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his phone to anyone who’ll look. Showing my face to strangers.
    I start the car and gun the engine a couple of times. If he moves just a little to his right, I could pick him off without hitting anyone else. The front of this Catalina is solid steel.He won’t even make a dent. I can just hose him off when I get home.
    But I don’t do it. It would be too easy. Too Koyaanisqatsi . Something has got to change and it will start with me not killing a rich kid who’ll go on drinking shit Scotch and stealing photos with people because he’ll never know how close he came to frat-boy Heaven tonight.
    I pull away from the curb and head home.
    â€œI KEEP TELLING you,” says Kasabian when I come in. “If you just buy the Girl Scouts’ cookies, they’ll leave you alone.”
    â€œThat gets funnier every time you say it.”
    â€œIt’ll be even funnier next time.”
    Kasabian runs things day to day at Maximum Overdrive, the video store where I live with him and Candy. Him downstairs in the back and me and Candy in the small apartment upstairs. This arrangement is best for everyone if for no other reason than Kasabian doesn’t really have a body. I mean, he has one, but it’s not his. It’s a retrofit from a mechanical hellhound body I stole when I could still shadow-walk Downtown.
    â€œKeep going. You’re going to talk yourself out of tamales.”
    Kasabian holds up a mechanical hound paw.
    â€œWitness me shutting up.”
    The paw creaks a little as he says it. Sometimes he clanks when he walks. That’s the other reason he spends most of his time down here and not upstairs in our palatial penthouse. I set the tamales on the counter.
    â€œSmart man. How’s business?”
    â€œWe’re doing all right. Still making bank off the specialstash. But we haven’t had anything new in for a while. The requests are piling up.”
    The special stash are videos a little witch named Maria gets for us through her ghost connections. Movies that don’t really exist, at least in this time and space. James Cameron’s Spider-Man . Sergio Leone’s The Godfather . Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness .
    â€œDo you explain that our movies come from another fucking plane of reality? It’s not like we’re rifling the bins at the Salvation Army.”
    Kasabian lifts the edge of the tamales bag and looks inside. I close it and move the bag to the other end of the counter. He gives me a look.
    â€œThey’re customers,” he says. “They know what they want and they want it now.”
    â€œNext time someone whines, tell them to fuck off home and watch Kindergarten Cop on Netflix.”
    He slips a DVD into a case and holds it up in my direction.
    â€œAnd that’s why you’re not allowed down here during business hours.”
    â€œI have my own work these days. I don’t have to mingle with you rabble.”
    He points at my eye.
    â€œYour boss give you that for mouthing off?”
    â€œIt’s still noticeable?”
    â€œLike a glazed ham at a bris.”
    â€œDon’t say anything when you see Candy.”
    I take the bag and head upstairs.
    â€œHey. What about the tamales?”
    â€œNo one eats until Candy gets home.”
    â€œI admire her work ethic, but tell her to get a day job. I’m hungry now.”
    â€œDidn’t someone say that suffering was good for the soul?”
    â€œOnly preachers and insurance salesmen.”
    â€œWe’re still waiting. I’ll put these in the oven to stay warm.”
    I go upstairs, stash the tamales, and go into the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, I stare at my face. Yeah. There’s no way she’s not going to notice the bruise. It will be gone by morning, but right now I’m fucked. For a second, I think about more ice, look at myself again, and see how stupid and desperate that is.
    I take the angel’s box out of my coat and put it