by Tad Williams
As Cinnamon helped his friend toward the door, leaving a trail of red drips across the concrete tiles, the Countess gave me a look from which all amusement had packed up and moved out. “You’ve got about two minutes, angel, so sit down and start talking. Then either I’ll tear your head off myself because you didn’t impress me, or those two will get nervous enough to call for backup.”
“Yeah. But you never got your drink.”
She looked at me like I must be kidding. “That two minutes was an outside estimate.” She watched me not sitting down, then the smile came back, one of the grudging, I admire your bravery but you’re still going to be dead as vaudeville kind. I get them more often than I’d like. “It’s still sitting on the bar—the one with the celery stick.”
“A Bloody Mary? You’re joking, right?”
She didn’t like that. “If you’re going to make editorial comments I’m going to pop your skull off your spine right now, Mr. Dollar.”
I went to fetch her Bloody Mary. There were two beers there, too, which had been meant for the bodyguards, so I brought those back as well. I felt like I’d earned them, and now that my heart wasn’t beating so fast I wanted to drink something quickly, before I realized what I’d just done. What if I’d had to shoot the second guard? At the very least I’d lose my job as a heavenly advocate, and in the midst of all this craziness about the Walker case, killing a member of the Opposition in public would probably bring much worse trouble than just a demotion to Angelic Patron of Cub Scouts or whatever.
“So,” she said as I slipped into the booth and faced her across the table, “why exactly do you want to die so badly, Mr. Dollar?” Somehow bar employees had cleaned the table and floor while I was gone. Everything was so clean it was almost like a first date. “Haven’t things been exciting enough already?”
“I’m not really seeking death,” I said. “More like information.”
“From me? What on earth can you possibly hope to learn from me? And why would I share anything with you? Need I remind you that our two organizations have been at war for millions of years?”
“Not war,” I said, then took a long swallow from one of my new beers. I wondered if I’d be alive long enough to start the second one. “Remember, it’s officially called a ‘conflict.’ Some of the bean counters on my side even like to refer to it as a ‘competition.’ Which would make us not enemies but…competitors.”
She bit her lip, perhaps to keep from smiling or frowning, perhaps simply because she knew it made her look so intensely sexy that it befuddled the mind of anything with a body. “What does the competition want to know? And not that I care, but you really had better stop showing off how brave you are and get to the point. Just because you caught Candy and Cinnamon by surprise, you shouldn’t think they’re useless. They can make you hurt for a very, very long time without letting you die. We have whole graduate studies programs for that, where I come from.”
“Oh, I know. In fact, that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. Who do you think earned their doctorate on Prosecutor Grasswax?”
Her lovely face went dead but the eyes remained as wide and innocently blue as a prairie sky. The voice was pure Mary Poppins. “Is that an accusation, Mr. Dollar? If it is, it strikes me as a very, very foolish one.”
I raised my hand. “Peace, Princess—”
“Countess.”
“Yeah. I’m not accusing you. Why would I want to do that even if I thought it was true? Grasswax didn’t work for my side, and he certainly wasn’t my friend. In fact, I thought he was a shit.”
“Then perhaps you did it.”
“Maybe. But you’ll have to trust me for now when I say I doubt it, and that I’d really like to know who did.”
“The whole infernal hierarchy would like to know.” Her eyes narrowed. “And they’re even more curious to find out what happened to his client, Edward Walker.”
“Client.” I laughed, but not very hard. “That’s a funny way to talk about a guy Grasswax was trying to get sentenced to an eternity of being fried in flaming oil like an eggroll.”
“Our prosecutor was doing his job, Mr. Dollar. I was doing my job, too. I suggest you might live a little longer—whether in or out of a body—if you just went away and did yours.”
“Yeah? Well, not only was I doing my job, I was literally minding my own business until all this shit started blowing sideways.” I was getting angry now, and it was beginning to suppress that prickly back-of-the-neck feeling that less experienced folks might mistake for cowardly fear. (I like to think of it as an imaginative form of caution.) The Countess had been right about one thing: I only had a few minutes at the most before her two Care Bears came back, probably with the rest of their cousins.
