by Tad Williams
We both ordered chocolate shakes. I was still fairly full from lunch, but it’s hard to turn down a serious milkshake, and that’s the kind they made there. “It’s weird to see you here, Mr. Dollar,” Edie said. “Not bad, I mean, just . . .” She laughed. “I totally didn’t expect you.”
“Me and the Spanish Inquisition,” I said. “Sorry—old joke.”
Edie gave me a stern look. “I know about Monty Python, Mr. Dollar. My dad quotes them all the time.”
“Ow.” I leaned back. “How’s life? How’s school?”
“Tenth grade completely sucks, but at least I don’t have to board at school this year. But I have to say I don’t think nuns make the best science teachers. Like, Sister Berenice was telling us the other day that humans only went to the moon to try to find God. And this other teacher told me that God hates San Judas because there are so many gay people living here.”
“Yeah, especially around the downtown fabric stores,” I said. “That’s a real problem for Heaven. Armageddon is supposed to start right here in the Pioneer District.”
She looked at me carefully. “I get it. You’re joking. There’s nothing wrong with gay people.”
“I agree. Not to mention that anybody who pisses off nuns is okay with me.” I paused while our shakes arrived, nodded thanks to the server, then unsheathed my straw. “Hey, I wanted to ask you something, Edie. The last time I saw you—remember?”
“Islanders Hall?” She pushed back her glasses again so she could see to force her own straw into the thick shake. “The auction, yeah. That was totes scary! All those people shooting! And you knocked me over on my bike.”
“It was quite a night, all right. But I wanted to ask you to tell me what you remembered about it. Mostly I want to know who else was there.”
I had picked the right girl. Edie reeled off a list—Japanese Crowleyites, some Jesuits, Scythian priestesses (Foxy had called them “Amazons,” I remembered) and more. But none of the names sparked any new ideas. I asked Edie in a roundabout way if she’d heard anything lately about a horn that might have the same kind of value as the feather, but she only shook her head.
“Oh, no! That feather—that was crazy! I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Not since then, either.” She paused for a moment, sorting something out in her mind. “The person who sent me that night, well, that person (she was walking around the pronoun, I noticed, protecting her client) wanted me to describe everyone else who was there, too, just like you.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble, but can you tell me anything about your client? Anything at all?”
She put down her milkshake. “You know I can’t do that, Mr. Dollar. It’s bad business.”
“I get it. Drink up, I understand. Okay, here’s another question. I have a real need to find out some things, and that night and the people who wanted the feather make a good starting point. Any chance your client would talk to me?”
Edie’s eyes went big. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, do me a favor. Contact him or her and ask, would you? Tell them it’s important to me and that I’d make it worthwhile to them.”
She still looked worried. “I don’t know.”
“It can’t hurt to ask. You’ve known me for a few years now, Edie. Have I ever lied to you about anything? Done anything crooked?”
“You hit that guy in the face that one time.”
“Are you talking about the jamoke who was trying to sell that bogus relic of Le Saint Prepuce? Come on, that was gross, and he totally had it coming. Let’s be fair—he threatened to pull a knife on me.”
She giggled. “Actually, it was pretty cool. Like a movie.” She slurped up the last of her shake and sat back, studying me through her slightly crooked glasses. She could have been Encyclopedia Brown’s cooler sister. “Okay, Mr. Dollar. I’ll check it out with my employer. How do I reach you?”
I wrote down my cell number on the receipt and pushed it across to her.
“I gotta go. I’ve got a crap-ton of math homework. Thanks for the milkshake!” She slid out of the booth and out the door, trundling her backpack on wheels behind her, just another tenth grader who could read ancient Akkadian and tell a genuine Stone of Giramphiel from a realistic fake at twenty yards’ distance.
• • •
Just as I was pulling up next to my apartment, my phone rang. This time it was my frequent co-conspirator, Sam. Finally.
“Sorry I couldn’t make lunch today, B. Things to do, people to irritate. What’s the good word?”
“The good word is gudeg, boychik, and you missed it.”
“Yeah, I know. Next time.”
“But I still need to talk to you. The shit is getting thick around here. And now, on top of everything else, my apartment is haunted.” I gave him the five-cent tour of my recent spectral happenings.
“Are you sure it’s not just a couple of your one-night stands still knocking around the place?” he said. “Judging by your past habits, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to call an exorcist.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you too.”
We passed a few more lazy insults and agreed to make a new lunch date in the next couple of days. As I went up the stairs toward my second-floor rooms, I was feeling like I might actually be making some headway with the four or five thousand critical issues hanging over my head. Then I got to my apartment, and even as I reached into my pocket for the keys, I noticed that the door wasn’t entirely closed.
You know how those alarms blare when a sub starts diving? That’s what I felt up and down my spine—danger, danger, danger! I left the keys where they were and pulled out my gun instead, then ducked down and slid through the door as quietly as I could.
I didn’t have to go far. Two young, pale guys in suits—yep, the same two I’d seen following me downtown—were pulling stuff out of my cheap pressboard book shelves, making a big old mess in the process. Worse, they had actually painted a big ragged swastika on the wall above the television set.
