Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (9 page)

“Just tell me how you found out,” I said. “About Hell, I mean.” Then it came to me. “My phone. Clarence said he tapped it or bugged it somehow when he was tailing Sam. The bug is still there.”

Temuel shook his head, but he didn’t outright deny it.

“Tell me you’re the only one in Heaven who knows.”

“I’m the only one, Bobby. For now. But I can’t guarantee you’ll get away with this forever.”

We talked for a while longer, and he gave me the rest of the details—you’ll get them too, but not yet—and then he stood, our little chat beside Rocket Jude apparently at an end. I wasn’t holding the gun anymore as we walked back across the broad square, but I wasn’t feeling much safer than I had on the way over. I was clearly into something big and deep, in way past my ability to survive unaided, and the only person offering me a lifeline was someone who, any time he chose, could have me busted down to Unidentified Angelic Smear, Second Class.

Twilight had turned to near dark. Sidewalks were empty now, but the streets were full of cars, late commuters heading home, everyone else on their way downtown for movies or dinner. A light, misty rain swept through, just enough to prickle my jacket with little droplets and make my face damp.

As we neared the end of Main Street an angular shadow suddenly peeled itself from between a pair of dumpsters and stepped out in front of us. It was dark, no streetlights, but I knew exactly who that wiry, crouching frame belonged to.

“It so slick,” Smyler said. “It so smart. It wait and wait.”

“Shit.” I fumbled my gun out of my pocket. Temuel stared at the scrawny apparition. My boss looked frightened, which was not the thing I wanted to see just then. “Stay there,” I said to the thing with the long blade, trying to make my voice sound firm and worth obeying. “I don’t want to shoot you—I’d rather talk—but I’ll blow you into little pieces if you take even one step.”

“I can’t be here,” Temuel said in a breathless rush. “I can’t risk . . .”

And then he was gone, just gone, as if he hadn’t been standing right beside me. When I turned back a stunned second later, the killer with the underslung jaw and a four-edged knife gripped in its hand was loping toward me, a skinny shadow with the staring, excited eyes of an insane child.

true names

T
HIS TIME
I had a gun in my hand. This time I was pushing silver. We obviously weren’t going to get a chance to discuss Smyler’s vendetta or who had put him up to it, so I aimed at his midsection and started pulling the trigger. I put three right through him.

I mean that literally, too: as the gun bucked in my hand, I saw the streetlight at the end of the alley through the big old holes the slugs left, as if the crazy little fucker was made of stars. Then the holes were gone—maybe I just lost the angle—and Smyler suddenly went sideways up the wall, two feet and one hand sticking him there like a fly as he skittered toward me, the long, pointy thing swinging in his free hand, aimed right at my face.

I threw myself down. He just missed me, but his knife tore my collar. Was he trying to kill me or just incapacitate me? And how the hell could three silver slugs zip through him and not even slow him down?

I did my best to turn hitting the ground into rolling myself back upright. It was hard to get a fix on my attacker in the deep shadows of the alley. For a moment I thought he had vanished, then I saw him skittering down the wall toward me like a spider. What the fuck
was
he? Or rather, what had my enemies turned him into? He was just pissing on gravity like it didn’t matter, like I was fighting a cage match against M.C. Escher.

I wasn’t going to waste any more bullets until I could put one into his head from up close. I still had the cosh in my sleeve, but that hadn’t been a huge amount of use the last time, so I grabbed a lid off a nearby garbage can and turned around just as Smyler bounced up onto the wall once more and then dropped on me. I was able to get the lid up, but Smyler’s bayonet punched through it like a ballpoint through typing paper and the point ended up an inch from my right eye. I twisted hard on the lid, doing my best to yank the hilt of the four-edged knife out of his hand. I didn’t quite manage it, but he had to change his position on top of me to compensate, so I rolled backward and took him with me, holding tight until I heard his head hit the street. I liked that sound. I felt a surge of adrenaline, and for once it didn’t just feel like terror.

If it came to endurance, the rubbery bastard was going to outlast me, so I drove into him as hard as I could, like a lineman on a blocking sled, putting the lid right against him and plowing him back onto the concrete as he started to get up. As soon as I felt hard ground stop us I scrambled on top of him and just began hitting him as hard in the face as I could with the can lid. After smacking him with it at least a dozen times I threw the lid to the side, his blade still stuck in it, then kept on with my fist and a chunk of concrete I’d found. I beat my own knuckles bloody, cracking Smyler’s head against the pavement again and again, so loud that I could hear it echo in the narrow space. He was scratching at me, but not accomplishing much more. I dropped once on his belly with my knee, then got up and began kicking. I could hear sirens—someone had finally called the police.

