The Dirty Streets of Heaven

thirty-five

There’s an evil old song by Little Walter called, “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights,” and that’s pretty much how it happened. The explosion down in the Grand Ballroom rocked the entire building, most definitely including the elevator shaft. The car lurched up and down and even a little bit sideways, knocking me around like a pinball, and then suddenly everything went dark.

How do I know the explosion was down in the ballroom? Because if you were going to make sure the summit conference didn’t continue, where else would you put a bomb except in the room where it was happening, the only room big enough in the hotel? Eligor’s own hotel.

He blew up his own fucking hotel! I remember thinking as I stood very still, trying to figure out if there was structural damage to the elevator and shaft or if it had only stopped because the power went out. But I came as close to admiring a murderous bastard of a demon-lord as I can get. Eligor the Horseman had cojones, I had to give him that. There was a lesson in this for me, too; I’d been trying to imagine how he’d get it done and hadn’t even considered that he might just blow the shit out of his own joint and kill a few dozen people at the very least, not to mention seriously inconveniencing hundreds of his closest allies. I’d seen how crowded that lobby was and couldn’t even imagine the scene now. I would never underestimate him again.

Eventually, I pushed up the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator and climbed out, then reached up in the dark. I seemed to be only a short distance under the next floor, so I braced myself against the walls of the shaft and worked my way upward until I could perch close enough to the door to work on it. It was hard to find leverage, but at last I got my fingers into the crevice and pulled it far enough apart to risk scrambling over and out. The escape was a lot hairier than I would have liked-it was pitch black, and even though the elevator was blocking the shaft, that was only in the spot just beneath me. If I didn’t manage to stay on top of my particular elevator I could have a straight drop to the basement. Anyway, I managed at last to clamber out onto the floor, covered with greasy carbon stains, the muzzle of my gun causing a permanent groin bruise through the inside of the pocket.

Some emergency lights came on now, casting a dull red-dare I say hellish? — glow over everything, so that even with my better-than-average sight I had to get real close before I could be certain I was on the third floor. Sam’s room was on the next floor up so I headed for the stairs. The stairwell was crowded with overstimulated people, most of them hurrying down toward the lobby before the hotel fell over or something, others in just as much of a hurry to get away from the lower floors where the explosion had happened. I smelled smoke but hadn’t yet seen any sign of fire, though the other guests looked and acted like terrified animals. There’s nothing like sudden disaster to deliver humans back to their original state of being, and even if you’re a demon or an angel vacationing in a human body, it works pretty much the same way.

I found Sam sitting in the open doorway of his room pulling his loafers on. I dropped down beside him because I wanted to tie my own shoes properly. I had a gun, yes, but no socks, no flashlight, no shirt, and no wallet. It’s hard to be prepared for a major explosion in your hotel, but I’d definitely dropped the ball.

“So, you don’t need a new body yet?” Sam asked.

“Not yet, but give me another ten minutes. Eligor’s men are going to be looking for me and I’m sure they’d like to change that.” Actually, I thought they were more likely to want to capture me if Caz had been telling the truth, and their boss still didn’t have the feather, but I didn’t want to waste time explaining everything.

Sam had the good grace not to ask any difficult questions, just climbed to his feet and slapped the place under his coat to let me know he was armed. “They might get an argument, then.”

I felt ten times better just knowing he and I were together. Not only wouldn’t I be worrying about what had happened to him, I knew from long, firsthand experience that he was exactly the right kind of guy to get into and out of trouble with-good thinker, good shot, good liar.

“So I’m guessing we want to go down where the other people are, if someone’s after you,” he said.

It took me a second to answer. “Yeah, sort of. Follow me to the stairs…”

Flashlight beams were now sweeping the wall at the far end of the corridor. The hallway had cleared in the half a minute since I’d gotten there, so whoever was coming with all those lights had deliberately forced their way upstream against the fleeing guests. In other words, they were almost certainly bad news.

Even as I yanked at Sam’s sleeve they appeared around the corner at the end of the hall; big, hunched figures wearing heavy gear and some kind of night-vision goggles that protruded from their faces like the eyestalks on a snail. Sam and I legged it the opposite direction, back to the stairwell I had used to get there. We opened the door as quietly as we could, but Eligor’s men must have been using amplification devices, or else they just had extra-good hearing. Muzzles flashed in our direction and we heard the stuttering, ripsaw noise of automatic fire as we dove through the door and slammed it behind us.

“Hold on a second,” I said.

“Not a good idea,” Sam replied.

“Just let me…” I finally got the extended magazine out of my gun and thumbed the silver slugs out of it, back into my pocket. Then I leaned out into the stairwell and tossed the empty magazine onto one of the steps above us “They’ve got infrared goggles-they’ll spot it. Maybe they’ll think we went that way.” And they would also take note that I had a large hand gun, which couldn’t do anything worse for us than make our pursuers a bit more cautious.

