was a little twisted, but there was not one slice of magic I could taste. Peter and all of his gang were pretenders. All amateur-hour kids dabbling in magic but no threat to anyone, just people who read Aleister Crowley and think orgasms are the secret sauce to magic potions. The invisible scars Edgar Vance had dug into my aura had taught me many things—including that real magic was about suffering and slavery. Real magic was ugly as an executioner’s heart.

The Rocketeer Sex Club was just that, a sex club with a fetish for Crowley’s era of the Ordo Templi Orientis and an idiot’s version of Vodou, but with a sci-fi twist and a hilarious newsletter called Uranus Rising that included porn stories with libertarian Martians made of Jell-O and willpower. Every paragraph made me spill my Dubonnet.

Mandy crossed her arms, as if to hold back the tears that would transform her thick eyeliner into dark rivers heading for her blushing cheeks. “I’m a modern woman,” she said defensively. “But I can’t stomach perversion. This stuff is not natural.”

I smiled, nodded, and decided that sharing my opinion was a great way not to get paid.

“James, how do you live with this filth?”

“Live with it?”

“The cases you take, are they like mine?”

“How?”

“Unnatural. We seem to be living in an age of hedonism and perversion. What Peter’s doing is . . . out of a nightmare.”

And one woman’s nightmare is another man’s playground, I could hear Edgar saying in the back of my mind. My skull shuddered.

“I’m sorry,” Mandy said. “I didn’t mean to make you ill. You must see so many terrible things.”

I exhaled hard and silent through my nose so it didn’t sound as if I was contemptuous of Mandy’s delicate sensibilities. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff, Mandy. To do what I do, you need to understand a range of human experiences, even ones you dislike, that scare you, or make you feel estranged. I try to be empathetic to all parties while serving my client’s . . .”

Mandy had returned to the photos and was traumatizing herself with the Chinese finger cuff routine her husband and a buddy performed on a woman with a rocket painted on her back.

“. . . I’ll drop you off at your school. Do you want me to keep the photos for you? I can’t send them through the mail without being brought up on obscenity charges.”

“What? No . . . no,” she said, eyes lingering on the dirty pic. “No. I should keep these. As evidence.”

I kept my grin steady so as not to ruin the rational thoughts I suspected covered something darker flickering in her mind.

And that’s when I heard it.

A cranky, revved-up throttle akin to the distorted saxophone on the Munsters theme song served as preamble before I caught sight of smoke in the rearview mirror. And in front of that smoke was a roadster ripping through traffic faster than the first sip off a drunk’s flask.

“What in heaven’s name is that sound?” Mandy said, then turned. “Good God! Is that . . .”

It was.

Ramming up West Slauson Avenue was a tricked-out roadster that would have looked futuristic when Peter started at the Jet Propulsion Lab back in the fifties: a pulsing red rocket car with wings and three wheels, smoke billowing out of a wheezy exhaust pipe above what looked like two rocket engines. Inside a glass bubble atop the contraption, manipulating the controls, sat the man of the hour: Peter Jefferson.

Jefferson’s amplified voice punctured the L.A. afternoon like an electric whoopee cushion that had been taught how to speak.

“MANDY! STOP! DESIST! I COMMAND YOU!”

“Command?” Mandy said. Sticking her head out the window, hands still gripping the evidence, she shouted, “I command you to go to hell Peter, you dirty . . . bastard!”

I hit the gas to give her insult meaning and get some distance, but the rocket car was piercing through traffic like a crimson needle. The American Legion Hall—where Cactus had ordered me to be before noon—was only three blocks ahead at the intersection of South Harcourt. But I had to stop this mad scientist of sex before he killed us all.

“YOU ARE BOUND TO ME BY COSMIC FORCES!” Jefferson bellowed. In my side mirror, I saw him slipping past a yellow tow truck and a VW bug. “SUBMIT AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN PLEASURES KNOWN ONLY TO THE STARS!”

“It’s over, Pete!” Mandy yelled, then stuck out the picture. “I’ve got all the evidence to sue you to death here on Earth, you pathetic egghead! Try commanding me again!”

The rocket car blasted forward to parallel me. We were going forty miles an hour with me honking everyone out of the way and Peter’s voice still polluting the air. “YOU ARE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THAT NO-GOOD THIEF AND SPY! I WILL BREAK HIS SPELL!”

“I’m under no one’s spell,” she screamed. “I can do what I want, too! See?” Mandy yanked herself back in the car and planted an awful kiss full of teeth and tongue on my mouth, while mangling my hair from its otherwise bullet-proof quaff into a messy mound with her hand.

She pulled away and I stabbed the brakes as a yellow light turned red, throwing my right arm across Mandy so she didn’t hurtle through Lilith’s brand-new windshield. The Veterans Hall was just to my left. I’d, technically, made it in plenty of time. I just couldn’t stop—yet.

Peter did what any pilot of a rocket car would do: hit a red button on his console and fired through the intersection like a comet, cutting in front of the onslaught of oncoming traffic from Harcourt.

Outside Veterans Hall, a protest group of longhairs waving placards stopped their slogan-chanting to goggle at the rocket car as Peter zoomed by screaming, “HELP! THE THROTTLE IS JAMMED! I CAN’T STOP!”

While all those eyes were on Peter, one pair of eyes was on me.

Cactus, standing on the steps to the hall in his dress greens, glared straight at me. His body language translated loosely to: “Clean up whatever this mess is you made, Brimstone, and get back here or I will parboil your flesh until your bones flee your meat sack and run screaming into the night.”

Mandy’s strident voice issued from behind her smeared lipstick, more or less echoing his thought. “Don’t just sit here! Save him!”

I smiled, hit the gas, pressed my horn harder than a Swedish masseuse would a contortionist’s back knots, and thought, “Why not? It could always be worse.”