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to glance at Beeman: A small man. Prissy. Arch expression. Clothes as neat as Constantine’s were rumpled.
    “Don’t I always?” Beeman said as he set his custom bowling bag on the counter of the kitchenette near the front door.
    John gestured to a small can with the image of a cow on it, waiting on the table. Beeman picked it up. The novelty can went mooooo.
    Something Beeman had requested. Taste is relative.
    “Much obliged,” Beeman said, putting the moo can in his pocket. He unzipped the bag, took out some water balloon-like ampules of holy water and a couple packs of Lucky Strikes, put them on the table. Constantine scooped them up, tucked them into his coat, which was lying over the chair. “How you feeling, John?” Meaning: Been back to the doctor? Diagnosis?
    Constantine didn’t want to talk about it. He nodded toward the bag. “So - what’s new?”
    Beeman began pulling things out of the bag.
    “Stone fragments from the Road to Damascus, bullet shavings from the assassination attempt on the Pope. And - oh, you’ll love this…”
    He took out a little matchbox with a homemade smiling bug drawn on it.
    “A screech beetle from Amityville.”
    He shook the matchbox and the beetle fluttered and clicked inside. Its wings whirred with an unnatural high pitch, like a muted scream.
    Constantine chuckled.
    “Yeah, funny to you - but to the Fallen, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard,” Beeman remarked.
    “What is it exactly with you and bugs?”
    “I just like them.”
    “Yeah, who doesn’t.” Constantine smiled. He liked Beeman.
    Beeman took a set of brass knuckles from the bag.
    It was solid gold and engraved with Catholic insignia. John tried them on - and they fit with an improbable snugness.
    “The gold was blessed by Bishop Anicott during the Crusades,” Beeman said, offhandedly.
    Constantine pocketed the gold knuckles, spotted something odd in Beeman’s bag, took out a foot-long copper tube, gripped the bulb at one end. “What’s this, a bicycle horn?”
    “Easy there, hero-”
    Constantine squeezed the bulb, and a ten-foot-long flame belched out of it. Constantine blinked, wrinkled his nose. The air stank of sulfur and reptile gut.
    “It’s dragon’s breath.”
    “I thought you couldn’t get it anymore.”
    Beeman shrugged modestly. “I know a guy who knows a guy.”
    Beeman reverently laid out what looked like an old, frayed rag. Constantine started to put the dragon’s breath tube down next to it.
    “No, whoa, John - boom! This is a piece of the robe Moses wore to the mountain. Very, very flammable.”
    Fire-from-the-burning-bush flammable? Constantine picked up the rag. Had Moses really worn this? Not all relics were what they were cracked up to be. But he did sense something…
    He looked at Beeman inquiringly. Meaning: This for real?
    Beeman nodded. “Yes. And yes. So, what’s the action?”
    Constantine held the rag up to the light. What was he expecting to see? “I just pulled a soldier demon out of a little girl. Looked like it was trying to come through.”
    Beeman stared at him. Constantine couldn’t mean come through - physically?
    “I know how it sounds… “
    Beeman snorted. “We’re finger puppets to them. Not doorways. They can work us but they can’t come through onto our plane. You know that.”
    “Check the scrolls anyway. See if there are any precedents, will you?”
    Beeman nodded. Constantine suspected he was being humored.
    “Sure, John. Anything else?” Beeman asked.
    Constantine coughed. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything… for, uh… “
    Beeman nodded sagely and reached into the bag.
    Pulled out a bottle. Vicks Formula 44.
    “On the house.”
    “Thanks, B. Hard day at the office.” Constantine toasted the air before taking a long pull on the cough syrup.
    --
    A building stood in the midst of Los Angeles, a spired hulk that seemed out of place in the sunny L.A. afternoon - it looked like something from thirteenth century France more