The Dirty Streets of Heaven

sixteen

Another night, another cheap motel. So far, I was staying ahead of trouble, both from the Opposition and from my own people, but I couldn’t figure out how my little adventure in Eligor’s office tower hadn’t come to the attention of my superiors. I didn’t expect the Grand Duke himself to report it, even though it was a ridiculously indiscreet breach of every convention there was, right back to Tartarus, but the whole Magian Society connection to Vald Credit suggested Eligor did have something to hide. He was quite high up, after all, so I supposed one of his underlings could have been the one sheltering the Magians, but I was fairly certain that the connections between a Hell-founded megacorporation, the slippery Reverend Doctor Habari, and Grasswax’s former bodyguard couldn’t all be accidental. For one thing, why would Howlingfell take time off from working for Eligor to pull a low-level duty protecting a mere prosecutor unless the Grand Duke wanted it that way? But the odds were that folks on both sides would eventually hear about my trip to Five Page Mill, and my bosses would find out soon after that. I could only imagine what the Ephorate would think of my little adventure, but my educated guess was ‘not much.’

So when I got woken up at the ComfortRest Inn at four in the morning with a client call, summoned to an accident scene on the freeway up near Mission Shores, I suspected I might hear from the Celestial City while I was Outside. And I did.

The client wasn’t anything unusual, a woman on her way to her job, driving all the way in from Morgan Hill. She’d fallen asleep at the wheel, drifted, hit the center divider, and flipped over. Luckily it had been early enough in the morning that the freeway was largely empty and no one else had been killed. Her guardian angel explained that the deceased was a nice, hard-working sort, a fifty-something grandmother whose defense wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, but I didn’t have long to enjoy that before the judge appeared in a glare of inscrutability and informed me that my superiors were requesting my presence in Heaven after we finished.

The last thing I wanted to do was face those five shiny, powerful beings across a table again, this time trying to explain why my idea of a low profile included shooting up somebody’s office, but I didn’t bother to tell that to the Principality who delivered the message. Firstly, it wouldn’t have done any good, and second, it might have spoiled poor Gloria Dubose’s chance at Heaven. I may be crazy, but I’m not a bastard. Not most of the time, anyway.

So I did my duty for God and Choir and then headed back toward the unevenly disinfected premises of the ComfortRest, but when I reached the motel I didn’t feel like trying to go back to sleep, and I certainly wasn’t in a hurry to visit my front office. As I’ve said before, Time is different in Heaven, so I didn’t think they’d care too much if I waited until night came around when I would sleep again. Until then, I’d just keep myself caffeinated and vertical. So I went and downed about four cups of dishwater-strength coffee at a 24-hour coffee shop and tried to decide what I was going to do next.

The more I thought about it the more I liked the Sollyhull Sisters’ advice about pretending to put Eligor’s whatever-it-might-be up for auction. I mean, it was a spectacularly stupid, spectacularly dangerous thing to do, but it wasn’t as if I had a lot of time to come up with something more subtle. My superiors were probably about to rip off my halo and drum me out of the corps, and a certain red-hot monstrosity with horns was out there somewhere looking for me-along with the rest of Eligor’s minions, probably-slowed only by the fact that I was moving around a lot and sleeping in motels. (It’s times like this when I wonder what the higher angels who organized all this were thinking when they gave us earthbound underlings bodies that needed to be fed and watered and rested just as if we were real people.)

So it seemed like I might as well poke things along. If I was going to wind up demoted (or worse) then I intended to go out like a crazy man, kicking and screaming and setting shit on fire all the way.

I parked downtown, not too far from Beeger Square. It was getting into the morning now, and I was beginning to think about a late breakfast to ease the headachy buzz of too much coffee, so I tried Sam but got no reply. On the off chance he was sitting in The Compasses and had turned his phone off, I called the bar phone. Chico said he hadn’t been in but that Monica had just walked in and wanted the phone. I didn’t even have a chance to react to that before she was in my ear.

“Don’t come in, Bobby.”

“Huh?” was what I replied, or something equally dazzling.

“If you were going to come to The Compasses, don’t,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to, but is this some weird way of saying you’re still pissed off at me?”

“How could anyone ever be pissed off at a sweetheart like you?” The sarcasm was so thick it actually made the phone heavy in my hand. “No, seriously, B, it’s weird around here. There are people lounging around outside the building, homeless folks, street crazies…”

“And this is new?”