As we sprinted down the stairs past the third floor and heading for the second, I said, “We need to get out of this building fast. The next floor down’s the mezzanine, right over the ballroom, and if it’s even still standing it’ll be full of firemen, and who knows what else.”

“So why do you want to go that way?”

“Because we’re going to sneak out the back.” I fought to get my breath. “Out to the marina.” The hotel had its own little harbor, because more than a few of the Ralston’s guests liked to arrive in expensive watercraft.

“Why?” Sam was panting, too. Our conversation sounded a bit like we were both being strenuously massaged. “We going to steal a yacht?”

“Better. Now shut up. I’m trying to read my phone.”

We dashed out onto the second floor, which was empty but full of hanging dust and the smell of burning. I hoped it was all from downstairs and that we wouldn’t suddenly find ourselves caught between Eligor’s security goons and a wall of fire. The only good thing was that the group chasing us had been comparatively small, no more than half a dozen men. Twice that number had probably gone to my floor but they would find out pretty quickly I wasn’t there. If the Grand Duke hadn’t been so busy making a point, watching Caz tell me off without even bothering to intervene, he might have called his men and told them I was out in front of the hotel. At least, that was the only reason I could see that he’d let me walk away when I was right there for the taking.

We sprinted through the second floor’s wide hallways past various meeting rooms and got to the end and the other fire stairs just as someone kicked open the stairwell door we’d exited. A spray of gunfire spattered the wall just to our right and petered out across the ceiling.

“Stop!” someone shouted. “This is the police! You can’t escape! Drop your weapons and lie down.”

“If that’s the police,” Sam grunted as we wrestled open the door to the stairs, “then I’m the Little Drummer Boy.”

I plunged down the stairs with my big buddy right behind me. “We have to find a way out to the marina without going near the lobby, ‘cause everything there’s blown to shit.”

“There’s an escalator on this floor that leads to the pool,” Sam said. “We can get to the boats without having to go near the lobby end.”

I heard the stairwell door open above us, a spatter of gunfire, then curses. The shots must have been accidental. One of the bullets actually pinged down the walls past us, kicking up gouts of plaster, shredding the wall hangings.

The first floor wasn’t damaged at this end, but the smoke and dust were even thicker, and the far end at the front of the hotel was clearly on fire, flames gleaming through the gray haze. I could hear screams now, and not just the agitated voices of rescue crews, but honest to God screams of pain and terror. I did my best to pretend that it wasn’t my fault-all this destruction and carnage just so Eligor could catch me.

But had Eligor really set off a bomb just so he could catch me off guard? Surely there were easier ways he could have done it-waited until tomorrow then thrown a cordon around the hotel being one obvious way. Why blow up the place?

Because he wants the conference stopped, I realized as we hurried toward the escalator. Bobby Dollar was only part of what was bugging the Grand Duke. The whole discussion was getting too close to things he didn’t want discovered-especially if he had made a deal with someone in the heavenly hierarchy. His fellow demon lords would forgive any kind of murder or treachery but they would never forgive a deal with the enemy.

“Shit,” said Sam, staring down at the long, unmoving escalator. “Of course. Power’s off.”

“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “Don’t trip.”

When we were halfway down the bad guys came out of the smoke and dust behind us like armed ghosts. They were shouting for us to stop, but they weren’t pretending to be police any more, and if they didn’t really want to kill me they were doing a good job of acting like they did. A stream of automatic fire took the rubber handrail off just behind Sam, so that it flew through the air like a dying mamba. The next burst laid a trail of holes down the aluminum escalator wall in front of me. Another pak-pak-pak blew the crystal chandelier hanging over our heads into glittering splinters, raining sharp fragments down on us.

We ran with our heads down as the floor-to-ceiling glass windows exploded into shards behind us. We ducked out through one of the automatic doors our pursuers had just conveniently blown into powder and then sprinted along the edge of the pool, both bent over like Quasimodo searching desperately for a bathroom. Out in the comparatively clean, cold bay air I realized for the first time how much smoke and particulate I’d been breathing and silently thanked my bosses for lending me a good, sturdy body in which to run for my life.

“We need to buy some time,” I gasped.

When the men in combat gear burst out of the hotel after us, Sam and I both turned and began firing. They dropped back into the cover of the doorway and returned a few volleys, but they were shooting wildly.

I had squeezed the trigger several times before I realized that I’d only had twenty shots to start, and unless I found the time somewhere to hand-load the shells jingling in my pocket, fifteen or sixteen shots was all I was going to have for a while. I would need to be careful.

