by Tad Williams
“I think so, yeah.”
I did my best to remain calm. “Any possibility it’s still around? That you could find it?”
“It might be in the crud drawer. That’s where the rubber bands from the newspaper and, like, twist ties and all the useless stuff like that goes.” She smiled beatifically, as if this breakthrough in domestic order was hers and hers alone.
I smiled back as charmingly as I could manage. “Any chance you could go see if it’s there, Ms. Walker?” Because if this guy was a ringer he obviously wouldn’t have left anything tonight. He had probably come just to vacuum up the Magian Society folder and any other loose ends, and he wouldn’t be coming back, either. “It would really help my article on your granddad.”
Two minutes later, after a great deal of rummaging noises and mumbled curses, Posie Walker reappeared in triumph waving a white cardboard rectangle. “Found it!”
I tried not to look too eager as I reached out for it. G-Man was watching me with the kind of hero-worshipping attention that I knew was going to cause trouble somewhere up the line. The card itself was simple—just a few lines in the same neat black italics as the folder I’d photographed:
The Rev. Dr. Moses Habari
The Magian Society
4442 East Charleston Road, Suite D, San Judas, CA 94043
There was a phone number too, which I immediately dialed. No longer in service, of course. “How long ago did you say he left?”
“’Bout half an hour,” Garcia informed me. “You gonna go after him? Can I tag?”
I briefly considered telling him my real feelings, but decided I might need something from him or Posie later on. “No, I need you to stay here in case he gets in touch again. And if he does, please don’t do anything weird.” I gave him my sternest look. “Just call me, understand? Discreetly?”
“Under control, Mr. Dollar.” He all but saluted. A couple of days ago he had been waving a gun in my face, now this dumbass was ready to follow me around like a baby duck. I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m an idiot magnet.
I was back on the Bayshore a few minutes later, this time heading toward Southport. I knew East Charleston Road fairly well because it wasn’t that far from where Sam lived, a neighborhood that had fallen on tough times twice, first in the seventies when the cargo-handling industry took a hit from competition across the bay, then again twenty years later when Shoreline Amusement Park closed for good. What remained were little business parks, storage lockers, and party supply warehouses, as well as a few apartment buildings and stores catering to a local population of retired longshoremen, general rummies, and of course the occasional angel.
As I made my way down Charleston toward the bay I could see the skeletal remains of Shoreline Park off to my right, the great fretwork arch of the Whirlaway coaster draped across the face of the waxing moon like a spiderweb. People were always coming up with new projects that were going to turn the little manmade island back into a dynamo of the local economy—hotels, office complexes, even one plan for a mid-bay golf course—but somehow they all came to nothing, and the abandoned amusement park just kept getting rustier and more decrepit. Nowadays it mainly got used as a location for low-budget zombie apocalypse movies.
4442 East Charleston was pretty much what I’d figured it would be, one of those single-story warehouse condos for small wholesalers and light retail, the business equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys. Suite D was empty and shuttered, also as I expected. I should have brought my break-in tools (again, none of your business) but they were in one of the packing boxes from my apartment, and I hadn’t had the time to find them. Anyway, it was impossible to tell from outside when anyone had last occupied the office suite, but just for due diligence I knocked loudly several times.
No response from the Magian Society folks, but a dissheveled guy with several days’ growth of beard finally came out of the C space next door and asked me who I was looking for. I wondered if his wife had kicked him out and he’d moved into his shop (which turned out to be true). He ran a little grinding business, specializing in the sharpening of some kind of exotic industrial cutting blades, and was quite willing to talk—a little too willing. He told me within the first minute that he’d never seen the tenants of Suite D, had no idea what they did or sold, and had often wondered if anyone was using the space at all, but it took me another ten minutes to get away from him, and I had to admire some of his machinery and reject several offers of a beer first.
All the way back across the city to my motel I rolled the newest bits around in my mind. I had confirmation of a connection between the African gentleman and the Magian Society, and I had a name for him, or at least a pseudonym. Also, judging by how quickly he’d scuttled over to cover his tracks at the Walker place, I was pretty sure that he knew I was looking for him. I had got the name of the landlord for the Charleston address from the grinder guy and decided that might be a place to start tomorrow, if luck kept the local deaths down to a minimum, so I had some free time.
Of course, no sooner did I think this than the phone rang, summoning me to a heart attack in a Spanishtown apartment building.
The deceased, who seemed to be the beloved patriarch of a large Honduran-American family, eventually turned out to be a nasty old bastard who defeated my best efforts to paint him as a product of his culture and era. He hadn’t actually killed or raped anyone, but his record was poor, and I was lucky to get him off with about a thousand years in Purgatory. I couldn’t help hoping it would do him some good, because even as his soul stood looking at his own corpse and his dry-eyed family, he was complaining that he deserved better. He was still bitching when the light took him.
Anyway, it was a nasty grind, and by the time I stepped out of the Zipper and back into real-world Spanishtown, it was nearly two in the morning. (Time continues to pass Inside while you’re Outside, if I didn’t already mention that, although not always at exactly the same rate.) All I wanted to do was get back to my motel, pour a drink, and call Fatback, who would have cycled to man-brain-and-pig-body by now, then fall into bed. But I was also on edge due to recent events, so when I heard a noise at the other end of the client’s apartment garage, I stopped in my tracks and yanked out my .38. Yes, my pulse was elevated. You damn betcha.
