Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (3 page)

coming back

I
CAN ONLY
look at four walls so long before I start to get a little crazy. It was worse the morning after my inquisition, because almost everything I owned was still in boxes on the floor of my new apartment, and the paltry number of those boxes made me think about how little I had to show for my existence. I suppose one of God’s chief servants should have been proud of such a sparse, monkish existence (if a crate of jazz and blues CDs and a couple of boxes of hot rod magazines interspersed with the occasional Playboy and Penthouse counts as “monkish”) but it just depressed me. If I’d been a happy little angel doing the work of Heaven it probably wouldn’t have been that way, but I’d always felt that somehow there must be something more to my afterlife. Now that I woke up each day with a Caz-shaped hole in me, I knew what was missing but that didn’t mean I was ever going to have it.

I’d sworn that I was going to get her back, and I’d really meant it. I still did, but the heat of my anger was less now that several weeks had passed, and I had begun to realize just how unlikely it was that I could make it happen. For one thing, Caz was back in Hell, and nobody just waltzes into Hell any more than they walk into Heaven without a reservation. In fact, you’d have a better chance of rolling a shopping cart into Fort Knox and helping yourself to gold ingots. Both Heaven and Hell are way off the grid, by which I mean almost certainly not on our big old round physical Earth. Even if I managed to sneak in, there would be the little matter of me being an angel. Conspicuous? Yeah, a bit. And last but certainly not least would be the fact that Caz was currently the unwilling property of Eligor the Horseman, Grand Duke of Hades, who’d already demonstrated his intent to torture me for at least an eternity or two, as soon as he cleared a few other matters off his desk. I’m not sure even Karael and an entire heavenly legion could manage to get Caz away from him, so you can imagine the odds against me on my own. In fact, the whole project was really just a complicated, painful way of committing soul-suicide.

But oh my dear Lord, every morning that I woke up, and Caz wasn’t with me, I ached. And every night I lay down by myself in that punky little room on Beech Street, and I thought about ways to get her back. But the one thing I could never imagine was an outcome where we were together, happy, and sane.

If I knew Heaven, I wasn’t going to hear anything from my inquisitors for a few days: one thing they’ve got plenty of up there is time. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they were all still floating around that conference chamber one-upping each other and hadn’t even started deliberating my fate. Just about the worst thing to do would have been to sit around my little studio apartment waiting for Heaven to call, even if I wasn’t already prone to maudlin Caz-thoughts, so I invented a few pressing errands to give me a reason to get dressed.

I took a cab over to see Orban, the gunsmith. He’s the one who built cannons for the Sultan to use at the siege of Constantinople a few hundred years back. Here’s how that worked out: Sultan wins, Constantinople falls, Christendom is seriously hacked off with Orban. Because he knows he’s never getting into Heaven, he refuses to die and still hasn’t done it. That’s how he tells it, anyway, and I’m not inclined to argue with him, especially since the stuff he supplies has saved my skin and soul many times.

Anyway, Orban also armors cars, and he still had my custom Matador in storage in his garage. And although I had enough money now to get it out of pawn, I was beginning to think that a gleaming, topaz-colored muscle car might not be the best ride for a man developing such a large collection of enemies. What good was it changing apartments and then parking the Amber Amigo out in front of it? Not that I was going to give that car up—I’d put too much money and sweat and spare time into it—but I was going to have to find something else for day-to-day use. In my business as an advocate angel I drive a lot and at all hours. No way I was going to be sitting at bus stops at three in the morning hoping the Number Eleven crosstown would get me to somebody’s bedside in time to be there when they died.

Orban wasn’t in the shop when I arrived, but one of his assistants, a bearded guy who looked like he would have felt comfortable with a parrot on his shoulder and his keel being hauled or something, recognized me and opened up the garage, a long building on the next pier over from Orban’s gun factory. Most of the vehicles inside had been brought in for some kind of modification, usually shielding, but the owners had either gone broke or had really needed the shielding earlier, and Orban had been stuck with the rides they left behind. He sold a few, especially if the security work had been finished, and kept the rest to cannibalize for spare parts.

