Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (42 page)

“And what do we have here?” Niloch murmured. “Oh, goodness me, oh, look! It is the Snakestaff creature, the one who ruined my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw. I think that before we bring you back to the Mastema, we must make you answer for
that
, mustn’t we? I think all we have to do is bring back a good-sized portion of you to be tortured by the Inquisitorial Board, hmmm? The head and a few dependent bits, perhaps? And after we have played with it, the rest can go into the mortar for rebuilding Gravejaw. That would be appropriate, would it not, my rude little guest?”

It took me a moment to figure it out, because so many parts of me were sending back messages of terrible, overwhelming pain, but I was lying on my gun. I reached under myself as unobtrusively as I could, meanwhile closing my eyes as if I had just given up, trying to get Niloch to move closer. One shot left. It wouldn’t save me—there were too many other hunters behind the commissar—but I could at least take Niloch out.

When I thought I was in position to move quickly despite the pain, I tugged the revolver out from under me, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The noise was surprisingly loud for a place with no ceiling, the echoes snapping back off the cylindrical walls, over and over. It hurt a lot to roll and move so violently, so quickly, but it would have all been worth it if I hadn’t missed.

Niloch didn’t seem disturbed that a bullet had just flown past his bony head. “Tch,” he said. “So unpleasant. First you destroy my sweet hounds, now you would attack me, too? For doing my civic duty? Shame on you, Snakestaff, shame.”

I think the rattling noise was him laughing, but I was a bit distracted by the glow now hovering in the air just behind him. Several of Niloch’s nearest soldiers were also staring. At first it was only a fizzle, no more than the smolder of a road flare, but then that fizzle suddenly dove down toward the ground, leaving an unstable streak of light hanging in the air. Just as Niloch himself realized that something was happening, a glowing hand appeared from the jagged, midair stripe of light; a second later Smyler bounded out of nothingness and onto the bridge beside Niloch. Even as the commissar opened up his bony jaw to shout an order, and well before his astonished soldiers could do anything, Smyler grabbed Niloch and jammed his four-bladed knife into the commissar’s neck, then began to twist it around in a way that couldn’t have been pleasant even for an arch-demon. Niloch screeched in pain and surprise. His men came crowding in around him, trying to pull loose the scrawny thing, but they couldn’t get a decent grip. Smyler was literally climbing around on Niloch, clinging like the commissar was a bunch of bananas and he was some kind bionic-murder monkey.

I realized I was staring at all this with my mouth open when I should be running like crazy. I tried to get up, but the heavy rope still ran from the harpoon in my chest and all the way back into the melee, and now it was wound around several people. Every tug as they fought with Smyler made the harpoon twist in my bloody chest, an agony I won’t insult with the weak word “pain.”

“Now it sees!”
Smyler screeched from the middle of the tangle. Niloch’s men were fighting desperately to free their master, but they were limited by the narrowness of the bridge and Smyler’s astonishing, horrifying quickness.
“It sees now. The reason.
You
are the reason. That is why you came before you should—it sees!”

At the edge of the fight, the demon soldier holding my harpoon suddenly grunted, staggered, then tumbled off the bridge in a spray of his own blood. I had only a split-instant to brace myself against being yanked over with him, but to my grateful astonishment the rope lay slack on the bridge, a bloody meat spider still clutching its far end: the harpoonist had gone, but his hand had stayed behind, thanks to Smyler’s crazy knifework.

Given a second’s reprieve, I did my best to break the rope, because I couldn’t run with that thing trailing behind me. It was going to be bad enough with the harpoon still waggling around in there, probably tearing the shit out of my demon lungs and demon heart. As I struggled to free myself, I backed carefully away from the melee. The space left by the harpoon-demon’s sudden exit had given Smyler more room to work, and work he did. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t care if you pardon the expression.

Imagine a world-class but spastic ballet dancer. Now run the video in your head about three or four times faster, and try to imagine that ballet dancer carries a long sharp blade, and when it uses that blade on flesh it believes it’s praying. I have never seen anything so horribly brutal that I could also call beautiful. I know it sounds weird, but it was art, like the wildest improvised solo you’ve ever heard spun out, sped up, and then landing at the end with a crash right back on the main riff. Everything happened so quickly it was hard to tell it wasn’t planned. But nobody, not even a demon, ever planned to die like that, on the murderous blade of that giggling, rubbery thing.

Two more of Niloch’s soldiers staggered bleeding off the bridge into nothingness. The whole pack of them now were converging on my unexpected savior like piranha in a feeding frenzy, but I didn’t think it was Smyler’s blood I saw fountaining in the air, or Smyler’s fingers and ears flying out of the scrimmage.

