Volume 01, Story 9
The door handle jiggles, the knob turns, and Mary Jane and Lucy stroll into Chino’s apartment laughing like they own it. Chino’s first question is how. Mary Jane holds up a key. It is Homeboy’s actual key, handed over because Lucy asked him to, so that one of these days she could sneak in, creep into Chino’s bedroom, and wake him up with a blow job. Chino’s sense of betrayal survives exactly as long as it takes Lucy to sit down on his lap. The bedroom door slams. That leaves Homeboy and Mary Jane on the couch with nothing to listen to but the two of them, one thing leads to another, and that is the moment two men walk in through the door nobody closed. Where is she. They want their Mistress. Homeboy informs them they’ve got the wrong apartment, because this ain’t Fifty Shades of Grey. Then Lucy’s very audible enthusiasm answers their question. They barge into the bedroom, get screamed back out, and are parked on the couch on either side of Homeboy and Mary Jane like scolded children until she is good and done. Homeboy, ever the host, offers them cookies. Some time later the television is playing Reefer Madness, the two strangers are howling with laughter at it, and Homeboy is curled up in Mary Jane’s arms wanting to know what kind of wicked tyrant would make this. Then the edibles land on all four of them at once.
When Lucy finally emerges, she surveys the two men snoring on her boyfriend’s couch and identifies them: her cadre of the fallen. Chino thinks this is a terrific bit: you make it sound like you’re the Devil. Lucy says maybe, and winks. A snap of her fingers brings the room back online, introductions are made, and Homeboy rules that Azazel is a cool fucking name. Then Mammon introduces himself, which puts Chino and Homeboy on the floor and everyone else in silence, because nobody in the room speaks enough Spanish to know what no seas mamón means. Learn some Spanish, white people. In the limousine afterward, Mammon driving and Azazel riding shotgun, Lucy produces an ornate box that is the exact twin of the one in Chino and Homeboy’s kitchen cabinet, right down to a red-black demonic pipe that’s the spitting image of theirs, except hers actually has weed in it. Homeboy observes that the only thing hers is missing is their note. Lucy had the boxes made. Theirs has been changing hands since a Pharaoh kept his Blue Lotus in it, by way of a Duke of France who kept opium in it and a run of German generals and officers across the World Wars, right up until Chino’s gramps pinched it off a Japanese officer. Homeboy runs that math and asks how old she is. Older than time itself, which Chino confidently prices at twelve billion years. As for the business she’s been quietly attending to: her cadre has been hunting a demon hunter. Not the Winchesters (fuck those guys), and anyway demons aren’t real. What a demon hunter hunts is Fallen Angels. We prefer Free Angels. Homeboy asks the obvious follow-up straight out, and Lucy answers it just as straight; Homeboy demands she do some Devil shit to prove it, and what he gets instead is Lucy raising a single eyebrow at Mary Jane, and Mary Jane climbing into her lap. Chino and Homeboy high-five in perfect synchronization.
The address turns out to be a basement: one spotlight, four more men built and dressed exactly like Azazel and Mammon standing silent along the walls, and in the chair at the center a lean, shaved-headed man, wrists bound behind him, bleeding from a cut over the eye, with eyes gone white all the way through, iris and all. This is Luis Dos Santos de Santa Ana. He spits blood on the floor and promises, in Spanish, to kill every one of them. He is blind, and it does not appear to inconvenience him: he can’t see Chino, or Homeboy, or Mary Jane, but the good Lord saw fit to let him see Free Angels, and to see them as they really are, which per Lucy is considerably more beautiful than the shape she happens to be wearing. What Lucy wants from him is what he knows about the other hunters. What Chino wants to know is whether killing one of them sends her to Hell, and the answer is that there’s no such thing: a dead Free Angel just goes back to Heaven, which sounds like a soft punishment until Lucy explains what an eternity of mandatory praise choir does to a being. And what Homeboy wants to know about is the glass jar on the table. Is that a dick. Yes. Is it that vato’s dick. Yes. The one thing an enhanced interrogation does not need is Homeboy handling the evidence. The jar goes to the floor. And somewhere in the wreckage, a shard of glass comes to rest within reach of the chair, and the blind man clocks it.
What happens next happens fast. Dos Santos saws through his ropes, snatches Mammon’s own gun off him, and puts a bullet point-blank through Mammon’s head, pausing only to slip on the severed testicle on his way over, which everyone winces at in unison. A second shot takes Azazel in the back as he shields the others’ escape. The remaining Free Angels surge forward in righteous fury, and Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane and Lucy run for the limo. Mary Jane takes the wheel. The thing is bulletproof, which stops the screaming the instant Lucy mentions it. Dos Santos empties a magazine into the armor for nothing, taunts bouncing off the glass, until he throws the gun aside and storms the car on foot. Are the doors locked? Heavy silence. Click. The door swings open and Dos Santos lunges in bellowing ¡Ahora mueres, Satanás! Chino’s foot meets his face, Homeboy’s boot meets his skull, and Mary Jane adds vicious kicks for good measure, followed by Homeboy locking in a rear naked chokehold until the man goes limp. Chino verifies unconsciousness the scientific way: a poke in the ass with an empty water bottle, on the theory that a hardcore religious man would fight to remove it. He doesn’t move. He’s out.
They drive for the Ominous Forest with Dos Santos bound in the trunk, and what happens in the clearing is the story’s raw nerve. Lucy snaps: kicks his head, beats him with her fists, then her shoe, crying the whole time, until Chino pulls her off and holds her while she shakes. I’m not fucking God! I’m just an angel! We don’t have superpowers! What pours out of her then is the truth about Heaven: a fucking hellscape where everyone is fucking happy all the fucking time, singing the same Goddamn songs over and over to stroke some omnipotent being’s fucking ego, forever. They bury Dos Santos in a deep hole with their bare hands (Uncle Rob has the shovels, probably at his new mansion), and Lucy breaks a nail doing it. Then, on the curb afterward, she tells Chino they have to part ways: her brothers are dead, she’s being hunted, and Free Angels are only safe in numbers. I am going to miss that cock, though. The limo sputters off into traffic. Mary Jane, watching it go: She knew how to please a pussy. Let’s go get high.
Featuring Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane, Lucy, Mammon, Azazel, Dos Santos, Free Angels.
Read the full story in The Adventures of Chino & Homeboy, Volume 01