B-Thug stared at me as the noise of their exit slowly died away. He shook his head. “Big play. But you’re not going to get anything more out of me, so you might as well just shoot.”
“Look, chummy, I let them go because you’re right—they’re obviously crazy. The kind who’d rather be martyrs. But you’re not.” I stepped a little closer, still not getting too near him; I never let my gun waver from the center of his torso. The.38 was loaded with some of my gunsmith friend Orban’s special handloads, good for a close-up weapon with a short barrel. They’d make a mess of him if he tried to jump me. “I’m betting you’re just earning some money. You’re a pro—you’ve got no loyalty to those guys.”
He actually smiled. It was weird to see, since it obviously didn’t mean the same thing as when an ordinary person smiled. “Don’t lecture me. You don’t know shit about me—or about them.” His mouth twisted. “You have no fucking idea who they work for, or what those people can do. They are into some totally sick shit, and it’s all real. I would rather have you shoot me any day than have them come after me for talking out of school.”
At that moment, I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. When the door suddenly swung open I was already turning toward it, certain that the Happiness Twins had nerved themselves to come back and try again.
Sam stood in the open doorway, confusion on his big, familiar face, waving his hand vigorously to fan away the last of the pepper spray.
“Hey, B, my eyes are burning—” was all he had time to say, then Bald Thug swept my legs right out from under me with some kind of kick, dropped me on my ass like it was the first day of karate practice. Then he was up and running. He hit Sam like a fullback on a dive play, and even though my buddy was taller and at least the same weight, he was staggered by the sudden impact and fell back into the hallway. B-Thug was out the door past him and down the hall while Sam was still trying to pull his gun, and although I got up and made the doorway a second or so later, B-Thug was already in the stairwell, so I had to let him go. If I missed him I might wind up putting a bullet into one of my neighbors’ apartments, or even into one of my actual neighbors.
Not that they were going to be my neighbors much longer, I felt pretty sure—some tenant must have called the police by now. Even in this part of Jude, indoor gunshots were unusual. Sorry, Temuel, but it looked like I was about to be driven out of another shitty apartment by work-related mayhem, whether the folk Upstairs liked it or not.
“What the genuine fuck . . . ?” said Sam. He grabbed me and kept me from collapsing. I seemed to be dribbling blood everywhere.
“Oh, yeah.” I paused to listen. Our Bald Thug was not a small man, and I could hear him caroming down the stairs like a two-hundred-fifty pound pachinko ball. “Yeah, you definitely took the words right out of my mouth, Sammy-boy.”
• • •
Sam opened the windows to ease the lingering sting of the pepper spray, then kindly filled a towel with some ice for me. Since I didn’t have a towel big enough to cover all the bruised areas, I concentrated on my face. While I lay on the couch, revolver still in hand in case any of my new friends came back, Sam scavenged the pantry for something non-alcoholic to drink and finally found one of the warm cans of Vernors that I kept around just for him.
When he popped the tab, tiny little bubbles flew out the hole like angry wasps. Sam took a long swig. “Ah,” he said. “The Scotch Bonnet pepper of ginger ales. Nice fit with your new air-freshener.” He pulled up a chair beside the couch and handed me my Belgian-made.45. “Found it on the kitchen floor. Somebody probably kicked it out of the way.”
I gave him a quick rundown on what had just happened, along with the rest of the recent news, including the Spook Train ride I’d been on even before I’d found B-Thug and friends in my apartment, scratchings and spiders and disembodied monkey-paws. “Which reminds me,” I said as I finished. I didn’t want to come off all suspicious with my only real friend, but the timing of his arrival had been strange. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was in town, and since I missed the lunch . . .” He got distracted by the design of the missionaries’ tattoos that I’d scrawled on the back of a Chinese delivery menu so I wouldn’t forget. “This is the ink they had, huh? Never seen it. Looks kind of Eastern—Indian, maybe.”
“Yeah, but they sounded like local junior college students, and they were dressed like the kind of guys who travel in black helicopters.”
