The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar (13 page)

“Countess,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

“We’ve met?” The only difference between her Outside and Inside appearance, I could see now, were her eyes. Here in the so-called real world they weren’t bloody red but a pale, icy blue. She smiled, but it was hard, hard,
hard
. “Remind me.”

“Just the other day. Outside the Walker house.”

“Walker house?” She could make even two such ordinary words sound as if I’d said something crude and suggestive. “I don’t know any such place, and I don’t know you.”

Now it was my turn to smile. “I’m willing to believe you didn’t know me before that, Countess, but I think everybody knows who was there by now. It’s become kind of talked-about in certain circles. My name is Bobby Dollar.”

She stared at me for a long second, chilly as a core sample pulled from the polar ice. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Dollar. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m expecting someone.”

“That’s okay. I’m willing to share,” I said, then a hand gripped my right arm so hard that the heavy mug dropped from my nerveless fingers and fell onto the table, fountaining beer and froth.

“The lady said
go
,” Number One, the guy with the web tattoo, informed me in a breathy whisper. “Now do it. Or I’ll pull your arm out of—”

I didn’t bother to wait and find out what he was going to pull it out of, or what he was going to do with it afterward. Instead I snatched up the dropped mug with my left hand and brought the heavy glass down as hard as I could on his fingers where they were splayed on the table. He let go of my arm and gave out a short, sharp grunt of pain that I derailed by backhanding him across the face with the mug, hard as I could swing it. As he toppled awkwardly to the floor, gushing blood from his nose, I heard footsteps right behind me. I dropped the mug and spun around; by the time I finished the turn my .38 was in my hand and pointing right at Number Two’s face. He was still fumbling for his own piece. I guess he hadn’t expected so much excitement at The Water Hole tonight. If it had been me running to protect my boss, I would have drawn long before I got so close, but that’s because I’m
not that strong compared to some of these bruisers, and I really hate pain.

“Fuck you, tough guy,” said Number Two. He had a military haircut, a huge mustache, and a really deep voice. Other than that, he could have been any death row triple-murderer. “Go ahead, shoot me. She’ll kill you worse than I ever could. Then she’ll take you home and kill you some more.”

“I don’t want to shoot you, sunshine. I don’t even want to damage you badly enough to interrupt your gay porn career.” I turned to the Countess, who was watching with something like amusement despite the blood and beer splashed across the table and threatening to drip onto what was probably five thousand dollars worth of designer workout gear. “Well, Ma’am? Do you and I talk, or are they going to have to move the tables to mop up all the red stuff?”

She gave me a bored look, then leaned over a bit so she could see the guy on the floor. “Candy?”

Number One looked up. Blood was still bubbling out from underneath his hand, and his eyes were swelling closed. I’d done a pretty good job on his nose. “I can still kill him if you want me to, Countess,” he said, grinning red.

“No, that’s not necessary. Cinnamon, take Candy out to the car and stop the bleeding.”

The guy looking down the barrel of my Smith & Wesson seemed disturbed for the first time. “No way! We’re not leaving you!”

She frowned. “You’re not doing me any good right now anyway. Go on. As you pointed out, I can take care of myself.”

Grumbling like an idling big rig, Cinnamon helped his bloody pal up off the floor. During the initial moments of the fray everyone in the bar had turned to look, but now they were losing interest rapidly, as they always do when us embodied folks make a public fuss. My old mentor Leo used to call this protective effect “the Cloud of Unknowing,” but I don’t know where he got that.

As Cinnamon helped his friend toward the door, leaving a trail of red drips across the concrete tiles, the Countess gave me a look from which all amusement had packed up and moved out. “You’ve got about two minutes, angel, so sit down and start talking. Then either I’ll tear your head off myself because you didn’t impress me, or those two will get nervous enough to call for backup.”

“Yeah. But you never got your drink.”

She looked at me like I must be kidding. “That two minutes was an outside estimate.” She watched me not sitting down, then the smile came back, one of the grudging,
I admire your bravery but you’re still going to be dead as vaudeville
kind. I get them more often than I’d like. “It’s still sitting on the bar—the one with the celery stick.”

“A Bloody Mary? You’re joking, right?”

