Shade City (4 page)

* * *

I emerged from the old theater into the dirty streets of Hollywood. The wide sidewalk housed metal barricades that still guided stragglers in and out of the club. Along Vine Street, a couple of bright yellow cars were waiting. I glanced at the watch still in my hand and realized the train had just closed. Fuck, I hated cabs.

As I pondered my options, a group of three girls and a guy came to my attention, mostly because the shortest chick was very animated. She was yelling at her friends. It was her. The Asian girl with the platinum hair from inside. They were standing next to a cab debating their next destination.

Something told me I only had a moment's chance, and I made my way to her.

I twirled the pocket watch by its chain. "Relax, you're an adult now."

As I approached, the cute girl was still spouting obscenities in a language I didn't recognize. Her friends didn't look especially put off so I figured it was safe to go in. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to hit on a chick who was pissed off at something, but then again, I wasn't known for making good choices. And her tiny skirt hugged her tight body in a way that let me overlook annoyances like thinking and reasons.

"Don't want to call it a night?" I asked loudly enough to interrupt her tirade.

She turned around with half a look of disbelief on her face, but the other half held a smirk when she saw mine. That was the half I needed to court.

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"I'm just a white boy from Miami and I don't know what language you're speaking, but if I had to guess, I'd say you didn't want to go home just yet."

Her eyes narrowed in playful creases and she brushed white bangs away from her face. I had thought she was wearing a crazy costume wig, but it looked real from up close. She had a small hoop in her right nostril to accent her cute little nose. I also noticed she had silver glitter sprinkled on her face and neck that led down to her cleavage. It was an unfair trick that naturally drew my eye. I returned my gaze to her face without shame. It was what she wanted, after all.

"It's only two," was all she offered. She didn't look upset anymore.

I glanced at the other two girls. One was tall and one was thicker, but they were both pretty in their own way. All three had layers of makeup and fake eyelashes and high heels and were otherwise decked out for a party. It seemed a shame to cut the night short after all that effort. But the tall one looked a little wobbly. The guy with his arm around her looked bored. I guessed they were the ones who wanted to leave.

"I'm Dante. What's your name?"

She blinked coyly at me. "Eva."

Good. She was easy to talk to. "Well, Eva," I said with a confident rhythm, "I was thinking about getting a bite to eat. We should all go together."

It wasn't that I really wanted everybody else to come along—I just couldn't ask her to abandon her friends and hang out with a stranger. This way, we could all be friends. And if the couple got tired and wanted to leave early, so be it. Two hot girls were good company for the night, and I was still trying to get Soren out of my head.

I ignored her as the thicker of the girls spoke up. "Let's go to K-town," she said. I already had the acceptance of one of the friends. I smiled at her.

Koreatown in Los Angeles is a funny place. It's the largest population of Koreans outside their native country, but it's also LA so they're still outnumbered by Mexicans. Mexicotown doesn't have the same ring and is probably superfluous in Southern California. Anyway, K-town has a little downtown center on Wilshire that's stuffed with restaurants and bars and tacky clubs. It's dirty and divey—and dangerous—but it is one of the few places in Los Angeles where you could have a drink after two. Illegally of course.

I spun around suddenly. I was in the middle of my groove and was trying to ignore the watch, but I'd learned to do that at my peril. She had a sense about things that I was still learning. So I flipped around and probably looked like an idiot. I didn't see anything at first. The clamor of partiers up and down the sidewalk blended together.

"What?" I whispered, not wanting to look like the kind of person who talks to a pocket watch. Not that it would stand out in Hollywood.

I immediately saw him. The dude should have been passed out on the toilet. Or perhaps stumbling out to find Pam. Instead he was being escorted to a taxi by a white guy with dreads. Soren had managed to clean himself up but still looked dazed. I got the feeling he was just following the lead of the other man. As Soren sat down in the back seat of the car, his benefactor handed something to the driver, closed the door from outside, and rapped on the roof to signal them off. Then the stranger watched the cab merge into the line of cars trudging along Vine.

He was an average-sized man who had an impoverished look about him and wore a plaid flannel trench coat. I didn't even know such things existed or that there was a market for them. Satisfied that Soren was away, he marched past me. I didn't get a chance to touch him to see if he was taken.

Not another one. Not tonight. I had already taken care of Soren.

I returned my attention to Eva and smiled. "Sorry, I thought I knew that guy." It was a weak save, and I could tell she had been startled by my move. Shit. I wanted to touch her, but I didn't want to scare her.

"Let's go," said the Asian guy, opening the door of their cab and helping his girl get in.

I had to consciously fight off a grimace. I knew this was important. I could tell. Violet had taught me how to work the streets, but she'd never demanded that I make a specific move before. I didn't know what this was about, but it might have been one of my few chances to learn more about the girl in the watch.

Eva recognized my apologetic eyes and waved her friend into the cab. She stood as tall as she could in her heels and held her chin up, but she looked more cute than put off.

"Shit, Eva. I need to take care of something first. Maybe I could meet you in K-town?"

"I didn't invite you," she shot back. The glare of her large eyes reprimanded me and simultaneously pulled me in even more.

"Well, maybe I can call you sometime?"

She shrugged. "Maybe." Then she turned to get into the car.

"At least," I said quickly, "at least tell me how to find you."

She put her small hand on the door as she squeezed into the back seat. Her short skirt had trouble covering her thighs. She didn't seem concerned.

"Maybe I'll find you," she said and yanked the door shut. I could only watch helplessly as the car pulled away.

