The Wrong Goodbye

little higher.”

I thought back to my deal, to the wife whose life I saved. “Yeah, I guess I would, at that.”

“Anyway, the collection went strictly by the numbers —he never even saw me coming. Only now his soul is missing. Stolen right out from under me.”

I smiled, all teeth and ill intentions. “Seems there’s a lot of that going around.”

“Look, you can make your funny jokes, but I’m not fucking around here! I swear, I buried the bloody thing like I was supposed to, but by the time the Deliverants arrived to pick it up, it was nowhere to be found. Now I’m at the end of my rope, and my handler’s getting really narky. Pretty soon, he’s going to run out of bollocks to tell his bosses, which means if I don’t produce something soon…”

So that explained the crows —who, by the way, had since been joined by several dozen of their friends, and now darkened every cornice, balcony, and parapet for a half a block around. Deliverants are the creatures responsible for conveying a soul to its ultimate fate. They’re often mistaken for simple scavengers by the living, and the form they take is dependent upon the location of the collection. These ones must’ve had quite a flight, tracking Danny all the way from Vegas. As I watched, another handful of them fluttered to a landing atop the clay shingles of the roof across the street. Danny’s missing soul was, by all rights, theirs now, and it looked to me like they meant to take it back. If I were Danny, it wouldn’t just be our employers I was worried about. Though if his manner were any indication, I’d say the Deliverants worried him plenty.

“Look, I get you’re in a bind,” I said. “What I don’t get is what the hell you expect me to do about it.”

“I expect you to show some fucking compassion! I expect you to find it in that bitter bloody heart of yours to care! I expect you to help me figure out who did this before our bosses’ bosses tire of my excuses and take matters into their own hands! I mean for Christ’s sake, Sam, I thought we were mates!”

“You’re full of shit, Danny, and you know it. If you want to go on about friendship and compassion, that’s your business, but if you believed a single word of it, then why’d you take Varela’s soul?”

“I had to be sure you’d come, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I get that. But if you and I were really friends, all you would have had to do was ask. Only you and I both know that ship sailed a long time ago, so let’s not pretend this is anything other than what it is. You took something that was rightfully mine. I want it back. Now why don’t you tell me what I’m going to have to do to get it?”

“So that’s it, is it —you think I planned to blackmail you? Well, fuck you, Sam Thornton. Fuck you very much. Of course I took your precious bloody soul —I knew there wasn’t any other way you’d meet with me. You ever ask yourself why it is that after all these years, you’re still so sodding mad at me? You tell yourself that I betrayed you —that I filled your precious Ana’s head with lies and stole her away from you. Only she was never your Ana to begin with, was she? And anyway, I did no such thing. If you ask me, you’re not angry because you think she never would’ve chosen me all on her own —you’re angry because you suspect she did.”

“Damn it, Danny, that’s not what this is about!”

“Ain’t it?” He fished a bundle of olive-drab cloth from his uniform shirt pocket and tossed it onto the table between us. “If it’s your soul you want, then take it and go. Sorry to have troubled you.”

I eyed the bundle for a second, and then picked it up. “Look, it’s not like I don’t see where you’re coming from —I just don’t know what I could possibly do to help. I mean, a year ago, maybe, but now? Now I can’t. Not after what happened in New York. There’s a war brewing between heaven and hell, Danny, and our kind are being kept on an ever shorter leash.”

He guffawed. “You think you need to tell me that?”

“Apparently, I do. And believe me, no one’s under more scrutiny right now than I am. I mean shit, when the dust from the Manhattan job cleared, there were two demons dead —dead by my hand. We’re talking the first of their kind to be killed in millennia —the first since the last Great War. I’m lucky I’m not spending the rest of eternity getting flayed alive. Probably would be, if I hadn’t gone all Dirty Harry on the bad angel and averted an apocalypse in the process. But it ain’t like I’m getting a free pass in all of this. Lily’s spent the past ten months watching me like a hawk to ensure every job is by the book —and there isn’t an angel or a demon out there that wouldn’t like to see me burn. Which means for now, I walk the straight and narrow. Hell, I’ll be lucky if they don’t shelve me just for meeting with you. I’m sorry, Danny, but my hands are tied.”

At that, Danny deflated, the fight gone out of him. He looked suddenly small, and frail, and afraid. Despite everything that had come between us, I wished there was something I could do to help him —that there was something I could say to keep him from feeling so alone. There wasn’t, though —or at least, that’s what I like to tell myself. It sounds better than the truth. Better than I didn’t even try.

Danny’s gaze drifted over to the building opposite the cafe, an elegant Spanish colonial with balconies that overlooked the avenue below. A wan halfsmile spread across his weary face. “It was a hell of a job we pulled in there, wasn’t it? When was that —’81, ’82?”

“’83,” I replied, a smile tugging at my lips as well.

“’83, of course it was! Bloody hell, seven of them, all at once —that’s not something that you soon forget. And the fight they put up —it’s amazing we got out of there alive! I remember the last of them was so coked up, he laughed and laughed as, one after another, all his mates went down. When all was said and done, I was so exhausted I thought I might collapse, and Ana had to shower for an hour to get the blood out of her hair.”

“I still remember the look on Lily’s face when she found out I’d pulled it off —she thought for sure they’d send me packing. Of course, she had no idea I had help.”

“We were thick as thieves back then, Sam. Where did we go wrong?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “Thieves steal, Danny. That’s where we went wrong.”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it, but Danny didn’t bristle. And at that moment, the waitress returned, carrying a steaming plate of tortilla-like flatbreads piled high with meat and cheese. She set the plate in front of me, and addressed Danny in Spanish too fast for me to follow.

“Sorry, love,” he said to her, rising from his seat, “I can’t stop.” And then, to me, so earnestly it broke my heart: “Thanks for coming, Sam. It was good to see you.”

He turned and left, then, his shoulders hunched against the mountain chill, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He set out in a diagonal across the street, heading back toward the plaza. I just sat and watched him go. I wanted to call to him, to tell him that I’d help, but I didn’t. I was too angry, I guess. Too afraid. Eventually, I lost sight of him within the crowded square, so I sat and stared at nothing.

And then, as one, a thousand crows took flight and followed.

4.

“Where the hell have you been?”

At the sound of Lilith’s voice, I damn near jumped out of my shoes. Not that there was anything wrong with the sound of Lilith’s voice. Lilith’s voice is like a slow drink of whiskey —a throaty purr you can feel in your socks. The kind of voice that’d make a man do pretty much anything, provided she asked just right. And Lilith always asked just right. No, it wasn’t the timbre of her voice that startled me. It was the fact that it was coming from about three inches behind me.

I tried to spin around to face her, but I’d been crouched low to the ground when she interrupted me, so I wound up landing on my ass. Said ass was now planted smack in the middle of Independence Park —several acres of rolling green criss-crossed with paths of brick, in the center of downtown Bogota. After my meeting with Danny, I’d walked the streets for hours, trying to get my head straight. Eventually, I wound up here. Truth be told, the walk did nothing to sort out the jumble in my head, but at least the park afforded me the chance to inter Varela’s soul. Which was precisely what I was doing when Lilith decided to pop by and scare the living shit out of me.

I propped myself up on one elbow, and willed the thudding of my meat-suit’s heart to slow. Lilith looked as