The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Ask for me on any corner downtown!” A couple of old black guys sitting on the front step of the apartment building next door laughed and pointed as they watched him prance past.

So-yet one more weird detail to add to a large, dangerous, and very confusing picture.

I had been thinking I would check my mailbox one last time before I left, but after meeting Fox I didn’t feel like going back inside the building. Not that it would have mattered-I never get anything but junk mail, anyway. I hopped in the car and went hunting for any sanctuary with cable TV and a working ice machine.

I picked a place on the Camino Real because it had a parking garage-after all, a ‘71 Matador with the full performance package isn’t the most discreet car in the world. In fact, I haven’t even seen another one around Jude with the same copper paint, let alone my checkerboard interior, so no way could I leave it out in plain view. In fact, I would have to think about ditching it entirely until the heat had blown over.

My phone continued to oblige me by not ringing, so I settled back to catch up on a few details that had been hanging fire the last couple of days. Fatback’s material on the late Grasswax (the real Grasswax, not his earthly “Grazuvac” identity) was interesting; I skimmed it and put it aside to reread later when I had less to do, but the main thing I noticed was that he’d been around longer than most prosecutors of his rank. The material on Edward Lynes Walker was more of the stuff I’d already seen: born in 1928, started first successful company in his San Judas garage in the early 1950s, riches and fame, blah blah, split and founded HoloTech when another company he had started got too corporate, blah blah, space program, contributed lots of money to ecological causes.

All of this biographical crap reminded me I still hadn’t looked through the pictures I’d taken at the Walker house the afternoon young Garcia Windhover had threatened to bust a cap in my ass. The images were still on my phone, which had somehow managed to survive in my pocket while I was being tossed around by a horned, red-hot whaddayoucallit.

There were a couple blurry shots of the Walker living room and one of Posie’s shoulder and part of the Mayan calendar, but most of the pictures were of the bookcases. I enlarged the images as much as I could and read down the spines of the books, Googling when I couldn’t get enough information from title and author alone. The late ELW’s collection was pretty much what I would have expected from the rest of the house, lots of coffee-table art books and big, expensive picture books about science, as well as collections of photography of the West, echoing the Ansel Adams prints on the living room walls. Among the ordinary-sized books, science and the arts seemed to dominate, although there were a few novels, some of them science fiction, like Carl Sagan’s Contact, others more mainstream stuff like Updike and John Irving. There was even a section of mysteries, the English village sort. I wondered if those had been his or his late wife’s. After what his granddaughter had told me I wasn’t surprised to see that Walker had no conventional religious books, although there were several volumes by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and even a hoary old copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. All together Walker had over a dozen titles with a pretty clearly antireligious slant. Still, for a scientist that wasn’t much of a surprise. Stubborn bastards, those scientists.

I was beginning to wish I’d found Walker’s music collection and taken pictures of that instead. You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)

As I mentioned, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for on the bookshelves-I didn’t really expect to find anything titled, “Evading Heaven” or “How to Make Your Soul Disappear.” I was mainly trying to get a feeling for Edward Lynes Walker beyond the dry facts that Fatback and the ordinary internet had already provided, something that might help me get a handle on why, of all the deaths in the world, his had been so different. But judging by his books at least, Walker was pretty much like millions of others who had managed to show up for their own afterlives. I had all but given up when something caught my eye.

I had enlarged a section of magazine-shaped objects that filled most of a shelf. Some of them were magazines, special year-end editions of things like Chemical and Engineering News, but most were stockholder’s reports for HT and some of the other companies in which Walker had been involved. Some of these dated from several years earlier, and the section in general looked like Walker might have stuck things into it but almost never pulled anything back out. But squeezed in right between reports for Littleton Bioscience and Metaware was a slender prospectus or something similar with the words “The Magian Society” printed on its spine in tasteful italics.

Alarm bells-hell, air-raid sirens-went off in my head. Because I had just heard about Magians, and not from just anyone, either. Somebody had asked me if I had heard anything about Magians-an archangelic somebody named Temuel, my supervisor.

I did a quick, fruitless online search for Magians. I found a lot of jabber about the Three Wise Kings but nothing about any “society,” so I phoned the Walker house. Posie Walker picked up about the twentieth ring, just when I had resigned myself to the answering machine.

“Hello?” She sounded a trifle baked again. I introduced myself, and she eventually remembered me. “Right. That writer guy.”

“Exactly. Listen, I was curious about your grandfather’s interest in the Magian Society.” I said it like everybody knew who that was, although I had already discovered nobody on the internet seemed to have heard of them.

“Never heard of ’em,” she said, on cue.

“That’s okay. I noticed he had something of theirs when I was there, a folder-maybe you could find it for me.” I gave her the bookshelf coordinates, which was a bit like trying to teach a marmoset to play chess; I doubted that she’d spent a lot of her time perusing her grandfather’s books. I told her I was happy to wait.

She came back a few minutes later. “Nope. There’s nothing like that.”

I stifled a curse. “Did you look carefully, Ms. Walker? Between Linson Bio-”

“Yeah, just like you said. It was there, probably, ‘cause there’s a space, but it’s not there now…” She trailed off, considering. “Maybe one of the cleaners took it.”

Oh, yeah. The Mighty Maids just happened to borrow the one thing in the entire bookshelf I wanted to see and take it back to their office for special cleaning. “Look, could I drop by sometime and take a look around? Sometime soon? Just in case it’s been, I don’t know, misplaced or something. It would really help my article if I could find it.”

Somebody yelled something in the background on her end. It sounded like Garcia the Gang-banger.

“I guess,” she said. “Sure. But not now. Somebody’s over. Later.”

She hung up without waiting to hear my reply.

Despite a powerful urge to drive over there right now and break in and look for myself, I decided not to. If it hadn’t been stolen from the shelf it was just misplaced, which meant it would still be there tomorrow, but breaking and entering the Walker place tonight might have dire consequences. Like I might accidentally walk in on Posie and her idiot boyfriend having sex.

It was a nice enough evening, and I would have loved to swing by The Compasses for a drink and some comradely bullshit, but it had only been twenty-four hours since the attack, and I wasn’t going anywhere that my pursuer might be watching. Also, to be honest, I wasn’t really in a hurry to see Monica either. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that I wanted to avoid her-I just wanted to avoid having a conversation with her. I hadn’t had time to figure out what falling into bed with Monica the other night was going to mean. Also, when I had been having the occasional moment of arousing thought, it wasn’t about Monica but a certain stunning blonde Hell-creature, and that was even more confusing. But I wouldn’t want you to think I was a complete moral coward, so I would like to make clear that the main reason for not going to The Compasses was as follows: Not wanting to suffer horrible, painful attack of the murderous-demon variety.

I had emailed Fatback to see if he could find me anything about the Magian Society or the name “Kephas,” but hadn’t heard from him yet because midnight was still hours away. I was getting hungry, so I walked from the motel to a Mexican place I had spotted on a side street. Considering it wasn’t anywhere near the worst part of Jude I felt surprisingly unsafe. Every movement at the edge of my immediate frame of vision yanked my head around, and sudden noises didn’t do much for my nerves either. It wasn’t just the thought of getting attacked by the ghallu that had me worried, either; if I was now a hot commodity that meant other people were probably willing to shop me for profit even if they didn’t have anything personal against me, so suddenly it wasn’t just eight-foot demons I needed to keep an eye out for but anyone who might be looking at me