The Wrong Goodbye

3.

The Plaza de Bolivar sparkled in the midday sun, still rain-slick from a spate of showers that had burned off when the first rays of morning light crested the Andes to the east. It was Sunday, and the massive square was flush with people: students, lounging on the steps of the old cathedral; lovers, chatting amiably as they strolled arm-in-arm; children, startling pigeons into flight as they splashed through the puddles that had gathered in the shadow of the capitol building. The scene looked like something out of a picture postcard, right down to the plaza patrons’ unselfconscious good cheer. At the moment, I hated each and every one of them, traipsing about without a care in the world while Danny jerked me around like a puppet on a string.

Five days had passed since I’d received Danny’s grisly message —five days since I’d left Varela’s mutilated corpse, and the corpses of his men, to be reclaimed by the jungle they’d so wrongly sought refuge in. The first two of them I’d spent hiking to the nearest village, although maybe village was too strong a word. Really, it was nothing more than a handful of ramshackle huts clustered around a narrow dirt track that served as their only road. God knows what they must’ve thought of me, stumbling filthy and delirious out of the jungle and begging for food and water in broken Spanish. But whatever they thought of me, they took me in, giving me not only food and water, but fresh clothes and a bed to sleep in as well. The bus to Bogotá arrived two days later, looking —as all buses in Colombia seem to —like some crazy Technicolor school bus, its roof piled high with suitcases, wicker baskets, and sacks of grain. I boarded it with a full belly, a clear head, and an undeniable reluctance to leave after the staggering hospitality I’d been shown by these people who had so little to give. Of course, the choice to leave wasn’t mine to make —Danny had made sure of that. I didn’t know what he was playing at, snatching Varela’s soul, and truth be told, I didn’t care. All I cared about was taking back what was rightfully mine, even if I had to tear him limb from limb to do it.

I set fire to a cigarette, and then struck out across the square. Though the sun was bright overhead, the mountain air was cool and thin. After a week spent traipsing through the Amazonian lowlands, my lungs seared from the sudden altitude, and gooseflesh sprung up on my arms at the slightest breeze. I was dizzy and weak, and my muscles protested at the exertion required to remain upright and on the move. If this meeting of ours were to come to blows, I didn’t like my chances. And with Danny, I really couldn’t rule it out.

About a half a block from the square was a small sidewalk café —a smattering of wrought-iron tables beneath a black canvas awning, within sight of the twin spires of the cathedral. I took a seat and ordered a cup of strong black coffee, as much for warmth as to kill the time. The minutes passed by as lackadaisically as the tourists, as though both had nowhere in particular to be. When I reached the bottom of my mug, I signaled to the waitress for another.

By the time I finished my second cup of coffee, I was jumpy, and my palms were sweating. My waitress wasn’t faring much better. When she brought my second refill, she shot off something in rapid-fire Spanish that I couldn’t understand, but I think I got the gist: order something besides coffee or beat sidewalk. I tried to explain to her that I was waiting for someone, but that didn’t seem to get much traction. Eventually, I acquiesced, looking over the menu and picking an item at random. That seemed to mollify her, because she snatched the menu from my hands and disappeared into the café, leaving me and my coffee jitters in peace.

“Hello, Sam. It’s been a while.”

Even though I’d been expecting him, I swear I never saw him coming. See, every Collector’s got their type. Some pick meat-suits based on strength, or speed, or stamina. Me, I prefer the quiet of the newly dead. But Danny, he’s got a whole ’nother set of criteria. Danny likes ’em pretty. Good teeth, a healthy tan, and ideally with a walk-in full of swanky clothes. He told me once in a moment of drunken confession that he clings to the creature comforts he enjoyed in life as a way of protecting against the erosion of self that comes from subjugating vessel after unwilling vessel, but I didn’t believe him for a second. He does it because he likes the way the ladies look at him.

But that was then, I guess. Today, he looked like shit. Sunken eyes ringed dark from lack of sleep. Sallow skin beaded with sweat and streaked with dirt. There was dirt in his hair, as well, and his clothes were so covered in it, it took me a moment to recognize them as the same fatigues worn by Varela’s men. So this is where the eighth man went, I thought —the one whose rifle I found abandoned alongside his dead compatriots. But that was nearly a week ago, and I’d never known Danny to stick with a meat-suit longer than a day or two. Something clearly wasn’t right here.

“You ask me, Danny, it hasn’t been long enough. Now where the hell is Varela’s soul?”

He blinked at me for a moment as though he hadn’t understood the question, and then dropped awkwardly into the chair opposite me. His eyes darted to and fro, never settling on anything for more than a second. His hands found the unused place setting laid out before him and began fiddling absently with it. His feet tapped out a twitchy, nervous rhythm from beneath the table.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said, his once lilting Queen’s English now brittle, strained.

