SANDMAN SLIM

"Yeah, I'm the ghost of Bruce Lee. You have a cigarette?" Carlos shakes his head. The moment is still burning bright for him, but it's over for me. The rage has gone south and now I have a bigger problem. No question I was shot at by a magic weapon, but it was used by someone who had no idea what he was doing. I consider the possibility that Mason sent the skinheads, not to shake down Carlos, but to ambush me, only that doesn't make any sense. If Mason decides to send a hit squad for me, he'll make sure they know exactly what weapons they're packing and how they work.

So, what devil Kris Kringle is handing out death rays to pinheads?

"Can I borrow your phone?" I ask. Carlos hands it to me and I dial the number of my old apartment. Vidocq picks up.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER Vidocq and I are sitting in a doughnut shop on Sunset drinking coffee and eating. He's paying. I'm close to tapped out. At least I spent Brad Pitt's money well. Before Vidocq got to Donut Universe, I'd examined the motocross jacket for damage. The Kevlar did a pretty good job. None of the knife slashes made it through the armor down to me. All the damage was to the leather, and I could fix that with gaffer tape.

"I've heard of power amulets like guns, but not like the one you describe," says Vidocq. "But I think I know someone who will. I'll introduce you soon."

The Frenchman puts a paper bag on the table. I take a bite of my Bavarian cream.

"What's that?"

"Look for yourself," he says, and pushes the bag at me. I open it and look inside. It's full of shirts.

"They are yours. You look like a fucking child in those video store things. You should wear your own clothes. They will help you remember who you are."

I roll down the top of the bag and put it on the seat beside me. I suppose I do look stupid in these shirts. In my head I'm still nineteen. Time is stuck there and it's like a punch in the balls every time I look in the mirror. At least no one will bother me for ID when I buy beer now.

But I don't want to look at what's in the bag right away. Part of me wants to burn everything Alice and I left behind eleven years ago. Another part wants to leave it all right where it is, frozen in time, like bugs trapped in amber. It never occurred to me to wear any of my old clothes again.

"There was something weird and familiar about that amulet and I've been trying to remember what since I left the club."

Donut Universe is a twenty-four-hour place with an outer-space theme. There's a big plastic UFO suspended from the ceiling over the display case. The girl working the counter is a green-haired pixie who looks somewhere between twelve and thirty-five. She's wearing sequined antennae that bob up and down when she talks. The grown-up part of my brain imagines that she tears the stupid things off and tosses them in the backseat of her car the moment she's finished her shift. The nineteen-year-old in me wonders if she sometimes wears the antennae when she screws her boyfriend, and what it's like to look up and see her and those sequined balls bobbing up and down over you.

"There was this one time Downtown when a couple of big, horned Hellions dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night. Azazel was my boss, but these two worked for Mephistopheles. The general with the fire palace. Lucifer's third favorite general. His boys took me to the arena. It was after-hours, but there were a couple dozen Hellion posh types in the stands. They wanted a private show starring the living boy, which I knew meant that I was about to get my ass kicked.

"My favorite weapon, a na'at, was on the ground. A na'at is sort of like a spear, but it morphs and changes into a lot more than a spear if you know how to use it right. Like everything else down there, the name is a Hellion joke. They call a na'at a 'thorn' because its full name, na'atzutz, is the kind of bush they used to make Christ's crown of thorns.

"Across the arena from me was something all draped in black. When it came closer I saw that it wasn't dressed in black. It was black, nothing but black. It was like a hole punched in the world. And it kept shifting and changing shape, like a sheet on a clothesline on a windy day.

"It just stood there, so I went for it. I threw a few feints, trying to draw it into a fight, but it didn't move. It didn't even turn when I moved around it. The na'atzutz is spear-shaped. When I took a quick, hard shot at the thing's head, the na'at went right through it, like it wasn't there. But when the thing raised its arm to push me away, it was like getting hit by a dump truck.

"The na'at extends over ten feet when you open it all the way, so when the thing came at me, I let the na'at out to its full length and swung it like a flail. It went right through the thing again. I wasn't about to let it lay into me again, so I did a Muhammad Ali and danced around the arena, trying to figure out what to do next. I didn't know how to fight something I couldn't even touch.