by Tad Williams
And, of course, I’d have to debrief with Temuel, but I didn’t want to think about that yet. I’ll be honest—the thought scared me. Yes, he’d done a lot for me, but I didn’t know where he stood with Anaita, and nobody—not even Bobby Dollar, everybody’s favorite poster boy for lack of impulse control—just jumps up and accuses a major angel and sitting ephor like Anaita of being a traitor to the Highest. Especially somebody like me, who was already on nineteen kinds of secret probation. Oh, and I had no admissible evidence whatsoever.
In fact, the more I thought, the more certain I was that I should just keep my mouth shut about most of it, even with The Mule, since I didn’t know what game he was playing or where he stood vis-à-vis not just Anaita, but also the Third Way and all the rest of this crazy shit I was floundering in. However much he’d helped me, Temuel was clearly up to his halo in secrets and weirdness, and I didn’t want to force him to choose between me and whatever else he had going on.
All this was swirling through my brain as I began to feel awake and connected enough to pull the sheet off my face and, Lazarus-like, rise from the tomb. Okay, rise from under the bed in the second guest room, the bed with the catalog coverlets and floral-print pillows, but you get the idea. I had already noted idly that the sheet wrapping me seemed to be a bit rougher and heavier than I remembered (not to mention quite a bit tighter) because of how it lay on my face, but as I tried to rise I realized that my problem was more complicated than that: it wasn’t a sheet on me at all, it was a tarp, and it wasn’t draped over me, it was wrapped around me from head to foot, so that my arms were pinned at my sides. This was not the situation I’d been in when I had last lived in this body. Not to mention that I could feel that something was moving me, bouncing me, even tilting me a bit from time to time, as though I were lying in the palm of a very, very large creature, and was being tilted at different angles while it decided which end to start eating first. (I had definitely been in Hell too long.)
Of course I kept my cool, because I knew the worst thing to do was start freaking out before I knew the facts. I calmly began shouting, “What the Jeezly fucking Christ is going on here? Somebody help me!” loudly and repeatedly. Okay, “calmly” isn’t quite the right word, but I didn’t only yell, I started pushing and scratching at the heavy tarp big time, inflating my chest and shoving outward with my arms, until I finally made enough space to get my hands up to my face.
Hands, plural. That was the first good news. Whatever else had happened to me, I had the full set of grasping implements in working order again, one attached to each wrist, with lovely bouquets of functioning fingers at the end. I could tell this because I was busily palpating my face, trying to tell if I was Bobby again, or still in the Snakestaff body. There were no stony lumps over my eyebrows or on my cheeks, and my skin felt much less sandpapery than it had in Hell, so I seemed to have returned to being B. Dollar, slightly itinerant angel. A probe of the back of my head found nothing but scalp and hair. No Doctor Teddy surgery scars either, so I was definitely out of the demon body. That calmed me down a little.
As I managed to work the canvas tarp a bit farther from my face and began to hear sounds more clearly, I finally realized that I wasn’t just rolled in a tarp, I was rolled in a tarp and riding in the trunk of a car. Okay, I’d survived repeated tortures by various finalists from Hell’s Got Talent, and pursuit by honest-to-Blind-Lemon hellhounds, so mere earthly troubles should have been no sweat. Still, I’ve watched Goodfellas and the Godfather movies often enough to know that rolled up in a tarp in somebody’s trunk is usually not a situation you want to be in.
I did everything possible to work the tarp loose so I could use my arms properly, but the thing was thick (and old, and smelly, I might as well mention while I’m feeling sorry for myself) and I could barely pull it down past my forehead. Still, I could see that I was definitely in the trunk of a car, and I could get my hands out far enough to actually try to work the lock open on the inside of the trunk lid, but the vehicle was apparently too old to have one of those emergency-release latches. If I’d had more leverage, I might have been able to rip the entire lock out—I’m pretty strong in my earthbound body—but that wasn’t happening, either, so I was left with only one heroic alternative.
As soon as I began pounding on the inside of the trunk lid the car started swerving around. Still, whoever was kidnapping me didn’t pull over or anything, so I had to start thinking about what I could try next. I wasn’t carrying my gun as far as I knew—I certainly hadn’t been when I left the body behind, because who wants to spend days or weeks lying on top of a large foreign-made pistol, even if you’re unconscious? At the very least I’d have been coming back to a body with a bunch of painful bruises, if not a few accidental gunshot wounds. So what was I going to do when they came to take me out and finish me off? And who had grabbed me, anyway? Eligor said his people hadn’t even found my body, let alone the feather. Was Anaita making sure somebody finished the job she’d originally given to Smyler?
I wouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out: the car was slowing down, the jouncing growing less. I redoubled my efforts to get free of the tarp and even the odds a bit, because wrapped in canvas I was about as dangerous as a large burrito.
