by Tad Williams
That was as much thinking as I could do with a head that felt like a used sweat sock stuffed with wet cement. I crawled in beside Monica, spent a minute getting used to the unfamiliar feeling of a bed with relatively clean sheets, then tumbled back into sleep.
“Wake up, Laughing Boy.” Monica was standing at the bedroom window, sipping from a glass of water and looking through the slats of the blinds. She was pretty much naked. I could see just enough of Cedar Street outside to know it was morning, the gray kind, the stay-in-bed kind, but it was more interesting looking at Monica. If only she wasn’t so damn cute, I thought: “cute” is one of my many, many weaknesses. “The refrigerator’s empty, and the only coffee’s instant, B.” She turned to survey me. “I think you’re going to buy me breakfast.”
Wasn’t much I could say to that except, “Yes, Ma’am.” Besides, I really needed the coffee. I swear, you don’t understand what slaves humans are to these meat sacks until you’ve spent some time not wearing one. And like I said, it was nice to look at Monica standing there, her graceful long back and wide hips. She wasn’t skinny like the woman on Friends, and her curves always looked good on her. Of course, the fact that she was showing me all this after the way our previous relationship had ended meant I needed to be careful. A drunken slip was one thing, but I was very far away from wanting to start all over with her.
“Your phone’s been ringing and ringing for over an hour,” she said. “Anything going on?”
Research coming in from Fatback, I guessed, but something about her interest didn’t feel entirely natural. I wondered if that was jealousy making its way back into the Bobby-and-Monica equation or something else-paranoia on my part? Or was I being too hard on myself, when a certain amount of paranoia was sensible? After all, it had been a pretty interesting week.
“Nothing too interesting,” I said as casually as I could, then groaned as I sat up and began hunting around on the floor for some pants. “My skull hurts. Hell, even my hair hurts. How much did we drink?”
She looked at me over one shoulder as she pulled on a clingy sweater. She didn’t seem as badly off as I was. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying herself. “Enough to make Chico cry. Where do you want to go? That pancake place still open?”
She said it lightly but my alarms went off. Monica and I used to go to the pancake place on Sunday mornings in the midst of our most domestic phase, when one of us was sleeping at the other one’s place most nights of the week. “Nah. This time of the day we’d have to wait half an hour for a table. Let’s go to Oyster Bill’s.”
“Oyster Bill’s? Their French toast tastes like cardboard.” She frowned. “You’re not freaking out on me already, are you, Dollar? One drunken fuck, and you’re getting ready to run for the hills again? I just wanted some decent pancakes.”
“No, no, that’s fine,” I said, although not entirely truthfully, “but at Bill’s they serve alcohol in the morning, and there’s a Pay and Save on the way there.” At that moment I needed a handful of aspirin and then a Bloody Mary more than anyone who hadn’t recently seen the flensed and unpleasantly disarticulated corpse of one of Hell’s prosecutors could possibly understand.
We stretched out our breakfast ’til close to noon. Several hairs-of-the-dog-that-bit-me stabilized my head, and we mostly just read the papers, but the whole thing was beginning to feel kind of creepily comfortable. See, I actually like Monica a lot, but…well, nothing more than that. She always seemed to see things in our relationship that were invisible to me. Also, the mathematics of our time together seemed to work out that for every week we had fun together we spent a week later on making each other miserable. I really didn’t want to set myself up for that kind of karmic payback. Things were complicated enough.
“So what’s going on with you, Bobby?” she asked at one point. “You hardly talked at all last night.”
“Is that why you brought me home? To talk?”
She scowled, half in jest. “Don’t be that way. It was nice and you thought so too. I’m just worried about you. You seemed…I don’t know, kind of freaky. About Grasswax and that Walker guy and everything.”
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about any of that. At best it meant she was feeling protective of me again, and at worst…well, I didn’t know what that might mean, but it bothered me that she was so interested in my recent work history. Paranoia can be caution by another name, especially when you live in the world of the unlikely full-time, the way I do.
Feeling this twitch of old habits returning was actually beginning to worry me a bit-I didn’t want to become that guy again. “It’s just the same old shit with some new twists,” I told her as I called for the check. “I gotta book, I’ve got some stuff to do. Take your time. Finish your coffee.”
“You’re going?” She gave me a wistful smile. “Okay. It was fun. Like old times.”
“Definitely.” I didn’t know what else to do so I bent and kissed her-on the mouth but promising nothing. “I’ll probably see you tonight. At The Compasses, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “At The Compasses.” I could feel her watching my back as I went out. On a hunch I waited half a minute, then doubled back past the front window at a different angle. She had her phone out and was talking, her face serious. Didn’t prove anything, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better, either. And now I was definitely starting to feel like that guy again, the trust-nobody guy. It’s not a nice way to feel, which is one major reason I gave it up.
It was a warm day for so early in the year and the waterfront was covered with downtown workers brown-bagging or just enjoying the bay breezes and watching the boats. With the return of brain-cell function I remembered that I’d promised Sam I’d take the kid off his hands the next day, which meant that, advocate work permitting, this afternoon was going to be my only chance to do some reconnaissance-I wanted to head over toward the university to check out The Water Hole and the surrounding neighborhood before the evening.