We fired as we ran, just like Butch and Sundance, and because Sam was a better shot than me, and because he wasn’t wasting silver, I let him do most of the shooting. We skirted the pool, ran down a tanbark-covered embankment (ripping the hell out of a bunch of inoffensive plants some hotel gardener had probably spent several days placing just so) and then hurried along the jetty beside the boats with their furled sails. The bigger ships had their own part of the marina, but I doubted that was where we’d find what I was looking for.

“It’ll be over here,” I told Sam. “By the harbor master’s office.”

“And ‘it’ is what, exactly?”

“Excursion boat,” I said. “The hotel does their own fishing tours. Cabin cruiser.” Fatback’s hotel maps and information were going to keep us alive, I was almost certain. “I know you can pilot one, but can you hotwire one?”

Fire engines were screaming up to the hotel behind us, and the sky was beginning to turn scarlet, which made us better targets. The bullets started to chop along the dock behind us, and I reflected that even if Eligor had other, better reasons for derailing the conference, his men still seemed very willing to shoot lots of bullets into his friends’ expensive boats to try to keep me from leaving it.

We found the hotel’s twenty-five foot cruiser whose stern proclaimed it the John P. Gaynor, whoever that was. To my very cursory inspection it looked like a reasonable little craft. I turned and ducked behind the gunwale and made an old word literal by sheltering behind it as I fired several rounds at our pursuers, forcing them to take cover behind a shed. Sam was already in the cabin, on his back, fumbling in the dark. I found a flashlight clamped to the wall and tossed it down to him, then went back and fired off a shot every time I saw something move behind the shed. I think I hit one of them; I certainly heard the sound of someone made profoundly unhappy by something. Whether it was the same guy, enraged by his wound, or some buddy of his making a heroic play, one of the guards then charged out from behind the shed and right toward us, automatic rattling, the flashes on the masts between us throwing long, quick shadows. He was wearing a black riot helmet, and it was hard to see him clearly with the fire and smoke billowing out of the building behind him, but I remembered Leo telling us that shooting last was often more important than shooting first. I hunkered back down behind the gunwale until only my eyes and the top of my head were sticking up-parts of me that I would have hated to lose but which I would need to make the shot. I let him get to within twenty yards, his bullets stitching their way along the cabin behind me, shattering glass and smashing expensive wood, before I pulled the trigger. His plexiglas mask spiderwebbed, and he tumbled forward and slid a couple of feet then lay still, but his helmet came off and kept rolling, its progress as uneven as a fumbled football. I hoped I’d just shot a demon, not some poor bastard of a security guard, but I didn’t have time for a forensic exam. Behind me the boat’s engine coughed and then caught, and Sam yelled, “Get your ass in here!”

Sam steered us out of the berth while I was still trying to find my footing to get down to the cabin. A few more shots hissed past, and one cracked against the wall behind me, but already the muzzle flashes were dim as birthday candles. The shooting stopped as I leaned into the cabin, feeling for the first time as if I really might survive this fiasco.

“Where?” Sam shouted.

“I don’t know! What do I look like, Mr. Bay Cruise Expert? The hell away from here.”

“There’s a landing not too far from my place,” he said. “We can make it in ten minutes.”

I hadn’t thought of heading down toward Southport, but it made sense. I crouched beside Sam as he piloted the cabin cruiser out of the estuary and into the dark waters of the slough. The boat began to pitch as we got out into the bay proper, and the wind kicked up. My stomach protested, but I was just glad not to be shot at and not to be in that hotel, which now looked like something out of Gone With The Wind, hungry flames leaping on both the first and second floors as fire engines, ambulances, and police cruisers screamed toward it from several directions.

“You want to tell me what any of this is about?” Sam asked, squinting through the cracked windshield.

I weighed how much truthiness would feel comfortable. I still didn’t want to put Sam in a bad position, and just because we had got away didn’t mean this was the end. Eligor had a long reach, and for all I knew they’d reconvene the conference next week and start asking questions again. “I seem to have pissed off the hotel owner,” was all I admitted. “Guess I left too many wet towels on the floor.”

Sam gave me a look and went back to squinting at the dark water. I was glad he was being careful. The public wetlands start just south of Sand Point, and there aren’t many lights out here, because what do sandpipers and curlews need with streetlights, anyway? More than a few ancient piers and even some abandoned boats lay half-buried in silt up and down the shore, and most of them could punch a pretty good hole in anything smaller than a tanker.

I clambered back up the cabin steps, so I could hunker down in the clean, nippy bay air and try to get my bearings. I had about nineteen seconds to think about what I was going to do next, which I wasted on several lurid fantasies of me single-handledly yanking the head off one of Hell’s most prominent nobles. Then something buzzed past me and smashed into the gunwale, showering me with chips of mahogany. The actual crack of the gun followed an instant later.