She didn’t like that. “If you’re going to make editorial comments I’m going to pop your skull off your spine right now, Mr. Dollar.”

I went to fetch her Bloody Mary. There were two beers there, too, which had been meant for the bodyguards, so I brought those back as well. I felt like I’d earned them, and now that my heart wasn’t beating so fast I wanted to drink something quickly, before I realized what I’d just done. What if I’d had to shoot the second guard? At the very least I’d lose my job as a heavenly advocate, and in the midst of all this craziness about the Walker case, killing a member of the Opposition in public would probably bring much worse trouble than just a demotion to Angelic Patron of Cub Scouts or whatever.

“So,” she said as I slipped into the booth and faced her across the table, “why exactly do you want to die so badly, Mr. Dollar?” Somehow bar employees had cleaned the table and floor while I was gone. Everything was so clean it was almost like a first date. “Haven’t things been exciting enough already?”

“I’m not really seeking death,” I said. “More like information.”

“From me? What on earth can you possibly hope to learn from me? And why would I share anything with you? Need I remind you that our two organizations have been at war for millions of years?”

“Not war,” I said, then took a long swallow from one of my new beers. I wondered if I’d be alive long enough to start the second one. “Remember, it’s officially called a ‘conflict.’ Some of the bean counters on my side even like to refer to it as a ‘competition.’ Which would make us not enemies but…competitors.”

She bit her lip, perhaps to keep from smiling or frowning, perhaps simply because she knew it made her look so intensely sexy that it befuddled the mind of anything with a body. “What does the competition want to know? And not that I care, but you really had better stop showing off how brave you are and get to the point. Just because you caught Candy and Cinnamon by surprise, you shouldn’t think they’re
useless. They can make you hurt for a very, very long time without letting you die. We have whole graduate studies programs for that, where I come from.”

“Oh, I know. In fact, that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. Who do you think earned their doctorate on Prosecutor Grasswax?”

Her lovely face went dead but the eyes remained as wide and innocently blue as a prairie sky. The voice was pure Mary Poppins. “Is that an accusation, Mr. Dollar? If it is, it strikes me as a very, very foolish one.”

I raised my hand. “Peace, Princess—”

“Countess.”

“Yeah. I’m not accusing you. Why would I want to do that even if I thought it was true? Grasswax didn’t work for my side, and he certainly wasn’t my friend. In fact, I thought he was a shit.”

“Then perhaps
you
did it.”

“Maybe. But you’ll have to trust me for now when I say I doubt it, and that I’d really like to know who did.”

“The whole infernal hierarchy would like to know.” Her eyes narrowed. “And they’re even more curious to find out what happened to his client, Edward Walker.”

“Client.” I laughed, but not very hard. “That’s a funny way to talk about a guy Grasswax was trying to get sentenced to an eternity of being fried in flaming oil like an eggroll.”

“Our prosecutor was doing his job, Mr. Dollar. I was doing my job, too. I suggest you might live a little longer—whether in or out of a body—if you just went away and did yours.”

“Yeah? Well, not only was I doing my job, I was literally minding my own business until all this shit started blowing sideways.” I was getting angry now, and it was beginning to suppress that prickly back-of-the-neck feeling that less experienced folks might mistake for cowardly fear. (I like to think of it as an imaginative form of caution.) The Countess had been right about one thing: I only had a few minutes at the most before her two Care Bears came back, probably with the rest of their cousins.

“It’s too bad the Walker affair has inconvenienced you,” she said, “but I have nothing else to share with you. And you have nothing to interest me.” She was armored like a tank, a very, very attractive tank
with diamond earrings and what looked like a large silver locket around her pale, smooth neck. “You ought to go away now.”

The shiny stuff distracted me a little—I was under the impression that demons hated silver. “Yes, I’m sure you’d like to get back to whatever you were doing, Countess. Slumming, is my guess.” I sat back, the picture of relaxation, or so I hoped. “I confess to being curious about what brings you to a place like this. I mean, sawdust-on-the-floor joints don’t seem like your scene, Princess.”

Now the smile was actively feral. “You’re trying to irritate me, aren’t you, Mr. Dollar? For your information, I like places like this. You see, I like students.”

“Breaded, with cocktail sauce? Or do you just gobble them down raw like sushi?”

