Happy Hour in Hell

nine: ectoplasmic boogaloo

I LIKE TO drive. For one thing, I find it just distracting enough that it leaves my mind free for deep thinking. If you ask me just to sit down and think, all I think about is how I’m tired of sitting down, but behind the wheel of a car I just turn the driving over to the lower functions and let my thoughts loose. Also, with the exception of my bosses trying to get hold of me, or the occasional hellbeast trying to disassemble me, when I’m driving I’m safe from interruptions. I knew my phone wouldn’t ring because I was on suspension, and unless Smyler had got hold of something faster than his old VW van, he wasn’t going to trouble me on the freeway. So I drove north, thinking.

Sam was right, of course: the whole idea of trying to sneak into Hell was so stupid that nobody in his right mind would even bother with it. There was a reason we’d been fighting these guys for a million years or more, and it wasn’t because we didn’t like their national anthem. They wanted to destroy us and did their best to accomplish that every damn day. Breaking into the place—well, that would be like a Jew breaking into Buchenwald. You might accomplish it somehow, but what would you do when you got there?

But my alternatives were few. And even if I didn’t go, I’d still have to find a way to deal with Smyler, which, despite his comparatively small size and up-close choice of weaponry, had already proved pretty damn difficult. I mean, how do you kill someone who’s already died twice?

With cheerful thoughts like these in my head, and the fabulous slide work of Elmore James rasping and clanging from the car’s speakers, I drove north through the no-man’s-land of smaller communities strung along the peninsula between San Judas and San Francisco, until I reached the industrial ruins at the edge of the Bayview district in South SF. I didn’t know exactly where I was going to find the Boy, but I knew he’d be somewhere under concrete in that not very nice part of the world. Bayview was where all the black shipyard workers settled, only to be kept there by economics and prejudice after the dock work dried up. It was a poor community, defined more by what other people thought about it than anything else, a refuge for the old and vulnerable. Which, I suppose, is why the Broken Boy had never left.

I spotted the first piece of telltale graffiti on a concrete stanchion, something that looked like a vertical row of letter “D”s, or an aerial view of a pregnant chorus line:

They weren’t Ds, of course, but Bs. Two of them, for the Broken Boy, which meant I was in the right area. It’s his obscure way of advertising. He doesn’t have many customers, but the ones who need him need him real bad, so he hangs out his shingle. I parked my car, locked it, checked to make sure I’d locked it, then set out on foot to see if I could find a greater concentration of BB-tags.

Eventually, somewhere north of Bayview Park, I spotted three of the tags on the same corner under the freeway. More importantly, an African-American kid of about ten or eleven years old was sitting there on a chunk of concrete and rebar, pitching pennies by himself against a pillar. He watched me from the corner of his eye as I approached, plainly trying to decide what kind of threat I was.

“Hey,” I said when I was about ten feet away. “I’m looking for the Boy.”

The kid gave me a quick you-ain’t-much look, then went back to flicking pennies against the cement. “So?”

“I’ve got five bucks if you can take me to him. I’m an old friend of his.”

“He don’t have no friends that old.” Clink.

“Look, you can go ask first if you want. Tell him it’s Bobby Dollar. He knows me.”

The kid gave me a longer look, then scooped up his pennies and stood, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his hoodie, his shoulders up against the wind. March in San Francisco is kind of like December anywhere else. He just stood there, waiting, until I figured out what was going on. I pulled the five out of my pocket and held it out. When he still didn’t come nearer, I set it down on an old plastic paint bucket, put a rock on it to keep it from blowing away, and stepped back. He took it cautiously, watching me the whole time like a cat accepting food from strangers, then turned and disappeared up an incline beside the freeway, leaving me in the cold shadows. I sat on the bucket to wait, but it must have been a slow day at the Broken Boy’s office because the kid was back in less than ten minutes.

“C’mon,” he said, jerking his head to show me which direction we were going. It was a bit of an obstacle course, uphill through dirt and ancient ice plant spiked with plastic bags and food wrappers, then through a culvert. I had to get down on my knees to get through, and couldn’t help but reflect on what a great target for a mugging I was, but there just wasn’t any other way to see the Broken Boy. It’s not like he has a phone and takes reservations.

I followed the kid through this obstacle course long enough that if I’d been trying to figure out where we were, I probably would have given up. We emerged at last in an even darker, bleaker, and more windswept area beneath another part of the freeway, outside what had once been some kind of maintenance door, its little safety cage still intact, although the light bulb it protected had long since disappeared. It looked rusted shut, but swung open surprisingly easily, revealing a set of steps leading down. The kid produced a flashlight from his hoodie and led me into the depths like a midget Virgil.

The maintenance tunnel was cluttered with old rusted breaker boxes jammed with grubby wires, dumped there when their day had ended. A few more turns and then the kid stepped aside and waved for me to walk past him. As soon as I did, he turned his flashlight off and everything went dark.