The guy with the pirate beard wandered back to whatever instrument of destruction he had been working on, leaving me to walk along the row of grills, footsteps echoing from the stained concrete below my feet to the rounded aluminum roof. Most of the cars were huge, limos and old American luxury sedans, the ones Orban had more trouble selling than the Hummers and pimped-out SUVs today’s drug dealers preferred. One of Orban’s old classics, a Pontiac Bonneville, had been ripped up like tinfoil by the
ghallu
, so I was in need of a new ride. I spent a few agonizing minutes yearning over a scratched-up but sound 1958 Biscayne that, with a little sanding and a new coat of paint, would have made me a very happy man, but it was just too damn interesting for my purposes. If I wanted interesting, I’d keep driving around in my Matador. Inconspicuous was what I needed, though it went against everything in my character.

Down at the end, looking like the runt of the litter because of its size and pushed-in snout, was a 1969 Nova Super Sport. The paint that remained was a faded coat of candy-apple red, but I could cover that with a less conspicuous color. It was probably a hot little number in its day—the SS’s had a standard 350 inch V-8. The frame was basically okay, but it looked like it would be quite at home rusting away on blocks in the front yard of somebody’s mobile home. Not bad for my purposes.

I left a note for Orban asking what he wanted for the Super Sport, then walked back from the Salt Piers by way of the freeway overpass, so that I’d worked up a pretty good appetite (and killed an hour or so) by the time I arrived at Oyster Bill’s. It was a little weird to think I might never eat there with Sam again, since we’d spent a lot of time there, but I also felt like I was honoring his memory.

The truth was, I didn’t know how to think about Sam and what had happened to him. When you know somebody as long as I’ve known Sam Riley, aka Advocate Angel Sammariel; when you’ve gotten drunk together, been in firefights together, and watched a few dozen human beings die in each other’s company, you kind of figure you’ve seen everything that other person has to show. So when I found out he’d been working for mystery-angel Kephas and the secret Third Way operation, essentially running a side game right on Heaven’s own turf, under my nose and everyone else’s . . . well, I still wasn’t sure how it all jibed. The last time the two of us had talked, just before he stepped through a shimmering door to somewhere I’d never seen before, he seemed pretty much like the Sam I’d shared all those breakfasts with in this very restaurant, watching the tourists get their money lifted by waterfront locals both legit and otherwise. But all that time, or at least the last couple of years, he’d been hiding the whole Third Way thing from me. It made a guy think, and to be honest, I really wasn’t too fond of thinking right at the moment. Still, I missed Sam and his big old country face. I couldn’t help wondering if we were going to see each other again and what that would be like.

After lunch I manufactured a few more errands, dropping off a hamper full of laundry at Lavanderia Michoacan and picking up some connectors from Radio Shack so I could finally get my television hooked back up. Then I sloped on home, grabbing a couple of burritos I could microwave when I got hungry. The television thing took longer than it should have—the way the wall jack was laid out I would have had to put my television right in the middle of my bed—so I had to go back to the Shack for another reel of cable. When I got back,
again
, I fixed myself a drink. Okay, maybe two. By the time I finished them the sun had gone down and the television was the only light in the room. I heated a burrito and watched the Giants game (they were playing the Pirates in Pittsburgh) until enough of the vodka buzz wore off that I began to look around at the walls, which seemed closer than they should have. I’d had that feeling a lot, and I don’t think it was just because my new apartment was even smaller than the last one. After a while I wanted another drink, but instead of fixing one I got up, put my shoes and coat on, and headed out to the Compasses where at least I’d be drinking with other people—a time-tested excuse for not being an alcoholic. I didn’t really want to go there, since I knew all my advocate angel buddies were going to ask me about my hearing with the Ephorate, but the idea of going to some other bar, where I didn’t know anyone, was even more depressing. And I was pretty sure that if I didn’t get out of the apartment I’d wind up fully dressed and painfully hung over the next morning, lying in front of the television, exposed to horrible people chatting away on some breakfast show, which I’m convinced is one of the torments of Hell. There’d been a few too many mornings like that since I let Eligor take Caz away. So I went to the Compasses.

