Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey Page A

the door invisible and, better yet, make everyone in the building forget there was ever an apartment here. He’s lived in the place rent free ever since.
    I knock on the door and Allegra opens it, hugs me, and invites me inside. Vidocq smiles from his worktable. He’s in a stained lab coat, boiling red gunk in a beaker so that it condenses and trickles down a glass tube and drips into another beaker, clear now and full of what look like small spiny fish swimming around in slow circles. It looks like he’s either just created life or is making dinner. He’s well preserved for two hundred (though he doesn’t like to admit to being over a hundred and fifty). Close-­cropped salt-­and-­pepper hair, nice clothes, and a trimmed beard. A mad scientist by way of GQ .
    â€œHow’s life without whooshing in and out of shadows?” says Allegra.
    â€œSlow. Terrifying. I’m more like regular ­people every day. I’m going to end up wearing Costco suits and going to cupcake stores.”
    Allegra’s hair is jet black and shorter than Chihiro’s. Her café au lait skin is paler than when we first met. She’s spent a lot of the last year indoors at the clinic looking after sick and injured assholes like me.
    â€œYou could do with a little more real life in your life,” Allegra says.
    â€œAs long as I don’t need an accountant or a résumé.”
    Vidocq leaves his hoodoo table and goes into the kitchen.
    â€œYour scars are your résumé,” he says. “What sensible employer would ask you for more?”
    It’s the truth. After eleven years in the arena in Hell my body looks like it was run through a wood chipper and put back together with a hot glue gun.
    â€œWould you like some coffee?” Vidocq says. “I just made it.”
    â€œIt doesn’t have little fish swimming around inside, does it?”
    He glances back at his worktable.
    â€œThat’s an interesting project. I’m experimenting with blood and blue amber to reanimate fossilized animals.”
    â€œWhose blood?”
    â€œMine, of course.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œTo understand life, why else?”
    â€œI’m not sure it’s working that well.”
    Allegra goes over and stares into the beaker.
    â€œHe’s right. Your critters have refossilized.”
    Vidocq sighs.
    â€œWe learn as much from our failures as our success.”
    â€œThen I’m a goddamn Rhodes scholar.”
    I take the coffee he offers. He hands the other cup to Allegra.
    â€œYou inspired the experiment, you know. Or your guest did,” she says. “Ever since he showed up it’s life this and the nature-­of-­death that.”
    â€œWhat about you? He set off any new thoughts for you?”
    She blows on her brew.
    â€œYou’re the only angel I’ve treated extensively, and you’re only part angel. I’m curious about what a full angel might be like.”
    I sip Vidocq’s coffee. It’s good and strong.
    â€œWhich brings me to the subject at hand: How do you know he’s an angel?”
    The day after Candy and I brought the guest home, Vidocq and Allegra came over and took hair, sweat, and saliva samples while he was asleep.
    Allegra taps the side of her mug with her index finger.
    â€œTechnically, we don’t. I’m just hoping.”
    Vidocq comes in with his own cup and sits on their sagging couch.
    â€œThe body we examined is that of an ordinary man,” he says. “Nothing more and nothing less.”
    â€œExcept that he’s missing his heart and, I’m guessing, most of his blood,” I say.
    â€œYes. Whatever is in the body is clearly not human.”
    â€œCould he be a new kind of zombie?” says Allegra.
    â€œI doubt it, but maybe I should have Brigitte look him over. She’s the Drifter expert.”
    â€œHe could be exactly who he says he is. I mean, no one has died since he