Devil Said Bang Read Online Free PDF

get one?”
    “I’m afraid this is the only one.”
    “Maybe I should take it.”
    “Feel free, my lord,” he says. “And don’t worry.
I’ll do my best to suppress the scandal.”
    “What scandal?”
    “The one about how the Lord of the Underworld, the
Archfiend, the Great Beast is afraid of a glorified secretary. I hate to think
what your enemies would make of that.”
    I want to stack cinder blocks on this four-eyed
fuckpop until he explodes. He opens his eyes a tiny bit wider behind the fake
glass in his fake glasses and stares.
    But the little prick has a point. Until I’m up to
Samael’s full strength, I don’t want ambitious peasants storming the castle with
pitchforks and torches.
    I reach for the letters and messages, closing my
hand around his. I squeeze. Not hard enough to break bone. Just enough to remind
him I could if I wanted.
    I let up and take my messages. He massages his
fingers but doesn’t say anything.
    “Learn to knock and we can go back to being BFFs.
Got it?”
    “Of course, my lord.”
    He does a tiny bow and leaves.
    I remember when I was out drinking with Vidocq in
L.A. he introduced me to another old-time thief. He said the best way to deal
with lock pickers is the simplest. You take all the furniture you can and stack
it up so it’s perfectly balanced against the top of the door. Anyone who tries
to get in will get a dresser or a rocking chair on their head. If you want to
fancy things up, you can add a bucket of lye dissolved in water. The real trick
is remembering to tell the maid before she comes in the next morning.
    I take the na’at out of the dresser and put it
under the pillows at the head of the bed. Stacking furniture sounds like too
much work.
    I toss the messages in the fireplace. Infernal
bureaucrats can kiss my ass.
    I head down to the library.
    T his
is my Fort Knox, my office, and my panic room. I’ve laid the heaviest protective
hoodoo I know around this place. Of all the hideouts I ever thought of running
to when things got weird, a library was right behind a leper colony and a
burning garbage truck. But here I am.
    I haven’t paced the place off, but the library
looks about a football field long, lined with two floors of books in
hundred-foot stretches of ornate dark wood shelves. The ceiling is domed and
painted with scenes illustrating the three tenets of the Hellion church. The
Thought: God and Lucifer arguing that if humans have free will so should angels.
The Act: the war. It’s pretty but stiff and trying too hard to look noble, like
a Soviet propaganda poster. The New World: Lucifer and his defeated, punch-drunk
Bowery boys in Hell. He looks like a tent revival preacher selling snake oil to
rubes, but in his own fucked-up way, the slippery son of a bitch is trying to do
right by his people.
    I’ve made myself a comfortable squat over by a wall
of the Greek wall, the stuff Samael told me to read. In a copy of a
half-falling-apart Reader’s Digest –condensed
large-print book on Greek history, I found his notes. (It’s embarrassing that he
knows me well enough that he left the info in a book written for shut-ins and
half-blind grandmas.) He included names of people I could think about for the
Council. If they’re the Hellions I can trust, I’m
not ready to meet the ones I can’t.
    I dragged a plush red sofa trimmed in gold, a big
partner’s desk, and a few chairs over to my squat. Sometimes I even let people
in to use the chairs. Not many and not often, but anyone who comes in is on my
turf. I know which carpets cover binding circles. I know which books are
hollowed out and stuffed with knives and killing potions.
    The desk and nearby shelves are covered with books,
paper, pens, and weird little machines. Stuff you can only find at an Office
Depot doubling as a night school for amateur torturers. There’s a spongy red
clamshell that growls when you squeeze it and spits out what I think pass for
Hellion staples. They’re sharp and thick, like