“Sam! Those fuckers are still after us!” I slid toward the rail on my belly, then cautiously lifted my head. They were at least a couple of hundred yards back, but their craft looked wider and faster than ours, and its full complement of running lights made it burn like a star. “And they have a better ride than we do!” I cursed myself for relaxing too soon: I should have realized Eligor would have more boats. I steadied the Five-Seven on the railing and squeezed off a shot, just to let them know there was a downside to all that light they were showing, but I don’t think I hit anything. I was now down to about half a dozen rounds in the mag and the loose ones rattling in my pocket, depending on how many had fallen out. “Sam! Fucking do something!”

“Do you really think there’s anything more useful I can do than keep the throttle all the way open and try to avoid running into anything?”

“Point taken.” I inched toward the stern railing, feeling very strongly that I didn’t want to get my head blown off. “Cabin cruisers don’t have torpedoes or anything, do they?” I called.

“Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me. There’s a Polaris missile down here under the cooler.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic just because I don’t know shit about boats.” A few more shots, or at least their hissing ghosts, snapped past. I chanced a quick look. “They’re gaining on us!”

“Fuck me.” Sam went silent for a moment, long enough to worry me, then said, “Keep your head down. There’s a nearer place I can land, but it’s probably going to be rough.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t ask.”

I popped up and squeezed another shot into the center of the constellation of lights. Their boat was higher than ours, and I couldn’t see anyone on it, so I aimed for the cabin windows but again didn’t seem to hit anything. You try shooting a pistol at a pitching boat from another pitching boat two hundred yards away, then you can criticize.

Our cabin cruiser’s engine was whining like a wood-chipper with a stump caught in it, and I began to wonder if we were even going to make shore. We took a sharp, deck-swamping turn toward the nearest bank and began slaloming through an inlet where reeds grew high on either side, hiding us for the moment. I crawled to the cabin stairs. “They can’t see us.”

“Stay the hell down,” my friend suggested. “You’re not that much fun, but I still don’t want to lose you.” As if to prove the opposite he suddenly swung the wheel wildly to one side, sending me tumbling. “Old dock,” he called as I picked my bruised body up from where I’d slammed against the outside of the cabin wall. “Now, shut up.”

I wanted to point out that he’d been doing most of the talking, but I was too busy clinging to the slippery deck with my fingernails. Try it some time, it’s fun! A moment later I saw a searchlight beam sweeping the reeds just to one side. Eligor’s men were much closer. The narrow, shallow estuary didn’t seem to be slowing them down much at all.

In fact, it slowed them down so little that a moment later the light fell directly on us and made the cabin glow like a Nativity scene in the town square as shots began to ring out again. This time they were definitely hitting things. Bits of wood and aluminum and fiberglass, and whatever else held the cabin cruiser together, were flying everywhere like razor-sharp pinwheels. One splinter about the size of my hand stuck into the cabin wall near my head and quivered as each new bullet slapped the boat. I scrambled on my belly until I could slide headfirst down the steps into the cabin. “Where’s this landing?”

“What are you doing down here?” Sam asked, risking a look back at me. “Get the hell up there and shoot something!”

Turning around in that narrow space wasn’t easy. I had just reached the top again when somebody or something squared up our cabin cruiser like a hanging curveball, bringing us to a surprisingly immediate, noisy, violent halt. I pitched backward, managing to keep my feet on the steps but smashing the base of my head against the low doorway. My gun flew away, bouncing then sliding along the darkness of the deck. I tried to crawl after it, but my body abruptly decided that my muscles should stop working for a few moments, and I collapsed onto the wet boards.

Even as I lay with a skull full of sparks, trying to remember which of me was the top part and which the bottom and how to make either of those work, everything around me, gunwales, bullet holes, shattered cabin windows, suddenly leaped into brilliance as a cruelly bright light set it all ablaze. A moment later I heard another loud crunch, this one farther away, and angry voices shouting, but I was still trying to find the correct sequence that would make my rubbery body function again so I could get up onto my hands and knees and look for my gun. I heard nothing but ominous silence from the cabin where Sam was.

I had just begun to crawl when shadows started clambering over the railing of our boat, dark, shouting shapes. I tried to stand but it didn’t work. Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my neck.

“Got you, you little shit,” said Howlingfell. “Fucked up the boss’s boat, but it was worth it.”

The pressure increased, the barrel of the gun pushing brutally hard against the base of my skull until I gave in and let him force me onto my belly. He slid the gun down to rest against the highest knob of my backbone.

“You think you’ll get lucky and make me kill you, Dollar.” He was breathing hard, but not that hard-it sounded more like hunger than pain. “But I’ll just put one in your spine. We can do everything we need to do with just the nerves of your head working-eyeballs, teeth…oh, there’s plenty to work with. You’ll scream out everything you know, Dollar, but it still won’t end. Not for days. I promise.”