Happy Hour in Hell

ten: a mild, gray man

IT WAS taking the Boy longer than it usually did. Maybe I’d tired him out with the first attempt, maybe it was just a hard thing to discover, but he was laboring like a truck going uphill, and I could tell he still wasn’t anywhere near where he needed to be. At first he had simply slipped out of normal conversation like a patient going under anesthetic, flowing seamlessly into what sounded like free-verse nonsense, but that had been the last comfortable thing I’d seen. He very quickly began hitching and writhing within his bonds and now seemed to be deep in some kind of seizure, his wasted limbs rigid, his teeth locked in a skull-like grin, grunts of pain puffing out his cheeks in regular rhythm.

I actually heard the first bone snap, a terrible muffled crack as his contortions put too much stress on his fragile structure. What was worse was that he didn’t even scream, as though such a brutal rupture of tissue and bone barely climbed to his attention, but only shut his eyes, slowly, like someone pulling down the shutters in front of a downtown store.

It had been bad the last time I visited him, and it was bad this time but in a wholly different way. I don’t know where the Boy goes or what he does—his dance is a complete mystery to me—but I can promise you no explorer of jungles or mountaintops works harder or suffers more. I sat and watched him for what must have been half an hour as he slowly twisted and curled into terrible shapes, the rubber tubes stretching with him so that at times they looked like the external arteries and veins of some completely alien creature. During that time I heard three more bones break. There might have been others I didn’t hear. And every moment I watched I felt like a monster.

Like any decent person, when I first met him I had tried to get him off the streets and into some kind of facility, but he wouldn’t do it. “I was in one of those places once, and I’m never going back,” he had told me. “Never.” He told me that if anyone tried to force him, he had just enough control of his arms to be able to jam one of his fists into his mouth and choke himself to death, and that’s what he’d do. I believed him.

But of course, nobody could watch what he was doing to himself, or what I was indirectly doing to him, and feel comfortable. Like I said, there are a lot of people that live in the gray areas, the between areas. And when you go to those places, it’s hard to know what rules apply.

He finally went slack and stayed that way. I went to disconnect him from his apparatus, but he shook his head and whispered something. I couldn’t hear him so I bent close. His breath was surprisingly sweet, like cinnamon.

“Get . . .Tico . . .”

I called to Boy’s helpers, and they trotted in like a pack of efficient ER nurses, gently untangling the tubes and disconnecting him, pushing up his sleeves and pant legs to reach the knots. As they rubbed life back into his pale pink limbs Tico came forward with a hypodermic, but the Broken Boy waggled his head.

“Bobby . . .” I got down close so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice. “They built a gate . . . just for the emperor . . .”

For a moment I thought he was babbling again, but he kept talking and I began to understand. I crouched by him, straining for whispers deep underground, as he told me about the Neronian Bridge.

When Tico had sedated him, the urchins carefully lifted the Boy down from the exercise station and onto a blanket so they could carry him off to his bed. Tico moved up close behind me, letting me know that it was time for me to leave.

The little kid named Kayshawn was back in the main chamber, waiting to guide me out. I looked back as I reached the corridor. Tico was staring at me, arms crossed, frowning past his piratical bandana. “You made him dance twice,” he said. “Don’t want to see you back for a long time.”

I don’t particularly like being told off by eleven year olds, but he was right. I shrugged and followed Kayshawn back toward the daylight.

On the way back down the peninsula I was no longer in the mood for anything quite so brisk and bustling as Elmore James, so I put on Chet In Paris. Baker’s aching blue notes were about right for the mood of someone who’d just spent a lot of money to learn a complicated and extremely painful way to commit suicide. I rolled up the windows and let “Alone Together” fill the car like a remembered perfume.

So was I really going to try to make a trip into Hell? It was worse than suicide, of course, like sending a belly dancer into a Mujahideen rape camp. And even assuming I could get into the place, how could any disguise possibly hold up long enough to get me close to Eligor . . . and Caz? Because from what I knew of Hell, the high rollers lived in ways that even Jude’s Young Republicans could never hope to match, each one with his own little fiefdom, fortress, private army. A wig and a fake mustache were hardly going to get me through all that.

As I reached the outskirts of San Judas I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. After my long adventure in the Bayview district it was well into the afternoon, and I hadn’t had any lunch, or much breakfast for that matter, and for once I had a pocket full of money. I wouldn’t get to spend any of it in Hell, and Orban would probably auction off my car anyway, so I took the exit to Redwood Shores and headed for an expensive Japanese place I knew out there, on the water.

