The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar (9 page)

“Thank You For Your Assistance, Angel Doloriel,”
the masked fixer said.
“As You See, We Are Cooperating With The Opposition In All Ways Possible In This Matter. If Anyone Else Contacts You About This, Or In Any Way Shows Inappropriate Interest, You Will Immediately Alert Us. God Loves You. You May Go.”

And go I did. After all, Grasswax’s hideously mangled form was still hanging between the trees, the sightless eyes watching me with what seemed like disappointment.

Don’t know what you were expecting from me, Brother Demon,
I thought as I stepped back into the world of time.
I don’t want anything to do with the heavy hitters, either my side’s or yours.

Before I got to the Walker house I had been pretty certain I would drop by The Compasses on my way back, but now I felt unsettled right down to the soles of my feet, and I just wanted to go home and bathe myself in holy water. Since I didn’t have any holy water, vodka would have to serve, and the bath would have to be on the inside rather than the outside. I kept a bottle of 42 Below in the freezer for just these kinds of spiritual emergencies.

Monica had left a message on my phone wanting to know how things had gone, and I also had a reminder from Sam that we were getting together after work tomorrow for our monthly dinner (an old custom of ours I’ll tell you about another time) but I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. I wanted to get quickly and quietly blotto because I felt like a garage full of car alarms right after a major earthquake.

When I got through the door of my apartment I pulled out the vodka, cracked the cap, then poured myself a couple of fingers in a glass and put on some Miles as thinking music. As “So What” began to curl around my living room like cigarette smoke I took a fiercely cold swallow and tried to make sense out of everything that had happened in the last day, from the unprecedented absence of Edward Walker’s soul to the sudden passing of Prosecutor Grasswax in the grisliest fashion imaginable.

My old boss Leo used to say that when you’re working for any gigantic and corrupt bureaucracy, whether it’s the British East India Company, the Politburo, or the NCAA, the first lesson is this: Don’t wait to find out exactly how they’re going to screw you before you start protecting yourself—get to work when you spot the first signs of trouble. This whole Walker thing was full of holes, and from long experience I felt sure more weird things were going to be crawling out of those holes very soon.

In fact this particular little clusterfuck, with its missing souls and dead demon-prosecutors, had all the warning signs of one of the worst snafus in recent memory, and if I wasn’t smack in the middle of it I was close enough to feel the heat most unpleasantly. It was time to start the counter-offensive—if I could do so without making things worse for myself, that is.

I poured myself another glass of numbness and thought about where to start.

About an hour later I noticed I had finished my third drink but had never poured myself a fourth. I got up to rectify that, noted that Miles had gone quiet, and put on some Robert Johnson. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Seemed like an appropriate night for Mr. Johnson and his crossroads bargain.

Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door

Early this mornin’, ooh, when you knocked upon my door

And I said, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.”

Even in a body that wasn’t one hundred percent my own, I couldn’t repress a shiver. It looked like I’d be doing a lot of things I wouldn’t much like in the next few days, including having a conversation with my best friend Sam about why he wasn’t being entirely honest with me. Alice in the office had said when she gave me the case that Edward Walker was supposed to be Sam’s client, and if our situations had been reversed I certainly would have explained to
my
old buddy by now why I missed taking a client that landed him deep in the shit.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed more information about everything—about dead Mr. Walker, even about Grasswax. But information about Hell’s labor force wasn’t easy to come by through regular channels. I was going to have to pay a visit to Fatback.

O
RDINARY WORK kept me busy much of the next day. Alice sent me a downtown client, a hit and run on the 84 over by Shell Mound Road. It was pretty much a slam dunk case—the victim was a twelve-year-old school kid crossing the intersection on the way home for lunch. The prosecutor, a new guy named Weepslug took one look at the scene and rolled his eye in disgust. (He only had one, more or less in the middle.) In fact it would all have been over in a very short time indeed—this wasn’t the kind of kid hiding any ugly secrets—but the rules about children are very, very strict, and we had to go through every formality. By the time the judge ruled, and I could finally leave the pathetic scene behind—the whole time we were arguing the case the kid’s twisted bicycle and one shoe were still lying in the middle of the road—my day was pretty much shot. Even winning the case wasn’t going to wipe away the memories of that child crying when he realized he wasn’t going home to his mom and dad.

Sometimes I hate what I do.

At one point, while the judge was questioning the deceased—they do that when it’s a minor—Weepslug turned to me and said, “You heard about Grasswax?”

I wondered if he really didn’t know. “Oh, yeah, I heard.”

“He was a bastard, but trust me, nobody deserves that.”

“I was under the impression you guys thought being a bastard was good.”

He gave me a strange look. For a demon I kind of liked him—his single, bleary eye had a bemused expression, and although he was almost twice my height he didn’t use that to intimidate. Not that I trusted him an inch, of course. “There’s good bad and then there’s
bad
bad,” he said. “G-Wax made some enemies on both sides.”

“You think somebody on
my
side of the scrimmage line might have done this?” This was a new idea. It wasn’t in character for our side, but that could be exactly how someone wanted it to seem. Still, the Bloody Net…!

The prosecutor’s forehead wrinkled in distress; it made his face look like someone had sat on a Christmas ham. “I’m not saying anything,” Weepslug declared, quick and loud. “I don’t know anything.”

“Neither do I,” I assured him. “There’s no greater bliss than ignorance.”