“Then you’re an idiot. I had to come —your little stunt in the jungle made sure of that.”

He recoiled as if I’d slapped him. His features twisted into an expression of hurt. “I’m sorry about that —really, I am —but I didn’t know what else to do! I’ve got no one else to turn to.”

“Sure you don’t, Danny,” I replied, my words dripping venom. “How is Ana, by the way?”

“Piss off, Sam, that was years ago. I mean, I’m sorry how that shook out, but I was hoping we were past that.”

“Past it? Is that what you hoped? You lied to her, Danny. You betrayed me. You know damn well I had nothing to do with Quinn getting shelved —but hey, if pinning it on me means you and Ana get to ride off into the sunset together, then by all means. After all, what’s a little backstabbing between friends?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sam, we’ve been through this all a thousand times. I swear to you, whatever she heard, she did not hear it from me. How many times am I going to have to tell you that before you’ll actually believe it?”

“At least once more.”

“I think I’ll save my breath,” he said. “Besides, what I did or didn’t tell her is immaterial. Ana’s a big girl, and her conclusions are her own. You know as well as anyone that once she’s made up her mind, there’s not a force on God’s Earth that’s going to change it. Now, I won’t deny that when she turned her back on you, it was me she turned to, but I can promise you there was no riding off into the sunset for the two of us. When Quinn got shelved, it shook her up pretty bad. And then you left–”

“Left?” I let out a single, barking laugh, shrill and humorless. “The way I remember it, you two abandoned me.”

“Yeah, well, whatever you want to call it, it was the beginning of the end for Ana and me. We held on for a while —out of obligation, I suppose —but we were just forestalling the inevitable. Truth is, I haven’t seen Ana in months.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him. Then again, it didn’t matter. After all, I hadn’t come here to pick at old wounds. I had come here to take back what was rightfully mine.

I came here for Varela’s soul.

“All right, Danny. Why don’t you tell me what we’re doing here?”

But Danny wasn’t paying me any mind. Instead, he seemed suddenly transfixed by a spot over my left shoulder. His face contorted in panic, and the idle tapping of his feet ceased. I twisted in my seat to see what it was he was looking at, but it was nothing but a common crow, preening itself on a porch rail a couple doors down. Or rather, it would have been a common crow on damn near any other continent. As far as I knew, no one had ever seen a crow this far south, which made this one anything but common. But aside from Danny, who looked like he was going to crawl out of his skin —and me, I suppose —no one seemed to pay it any mind. Guess there weren’t a lot of bird-watchers out that day.

Eventually, Danny realized I’d asked a question and got around to replying, though his eyes never left the crow perched behind me. “I’m in trouble, Sam.” As he spoke, three more crows fluttered to a landing on the street beside us, picking at whatever scraps of food had settled in the cracks between the ancient cobblestones. He glanced at them, and the fear-lines in his face deepened. “I need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s… it’s about a job. A couple weeks ago, this was. The bloke was a mob enforcer out of Vegas by the name of Giordano. Nothing special about him, really —just your typical street thug. Or, at least, he was, until he cut a deal with a demon a couple years back and wound up a made guy. Honestly, you’d think if you were going to go to all the trouble of selling your immortal bloody soul, you might aim a little higher.”

I thought back to my deal, to the wife whose life I saved. “Yeah, I guess I would, at that.”

“Anyway, the collection went strictly by the numbers —he never even saw me coming. Only now his soul is missing. Stolen right out from under me.”

I smiled, all teeth and ill intentions. “Seems there’s a lot of that going around.”

“Look, you can make your funny jokes, but I’m not fucking around here! I swear, I buried the bloody thing like I was supposed to, but by the time the Deliverants arrived to pick it up, it was nowhere to be found. Now I’m at the end of my rope, and my handler’s getting really narky. Pretty soon, he’s going to run out of bollocks to tell his bosses, which means if I don’t produce something soon…”

So that explained the crows —who, by the way, had since been joined by several dozen of their friends, and now darkened every cornice, balcony, and parapet for a half a block around. Deliverants are the creatures responsible for conveying a soul to its ultimate fate. They’re often mistaken for simple scavengers by the living, and the form they take is dependent upon the location of the collection. These ones must’ve had quite a flight, tracking Danny all the way from Vegas. As I watched, another handful of them fluttered to a landing atop the clay shingles of the roof across the street. Danny’s missing soul was, by all rights, theirs now, and it looked to me like they meant to take it back. If I were Danny, it wouldn’t just be our employers I was worried about. Though if his manner were any indication, I’d say the Deliverants worried him plenty.

“Look, I get you’re in a bind,” I said. “What I don’t get is what the hell you expect me to do about it.”

