Happy Hour in Hell

five: hog caller

ACTUALLY, I had one idea, but I couldn’t do anything about it until midnight. To keep my head straight, I sat up listening to Thelonious Monk and his quartet playing at Carnegie Hall, over and over. It didn’t really work, because I kept wondering how perfect music like that could happen in such a fucked-up universe. When the clock finally struck twelve I turned down Coltrane mid-solo and called my favorite hog.

He’s only half a hog, really. My friend Fatback (which I never call him to his face) is a were-hog named George Noceda. During the day, man with pig’s brain; after the witching hour, pig with man’s brain. No, ladies, that doesn’t make him just like all us other guys. Not fair.

“Bobby!” His voice was still gruff from the transformation. I should have given him a few more minutes, but I was desperate. “What can I do you for?”

“Information, fast as you can get it for me. It might keep me from being turned into a human kebab.”

“So what else is new? One of these days you’re going to say, ‘Take your time, George. There’s no hurry,’ and I’ll know it’s truly the End of Days.”

“Don’t make jokes, buddy. Not tonight.” When stuff starts to slide—and the important stuff in my life was sliding like a jackknifed panel truck—Bobby D’s world can turn into a bad horror movie quick, stuff that would make even a were-hog faint. “I need information on a dead guy. Well, a supposedly dead guy.” I ran down what I already knew about my latest worry, both the original charmer and Smyler v.2, plus what little I’d been able to see of v.3. “Can you find me some information fast?”

From the snort you might have thought he was changing back to pigbrain again, but actually it’s a lot louder and less pleasant when it really happens. “Yeah, sure, Mr. Patience. Just let me get some slops down. I’m starving.”

“Doesn’t the . . . the other version of you eat?”

“Yeah, but not enough to keep eight hundred pounds of pork happy after I change. But I’ll be right on it in half an hour or so, man.”

It’s always strange to be talking to a pig in the middle of the night, but as swine go, Fatback is definitely one of the best. “Thanks. Call me if you get anything interesting, otherwise just send it all to my phone.”

“No problem, Mr. B. If you’re trying to find a dead guy, though, maybe you should talk to some other dead people. You know a few, right?”

“Know a few? They’re my bread and butter, Georgie. But I’ve got to get some shut-eye first. I feel like shit.”

“Count your blessings, Bobby. That’s what I sleep in.”

So the next day, when the sun was far enough up the sky that it didn’t give me a headache, I went to see the Sollyhulls.

The Sollyhull Sisters are a pair of middle-aged Englishwomen who died in a fire half a century ago—almost certainly one they’d set to get rid of their parents. Because of this, they didn’t go to Heaven, of course, but for some reason they haven’t gone to Hell, either. Still, the sisters are very nice, if a bit screwloose, so I try not to think too much about the arson part of their bio. I really needed some expert help to find out how Smyler had come back, and the Sollyhulls liked me and were always willing to chat. My world is full of folks like that—in-betweeners who don’t quite belong to one side or the other. (My piggy friend Fatback didn’t really count that way, because he hated Hell so badly for the were-pig thing that he spent all his time getting up in their shit, research-wise.)

I caught up with the sisters at the latest diner they were haunting. They preferred tearooms, but apparently San Judas was short on good ones. I took a table in the back where it wouldn’t be so obvious that I was talking to invisible people—invisible to everyone but me, that is. As always, I had brought the sisters a gift, so after the two ghost-ladies had finished telling me about the fun they’d had teasing some paranormal investigators who had started hanging around their previous diner, I lifted a small, gift-wrapped box onto the table. “Here, I brought you a little something,” I said, and took the lid off the tin.

“What is it?” Doris asked. “Oh, Bobby, you darling—pastilles! Betty, violet pastilles!”

Betty leaned forward for a long sniff. “Ah, lovely. The French kind! Ooh, I loved these! Much better than those Whatsit Brothers ones our gran used to give us.”

I let the sisters enjoy the scent for a while. That was about all they could do, but judging by their noises of rapture, that was plenty. Then I asked them if they knew anything about a revenant named Smyler, and told them what I knew of his history—at least, through his first two deaths.

“Don’t think so, dear,” Betty said after some consideration. “There was a fellow they used to call The Smiler, but that was years ago in England and he was a tall, tall fellow. Lovely teeth, too. Dead since Queen Victoria’s day, everyone said, but he had a set of pearlies you could read by on a dark night. Still, he’d done his victims with arsenic, hadn’t he?”

“Cyanide, dear.”

“Right you are, our Doris. Cyanide. It wouldn’t be him, would it?”

I said I didn’t think so.

“Then there was Moaning Sally, but she was a girl, wasn’t she? She stabbed her lover and some of his family with one of those bayonets. Quite a lot of stabbing, altogether. They said she killed herself in her prison cell, then came back and hung about the street near St. Chad’s in Birmingham, but that’s all part of that awful ring road now, isn’t it, Doris?”

“The Queensway. Dreadful thing.”

“So it probably wouldn’t be her, not all the way over here in America. Wait, you said it was a fella you were looking for, didn’t you?”

I could see they weren’t going to be able to help me much with Smyler himself, so I tried a more general question. “But how would something like that happen at all? Have you ever heard of somebody dying once, then coming back, then being exorcised or whatever you’d call it . . . ?”

