The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar
Read The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar Online
Authors: Tad Williams
DAW Books Presents
The Finest in Imaginative Fiction by
TAD WILLIAMS
BOBBY DOLLAR
THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN
HAPPY HOUR IN HELL
*
SLEEPING LATE ON JUDGEMENT DAY
*
SHADOWMARCH
SHADOWMARCH
SHADOWPLAY
SHADOWRISE
SHADOWHEART
TAILCHASER’S SONG
THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS
MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN
THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR
STONE OF FAREWELL
TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER
OTHERLAND
CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW
RIVER OF BLUE FIRE
MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS
SEA OF SILVER LIGHT
*
Coming soon from DAW Books
THE
DIRTY STREETS
OF
HEAVEN
A Bobby Dollar Novel
TAD WILLIAMS
DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM
SHEILA E. GILBERT
PUBLISHERS
www.dawbooks.com
Copyright © 2012 by Tad Williams.
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-101-59757-6
Jacket art by Kamil Vojnar.
Jacket design by G-Force Design.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1599.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First printing, September 2012
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
This book is dedicated to my dear friend David Charles Michael Pierce.
Dave loved stuff like this and I think he would have liked this book, too. I hope someday we’ll see each other again, and he can let me know what I got right and what I got wrong.
Thanks for being my buddy, Dave. I miss you. We all miss you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As usual, there are far too many people whose work contributed to the writing of this book than I can ever properly thank, but these are at the top of the list:
Much gratitude to my magical wife, Deborah Beale, and my first choice for backup in a firefight, my dangerous pal Josh Stallings, for reading the rough manuscript and offering sensible advice.
Huge thanks as always to our assistant Dena Chavez and her husband Scott Chavez, who helped hold reality together for us during a crazy year while I wrote it. Couldn’t have done it without you guys.
My agent, Matt Bialer, was and always is a huge source of calm in a world of stress and strange contractual language. Bless you, Matt.
Lisa Tveit makes sense of my online life, including our website at tadwilliams.com, and I can’t thank her enough for that.
And of course my publishers, all of them, but especially the good people at DAW Books and my editors Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, who keep reminding me that books should make sense.
Three: Different Than Sunday School
Seven: A Lioness Comes to Drink
Fourteen: Friends in Low Places
Sixteen: Brady Doesn’t Believe
Seventeen: Economical with the Truth
Eighteen: Poison Darts and Fiji Mermaids
Twenty-One: Knife Fight in a Harem
Twenty-Three: Assorted Blasphemies
Twenty-Six: The Pride that Goeth
Twenty-Seven: The Atheist’s Bible
Thirty-One: Something to My Advantage
Thirty-Two: Saddest Sound I Ever Heard
Thirty-Three: The Odor of Violent Subtext
Thirty-Four: Breathing Together
Thirty-Six: Departed this Earth
Thirty-Nine: The Dirty Streets of Heaven
inhuman resources
I
WAS JUST stepping out of the elevator on the 43rd floor of the Five Page Mill building when the alarms began going off—those nightmarish, clear-the-building kind like the screams of tortured robots—and I realized I’d pretty well lost any chance at the subtle approach.
Did I mention that when I’m under stress I tend to revert to old habits? And being chased by monsters (as well as being made the fall guy for the biggest fuck-up between Heaven and Hell in the last few thousand years)
will
produce some stress. So that was me right then—jumpy and in need of answers. And when I’m feeling that way I tend to push on things until something happens.
I didn’t calm down any when a husky security guard lurched out of the stairwell a few yards away, eyes adrenaline-wide, shoving his service pistol in my face. He shouted, “Get on the floor!” but instead of keeping the gun trained on me he started waving it to show me where to go, and I knew that I had him.
“Hold on, don’t…don’t you want to see my employee badge or something?” I was doing my best to sound like a confused and innocent corporate drone. “P-p-please don’t shoot me!”
“I want you down on the floor! There!” Again he jabbed the gun toward the discreetly expensive carpeting. The alarms were making it hard to hear so I went with that, screwing up my face in fear and confusion.
“What? I didn’t understand you! Don’t shoot…!”
“God damn it, get down!” He grabbed my arm with his free hand. I leaned away to get him off balance, then yanked his wrist so that he staggered toward me, waving his gun hand in a desperate attempt to keep his balance. It didn’t matter much because I hit him square in the face with my forearm, jolting his head back and dropping him like a sack of laundry. Broke his nose, too, I’m pretty sure.
I didn’t know whether Vald’s security guards were normal people on a normal payroll or soldiers of the Opposition, and I didn’t have time to search this guy for extra nipples or whatever. (To be honest, except for a few retro covens, extra nipples have pretty much fallen out of fashion as a sign of allegiance to Hell.) So I left him alive but unconscious on the floor and tossed his gun and walkie-talkie into a trash bin in case he woke up sooner than I expected.
Everything had gone ass-up now and I knew I would be better off just leaving before anyone got killed, but I do have that problem I mentioned—when I get agitated I just kind of put my head down and keep shoving. Like a rhino with an itch, as my old boss delicately put it. Anyway, I decided I might as well see where this whole thing was going to lead.
I knew I had about seven or eight minutes maximum before the building was completely overrun by people with guns who would be happy to use them on me, so I hurried up the stairs to the 44th floor where I paused for a second or two to admire the view of Stanford University’s creepy Gothic towers through the picture window at the end of the hall. The master office suite clearly took up the entire floor, so I walked through the only door and found myself standing in front of the calmest woman I have ever pointed a gun at. She was good-looking, too—slender, with Eurasian features, short, dark hair, and extremely cold eyes. I was pretty certain she’d already pushed the silent alarm.