“Who goes there?” asked a voice that could not possibly have belonged to anyone past puberty. “Friend or foe?”

“What is this, a road company of Peter Pan? It’s me, Bobby Dollar. Tell the Boy I’m here.”

One by one lights began to flick on, each one a flashlight held by a kid no older than the one who had led me. It really looked like they were on a camping trip, getting ready to tell ghost stories. There was even a campfire, of a sort—a hibachi in the middle of the room, full of hot coals. The little barbecue was mostly covered with an iron lid, only little bits of red light leaking out to splash the grimy cement walls. One of the junior soldiers went and kicked the lid off, and all of a sudden I could see properly. Not that there was much to be seen, just the half-dozen kids and the damp, ugly nexus of concrete tunnels.

“I hope there’s enough ventilation here for that barbecue,” I said. “Otherwise you and the Boy are going to wind up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Don’t worry about us.” The tallest of the kids stepped forward. He was missing an eye, or so I guessed, because he had a bandana tied over one socket, which made it look more than ever like Captain Hook should be making his appearance soon. “How do we know it’s really you?”

“Other than the fact that I found the place? I don’t know. Try asking me my mother’s maiden name.”

One-Eye frowned. “We don’t know that.”

“Neither do I, so we’re even. Look, I brought money, and I’m in a hurry. Can I please see the Boy?”

“Hey,” said one of the other kids in a lazy voice I was meant to hear, “if he’s got money, why don’t we just take it off him?”

“Shut the fuck up,” said One-Eye quickly. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.” He turned back to me. “I’ll see if he’s ready.”

Something whispered through the room then, a scratchy little sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck get up and look around. It took me a moment to make out the words: “No, it’s all right. Bring him in.” It sounded like a ghost, and not the healthy, lively kind like the Sollyhull Sisters, either.

He was sitting in the corner of a room off the main tunnel. I’d actually gone past his door. The only light was from a dry-cell emergency lantern near him, which cast his distorted shadow high across the walls. He barely filled the wheelchair. He’d lost weight since the last time I’d seen him, and although I was certain only that the Boy was somewhere between nine and fourteen years old, I did know that he shouldn’t be getting smaller at his age.

The Broken Boy swung his head to the side so he could see me better. Just the angle at which his neck bent was painful to see. Cross Stephen Hawking with a singed spider and you have some idea. Except for his skin, which is pink and healthy as the hide of a newborn mouse. And his eyes, which are even more alive, alive-oh. “Hi, Bobby. Good to see you.” His voice was softer than I remembered, more air, less weight. “Long time.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ve been out of the Harps for a while now, you know.”

“That didn’t stop you the last time.”

Didn’t really want to get into that. Tell you another time. “Can you help me out, BB?” I suddenly felt bad. “Are you up to it?”

“Me?” The head lolled, the chest heaved. He was laughing. Quiet as it was in that cement tomb under the freeway, I couldn’t actually hear it for a bit. “Never better. Run faster, jump higher. Satisfaction guaranteed.” Then those bright eyes fixed on me again. “You don’t have to worry about me, Bobby.” A sentence that could just as easily have been finished, “because there’s nothing you can do.” Which was true: the gray areas between my team, the other team, and ordinary human folk are full of people like the Broken Boy, growing and dying like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.

“Okay, but I’ll have to explain for a bit first . . .”

“Money?”

I dug it out of my pocket, took off the rubber band. “I remember the drill. Nothing bigger than twenties. Your helpers can handle them up to make ’em look less new. They look like they’d be good at it.”

For a moment, as I held out the cash, his Tyrannosaurus arms almost seemed to be trying to reach for it out of old reflex, but then he called One-Eye (who was apparently named Tico) to take it from me and put it in the box. Tico swaggered out as if he’d made all that money himself. The Boy watched him go.

“They’re good kids,” he said from the vast height of the two or three years he had on any of them. “They take care of me.” And for just a moment I could hear the child he might have been if his gifts or his past had been different; the lonely, sick kid who wished he could go out and play with the others. Kind of like getting punched in the stomach, that was.

A moment later Tico returned with two of the other kids and began to get the Broken Boy ready. As they strapped him to his apparatus, which was really not much more than a rusty old home fitness gym they must have dismantled up in the real world and put back together down here, I found myself wondering for a moment about where they had all come from, what strange tangle of stories had brought them here together. Boy was the strangest of all, of course, but I knew almost as little about him as I did about any of his pint-sized minions. Even Fatback hadn’t been able to track down his real name. By the time any of us heard of him, he was already this tiny, messed-up kid with a very strong gift, selling that gift to support himself and a rotating gang of urchins.

Of course, no gift comes without a price tag, and the one the Boy paid was pretty steep.