“Oh, look!” yelled Sweetheart when I walked into The Compasses just before six, “It’s Heaven’s Most Wanted!”

“Yeah, cute, very cute.”

Sam was at the bar with a ginger ale and a
San Judas Courier
spread out across the counter. Newspapers were another way my buddy liked to cultivate his old-school act. “Check it out,” he said as I approached. “His working name was Darko Grazuvac.”

It took me a moment. “Grasswax? He got an obituary?”

“Obituary, hell—he got an above-the-fold story. After all, he did just turn up drowned at the scene of a headline suicide. What did you expect?”

This was making me more and more uneasy. Neither our side nor the Opposition liked publicity, especially not this kind—having reporters digging into the backgrounds of people whose pasts were largely invented is never a good thing for either of us. “So, why would anyone bump him off right there at the Walker guy’s house?”

Sam shrugged and downed his ginger ale. “Sending a message? Dunno. Let’s go eat.”

You could get a meal of sorts at The Compasses but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to do if you were going to keep living in the same body afterward, so we wandered across Beeger Square to Boxer Rebellion, my favorite Chinese place. It’s small and unpretentious, and
for a Chinese restaurant (which tend to the businesslike over the sentimental in my experience) also quite friendly.

Normally having a pair of chopsticks in my fist and a plate of their sesame seed mutton in front of me is enough to convince me that the Highest is on His throne and all’s right with the world, but tonight it wasn’t working.

“So what’s going on?” I asked Sam. “Where were you yesterday? Why did I get what should have been your client, and how come you didn’t say anything about it when I saw you?”

He swirled his tea around in his cup before drinking it down. “You mean the Walker thing? Damned if I know, old buddy. Why you got it, I mean. Why I
didn’t
get it—well, that was the kid’s fault.”

“Clarence? That kid?”

Sam thinks chopsticks are for poseurs. He took a big spoonful of pork and
suan cai
stew and looked at it like he wasn’t certain what it was, even though he orders the same thing every time. “Yeah. He had me back and forth from Outside to Inside all day, asking me to show him how different things worked. When the call came down we had just stepped through a Zipper because he wanted to watch to see if my appearance changed Outside.”

“Curious little bastard. But you’re supposed to be training him, not letting him dictate your schedule.” I was still pissed off. Not that I wanted all this crap landing on Sam, but I sure as hell hadn’t wanted it on me, either.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. When the call came, I got it, but I couldn’t answer it. And when I tried to step back Inside to see if that helped, I couldn’t make the Zipper work. Lasted what felt like about ten minutes and by then the call had rolled over—I didn’t know it went to you, though.” He shrugged. “Pretty weird, huh?”

“Damn weird. Have you mentioned that to anyone?”

“Anyone? Everyone! You forget, I had to talk to the fixer about everything that happened that day. That’s all I know—it wasn’t like one of the fixers from the House was going to tell me what had been going on with the Zippers. But that’s not what’s
really
bugging me.” He shook his big head. Sam looks about twenty years older than his body’s supposed to look. Part of it is just the way he moves, that kind of unhurried, good-old-boy thing. He talks the same way, and it can
drive you crazy. Now he made me wait while he took two more spoonfuls of soup and all but sent them out to the forensic lab for tests, swirling the cabbage around in his mouth for what seemed like minutes. (Just because we’ve been friends for years doesn’t mean I never think about murdering him.) “It was too convenient, the way it all happened,” he finally said. “If the kid hadn’t wanted me to be there, I wouldn’t have been Outside when it all went down—wouldn’t have been stuck. No, there’s definitely something unusual going on with our young Clarence,” he finally said.

“Well, shit, no kidding. I already knew that.” I told him about the odd conversation I’d had with the Mule, how he’d asked me to keep an eye on the new boy.

Sam nodded slowly. “Haraheliel. That’s his angel name, right? You ever heard of him before?”

“Nope. But someone might have. He claims he was in Records—Filing, he says. Maybe we should see if anyone else remembers him.”

“I could do that,” Sam told me, slurping up a little broth. “But you’d have to do me a favor and take him off my hands for a couple of days. I can’t get anything done with him hanging around.”

“Then maybe I should be the one to do the investigating.”

Sam frowned. “Look, B, the kid likes you. He’s been asking about you, so it’d be a natural, and I got a buddy or two working in the Records Halls that I know from the old days. They should have some ideas how the kid wound up here.”

I thought about it. Sam did know a lot of people, but our fellow advocate Walter Sanders knew people in Records, too so I could just as easily ask him. But when a friend asks a favor…“Okay. But I can’t take him off you ’til the day after tomorrow. I’m going to be too busy before that.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking into some things of my own. I’ll fill you in if anything interesting comes up.”

Sam considered, then lifted his teacup. It took me a moment, but at last I caught on and raised my beer bottle to clink against the delicate porcelain. “Confusion to our enemies!” he said, our familiar toast.

“Amen to that,” said I.

Once upon a time most of San Judas was agricultural land—numberless small farms, orchards, you name it. Then the city began to grow, and
everything that wasn’t city gradually got pushed farther and farther away, until nowadays you can’t find much that resembles real agriculture except backyard wineries and people growing pot in their garages. But there were still a few exceptions, and after I said goodbye to Sam I retrieved my car from the handicapped parking space (yes, angels cheat sometimes, but come on, we’re doing God’s work!) and went back to my apartment to kill some time. A little before eleven I got back behind the wheel and headed up into the hills in search of one particular farm.