I also wanted a little time on my own to think. Some people can manage that while they’re making slightly awkward conversation with an ex-lover with whom they might or might not have just started up again. I’m not one of those people.
Even if you don’t know San Judas all that well you may know something about Stanford University, the Harvard of the West, alma mater of several US presidents and (although they don’t talk about this quite as much) nursery of uncounted numbers of extremely unpleasant tactical weapons, including the hydrogen bomb.
Back in the middle of the nineteenth century there was only one real city in Northern California-San Francisco, which started its boom with the Gold Rush and never looked back, selling prospectors’ gear to all those suckers on their way to the gold fields, then taking more money from them when they came back in exchange for all manner of services, a few of them actually legal. Across the mouth of San Francisco Bay, Oakland became the jumping-off point for those on their way to the golden hills.
Two other large towns also began to grow beside the bay, one centered around Mission San Jose at the bay’s southeastern end, the other around a secondary mission named “San Judas Tadeo” beside what later became the Redwood River. See, contrary to what a lot of idiots thought then (and still do), the name San Judas has nothing to do with Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus (although later on it came to fit amusingly with the growing image of the place). The city’s named for St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless, the unloved, and other lost causes-in other words, an even better fit than being named after Christ’s ex-pal.
As more and more people began to need wood for boats and houses, sawmills sprung up all over the hills west of San Judas and settlers dredged the Redwood River so the logs could be brought by water to the new harbor there. Then, just when the town was really starting to grow, somebody found oil up in the Santa Cruz Range and a lot of it got shipped out down the river to San Judas and its new harbor. The boom only lasted about a decade or so, but that was enough to leave Mission
San Jose and any other pretenders to the title of the Bay Area’s second city in the dust.
And that’s kind of been the nature of San Judas ever since-boom and bust, feast then famine. It’s been an oil town, a port town, and eventually a factory town because of all the defense industries that set up here around the time of the Second World War. And a main lure for that kind of technology were all those science and engineering graduates from Stanford and the other local universities, which is why Jude, along with Berkeley and San Francisco itself, wound up at the center of the information revolution.
Leland Stanford was a Victorian-era entrepreneur-a “robber baron” to many-who became the governor of California. When his only child died of typhoid, he and Mrs. Stanford built the university in their son’s honor, and for the first few years it was a remarkably forward-looking institution. Then Stanford’s wife died in a fire, with the ex-Governor himself unable to save her because of a locked door. The governor heard her last terrible moments and was never the same man after that, nor was his university the same kind of open and open-hearted place it had been: No more modern, sandstone buildings, no more sweeping vistas to the beautiful western hills. Instead the university grew upward as much as out, spiking the skyline with dark, Gothic towers. The governor’s gift to the state also grew more inward as well, surrounding itself with turreted walls that made it look more like the castle of an occupying army than a modern seat of learning.
Once the Camino Real, the great north-south highway that stretches from San Francisco all the way down to the far end of the bay, ran right through the university itself, but sometime in the 1920s the Stanford board of regents decided they didn’t like the hoi polloi motoring freely through their expensive and exclusive university so they lowered the road and turned it into a long tunnel that passes under the narrowest part of the university property. If you decline to use the tunnel your choice is either line up to be examined for admittance at one of the two forbidding university gates or just turn the hell around and go back.
Perhaps because the deadly fire that killed Mrs. Stanford was rumored to have been started by a drunken servant, or perhaps because he was just a mean old bugger, Governor Stanford was also very, very down on alcohol-not a drop to be had on campus, and for years not a drop to be had anywhere near the campus. That’s eased over the decades. Although the university itself is still famously dry, a number of drinking establishments sprang up in the shadow of the walls to serve Stanford students. Preparing to rule the world can be thirsty work, I’m told.
The Water Hole was one of these student hang-outs, nestled between the Camino Real and the university turnoff, only yards away from huge and forbidding Branner Gate, a monstrosity of black granite whose polished sheen made it look perpetually wet. At least, I had always thought of The Water Hole as a student hang-out, which was one of the reasons I’d never been inside. I once had a client who got run over in the parking lot by a drunken university professor, and helping him off to Heaven afterward was the closest to the property I’d ever been.
If Fatback’s information was correct, though, there was a bit more to the place than that. In fact, if one of Hell’s big hitters hung out here, that automatically made it pretty damn dangerous and the last place someone in my position should be, but here I was casing the joint like a private dick setting up a motel sting for an unhappy spouse.
I was doing it because a lot of things still didn’t make sense with this whole Walker/Grasswax affair. For one thing, I wondered why my own team had so quickly and casually offered me up to the Opposition for questioning. Didn’t make me feel very protected if you know what I mean, which was why I wanted a different perspective on the matter. The fact that the perspective in question belonged to a devastatingly attractive woman-creature was simply how things had worked out. That was what I was doing my best to believe, anyway, but I had to admit that despite our only momentary acquaintance, I’d had trouble keeping the glamorous Countess out of my thoughts.
