The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar (23 page)

Which I confess freaked me out a bit, because I’d never heard of such a thing as an ex-angel, or at least not any new ones since the Fall. I was beginning to think this guy was no ordinary sinner. Listening too closely to what demons say is a famous rookie mistake, however, and whatever else I might be, I’m no rookie. “Does it matter?” I asked. “I
just want information. If you give it to me and it’s real, then I’ll walk away and everyone’s happy.”

“Everyone? What about poor Holly? She was the pitcher on our company softball team.” He took a few steps back toward the window and looked out and down again. “Ah, the police are here. Looks like somebody noticed her body.” He turned around and smiled at me. “What’s your name, angel? Who is it I’m going to see dragged down to the deepest pits of Erebus?”

“I’m not telling you my name unless you tell me yours.” There are rules about these things, you see. “But I don’t care that much about you, really. I just want to know about the Magians. Now hurry up, Ken. If your guards get here you’re going to be in more trouble than I’ll be in, remember?”

He sighed and shook his head, then spread his arms in a gesture of amused resignation. Something I can only call an aura of power began to radiate from him, strong as the heat of the sun on a hungover morning, strong enough to make my eyes blink and my head ache. The master of Five Page Mill was golden and self-assured as a lion on the veldt. “Tell you my name? You mean you really don’t know? Do you think that if you find out you’ll wield some kind of control over me?” He laughed like he truly was enjoying himself, as if I had shown up just to please him. “I’m Eligor the Horseman, you wretched upstart—one of the Grand Dukes of Hell.”

Oh, shit.
That was all I could think, over and over like a skipping CD.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit.
Eligor was one of the really big ones. I had tossed in my little baited hook, and I had snagged Leviathan.

“I fought beside the Lightbringer at the walls of Heaven.” His voice seemed to get louder with every moment. “I was cast down when He was cast down. I have shared His exile since the beginning. But you—you’re nothing. A fly.” With that he began to grow, shadows of both glaring light and total darkness stretching around him, his face blossoming into something grotesque and horrifying beyond description, until he towered above me crowned in flames and cloaked in shadow and the room itself seemed shrunken to the size of a grave.

“And do you know what else?” His voice pressed in on me from all sides, louder even than my heart’s blood as it rushed through my veins. “I don’t believe your story, little angel. I don’t think you’ve made
any arrangements at all. No, I’d guess you’re the improvisational type—that you’re here by yourself without any backup plan at all. And that’s how you’re going to die, too.
Alone.
”

He stretched out his hand toward me. I couldn’t move. Dimly, dimly through the thundering of my arteries I could hear the guards banging on the office’s outer door, breaking in, but I couldn’t turn, couldn’t see anything but Eligor’s triumphant, terrifying face.

E
LIGOR’S LONG, icy fingers wrapped my head. Again I was in the presence of something that could tear my mortal body apart like bread dough, but this time it had already caught me. The founder of Vald Credit lifted me at arm’s length until my feet were kicking several inches above the floor and my neck felt like chewed taffy.

“Go ahead,” I told him, determined not to go out begging. It probably sounded a lot like
Grrruhrhrdd,
since his hand was crushing my features into a shape they weren’t meant to take. “Kill me.”
Krrrmrr.

“Oh, definitely. Sooner rather than later.” He smiled. There were sharp things in his mouth that didn’t even look remotely like teeth. “But first, I’m going to call up a couple of hard, pipe-hittin’ Nergalis and we’re going to go to work on you until we find out who you are and why you came storming into my office with this Magian Society bullshit.”

Still dangling me in mid-air like a prize trout he muted his glamour and shrank back to looking like Kenneth Vald once more, but his eyes remained distinctly goatlike, pus-yellow with horizontal slots for pupils. This was about as bad as things could get. Eligor may not have been Old Scratch himself, but he was high in the Hellish nobility, with strength and abilities to match. They don’t really have a firm hierarchy down there, but I couldn’t kid myself—he was a member of the All-Star Team and I was one of Heaven’s lowliest bench-warmers.

The demon lord fluttered the fingers of his free hand and the nearer
office door abruptly sprang open. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a half-dozen or more armed guards dressed like SWAT commandos tumble through and into the office. One was so surprised by the door’s sudden unlocking that as he fell he discharged his M4 with a deafening rattle. Bits of ceiling rained down around us for several seconds as the guards scrambled to their feet and surrounded me with a ring of automatic weapons, although it scarcely seemed necessary since I was still hanging helplessly in midair and no threat to anything except my own dry underwear.

Several of the plainclothes security guys shoved in after the armored men. The leader of these had his gun in one hand and a phone in the other. It was Howlingfell. “Boss,” he said, “—I mean Your Grace—we got a problem!”

“I’ve got the problem right here,” said Eligor, bouncing me gently up and down. I swear I could hear my neck vertebrae popping like popcorn. “I want you to get me some of those nasty Shahr-e Sukhteh fuckers who like to play with needles and fire. We’re going to find out who this little winged rat is and who sent him.”

“Oh, shit,” said Howlingfell. “I think I know that guy.” He pushed his way through the ring of guards and got right up in my face, standing on tiptoes so he could examine me as I struggled in Eligor’s unbreakable grip. Even in his human body he was no prize: not only was he ugly, he had breath like rotting dog food. After a moment he showed his teeth in a tongue-lolling grin. “Yeah, that’s Bobby Dollar. I met him a coupla times—he’s one of those advocates.” If he remembered me, I was pretty sure he also remembered my foot on his windpipe.

