The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“A minute? Angel, please. I’ve been lying here waiting and listening to you wheeze like an asthmatic basset hound for at least half an hour. You should get checked for whatever that is. Sleep apnea. You sounded like you were trying to swallow your tongue.”

“Really?” Alarmed, he sat up.

“No. But I’m glad your heart’s actually beating now. Find me coffee, and then tell me what you discovered in the Records Hall.”

“You’re an asshole, Bobby.”

“Just trying to do the Lord’s holy work.”

He led me upstairs to the kitchen and got something going in a French press that looked appropriately black and strong. “Are you going to be pissed off at me if I didn’t find all the stuff you wanted?” he asked.

“Depends. Talk.”

He looked like a kid who was certain he’d be grounded for a month. “It’s just…well, except for that Patrillo guy, there wasn’t anything on any of the rest of those names.”

“Really?” I gave him a stern look, but inside I was pleased. He’d passed the test, as well as confirming what I’d guessed about the names. Jose Maria Patrillo, head of some Christian charity called the Sixth Angel Foundation, was the only person whose name I’d given the kid that wasn’t one of the names Fatback had told me showed up in connection with the Magian Society. As I’d suspected, Clarence hadn’t been able to find any records on Habari or any of the others, just the ringer, Patrillo, which meant the Magian-related names all had to be pseudonyms. “Really, kid? You couldn’t find anything on the others? Nothing at all? Not even rumors?”

“It doesn’t work like that!” He looked upset at being doubted. Really it was what I had expected to hear, and I was happy to have the confirmation. It also made me feel better about Clarence’s truthfulness, although by no means did it prove he was legit. “This isn’t like an internet search or something,” he explained as I did my best to act as though I didn’t already know. “The Records are about real people, see. I found all kinds of stuff on that Patrillo guy, but all the other names-that Habari and the Germans, those others-they just don’t give anything back. They’re not among the living right now, if they ever were.”

“Which is probably because they aren’t real people,” I said. “Cool your jets, kid. I believe that’s all you found, and I don’t think anyone else would have found anything more, but-”

I didn’t get a chance to finish because just that moment Sheila, Clarence’s roommate/surrogate mom, walked into the kitchen. She was wearing slippers and a dark green velour housecoat. “Good morning, Harrison,” she fluted as she came in, then stopped, clearly a little surprised to see me. “Oh! Did your friend stay over?” Her look was confusion mixed with an unwillingness to intrude on what she obviously considered private matters.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said cheerfully. “We were up so late playing Twister that I just crashed out on Harrison’s floor.” I turned to the kid, who had spluttered coffee down his front. “You okay, buddy?”

“Twister?” she said doubtfully.

“Yeah, it’s a card game. A variant on Two-Man Stud. Hope you don’t mind me spending the night. It got a bit late to drive home.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” she said. “Do you fellows want some breakfast?”

“He might,” I said, standing up. “I need to get to work. See you, Harrison. Thanks for the game.”

Clarence looked as though he wished the ghallu had got me after all.

I only knew part of the reason that Eligor had sent his pet monster after me; I knew why he thought I had the golden feather, but not why Grasswax had blamed it on me, or exactly what kind of weird bargain the feather signified. But one thing I’d decided was that it was too much of a coincidence that Grasswax, Caz, Eligor, and I should all be involved somehow with both the disappearing souls and the disappearing feather, especially since it was now looking like it had all gone down on the same day. In fact, I was becoming more and more certain that the feather had some bearing on the whole missing-souls mess that started with Edward Walker’s death. I also wanted to know why Walker and the others had been souljacked in the first place. Were they just random victims? But if so, why would Walker have been checked out so closely ahead of time, including personal visits from Habari? Was Habari working with the soul-stealers or against them?

The fact that the Rev. Dr. Habari and the others from apparently Magian-related groups seemed to have no independent existence only strengthened my belief in a link between Eligor’s feather and the missing souls. The Magian paper trail leading to Eligor suggested that, whether or not he was the author of the Great Soul Snatch, the grand duke clearly had something to hide about his role in the whole apocalyptic mess. It also made me realize that I needed to get a better handle on the souls who had already disappeared, or at least find out enough about them to look for patterns. I needed to speed things up, and I had very little hope that the summit conference between Heaven and Hell was going to come up with answers that would help me-not with so many asses to cover, both those bearing tails and otherwise.

When I hit the Camino Real I found myself a coffee shop that looked just busy enough that I wouldn’t be the only patron and ordered a late breakfast, then pulled up all the memos Fatback had sent me about the individuals in San Judas whose souls Monica had told me were among the missing. It wasn’t the first time I’d looked the information over but it had been more than a few days, and I was hoping something new would jump out at me.

Even the atheist angle, which was quite strong with Walker and a few others, didn’t hold up all the way through. Several of the missing souls belonged to men who seemed to have a fairly ordinary connection to religion, and one of them was even a well-known Christian minister, leader of a successful, modern, evangelical church that was big among the lapsed Catholics of Spanishtown. On the surface, the missing souls seemed to be a pretty random lot.

I had worked through hash browns, bacon, my second cup of coffee, and was poking at the fruit cup when I finally realized I’d been spending my time looking for secondary connections like neighborhoods and workplaces and committees and even children’s schools without giving any attention to perhaps the most important thing they all had in common-their deaths. Walker was a suicide. Rubios, the minister, had fallen from an office balcony when a railing had given way. An esteemed Stanford researcher had slipped off a BART platform in front of a moving train with nobody nearby. The police had concluded her death was nothing but a tragic accident. The rest? Two suicides and three more natural deaths.

So there was my first question-three suicides? Wasn’t that an abnormally large ratio out of seven otherwise random deaths? Had they all really chosen to take their own lives? One of the suicides had been very ill, which made it less likely that foul play was involved, but it certainly didn’t rule it out.

But if Eligor or some other strategist in Hell had come up with a way to snatch the souls of the departed right under our angelic noses, why would they need to make it look like anything? Dead folks were shuffling off the mortal coil every hour, and both sides had thousands of operatives just to process those transitions to the afterlife. Why bother to hurry a few folk out of their mortal bodies just to snatch their souls? Unless some kind of special death was necessary before the soul in question could be hijacked. Was that where someone like the elusive Habari came in? To “help” the chosen out of their bodies, whether they wanted to go or not? But the Reverend Doctor seemed to have spent a lot of time hanging around with Edward L. Walker for someone whose job was simply to commit a murder. Even if it was necessary to give the mark something before he or she died-some kind of soul-collector or equally science-fictional device-it seemed like it would have been easier to have a professional pickpocket plant the thing on them before they were killed instead of sending someone like Moses Habari to pal around with the intended victim for weeks ahead of time.

No, clearly I still didn’t have enough information to make sense out of the disappearing dead, or even to begin to. I sure couldn’t guess what the method was, and I didn’t have a clue as to the motive, either. Why steal souls and try to hide it? Not that the Opposition wouldn’t have loved to be able to do it, but when there’s only two players in the game, and one of them always cheats anyway, why would they bother to keep their advantage a secret? There were only two players in the game, weren’t there…?

I shuffled through the information Fatback had sent me on the deaths, all the forensics and reports from first responders, but still nothing jumped out at me except the waste of all these significant lives, many of them over before they should have been, no matter what the reason.

Then something did jump out at me. In fact, it damn near knocked me down and screamed “Boo!” in my face. Significant lives. The methods of leaving those lives may have seemed random and the lives themselves may not have had any connections with each other, but one thing