“Just to let you know, whoever you are,” I announced loudly, “I’m tired, nervous, and armed. Let’s avoid a serious mistake, shall we? Come out where I can see you.”
The figure that stepped out of the shadows was so big that for a freaky moment I feared the worst, but I quickly saw this shape was far more human than the ghallu that had chased me. With some relief I recognized my old friend, the Countess’s Bodyguard Number One.
“I wish we had some more time, Dollar,” he said. “I’d love to see you try to stop me with that popgun before I folded you up like a napkin.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame we don’t have time to try that, you big cutie,” I said. “Seriously, if you want to waltz around, come back when I’m not so tired and we’ll do it properly. Because right now I want to go to bed so bad that I’ll just put a few slugs in your skull, which will at least keep you out of my hair long enough for me to get some shut-eye.”
“You talk big, halo boy.”
“Look, what do you want?” I wasn’t kidding—I really was willing to shoot him just to get into bed sooner.
“Somebody wants to talk to you. She’s waiting.”
My heart sped. It couldn’t be good to have an archdemon looking for you in the middle of the night, but for some reason I still found it exciting in a sick kind of way. “All right. One thing, though, Carob? Wait—Cocoa, was it?”
He wasn’t amused. “It’s Candy.”
“Oh, sorry, right. I just wanted to know—where’s your buddy with the porn ‘stache?”
“Cinnamon? He’s driving the car.”
“I hope so. Because please notice where I’m holding my gun. If someone suddenly appears out of the bushes I’m going to blow your dick off o
n general principles.”
Fortunately for Candy he was telling the truth. As we emerged from the apartment building garage, I saw a long car with black windows idling under a streetlight. The driver’s window was open, and Cinnamon was sitting there in all his cookie-dustered glory. He sneered at me as Candy opened the back door and gestured for me to get in.
I didn’t like turning my back on Candy—didn’t like it at all—so I shoved my gun against his belly as I leaned down to look inside. The Countess gazed back at me. Her eyes were big as a doe’s under the dome light, but none of Bambi’s relations ever had a gleam like that. Satisfied that at least Candy and Cinnamon weren’t on some kind of freelance revenge trip, I slid in. The door thumped shut behind me, making my ears pop.
“Hiya, Countess,” I said. “Or does you following me around at this time of the night mean we’re good enough friends that I can start calling you Ca—”
I didn’t finish my sentence because she slapped me so hard it nearly dislocated my jaw. I stared at her for a moment, stunned. “Hang on…!” I began, then she smacked me again, and this time I felt her nails dig into my cheek like fishhooks. When little lights stopped flashing in front of my eyes I reached up and dabbed at the wetness I felt there. Yep, blood. “What the hell was that for?” I asked.
“I knew you were self-absorbed and self-satisfied, Mr. Dollar.” The dome light was still on; she was showing a little color high on her cheeks, something I hadn’t seen before. You’ll probably think me hopelessly shallow when I confess that I liked it, despite the pain I’d had to endure to see it. “What I didn’t realize is that you were also suicidal.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Oh, I think you do.”
“On the contrary, and I feel like I know less and less every second.” What was with this woman?—no, this demon, I reminded myself. I couldn’t figure her out at all. Most of the denizens of Hell I meet make it very clear they wish they could immediately start killing you in a complex, painful way and are only prevented from doing so by the Tartarean Convention, but I couldn’t figure out what the Countess wanted at all. “Why don’t you ask me some questions next time before you start hurting me?”
“You think that hurt? Believe me, if I ever decide to inflict pain on you, Dollar, you’ll know.”
“Look, just tell me what’s going on.” Bodyguard Two had just climbed out from behind the wheel to share a smoke with Bodyguard One under the streetlight, so we were alone in the car. “Is this something to do with that Foxy character?”
“The little Japanese freak?” She leaned back in the seat. She was wearing a black dress, very short, and showing a lot of long, smooth leg. I dragged my attention back up to her face. It’s not real, Bobby, I reminded myself. Strip away the illusion, and she probably looks like some kind of giant slug. “No,” she said, “this is about you, angel. Word is all over the street that you’ve got hold of something big—and I’m not talking about the street you can see from your cruddy little apartment.”
“Ah. You’ve seen it, then. I’m planning to redecorate—you know, ferns, Scandinavian Modern furniture in natural woods…”
“Shut up. I’m talking about the word on the Via Dolorosa.” Which was one name for the main drag of Pandaemonium, the capital of Hell. “That you’ve got hold of something important and you’re looking for a buyer. A once-in-an-epoch piece of merchandise.”
“But I don’t—!”
“Shut up. And they’re also whispering all over Dis Pater Square and the rest of the city that you got this something important from me. Which means on top of everything else I have Chancellor Urgulap and his investigation poking into all my affairs, making my life miserable. I am not happy.”
