I stopped in front of the table. The bald bodyguard tensed his arm-muscles but didn’t move. He kept his hands out in plain view, so I did the same. One of my hands was holding a beer mug, anyway. You’re right, I really hadn’t thought this through too well.
“Countess,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”
“We’ve met?” The only difference between her Outside and Inside appearance, I could see now, were her eyes. Here in the so-called real world they weren’t bloody red but a pale, icy blue. She smiled, but it was hard, hard,
“Just the other day. Outside the Walker house.”
“Walker house?” She could make even two such ordinary words sound as if I’d said something crude and suggestive. “I don’t know any such place, and I don’t know you.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “I’m willing to believe you didn’t know me before that, Countess, but I think everybody knows who was there by now. It’s become kind of talked-about in certain circles. My name is Bobby Dollar.”
She stared at me for a long second, chilly as a core sample pulled from the polar ice. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Dollar. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m expecting someone.”
“That’s okay. I’m willing to share,” I said, then a hand gripped my right arm so hard that the heavy mug dropped from my nerveless fingers and fell onto the table, fountaining beer and froth.
“The lady said
I didn’t bother to wait and find out what he was going to pull it out of, or what he was going to do with it afterward. Instead I snatched up the dropped mug with my left hand and brought the heavy glass down as hard as I could on his fingers where they were splayed on the table. He let go of my arm and gave out a short, sharp grunt of pain that I derailed by backhanding him across the face with the mug, hard as I could swing it. As he toppled awkwardly to the floor, gushing blood from his nose, I heard footsteps right behind me. I dropped the mug and spun around; by the time I finished the turn my.38 was in my hand and pointing right at Number Two’s face. He was still fumbling for his own piece. I guess he hadn’t expected so much excitement at The Water Hole tonight. If it had been me running to protect my boss, I would have drawn long before I got so close, but that’s because I’m not that strong compared to some of these bruisers, and I really hate pain.
“Fuck you, tough guy,” said Number Two. He had a military haircut, a huge mustache, and a really deep voice. Other than that, he could have been any death row triple-murderer. “Go ahead, shoot me. She’ll kill you worse than I ever could. Then she’ll take you home and kill you some more.”
“I don’t want to shoot you, sunshine. I don’t even want to damage you badly enough to interrupt your gay porn career.” I turned to the Countess, who was watching with something like amusement despite the blood and beer splashed across the table and threatening to drip onto what was probably five thousand dollars worth of designer workout gear. “Well, Ma’am? Do you and I talk, or are they going to have to move the tables to mop up all the red stuff?”
She gave me a bored look, then leaned over a bit so she could see the guy on the floor. “Candy?”
Number One looked up. Blood was still bubbling out from underneath his hand, and his eyes were swelling closed. I’d done a pretty good job on his nose. “I can still kill him if you want me to, Countess,” he said, grinning red.
“No, that’s not necessary. Cinnamon, take Candy out to the car and stop the bleeding.”
The guy looking down the barrel of my Smith amp; Wesson seemed disturbed for the first time. “No way! We’re not leaving you!”
She frowned. “You’re not doing me any good right now anyway. Go on. As you pointed out, I can take care of myself.”
Grumbling like an idling big rig, Cinnamon helped his bloody pal up off the floor. During the initial moments of the fray everyone in the bar had turned to look, but now they were losing interest rapidly, as they always do when us embodied folks make a public fuss. My old mentor Leo used to call this protective effect “the Cloud of Unknowing,” but I don’t know where he got that.
As Cinnamon helped his friend toward the door, leaving a trail of red drips across the concrete tiles, the Countess gave me a look from which all amusement had packed up and moved out. “You’ve got about two minutes, angel, so sit down and start talking. Then either I’ll tear your head off myself because you didn’t impress me, or those two will get nervous enough to call for backup.”
“Yeah. But you never got your drink.”
She looked at me like I must be kidding. “That two minutes was an outside estimate.” She watched me not sitting down, then the smile came back, one of the grudging,
“A Bloody Mary? You’re joking, right?”
She didn’t like that. “If you’re going to make editorial comments I’m going to pop your skull off your spine right now, Mr. Dollar.”
I went to fetch her Bloody Mary. There were two beers there, too, which had been meant for the bodyguards, so I brought those back as well. I felt like I’d earned them, and now that my heart wasn’t beating so fast I wanted to drink something quickly, before I realized what I’d just done. What if I’d had to shoot the second guard? At the very least I’d lose my job as a heavenly advocate, and in the midst of all this craziness about the Walker case, killing a member of the Opposition in public would probably bring much worse trouble than just a demotion to Angelic Patron of Cub Scouts or whatever.
“So,” she said as I slipped into the booth and faced her across the table, “why exactly do you want to die so badly, Mr. Dollar?” Somehow bar employees had cleaned the table and floor while I was gone. Everything was so clean it was almost like a first date. “Haven’t things been exciting enough already?”
“I’m not really seeking death,” I said. “More like information.”
“From me? What on earth can you possibly hope to learn from me? And why would I share anything with you? Need I remind you that our two organizations have been at war for millions of years?”
“Not war,” I said, then took a long swallow from one of my new beers. I wondered if I’d be alive long enough to start the second one. “Remember, it’s officially called a ‘conflict.’ Some of the bean counters on my side even like to refer to it as a ‘competition.’ Which would make us not enemies but…competitors.”
She bit her lip, perhaps to keep from smiling or frowning, perhaps simply because she knew it made her look so intensely sexy that it befuddled the mind of anything with a body. “What does the competition want to know? And not that I care, but you really had better stop showing off how brave you are and get to the point. Just because you caught Candy and Cinnamon by surprise, you shouldn’t think they’re useless. They can make you hurt for a very, very long time without letting you die. We have whole graduate studies programs for that, where I come from.”
“Oh, I know. In fact, that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. Who do you think earned their doctorate on Prosecutor Grasswax?”
Her lovely face went dead but the eyes remained as wide and innocently blue as a prairie sky. The voice was pure Mary Poppins. “Is that an accusation, Mr. Dollar? If it is, it strikes me as a very, very foolish one.”
I raised my hand. “Peace, Princess-”
“Countess.”
“Yeah. I’m not accusing you. Why would I want to do that even if I thought it was true? Grasswax didn’t work for my side, and he certainly wasn’t my friend. In fact, I thought he was a shit.”
“Then perhaps
“Maybe. But you’ll have to trust me for now when I say I doubt it, and that I’d really like to know who did.”
“The whole infernal hierarchy would like to know.” Her eyes narrowed. “And they’re even more curious to find out what happened to his client, Edward Walker.”
“Client.” I laughed, but not very hard. “That’s a funny way to talk about a guy Grasswax was trying to get sentenced to an eternity of being fried in flaming oil like an eggroll.”
“Our prosecutor was doing his job, Mr. Dollar. I was doing my job, too. I suggest you might live a little longer-whether in or out of a body-if you just went away and did yours.”
