The Dirty Streets of Heaven

eleven

“Karael? Karael, General of the Glittering Host-that Karael? Wow, he’s a heavy hitter.” Sam sounded impressed. “You really got the treatment.”

“Yeah, even I’ve heard of him,” said Clarence. The two of them were helping me clean up the wreckage of my apartment and pack it up for storage-not that I had a lot worth keeping, especially after the place had been ransacked. I’d lived there for a couple of years and a lot of people knew it. It had been the first place the ghallu went looking for me, which meant I was going to have to stay away from it for a while.

“Everybody knows Karael, kid.” Sam took a swig of his ginger ale. “I’m not surprised they brought in someone like him, though. If that Walker guy was only the first, if other souls are going AWOL-well, shit, no wonder they’re panicking up at the House.”

I hadn’t said anything about the other two names Temuel had floated, first because I didn’t trust the kid, second because I wanted to check into them myself before muddying the waters. I’d tell Sam when I had a chance.

Meanwhile, Sam kicked at a bunch of scattered hot rod magazines that someone had dumped on the foor while searching the apartment. “You’re not really keeping all this, are you, B? What are you planning to do, open a Museum of Crap someday?”

I ignored that and gathered up the magazines. Sam wasn’t exactly Mister House Beautiful himself. He lived in the seedier section of Southport, you could barely see his living room carpet under all the newspapers and pizza boxes, and his bathroom towels had sweat stains on them. “But I still don’t know why someone would send a monster like that after me,” I said. “Look at this place-they were searching for something. And it wasn’t just that hell-beast in here, either.”

Clarence looked up from where he was picking up tableware that had been scattered across the linoleum. I suppose I should have asked him to put it in the sink to be washed after being Hell-handled, but I hardly ever use any of it except to stir coffee and butter toast, anyway. “What do you mean, Bobby?” the kid asked.

“What do I mean? Look, this place is a mess, sure, but a ghallu is a spirit of elemental disaster the size of a small car and hot as the inside of a crematory oven. It pursues. It captures. It kills. You don’t summon one of those and tell it, ‘Oh, and take a look in the guy’s kitchen cabinets while you’re there.’ That’s like asking a grizzly bear to audit my tax records.”

“You don’t pay any taxes,” Sam pointed out.

“Shut up,” I acknowledged. “You understand, Junior? They want to catch me or kill me, but they also think I know something. Or that I have something they want.”

Clarence suddenly looked a bit nervous. “You think they’ll come back?”

“If I stayed here? Probably guaranteed. Which is why I’m going to be kicking it in some rent-by-the-hour motel tonight, and then some different but equally charming spot tomorrow night.”

“Trust me-he’s slept worse places,” Sam said.

“Yeah, thanks for making me look good in front of the kid.” With the boxes loaded into my car, the aparment looked sad (and almost tidy.) “Let’s go down the block,” I said. “I’ll buy you boys some lunch before the phone rings and one of us has to go off and mess around with dead people again.”

Sam got a call to a client in Spanishtown as we were finishing, and Clarence went with him, so I walked back to my car alone. I put my jacket on because the thin February sunshine wasn’t enough to keep me comfortable. I wished the spring would hurry up and arrive. It’s funny, but even regular trips to the permanently glorious weather of Heaven doesn’t change the pure pleasure of walking out your door one day and finding that warm days have arrived, that suddenly wearing a jacket makes you too hot.

I kept my eyes open as I went through Hoover Park, although I was nearly certain that the demonic beast someone had sicced on me was strictly a nighttime diversion. I told you how much energy it takes to sustain something so scary and unusual, right? It’s a factor of ten more difficult to make one of those manifest in full daylight. Still, something a bit more civilized than the ghallu had tossed my apartment, and the horned monstrosity probably hadn’t done anything as delicate as stringing up Grasswax by his own nerve fibers either, so I tried not to let myself be distracted by the heedless civilians all around me. I saw the guy waiting out in front of my building from almost a block away, which gave me plenty of time to clock him as I approached.

