I could smell the sweet, subtle odor of tenrec following me from the warehouse. Curling around me, as physical as wire against the throat. I’d had to look that one up. Not knowing what a tenrec was had haunted me. But knowing hadn’t helped.

Part of me wanted to tell Hellmouth where I was and just get it over with. Whatever he wanted, whatever he was after.

Unless what suited Hellmouth best was me in limbo. In which case it didn’t matter.

[78]

Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don’t even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.

All these worthless cases I thought were worth taking on. While the world burned. While Vilcapampa was taking god-knows-what measures—and not just against me, but, I imagined, against the remnants of Silvina’s network. If “Friends of” could be considered a network and if that network still had a purpose. While Hellmouth searched like some infernal floating eye. I might’ve put Ronnie in danger just by going to Unitopia. Everything I turned my attention to turned to shit.

Small beer. Small potatoes. Small towns. Where would these cases have gone without me? These needs and wants, these paranoid fears that half the time were actually something. But usually not worth the victim knowing the truth. What I really owed them was to put the truth in the widest possible context. To spread Silvina’s gospel, to overturn the comfort of the everyday with the knowledge of what would come tomorrow.

No matter who Silvina had been in bed with, literally and figuratively. No matter what Silvina had meant to do, no matter whether I agreed with it or not, I knew she was right about the state of the world. So maybe I was hiding in more than one way. Maybe I was hiding from the future.

The ethics of surveillance. The ethics of spying. Well, I’d thrown that all out the window with my small-beer cases. Everything existed in a tactical state of gray. You couldn’t untangle the passion from the logic, the underlying philosophy from the technology.

Fuck it. I had a job to do.

I arrived late in the day. The car dealership slumped across a lot on the edge of town, the kind of generic place with streamers and banners that fades into the background so easily. The streetlamps here were a sickly yellow that leaked light in strange patches. The competing green-gray of sky sparked against the steel of flagpoles and chrome of car hoods. I already knew the business wasn’t doing well—the financials were terrible.