That stopped me dead for a second. I looked at her and for the first time saw not an impossibly beautiful temptress or an evil spirit in disguise but somebody who might just be as worried about the current state of play as I was. And I sure didn’t envy anybody who had that horrible melted giant bug I’d met at Walker’s place breathing down her neck.
“Okay, lady,” I said. “You’ve had your say. Now listen to mine.” I held my hand up to forestall an interruption and to my amazement it worked. “I don’t know anything about any special something except that a dancing albino Asian asked me today if I wanted to sell it, and you seem to think I’ve been bragging that I have it. But like I said, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have, and if I’ve got it, I’m not aware of it. Hang on—I’m not done.” I raised my hand again when she started to speak, but instead of slapping her as she’d done to me I reached forward and gently touched my finger to her red, red lips. I don’t know exactly why I did it, I just did. She knocked my hand aside, but in a strange, uncaring way quite different from the way she’d slugged me just a minute earlier. “Right,” I said. “Now, here’s the next part. You remember the scorchmark I showed you—that handprint something burned into my door? Well, now I’ve seen that something up close and in person. In fact it tried to kill me last night, and nearly succeeded. When you saw that picture, I could tell it meant something to you—you’ve seen something like it before, haven’t you? So instead of busting my chops again, why don’t you show a little good faith and tell me what you know for a change? Something’s got you upset, Countess—let’s see if we can do each other some good. Is all this craziness about the Walker case?”
She stared at me for a long time, and all of a sudden the inspiration that had carried me along deserted me. What did I think I was doing here? I couldn’t trust this tarted-up hellbitch even if she decided to trust me, and she would never trust me. Not to mention what would happen if my bosses found out I was sitting in a car in the middle of the night volunteering to share information with the Countess of Cold Hands, one of Hell’s fixers. The next summons I got would be to a heavenly court martial (if they didn’t just incinerate me without a trial). This kind of shit just wasn’t done without archangelic supervision, and I had already been warned to stay on the straight and narrow. But things had started moving too fast for me, and I was tired of playing blind man’s bluff, weary of trying to figure out the shape of what was going on by feel alone.
“It’s not all about the Walker case,” she said slowly. “But Walker has got my masters shaken up.”
“Really? It’s not just something they’ve done to drive Heaven crazy?”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t seem to be. As far as I can tell, they’re really worried. And there have been more souls lost since that happened.”
I felt a little chime of reassurance. I knew I was probably crazy for even entertaining the possibility, but maybe she really was being straight with me—or as straight as she knew. “I’ve heard that too. But if both sides are freaking out, where did Walker go? Where did any of them go?”
She pulled a compact from her purse and gave herself a quick once-over in the mirror. “Don’t know,” she said. “And to be honest, I don’t care, even though I’ve been questioned about it nonstop ever since it happened. I’ve got enough problems of my own.”
“Like what?”
Her eyes flashed, and I’m not saying that poetically: something sparked red in the depths. “None of your fucking business, Dollar.”
“Okay, fair enough. But what about the thing that burned the crap out of my apartment door?”
“It’s a ghallu,” she said, sounding like an English Home Counties schoolgirl reciting what she’d learned in a particularly dreary class, “a living piece of Old Night, which is another word for Chaos, in case you crashed and burned your afterlife exams. Expensive to summon, nearly impossible to stop. And, yes, I’ve seen that mark before.”
“Where? And who sent it after me?”
“The answer to the first is, again, none of your business, Dollar. As to the second, I don’t know, but it’s bad news. If you really don’t know what’s going on with any of this, I strongly suggest you get out of the way, as far away and for as long as possible.
No good can come of it.”
Now it was my turn to stare. For the first time since the conversation started I didn’t believe what she was saying, at least the part about not knowing who sent the ghallu. Still, she had been amazingly open, so I decided not to push my luck. Well, not too much.
“Okay, then, Countess. Only one more question, I guess. What about us?”
Her eyes opened wide. “What?” But she sounded more surprised than angry. “What’s that supposed to mean, angel?”
“We’re helping each other, right? Well, what if I find out something you should know? I’m not just going to hang around The Water Hole on the off chance you’ll wander in to pick up a couple of pre-meds to go.”
“Is that really what we’re doing?” She was definitely amused in a kind of biting-something-sour way. “Helping each other? As far as I can see, the only person helping anyone is me. What could you possibly do for me in return?”
“Let’s not rush things. Just in case it comes up, how do I get in touch?”
She laughed, suddenly and with apparent sincerity. “You really are a piece of work, Bobby Dollar. You have a very high estimation of your own importance.”
“Beg your pardon, sister, but it’s your car I’m sitting in, not the other way around. You wanted to talk to me. And knock me around a bit.” My jaw was still sore.
“Very well.” She pulled a business card from her purse, wrote something on it with a very nice fountain pen. “Call this in an emergency. Leave a message. I’ll get hold of you.”
“Thank you, Countess.” I still wasn’t quite sure what I had got into, but it was definitely something unusual.
Suddenly a smile, tight and secretive. “Oh, I think you can call me Caz, now,” she said. “Until you get yourself killed, anyway. Sleep tight.”
Which was definitely a dismissal. I slid toward the door, then paused. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—where does your name come from?”
