happen-you were supposed to save me! Aaah! Huuhhhh!
I drove very slowly back across the city, stopping on the way at a bar I didn’t remember ever seeing before and couldn’t have found again if I had to. I downed two fast drinks, then realized I probably shouldn’t push my luck, even though I badly needed to get smashed, and get that way very soon. Too many nasty people were looking for me to risk ending up in a drunk tank or stumbling around in some parking lot in the dark. I got back into my car, stopped at a liquor store on the Camino Real and bought a bottle of vodka and a bag of ice, then headed back to my motel.
Before I got too obliterated I called in to the office and got Alice’s voice mail.
“Tell the bosses that Bobby Dollar isn’t coming into the Celestial City tonight,” I instructed the silence. “Because I don’t want to have to listen to any more lectures about doing my job. Tell them that. And tell them if they really want me they can come get me. Otherwise I’m going to stay here and keep doing what I’m doing, the best way I know how.”
I was halfway through the bottle before I stopped hearing that college kid screaming like a burning child as he tumbled down into the darkness.
seventeen
I got up the next morning with a head that felt like the ball from some brutal medieval game, the kind where at least a couple of peasants died every time. But even the horrible throbbing couldn’t make me forget the not- very-bright thing I’d done the night before-basically told Heaven to go fuck itself. So why wasn’t I standing up in front of a celestial firing squad or whatever it was that happened to bad angels?
I toyed with the hope that Alice had tried to save me by not passing my message along, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. Another possibility was that up there in the timelessness of Heaven they just hadn’t yet got around to pressing the “Blow Up Bobby Dollar” button, but as far as I’d seen, Heaven didn’t tend to wait around before meting out corrections and general holy vengeance.
So I was left with the two most likely answers: Heaven didn’t care that much what trouble I got into, so Heaven was going to wait and let me hang myself, or Heaven actually approved of what I was doing and, presumably, whatever I was going to do in the near future. Which would have been pretty funny because I didn’t have even a clue as to what I should do next.
I put on a pair of sunglasses so I could hobble to the motel manager’s office and get myself a couple of cups of cheap coffee to take back to the curtained, comfortable darkness of my room. A few aspirin, a few more aspirin, then I was almost ready to face the day and what it might bring. First, though, I had some self-defense business to take care of. I’d lost my Smith amp; Wesson in Five Page Mill, and this didn’t seem like a good time to be walking around unarmed.
Orban the gunsmith picked up on about the tenth ring. “Speak.” He has an eastern European accent and the rasp of a man with a porcupine lodged in his throat. He told me once he was shot in the neck during the First World War and it’s never been right since. I believed him. You would, too.
“Bobby Dollar here. I need some silver.”
“Hmmm.” A noise like someone dragging a stick along a picket fence. “Bullets or something else?”
“Bullets. But I need to talk to you about it. You around today?”
“Two o’clock,” he said, then hung up.
Orban’s factory was out at the end of Pier 22-one of the Salt Piers. Thirty or forty years ago the southern end of the port of San Judas was owned by the Leslie Salt Company. They harvested salt from the bay water and piled it into mountains to dry, a range of miniature Alps looming over the not-quite-Tyrolean splendors of Belle Haven and Ravenswood. The salt-harvesting people changed to a different technique in the nineties that used less space, so they sold off a bunch of the land at the southernmost end. Most of it became a nature preserve, but some of the piers where they used to load the salt onto container ships were repurposed into shops and apartments. The dingiest of them at one end were sold as live/work spaces. A lot of artists got in with grants from the city, but a few small manufacturers like Orban got in too. He wanted somewhere he could make noise at any hour of the day or night.
He made a lot of it, too. Today I could hear his machinery and the clangs of hammers all the way out at the entrance to the cracked asphalt expanse of the parking lot, which was mostly full this time of the day, but would be nearly as empty as the Gobi desert by midnight. Orban had created quite a thriving little concern here at the end of Pier 22, a collection of long, low buildings full of metal-grinding and bending and riveting machinery and God knew what else, manned largely by black and Hispanic workers. At the near end stood another set of benches set up for handwork, where lots of white guys with beards, who looked like they should be out with the anti-government militia on weekends, sat fiddling with various bits of guns-measuring, filing, polishing. Out of sight at the far end was the room full of sand-filled buckets that Orban used as a firing range. Beyond that, outside, was what the gunsmith called his veranda, a metal platform that stuck out over the water. He kept a couple of chairs out there so he could sit and look across the bay all the way to the Newark Ferry Port, atmosphere permitting.
The master gunmaker himself had a short grizzled beard and hair that grew naturally in a thick monk’s tonsure. Just looking at him you’d guess a fit sixty-five years old, but according to him, he’d been around about five centuries longer than that. Orban got on the wrong side of Heaven back in the fifteenth century because of something that happened at the siege of Constantinople, (or so he’d told me one night over a couple of glasses of strong red wine, while we waited for one of his assistants to finishing customizing some weaponry for me). Since Heaven would never take him back, he said, and he didn’t want to go to Hell, he had simply decided not to die.
Don’t bother to ask-I’m just telling you what he told me.
Orban had his back to me but looked up as I reached the makeshift counter, as though he had actually heard me over the clanging, slamming din. He was wearing some special eyepieces that made him look like a robot crab. He slid them back onto his forehead and stood up, which didn’t take long. He’s not very tall.
“What do you want, Dollar? Make it fast-I have real customers to take care of, you know.”
“Yeah, nice to see you too. I need some help and advice. Oh, and bullets. Silver bullets.” I told him what was after me and everything I knew about it, but he shook his head the whole time I was talking like I was saying it all wrong. “What?” I asked. “Silver no good against one of those?”
“Only if it’s special.”
“Special how? Blessed by a priest?”
He made a face like he’d bitten a lemon. “Priests no good. This thing chasing you is older than the Jews, let alone the bloody Christians. Come.”
I kept asking him questions as he led me across the fluorescent-lit expanse of the long, extremely noisy room, but he couldn’t define “special”, except that he couldn’t supply it. That gave me a chill, and I hadn’t been particulary warm before: Orban’s place doesn’t have a secondary ceiling beneath the roof, just a fretwork of beams, so it was cold in there most of the year. Maybe that’s why the gunsmith still looked pretty good for five hundred plus.
He stopped to discuss my order with a swarthy guy in an apron. “How much you want?” Orban asked me. “Going to cost ten dollars per piece just for the silver-it’s high now. Give you a hundred at fifteen a round complete- that’s a good price for custom work.”
Man, I thought, saving my life was going to be expensive, and Heaven didn’t pay us much. “Then give me a hundred of ’em, I guess. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.” Orban always treated me fairly, but I still wasn’t thrilled. The new ammunition was going to blow a large wad of my emergency funds, and I was pretty sure my bosses weren’t going to expense me for the extra motels and silver monster-killers.
Once Orban finished going over the technical specs with his assistant he led me out to his rusty veranda. It was mid-afternoon, and the water was full of working vessels, most of them small since we were a good distance south of the working part of the port, and most of what surrounded us was shallow water and estuaries. “Sit,” he