Because she’s made that way, I reminded myself. On purpose, just like the wiggly little fake worm growing on one of those toothy deep-water fish.
I’d seen the outside of the bar a zillion times, with its famously broken sign reading “The Wate Hole.” The rest of the place was about what you’d expect of a mid-century student dive, a long, low wooden building with tiny windows that had been almost completely plastered over with old band flyers and Happy Hour two-for-the-price-of-one ads. My first surprise when I stepped through the scratched and many-times-repainted door was how big the place really was. The main room stretched back into what I had thought must be the building behind it, and though the ceiling was low and the lights were lower, it was possible to see that it was pretty crowded, especially for a weekday afternoon.
It was an odd setup for a college bar, that was clear right away. In some ways The Water Hole looked more like a nightclub, including a scarred dance floor and a small stage at one end of the room, but it was the patrons who really confused me. Usually student joints are low on ambience and even lower on mystery but big on picnic tables and pitchers of cheap beer. The Water Hole had more of the feel of your sleazy lounge rendezvous, the kind of place where businessmen in town for the weekend went looking for drunk and lonely hausfraus. Not that there weren’t any students in the place, but they weren’t acting very student-y, if you know what I mean. Instead of the groups of three or four or more I would have expected, the patrons were mostly huddled in pairs, but plenty of drinkers, both at the bar and in the dark narrow booths, were obviously on their own and drinking pretty seriously as well-the unsocial kind of drinking that I’d done a few times myself and which left no cheerful memories.
To be honest, I couldn’t quite get a handle on anything about the place, and that was beginning to bug me. I contemplated ordering a beer from the sour, tattooed, and shaven-headed bartender, then checking out the exits and the restrooms in a conscientious manner so I’d know the layout when I came back in the evening, but for some reason I didn’t relish the idea of becoming one of those solitary afternoon drinkers, even in the service of proper reconnaissance. Instead I turned around and slipped back out to the parking lot.
I still hadn’t received any work calls, and I didn’t want to have to deal with the questions that seeing Monica would raise, so I decided to avoid The Compasses. I stopped instead at my other place of business, the second-floor office on Arch Street that we local advocates share, a place we use to prop up our real-world identities as insurance adjusters, reporters, or whatever other guises help us to snoop around effectively as we perform our angelic chores. The only person who works there is our secretary, the angelic functionary named Alice. Like me, most of the rest of the advocates look like they’re in their twenties or thirties. I’m not sure how Alice pulled duty that had her looking like she was fifty-five and lived on fast food (unless she really did live on fast food and had done this to herself) but it didn’t seem like she could be very happy about it. And in fact, she never gave any indication that she was happy.
“Hi, Alice,” I said. “Anything happening I should know about?”
She barely looked up from her computer. “Other than you screwing the pooch with that Walker thing?”
“Thanks, nice to see you too. You’re the one who sent me that, right?”
She raised a penciled-on eyebrow. “Do you see anyone else here? Your big stupid buddy was offline, so I gave it to you. Then you messed it up all on your own.”
All of which I already knew. “You’re a treasure, Alice. Sam said he lost connection. Is that usual? Was there anything else strange about the call?”
“It happens occasionally. It’s because of the weather Outside-well, it’s not weather, exactly…” She shook her head, opened a drawer, and took out a bag of M amp;Ms. She poured herself a generous handful and put the bag away without offering me any. “As far as the call, Mr. Detective Guy Full of Questions,” she said through a clicking mouthful, “it came right down from Central Dis
patch, same as usual.”
I left Alice typing and crunching and headed back to my place, planning to settle in with a cup of coffee and the files Fatback had sent me. It was late afternoon, and Stambaugh Street was bustling with people on their way home. Every tenant in my building seemed have entered the lobby at the same time, so I waited for another elevator instead of crushing myself into the first with everyone else.
As I walked down the fourth-floor hallway I noticed something strange-a sour, slightly alarming odor that made my eyes and nostrils itch. Before I figured it out by scent alone I reached my door and saw the source. A handprint roughly the size of a car’s steering wheel had been scorched into the door, the wood blackened and charred and the paint bubbled round it-a handprint distorted by what looked like trailing scars made by long claws. My heart bumped and stuttered in my chest just like a real, terrified living person’s heart, and my skin went icy cold with shock. I darted a look around, but I was alone in the corridor.
The Burning Hand. Somebody had marked my own personal door with the Burning Hand, Hell’s way of letting you know that you were living on borrowed time. I’d been taught that the only people who received this sign of infernal displeasure were poor, doomed fools who’d tried to cheat the Devil himself.
Apparently someone thought yours truly was just that kind of fool.
seven
a lioness comes to drink
The inside of my apartment was as hot as an oven, sticky-hot, and pretty much a continuation of the obvious message left on the front door. Furniture was upside down, small stuff had been smashed, drawers had been pulled out and dumped, and what few papers and books I had were strewn all across the floor. Even my CDs-no, I haven’t gone all-MP3 yet-had been dragged out, opened, and scattered. I looked down at the faces on the floor, Monk, Buddy Guy, Cannonball Adderley, staring up at me like a frozen crowd scene. What had the visitors been looking for?