“It’s too bad the Walker affair has inconvenienced you,” she said, “but I have nothing else to share with you. And you have nothing to interest me.” She was armored like a tank, a very, very attractive tank with diamond earrings and what looked like a large silver locket around her pale, smooth neck. “You ought to go away now.”
The shiny stuff distracted me a little—I was under the impression that demons hated silver. “Yes, I’m sure you’d like to get back to whatever you were doing, Countess. Slumming, is my guess.” I sat back, the picture of relaxation, or so I hoped. “I confess to being curious about what brings you to a place like this. I mean, sawdust-on-the-floor joints don’t seem like your scene, Princess.”
Now the smile was actively feral. “You’re trying to irritate me, aren’t you, Mr. Dollar? For your information, I like places like this. You see, I like students.”
“Breaded, with cocktail sauce? Or do you just gobble them down raw like sushi?”
“Nothing so crude, Mr. Dollar.” She had leaned a little closer to me without my noticing, and now her hand alighted on my thigh. I could feel the points of her nails pressing through my jeans. “I’m not a vampire or some other sad, cartoonish thing that eats people. I’m one of Hell’s nobility. Despair, that’s my true meat and drink. And at this age, they are so easily turned down that path.” She giggled like a teenage girl whispering with a friend. “Someone I used to know told me I should aim higher. ‘It’s like shooting blind fish in a very small barrel,’ was how he put it. But I do so love to see them cry and beg, because they start out so sure of themselves—especially the boys!”
“If you’re trying to creep me out you’ll have to try harder.” But I was as conscious of that hand on my leg as I would have been of a poisonous spider. Although not in entirely the same way. “I really don’t care how you spend your time, Countess. It just gave me a chance to meet you and ask some questions.”
The nails poked into my leg a little harder. She moistened her lips, which were already dewy in the extreme. “And have you asked everything you want to ask?”
This had gotten weird very fast. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been around members of the Opposition’s seduction brigade before, and they have mojo working for them a poor little angel boy like me can’t even understand. But the Countess was something else. Way else. I was scared she was going to slide her hand up to my crotch and find out just how much of an act my I’m-not-impressed really was. “Okay, then, one more thing,” I said. “Yesterday I came home and found that I’d been visited by the Burning Hand. Anything you can share with me about that? Did I offend somebody on your side?”
“After seeing you operate, I can’t imagine how that could happen. But I highly doubt it, anyway. I suspect someone’s pulled a little prank on you. The Burning Hand—well, that’s a bit of an old wives’ tale. Haven’t heard of anyone actually getting one for years.”
“Then maybe it’s time to modernize the database.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and punched up a picture of my front door, then held it in front of her very pretty face. “What would you call that?”
Jackpot—or at least an expression crossed her face for the first time that wasn’t part of her Demon Queen act. She took her hand off my leg. Th
e weird thing was that it wasn’t just surprise I saw but a hint of fear as well, which freaked me out. What could scare one of Hell’s society-page regulars?
Whatever it was vanished in a moment, like the reflection of something moving. “You’re half right, Mr. Dollar. That’s a burning hand—but it’s not The Burning Hand.”
“What are you talking about?”
The hand dropped lightly on my leg again and squeezed ever so gently. The nails were sharp enough to poke through the denim and touch actual skin. “Back in the old days, people who tried to renege on their agreements with us would be reprimanded with the mark of a black, ashy hand on their doors…but the hands that made the marks were human, or at least human-sized. The tradition is very clear about that. Unless you live in a munchkin cottage, I’d say the hand that made this must have been at least as big as a polar bear’s paw.” She held up her own dainty little mitt—the one that wasn’t prickling my thigh. Her long, sharp nails were without polish but very, very clean. “In other words, not made by anything human-sized.”