It’s an angel bar—
the
angel bar in downtown San Judas. It’s in the old Alhambra Theater building near Beeger Square, a former Masonic meeting hall. The Masons’ insignia, the Square and Compasses, still hangs over the door. A lot of the place was recently torn up by a Sumerian demon (it was chasing me, as it happens) but although there were still signs of ongoing construction, the bar was more or less back to normal.

The Compasses was predictably loud, with the usual suspects in residence—the Whole Sick Choir as we sometimes called ourselves. (We’d even put it on softball shirts once, but dropped out of the local league when we found out we were actually expected to show up and play softball.) Chico was behind the bar, looking his usual combination of Mexican biker and aloof Confucian scholar, fiddling with his mustache while deciding which of the guys singing off-key at the bar he was going to cut off first. The serenaders were led by Jimmy the Table, a portly fellow who liked to wear old-fashioned gangster suits and looked like he should be out helping Nathan Detroit find a place to hold his famous floating craps game. He waved to me when I went past, but he didn’t stop singing, being well into the middle verses of “Roll Me Over,” a song that’s always more fun to sing than to listen to. I didn’t intend to do either. I had Chico get me a Stoli, and then I crept off to one of the back booths. For about ten minutes nobody noticed me, and I just sat and watched God’s warriors at rest and play. Pretty horrifying sight, if I do say so myself, but good for some laughs.

Of course I couldn’t stay that lucky very long. Sweetheart, large, bald, and fabulously angelic, spotted me and rolled over to give me a frighteningly detailed account of all the cheap punks and overdressed poseurs in the club he’d visited the previous night, and to quiz me on my latest trip through the Pearly Gates. And of course, a few minutes later Young Elvis showed up, and I had to tell it all over again, or at least the abbreviated and sanitized version I’d cobbled up for public consumption. Most of the Choir didn’t even know that Sam was gone. The official word was that he was on some kind of administrative leave, and although the rumors had been flying in the Compasses ever since he disappeared, as far as I knew, nobody but Clarence and me knew what had really happened.

Later in the evening, Monica came in with Teddy Nebraska, an angel I didn’t know too well because he worked the other end of town and tended to hang out there, too. Monica was relatively sober, or at least sober enough to remember that I had been kind of a shit to her lately, so after she got the bare bones of what had gone down with me and the bigwig angels she floated off to find more entertaining company. This was an immense relief, even though it left Teddy Nebraska sitting in my booth making awkward chitchat until he thought of an excuse to follow her, or at least to get out of my morose vicinity.

Monica Naber and I have history. She’s a wonderful woman (or angel, or angel-woman) but I’ve hardly dared to talk to her since the thing with Caz started, not because it would be cheating on Monica—we’ve always been a lot more casual than that—but because she knows me well, and I’m scared to death she’d sort of metaphorically sniff the scent of another woman on me. Normally that wouldn’t bother me; many of my other relationships have twined in and out of my weird off-and-on thing with Monica. But if anyone in Heaven found out about Caz there would be nothing left of me but a scorched hole in the sidewalk and the whiff of dispersing ozone.

I decided I’d made a mistake showing up at the Compasses instead of just going to some ordinary bar. My fellow angels wanted to socialize, but what I really wanted to do was sit in stoic, self-pitying silence until I had enough of a buzz on to stagger home. I’d cursed my job for years, being roused at all hours of the day and night and sent skittering across Jude to take up the fight for somebody’s immortal soul, but now I was beginning to realize how much I missed it. Being on administrative leave, or whatever bureaucratic limbo I was inhabiting at the moment, was too much like being a prisoner of my own mind. I needed distractions, but not the other-people’s-problems kind. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really that type of guy. I mean, I care about people, really I do, but to be honest I’d rather not have to hear too much about them.