“Run!”
he shouted.
“Run, angel!”
Then, as if to prove Smyler’s kind intent, something else came flying out of the ruckus and rolled to a stop near my feet, blood dribbling from it to join my own good-sized puddle. It was Niloch’s long, skull-like head, the jaws snapping at nothing, slow as a dying crab. The wet red eyes rolled up, and it saw me. Somehow, despite no longer being attached to larynx or lungs, it said in a near-whisper,
“I . . . will . . . !”

I didn’t think, just stomped on it as hard as I could, feeling the bones smash beneath my foot. “Shut up,” I said, then kicked the broken, oozing lump off the bridge. “Just. Shut up.”

I ran then, although it was more like hobbling, blood and brain matter still oozing out of the back of my skull, clutching the harpoon stuck through my chest in both hands to minimize the horrible pain from its every movement—a picture William Blake might have painted after a really bad Saturday night. I ran until the bellows and squeals of Niloch’s soldiers had fallen away behind me, then ran on, through a darkness I can’t even remember now. I vaguely recall reaching the elevator, but I think I kept running even after that, throwing myself blindly against the sides of the coffin-shaped box until I understood I was safe, or at least as safe as I’ll ever be in this life, until I could finally say the words Temuel taught me and lay aside my demon body, until I could leave Hell behind me and surrender to blessed, blessed blackness.

I’ve never seen Smyler again since the Neronian Bridge. I don’t know whether he survived. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I am sure that he saved me when nothing else but God Himself could have done it.

body in the trunk

S
OMETHING FINALLY
pulled the blanket of darkness off me, but I couldn’t find the buttons and switches yet to make my muscles work correctly, so I lay there for a little while trying to figure out where I was.

I had left my body hale and well under a sheet in the late Edward Lynes Walker’s house, so that was where I should be, but Eligor had told me his people had searched the place without finding it. That could mean anything, not much of it good. I had to be patient, though; this long out of my earthly shell made reintegrating a bit like one of those weird dreams you get when you think you’re awake but you aren’t, or at least not entirely. You hear noises and sometimes even voices from the real world, but you just don’t care.

Not that I heard voices, because I didn’t. I could feel my body, though, or at least
some
body: I had the cramped, prickling muscles to prove it, and I seemed to be wrapped in the appropriate sheet I’d left my body in. I decided to hope for the best. I was going to give myself another minute or two to reintegrate properly, then get out from under the bed in the upstairs guest room at the late Edward Walker’s house and take a shower for about nine hours straight. If I was
extremely
lucky, Walker’s granddaughter Posie and her boyfriend Garcia would be out somewhere, and I’d have the place to myself for a while, but that wasn’t crucial. What I really wanted to do after my shower was go somewhere that had good food and alcoholic beverages and consume lots of both, then go home and do some actual sleeping—not that a few drinks and a nap was going to make me forget what I’d just been through. I also needed to check in with Heaven as soon as possible. Since I still had an earthly body to come home to, I assumed I hadn’t been cast into the outer darkness quite yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to check. At the very least, I’d probably missed a shit-ton of messages.

And, of course, I’d have to debrief with Temuel, but I didn’t want to think about that yet. I’ll be honest—the thought scared me. Yes, he’d done a lot for me, but I didn’t know where he stood with Anaita, and nobody—not even Bobby Dollar, everybody’s favorite poster boy for lack of impulse control—just jumps up and accuses a major angel and sitting ephor like Anaita of being a traitor to the Highest. Especially somebody like me, who was already on nineteen kinds of secret probation. Oh, and I had no admissible evidence whatsoever.

In fact, the more I thought, the more certain I was that I should just keep my mouth shut about most of it, even with The Mule, since I didn’t know what game he was playing or where he stood vis-à-vis not just Anaita, but also the Third Way and all the rest of this crazy shit I was floundering in. However much he’d helped me, Temuel was clearly up to his halo in secrets and weirdness, and I didn’t want to force him to choose between me and whatever else he had going on.

All this was swirling through my brain as I began to feel awake and connected enough to pull the sheet off my face and, Lazarus-like, rise from the tomb. Okay, rise from under the bed in the second guest room, the bed with the catalog coverlets and floral-print pillows, but you get the idea. I had already noted idly that the sheet wrapping me seemed to be a bit rougher and heavier than I remembered (not to mention quite a bit tighter) because of how it lay on my face, but as I tried to rise I realized that my problem was more complicated than that: it wasn’t a sheet on me at all, it was a tarp, and it wasn’t draped over me, it was wrapped around me from head to foot, so that my arms were pinned at my sides. This was
not
the situation I’d been in when I had last lived in this body. Not to mention that I could feel that something was moving me, bouncing me, even tilting me a bit from time to time, as though I were lying in the palm of a very, very large creature, and was being tilted at different angles while it decided which end to start eating first. (I had definitely been in Hell too long.)

