The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Sam looked embarrassed. “Well, actually, Temuel told me. Apparently he made some inquiries of his own and then got told to lay off, that it was you the higher-ups were interested in and the Mule shouldn’t interfere. As to why they’re interested in you…hell, I don’t know.”

I sat back in my chair. I felt like I had been punched. “So our bosses sent Clarence to get the dirt on me?” I wanted to go find the kid and give his Dockers-clad ass a good kicking. “Shit! What did I do?”

“You’re a nice man, Dollar, but a lousy angel.” Sam stood up. “Think about it. You said yourself, this is a conspiracy, so maybe this little inquiry isn’t official. Maybe whoever put the kid onto you is trying to cover his own angelic ass for something. It could even be Temuel pulling a fast one on both of us.”

“Or maybe whoever engineered this missing-souls thing is looking for a fall-guy, and I’ve been elected,” I said. “After all, it wouldn’t take much to make Karael and the rest believe I’d gone rogue.” I had a sudden urge to hole up somewhere, maybe not even in San Judas, and just stay that way until Judgement Day-maybe longer. I was that sick of all this spy-caper bullshit.

“Nah, you’ll be okay.” Sam downed the rest of his ginger ale. “I’m pretty sure this crap is going on all the time in Heaven, Bobby, whether you and I know about it or not. You try to figure out what’s going on over our heads, you’ll go crazy.”

I couldn’t process it all yet. I’d need time to figure out how this new information fit in, but time was the one thing I didn’t have much of. “And you’re sure you want to stick around while I’m being fitted for a frame-up, not to mention that I’m Eligor’s target of choice? Are you even up to it? Because I wasn’t joking earlier-you look terrible, Sam.”

He waved his hand as he got up. “Hey, I’m fine, fit, and sober. Okay, not fit. The thrashing from that red-hot bruiser of yours makes me feel like I’m about two hundred years old. I think after the Inquisition-oops, the summit conference-is over I’m going to take a couple of weeks off and get better before I go back to the grind.”

Sam was one of those guys who’d respond to losing a finger in a chainsaw accident with, “Well, at least I can hock one of my rings,” so I knew he must really be hurting. “Look,” I told him, “I’m not going downstairs tonight, and I know you don’t like to hang out in bars anyway, so why don’t you just stick around? We’ll watch some porn and charge it to the office.”

He smiled, the first time he’d looked like his regular ugly self in a while. “Nice idea, but I’ve got a room of my own and I get dirty movies there too. Phone me if you need me. I’m going to crash.” He paused in the doorway. “Breast In Show looked good. I think it’s even in 3D. Don’t get your eye poked out.”

After Sam had gone I put the chain back on the door and prepared for a night in. Unlike my best friend, I have no wagon upon which I have to remain, so I found a couple of little bottles of vodka in the minibar and some orange juice and retired to my bed and its bumpy headboard. My brain was too full of weirdness to watch anything in a serious way. I channel surfed, drank iceless Screwdrivers, and tried to figure out how I’d landed myself in so much trouble.

Latest information piled now on top of earlier unanswered questions, I did my best to find the disinterested, calm state where thinking happened without me trying to make it so. I sort of got there, but things swirled in my head like one of those money-tube game shows, every idea a dollar bill, and for all my grabbing, I felt sure I was still going home broke.

The Clarence stuff made no sense at all: the kid had been dropped on us before the souls even started vanishing. Before I met Caz, too. But if Edward Walker and the rest of the MIAs wasn’t the issue, and Clarence’s arrival predated my relationship with the Countess, why had anyone Upstairs suddenly become interested in me? It wasn’t like I had just started slacking, complaining, and taking the Lord’s name in vain last week. No, I just wasn’t ready to make any guesses about that stuff yet.

Sam’s revelations about the kid hadn’t answered any of my other questions, either, and I still had a ton. Where had Eligor’s feather gone? How was I going to stay ahead of the ghallu? And did my new chum Prince Sitri fit into this mess somewhere? Clearly the fat bastard didn’t mind talking, but as with any demon, believing anything he said was like wearing an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt with the arrow pointing straight up at your own stupid face. Still, the one thing about demon lords is they hate each other almost as much as they hate us-more, sometimes-and Sitri didn’t seem to have much of a problem about getting into Eligor’s shit. I was sure he was telling the truth about the ownership of the hotel-why lie? — but everything else had to be checked, or at least carefully considered.