“You always meet the most interesting people, B. Then they try to kill you.” Sam frowned at the drawing. “We should look this up online.”
“If I knew what it was called, I would. But since I don’t, I have other ways to get information.” I took a picture of the drawing and emailed it to my friend George, aka Fatback, researcher par excellence. “Shit,” I said, catching a glimpse of the clock. “He won’t even be human for hours.”
“Don’t be a hater. You and I haven’t been human for years.”
“You know what I mean.” My main researcher happens to be a were-hog, which isn’t all that common, whatever some single women may tell you. “While he has pig-brain, he’s not going to be able to do anything.”
“We can wait. What were you planning to do this evening, anyway, sport? Your face looks like ground beef, and from the way you’re breathing you’ve got a couple of cracked ribs, too. I recommend you settle back, hold that ice against the meatloaf on the front of your head, and let me bring in something to eat.” He held up the menu with the tattoo scrawl. “How about Happy Buddha?”
“I just had Asian food,” I said. I felt my jaw and groaned. “But you get what you want. I think it’s going to be nothing but broth for me until at least tomorrow.”
• • •
At about eleven I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing Sam had said in the last half an hour. I needed to crash so badly I couldn’t hold my head up. I told Sam he didn’t have to watch me all night.
“Naw, I’m staying. What if those assholes come back, B?”
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not moving off this couch because all my bones are broken. You can sleep on my bed.”
He got up to examine the tangle of not-washed-lately sheets. “Never mind. I’ll sleep in my car downstairs.”
“Don’t be such a pussy. Just pull that stuff off and get my sleeping bag out of the closet. Or there’s even some clean sheets and blankets in there, I think.” Actually, I wasn’t too sure of that at all.
“Yeah, I’ll take the sleeping bag. Can’t be any worse than some of the places I’ve slept.” He leaned in through the bedroom doorway and called out, “Don’t take that as a challenge, you weird organisms that live here in Bobby’s filthy room.”
“Fuck you, Sammy.” I sank back into the couch and pulled the blankets up, but I wasn’t ready to relax. I really wanted a drink, but I wasn’t going to ask my teetotal buddy to pour it for me, even though he would have. I got up and staggered across to the cabinet where the vodka bottle was and brought it back to the couch. “Don’t wake me up for anything short of Judgement Day.”
But I didn’t get to sleep anywhere near that long. Sometime between eleven and midnight my phone rang.
“Hi, Mr. Dollar? It’s me, Edie. You said to call. I hope it’s not too late.”
By now my entire skull felt like a flower pot that had been dropped from a third story balcony, so I just said, “No, ’s fine.”
“Okay, that’s good. Doctor Gustibus says he’ll talk to you.”
“Who?” I wasn’t entirely awake.
“Doctor Gustibus? You know, the guy I was working for at Islanders Hall? He says he’ll talk to you if you want. At his house. I’ll give you the directions if you have a pen.”
Sam was snoring contentedly in my room, so I got up and walked my throbbing head around until I found something to write with. “Shoot.”
When Edie had fini
shed and hung up, I stared blearily at the scrap of paper to be sure it made some kind of sense, then I put it in my wallet and slid back into dreams of marching columns of Disney cartoon characters, who each stopped to punch me in the head before goose-stepping past. There were a lot of them.
Man, that was a long night.
seven
world’s edge
THE PHONE woke me again about quarter to five. It was a client. Well, to be more precise, it was Alice informing me I had a client. Alice has been working for the main office as long as I’ve been an angel. She’s efficient (in an at-least-the-trains-run-on-time sort of way) but she has a voice that could strip paint and the personality of an itchy Komodo dragon. Choosing her to be our dispatcher, like the Hallelujah Chorus ringtone, shows that somebody in the heavenly hierarchy has a third-grade sense of humor.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked her.
“Can’t. I lie awake feeling bad about having to wake up hungover bums like you.”
See? The milk of angelic kindness positively drips from that woman.
