The Dirty Streets of Heaven

I hadn’t said anything about the other two names Temuel had floated, first because I didn’t trust the kid, second because I wanted to check into them myself before muddying the waters. I’d tell Sam when I had a chance.

Meanwhile, Sam kicked at a bunch of scattered hot rod magazines that someone had dumped on the foor while searching the apartment. “You’re not really keeping all this, are you, B? What are you planning to do, open a Museum of Crap someday?”

I ignored that and gathered up the magazines. Sam wasn’t exactly Mister House Beautiful himself. He lived in the seedier section of Southport, you could barely see his living room carpet under all the newspapers and pizza boxes, and his bathroom towels had sweat stains on them. “But I still don’t know why someone would send a monster like that after me,” I said. “Look at this place-they were searching for something. And it wasn’t just that hell-beast in here, either.”

Clarence looked up from where he was picking up tableware that had been scattered across the linoleum. I suppose I should have asked him to put it in the sink to be washed after being Hell-handled, but I hardly ever use any of it except to stir coffee and butter toast, anyway. “What do you mean, Bobby?” the kid asked.

“What do I mean? Look, this place is a mess, sure, but a ghallu is a spirit of elemental disaster the size of a small car and hot as the inside of a crematory oven. It pursues. It captures. It kills. You don’t summon one of those and tell it, ‘Oh, and take a look in the guy’s kitchen cabinets while you’re there.’ That’s like asking a grizzly bear to audit my tax records.”

“You don’t pay any taxes,” Sam pointed out.

“Shut up,” I acknowledged. “You understand, Junior? They want to catch me or kill me, but they also think I know something. Or that I have something they want.”

Clarence suddenly looked a bit nervous. “You think they’ll come back?”

“If I stayed here? Probably guaranteed. Which is why I’m going to be kicking it in some rent-by-the-hour motel tonight, and then some different but equally charming spot tomorrow night.”

“Trust me-he’s slept worse places,” Sam said.

“Yeah, thanks for making me look good in front of the kid.” With the boxes loaded into my car, the aparment looked sad (and almost tidy.) “Let’s go down the block,” I said. “I’ll buy you boys some lunch before the phone rings and one of us has to go off and mess around with dead people again.”

Sam got a call to a client in Spanishtown as we were finishing, and Clarence went with him, so I walked back to my car alone. I put my jacket on because the thin February sunshine wasn’t enough to keep me comfortable. I wished the spring would hurry up and arrive. It’s funny, but even regular trips to the permanently glorious weather of Heaven doesn’t change the pure pleasure of walking out your door one day and finding that warm days have arrived, that suddenly wearing a jacket makes you too hot.

I kept my eyes open as I went through Hoover Park, although I was nearly certain that the demonic beast someone had sicced on me was strictly a nighttime diversion. I told you how much energy it takes to sustain something so scary and unusual, right? It’s a factor of ten more difficult to make one of those manifest in full daylight. Still, something a bit more civilized than the ghallu had tossed my apartment, and the horned monstrosity probably hadn’t done anything as delicate as stringing up Grasswax by his own nerve fibers either, so I tried not to let myself be distracted by the heedless civilians all around me. I saw the guy waiting out in front of my building from almost a block away, which gave me plenty of time to clock him as I approached.

My car was parked farther down the street, and there was a chance I could have got into it without a confrontation, but he didn’t look too intimidating. He was fairly tall but pale and thin-really thin. That was one of the first things I noticed. He looked like a middle school kid wearing his dad’s suit. He didn’t stand still, either, but jittered and dance-stepped in place, apparently not the least self-conscious, although as I watched a woman with a stroller and an old man with a bag of groceries both gave him a wide berth. And his skin was so completely white-bloodlessly white-that for a moment I had the chilling illusion his dark baggy suit might be what he’d been buried in.

It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to slip past him to my car, and in fact I was a bit curious, so I kept walking toward him. When he finally heard me he spun all the way around to look at me and I realized that he was alive but more than just ordinarily pale. He was some kind of albino, although his eyes were tawny, not the more common pink. To put an interesting twist on it, he wasn’t just albino but Asian, too-a combination you don’t see that often, even in cosmopolitan San Judas. More importantly though, from his first words, it seemed clear that my unpigmented Asian-American friend was not entirely sane.

“Dollar Bob?” he said in a chirpy voice. “Mr. Bobby D? Dollar Man?” He stopped bouncing for a moment and frowned, his whole face creasing into a sock puppet of the mask of tragedy. “Or am I wrong again? So many people have said no today! No, no, not Dollar!”

“Who the hell are you?” My choice of words wasn’t entirely random. He did have something of the look of the Opposition, but that might just have been his skin condition.

“Don’t know me? Everybody knows me! All over downtown!” He giggled and did another little soft-shoe shuffle.

“Well, I don’t-and I don’t want to, either.” But he didn’t have the smell of serious danger on him, at least as far as I could tell. Still, I kept my hand in my jacket pocket where my.38 was hiding.

His eyes got big. As I said, the irises were sort of yellow-brown, the irises vertical like a cat’s or a fox’s eyes. Whatever he was, he was definitely in the “other” category. “Oh, but I know you, Mr. Bobby Doll-dollar!” he exclaimed. “And I think you have something you might want to sell. I know lots of people who want to buy. I can arrange! Good business, huh? Good for everyone!”

“I don’t have anything to sell.” Was this guy with the Noh-mask face some kind of lost spirit who’d seen me and Sammy and the kid cleaning broken furniture out of the house and now was hoping to scam a few bucks? The creatures that fall through the cracks in the great war between Us and Them often wind up homeless, and with his too-roomy suit and his loopy dialogue this pale fellow certainly could have been one of those, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let me dismiss him so easily.

“Really really truthful true?” The albino leaned way down and then squinted up at me from below. “No little something you might have found? No pretty shiny? A little flippy flappy something that needs a special helper to find a market?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and his presence was beginning to depress me. It was bad enough that the bad guys knew my apartment-was every fairy-tale gutter-rat in Judas going to come hang out there, too? Plus, there was just something about the guy that creeped me out. Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that the folks who had tossed my apartment thought I knew something…or had something that they wanted. And this guy thought I might be trying to sell something.

“Just out of curiosity, pal,” I said, “how much do you think you could get for a-what did you call it? A ‘pretty shiny’? I mean, if someone knew where to find such a thing?”

“Oh, he would be a very rich man. Yes indeed!”

“But how do I know we’re even talking about the same thing?” I was trying to find a way to get him to identify whatever he was looking for without admitting that I didn’t have it and didn’t know what it was. “We need to be a little more specific.”

He laughed as if genuinely pleased by what I’d said and threw his scarecrow arms in the air, sleeves flapping. “If you have it, Mister B-Doll, I know people who want it. Don’t need to say more than that!” He spun. Jazz hands.

I wanted to pop him one just to get him to stand still. “Look, I don’t have time to mess around. I don’t know you, and I don’t do business with people I don’t know.”

He laughed again. “Okay, Bobby! You the boss! But if you change your mind and want to talk about the shiny-shiny-talk for real-just ask around. Any corner downtown! I’ll find out! Fox, that’s me!”

“Fox?”

“Or Foxy-boy! Mr. Fox! Foxy Foxy! They are all me and they all know me!” He grinned hugely and I noticed that at least a couple of his upper teeth were gold. An instant later he had whirled away from me and was strutting off, making his way up Stambaugh in the general direction of Main Street like the drum major of the Hiroshima Ghost Parade.

“Wait? How do I get in touch with you if I do want to talk?”