My car was parked farther down the street, and there was a chance I could have got into it without a confrontation, but he didn’t look too intimidating. He was fairly tall but pale and thin-really thin. That was one of the first things I noticed. He looked like a middle school kid wearing his dad’s suit. He didn’t stand still, either, but jittered and dance-stepped in place, apparently not the least self-conscious, although as I watched a woman with a stroller and an old man with a bag of groceries both gave him a wide berth. And his skin was so completely white-bloodlessly white-that for a moment I had the chilling illusion his dark baggy suit might be what he’d been buried in.

It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to slip past him to my car, and in fact I was a bit curious, so I kept walking toward him. When he finally heard me he spun all the way around to look at me and I realized that he was alive but more than just ordinarily pale. He was some kind of albino, although his eyes were tawny, not the more common pink. To put an interesting twist on it, he wasn’t just albino but Asian, too-a combination you don’t see that often, even in cosmopolitan San Judas. More importantly though, from his first words, it seemed clear that my unpigmented Asian-American friend was not entirely sane.

“Dollar Bob?” he said in a chirpy voice. “Mr. Bobby D? Dollar Man?” He stopped bouncing for a moment and frowned, his whole face creasing into a sock puppet of the mask of tragedy. “Or am I wrong again? So many people have said no today! No, no, not Dollar!”

“Who the hell are you?” My choice of words wasn’t entirely random. He did have something of the look of the Opposition, but that might just have been his skin condition.

“Don’t know me? Everybody knows me! All over downtown!” He giggled and did another little soft-shoe shuffle.

“Well, I don’t-and I don’t want to, either.” But he didn’t have the smell of serious danger on him, at least as far as I could tell. Still, I kept my hand in my jacket pocket where my.38 was hiding.

His eyes got big. As I said, the irises were sort of yellow-brown, the irises vertical like a cat’s or a fox’s eyes. Whatever he was, he was definitely in the “other” category. “Oh, but I know you, Mr. Bobby Doll-dollar!” he exclaimed. “And I think you have something you might want to sell. I know lots of people who want to buy. I can arrange! Good business, huh? Good for everyone!”

“I don’t have anything to sell.” Was this guy with the Noh-mask face some kind of lost spirit who’d seen me and Sammy and the kid cleaning broken furniture out of the house and now was hoping to scam a few bucks? The creatures that fall through the cracks in the great war between Us and Them often wind up homeless, and with his too-roomy suit and his loopy dialogue this pale fellow certainly could have been one of those, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let me dismiss him so easily.

“Really really truthful true?” The albino leaned way down and then squinted up at me from below. “No little something you might have found? No pretty shiny? A little flippy flappy something that needs a special helper to find a market?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and his presence was beginning to depress me. It was bad enough that the bad guys knew my apartment-was every fairy-tale gutter-rat in Judas going to come hang out there, too? Plus, there was just something about the guy that creeped me out. Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that the folks who had tossed my apartment thought I knew something…or had something that they wanted. And this guy thought I might be trying to sell something.

“Just out of curiosity, pal,” I said, “how much do you think you could get for a-what did you call it? A ‘pretty shiny’? I mean, if someone knew where to find such a thing?”

“Oh, he would be a very rich man. Yes indeed!”

“But how do I know we’re even talking about the same thing?” I was trying to find a way to get him to identify whatever he was looking for without admitting that I didn’t have it and didn’t know what it was. “We need to be a little more specific.”

He laughed as if genuinely pleased by what I’d said and threw his scarecrow arms in the air, sleeves flapping. “If you have it, Mister B-Doll, I know people who want it. Don’t need to say more than that!” He spun. Jazz hands.

I wanted to pop him one just to get him to stand still. “Look, I don’t have time to mess around. I don’t know you, and I don’t do business with people I don’t know.”

He laughed again. “Okay, Bobby! You the boss! But if you change your mind and want to talk about the shiny-shiny-talk for real-just ask around. Any corner downtown! I’ll find out! Fox, that’s me!”

“Fox?”