“Freeze!” I stepped in, gun up and braced, and swung it back and forth between the two of them. Both were young, probably mid-twenties. One had dark hair, one had light, but both were as Caucasian as Betty Crocker’s firstborn. They looked like student athletes, maybe a little older, but certainly less than thirty. And though they were equally wide-eyed as they looked at my gun, neither of them seemed particularly frightened, which was not a soothing thing. These weren’t just thugs or thieves, although I was pretty sure they were both human.
“So,” I asked, “you Jehovah’s Witnesses need to supplement your income these days, huh? You’re not going to get much for those old issues of Car and Driver.” I gestured to the swastika, but didn’t take my eyes off the men. “Or are you something else? The local Neo-Nazi Welcome Wagon?”
One of them started to lower his hands, but I gestured angrily for him to put them back up.
“If you just tell us where it is,” he said in a calm voice, “there’ll be no need for trouble.” He sounded American, that’s all I could tell you.
“And if you lie face down on the floor with your hands where I can see them, I won’t have to send you to Jesus with a bunch of holes in your face,” I pointed out.
Several things happened in the next second or so. I heard a noise behind me, then something hit me hard on the back of the skull. I staggered, and the only shot I took went wide and high of both the guys in suits. I fell forward onto my hands and knees, my head suddenly feeling like a broken cabin window at thirty-five thousand feet, all my thoughts rushing around and being sucked out into darkness. Also, and I realize I wasn’t a very reliable witness at that instant, but I swear that the swastika painted on my wall ran away.
As I crouched there in the silence following the echo of my shot, swaying, trying to find the strength to get up, I heard my upstairs neighbor start pounding on the floor again, as if a g
unshot was no different than playing the stereo too loud. Then somebody kicked me in the head—yes, the same, hurting head—and I went off to sleepy-bye land, which was very, very dark.
six
black sun
YOU CAN tell it’s not a good day when you get coldcocked, and then you regain consciousness and they’re still hitting you.
Two guys had my arms, one on either side of me. I couldn’t see them very well through the blood running down into my eyes, but I was pretty sure it was the two missionaries, because the guy in the black t-shirt currently punching my face was a new player in the game. He was a muscular, bald-headed thug a little shorter than me, with forearms like premium hams. Unlike the other two, he seemed like someone who hit people for money. Instead of just beating my face into hamburger, he was working the body as well, softening up my ribs (well, turning them into the bottom of a snack bag, to be precise) and then going back to the head every now and then just when I started to be able to think straight. He’d already opened cuts above my eyes, judging by all the blood, and my nose cartilage definitely felt bendy and wrong.
He paused when he saw me looking at him.
“Okay. Now we can get down to business.” Bald Thug looked like he might be local muscle. I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought I might even have seen him in Oyster Bill’s once or twice, on the ass-end of a Saturday night. He finished up with one last, solid punch into my breadbasket, doubling me up.
“How’m I . . . s’posed . . . talk?” I grunted, trying not to puke Javanese food all over my shoes.
“Shit, I don’t care whether you talk,” said B-Thug. “Just point. Where is it?”
Man, I was getting fucking tired of that question. I’d gone through a long stretch earlier in the year of being asked that by an animated corpse with a long knife. That had been about the feather. Since Eligor had taken the feather back, I was pretty sure this was about the horn. That worried me almost more than the beating, because there was no way anyone should know already that I was looking for it. So I played dumb. “Where’s what?”
He hit me again, a quick, straight right that split my lip and sent a generous dribble of blood down the front of my shirt. “Don’t bullshit me. Where’s the thing? Some important people want to know—now.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”
An open-handed shot from his left rocked me back. I couldn’t help wondering where my gun was: I’d dropped it when I first got hit and I couldn’t see it anywhere.
Who were these people, why did they want Eligor’s horn (if I was right about what they were hunting) and why did they think I had it? I was pretty certain they were all human, which meant they might be uninformed enough to think I really was holding out on them, and that was a scary thought. The young guys on either side of me, although hanging on to my arms with grim determination, didn’t look or act like pros, but Bald Thug definitely seemed capable of killing me, or at least killing this particular body. I really hate dying at the best of times, and at the moment I wasn’t absolutely certain that my bosses would give me a new body afterward.
I let myself go slack so that the two guys holding me had to pull harder to keep me upright. While I pretended to a moment’s grogginess—even more believable if they didn’t know I was angel-strong, because their muscle guy had absolutely knocked the crap out of me—I glanced at their positions on either side. As I did, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the missionary boys’ had an unusual tattoo on his wrist. I couldn’t make out the whole thing, but it was enough to catch my attention.
Then, as they set themselves to haul me up straight again, I smashed my foot down on the instep of the guy on my right, then back-kicked the other guy in the shin. Even as they both let go, howling in pain, I lunged forward and rammed my head right into Bald Thug’s gut. I drove him backward, doing my best to knee his face as he fell. I didn’t catch him solid anywhere, but I knocked the breath out of him long enough to throw myself onto the floor. I scrambled to the couch as fast as I could, because I could already hear B-Thug climbing to his feet behind me. If I’d been planning to make a run for it, I wouldn’t have made it. I wasn’t, though. I was just trying to get to my sofa gun.