Sam was asleep on top of my bed, sprawled like an elephant seal on the sand and making similar noises. I took a quick shower, doing my best not to scream when the soap got into all the scrapes and cuts, then rang my friend Fatback to see if anything was happening on the research front.
“Morning, Mr. D!” He sounded quite cheery for a man who was going to turn back into a brainless beast in a man’s body at any moment. “I’m just sending out that stuff you asked about.”
“Thanks, George. Anything interesting?”
“Nothing out of your normal range of weirdness. That design’s called the Sonnenrad, the sun wheel. It’s always been big with racial pride groups in Europe, but the occult boys in Hitler’s SS picked it up, too, and it’s associated with some of their black rituals. That means modern neo-Nazis love it, of course, and there’s a pretty nasty group these days named the Black Sun Faction—“Black Sun” is another name for that Sonnenrad design. I can’t find much about them, but they look spooky.”
“Cool, I’ll read it all through when I get a chance. Bill me, yeah?”
“Don’t worry, I already did. I’m saving up to get this new Swedish eye-tracking software. My voice-control stuff is too old and slow, and it makes too many mistakes.”
Just to clear up any confusion, George Noceda—at least the George I talk to—has problems using a keyboard because he doesn’t have hands, he has trotters. That’s because he’s a pig. Pig with a man’s brain by night, man with a pig’s brain by day—pretty much the shittiest kind of were-pig you could be. The reason why is a long story, but basically he got hosed by Hell. “Hope it works out for you, buddy.”
“Very kind, Mr. B. I’d better get off the phone—the sky’s getting light. Vaya con dios.”
“You too, man.” And I meant it. I wouldn’t have wished George’s curse even on Donald Trump, and George is a really nice guy.
The client I’d been called to argue for was a nice old lady named Eileen Chaney who had just died in Sequoia General an hour before I got there. When I stepped Outside she was patiently waiting for me, and seemed completely unsurprised by any of what was going on, except that I didn’t have wings.
“Haven’t earned them yet,” I said, which might not have been the exact truth but was at least simple.
“I’m sure you will, young man.” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You have a nice face.” Okay, so death hadn’t improved her vision, but I still resolved to do my best for her. Turns out there wasn’t much to do. Mrs. Chaney had nothing shocking in her background, Hell’s prosecutor was comparatively new and only offered the most perfunctory case against her, and so the whole thing was over in what felt like half an hour.
When Mrs. Chaney and the judge disappeared, I was left alone with the prosecutor for a moment. Except for the whites of his eyes, this demon (who went by the charming moniker “Shitsquelch”) looked like a statue carved out of a giant peeled purple grape. He stared at me with unhidden interest.
“I’ve heard about you, Doloriel,” he said.
“Yeah. People get bored, my name comes up.”
“Seriously. Some of the folks on my side really don’t like you. Like, they’ve got plans. If I were you I’d get into a different line of work.”
“If you were me, your friends would have killed you a long time ago,” I said.
While he was puzzling that out, I split. I was afraid he might ask me for my autograph or something.
It was about seven-thirty in the morning when I got back to the apartment house, an ugly time of the day for any sane person but especially for someone with as many sore parts as I had. I parked across the street and looked around carefully before leaving the car. In the building lobby I ran into some neighbors, two young women who lived down the hall. We’d seen each other a few times but never spoken. I thought they were probably a couple, because I only ever saw them together. One was tall and lithe and dark, the other only a little shorter, red-haired and impressively muscular without being particularly big. They were dressed to go out running. I stepped aside to let them by, and the redhead stared at my face.
“Oh! Z vami vse garazd?” she said. Sounded like Russian. “Are you quite right?”
I assumed she meant, “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay, thanks. I was mugged.”
“Bozhe mii!” She said something else that I couldn’t understand to her dark-haired friend, who shook her head gravely. They walked past me with sympathetic looks on their faces.
“Take careful!” the tall dark one told me as they went out. She too was pretty obviously another non-native speaker.