“Shut up. I know the regulars, and these aren’t them. They’re watching the place-they take turns so it’s not too obvious. Someone’s definitely got an eye on The Compasses, so how much would you be willing to bet it’s not you they’re watching for?”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t touch that action. That’s why I wasn’t planning to come in anytime soon.” I sighed. Eligor must have found out that after the arrest I’d walked right out the back door of County. Was I going to be living on the run indefinitely? Permanently? Because you don’t outlast one of the Lords of Hell in a grudge-match.

“And there’s more,” she said. “We’ve had a couple of more no-show clients, if you know what I mean. Like your Walker guy.”

“Hang on-you mean here in San Judas?”

“One for Sanders, one for Jimmy the Table. I’ll send you some information about those clients when I can, but basically it was the same as with yours-everybody present except the guest of honor.”

I cursed silently. If there were already more vanishing souls just in San Judas that might mean more everywhere. It was beginning to look like an epidemic. “Thanks for the information, beautiful. I owe you.”

“More than you’ll ever know, Dollar. Dinner and drinks might pay back a little of it. Let me know when there’s a break in your schedule of being attacked.” She paused when she normally would have hung up, then added: “Be careful, Bobby. Really. This stuff is getting scary-weird.”

If the bad guys were keeping watch for me at The Compasses then obviously Beeger Square was out, but I still needed a corner somewhere in the middle of downtown, because that’s where Foxy the White-Nosed Reindeer had told me to ask for him. I headed back down Broadway until I got to Beech, where the pedestrian traffic was still thick, then popped over to Marshall, not far from the Kaiser Health tower. Only a couple of days to Carnival now and the decorations were all up, streetlights and traffic lights swathed in tinsel. They’d have finished erecting the stage and the reviewing stands in Beeger Square and hung the special colored lights, but God only knew when I’d get to see them.

I watched the nearest corner for a few minutes but nobody seemed to be lingering except the guy crouched against the base of the traffic light with the cardboard “HOMLESS NEED HELP GOD BLESS YOU” sign. I gave him twenty dollars to get something to eat and he thanked me and ambled off toward the coffee shop on the far corner. As soon as he was gone I took a breath, feeling increasingly stupid, and said, “Fox.”

Nothing happened. I tried again, ”Mister Fox” this time, and over the next few minutes even worked my way up to “Foxy Foxy,” but still without luck. I was about to give up, deciding I had been too tricky trying to summon him that way, that he really had meant I should ask for him like an ordinary street person, among people hanging around on corners, but I had one more idea and was determined to try it before packing it in. In a lull after the pedestrian green light emptied my corner, I opened a Zipper-just a small one-put my mouth against it, and whispered “Fox” into the timeless spaces of Outside.

“Dollar Man!” someone cried from just behind my right ear, startling me badly. I spun around, and there he was in all his pale glory, his baggy dark suit augmented by a truly ghastly knit scarf of alternating pink and black stripes. With his untanned skin and his continual prancing he looked like the sacrificial lamb the goth kids might send out first to distract the school bullies while the rest made a run for it. “You call for Foxy!” he said cheerfully. “Is it love, true love?”

Another group of pedestrians was assembling on the corner, waiting for the light to change, but none of them paid us any attention. I couldn’t tell whether that was angelic glamour protecting us or just the fact that downtown Jude has plenty of residents who looked and acted like Mr. Fox. Did I mention that we closed the state mental hospital a few years ago and threw most of the patients out into the streets?

“So you come to do business, Mr. Bob Dollar?” He spread his long white fingers. “You decide to sell, or you interested in some of Foxy Foxy’s other products? I have the best, all sizes, all smells, all the time!”

I really wanted to get this over with quickly: Every moment I spent standing on a downtown corner I felt like I had a big target painted on my back. Or maybe a price tag. “You said you had…buyers,” I said quietly. “For that…thing. I’ve decided I’d like to have a little auction. Do it all at once. Get my price and then get rid of it.”

“Ah.” Fox smiled broadly, showing some gold. He looked like a live-action anime character. “Getting a little hot in Bobby-town, yes? Is it, yes? Perhaps the grand duke’s moo-cow going clip-clop in your china shop?”

I smiled back, but it wasn’t a happy one. “Just tell me, can you arrange it?” So my pale new friend knew about the ghallu. He clearly knew a few things. Who was this guy? I couldn’t figure out if he was one of Hell’s banished-you run into them-or an undead hanger-on like the Sollyhulls, or something else equally weird that I just hadn’t heard of yet. “Can you?”