* * *

I marched south on Vine, following the man in the plaid trench coat.

"I don't appreciate being cockblocked by a twelve-year-old," I murmured.

"Yeah, well, I thought you could be an adult for once too."

Violet was eighteen, technically, if you counted from the day she was born. That's how most people keep track, I guess. But Violet was different, mostly owing to the fact that she was dead. Six years ago, when she was only twelve, she had been killed under circumstances that were still a mystery to me. All I knew was that, two years after the fateful event, around the time I had first moved to Los Angeles, I found her. It was serendipity, perhaps, that I wasn't in town for long before I stumbled upon the watch at an antique store in the Magnolia Corridor. It was a cool trinket. It was old and looked it. As a bonus, it still kept good time. I was in for a bit of a surprise when I found out that the watch was haunted by a little girl.

"She was fucking hot."

I nodded as I twirled the watch around my hand. The man with thick dreadlocks did look sketchy, I'd give her that. He looked over his shoulder and turned west onto Hollywood Boulevard.

I hurried forward to keep up without making it look like I was chasing somebody. I assumed this scenario would result in having to expel another shade, but that was premature. I didn't know for a fact that he was even taken. I would need to confirm that first.

Violet was keeping something from me, which wasn't altogether strange. She was tight-lipped. All business. She didn't like to talk about her past. We'd done this dance for four years together, and I only discovered that she was murdered six months ago. I still didn't know the details. I just waited for her to open up or slip up. But whatever her problem was, whether trust or trauma, she'd always been a dependable teacher. And she never asked for anything in return. At least, not until now.

"So you know this guy?" I asked.

As I turned onto Hollywood, he was almost a block ahead of me. I continued my brisk pace as the cool wind battered me. I had a long sleeve T-shirt on. That was enough to combat the LA chill for short walks. This November was cooler than usual, however, and I had no idea how far we were going. What was worse, my bright red shirt didn't exactly make me an inconspicuous tail.

"Is he taken?"

I sighed. "You know you're being more cryptic than usual, right?"

"Actually, I'm okay with just calling it a night."

"Yeah, I got that. Why is it I get the feeling that if I knew half of what you did, I probably would have ditched you a long time ago?"

Violet was quiet for a moment, but then she said what she always did. A few words, a poem, that stressed our strength together.

I sighed. It was true that I liked the power. The novelty of a talking watch wore thin when I realized she only talked to me, in my head. But she was an actual person, or had been, and she knew things I didn't know. She had been to the Dead Side and had somehow come back to this world by attaching herself to this watch. Then she had found me or I had found her—I wasn't sure which. I suspected it was a bit of both.

I was always a little different, you see. I had a gift. Or a curse. I could see things. Not ghosts or demons or monsters or anything that a movie would render in CGI. There was nothing so material. I could just recognize the tears in the fabric of the world sometimes. I noticed moments of singularity when others didn't. I could feel the presence of the dead. Not as wandering spirits, but as a sort of second shadow within the very substantial people of the world.

I'd left Miami when I was twenty. My goal was to get as far away from my batshit parents as I could. So I went to the opposite coast. I didn't really know what I was doing out here but I had always felt drawn to the city. As Violet had said about the man I was following, the city felt... familiar. It was the natural result of my inertia. Then Violet came into the picture and I suddenly had an outlet for my quirks. I had a reason for being, even if there was no how or why. The girl in the watch took an instant liking to me and taught me to pay more attention to my talents.

Together, between the two of us, the lonely streets have never been livelier.

I had gained some ground on the suspicious man. He walked ahead of us as we carelessly tramped on the marble stars of Hollywood legends. Laurence Olivier, Bob Hope, Buster Keaton, Nat "King" Cole, Liberace, Charles Chaplin, Ingrid Bergman—the sidewalk read like a who's who of a forgotten era, a time when having your name set in a star didn't mean you'd be covered in piss and blood and whatever else made up the sludge of the new city.

We walked past the beggars and drug dealers and prostitutes as well as the drunken club kids and bar patrons and police officers. Everybody was here but the tourists. They were the only ones who wanted to see the pink stars, but they came out during the day, when Hollywood was an entirely different kind of crazy.

At the intersection of Highland, the man crossed the street and headed south again. I ran ahead to catch the light of the crosswalk when he took a look behind him. I ducked within the sparse crowd as it crossed. The man with the dreadlocks may have seen me. I couldn't be sure.

"So let's get this straight," I started, mumbling under my breath as a group of guys passed me. "You don't know who this man is or if he is taken, just that something compels you to follow him. Is that right?"

I shook my head as I reached the south side of the street. That wasn't good enough.

"I don't mean to doubt you, but I can't just walk up to the man and shake his hand. If he was up to something shady then I'd basically be letting him know that I know. He's already apprehensive as it is."

Only moments before, the man had strolled confidently past two police officers on the street. Now he was watching his six as if he'd just committed a crime. He was jumpy. Maybe he had noticed me, after all.

"You've never accused me of that before."

I kept my distance until I saw the flannel trench coat hunch into a crowd standing outside Mel's Diner. The establishment was bustling with business at this time. As if it were a commentary about the way things worked in Hollywood, there was a small line of hungry people waiting to get in and a bouncer standing at the door. He was more of a host really—a nice bald black man who didn't make any attempts to pacify angry guests—but it seemed fitting in this place. I nodded at him as I walked by.

The rest of the sidewalk ahead was fairly empty and I didn't see the man. I reached the edge of the building and turned the corner to check the open-air parking lot. No activity there either. Did he have time to walk this far?