I could tell there was something else she wasn’t telling me, but I could also sense that she wasn’t going to tell me now. A sort of wall had suddenly gone up between us. I decided to cut my losses and see if I could get out of The Water Hole without a firefight. I disengaged her grip from my leg and slid out of the booth, but just as I did so the front door swung open and several large shapes crowded through, blocking the orange sodium light from the parking lot. Reinforcements.
“Thank you, Countess,” I said. “You’ve been more helpful than you know.”
“You’re cute, Dollar. If you survive the next few minutes you may call me Casimira the next time we meet.” She smiled, and she was so beautiful it hurt my chest. “My friends call me ‘Caz,’ but I don’t think you’ll be around long enough to earn that privilege.”
Damn, she was fine.
There were about five or six of them coming toward us, an entire exhibit escaped from the Big and Ugly Hall of Fame. I sprinted for the other end of the room, furious now that I hadn’t taken time earlier to map the exits.
I found the men’s room and levered myself out the window. Luckily they hadn’t thought enough of me to leave anyone staked out in the parking lot, so by the time they’d busted the lock on the restroom door I was wiping off sweat as I pulled out onto the Camino Real. But I was most of the way back to the motel room I’d rented on the north end of town before I finally stopped thinking about her hand resting lightly on my leg.
eight
posie and g-man
I AWOKE TO the sun stabbing through the dusty blinds of the Royal Highway Motor Hotel like Norman Bates’s favorite steak knife, as well as the four most famous notes of the Hallelujah Chorus chiming over and over again from my phone—the sound of waiting messages. Believe me, if it was up to me, I’d have something better (or at least more discreet) but our phones are work-issue and Nikola Tesla himself couldn’t reset them. That doesn’t mean that’s what folks like you would hear, but it’s all an angel like me gets when the phone wants you to know there’s a message—HAH-lay-loo-yah. HAH-lay-loo-yah. Whoever did the programming for the House was either criminally stupid or had a very unpleasant sense of humor.
Besides all the stuff from Fatback I hadn’t read yet, I had also received several nasty messages from Temuel’s office wanting to know where I was staying and one text from Clarence the Trainee Angel asking when I was going to pick him up. Shit, I remembered, that thing I set up with Sam. I sat in a puddle of unpleasantly bright light looking for the time and finally spotted the motel clock proclaiming 9:22 in digital scarlet. Practically the crack of dawn. I texted the kid back with fingers that felt like uncooked sausages, telling him to meet me at noon at Oyster Bill’s. No sense hurrying into the day. Besides, I had an errand I wanted to run before then, after I had self-administered some coffee.
Twenty-five minutes later, showered and with a cup of Peet’s the size of a grain silo between my knees—no cup holders in a vintage Matador, which might make you wonder how people survived the seventies long enough to invent cup holders later on—I was headed down the Bayshore toward the Walker place for the third time this week. The neighborhood had more or less returned to normal after the circus of the last couple of days, the sidewalks full of smiling postal carriers and people wearing casually expensive clothes walking their casually expensive dogs. Pretty much what you’d expect on a Saturday morning in Jude’s Palo Alto district.
Edward Walker’s house looked like any other house on the street now except for a small island of stuffed toys and flowers and written tributes, the kind of sentimental Sargasso that quickly collects these days near the scene of any semi-public tragedy. There was a different car in the driveway today, a scuffed, nondescript Japanese sedan that didn’t look like anything Walker himself would have driven. The car in which he’d died was nowhere in sight, although the garage door was closed.
I was mostly interested in what I might discover on the Outside, but the slightly odd car intrigued me, so I knocked on the door. Ordinarily in these situations I’m an insurance investigator, but that wasn’t going to play well at the house of a prominent suicide, and my usual backup, the National Transportation Safety Board, didn’t really make sense when the crime scene was a parked car, whether or not the engine had been running.
The young woman who opened the door could easily have walked out of someplace like The Water Hole or any other college hangout, and from practically any time in the last forty years. She had long dark hair braided with little bells and whatnot, and wore a dark, figure-camouflaging hooded sweatshirt over jeans and sandals. She squinted at me as though someone coming to the door was a very nutty idea. “Yeah?”
