The Dirty Streets of Heaven

by the way, I’ve got a gun. And I’m pretty sure I’ve also got the only bullets in the room.”

thirty-eight

the third way

“You?” I said. “Really?”

Clarence looked at me but he kept the strange little gun pointed at Sam, which didn’t really make sense. “Surprised? Or disappointed?” He was playing it very tough, but there was a telltale tremor in his gun hand.

“Depends, I guess. How did you find us out here?”

“Hold on,” he said. “Before anybody does any more talking, I just want to mention that this is a needle gun full of some kind of South American plant toxin, Sam, so if you try do something dramatic like kill yourself, I’ll drop you with it, and you’ll be paralyzed for hours. And I can make the shot, too-I’ve been practicing.” He looked down at the titan corpse of the ghallu. “Wow. Did you do that, Bobby? That must have been tough.”

“Hold on, why would Sam want to kill himself?” I demanded.

“Because he’s got access to at least one other body,” Clarence said. “Habari’s.”

Startled, I looked at Sam, who shrugged. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Habari was you?”

“Who did you think it was?” he asked me. “I thought you knew. Fuck’s sake, I thought that’s why you took me to that headstone.”

“I knew you had something to do with all this Magian Society stuff, but I thought Habari might be…well, Leo. Because they both died about the same time.”

“You’re talking about our Leo? From the Harps?” Sam shook his head. “As far as I know, he’s dead and we’re not getting him back. And Habari died a year or so after Leo. But Leo was involved, indirectly….”

“Wait a minute.” I turned back to Junior, who was still trying to perfect his I’m-in-control stance. “This is going too fast for me. How did you find us here?”

Clarence had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sam’s phone is hacked. I can always find out where he is. I had some help from Upstairs on that.”

“You were tracking Sam all this time, not me?” I looked at Sam. “So you lied to me. It wasn’t me he was spying on.”

“Shit, B,” he said, “I lied to you about a lot of things. Yeah, the kid’s been keeping an eye on me all along. Some of our bosses were getting suspicous.”

Then something else occurred to me, and I turned back to Clarence. “But Sam lost his phone earlier tonight, long before we got here. So how did you track us to Shoreline Park?”

Clarence stared back, but he was hesitating. “I bugged your phone, too,” he admitted at last. “After I got here, I followed the noise.”

If he’d had access to my phone he might know everything, even about Caz. This wasn’t good at all. “So Temuel was just double-bluffing me? You’ve been working for our bosses all this time? That still doesn’t explain how you got here, kid-you can’t drive. Or did you lie about that too?”

Now Clarence looked really guilty. “I…found a ride.”

I laughed despite myself. “And is what’s-her-name, your nice old landlady, sitting out there in her Continental keeping the heater running ’til you get back?”

He scowled. “You don’t know everything, Bobby. I’ve been renting from them because Burt has an indoor shooting range in his basement. They let me practice down there.” He turned to Sam. “Now it’s your turn, Angel Sammariel. Start talking, because once I turn you over to our superiors they’ll clamp down on all this and I’ll never find out what happened. How did the Third Way approach you? What did they offer you?”

“Not they,” Sam said after a moment. “Kephas.”

The other name Temuel had given me, along with the Magians.

“Never heard of him,” said Clarence.

Sam shook his head. “Not a him, necessarily. Just a disguised presence, not male, not female. A high-up angel, though, that’s for sure. Kephas offered me a deal.”

“Kephas means ‘rock,’” I said, remembering what Fatback had told me. “As in, ‘On this rock I will build My church…’”

Sam nodded. “The higher angels, they like that old school stuff.”

Clarence snorted at this. “Betraying Heaven is old school?”

Sam gave the kid a cold look. “You wouldn’t know about it, Junior, but me and Bobby saw a lot of ugly stuff when we were in the Harps. Stuff they don’t teach you in the Records department-”

“Yeah, yeah, it was hell out there,” Clarence interrupted. “Spare me the justifications, Sam. You didn’t like what our superiors gave you to do, so you decided to find some nicer bosses.”

Sam shook his head again, not in negation but in something more like resignation. “It was our old top-kicker Leo who first got me thinking, actually. He was always talking about the politics, the stuff going on behind the scenes, wondering who was really in charge.”

“Another paranoid.” But Clarence sounded like he might be trying to convince himself more than us.

“Said the undercover spy to his ex-partner.” Sam forced a sour grin. “After awhile, what Leo said began to make sense; whoever’s really in charge, they don’t seem to have our interests at the top of their priority list. I couldn’t ignore that any longer. And then Leo died-the real death, the final kind. I didn’t think it was an accident. Still don’t. Maybe I said a few things afterward that drifted around Upstairs, I don’t know. Whatever tipped them off, the Third Way group found me. Kephas was their representative, and he, she, whatever it is, asked me if I wanted to do something to make Heaven better.” Sam then repeated most of the stuff I’d already heard in Walker’s quasi- suicide letter about the Third Way, their belief in the need for an alternative to Heaven and Hell, their willingness to try to do something about it. “They weren’t ready to move yet-this was years ago-but I couldn’t take being in the Harps any longer.” He turned to me. “It was beginning to feel like a lie, Bobby-all that talk about how we were the only bulwark against Hell’s evil on Earth, but there we were doing all that awful shit.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “I might have listened, too.” But I wasn’t certain about that. I don’t like chaos. I don’t like secrets. And I sure as hell didn’t like the idea of people as powerful as Karael and his friends being angry at me.

“So I quit the Harps,” Sam went on, “took an informal leave of absence, and for a while I just…well, sort of bummed around. Settled here in San Judas and tried to figure out what I was doing. Made friends-mortal friends, even. One of them was Reverend Habari.” The tone of Sam’s voice said this was important to him. “I really wish you’d known him, Bobby. He was a good man. Truly good. He wasn’t just a community political activist, he would take in homeless folk and feed them and let them stay until he could get them into a shelter. He marched in all the marches, but he also stayed up late supervising the night basketball league in Sierra Park. Visited shut-ins. Read to sick folks. And then he got cancer and died. And all I could think was, ‘And that’s the end of a good man. He’s gone.’”

“What do you mean?” Clarence sounded outraged. “He died. If he was as good as you say, then he went straight to Heaven!”

Sam’s voice rose. “For what? To become what? Our masters have made certain we don’t know anything for sure, kid. The only angels we know are like us-ciphers with their memories wiped, working for the Man down here on Earth or our bosses in Heaven. Is that what happened to Moses Habari? They just erased everything and started him over, like us? Or is he one of those poor fools square-dancing in the Fields of the Blessed with about as much of his personality left as a psychiatric patient pumped full of happy drugs?”

“It’s not like that!” The barrel of Clarence’s needle gun wavered, but he kept it on Sam. “We’re angels! We work for God!”

“Well, see, that’s something I’m not as sure about as you, son. All that stuff you used to ask me, ‘Why this,