I had finally worked my upper body free when the car stopped. Someone fumbled with the trunk lid. Disgusted with myself for not having hidden some kind of weapon on my body before leaving it helpless, I braced myself against the floor of the car. When the trunk popped open, I shut my eyes to keep myself from being blinded by the glare, and struck out as hard as I could with my fist. I had the deep satisfaction of hearing somebody gasp in serious discomfort and fall down, so I opened my eyes, kicked my way loose from the canvas, and started climbing out of the trunk, but slowed down a bit when I saw that instead of Luca Brasi or one of Don Corleone’s other button-men, I had instead just punched Clarence the Junior Angel right in the nuts.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I shouted. “In fact, what are you doing period? Why am I in the trunk of a car?” This might have been a bit unfair to Clarence, who was lying on his back, curled up like a dying insect, moaning with pain and nausea, and not in the best position to answer questions.
I heard the driver’s side door slam. A moment later Garcia Windhover, aka “G-Man,” aka “World’s Most Useless Human” came trotting around the side, dressed in his usual gangster drag, like he’d put together his Young Jeezy outfit during a sale at Hot Topic. He’d added to it this time with a black eye patch, which made him look less like a pirate or Nick Fury than like a fourth-grader being treated for lazy eye. “Whoa!” he said, looking worriedly at Clarence, who was lying in the road next to the car quietly retching and panting like a woman in painful labor. “Bobby, dude, why’d you do that?”
“Why’d I do that? No, why am I in the trunk of a car?” I looked at the gaudiness and unnecessary chrome and winced. “Even worse, your car? I don’t want even my dead body in this car, ever. And what’s Clarence doing here, Windhover? He wasn’t supposed to know about this.”
“I needed some help.”
“You’re going to. That’s a promise. I didn’t mean to sock Clarence in the balls, I was just defending myself against kidnappers, but you . . .” I glared at G-Man so direfully that he actually took a couple of steps back. “I’m going to punch you in the manfruit over and over again until you’re ringing like the bells of Notre Dame when the hunchback bought caffeinated by mistake.”
I actually felt better after I said all that. More like my old self. I sat for a moment on the edge of the open trunk, then bent to help Clarence off the ground. He didn’t want to get up at first, but after a moment let himself be coaxed into, if not standing, at least being partially upright.
“Oh, oh, oh,” he moaned, still holding his crotch. “Bodies suck. I think one of them popped.” We were on a side street just off the Camino Real, and a few pedestrians were checking us out, probably wondering whether someone was peddling stolen good
s out of the back of their car. Which Clarence and G-Man were, in a sense, since I had stolen myself right out of Niloch’s clammy hands. Thanks to Smyler, of course. It felt very weird to think that, I’m sure you can imagine.
“Sorry, Junior,” I said. “Honest, I didn’t know it was you. All I knew was someone had wrapped me up in a tarp. I figured some bad guys were going to dump me in the baylands or something.”
Clarence winced and shook his head. “We were taking you back to Garcia’s house.”
“You mean Garcia’s sort-of-grandfather-in-law’s house? The place I already was? Where he was supposed to keep my body safe and sound and not put it in the trunk of his godawful embarrassment of a car and drive it around San Judas like I was a bunch of Mexican dress shirts heading to a flea market?”
“You sound pissed, dude,” G-Man said.
Always quick on the uptake, that lad. “Just a little. And I’ll probably get over it. But right now I’d like to be somewhere other than by the side of a road, so why don’t we go back to Posie’s granddad’s house, Windhover, and you can explain to me what exactly is going on?”
G-Man nodded. “Okay. They probably took the tent down by now.”
It turned out that Edward Walker’s nice house in the Palo Alto district, where G-Man and Posie had been squatting for the last few months, was going on the market. As part of that process, the real estate agent had informed Posie that the place would have to be tented for termite fumigation. I suppose I should have been grateful that G-Man had the brains at least to figure out that a massive dose of pesticide might be bad for my body, but he handled it in typical idiotic fashion. I was too heavy for him to carry, he said, so he’d recruited Clarence—who, you may remember, I had intentionally not told about any of this—to wrap me up in the tarp, carry me out, and drive me in G-Man’s car over to the place in Brittan Heights where Clarence rented a room. I’d spent the last few days in a toolshed that Clarence’s landlords never used. The Littlest Angel at least had the wit to look embarrassed about this.
“A toolshed? Really? What, just propped up with the spiders and earwigs and whatevers crawling all over me?” I knew I was being unpleasant about it, but I wasn’t ready to care yet. Maybe having just spent a massive amount of time undergoing torture in Hell had something to do with that.
“No!” said Clarence. “No, Bobby, I put you on an old pool table. I kind of made a space and then stacked some other stuff on you. You weren’t just propped up or anything. And I didn’t see any spiders.”
“Thanks for that. It’s nice to know I was so well cared-for.”
Clarence frowned. “You don’t have to be so bitchy, Bobby. You already punched me in the testicles.”
“True.” I nodded, downed the rest of the bottle of pisswater that Garcia kept in the late Edward Walker’s refrigerator, some weak-ass hipster beer that used to be drunk by blue-collar guys because it was the only weak-ass crap they could afford, and was now supported almost entirely by nostalgics with tattoos and semi-expensive bicycles. Still, that stuff was better than no beer, although the contest was closer than you might think. “Sorry about that again, Clarence. Really truly. Self-defense, disoriented and confused, probably even PTSD. Put that together and make an excuse out of it you can live with, okay?”