First the kids wound his limbs and torso in elastic bandages, the kind weekend athletes use on a sprained ankle, until he looked like a joke hospital patient from a comedy sketch. Next they tied him to the exercise machine with surgical tubing. I was pleased to see they did it gently, with the reverence of priests preparing a holy shrine. They left slack in each connection except for the one around his forehead. The Boy’s eyes followed them, showing white at the edges, but I could tell he was calm. After all, he’d been through all of this more than a few times already.

“Hey, Bobby,” he said, “Kayshawn, the one who brought you in from the checkpoint?” His voice was so quiet I had to move forward to hear him. “He came to me because he wanted me to teach him how to dance. He heard of me, see, but he thought I was ‘Breakin’ Boy.’”

“Breakin’ Two, Ectoplasmic Boogaloo,” I said, apropos of nothing except the vague anxiety I always felt watching the Boy do his thing.

Tico came in from the other room with a can of Sterno burning on an old china plate. “But you don’t dance so good, huh, boss?”

“You’re tripping,” said the Boy. “I dance really, really good. But none of you can see me doing it.”

Tico squinted his single eye as he poured something powdery from his fist into the Sterno, then set the plate down on the floor in front of the exercise machine, making the Broken Boy look more than ever like some distorted heathen idol. The can began to spark and smoke a little, then the orange flame began to cool into blue. Tico backed away and crouched against the wall with the others, a rapt little congregation.

“Tell me what you want to know, Bobby,” the Boy said. “Then I’ll show you my dance.”

I’d seen it. It was pretty impressive. Two thousand bucks’ worth? That depended on what I walked out of here knowing. So I told him about Smyler and how I’d watched the murderer burned away to carbon in a magical angel net, and how more recently he’d tried several times to stab me.

“Strange one,” said the Boy slowly. The flame was entirely blue now, the room cold to the eye as a 1940s gangster film. “Strange . . .” Other than the flicker above the Sterno can, the only movement was the Boy’s head as it pulled in short jerks against the tubing that held him, as if his body had decided to escape while his brain was busy talking. “Strange to think . . . who’s buying? Who sells . . . ?” He trailed off. His eyes had rolled up beneath his lids. “She makes seashores with a sea shell,” he said then, as calmly as discussing the weather, but the way he spoke made him seem very far away. “She masks. No—he must . . . ? Mastema? Makers with more of the tiny tiger bright light. Paper white light. White when you . . . while you—”

Then the Broken Boy gasped, and everything between his nose and his shoulders torqued violently to one side, as though struck by some huge, invisible fist. I had seen what happened to him when he plied his talent, but this was something different. For a moment afterward he just hung quivering in his harness of tubes like an exhausted butterfly halfway out of the chrysalis. Tico and one of the others actually scuttled forward, but a quiet yet distinct hiss from the Boy sent them back to their places. The blue flame wavered at their approach and retreat. By the time it had settled, the Boy had found his voice again.

“Sorry, Bobby,” he said, each word a dry scrape. “Can’t do it for you. Something . . .” He worked for air. “Something won’t let me. Something stronger. A lot stronger . . . than me.”

Which sucked, because it pretty much proved that Eligor or someone else near the top of the food chain was definitely after me. Could it be someone I hadn’t suspected? That fat demonic bastard Prince Sitri had certainly enjoyed the opportunity to yank my chain and his rival Eligor’s at the same time. But if he was the one who’d sent Smyler after me, this was a lot more complicated than I’d guessed. No, the odds were strong on the grand duke himself, Caz’s former boyfriend and current captor. And if the Boy couldn’t give me any information about Smyler, that meant the undead little fucker was going to keep coming after me, and I’d have to keep improvising. How many times could I get lucky?

If Smyler was off-limits, then I had to concede that the best defense would be a good offense, as sports journalists like to say.

“You still owe me an answer,” I told the Broken Boy.

“Really? After I just got the shit kicked out of me for messing in your business?” He looked like a plucked chicken in a pair of Garanimals jeans and a sweatshirt, but I was out of options. I had to be hard.

“You owe me an answer, kid. I can’t afford to pay you two thousand bucks just to admire your decor.”

He laughed. A little bubble of spit remained on his lower lip. “You’re a nasty man, Bobby.” He craned his head to see me better. I moved to make it easier. “What do you want to know?”

I looked around at the bright eyes and dirty faces of the Boy’s followers. It was like having an audience of raccoons. “Send your friends away. This one’s not for public consumption.”

The Boy must have made some gesture, because Tico got up and led the others out. BB had them well trained, I had to admit it. Pretty good for a sixty-pound bundle of rags that couldn’t stand by itself. When they were gone, I stepped closer. Even under all this concrete I didn’t want to say anything too loudly. I don’t know why—I had talked about it in the park with Sam without worrying. But suddenly I felt something heavy on me, the weight of superstition or just the realization of what I was actually intending.

“I need to know how to get into Hell.”