“Can do, flyboy!” he said cheerfully. He grinned like the host of one of those Japanese game shows where they make the contestants eat centipedes. “Can do! I’ll set it up, you bring the thing, and we’ll all swing, swing, swing.”

“Okay. But one more thing-no demons, got it? Nobody from Hell. I smell any horns, I walk.”

“Heard and obeyed, Dollar Bob!”

“Okay. When should I get hold of you again?” I turned sharply at a noise, but it had nothing to do with me-a car had almost run over a late-breaking pedestrian in the crosswalk, and the driver was now venting his rage through his open window.

“No need, my new friend,” Fox said cheerfully. “I’ll find you and let you know when the big meet and greet will be!”

“I’m not sure you’ll be able to find me that easy,” I began, but when I turned back to him there was no longer anybody on the corner with me except the homeless guy, who was just returning with a cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee, his sign tucked under his arm.

“Gotta go back to work,” he said as if apologizing.

“Did you see where that guy went? Pale-skinned Asian guy in a dumb-ass scarf?”

The man only shook his head. “No offense, man, but you weren’t talking to anyone when I got here…just yourself.”

I had a choice of errands to occupy me while I waited however long it would take for Fox to set up the auction. As I drove back to the motel I called Fatback and left a voicemail adding Foxy Foxy and Grand Duke Eligor to the list of things I wanted to know more about. I was giving George so much work I was going to need to top up his retainer out of my motel-shrunk bank account. I also left a message with my friend Orban the gunsmith telling him what I was going to need from him, then ducked into a drug store and bought myself more shaving stuff and toiletries because it looked like I was going to be staying in motels for a while, and I was beginning to get a little lackluster in the grooming department. I mean, if you died, you wouldn’t want a heavenly advocate who looked like he’d just tried to use his six months’ sobriety chip to buy a drink, would you?

The small stuff dealt with, I headed down toward Southport with the car windows open, hoping the bay air would blow a little life back into me. I only had until tonight to get more answers, then I’d have to go in and face my masters-and that was really what they were, weren’t they? I called them bosses or employers, but unless you’re in the mob or an army under fire your bosses can’t usually kill you when they get pissed at you, and no other bosses but mine and my opponents’ can have your soul jerked out of your body and sent to the deepest fiery pits to suffer for eternity. Unless you work for Walmart.

Anyway, I did my best to enjoy the cool but not too cool air, since I didn’t know when I might get to appreciate it again. I followed Charleston Road out to the little office park I’d already visited, the place where the Magian Society had rented their storefront. This time I had my breaking and entering tools in the trunk because I was going to toss the place, if there was anything left to toss.

As I pulled into the driveway of the parking lot for 4442 another car was pulling out, a clunky old sedan which might once have been pearly gray but now was scratched to shit and had a fine tracing of rust around all the trim. I looked at the driver as I passed, wondering if it might be my friend the grinder guy from Suite C, but the person who looked back at me was a middle-aged black man with a round face, gray hair, and-as soon as he saw me-a look of extreme shock on his face. I mean he pinned me immediately, like he’d just been looking at a picture of me. Habari. Had to be. His tires squealed as he pressed the pedal all the way to the floor, and the big old rusty boat fishtailed for a moment before it caught the road and roared away. His back seat was full of boxes-the guy even had rolled-up stuff hanging out the windows like some kind of fly-by-night carpet salesman.

I was caught in the narrow driveway and made the mistake of trying to make my U in a single turn, which meant I had to go up the high curb on one side of the driveway where I got stuck for a second. When I finally got all my wheels back on the level I took off after him as quickly as I could, but that big boat had more under the hood than I would have guessed: he was already a few hundred yards or so ahead of me, heading back up Charleston.

I won’t bore you with the details-you want a car chase, wait ’til they make a film out of my life. I almost caught up to him after about a quarter of a mile, but he was swerving all over the narrow road, and there were enough other cars nearby that I didn’t want to risk causing an accident. I almost caught him again on Rengstorff Avenue on the far side of Bayshore. I forced him over toward the other lane, then we hit a red light, and he was pinned by the cars in front of him. I was too, but he was in the far left lane, and the crazy bastard drove right over the center divider, leaving part of his muffler pipe on the ground, then disappeared back over the freeway toward the eastern side. Despite all the smoke and noise he was putting out, by the time the light changed and I could go after him, I couldn’t find a trace anywhere.

I drove back to the Magian Society and let myself in, but Habari had cleaned the place out. Nothing left but cut phone wires and electrical cords hanging out of the sockets. It was an empty cave now, just drywall, industrial carpeting and concrete-not even an insurance company calendar left on the walls.