By the time I was ready to order I discovered I wasn’t as hungry as I’d thought, so I just asked for a basket of mixed tempura to go with my Sapporo. I crunched at it distractedly and let my thoughts flop around as I watched the seagulls dive off the rail outside. I was trying to make things come out in some order other than “you’re pretty much screwed,” but I couldn’t. My options seemed to be exactly two: stay and eventually find myself with a pointy object poking deep into my delicate brain tissues, courtesy of Smyler, or take the fight to Eligor with some farce of trying to sneak my girlfriend out of Hell, like a warped Crosby and Hope movie—The Road to Inferno. Either way, I could no longer rely on my bosses to resurrect me if I died in action, me being under suspicion and all.

The restaurant was almost deserted at that time of day, so I took my time eating, and might have had a second beer or two by the time I finally made my way back onto the Bayshore and headed home. It was still light but the sun was showing signs of wanting to get down behind the hills for the night, and downtown Jude was full of the late-afternoon shadows that come so quickly, dropping the temperature in the concrete canyons around Beeger Square ten degrees or so in a matter of minutes.

And, no, when I got to my place I didn’t just turn off Chet Baker, leap out of my car, and charge in. I hadn’t forgotten what happened the last time. I drove around the block twice with my eyes wide open but saw no sign of anything unusual, just the usual assortment of grocery-haulers and dog-walkers that you’d get pretty much any decent day. Still, I parked across the street from my building and went through the lobby as cautiously as I could manage without looking like a complete idiot. Since Smyler seemed to know where I lived, I would probably have to pack up and move again, which depressed the shit out of me. Little as I owned, I hadn’t even unpacked it yet.

The door was locked, which reassured me slightly. As I pushed the door open, I tucked my gun into my waistband so I’d have a hand free in case anything jumped on me. Nothing jumped on me. There was, however, a stranger sitting in the middle of my couch.

My gun was back in my hand so quickly I almost didn’t realize I’d pulled it, pointed right at his calm face. It wasn’t Smyler, that was the good part, but I couldn’t think of anyone or anything else that ought to be in my place when I wasn’t there. I’d never seen this stranger before, a middle-aged Semitic-looking guy with a salt and pepper beard and a hairline that inched back almost to the top of his head.

“Who the hell are you?”

He looked at me with mild reproach. “Please don’t point that at me. I don’t mean you any harm.”

“Then what are you doing here? I don’t recall inviting you.”

He shook his head. “You didn’t. But I’m a friend.” His hands were folded in his lap. He wore a cheap brown suit and a charcoal gray overcoat, oddly old-fashioned in a San Judas spring. Everything about him seemed tailored toward looking harmless. There are creatures in nature that look like that just so they can get their victims close enough to sink their teeth into them. Some of those creatures even talk as nicely as this guy. I’ve met them. Until I knew better, this mild, gray man officially scared me, so I kept my gun trained between his mild, gray eyes.

“Then tell me something that will convince me not to put a bunch of silver in you so I can dump you out by the trash cans and settle in to watch Dancing With The Stars.”

His smile was only slightly more robust than the Broken Boy’s. “Let’s go for a walk, Bobby.” When he saw me hesitate, he slowly lifted those harmless hands. “If I wanted to hurt you, would I wait for you here, then ask you to come outside?”

“You would if you had buddies waiting out there,” I said, but he was right, it didn’t really make sense. Not that I assumed he was my new BFF or anything.

I got behind him and let him lead me out the door, the barrel of my gun against his spine so that he’d block the view of it from anyone coming toward us. Didn’t want to alarm the neighbors any more than necessary after they’d seen me get brutally smacked around on the sidewalk the other night.

As we stepped outside, me swiveling like a turret gunner, keeping an eye out for any accomplices the guy might have brought along, he gave me a look that might have been disappointment mixed with mild amusement. “Do you really not know me, Bobby?”

I stared, but although there was something familiar about his way of talking, maybe even about his slight, small form, I couldn’t put my finger on it. For a half-instant I even wondered if he might be my old top-kicker Leo from the Harps, back from the dead, but that wasn’t who he reminded me of, and Leo would never have played a little game like this: if he ever came back I’d find him sitting on my chest in the middle of the night demanding to know whether I was planning on sleeping until fucking noon.

My gun hidden away now in my coat pocket (but my finger still on the trigger) I walked with the stranger to Main Street before turning toward Beeger Square. The fountain in the square (mostly known as “Rocket Jude” because the centerpiece is a Bufano statue of our patron saint that’s sort of shaped like a missile) is a major hang-out spot, and I knew nobody would give us a second look, but I liked the idea of having people around while I found out what this guy’s play was going to be.

We settled onto one of the benches. I left about a foot between us to make it harder for him to grab me. He must have seen this little bit of tradecraft because he shook his head. “Still nothing, Bobby? As much as we talk to each other?”