Of course I kept my cool, because I knew the worst thing to do was start freaking out before I knew the facts. I calmly began shouting, “What the Jeezly fucking Christ is going on here? Somebody help me!” loudly and repeatedly. Okay, “calmly” isn’t quite the right word, but I didn’t only yell, I started pushing and scratching at the heavy tarp big time, inflating my chest and shoving outward with my arms, until I finally made enough space to get my hands up to my face.

Hands, plural. That was the first good news. Whatever else had happened to me, I had the full set of grasping implements in working order again, one attached to each wrist, with lovely bouquets of functioning fingers at the end. I could tell this because I was busily palpating my face, trying to tell if I was Bobby again, or still in the Snakestaff body. There were no stony lumps over my eyebrows or on my cheeks, and my skin felt much less sandpapery than it had in Hell, so I seemed to have returned to being B. Dollar, slightly itinerant angel. A probe of the back of my head found nothing but scalp and hair. No Doctor Teddy surgery scars either, so I was definitely out of the demon body. That calmed me down a little.

As I managed to work the canvas tarp a bit farther from my face and began to hear sounds more clearly, I finally realized that I wasn’t just rolled in a tarp, I was rolled in a tarp and riding in the trunk of a car. Okay, I’d survived repeated tortures by various finalists from Hell’s Got Talent, and pursuit by honest-to-Blind-Lemon hellhounds, so mere earthly troubles should have been no sweat. Still, I’ve watched
Goodfellas
and the
Godfather
movies often enough to know that
rolled up in a tarp in somebody’s trunk
is usually not a situation you want to be in.

I did everything possible to work the tarp loose so I could use my arms properly, but the thing was thick (and old, and smelly, I might as well mention while I’m feeling sorry for myself) and I could barely pull it down past my forehead. Still, I could see that I was definitely in the trunk of a car, and I could get my hands out far enough to actually try to work the lock open on the inside of the trunk lid, but the vehicle was apparently too old to have one of those emergency-release latches. If I’d had more leverage, I might have been able to rip the entire lock out—I’m pretty strong in my earthbound body—but that wasn’t happening, either, so I was left with only one heroic alternative.

As soon as I began pounding on the inside of the trunk lid the car started swerving around. Still, whoever was kidnapping me didn’t pull over or anything, so I had to start thinking about what I could try next. I wasn’t carrying my gun as far as I knew—I certainly hadn’t been when I left the body behind, because who wants to spend days or weeks lying on top of a large foreign-made pistol, even if you’re unconscious? At the very least I’d have been coming back to a body with a bunch of painful bruises, if not a few accidental gunshot wounds. So what was I going to do when they came to take me out and finish me off? And who had grabbed me, anyway? Eligor said his people hadn’t even found my body, let alone the feather. Was Anaita making sure somebody finished the job she’d originally given to Smyler?

I wouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out: the car was slowing down, the jouncing growing less. I redoubled my efforts to get free of the tarp and even the odds a bit, because wrapped in canvas I was about as dangerous as a large burrito.

I had finally worked my upper body free when the car stopped. Someone fumbled with the trunk lid. Disgusted with myself for not having hidden some kind of weapon on my body before leaving it helpless, I braced myself against the floor of the car. When the trunk popped open, I shut my eyes to keep myself from being blinded by the glare, and struck out as hard as I could with my fist. I had the deep satisfaction of hearing somebody gasp in serious discomfort and fall down, so I opened my eyes, kicked my way loose from the canvas, and started climbing out of the trunk, but slowed down a bit when I saw that instead of Luca Brasi or one of Don Corleone’s other button-men, I had instead just punched Clarence the Junior Angel right in the nuts.

“What the fuck are
you
doing here?” I shouted. “In fact, what are you doing
period
? Why am I in the trunk of a car?” This might have been a bit unfair to Clarence, who was lying on his back, curled up like a dying insect, moaning with pain and nausea, and not in the best position to answer questions.

I heard the driver’s side door slam. A moment later Garcia Windhover, aka “G-Man,” aka “World’s Most Useless Human” came trotting around the side, dressed in his usual gangster drag, like he’d put together his Young Jeezy outfit during a sale at Hot Topic. He’d added to it this time with a black eye patch, which made him look less like a pirate or Nick Fury than like a fourth-grader being treated for lazy eye. “Whoa!” he said, looking worriedly at Clarence, who was lying in the road next to the car quietly retching and panting like a woman in painful labor. “Bobby, dude, why’d you do that?”

