“Yeah? Well, not only was I doing my job, I was literally minding my own business until all this shit started blowing sideways.” I was getting angry now, and it was beginning to suppress that prickly back-of-the-neck feeling that less experienced folks might mistake for cowardly fear. (I like to think of it as an imaginative form of caution.) The Countess had been right about one thing: I only had a few minutes at the most before her two Care Bears came back, probably with the rest of their cousins.
“It’s too bad the Walker affair has inconvenienced you,” she said, “but I have nothing else to share with you. And you have nothing to interest me.” She was armored like a tank, a very, very attractive tank with diamond earrings and what looked like a large silver locket around her pale, smooth neck. “You ought to go away now.”
The shiny stuff distracted me a little-I was under the impression that demons hated silver. “Yes, I’m sure you’d like to get back to whatever you were doing, Countess. Slumming, is my guess.” I sat back, the picture of relaxation, or so I hoped. “I confess to being curious about what brings you to a place like this. I mean, sawdust- on-the-floor joints don’t seem like your scene, Princess.”
Now the smile was actively feral. “You’re trying to irritate me, aren’t you, Mr. Dollar? For your information, I like places like this. You see, I like students.”
“Breaded, with cocktail sauce? Or do you just gobble them down raw like sushi?”
“Nothing so crude, Mr. Dollar.” She had leaned a little closer to me without my noticing, and now her hand alighted on my thigh. I could feel the points of her nails pressing through my jeans. “I’m not a vampire or some other sad, cartoonish thing that eats people. I’m one of Hell’s nobility. Despair, that’s my true meat and drink. And at this age, they are so easily turned down that path.” She giggled like a teenage girl whispering with a friend. “Someone I used to know told me I should aim higher. ‘It’s like shooting blind fish in a very small barrel,’ was how he put it. But I do so love to see them cry and beg, because they start out so sure of themselves-especially the boys!”
“If you’re trying to creep me out you’ll have to try harder.” But I was as conscious of that hand on my leg as I would have been of a poisonous spider. Although not in entirely the same way. “I really don’t care how you spend your time, Countess. It just gave me a chance to meet you and ask some questions.”
The nails poked into my leg a little harder. She moistened her lips, which were already dewy in the extreme. “And have you asked everything you want to ask?”
This had gotten weird very fast. Don’t get me wrong-I’ve been around members of the Opposition’s seduction brigade before, and they have mojo working for them a poor little angel boy like me can’t even understand. But the Countess was something else.
“After seeing you operate, I can’t imagine how that could happen. But I highly doubt it, anyway. I suspect someone’s pulled a little prank on you. The Burning Hand-well, that’s a bit of an old wives’ tale. Haven’t heard of anyone actually getting one for years.”
“Then maybe it’s time to modernize the database.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and punched up a picture of my front door, then held it in front of her very pretty face. “What would you call
Jackpot-or at least an expression crossed her face for the first time that wasn’t part of her Demon Queen act. She took her hand off my leg. The weird thing was that it wasn’t just surprise I saw but a hint of fear as well, which freaked me out. What could scare one of Hell’s society-page regulars?
Whatever it was vanished in a moment, like the reflection of something moving. “You’re half right, Mr. Dollar. That’s a burning hand-but it’s not
“What are you talking about?”
The hand dropped lightly on my leg again and squeezed ever so gently. The nails were sharp enough to poke through the denim and touch actual skin. “Back in the old days, people who tried to renege on their agreements with us would be reprimanded with the mark of a black, ashy hand on their doors…but the hands that made the marks were human, or at least human-sized. The tradition is very clear about that. Unless you live in a munchkin cottage, I’d say the hand that made this must have been at least as big as a polar bear’s paw.” She held up her own dainty little mitt-the one that wasn’t prickling my thigh. Her long, sharp nails were without polish but very, very clean. “In other words, not made by anything human-sized.”
I could tell there was something else she wasn’t telling me, but I could also sense that she wasn’t going to tell me now. A sort of wall had suddenly gone up between us. I decided to cut my losses and see if I could get out of The Water Hole without a firefight. I disengaged her grip from my leg and slid out of the booth, but just as I did so the front door swung open and several large shapes crowded through, blocking the orange sodium light from the parking lot. Reinforcements.
“Thank you, Countess,” I said. “You’ve been more helpful than you know.”
“You’re cute, Dollar. If you survive the next few minutes you may call me Casimira the next time we meet.” She smiled, and she was so beautiful it hurt my chest. “My friends call me ‘Caz,’ but I don’t think you’ll be around long enough to earn
There were about five or six of them coming toward us, an entire exhibit escaped from the Big and Ugly Hall of Fame. I sprinted for the other end of the room, furious now that I hadn’t taken time earlier to map the exits.
I found the men’s room and levered myself out the window. Luckily they hadn’t thought enough of me to leave anyone staked out in the parking lot, so by the time they’d busted the lock on the restroom door I was wiping off sweat as I pulled out onto the Camino Real. But I was most of the way back to the motel room I’d rented on the north end of town before I finally stopped thinking about her hand resting lightly on my leg.
eight
I awoke to the sun stabbing through the dusty blinds of the Royal Highway Motor Hotel like Norman Bates’s favorite steak knife, as well as the four most famous notes of the Hallelujah Chorus chiming over and over again from my phone-the sound of waiting messages. Believe me, if it was up to me, I’d have something better (or at least more discreet) but our phones are work-issue and Nikola Tesla himself couldn’t reset them. That doesn’t mean that’s what folks like you would hear, but it’s all an angel like me gets when the phone wants you to know there’s a message-HAH-lay-loo-yah. HAH-lay-loo-yah. Whoever did the programming for the House was either criminally stupid or had a very unpleasant sense of humor.
Besides all the stuff from Fatback I hadn’t read yet, I had also received several nasty messages from Temuel’s office wanting to know where I was staying and one text from Clarence the Trainee Angel asking when I was going to pick him up.
Twenty-five minutes later, showered and with a cup of Peet’s the size of a grain silo between my knees-no cup holders in a vintage Matador, which might make you wonder how people survived the seventies long enough to invent cup holders later on-I was headed down the Bayshore toward the Walker place for the third time this week. The neighborhood had more or less returned to normal after the circus of the last couple of days, the sidewalks full of smiling postal carriers and people wearing casually expensive clothes walking their casually expensive dogs. Pretty much what you’d expect on a Saturday morning in Jude’s Palo Alto district.
Edward Walker’s house looked like any other house on the street now except for a small island of stuffed toys and flowers and written tributes, the kind of sentimental Sargasso that quickly collects these days near the scene of any semi-public tragedy. There was a different car in the driveway today, a scuffed, nondescript Japanese sedan that didn’t look like anything Walker himself would have driven. The car in which he’d died was nowhere in sight,
