The Dirty Streets of Heaven

killed and being arrested by an SJPD S.W.A.T. team. But still, I shouldn’t have left it. I had only missed getting the slippery bastard by a few minutes. I ached to have him there with me in that deserted office so I could ask him a few pointed questions, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it?

I headed back toward the busier parts of town.

I was really missing The Compasses. Avoiding my favored hang-out would have been tough at the best of times, but for a guy who also had to move from motel to motel it was miserable. I was banned from most of my friends, my home, everything. I was angry that this had happened to me-furious-and, of course, I was scared, too, but also just plain bored. In fact, it was a bit like being in combat.

I picked my stop for the night early, a budget place near the Bayshore, then sat watching a preseason Giants game on the television and nursing a beer. Sam returned my call but said he had a client that was probably going to take him a while. I would even have been willing to spend an evening hanging around with Clarence, but Sam said the kid had gone home for the night. In a fit of ennui I even called him but he didn’t answer his phone. I wondered if the kid was having dinner with his adopted family, cozy and, for a little while, feeling almost human.

When my own phone rang a bit later and it was Alice sending me a client, I was as pleased by the news of someone else’s death as I’d just about ever been. Horrible, I know, but I’m being honest-I was that desperate for something to do besides watch a bunch of minor league players I didn’t know getting their brief shot at the bigs.

The victim turned out to be a kid from Stanford who’d fallen out of his dorm window, so I flashed one of my fake IDs at the Teller Gate guards and drove onto the campus. The dormitory in question was at the western end of the school where the trees were thick and the hills leaned close overhead, which gave the spot kind of a Sleepy Hollow feel. I left my car in one of the lots and walked the rest of the way in, showing a press badge to anyone who seemed doubtful about my right to be there but otherwise trying not to be noticed. I did it well enough that by the time I reached the dormitory itself, an island of flashing lights in the middle of the darkness, I might as well have been invisible. I strolled past the outermost barricade of Stanford campus police vehicles, three regular cruisers, and several golf-carty things blocking the driveway. The house was festooned with bunting and hand-painted signs-apparently a Mardi Gras party had been the evening’s entertainment. I glanced briefly at the tent being erected over the body of the unfortunate student, then opened a Zipper and stepped Outside.

It was a relief to see the dead kid’s soul actually waiting there, dressed in a stained toga and tangled strings of shiny parade beads, probably looking pretty much as he had in life (although undoubtedly better than he did in death after falling head first off the roof of a four-story building onto pavement). He had one of those haircuts that always irritates me, one where the hair on either side has been brushed together in the middle like some kind of dolphin fin. It turns the wearer into a pinhead-not a good look for anyone.

“Brady Tillotson,” I said. “God loves you.”

“What is this shit?” he asked, glaring as though I might have engineered his fall, although by the smashed bottles lying near the now shrouded body I guessed his passing was more likely what would be called “misadventure,” which is legal shorthand for “death by stupid.”

“You’re dead, Brady. I’m sorry, but I’ll do my best to make this go smoothly for you. I’m Doloriel, your heavenly advocate.” I didn’t see his guardian angel yet, or the Opposition, so I gave him a quick rundown of what was going to happen.

He seemed less than impressed. He was a big, handsome kid and looked and acted like he usually got his way by one means or another. “You’re shitting me, right? I don’t believe in any of that crap.”

“Well, it believes in you, Brady, so it doesn’t matter much what you think.”

“Fuck that. I’m leaving.” And he turned around and stumbled off into the darkness. Death usually sobered people right up but there were exceptions. I wasn’t too worried about him getting away, though: One thing about being Outside is that it isn’t a place, it’s the timelessness that belongs to a place-an eternal moment, I guess you’d say. It’s tied to the people who are physically in that moment, observing it, so the farther away you get from what you could see during that original moment, the less real it is, until eventually you’re left in the dark with a few familiar sounds. Then, after the sounds go quiet, you usually find yourself hurrying back toward the main bit of the moment again. See, there’s nowhere else to go. Otherwise, all the angels and devils would be popping in and out of Outside like it was a Star Trek beam-me-up device, spying on each other through the Zippers. It doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, what I’m telling you is that Brady Tillotson wasn’t going anywhere.

His guardian showed up a couple of moments later, a fizz of light named Gefen. Rotwood the prosecutor showed up shortly thereafter, a demon so old and gnarled he might have been painting Hell when the Devil himself first moved in. I’d appeared against Rotwood before-he knew his stuff and some of the judges seemed to like his familiarity with the rules, but there were scarier prosecutors out there.

“This won’t be easy,” said Gefen quietly as the prosecutor conferenced with his own infernal version of a guardian angel.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because our client is a shit.”

It was only a short time longer in that timeless place before the judge flared into our presence. It was my old buddy Xathanatron, the Principality who had sent Silvia Martino to Heaven the night Clarence had first tagged along.

Angel Doloriel, it said to me, You Are Again Summoned To The Celestial City. There was a pause, then: It Seems I Must Add “Secretary To The Advocate” To The List Of My Titles.

This was a joke, boss-angel style, and so I laughed in a way I hoped sounded at least slightly sincere. “That’s very funny, Your Honor. Thank you for passing the message along. I hope we won’t keep you long tonight.”

It Is All The Same-The Interruption Of My Contemplation Has Already Occurred. I couldn’t help noticing he still had that charming, democratic touch.

I finished huddling with Gefen just as my dead student stumbled back into our presence, toga flapping like the sails on the Marie Celeste. He looked a little more sober now but just as pissed off. The guardian angel’s full report was longer than his initial remark but came to the same thing: Brady Tillotson was a drunkard, a bully, and as close to being a date-rapist as you can get without actually stepping over the line and using drugs or gross physical force, but certainly the kind of guy who liked his women too drunk to understand the issues of consent properly. He cheated on his studies-he was a starting linebacker on the football team and people were always around to “help” him pass his classes-he stole from friends, and was also one of those people who even years out of high school still got a real kick out of bullying other students. In other words, a shit. What made my job even tougher, though, was that he wasn’t cooperating.

“I don’t think any of this is right,” he kept saying way too loudly. “Who do I complain to? I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t fucking believe in any of it. It’s crap. There aren’t any angels. It’s a lie.”

The judge didn’t say anything about this unending whine of complaint, but it couldn’t have been helping. I did everything I could to come up with mitigating circumstances-Brady Tillotson’s youth, his parents’ divorce, the fact that junior high school and high school coaches and teachers had never disciplined him because he was a star athlete-but I was not at my best because I’d taken a bit of a dislike to the kid myself. He would definitely be getting a long stretch in Purgatory, but I have to admit I thought he deserved it.

Near the end, when we’d summed up and Xathanatron had dropped into a glittering silence to consider the arguments, Brady suddenly turned to me, and for the first time all the anger and resistance had left his face. Post- mortem sobriety had caught up with him

“Oh my God,” he said. “This is real. This is real! I’m dead!”

“I’m afraid so,” I told him. “But things can get better than this….”

“What’s going on here? Why are you…? Oh, Jesus-shit, I’m never going to see my mom again.” His face went slack with grief, and a tear welled up and trembled on his lower lid. “Never…”

Xathanatron spoke. The Sentence Is Damnation, was all the judge said, then vanished.

Rotwood clapped his withered hands together once in pleasure before he also vanished. A vortex began to swirl around Brady Tillotson and although he fought against it, already he was beginning to be pulled apart and sucked downward.

“No!” he cried. His eyes were terrible. “Don’t let them. Please, please, please! This isn’t supposed to