“Or Foxy-boy! Mr. Fox! Foxy Foxy! They are all me and they all know me!” He grinned hugely and I noticed that at least a couple of his upper teeth were gold. An instant later he had whirled away from me and was strutting off, making his way up Stambaugh in the general direction of Main Street like the drum major of the Hiroshima Ghost Parade.

“Wait? How do I get in touch with you if I do want to talk?”

“Ask for me on any corner downtown!” A couple of old black guys sitting on the front step of the apartment building next door laughed and pointed as they watched him prance past.

So-yet one more weird detail to add to a large, dangerous, and very confusing picture.

I had been thinking I would check my mailbox one last time before I left, but after meeting Fox I didn’t feel like going back inside the building. Not that it would have mattered-I never get anything but junk mail, anyway. I hopped in the car and went hunting for any sanctuary with cable TV and a working ice machine.

I picked a place on the Camino Real because it had a parking garage-after all, a ‘71 Matador with the full performance package isn’t the most discreet car in the world. In fact, I haven’t even seen another one around Jude with the same copper paint, let alone my checkerboard interior, so no way could I leave it out in plain view. In fact, I would have to think about ditching it entirely until the heat had blown over.

My phone continued to oblige me by not ringing, so I settled back to catch up on a few details that had been hanging fire the last couple of days. Fatback’s material on the late Grasswax (the real Grasswax, not his earthly “Grazuvac” identity) was interesting; I skimmed it and put it aside to reread later when I had less to do, but the main thing I noticed was that he’d been around longer than most prosecutors of his rank. The material on Edward Lynes Walker was more of the stuff I’d already seen: born in 1928, started first successful company in his San Judas garage in the early 1950s, riches and fame, blah blah, split and founded HoloTech when another company he had started got too corporate, blah blah, space program, contributed lots of money to ecological causes.

All of this biographical crap reminded me I still hadn’t looked through the pictures I’d taken at the Walker house the afternoon young Garcia Windhover had threatened to bust a cap in my ass. The images were still on my phone, which had somehow managed to survive in my pocket while I was being tossed around by a horned, red-hot whaddayoucallit.

There were a couple blurry shots of the Walker living room and one of Posie’s shoulder and part of the Mayan calendar, but most of the pictures were of the bookcases. I enlarged the images as much as I could and read down the spines of the books, Googling when I couldn’t get enough information from title and author alone. The late ELW’s collection was pretty much what I would have expected from the rest of the house, lots of coffee-table art books and big, expensive picture books about science, as well as collections of photography of the West, echoing the Ansel Adams prints on the living room walls. Among the ordinary-sized books, science and the arts seemed to dominate, although there were a few novels, some of them science fiction, like Carl Sagan’s Contact, others more mainstream stuff like Updike and John Irving. There was even a section of mysteries, the English village sort. I wondered if those had been his or his late wife’s. After what his granddaughter had told me I wasn’t surprised to see that Walker had no conventional religious books, although there were several volumes by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and even a hoary old copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. All together Walker had over a dozen titles with a pretty clearly antireligious slant. Still, for a scientist that wasn’t much of a surprise. Stubborn bastards, those scientists.

I was beginning to wish I’d found Walker’s music collection and taken pictures of that instead. You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)

As I mentioned, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for on the bookshelves-I didn’t really expect to find anything titled, “Evading Heaven” or “How to Make Your Soul Disappear.” I was mainly trying to get a feeling for Edward Lynes Walker beyond the dry facts that Fatback and the ordinary internet had already provided, something that might help me get a handle on why, of all the deaths in the world, his had been so different. But judging by his books at least, Walker was pretty much like millions of others who had managed to show up for their own afterlives. I had all but given up when something caught my eye.

I had enlarged a section of magazine-shaped objects that filled most of a shelf. Some of them were magazines, special year-end editions of things like Chemical and Engineering News, but most were stockholder’s reports for HT and some of the other companies in which Walker had been involved. Some of these dated from several years earlier, and the section in general looked like Walker might have stuck things into it but almost never pulled anything back out. But squeezed in right between reports for Littleton Bioscience and Metaware was a slender prospectus or something similar with the words “The Magian Society” printed on its spine in tasteful italics.

