Aloha From Hell Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’ll play stripes. Thirteen in the corner,” as he lines up the shot. He sinks it.
    I puff on the smoke. I get the feeling he’s not going to leave me much else to do.
    “So what kind of a demon was it?”
    I shake my head.
    “Damned if I know. I’d never seen one like it before.”
    He creeps around the table, not looking up.
    “What did it look like?”
    “Not much. I mean, from a distance it looked like a guy in a cheap suit. But when it got closer, it was all Jell-O and acid. When it grabbed me, bang, I was burning.”
    He takes one of the blue chalk cubes from the side of the table and uses it on his stubby legs.
    “Sounds like a Gluttire.”
    “A what?”
    “Gluttire. A glutton. He wasn’t burning you. He was trying to dissolve you. Gluttons are pretty rare and mostly eat other demons. You been around any recently?”
    “Yeah. The guy whose house we hit had a digger in the wall safe.”
    “There you go,” he says, and sinks the fourteen. “He smelled the digger.”
    “I need to start bringing cologne on robberies.”
    “There’s a ton about demons in the Codex . There’s a lot more kinds of them thalis of than you think, but Gluttires are the rarest. Most people never get to see one.”
    “Lucky me.”
    Things get quiet for a minute. He knows what I’m going to ask.
    “Talk to me about Downtown. Got any gossip? Marilyn Monroe dating the Antichrist? Is Lovecraft being tortured by sexy octopuses?”
    “What makes you think Monroe’s Downtown?”
    “Wishful thinking.”
    Kasabian lines up another shot and sinks it. I’m not even paying attention to which balls anymore.
    I say, “So?”
    Kasabian doesn’t look up when he answers, keeping his eyes down on the table.
    “The weather’s hot with a chance of chain saws and bullshit blowing up from the south.”
    I walk over and put my hand over the cue ball. Kasabian looks up at me, not at all happy.
    I’m bugging him about the one thing he controls. His one little domain. The Daimonion Codex. It’s Lucifer’s Boy Scout manual, Google search engine, and secret angelic ballbuster cookbook all in one. The most valuable thing in Hell besides the horned one himself. It contains every bit of dark, esoteric-stuff-you-don’t-want-to-know-about-if-you-ever-want-to-sleep-again knowledge in the universe. As far as I know, Kasabian is the only one on earth who can read it.
    He glances down at my hand and I take it off the cue. He sinks another ball. The little prick has been practicing when I’m not around.
    Kasabian used to look things up in the Codex for Lucifer when he was too busy, which was 90 percent of the time. Of course, nothing in Hell works the way it’s supposed to. That’s why they call it Hell. The magic gear down there is like buying Russian souvenirs. The samovars are pretty, but you know they’re going to leak all over your mom’s chintz tablecloth.
    What that means is that Hell’s half-assed gear hacks pretty easy. Take the Codex . Kasabian’s supposed to get a peek Downtown just wide enough to read the book. But it doesn’t work right. He’s like one of those traffic surveillance cams that catch you running red lights. If he squints just right, he can see a lot more than the book. He’s like a whole series of traffic cams wired together and he can spyglass all over Hell. Not all of it, but a lot. It’s the one thing he has over me and he never lets me forget it.
    He says, “The usual Chuck E. Cheese ball pit-party games. Since Lucifer pissed off back to heaven, Mason’s completely taken over. Lucifer’s generals are having slap fights over battle plans. MammoKasplans. n and Baphomet have been sabotaging each others’ troops. Poisoning their food and shit like that. All so they can suck up to Mason. Semyazah is the only general who refused to kiss Mason’s ass, so he’s had to blow town.”
    “Smart move.”
    “Mason’s getting ready for something. He’s pulling troops in from everywhere, but they’re scattered