I cursed myself up one side and down the other for waiting too long before coming back. I had let myself get caught up in everything else, although admittedly everything else included almost getting killed and being arrested by an SJPD S.W.A.T. team. But still, I shouldn’t have left it. I had only missed getting the slippery bastard by a few minutes. I ached to have him there with me in that deserted office so I could ask him a few pointed questions, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it?

I headed back toward the busier parts of town.

I was really missing The Compasses. Avoiding my favored hang-out would have been tough at the best of times, but for a guy who also had to move from motel to motel it was miserable. I was banned from most of my friends, my home, everything. I was angry that this had happened to me-furious-and, of course, I was scared, too, but also just plain bored. In fact, it was a bit like being in combat.

I picked my stop for the night early, a budget place near the Bayshore, then sat watching a preseason Giants game on the television and nursing a beer. Sam returned my call but said he had a client that was probably going to take him a while. I would even have been willing to spend an evening hanging around with Clarence, but Sam said the kid had gone home for the night. In a fit of ennui I even called him but he didn’t answer his phone. I wondered if the kid was having dinner with his adopted family, cozy and, for a little while, feeling almost human.

When my own phone rang a bit later and it was Alice sending me a client, I was as pleased by the news of someone else’s death as I’d just about ever been. Horrible, I know, but I’m being honest-I was that desperate for something to do besides watch a bunch of minor league players I didn’t know getting their brief shot at the bigs.

The victim turned out to be a kid from Stanford who’d fallen out of his dorm window, so I flashed one of my fake IDs at the Teller Gate guards and drove onto the campus. The dormitory in question was at the western end of the school where the trees were thick and the hills leaned close overhead, which gave the spot kind of a Sleepy Hollow feel. I left my car in one of the lots and walked the rest of the way in, showing a press badge to anyone who seemed doubtful about my right to be there but otherwise trying not to be noticed. I did it well enough that by the time I reached the dormitory itself, an island of flashing lights in the middle of the darkness, I might as well have been invisible. I strolled past the outermost barricade of Stanford campus police vehicles, three regular cruisers, and several golf-carty things blocking the driveway. The house was festooned with bunting and hand-painted signs-apparently a Mardi Gras party had been the evening’s entertainment. I glanced briefly at the tent being erected over the body of the unfortunate student, then opened a Zipper and stepped Outside.

It was a relief to see the dead kid’s soul actually waiting there, dressed in a stained toga and tangled strings of shiny parade beads, probably looking pretty much as he had in life (although undoubtedly better than he did in death after falling head first off the roof of a four-story building onto pavement). He had one of those haircuts that always irritates me, one where the hair on either side has been brushed together in the middle like some kind of dolphin fin. It turns the wearer into a pinhead-not a good look for anyone.

“Brady Tillotson,” I said. “God loves you.”

“What is this shit?” he asked, glaring as though I might have engineered his fall, although by the smashed bottles lying near the now shrouded body I guessed his passing was more likely what would be called “misadventure,” which is legal shorthand for “death by stupid.”

“You’re dead, Brady. I’m sorry, but I’ll do my best to make this go smoothly for you. I’m Doloriel, your heavenly advocate.” I didn’t see his guardian angel yet, or the Opposition, so I gave him a quick rundown of what was going to happen.

He seemed less than impressed. He was a big, handsome kid and looked and acted like he usually got his way by one means or another. “You’re shitting me, right? I don’t believe in any of that crap.”

“Well, it believes in you, Brady, so it doesn’t matter much what you think.”

“Fuck that. I’m leaving.” And he turned around and stumbled off into the darkness. Death usually sobered people right up but there were exceptions. I wasn’t too worried about him getting away, though: One thing about being Outside is that it isn’t a place, it’s the timelessness that belongs to a place-an eternal moment, I guess you’d say. It’s tied to the people who are physically in that moment, observing it, so the farther away you get from what you could see during that original moment, the less real it is, until eventually you’re left in the dark with a few familiar sounds. Then, after the sounds go quiet, you usually find yourself hurrying back toward the main bit of the moment again. See, there’s nowhere else to go. Otherwise, all the angels and devils would be popping in and out of Outside like it was a Star Trek beam-me-up device, spying on each other through the Zippers. It doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, what I’m telling you is that Brady Tillotson wasn’t going anywhere.