So, where did that leave me on the big questions? What did I know for certain?

According to Caz, Eligor had made a deal with someone in Heaven, with the marker of that deal being a golden feather. That deal hadn’t necessarily been about the missing souls and the Third Way, but it was an awfully big coincidence timewise if it wasn’t.

Caz’s story (which I wanted to believe, of course, but not being a suicidal idiot had to take with a few grains of salt) was that she had stolen the feather from Eligor as protection and then passed it on to Grasswax when things got hot. Howlingfell said Eligor had sent him to be Grasswax’s bodyguard, which must have alarmed Grasswax quite a bit; Eligor was as much as telling him, “I know you’ve got it.” The deal with Edward Walker’s soul or lack thereof then went down, and by later that same day Grasswax was dead in a very ugly manner that suggested he’d pissed someone off pretty thoroughly or else that they’d wanted information badly, which supported Caz’s story. A short time later, I was entertaining visits from the ghallu, which Caz and Howlingfell had both confirmed was Eligor’s fetch, and that suggested that Grasswax really had told the Grand Duke-probably while vomiting blood-that he gave the feather to me.

Why me? Sure, Grasswax hadn’t seemed to like me much, but pinning it on me still seemed pretty extreme when he must have known he wasn’t going to survive being questioned by Eligor and his minions. I didn’t have the feather, so who had he been protecting? Caz? Didn’t seem in character from a nasty piece of work like Prosecutor Grasswax.

And now I had to fit our young friend Clarence into all this, too. My bosses were spying on me for some reason. Why? Had one of them known that Walker’s soul wasn’t going to turn up, and also knew I’d be on the case? That still didn’t explain much.

A sudden thought from earlier reoccurred to me: what if Eligor wasn’t the only player? What if someone like Sitri wanted the feather too, to blackmail Eligor or whoever the feather belonged to? Could the fat prince have been the one who actually tortured Grasswax, trying to get in on the Great Plumage Hunt? If so, Caz was mistaken…or was lying to me, and so was Howlingfell. But it still didn’t explain where the golden feather was now, or the weird thing my albino buddy Fox had told me about Eligor’s prize: “I smelled it on you.”

You can go crazy with this stuff-wheels within wheels, as Sam put it. Is it any wonder every now and then I have to stop thinking and just do something?

And just to round it all out, I had found a connection between Eligor and Reverend Doctor Habari, the front man for the Magian Society. So what if this whole Third Way mess was some kind of massive, deep-cover fraud Hell was putting over on us to disguise the fact that they’d found a way to shanghai souls before they ever reached judgement? Or a private play for infernal power by Eligor (or Sitri, for that matter)? Either way, the stakes were clearly high, because if Eligor was willing to let his hired demon smash up The Compasses he was obviously more worried about finding the feather than being discreet.

And of course I had to deal with the possibility that the answer was None of the above and that the Magians really did represent some fifth column in Heaven, maybe even the first stages of an attempted coup. We hadn’t had one of those get even close to success since the Lightbringer first tried to snatch the car keys and Daddy took the T-Bird away. Another such revolution from within would be way out of my league, and yet I was right in the middle of it and getting very little support or information from my bosses. As you can imagine, the word “scapegoat” kept coming back to me. It wasn’t a word I liked.

Caz drifted through all these thoughts like a trail of smoke or a hint of some exotic perfume. Had she been using me to get herself off the hook or to push some agenda I couldn’t yet see? That was certainly within the character of her calling. But asking me to believe she had fooled me so completely was asking me to believe that I had learned nothing in all the eventful years of my angelic life, that I was as gullible as the newest halo fresh off the heavenly bus and had fallen in love with an unrepentant hell creature after we spent one night together.

All these possibilities jostled around in my brain like cranky kids kept up too late. At last I gave up trying to figure it all out in one night and called the office to check my conference schedule for Saturday and Sunday: I did not