infernal displeasure were poor, doomed fools who’d tried to cheat the Devil himself.
Apparently someone thought yours truly was just that kind of fool.
seven
The inside of my apartment was as hot as an oven, sticky-hot, and pretty much a continuation of the obvious message left on the front door. Furniture was upside down, small stuff had been smashed, drawers had been pulled out and dumped, and what few papers and books I had were strewn all across the floor. Even my CDs-no, I haven’t gone all-MP3 yet-had been dragged out, opened, and scattered. I looked down at the faces on the floor, Monk, Buddy Guy, Cannonball Adderley, staring up at me like a frozen crowd scene. What had the visitors been looking for?
And yes, of course it occurred to me that this had to be connected to the current mess of the missing soul and the dead prosecutor, but the fact that somebody was upset enough about it to trash my place and leave a burning symbol of their discontent on my front door didn’t get me any nearer to understanding the
One good thing: whoever had been there wasn’t smart enough to find my gun safe, and since I’m not going to explain where it’s hidden, you won’t find it either if you happen by some day. I don’t need a gun in my daily job, and I don’t usually carry, but things had just changed-drastically-so I grabbed my S amp;W revolver, a couple of speed loaders, and a few extra boxes of hollow points. Then I called Alice over at the office. “Tell headquarters I’m going to move out for a few days,” I said.
“It’s cheaper just to give in and wash the dishes,” she said.
“Ha ha. Somebody tossed my place. Just tell them.”
I heard her making a note, or at least banging on her keyboard. “Where you gonna be, Dollar?”
“I’ll let them know when I’ve decided,” I said.
“They won’t like that.” She almost sounded human. I wondered what her history might have been. “They don’t like to guess. And it doesn’t seem like a good time to make the bosses nervous.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know where I’m going yet.”
“You want me to give you the safe house information? I thought you knew ’em all by heart.”
“Email them. I’ll pick a nice one, get cozy, and think of you.”
I hung up before she told me to get bent or something and ruined the illusion that, just for a minute, she actually cared whether I did or didn’t exist. Alice was right-the Mule and his supervisors were not going to like me moving out without leaving them a forwarding address, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t get in touch with me if they wanted. I wasn’t going to one of their safe houses. Just for the moment I wanted to be the only person who knew where Bobby Dollar might lay his weary head. The Burning Hand thing had shaken me pretty good.
As I sat waiting in The Water Hole I nursed a beer and tried to figure out what had made someone so mad at me personally. It almost had to be about be the Walker thing. Even if the late Grasswax had been venal enough to want to take a shot at the folks who had witnessed his humiliation (as he’d put it) with the Martino case the day before, Sam, and especially young Clarence, would surely have been on his list ahead of me. But if it was the Walker thing, what had I done other than be on the scene when the soul in question failed to show? And what had I done after that except answer official questions from my superiors and Hell’s chancellor, then request some information from Fatback? Had my visit to the pig man triggered some kind of information-search alarm? If so, that didn’t narrow things down much because I’d asked him for information about lots of different stuff, including the lovely hellspawn I was hoping to meet here tonight.
Suddenly feeling a touch vulnerable, I slid along the bench until my back and left side were against the corner of the booth. Fatback’s information had sent me here, and here I sat. Did my enemies know that? Had the flaming handprint across my door been meant to convince me not to do exactly what I was doing? I looked around, but though the afternoon’s solitary drinkers and college students had been augmented by what looked like some after- work gatherings and a few solos grabbing a beer at the bar on their way home (most of whom were staring up at the college basketball game on the big screen) I didn’t see anyone who looked out of place or seemed to be clocking me in turn. Still, I loosened my coat a little in case I had to get at my.38 in a hurry. My quarry tonight was a high-ranking minister of Hell itself, and those sort of people were not known for their sweet tempers and reasonable dispositions. Of course, they weren’t known for being particularly afraid of guns, either.
Maybe ten minutes later there was a little stir that I felt more than heard. A very, very large man had just shouldered through the door, followed quickly by another even larger man. My heart sped. I had seen both of them before, although not in these earthly bodies-the Countess’s bodyguards, the things with the gray, nerveless skin that had accompanied her Outside on the day Edward Walker died. Sure enough, after they stood in the doorway looking around for a moment the one in back stepped out. When he returned a couple of seconds later he was following the very creature I had been waiting for-the Countess of Cold Hands herself.
As they escorted her across the room you could tell which patrons had never seen her before by how openly and unself-consciously they stared. I didn’t blame even the most obvious, since her earthly form was almost exactly the same as I had seen before and almost exactly as compelling. She was dressed a bit more discreetly tonight than the fetish schoolgirl look I’d seen before-if you could call red-streaked blonde hair, a bright pink designer sweatsuit, and large, visible diamonds discreet. She could have been the teenage daughter of an extremely wealthy Hollywood producer.
I was relieved to see that her bodyguards were smaller than they had been on the far side of the Zipper, but they were still both considerably larger than me or anyone else in the place. A couple of college dudes who looked like football players eyed them speculatively-not so much “Can we take them?” I suspect, as “Hmmm, wonder what kind of ‘roids they’re taking?”
The Countess walked across the room slowly but completely without self-consciousness, and even the men who weren’t looking at her shivered as she went past and turned to see what had just happened. Remember how I talked about the chesty, small-dog walk? Apparently that was how she moved when she was doing “busy” and “hard at work”; here she moved more languorously and seemed even more dangerous because of it, like a lioness coming down to drink.
Obviously this particular Water Hole drew some pretty big game.
She wound up on the far side of the room from me, in another booth facing perpendicularly to mine. As soon as she slid into her seat everyone sort of lost track of her, the same way folks don’t notice me and the other advocates when we open a midair Zipper-she just fell right off their mental radar. One of the bodyguards crammed himself into the booth next to her as the other one asked her something. She nodded and he headed off toward the bar.
The beady little eyes of Bodyguard Number One, who was shaven-headed and had a spiderweb tattooed under one eye, pinned me as soon as I rose, then stayed fixed on me for my lengthy journey across the floor. I say “lengthy” because the entire twenty yards or so I was thinking there was a good chance he might recognize me and just shoot me in the gut or something. Like I’ve said, dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an embodied angel, but it’s certainly high on any list of painful, joyless ways to spend an evening.
Halfway across I realized I still had my beer, which showed how clearly I wasn’t thinking-I was even carrying it in my shooting hand. I’d like to blame that bit of idiocy on the tension of the moment-this kind of confrontation just doesn’t happen very often-but I’m afraid it was probably entirely to do with the fact that the Countess of Cold Hands was so disturbingly gorgeous, a woman for whom you might risk not just your freedom but literally your immortal soul. Yeah. She was that fine.