His guardian showed up a couple of moments later, a fizz of light named Gefen. Rotwood the prosecutor showed up shortly thereafter, a demon so old and gnarled he might have been painting Hell when the Devil himself first moved in. I’d appeared against Rotwood before-he knew his stuff and some of the judges seemed to like his familiarity with the rules, but there were scarier prosecutors out there.

“This won’t be easy,” said Gefen quietly as the prosecutor conferenced with his own infernal version of a guardian angel.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because our client is a shit.”

It was only a short time longer in that timeless place before the judge flared into our presence. It was my old buddy Xathanatron, the Principality who had sent Silvia Martino to Heaven the night Clarence had first tagged along.

Angel Doloriel, it said to me, You Are Again Summoned To The Celestial City. There was a pause, then: It Seems I Must Add “Secretary To The Advocate” To The List Of My Titles.

This was a joke, boss-angel style, and so I laughed in a way I hoped sounded at least slightly sincere. “That’s very funny, Your Honor. Thank you for passing the message along. I hope we won’t keep you long tonight.”

It Is All The Same-The Interruption Of My Contemplation Has Already Occurred. I couldn’t help noticing he still had that charming, democratic touch.

I finished huddling with Gefen just as my dead student stumbled back into our presence, toga flapping like the sails on the Marie Celeste. He looked a little more sober now but just as pissed off. The guardian angel’s full report was longer than his initial remark but came to the same thing: Brady Tillotson was a drunkard, a bully, and as close to being a date-rapist as you can get without actually stepping over the line and using drugs or gross physical force, but certainly the kind of guy who liked his women too drunk to understand the issues of consent properly. He cheated on his studies-he was a starting linebacker on the football team and people were always around to “help” him pass his classes-he stole from friends, and was also one of those people who even years out of high school still got a real kick out of bullying other students. In other words, a shit. What made my job even tougher, though, was that he wasn’t cooperating.

“I don’t think any of this is right,” he kept saying way too loudly. “Who do I complain to? I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t fucking believe in any of it. It’s crap. There aren’t any angels. It’s a lie.”

The judge didn’t say anything about this unending whine of complaint, but it couldn’t have been helping. I did everything I could to come up with mitigating circumstances-Brady Tillotson’s youth, his parents’ divorce, the fact that junior high school and high school coaches and teachers had never disciplined him because he was a star athlete-but I was not at my best because I’d taken a bit of a dislike to the kid myself. He would definitely be getting a long stretch in Purgatory, but I have to admit I thought he deserved it.

Near the end, when we’d summed up and Xathanatron had dropped into a glittering silence to consider the arguments, Brady suddenly turned to me, and for the first time all the anger and resistance had left his face. Post-mortem sobriety had caught up with him

“Oh my God,” he said. “This is real. This is real! I’m dead!”

“I’m afraid so,” I told him. “But things can get better than this….”

“What’s going on here? Why are you…? Oh, Jesus-shit, I’m never going to see my mom again.” His face went slack with grief, and a tear welled up and trembled on his lower lid. “Never…”

Xathanatron spoke. The Sentence Is Damnation, was all the judge said, then vanished.

Rotwood clapped his withered hands together once in pleasure before he also vanished. A vortex began to swirl around Brady Tillotson and although he fought against it, already he was beginning to be pulled apart and sucked downward.

“No!” he cried. His eyes were terrible. “Don’t let them. Please, please, please! This isn’t supposed to happen-you were supposed to save me! Aaah! Huuhhhh! Aaaaaaaah!” Brady’s shrieks kept changing pitch because his face was melting, warping obscenely as he took on the dreadful shape he would wear Down There forever. Then he was gone.

I drove very slowly back across the city, stopping on the way at a bar I didn’t remember ever seeing before and couldn’t have found again if I had to. I downed two fast drinks, then realized I probably shouldn’t push my luck, even though I badly needed to get smashed, and get that way very soon. Too many nasty people were looking for me to risk ending up in a drunk tank or stumbling around in some parking lot in the dark. I got back into my car, stopped at a liquor store on the Camino Real and bought a bottle of vodka and a bag of ice, then headed back to my motel.

Before I got too obliterated I called in to the office and got Alice’s voice mail.

“Tell the bosses that Bobby Dollar isn’t coming into the Celestial City tonight,” I instructed the silence. “Because I don’t want to have to listen to any more lectures about doing my job. Tell them that. And tell them if they really want me they can come get me. Otherwise I’m going to stay here and keep doing what I’m doing, the best way I know how.”

I was halfway through the bottle before I stopped hearing that college kid screaming like a burning child as he tumbled down into the darkness.