Alarm bells-hell, air-raid sirens-went off in my head. Because I had just heard about Magians, and not from just anyone, either. Somebody had asked me if I had heard anything about Magians-an archangelic somebody named Temuel, my supervisor.

I did a quick, fruitless online search for Magians. I found a lot of jabber about the Three Wise Kings but nothing about any “society,” so I phoned the Walker house. Posie Walker picked up about the twentieth ring, just when I had resigned myself to the answering machine.

“Hello?” She sounded a trifle baked again. I introduced myself, and she eventually remembered me. “Right. That writer guy.”

“Exactly. Listen, I was curious about your grandfather’s interest in the Magian Society.” I said it like everybody knew who that was, although I had already discovered nobody on the internet seemed to have heard of them.

“Never heard of ’em,” she said, on cue.

“That’s okay. I noticed he had something of theirs when I was there, a folder-maybe you could find it for me.” I gave her the bookshelf coordinates, which was a bit like trying to teach a marmoset to play chess; I doubted that she’d spent a lot of her time perusing her grandfather’s books. I told her I was happy to wait.

She came back a few minutes later. “Nope. There’s nothing like that.”

I stifled a curse. “Did you look carefully, Ms. Walker? Between Linson Bio-”

“Yeah, just like you said. It was there, probably, ‘cause there’s a space, but it’s not there now…” She trailed off, considering. “Maybe one of the cleaners took it.”

Oh, yeah. The Mighty Maids just happened to borrow the one thing in the entire bookshelf I wanted to see and take it back to their office for special cleaning. “Look, could I drop by sometime and take a look around? Sometime soon? Just in case it’s been, I don’t know, misplaced or something. It would really help my article if I could find it.”

Somebody yelled something in the background on her end. It sounded like Garcia the Gang-banger.

“I guess,” she said. “Sure. But not now. Somebody’s over. Later.”

She hung up without waiting to hear my reply.

Despite a powerful urge to drive over there right now and break in and look for myself, I decided not to. If it hadn’t been stolen from the shelf it was just misplaced, which meant it would still be there tomorrow, but breaking and entering the Walker place tonight might have dire consequences. Like I might accidentally walk in on Posie and her idiot boyfriend having sex.

It was a nice enough evening, and I would have loved to swing by The Compasses for a drink and some comradely bullshit, but it had only been twenty-four hours since the attack, and I wasn’t going anywhere that my pursuer might be watching. Also, to be honest, I wasn’t really in a hurry to see Monica either. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that I wanted to avoid her-I just wanted to avoid having a conversation with her. I hadn’t had time to figure out what falling into bed with Monica the other night was going to mean. Also, when I had been having the occasional moment of arousing thought, it wasn’t about Monica but a certain stunning blonde Hell-creature, and that was even more confusing. But I wouldn’t want you to think I was a complete moral coward, so I would like to make clear that the main reason for not going to The Compasses was as follows: Not wanting to suffer horrible, painful attack of the murderous-demon variety.

I had emailed Fatback to see if he could find me anything about the Magian Society or the name “Kephas,” but hadn’t heard from him yet because midnight was still hours away. I was getting hungry, so I walked from the motel to a Mexican place I had spotted on a side street. Considering it wasn’t anywhere near the worst part of Jude I felt surprisingly unsafe. Every movement at the edge of my immediate frame of vision yanked my head around, and sudden noises didn’t do much for my nerves either. It wasn’t just the thought of getting attacked by the ghallu that had me worried, either; if I was now a hot commodity that meant other people were probably willing to shop me for profit even if they didn’t have anything personal against me, so suddenly it wasn’t just eight-foot demons I needed to keep an eye out for but anyone who might be looking at me funny. On the streets of San Judas that can tire you out real fast.

