The Shonin shakes his head. It sounds like twigs cracking.
“No reasoning with some people.”
“Amen to that,” says Wells.
Candy says, “You’re really going to drink that stuff?”
I take off my wet coat and throw it over the back of a chair.
“If I don’t have to slice and dice myself, I’m willing to try it. Wells won’t let him kill me, will you, Wells? I’m the only one with experience handling the 8 Ball.”
“So far,” says Wells. “But there’s always tomorrow.”
“Maybe not too many,” says Candy. “You might want to remember that.”
The Shonin takes the tea off the burner and pours a brown mess into a small ceramic cup.
“The girl . . .”
“Candy,” she says.
The Shonin looks at her.
“Your name is food? How about I call you Banana Split or Hot Dog?”
Candy turns Jade for a second. Her eyes go black, with pinpoints of red at the center. Her teeth are as sharp as a shark with a switchblade.
“Why don’t you just do that?”
The Shonin looks at Wells.
“What the hell kind of a place do you run here? You bring me a fatty and a demon to work with? I didn’t meditate in a hole in the ground for four hundred years for this crap.”
Candy goes back to her human face and I touch her shoulder on the way to the cooler. She doesn’t take shit from anyone. It’s one of the reasons we get along.
I take the dead man’s head from the cooler and sit facing it in the silver circle on the floor. I take the Colt from my waistband and hand it to Candy. She snatches the tea out of the Shonin’s hand and brings it to me.
“Thanks.”
“Now I have both of our guns. If anything weird happens here, I’m shooting these two first.”
“Please do.”
I look at the Shonin.
“I’d still like that crow feather.”
He goes to the herb table and pulls a feather from a bundle wrapped in twine. Candy takes it from him and brings it to me. This isn’t like the old days. I’m still getting used to having someone watch my back. It’s an okay feeling.
“Thanks, baby.”
I throw back the cup of tea. It tastes like hot swamp water filtered through a baboon’s ass.
“Okay,” the Shonin says. “Now you meditate. You need a zafu to sit on? What kind of meditation do you do?”
I pull a flask from my back pocket.
“The liquid kind,” I say, unscrewing the top and downing a long drink of Aqua Regia, the number one booze in Hell. It goes down like gasoline and hot pepper and washes the taste of baboon out of my mouth.