What, you don’t have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did.
I kept mine under the cushions where they came together in the middle, a place nobody ever sat (mostly because I almost never had any visitors). It was my good old S&W five-shot revolver, a piece I’d semi-retired. It was about as reliable a gun as you can find, excellent for stashing in a couch against a sudden need. I yanked it out, rolled, and there was Bald Thug still a couple of feet away, stock still now and staring at the muzzle that I was pointing between his eyes.
“Down on your knees,” I told him. “Hands behind your head. Yeah, you’ve been here before, haven’t you?” I moved back a little so I could keep all three of them under the gun, but I kept talking to the pro. “I’m not going to punch you just because you punched me, Slappy—I’m not the vengeful type. But if you or either of your buddies move, I’ll immediately blow the whole middle part out of your face and then figure things out from there. Clear?”
Thug nodded, hands still behind his head, so it looked like he was doing yoga or something.
“Good.” I stared at him for a long second or two, then turned to his partners. “Okay, boys, pull up those sleeves. I want to see what’s on your wrists. No, the other wrist, shithead.”
As I suspected, they both had the tattoo, which I could now see in full:
“What the hell does that stand for?” I asked. Neither of them would meet my eye. “I strongly suggest somebody tells me what’s going on and who you three are before I get any more irritated.” Strangely, it wasn’t just the muscular pro who looked like he was going to keep his mouth shut, but both missionaries, too.
I turned to the one on my right. “Hey, I could shoot you in the balls. That might loosen you up a bit, unless you’re extra-brave.” I swiveled the gun to the other missionary. “Or I could shoot you both in the gut, and you could watch each other bleed to death, all the time thinking how much easier it would have been just to answer my questions—especially after you broke into my place and painted a fucking swastika on my wall, then beat the shit out of me.” But I noticed there was nothing on the wall now, as if my hallucination of it running away had been real. “Where did it go, anyway? Did you wipe it off?”
Weirdly, both the younger guys only looked more frightened when I mentioned this. The muscular, bald guy just shook his head. “They’re not going to talk,” he said. “They’re crazy. And you don’t have the stones to get anything out of me.”
I walked to the nearest missionary, the dark-haired one, and put the snout of my.38 up next to his eyeball. He was clearly nervous but held his water pretty well. “Is that true, kid? You’d really take a bullet instead of just having a friendly chat?” He only set his jaw. I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do with them. I couldn’t be sure one of them didn’t have a gun—shit, they probably all had guns—so I didn’t know how long before one of them did something dramatic and the serious shooting began. Not that things would go all that easy even if they were all unarmed.
The dark-haired guy, up close, may not have been the sort of mayhem machine that B-Thug was, but he and his blond partner both looked pretty fit, and they certainly weren’t panicking. They were both clean-shaven and had similar haircuts, trimmed high on the neck and sides, leaving nothing around their ears or the back of their heads but precise stubble. They looked military, but if so they must have been from the Northern Finnish Irregulars or something, because they didn’t have a square inch of tan between them. The pair looked like fanatics—and that was the problem. The more I watched them, the more I got the sense they weren’t going to tell me anything useful until the pain got very intense. After spending a long stretch in Hell, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, even to these deserving shit
-stains. But what else could I do? Just shoot them? Yeah, and then have to get rid of three bodies in downtown St. Jude. I could have called the cops, but these guys weren’t ordinary criminals, and I might attract more attention than I wanted if I tried to have them arrested for burglary. Maybe I could have called the Compasses to see if anyone there wanted to help me find out who these guys were, but at the moment I was even less willing to share my private business with my co-workers than with the police. The more I thought about it, the more I could see only one practical solution.
While I still had the gun next to his eye, I quickly pat-searched the dark-haired guy, whom I decided to call “Timon,” and then did the same to his fair-haired partner, “Pumbaa.” To my surprise, neither had a gun or any other weapons to speak of, although one had a can of pepper spray in his pocket. I impounded it, then gestured the two of them toward the front door.
“Go, and just keep going. Get the fuck out of my place. I’m going to have a little chat here with your friend.” I waved the gun toward Bald Thug, who was watching with the cold, calculating eye of an ambush predator. “When I’m done, there won’t be much left of him, so don’t bother hanging around. And if I see either of you again ever, I won’t waste time with another of these informative chats. I’ll just blow your brains out.”
Timon and Pumbaa both looked at me, then at each other. It was obvious what they were thinking.
“Yeah, you could try it,” I told them. “But I promise I’ll blow at least one sucking hole in each of you before you get near me. You may be some kind of fanatics, but no matter what you think, you’re not superheroes. You go anywhere other than out that door, and you’ll be carrying your intestines with you.”
They didn’t turn fast enough for me, so I pepper-sprayed them both lightly in the face and shoved them out the door with my foot as they gagged and gasped. As I turned my attention back to Bald Thug, I heard them stumbling in the hall and then clattering down the stairwell, still choking and cursing.