I made it to the restaurant without incident, and to my pleasant surprise it turned out they made carnitas that actually tasted like something you might get in Mexico, and I mean that in the best possible way. It looked like the kind of establishment where they’d have a DJ on weekends, but on a weeknight it was almost deserted and quiet enough to think. As I ate I knocked back a couple of Negra Modelos and looked over the research material. I discovered some interesting things about the late Edward Walker I hadn’t known, including the fact he was a member of American Atheists and had even spoken at a few of their conventions. It still didn’t get me any closer to what had happened, of course-as far as Heaven is concerned, an atheist’s soul is just like any other nutbar’s. If they lived a decent life, we take ’em.

I also did a little more searching for Magians online. Turns out the term doesn’t just mean the guys out of the “We Three Kings” song but also covers Zoroastrian priests from Persia. Either way, though, it seemed to have too much to do with religion to interest someone like Walker. Could the name “Magians” have some other meaning, I wondered-alchemical or something? Could it be some kind of fraternal organization of scientists? I Googled as I worked my way through dinner but didn’t turn up anything.

Somewhere during my second beer I looked up and noticed that a guy sitting at the bar was watching me, but he glanced away when he saw me looking back. He appeared to be an ordinary working guy in work boots and a trucker cap, probably Mexican or Central American by ancestry. At any other time I would have figured he’d just been looking me over out of idle curiosity, but tonight I was thinking about things differently. I caught him staring again a couple of minutes later and gave him a hard glance in return. He dropped his eyes quickly, but I could see a tiny sheen of sweat on his neck. He didn’t look like someone who thought I was kind of cute. He looked like someone who’d recognized me, and that probably didn’t mean anything good. That’s the downside of having friends in odd places-other people who hang out in those odd places start to recognize you.

If I stayed long enough I felt pretty sure he’d find an excuse to step outside and call someone, so I beat him to the punch, finishing my beer with a long swallow and leaving my money on the table. As I headed for the door I swung wide to the bar and caught the guy by surprise. As he stared up at me I leaned toward him and whispered, “If anyone’s coming after me, they better come hard and strong, got me? Duro y fuerte. Porque yo soy un angel de Dios.”

I left him staring, his mouth hanging open. I had either given one of Hell’s helpers fair warning or scared the crap out of some guy who’d developed a little crush on a stranger.

I walked back with my eyes wide open just in case he’d informed someone of my whereabouts before I noticed him, but I got back without incident. As I reached the motel my phone rang.

“Is this Mr. Dollar, yo? It’s G-Man-remember?”

“G-Man as in Garcia? As in, I took away your piece and rapped your skull with it? Yeah, I remember you, chummy. What do you want?”

He sounded like he’d really psyched himself up for this. “You said…you said maybe I could get my strap back?”

“Gun, Garcia. A Palo Alto kid can’t call it a ‘strap’ without sounding like a total douche. You got some information for me?”

Now he just sounded hurt. “Yeah, okay. Sorry. If I tell you something, can I get my-my gun back?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to tell me?”

“Well, Posie…I was talking to Posie…she’s my girlfriend, right? And she said when you came over you were interested in some African guy her grandfather knew?”

“Yeah, I am.” Although this Magian thing was what really had my interest now. “So? Did you find out his name?”

“Sort of. But even better, man-he was here.”

“What? What are you talking about? Where?”

“Here at Posie’s house-I mean her granddad’s house. That African guy was here. She didn’t know he was coming or anything, he just showed up. He hung around for a long time, talking to Posie and stuff. She made him tea, even. He was here when you called before. Anyway, he just left a few minutes ago.”

“He was there when I called?” It was very difficult not to shout, but I was on a public street. “And you waited until now to tell me?” I had a sudden, very strong suspicion about why this African gentleman might have dropped by and also why Posie hadn’t been able to find the folder. “Jesus, why did you wait so long?”

“Hey, man, I didn’t want to give anything away! Like that you were looking for him! I know all about this private detective shit, yo. So I waited until he left.”

“God save me.” I headed for the stairs down to the motel garage. “Stay there, both of you. I’ll be right over.”

“Well? Do I get my piece back?”

“Oh, I’m going to give it to you, all right-same way I did last time. I’m going to smack your dumbass head with it.” I hung up on him and climbed into my car.