“Oooh.” Monica made a face of sympathetic worry. “How freaky!”
Jimmy the Table and Sweetheart and some of the others made their way over. The one good side of the whole nasty mess was that for at least one night I didn’t have to pay for my own drinks.
“Do you think the Other Side did it?” Monica asked. “Are they trying to provoke something?”
“Jeez, how should I know? They sent in one of their own fixers quick enough. Female, called the Countess?”
Jimmy the Table let out a shrill laugh. “I heard about that bitch! They said she wore a necklace of human balls to the company Christmas party!”
“I don’t think the Opposition celebrates Christmas, darling,” Sweetheart gently told him.
“Some party, then-don’t matter.” Jimmy was very pleased to be the one with information. “Anyway, if they put
“Zepuriel,” said Sweetheart. “The one with the cute bottom?”
“Whatever,” said Jimmy, refusing for once to be baited. “Why do you think he transferred out of the advocates back to Painting Rainbows Division or wherever he wound up? He met up with her on a job, and she ripped him up so bad he never got over it.”
“You are entirely full of shit,” said Walter Sanders from behind his beer in the corner. “Never happened.”
“Screw you, I was there!” said Jimmy, and half a minute later they had forgotten all about the rest of us and were happily insulting each other in a way that an outsider would think was deadly serious. Some combination of the Table, Walter Sanders, and young Elvis were always arguing about some stupid thing, but I didn’t mind. You spend a lot of time passing time when you’ve got Eternity on the clock.
“I’ve heard of her,” Monica told me when the rest of the Whole Sick Choir had finally eddied away. “Jimmy’s right about one thing-everything I’ve heard about that bitch is bad news.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hell’s fixer and her slender pale legs and fairy-tale face. Even for the most confirmed Hell-haters among us heavenly sorts, it’s hard to remember sometimes what’s underneath the exterior if the bodywork is good enough. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to admit that to Monica. “I’m done with it. Filed my report with the minister and another one with the Mule. And if this missing-soul thing is real, it’s way out of our league, anyway. I doubt any of us will ever hear about it again.”
It’s amazing the stupid things I say sometimes. I mean, you could start an entire branch of scientific research about the stuff I say that gets proved wrong while I’m still busy saying it. Because less than an hour later, Sam and young Clarence walked in, which at the time I thought was a very good thing, because Monica and I were sharing a table and I was having trouble remembering why we stopped doing those things we used to do together. Yes, I’d had a few. Anyway, Sam and his pup angel walked in, and I took one look at young Clarence and knew I didn’t want to hear it. He had that excited-rookie look on his face-the kind of thing that never brings anyone any good. At the cheap end it only steals a few priceless hours of your immortal life, but the cost can and often does go much higher.
“You remember Grasswax the prosecutor?” Clarence asked.
“Just saw him a few hours ago. In fact, I see more of him these days than I do you guys. What of it?”
Clarence’s eyes were big. “He’s dead.”
I stared at him and wondered if I had ever been that new. “Nobody dies, kid. At least nobody like us. You mean his body got killed?”
The rookie blushed. “I guess so.”
Like our side, the bad guys hand out mortal forms to those who do their earthly work; if lost to accident or actual malice those bodies can be replaced. But trust me-getting killed can still be extremely unpleasant, even when you don’t permanently die from it. I turned back to Sam, who seemed unusually grim. “I just saw the red bastard an hour or two ago. Is this real?”
“Real and real bad,” Sam said, nodding. “And real messy, apparently-they found him at the scene of that last death, the weird one with the vanishing soul everyone’s losing their shit about. We just got interrogated by a minister because we won that Martino case against him yesterday.”
Which explained where Sam and the rookie had been, at least for the later part of the day. I realized I still hadn’t told Sam what Temuel had said about the kid, but I didn’t want to get distracted now. “Oh, man,” I said, “Grasswax got killed at the Walker house? It must have happened right after I left.”
“Then I’m surprised you haven’t been questioned about it yet, actually.” Sam’s tone was a little odd, but I put it down to the circumstances. Not that one of the Opposition getting rubbed out was unheard of, but it wasn’t common, and on top of the inexplicable case of Edward Lynes Walker, it had clearly been a day for strange stuff.
“I already got put through the mill on the suicide guy, so maybe they don’t need…” was all I had time to say before I felt a presence in my head, a dazzle of power and a sounding ring like trumpets.
Come where? Why, back to the Walker house in Palo Alto. Scene of the crime.
In fact, the scene of both crimes, now that I thought about it.
four
I liked my situation less and less by the moment-in fact, the whole thing stank. Why was I being called back to the Walker house? If my bosses wanted to quiz me beyond what the fixer/minister had already done, why not just summon me to Heaven? Temuel had called me in for nothing more important than chatting about young Clarence, so something like
Another question that was still itching me: Who had called in the shock troops so quickly? As soon as Edward Walker’s soul turned up missing, worker bees from both sides had descended on the scene before either Grasswax or I could check in with our bosses-or at least that was how it had looked. My team and the Opposition are both very into procedure, as I had learned many times to my sorrow. What happened this time?
And to muddy the waters even further, only hours later Grasswax was dead and I was apparently wanted back on the scene for more questioning but I was the one who had questions that needed answering. Who had bothered to kill Grasswax’s mortal form? It’s not like it would shut him up about anything-earthbound employees of both sides wound up dead all the time. I’ve been there myself. We get debriefed about what happened and then decanted into another body.
Altogether, the affair had more loose ends than Swinger’s Night in a bucket of worms, so I had a lot to think about as I skittered down the Bayshore through a canyon of glowing high-rise windows to the Palo Alto district, then made my way along the tree-lined streets until I was back in front of the Walker residence.
I parked as close to the house as I could. The street was still full of police vehicles and news trucks even though the death had happened this morning and by now the streetlights had come on. I’d already heard the story on the car radio-“Scientist and Philanthropist Takes His Own Life,” was the basic gist, featuring several quotes from Walker’s friends and family about how they had no idea he was despondent or even worried, although there were also unsubstantiated rumors that he might have been ill with something serious.
Anyway, it wasn’t the real-world version of the Walker place that I wanted (although I was beginning to have a few questions about that as well). I opened a Zipper and the few police technicians still lingering around the open garage tented with white plastic froze into immobility as I stepped Outside, but I scarcely noticed because what I stepped into on the far side of the Zipper was your basic hive of activity. Opposition minions were everywhere, dozens of types, some indistinguishable from deformed humans, others so unpleasantly different I couldn’t look at them for very long.
Only one member of our team was waiting for me there, but he was enough all by himself. I think it was the same fixer as before-certainly the bizarre plague mask seemed the same-but it’s hard to tell with the higher angels since they can manifest in all kinds of ways. Outward appearances only seem to be important to earthbound types