“Why’d I do that? No, why am I in the trunk of a car?” I looked at the gaudiness and unnecessary chrome and winced. “Even worse,
your
car? I don’t want even my
dead
body in this car, ever. And what’s Clarence doing here, Windhover? He wasn’t supposed to know about this.”

“I needed some help.”

“You’re going to. That’s a promise. I didn’t mean to sock Clarence in the balls, I was just defending myself against kidnappers, but you . . .” I glared at G-Man so direfully that he actually took a couple of steps back. “I’m going to punch you in the manfruit over and over again until you’re ringing like the bells of Notre Dame when the hunchback bought caffeinated by mistake.”

I actually felt better after I said all that. More like my old self. I sat for a moment on the edge of the open trunk, then bent to help Clarence off the ground. He didn’t want to get up at first, but after a moment let himself be coaxed into, if not standing, at least being partially upright.

“Oh, oh, oh,” he moaned, still holding his crotch. “Bodies suck. I think one of them
popped
.” We were on a side street just off the Camino Real, and a few pedestrians were checking us out, probably wondering whether someone was peddling stolen goods out of the back of their car. Which Clarence and G-Man were, in a sense, since I had stolen myself right out of Niloch’s clammy hands. Thanks to Smyler, of course. It felt very weird to think that, I’m sure you can imagine.

“Sorry, Junior,” I said. “Honest, I didn’t know it was you. All I knew was someone had wrapped me up in a tarp. I figured some bad guys were going to dump me in the baylands or something.”

Clarence winced and shook his head. “We were taking you back to Garcia’s house.”

“You mean Garcia’s sort-of-grandfather-in-law’s house? The place I already was? Where he was supposed to keep my body safe and sound and
not
put it in the trunk of his godawful embarrassment of a car and drive it around San Judas like I was a bunch of Mexican dress shirts heading to a flea market?”

“You sound pissed, dude,” G-Man said.

Always quick on the uptake, that lad. “Just a little. And I’ll probably get over it. But right now I’d like to be somewhere other than by the side of a road, so why don’t we go back to Posie’s granddad’s house, Windhover, and you can explain to me what exactly is going on?”

G-Man nodded. “Okay. They probably took the tent down by now.”

It turned out that Edward Walker’s nice house in the Palo Alto district, where G-Man and Posie had been squatting for the last few months, was going on the market. As part of that process, the real estate agent had informed Posie that the place would have to be tented for termite fumigation. I suppose I should have been grateful that G-Man had the brains at least to figure out that a massive dose of pesticide might be bad for my body, but he handled it in typical idiotic fashion. I was too heavy for him to carry, he said, so he’d recruited Clarence—who, you may remember, I had
intentionally not told about any of this
—to wrap me up in the tarp, carry me out, and drive me in G-Man’s car over to the place in Brittan Heights where Clarence rented a room. I’d spent the last few days in a toolshed that Clarence’s landlords never used. The Littlest Angel at least had the wit to look embarrassed about this.

“A toolshed? Really? What, just propped up with the spiders and earwigs and whatevers crawling all over me?” I knew I was being unpleasant about it, but I wasn’t ready to care yet. Maybe having just spent a massive amount of time undergoing torture in Hell had something to do with that.

“No!” said Clarence. “No, Bobby, I put you on an old pool table. I kind of made a space and then stacked some other stuff on you. You weren’t just propped up or anything. And I didn’t see any spiders.”

“Thanks for that. It’s nice to know I was so well cared-for.”

Clarence frowned. “You don’t have to be so bitchy, Bobby. You already punched me in the testicles.”

“True.” I nodded, downed the rest of the bottle of pisswater that Garcia kept in the late Edward Walker’s refrigerator, some weak-ass hipster beer that used to be drunk by blue-collar guys because it was the only weak-ass crap they could afford, and was now supported almost entirely by nostalgics with tattoos and semi-expensive bicycles. Still, that stuff was better than no beer, although the contest was closer than you might think. “Sorry about that again, Clarence. Really truly. Self-defense, disoriented and confused, probably even PTSD. Put that together and make an excuse out of it you can live with, okay?”

He gave me one of his looks, somewhere between “hurt puppy” and “irritated older brother.” I might not have wanted to trust him, although I was going to have to now, at least to an extent, but how could I dislike anyone who was so easy to annoy and so profitable to tease?