“I expect you to show some fucking compassion! I expect you to find it in that bitter bloody heart of yours to care! I expect you to help me figure out who did this before our bosses’ bosses tire of my excuses and take matters into their own hands! I mean for Christ’s sake, Sam, I thought we were mates!”

“You’re full of shit, Danny, and you know it. If you want to go on about friendship and compassion, that’s your business, but if you believed a single word of it, then why’d you take Varela’s soul?”

“I had to be sure you’d come, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I get that. But if you and I were really friends, all you would have had to do was ask. Only you and I both know that ship sailed a long time ago, so let’s not pretend this is anything other than what it is. You took something that was rightfully mine. I want it back. Now why don’t you tell me what I’m going to have to do to get it?”

“So that’s it, is it —you think I planned to blackmail you? Well, fuck you, Sam Thornton. Fuck you very much. Of course I took your precious bloody soul —I knew there wasn’t any other way you’d meet with me. You ever ask yourself why it is that after all these years, you’re still so sodding mad at me? You tell yourself that I betrayed you —that I filled your precious Ana’s head with lies and stole her away from you. Only she was never your Ana to begin with, was she? And anyway, I did no such thing. If you ask me, you’re not angry because you think she never would’ve chosen me all on her own —you’re angry because you suspect she did.”

“Damn it, Danny, that’s not what this is about!”

“Ain’t it?” He fished a bundle of olive-drab cloth from his uniform shirt pocket and tossed it onto the table between us. “If it’s your soul you want, then take it and go. Sorry to have troubled you.”

I eyed the bundle for a second, and then picked it up. “Look, it’s not like I don’t see where you’re coming from —I just don’t know what I could possibly do to help. I mean, a year ago, maybe, but now? Now I can’t. Not after what happened in New York. There’s a war brewing between heaven and hell, Danny, and our kind are being kept on an ever shorter leash.”

He guffawed. “You think you need to tell me that?”

“Apparently, I do. And believe me, no one’s under more scrutiny right now than I am. I mean shit, when the dust from the Manhattan job cleared, there were two demons dead —dead by my hand. We’re talking the first of their kind to be killed in millennia —the first since the last Great War. I’m lucky I’m not spending the rest of eternity getting flayed alive. Probably would be, if I hadn’t gone all Dirty Harry on the bad angel and averted an apocalypse in the process. But it ain’t like I’m getting a free pass in all of this. Lily’s spent the past ten months watching me like a hawk to ensure every job is by the book —and there isn’t an angel or a demon out there that wouldn’t like to see me burn. Which means for now, I walk the straight and narrow. Hell, I’ll be lucky if they don’t shelve me just for meeting with you. I’m sorry, Danny, but my hands are tied.”

At that, Danny deflated, the fight gone out of him. He looked suddenly small, and frail, and afraid. Despite everything that had come between us, I wished there was something I could do to help him —that there was something I could say to keep him from feeling so alone. There wasn’t, though —or at least, that’s what I like to tell myself. It sounds better than the truth. Better than I didn’t even try.

Danny’s gaze drifted over to the building opposite the café, an elegant Spanish colonial with balconies that overlooked the avenue below. A wan halfsmile spread across his weary face. “It was a hell of a job we pulled in there, wasn’t it? When was that —’81, ’82?”

“’83,” I replied, a smile tugging at my lips as well.

“’83, of course it was! Bloody hell, seven of them, all at once —that’s not something that you soon forget. And the fight they put up —it’s amazing we got out of there alive! I remember the last of them was so coked up, he laughed and laughed as, one after another, all his mates went down. When all was said and done, I was so exhausted I thought I might collapse, and Ana had to shower for an hour to get the blood out of her hair.”

“I still remember the look on Lily’s face when she found out I’d pulled it off —she thought for sure they’d send me packing. Of course, she had no idea I had help.”

“We were thick as thieves back then, Sam. Where did we go wrong?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “Thieves steal, Danny. That’s where we went wrong.”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it, but Danny didn’t bristle. And at that moment, the waitress returned, carrying a steaming plate of tortilla-like flatbreads piled high with meat and cheese. She set the plate in front of me, and addressed Danny in Spanish too fast for me to follow.

“Sorry, love,” he said to her, rising from his seat, “I can’t stop.” And then, to me, so earnestly it broke my heart: “Thanks for coming, Sam. It was good to see you.”

He turned and left, then, his shoulders hunched against the mountain chill, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He set out in a diagonal across the street, heading back toward the plaza. I just sat and watched him go. I wanted to call to him, to tell him that I’d help, but I didn’t. I was too angry, I guess. Too afraid. Eventually, I lost sight of him within the crowded square, so I sat and stared at nothing.

And then, as one, a thousand crows took flight and followed.