the door I called to the waitress.
“I’m afraid I’ve spilled one of my perfume samples on the floor. Sorry to make work for you, but I’ve got to run. I’ve left some extra money.”
The Sollyhull sisters had risen up like clouds of steam in sensible shoes, becoming less and less substantial as they flew back and forth above the table until at last I could no longer see them. But as I led the kid to the door we could still hear them, giggling like schoolgirls.
“Oh, that’s lovely. Lovely! Takes me right back!”
“Do you remember that boy Tom Kippers who used to take you to the pictures? The one who always carried barley sugar?”
“Barley sugar! What I wouldn’t give for some of that right now! Oh, Doris, what a lovely thought!”
As we headed for the car Clarence asked me, “How did they die?”
“I think they set their house on fire. Something like that. Killed their parents, too, but I don’t think they meant to die themselves-just didn’t get out fast enough or something. Pretty famous case in Birmingham.”
“What? Did they do it on purpose?” the kid asked, horrified.
I closed my door and buckled myself in. “They died a long time ago-like I said, it was a famous case. You only haunt things when you’re working off certain very severe Purgatorial deals, the kind that keep souls from going straight to hell.” I shrugged. “They probably wouldn’t still be hanging around if it had been an accident, would they?”
The rookie didn’t say much on the way back into downtown.
sixteen
Another night, another cheap motel. So far, I was staying ahead of trouble, both from the Opposition and from my own people, but I couldn’t figure out how my little adventure in Eligor’s office tower hadn’t come to the attention of my superiors. I didn’t expect the Grand Duke himself to report it, even though it was a ridiculously indiscreet breach of every convention there was, right back to Tartarus, but the whole Magian Society connection to Vald Credit suggested Eligor did have something to hide. He was quite high up, after all, so I supposed one of his underlings could have been the one sheltering the Magians, but I was fairly certain that the connections between a Hell-founded megacorporation, the slippery Reverend Doctor Habari, and Grasswax’s former bodyguard couldn’t
So when I got woken up at the ComfortRest Inn at four in the morning with a client call, summoned to an accident scene on the freeway up near Mission Shores, I suspected I might hear from the Celestial City while I was Outside. And I did.
The client wasn’t anything unusual, a woman on her way to her job, driving all the way in from Morgan Hill. She’d fallen asleep at the wheel, drifted, hit the center divider, and flipped over. Luckily it had been early enough in the morning that the freeway was largely empty and no one else had been killed. Her guardian angel explained that the deceased was a nice, hard-working sort, a fifty-something grandmother whose defense wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, but I didn’t have long to enjoy that before the judge appeared in a glare of inscrutability and informed me that my superiors were requesting my presence in Heaven after we finished.
The last thing I wanted to do was face those five shiny, powerful beings across a table again, this time trying to explain why my idea of a low profile included shooting up somebody’s office, but I didn’t bother to tell that to the Principality who delivered the message. Firstly, it wouldn’t have done any good, and second, it might have spoiled poor Gloria Dubose’s chance at Heaven. I may be crazy, but I’m not a bastard. Not most of the time, anyway.
So I did my duty for God and Choir and then headed back toward the unevenly disinfected premises of the ComfortRest, but when I reached the motel I didn’t feel like trying to go back to sleep, and I certainly wasn’t in a hurry to visit my front office. As I’ve said before, Time is different in Heaven, so I didn’t think they’d care too much if I waited until night came around when I would sleep again. Until then, I’d just keep myself caffeinated and vertical. So I went and downed about four cups of dishwater-strength coffee at a 24-hour coffee shop and tried to decide what I was going to do next.
The more I thought about it the more I liked the Sollyhull Sisters’ advice about pretending to put Eligor’s whatever-it-might-be up for auction. I mean, it was a spectacularly stupid, spectacularly dangerous thing to do, but it wasn’t as if I had a lot of time to come up with something more subtle. My superiors were probably about to rip off my halo and drum me out of the corps, and a certain red-hot monstrosity with horns was out there somewhere looking for me-along with the rest of Eligor’s minions, probably-slowed only by the fact that I was moving around a lot and sleeping in motels. (It’s times like this when I wonder what the higher angels who organized all this were thinking when they gave us earthbound underlings bodies that needed to be fed and watered and rested just as if we were real people.)
So it seemed like I might as well poke things along. If I was going to wind up demoted (or worse) then I intended to go out like a crazy man, kicking and screaming and setting shit on fire all the way.
I parked downtown, not too far from Beeger Square. It was getting into the morning now, and I was beginning to think about a late breakfast to ease the headachy buzz of too much coffee, so I tried Sam but got no reply. On the off chance he was sitting in The Compasses and had turned his phone off, I called the bar phone. Chico said he hadn’t been in but that Monica had just walked in and wanted the phone. I didn’t even have a chance to react to that before she was in my ear.
“Don’t come in, Bobby.”
“Huh?” was what I replied, or something equally dazzling.
“If you were going to come to The Compasses, don’t,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to, but is this some weird way of saying you’re still pissed off at me?”
“How could anyone ever be pissed off at a sweetheart like you?” The sarcasm was so thick it actually made the phone heavy in my hand. “No, seriously, B, it’s weird around here. There are people lounging around outside the building, homeless folks, street crazies…”
“And this is new?”
“Shut up. I know the regulars, and these aren’t them. They’re watching the place-they take turns so it’s not too obvious. Someone’s definitely got an eye on The Compasses, so how much would you be willing to bet it’s
“You’re right, I wouldn’t touch that action. That’s why I wasn’t planning to come in anytime soon.” I sighed. Eligor must have found out that after the arrest I’d walked right out the back door of County. Was I going to be living on the run indefinitely? Permanently? Because you don’t outlast one of the Lords of Hell in a grudge- match.
“And there’s more,” she said. “We’ve had a couple of more no-show clients, if you know what I mean. Like your Walker guy.”
“Hang on-you mean here in San Judas?”
“One for Sanders, one for Jimmy the Table. I’ll send you some information about those clients when I can, but basically it was the same as with yours-everybody present except the guest of honor.”
I cursed silently. If there were already more vanishing souls just in San Judas that might mean more everywhere. It was beginning to look like an epidemic. “Thanks for the information, beautiful. I owe you.”
“More than you’ll ever know, Dollar. Dinner and drinks might pay back a little of it. Let me know when there’s a break in your schedule of being attacked.” She paused when she normally would have hung up, then added: “Be careful, Bobby. Really. This stuff is getting scary-weird.”
If the bad guys were keeping watch for me at The Compasses then obviously Beeger Square was out, but I still needed a corner somewhere in the middle of downtown, because that’s where Foxy the White-Nosed Reindeer