“Hi. My name is Robert Dollar and I work for Vista Magazine. I’m so sorry to bother you at a time like this but for some reason I couldn’t reach anyone by phone. Is Mrs. Walker here?”
She looked at me as though I had asked her whether fish flew. “There isn’t any Mrs. Walker. You ought to know that. My grandmother died about five years ago.”
“I’m so sorry—of course.” I hadn’t expected to deal with real folks, and although some of Fatback’s information was in a folder in my hand, I hadn’t found a chance to read most of it. “So you’re Mr. Walker’s granddaughter. Do you think I could have a few moments of your time? We’re running…well, it’s sort of a tribute to your grandfather, and I’d like to make certain I’ve got the details straight. These things are always hurried, because of course no one was prepared…”
For a moment the irritated look dropped from her face to be replaced by sadness. She was actually quite a pretty young woman, but with a sullenness about her that made her look less than bright. “No one. You got that right.” She shrugged. “Come in, I guess. Wait, shouldn’t you show me some identification?”
I have more identity cards than an international smuggler and I’ve learned to find the right one as nimbly as a stage magician. I popped it out, and she squinted then waved me inside. She led me to a large, open living room and flopped down on the couch without giving any indication of where I should sit. The other couch was too far away, so I perched on a hassock a few feet from her and tried to look journalistic. She didn’t offer me anything to drink—while she fetched it I would have cased the room as thoroughly as possible—so I did my best to examine the place while we talked. It was very clearly the living room of a man of ideas, or someone who wanted to be seen as one, anyway, with one wall of the primarily white room dominated by an immense book case. Most of what it held was books, but there were also a number of casually fabulous folk art items perched on the shelves. A few pictures hung on the walls, mostly black and white Ansel Adams prints of dramatic landscapes uncluttered by human figures. The couches had sheepskins draped on them and nice examples of Mesoamerican pottery sat on many of the surfaces. The whole thing looked expensively tasteful but also a trifle neglected—I thought I could see dust on some of the pieces.
&nb
sp; I pulled out Fatback’s report and stole a second to glance over it. There it was at the top of Walker’s bio, what I should already have known—widowed, wife was named Molly. And the granddaughter was…
“You must be Posie, right?”
She nodded. “Like the flower.”
Looking up from the bio, my eye was caught by an impressively large Mayan calendar in baked red clay that hung on the chimney behind the young woman. “That’s a lovely piece,” I said. “Is it genuine?”
She squinted at it, then shrugged; I was beginning to think she normally wore some kind of lenses. “I don’t know. Grandma and Grandpa used to bring stuff back from all kinds of places. I think that’s from Mexico or something.”
Laboriously, I turned the questioning from things Posie didn’t know much about to things Posie apparently knew nothing about at all—for instance, the reason her grandfather had killed himself. Not that I asked her outright.
“Such a shock to the whole community.” I shook my head. “Your grandfather was so admired. He seemed like a man who had so much to live for.” I lowered my voice to a respectful half-whisper. “I don’t mean to pry—and this certainly won’t go in the article—but was he ill?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But he never told us stuff like that, anyway.”
“Did he have any other confidantes?”
“Other confidence?”
I wanted to groan but stood up instead. I began to examine the bookshelves, discreetly (or at least I hoped so) photographing them with my phone. “No, confidantes—people he talked to. Close friends, colleagues. A priest…?”
“Priest!” She laughed sourly. “That’s pretty funny. Grandpa hated religion. Thought it was all a bunch of shit to trick people out of their money.”
I nodded. “Well, obviously it wouldn’t be a priest then, but still, he must have had friends. Your grandfather was a very beloved man. Did he have anybody to share…difficult decisions with?” I was all but asking her who else I could talk to, but she was very slow on the uptake. I finally figured it out, though—the girl wasn’t necessarily stupid, she was just stoned. As I passed her I got a distinct whiff of weed off her sweatshirt and hair.