“Nothing so crude, Mr. Dollar.” She had leaned a little closer to me without my noticing, and now her hand alighted on my thigh. I could feel the points of her nails pressing through my jeans. “I’m not a vampire or some other sad, cartoonish thing that eats people. I’m one of Hell’s nobility. Despair, that’s my true meat and drink. And at this age, they are so easily turned down that path.” She giggled like a teenage girl whispering with a friend. “Someone I used to know told me I should aim higher. ‘It’s like shooting blind fish in a very small barrel,’ was how he put it. But I do so love to see them cry and beg, because they start out so sure of themselves—especially the boys!”

“If you’re trying to creep me out you’ll have to try harder.” But I was as conscious of that hand on my leg as I would have been of a poisonous spider. Although not in entirely the same way. “I really don’t care how you spend your time, Countess. It just gave me a chance to meet you and ask some questions.”

The nails poked into my leg a little harder. She moistened her lips, which were already dewy in the extreme. “And have you asked everything you want to ask?”

This had gotten weird very fast. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been around members of the Opposition’s seduction brigade before, and they have mojo working for them a poor little angel boy like me can’t even understand. But the Countess was something else.
Way
else. I was scared she was going to slide her hand up to my crotch and find out just how much of an act my I’m-not-impressed really was. “Okay, then,
one more thing,” I said. “Yesterday I came home and found that I’d been visited by the Burning Hand. Anything you can share with me about that? Did I offend somebody on your side?”

“After seeing you operate, I can’t imagine how that could happen. But I highly doubt it, anyway. I suspect someone’s pulled a little prank on you. The Burning Hand—well, that’s a bit of an old wives’ tale. Haven’t heard of anyone actually getting one for years.”

“Then maybe it’s time to modernize the database.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and punched up a picture of my front door, then held it in front of her very pretty face. “What would you call
that
?”

Jackpot—or at least an expression crossed her face for the first time that wasn’t part of her Demon Queen act. She took her hand off my leg. The weird thing was that it wasn’t just surprise I saw but a hint of fear as well, which freaked me out. What could scare one of Hell’s society-page regulars?

Whatever it was vanished in a moment, like the reflection of something moving. “You’re half right, Mr. Dollar. That’s a burning hand—but it’s not
The
Burning Hand.”

“What are you talking about?”

The hand dropped lightly on my leg again and squeezed ever so gently. The nails were sharp enough to poke through the denim and touch actual skin. “Back in the old days, people who tried to renege on their agreements with us would be reprimanded with the mark of a black, ashy hand on their doors…but the hands that made the marks were human, or at least human-sized. The tradition is very clear about that. Unless you live in a munchkin cottage, I’d say the hand that made this must have been at least as big as a polar bear’s paw.” She held up her own dainty little mitt—the one that wasn’t prickling my thigh. Her long, sharp nails were without polish but very, very clean. “In other words, not made by anything human-sized.”

I could tell there was something else she wasn’t telling me, but I could also sense that she wasn’t going to tell me now. A sort of wall had suddenly gone up between us. I decided to cut my losses and see if I could get out of The Water Hole without a firefight. I disengaged her grip from my leg and slid out of the booth, but just as I did so the front door swung open and several large shapes crowded through, blocking the orange sodium light from the parking lot. Reinforcements.

“Thank you, Countess,” I said. “You’ve been more helpful than you know.”

“You’re cute, Dollar. If you survive the next few minutes you may call me Casimira the next time we meet.” She smiled, and she was so beautiful it hurt my chest. “My friends call me ‘Caz,’ but I don’t think you’ll be around long enough to earn
that
privilege.”

Damn
, she was fine.

There were about five or six of them coming toward us, an entire exhibit escaped from the Big and Ugly Hall of Fame. I sprinted for the other end of the room, furious now that I hadn’t taken time earlier to map the exits.

I found the men’s room and levered myself out the window. Luckily they hadn’t thought enough of me to leave anyone staked out in the parking lot, so by the time they’d busted the lock on the restroom door I was wiping off sweat as I pulled out onto the Camino Real. But I was most of the way back to the motel room I’d rented on the north end of town before I finally stopped thinking about her hand resting lightly on my leg.