Billy starts to wonder why the fuck the EMTs aren’t here yet, and then he realizes that he’s still half covered in incriminating forensics, so it’d probably be good for him to be gone before they arrive. If he can figure out where to go.
“I have to use the phone,” he says.
His memory hasn’t improved. Out of all the phone numbers he’s ever known, he can still only remember one. Fortunately it’s the one that he needs.
He calls the Ghoul.
“I heard tell that you had emerged,” says the Ghoul, when he hears Billy’s voice.
Billy processes this. “You talked to Anil?”
“Correct. He didn’t sound well, you know. And he made it sound like you were in—something of a bad situation.”
“It’s all right,” Billy says. “I’m just doing my job.”
Silence on the other end of the line. Billy gives it a second, but he can’t really wait. Forward motion. Forward motion is good.
“I need your help,” he says.
“Tell me. What can I do?”
“I need the address of the Bladed Hyacinth office.”
A pause. Billy can hear an unspoken why hovering over the conversation. But the Ghoul has never been able to resist a direct request to look something up on the Internet.
“One moment please,” he finally says. Billy can hear the Ghoul’s bony fingers clacking across a keyboard. “I’m pulling that up now.”
He gives the address to Billy. It’s also in Chelsea, close enough that someone could flee there on foot.
Bingo, Billy thinks.
He looks around for something he can use to write the address down but can’t find anything. Well. He’s sure he’ll remember. This one time he won’t get distracted and forgetful and fuck it up. That’s all I ask, he thinks. Just this one time.
“Well,” Billy says. “Thanks. And it’s good to hear your voice. But I should go.”
“Billy,” says the Ghoul. “One last thing.”
“What’s that.”
“You should call Denver. She’s been really worried about you since the reading last night. I think it would mean a lot to her if you gave her a call.”
“I don’t—I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Billy says. He imagines seeing Denver one final time, saying goodbye. Tries to imagine what function that would serve. For him, for her, for anyone. Comes up with nothing. Total blank. He’d rather she remember him as what he was than as what he is now. He’d rather she remember him as some goofy fuck-up who liked her movies, who found beauty in the movement of water, than as a killing machine.
He tries to come up with some way to explain this to the Ghoul, who has fallen into a pensive silence, but after a few seconds of trying out wordings in his head he just gives up and puts the phone back in its mount. It’s time to go.
He shakes a set of keys out of Jørgen’s pants. “I’m taking the van,” he says. Jørgen seems to have slipped out of consciousness and he doesn’t say anything.
“You’ll tell him?” Billy asks Elisa.
“I’ll tell him,” Elisa responds.
“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I guess it’s time to hunt a motherfucker down.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RIDGEWAY VS. CIRRUS
GESTURES OF OPTIMISM • FANCY CHAIRS • FIST-FORMATION OPTIONS • REALLY GOOD FOOTAGE • BACKSEAT KISSES • THE THING WITH FEATHERS • UNO • THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING GOOD • APOLOGIES AND PRAYERS
Billy remembers the address.
He’s not the best at urban driving, and he gets turned around in traffic and heads the wrong way for a few minutes, eventually needing to correct with an astonishingly brazen U-turn. But finally he gets to the right block. He double-parks and punches on the hazard lights, the universal sign for I’ll be back in a minute. Wresting a satanic world-destroying doodad from the clutches of a gun-wielding maniac does not seem like an errand that will conclude as tidily as, say, delivering a pizza, but he thinks it’s important to make the occasional gesture in the direction of optimism.
The building that houses Bladed Hyacinth is a three-story thing, squat and ugly. From the label on the intercom, Billy gleans that the offices are on the second floor, up a flight of stairs that he can perceive dimly through the smoked glass of the street entrance. He tries the door; it’s locked.
He glares at it, wondering if he can blow it to pieces. But nothing. He remembers Elisa saying that she could will herself into the wolf form; she just needed to really want to kill someone. And so Billy thinks of all the reasons why he wants to kill Anton Cirrus. He thinks of Anton Cirrus firing bullets into Jørgen, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor of a Starbucks. He thinks of Anton Cirrus’s stupid write-up. The storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Billy grimaces.