He gave me one of his looks, somewhere between “hurt puppy” and “irritated older brother.” I might not have wanted to trust him, although I was going to have to now, at least to an extent, but how could I dislike anyone who was so easy to annoy and so profitable to tease?
“So . . . what were you doing, Bobby?” he asked.
“Crazy shit. Don’t try it at home,” I said. “Seriously, don’t try it anywhere else, either. Let’s go find me some real food instead of this box of Triscuits and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“You want to ride in my whip?” G-Man asked.
“You were not included in the invitation,” I said. Because it was going to be hard enough talking to Clarence, who at least knew I was an angel, being one himself. There was no way I was going to include Garcia Windhover in the discussion.
G-Man’s expression, though, was so much that of the kid who not only doesn’t get picked, but also the team that gets stuck with him then demands compensation, that I felt sorry for him. “Okay, you’re right, Garcia, I at least owe you dinner. I mean, you may have carried me around in your trunk like a deer you ran over on the road and were trying to sneak home to make venison jerky, but I survived.” I would come up with some sanitized, non-terrifying-to-ordinary-humans version of what had been going on, although I’d need at least another couple of drinks in me before I could imagine what that version might be.
After the explanations-obligations were disposed of, I’d get back to my real job: getting Caz out of Eligor’s clutches. I hadn’t forgotten that for a second, especially because I was now wearing my jacket again, the one with the secret angel-feather pocket which happened to be in another space/time continuum. Eligor had actually told the truth about not being able to find it, because if he had, there was no way he’d have let me escape Hell. “And then afterward, you, Clarence my man, can drive me back to my charming apartment, assuming my landlord hasn’t already rented it to some wife-beating crackhead, and I’ll catch you up on company business on the way.”
“I’m down wit’ that!” said G-Man. “You want to hit the Chinese place down in Whisky Gulch?”
“Sure. But one thing, Windhover. If you’re going to hang around with me, you may not wear that eye patch. Not in public.” It reminded me too much of the Broken Boy’s helper, little Tico. That kid hadn’t been covering up to look cool; he had been hiding something ugly and painful.
“But it’s a tribute to Slick Rick!”
“And Rick would agree with me. For one thing, Slick is actually missing an eye. You aren’t.”
The G-Man pouted but agreed to leave his newest accessory behind. I almost told him that, even without it, he would have looked right at home in Pandaemonium, capital of Hell, but he probably would have thought that was a compliment.
forty-five
job creation
IF SOMEONE had asked me what I’d do if I ever escaped from Hell, my first guess would not have been pot stickers and cashew chicken, but that’s how it turned out.
My second guess would have been pretty close to the money, though: As soon as I got back to my apartment, which was as dingy and unwelcoming as always, I promptly took a very, very long shower and then slept for the next fourteen hours straight. When I woke up, I was so pleased to find myself back in San Judas and wearing an ordinary (or at least non-demonic) body that I showered all over again, sang Dinah Washington songs at the top of my voice, and finished with a smoking rendition of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” that caused a tin-eared neighbor to pound on the wall. I ignored the critic. Don’t get me wrong, I had plenty of new scars that were never going to heal completely, and nightmare-fodder that would last for centuries, but things were finally moving my way. I was not so much of an idiot that I assumed exchanging the feather for Caz was going to be as straightforward as doing it with someone who wasn’t a cheating, murdering, psychopathic demon lord, but I knew Eligor and I both wanted what the other guy had, and that was good enough to start with.
I got the main switchboard at Vald Credit and slowly worked my way up the ladder, dropping names and telling lies until I made it all the way to Eligor’s own personal assistant. This one had an English accent, which reminded me a bit of Caz and made my heart beat even more impatiently.
“Who are you?” she asked—a bit bluntly, I thought.
“Bobby Dollar. Your boss knows me.”
“Does he? I’ve never heard of you.”
She seemed to be trying to piss me off. Well, that might have worked a few weeks ago, but not now—not on The Angel Who Walked Through Hell. I couldn’t help wondering if she’d behave any differently if she knew I was the one who shot her predecessor through the face and then helped her out a f
ortieth-story window. Maybe she’d be grateful to me for that bit of impromptu job creation.
“Doesn’t matter what you think,” I said. “Just tell your boss. Tell him I’m back, and I’m ready to do the swap.”
“Huh.” She didn’t sound impressed, but she did pause for a second. She might even have been paying attention. “Okay, the swap. Got it.”
“Yeah, tell him that he picks the time, I’ll pick the place. All nice and cozy and aboveboard.”
“Fabulous. I’ll pass it along.” And then she hung up. Hung up! Some bloody personal assistant, treating Eligor’s associates like that. Of course, it hadn’t been that long ago that her boss was busy setting all my nerve endings on fire, so I guess it wasn’t that rude, given the context. I even wondered a little if it might be the same secretary I’d killed, just re-bodied (and with an English accent this time for extra zing).
Now I needed a place to do the exchange. Even if Eligor actually meant to honor the bargain (something I wasn’t taking for granted) I was going to need help.