“Watch your language, dear,” said Doris primly. “We’ve got feelings, you know.”

“Well, let’s just say ‘dispatched’ a second time and then coming back again. Have you ever heard of anything like that? How could that happen?”

“To be honest, love, I’ve never heard of anything like it. Have you, Betty?”

“No, dear. And I feel terrible after you bought us these lovely pastilles, and we’ve had such a nice visit. But no. I’m afraid you’ll have to find somebody a bit more qualified to answer that. Have you tried the Broken Boy yet?”

I hadn’t, and I didn’t really want to, but I was beginning to think I might not have a choice. That’s the problem with ghosts. Sometimes they’re a lot of help, sometimes worse than useless, but it always takes a long time to find out, because most of them like to talk and they all tend to be a bit loopy.

I thanked the ladies and walked out past other customers and the waitresses, none of whom had come anywhere near me during my entire visit, not even to see if I wanted to order something. Clearly, the Sollyhulls had already begun to freak out the regulars, and I wondered how long it would be until the paranormal fanboys were onto this place as well. I had a worried feeling the sisters might be developing a taste for notoriety.

One of the many problems with visiting the Broken Boy was that, unlike the sisters, he didn’t give out information in return for a cheap box of hard candy. In fact, last time I heard, he was charging two thousand dollars a session, and my bank account was pretty much tapped out. Heaven doesn’t pay us a whole lot. Then again, we don’t have to put anything aside for retirement.

These are the jokes, people. If you came to laugh, you might as well start now.

Anyway, if I wanted to visit the Broken Boy I needed to raise some cash, and I didn’t have much in the way of options. I’d been thinking about putting my Matador in long-term storage and trying to scrape up the money somehow to buy that ’69 Super Sport from Orban, but since I didn’t play the lottery I had trouble imagining a scenario where that could happen without the sudden appearance of Santa Claus. Now I was beginning to think I might have to sell the Matador outright. I loved that car and had spent several years finding parts and getting it refurbished, not to mention putting up with endless shit from Sam and Monica and the rest of my friends because of it. It had to be worth at least twenty thousand—there were only a few of them left. Of course, the money might save my immortal soul, which I was also rather fond of. It was a tough call.

I took a walk along the bay to think it over, and by the time I was finished I was at the Salt Piers where Orban has his gun shop and armory complex. I found him in the big garage, smoking his pipe and watching a bunch of his burly, tattooed henchmen use a chain hoist to lower a massive steel plate into an Escalade, presumably to keep the dumbasses who would eventually ride in the back seat from shooting the driver by accident.

Orban cocked a shaggy eyebrow at me. “What do you want, Dollar?” he growled in that mouth-full-of-rocks accent he’s never shaken in all these years. “You come to pay me finally for warehousing your piece of shit candy car?” Orban’s not a big guy, but there’s something about him that makes me very glad we get along.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

Over a glass of the poisonous red wine Orban favors, I made my pitch about the Matador. That bristling brow climbed up again. He knew how I felt about my car. “Tell you what,” he said. “I give you ten for it—”

“Ten!” I was so upset I spilled Bull’s Blood in my lap. “It’s worth twice that! More!”

“Shut up. You don’t hear me out. I give you ten for it, I promise not to sell it for three months. You pay me back the ten, you can have it. You can’t, I sell it and give you ten more.”

In other words, he was going to loan me the money on the Matador for three months, interest free. Which was a pretty damn decent thing for him to do. I didn’t say that, of course, because it only would have pissed him off. And I haggled too, because if I hadn’t he would have been mortally insulted. Orban wouldn’t front me any more money, but he did up the back end two thousand bucks, which confirmed to me that the Matador must be worth about thirty big ones. He’s not stupid, even when he’s doing somebody a solid. He also threw in a couple of dozen high-velocity silver slugs for my Belgian FN automatic. If I bumped into Smyler again I wanted to be ready.

I immediately gave him back two thousand of the money for an ugly, unarmored banger, an ancient stock Datsun 510 with so much bondo on the fenders it looked like it had mange. (The Super Sport had a brand new L78 under the hood, so it wound up being a little out of my price range.) Still, the old 510s could be zippy little cars, and Orban said the engine was good. I signed the papers, left the office while he opened his safe, then took the rest of my money in cash. Orban didn’t much believe in banks. Eighty benjamins makes too thick a stack to fit in a wallet, not to mention that wallets can be dropped or lifted, so I put the money in my underwear. Yes, I did. Deal with it.

The boxy little car handled surprisingly well. People used to customize the 510s for racing, although nobody’d ever bothered with this one. I stopped to grab some takeout at a burger place in the neighborhood, then I parked the new ride around the corner from my building under a streetlight which had just come on for the evening. I was locking it up when something smashed into me from behind, cracking my head against the doorframe so hard that I saw nothing but flashing sparkles for a few seconds. Then I realized I was lying on my back and something was squatting on my chest.

“Where is feather?” my attacker whispered. “Where? Hided somewhere?” The streetlight was just above us so I couldn’t see the face beneath the shadowing hood, but I could smell its breath, smell the rot. I carefully shifted my weight to get some leverage, but then I felt something press against my lower eyelid, sharp and steady as a doctor’s needle. “It going to find out. Yes, it will.”