SANDMAN SLIM

The office is a blank storefront with blinds covering all the windows and the words EXISTENTIAL HEALING on the door in gold peel-and-stick letters. I try the door, but it's locked. I start pounding and the door swings open almost immediately. A tiny shaggy-haired brunette in tattered black jeans and Chuck Taylors stands there.

"Candy?"

"Stark?"

From the way she talked on the phone, I was expecting a big blond Judy Holliday type, not Joan Jett's little sister.

"Bring her inside. Doc is waiting."

The inside of the clinic is as bare as the outside. A couple of junkyard desks, with a not very new-looking laptop on top of one. A file cabinet covered in real estate stickers, Half a dozen metal folding chairs and a pile of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitans, probably pulled from the Dumpster behind the nail salon.

This is the office of Vidocq's angel of mercy?

I'm seriously thinking about taking Allegra out of here and to a real hospital, no matter what I promised her. Then Kinski walks out of his exam room.

"What are you waiting for? Get the girl in here," he tells me. I do.

Kinski is as impressive as his office isn't. He's tall. A little taller than me. Like me, he'd been a lanky boy, but the years have added a few pounds to his middle and etched lines like a desert riverbed around his eyes. But he's still handsome. You can tell that when he was young he'd been the kind of good-looking that made girls forget about their boyfriends for the night and made guys want to punch him in the face on principle.

Allegra is too wobbly to walk anymore. I pick her up, follow Kinski into the next room, and set her down on a padded exam table.

He touches her head and cheeks. Takes her pulse at her wrist and her neck and moves each lid back for a look at her eyes. Allegra squirms on the table and tries to push him away.

"You hurting?" he asks.

"Yeah. My head."

"Anywhere else?"

Allegra shakes her head.

"Okay. I want you to try and relax. Just breathe in and out real deeply. Can you do that?"

She nods, takes in long breaths, and lets them out slowly. Kinski puts one hand lightly on her forehead and keeps it there. He pats himself down and finds something like a piece of blackened jerky from his breast pocket.

"Chew on this," he says, putting the jerky between her lips.

"What is it?" she asks.

"You'll like it. It's dried fruit. Tastes good."

She chews and he keeps his hand on her, staring down like he's listening for something. I hear it, too. Her breathing and heartbeat slow abruptly. Her body relaxes. Kinski shoots me a quick glance like he knows that I can hear it, too.

"She's out," he says to Candy, and turns back to me. "What really happened to her?"

"I don't know exactly. I came back and the place was broken into. I think by a guy named Parker. He's another magician. Some magic things were missing."

"What kind of things?"

"A guy. Part of a guy, really."

"Part of a guy. Okay. Are you fooling around with stuff over there that's going to make this girl's condition more complicated? Any potions or herbs related to necromancy? Are you playing with any resurrection rituals?"

"Never."

"Okay. But you come in here with an injured girl and tell me that some magic part of a guy that you don't want to talk about gets stolen and I start thinking zombies. And that is some serious stuff."

"It's nothing like that. The guy wasn't dead. I was real careful about that."

"So careful this girl's skull is cracked."

"Can you fix her?"

"I've fixed worse." He looks over at Candy. "You want to get me the things, honey? I want to make sure this girl is all the way dozing before I take my hand off."

"How many do you want?"

"I think six should do it."

Candy gets six fist-size objects from an old medical cabinet. Each of the objects is wrapped in dark purple silk. She sets them on the exam table next to Allegra and unwraps them. They're six shiny pieces of some milky-white stone.

Kinski lets go of Allegra, takes two of the stones, and places them on each side of her head. Candy places others over her heart and in her hands. Kinski puts the last piece, the smallest and nearly flat, between Allegra's teeth.

He gets old, unglazed clay jars from under the table, pours several oils onto his hands, rubs them together to mix them, then smears the dark potion on Allegra's face. The oils smell like jasmine and wet pavement after a rain.