Sam was gone, off to save the world or buy more ginger ale. I was on my own. I tried to catch up on a little sleep but I was too wired to relax, not to mention my ribs and skull felt like they’d been run through an industrial stamping press, so I got up again, swallowed about eleven ibuprofen, and checked out the directions Edie Parmenter had given me the night before. Her employer, this Doctor Gustibus, lived a good distance out of the city, over on the coast side of the hills, but I didn’t mind a little thinking time.
As I headed toward the freeway on-ramp I called Alice and asked her to take me out of rotation for a couple of hours while I handled some personal business.
“You can call it what you want,” she said. “Me, I’d just be honest and say ‘Staying home to watch game shows and jerk off,’ but I’ll pretend if you want.”
“It’s a complete mystery to me why people so often use the words ‘vicious bitch’ to describe you, Alice.”
She hung up before I’d finished being rude. I hate that.
• • •
I do like driving, especially when I don’t have to worry about a call from work. I followed the Woodside Expressway up and over the hills toward the Pacific, rising from oak scrub to redwood forest. When the sun got high enough it burned off some of the morning mist. It was not what you call a gorgeous November day, at least by Northern California standards, but it was nice enough. This time of year the golden light we get in October turns a bit brassy, and it’s almost silver by December. Today it was still on the buttery side, but there was a distinct nip of winter in the air, that cold twinge of mortality even an angel can feel, the chill that can make you shiver even in direct sun.
As I slalomed through the hills, I took inventory.
Anaita had made some deal with Eligor, and (as best I could tell) they had exchanged Feather and Horn to seal the bargain. Eligor had lost the feather for a while, but now he had it back, thanks to me, Barnum’s favorite angel. (I call myself that because apparently there’s a sucker born every minute even in the afterlife, and I’m the afterliving proof.) The horn, however, the other marker of their bargain, was still hidden.
And now, to add to the fun, some neo-Nazis and local criminal scum had appare
ntly banded together to find the horn—reasons unknown—as well as work in a few beatings for me when their busy schedules allowed. I had no idea how these guys fit into things, but lots of folk had been interested in the feather when I had pretended I was going to sell it. It was possible some of the bidders at the Big Feather Auction had been fronts for the Black Sun or were connected to them some other way. I hoped Edie’s employer could tell me more about those organizations than just their names, which was why I was driving all the way out to the coast. If I didn’t get anything useful out of this Gustibus, I’d be back to square one again. And I didn’t have anything in square one except empty space.
As I crested the hills, the fog began to turn into drizzle. I put on the wipers and turned up the CD player, one of the few additions I’d made to the extremely old Japanese car I was driving. Charlie Patton’s blues took me through the rain and back into the light as I reached the shining, wet expanse of Highway 1 on the far side of the mountains, where I headed north.
The sky was streaked with clouds, although blue was trying to push through. The ocean itself was a steely gray, and there must have been some decent surf because I saw cars parked in several places along the shoulder and people in wetsuits heading down to the shore with boards.
Edie’s directions said, “Before you get to Half Moon Bay, turn left at the flying horse.” I wished I’d double-checked with her before leaving, because she hadn’t specified whether this marvel was a street, a restaurant, or an actual horse with wings. As I got close to Half Moon Bay, I slowed down a little. Luckily it was only a bit past noon, because the visibility gets really bad later in the afternoon as the sun drops toward the ocean and shines straight into your eyes. I passed a few restaurants and bars with picturesque names, but none of them were anything to do with horses, feathered or otherwise.
I was just a few miles south of the golf course and thinking seriously about turning around when I passed out of the latest sprinkle of rain. As wipers swept the last drops from my windshield, I saw it. It really was a flying horse—not, I hasten to say, a live one, but one of those old gas station signs, although in this case you couldn’t see anything but the red Pegasus, and not much of that because it was leaning against a tree about ten yards off the highway, half covered with underbrush. I couldn’t help wondering why nobody had snatched it and sold it to some collector.