At a certain point there’s no explaining. I think it was the red mist, like the Vikings used to get. Everything that had happened to me, everything that had seeped in and painfully corroded me, the frustration, the anger, most of all the terror, it all came out. I kicked that horrible little thing until I swear I kicked all its bones to pieces. I kicked his head the same way. I kicked blood into the air. I kicked until the limp thing that had been Smyler just snagged the end of my foot each time like a broken kite. Then I fell back against the alley wall between two garbage cans, gasping and wheezing and trying not to cry. Even after what I’d just done, I felt like the victim of a prison shower rape.

Then the crushed, misshapen head lifted on the broken neck. It contorted, seemed to pull its entire body up toward the disjointed neck, then began to shrug it all back into shape as the bones knitted together and the creature remade itself. It took only seconds to happen, and it shook me so much I could only stare gape-jawed. I couldn’t even guess how much power Eligor must be burning to let Smyler do this. Just to get me? Fucking Bobby Dollar, tiny little thorn in the grand duke’s very vast side? It was like smuggling in a nuclear weapon to bump off a squealer.

His body almost normal already, my enemy stared at me. The blood-soaked hood still framed it, but the face was healed, the dead gray skin gone tight over the mummy bones. Those ugly little bottom teeth jutted—Smyler was smiling.

“Oh, it
like
this, Bobby Dollar! Said he don’t give up. Yes! More! It want your heart.” And then he pulled his crazy knife out of the garbage can lid and leaped up onto the wall and stuck there like a lizard basking in a Tijuana courtyard.

I’d lost my gun somewhere in the red rage, but it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t beat him. As long as Eligor or whoever was pouring this much power into keeping him alive and functioning on Earth, I was going to lose. I had nothing left to fight with but the bloody chunk of concrete in my hand. I backed myself along the wall toward a doorway, where I would have the best chance of defending myself, but the body I was wearing was not going to magically repair puncture wounds in seconds like his did, and he probably wasn’t planning to kill me right away in any case. He, or at least his master, wanted to know where the feather was, and I had no doubt he would happily take his time finding out.

The sirens were getting really loud now.

I had lost him again in the shadows, but I spotted movement and realized he had slipped down to the ground where he was harder to see, hidden by the shadow of a dumpster. I braced myself, guessing he wouldn’t wait long. I was right.

Smyler came across the alley like a crab, zigzagging sideways at crazy angles. I caught a glint of his sharklike stare, then the longer smear of reflected streetlight that was his blade. I ducked on pure instinct and the bayonet whipped invisibly past my ear. I only knew it was there when it cut my cheek coming back the other direction.

“Bobby!”
someone said.
“Close your eyes!”

And I did, a mere moment late, just slow enough that I saw the first burst of fiery light. The rictus mask of Smyler as he loomed over me, his eyes wide but his pupils suddenly no bigger than the heads of ants, was burned onto my retina.

The light burned brighter and brighter even through my closed eyelids, even through the lingering afterimage of Smyler’s terrible face, flaring so intensely that my own head seemed to turn all white inside. Smyler shrieked. Despite everything I had done to him, it was the first time I’d heard him in distress. Then the whiteness was too much, and I fell down and pulled the dark around me for a little while.

When I could think again I realized I was crouching on my hands and knees, my forehead against the cold pavement. I struggled upright. Smyler was gone. Temuel, or at least his human form, stood beside me. His hand looked like it was in an ex-ray machine, the skin still glowing so deeply pinkish-orange that I could see the bones beneath the muscle. He offered me his other hand to help me up. It felt pretty normal.

“Where did he go?”

“That thing?” Temuel looked troubled. “It ran away from the light. It’s stronger than it looks. You should get away from here. I pointed the police in another direction, but they’ll be back.”

I should have thanked him, but all I could think of to say was, “Do you know anything about
that thing
, as you call it?”

He gave me a look that said nothing, absolutely nothing. “I can’t be here, but I couldn’t leave you to be attacked, either.” He quickly looked me up and down. “I must go now.”

“We still seem to have a lot to talk about.”