I stared at him, irritated (and still more than a bit nervous) and then suddenly I knew who he was. It hardly seemed possible. “Temuel? Archangel Temuel?”

“Ssshhh.” He actually put his fingers to his lips. “You needn’t shout it.”

I sat there chewing over what to say next. Stunned is not the word. The higher angels only appear on Earth for important things, and when they do it’s like one of the Hollywood elite showing up at your birthday party. Not that Temuel was that glory-hound type. But that was just the problem—he wasn’t the type to come to Earth at all, let alone to hang out in my grubby little apartment.

“What are you doing here?” I finally asked. “I mean, is this . . . official business? Like, Heaven-dot-org stuff?”

“What do you think?”

I swallowed. I’m not usually at a loss for words, but I simply didn’t know what to say. Did this mean somebody had blown the whistle on me about Caz? Or was it the feather? Was Temuel here to discreetly terminate my employment? My finger tightened a little on the trigger of my automatic, but that was reflex. If my bosses wanted to cross me off the employment roll, a few silver slugs weren’t going to help me any. At last, for lack of anything else to offer, I asked, “What do you want?”

“I hear you’re interested in going to Hell. I’m willing to help you.”

Hearing that was not hugely different than getting slapped across the face. “Huh? What? I mean, why?” It’s hard to make intelligent conversation when your already feeble grip on How Things Work has just proved a lot more slippery than you ever suspected. “Why would you want to help me do that?”

“Why, so you’ll help me.”

My archangel proceeded to tell me what he wanted and what he’d give me in return. None of it made the least amount of sense, not then; it was all I could do just to listen without shaking him and shouting, What’s going on here? What is my boss doing here on Earth, undercover, telling me how he’s going to help me reach Hell so I can save my demon lover? (Not that he ever mentioned that part: if he knew about Caz, he was keeping quiet about it.) But the things he said sounded genuine, as did what he suggested he could arrange for me. And when he asked me his return favor, which I had assumed would be something on the lines of emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, what he wanted was surprisingly simple. Stupidly simple, even.

“That’s all you want? You just want me to find a guy and tell him that?”

“I want you to find someone in Hell, Bobby. It’s not all that easy.”

“But still . . .” I shook my head. Questions were good—questions would keep me alive—but too many questions might lose me this chance. Yes, of course, every bit of self-preservation in me was screaming “trap!” but how could it be? I mean, if the rest of my superiors knew as much about me as Temuel seemed to, I’d already given them enough rope to hang me and the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir, too. No, the Mule claimed he was doing this alone, and so far that was the only explanation that made sense.

“Just tell me how you found out,” I said. “About Hell, I mean.” Then it came to me. “My phone. Clarence said he tapped it or bugged it somehow when he was tailing Sam. The bug is still there.”

Temuel shook his head, but he didn’t outright deny it.

“Tell me you’re the only one in Heaven who knows.”

“I’m the only one, Bobby. For now. But I can’t guarantee you’ll get away with this forever.”

We talked for a while longer, and he gave me the rest of the details—you’ll get them too, but not yet—and then he stood, our little chat beside Rocket Jude apparently at an end. I wasn’t holding the gun anymore as we walked back across the broad square, but I wasn’t feeling much safer than I had on the way over. I was clearly into something big and deep, in way past my ability to survive unaided, and the only person offering me a lifeline was someone who, any time he chose, could have me busted down to Unidentified Angelic Smear, Second Class.

Twilight had turned to near dark. Sidewalks were empty now, but the streets were full of cars, late commuters heading home, everyone else on their way downtown for movies or dinner. A light, misty rain swept through, just enough to prickle my jacket with little droplets and make my face damp.

As we neared the end of Main Street an angular shadow suddenly peeled itself from between a pair of dumpsters and stepped out in front of us. It was dark, no streetlights, but I knew exactly who that wiry, crouching frame belonged to.

“It so slick,” Smyler said. “It so smart. It wait and wait.”

“Shit.” I fumbled my gun out of my pocket. Temuel stared at the scrawny apparition. My boss looked frightened, which was not the thing I wanted to see just then. “Stay there,” I said to the thing with the long blade, trying to make my voice sound firm and worth obeying. “I don’t want to shoot you—I’d rather talk—but I’ll blow you into little pieces if you take even one step.”

“I can’t be here,” Temuel said in a breathless rush. “I can’t risk . . .”

And then he was gone, just gone, as if he hadn’t been standing right beside me. When I turned back a stunned second later, the killer with the underslung jaw and a four-edged knife gripped in its hand was loping toward me, a skinny shadow with the staring, excited eyes of an insane child.