“Do you know the Museum of Industry?” he asked. Duh. Even tourists knew the place, and I’d been living in Jude for years and years. “Good. Meet me in front of it tomorrow night, by the fountains. Ten o’clock.” He hesitated, looking me over. “And take care, Bobby.” Then he walked away.

I just watched him go. I was so tired and battered I could barely stand, but I did remember to retrieve my gun. One odd thing had struck me, though, and it was what I kept turning over and over as I limped home. The whole time he’d been here, Temuel had never once called me Doloriel, my true name. My angel name.

With wounds to tend and all this crazy to deal with, I couldn’t even take the evening off—not yet. I made it back home with a few rest stops, ignoring the comments of strangers who assumed I was drunk. It could be that Temuel’s disco light show had hurt Smyler bad enough to keep him away a long time. Certainly I’d never heard him react to pain before, and that included the time I saw him burned to charcoal. But I couldn’t count on it. The horrible thing had beaten me badly. Only Temuel’s interference had saved my life, maybe even my soul. I couldn’t gamble that Smyler wouldn’t come back.

Once inside my apartment I threw a few nights’ worth of toiletries and other emergency supplies into an old suitcase with a missing buckle. I left my real luggage in the tiny hall closet, since I didn’t want it to look like I’d moved out if anyone came looking for me, including my own side.

Just to avoid familiar patterns while searching for a place to crash, I headed up the Woodside Highway and then a few miles south before turning east again toward a part of town I hardly ever visited. The Sand Hill corridor was one of the leading indicators of whether San Jude was in boom or bust mode; you could track the square footage costs like a local stock. And because it was ground zero for venture capital money, it was also ground zero for fairly expensive hotels, many with gorgeous views of the hills, which turned dry gold this time of year before the rains brought back the green. I still had Orban’s money in my pocket, and if I was going to Hell, I wouldn’t be taking any cash with me, so I guessed I might as well spend some on comfort now.

The hotel I chose was a very chic little businessman’s special, and since I didn’t care about the view I got quite a nice suite for my several hundred dollars. What I really wanted was safety, and I was more likely to get it in a place like this, expenses be hanged. I had stopped at a service station to clean up a bit first, but I’m sure I still looked like someone who’d been mugged. To her credit, though, the young woman behind the counter didn’t even bat an eye and actually smiled when she handed me the change from my wad of bills. Inside, I raided the minibar, then took the longest, hottest bath I’ve ever managed, doing my best to scald away the worst of the aches, along with my compulsive shivering. I steamed long enough to be legally declared chowder, but the tremors wouldn’t entirely go away.

At last, I climbed out, wrapped myself in a thick terrycloth robe with the hotel’s logo on the pocket, and started another drink. Believe it or not, it was purely for the pain, since it had become obvious to me that I was in one of those dark, miserable moods that even booze wasn’t going to change. I know, that sounds unAmerican, but there you go: I know myself, and I know how these bodies I wear tend to work.

I was pretty sure who was behind all this, and it made me feel like I had something jagged lodged between my brain and the frontal bone of my skull. If it had been food in my stomach it would have been something indigestible like gravel or glass, but it was an idea, and that was a thousand times worse.

Eligor.
First he had set his horned Sumerian monster to chase me all over creation, long before I had ever touched his ex-girlfriend, just because he thought I had his damned angel feather. Then he had taken Caz away right in front of me, but not before making her tell me she didn’t love me. Now he had started all over, siccing his undead psycho-killer Smyler on me like a cat after a rat, so that I had to hide even from my own employers and friends. And
he
had
Caz!
In other words, Eligor owned the game, but he was still going to grind me into the dirt to show me how strong he was and how little I mattered. How could Hell itself be any worse? (Yes, it was a very stupid question, and I was soon going to find out just how stupid, but at the time I was half-lit and hurting.)

If I had been wavering at all, I was now determined. I wasn’t going to sit around any more waiting for someone else to try to kill me, or frame me, or anything else. If the grand duke wanted to play for those kinds of stakes, I was going to do my best to take the game right to him.

Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time even after I turned the lights out. I lay with my hands behind my head and watched the jittering light from the television make shadows on the ceiling while I thought about how much I hated Eligor the Horseman and how good it would feel to pull his scorched, worthless heart out of his chest and show it to him.

When I did finally sleep I didn’t travel anywhere but deeper into that darkness. I woke with the faint taste of blood in my mouth.