I smiled back, then spat at him, hoping he might go for me despite his boss’s presence and accidentally kill me (this definitely seemed like one of those situations where dying had to be better than the alternative) but although the gob of spittle landed on his cheek, Howly never had the chance to do anything but step back, because suddenly Eligor roared like a wounded lion and flung me to the ground.

“Bobby Dollar
?” his master bellowed. “You mean this is
Doloriel
? The little pimp who
stole from me
?”

This shit was just getting worse and worse. So that thing I was supposed to have (but didn’t actually possess) belonged to one of the Grand Dukes of Hell? To the same archdemon who had just captured me with the ease of a man scooping up an escaped hamster and had
decided to set some sadistic Middle Eastern demons on me before he even knew who I was? This was just fucking peachy.

“Tell me where it is, punk. Right now.” Eligor leaned down and yanked me back into the air, this time with hands clamped on each arm, and held me in front of his face. He smelled a lot better than Howlingfell, but for a moment I could see into the endless abyss behind those black-slot eyes, and it nearly stopped my heart. Eligor wasn’t Hell’s only grand duke, but there aren’t many and they are all horrifyingly dangerous. Like the stupid dick I am, I had started a bar fight with a stranger who turned out to be a World Heavyweight Champ. “If you tell me right now,” he said, “maybe I’ll just peel your face off and let you live like that for a while, chained to my desk.”

“I c-can bring it to you. I swear I can—if you let me go. Otherwise you don’t get shit out of me.”

“Oh, I’ll get
everything
out of you, you little winged pimple.” The demon lord was having trouble keeping his Kenneth Vald face on: it was rippling as if it might get too hot and just melt away. The experience was a bit like sitting in the control room of a nuclear power plant in mid-disaster—fascinating in that you only get to watch something like that once in your life, and it’s probably also going to be the last thing you’ll ever see. “Sweat, blood, shit, and piss to begin with,” Eligor snarled, “—oh, a
lot
of blood. Then eventually every cell of your body will slowly be turned into liquid and squeezed out onto the floor of my recreation room.” He dropped me again. I fell hard but managed to crawl back up onto my knees. Might as well die with my head above floor level, I figured. (Don’t ask me why—it just seemed better somehow.)

“But, Master,” said Howlingfell, “you can’t—I mean, not now!”

Vald/Eligor turned toward him, head pivoting slowly like a king cobra gauging optimum striking distance. “I
can’t
…?”

Howlingfell went pale and began squirming. I thought he was going to throw himself to the floor beside me and show Eligor his belly. “No, it’s because of the cops! There’s about forty of them down in the lobby.” He waved his phone. “They said there’s a fugitive up here—they must have meant this Dollar guy. He’s wanted for murdering Grasswax, the prosecutor—I mean Grazuvac. They were afraid he might have taken you hostage. It was all I could do to get them to wait five minutes and let me and my men check things out!”

Eligor snorted. “Cocksuckers. As if some minor-leaguer’s going to…” He shook his head in irritation. “Look, just tell them we killed the little shit already, and they can come pick up the body pretty soon. That’ll give us time to—”

Astonishingly, Howlingfell interrupted. He had bigger balls than I thought, although judging by the look on Eligor’s face he might not have them for long. “But it’s been more than five minutes, Master. They’re already on the way up. Talk to the guy in charge of them, Your Grace—he won’t listen to me!”

“Give me that fucking phone.” Eligor reached out and snatched it from Howlingfell’s hand. “Is someone there? This is Kenneth Vald speaking. Officer, I don’t know who you are, but I demand you contact Deputy Chief Bryant and he’ll tell you…” He paused for a moment. “Bryant? That’s you? What the hell is going on? How dare you enter my building without…” There was another kind of anger in his voice now and, for at least this moment, he had forgotten about me. I stared blearily around the room but didn’t see any immediate hope of escape. My revolver, which might or might not have been empty, had fallen to the ground when the Grand Duke grabbed me, then had been kicked aside somewhere by one of his guards. Unlike the window in the outer office, the one in here was still whole, and without a gun I had doubts I could break the safety glass, even if I could somehow get through the ring of guards pointing their assault rifles at me.

“What do you mean you’re outranked? I don’t care!” Duke Eligor was beginning to look a bit bothered: his hair and whiskers were still the same pale, pale gold, but his skin had gone the color of new brick. “Well, screw you and your higher authority, Bryant! I’m going to cut the little bastard to pieces, and you can have what’s left when you get there. So? I don’t
care
if this is a public frequency! Anyway, who’s even going to know if you tell them the guy was already…” He frowned, listening, then pointed at Howlingfell. “Go look out the window.”

The minion went to the window. “What do you want to know?”

“Are there guys with sniper rifles and cameras on the roof of the Courier Building?” Eligor asked. “Looking in the window here?”

“Yes, Master,” Howlingfell said. “A lot of them. Do I have to keep standing here? What if they think I’m him?”

Eligor raised the phone again. “Who did this shit to me, Bryant? Because that’s a pretty damn big coincidence. I want a name.” His slotted
eyes narrowed. “Oh, really? All right, you can take the suspect. Bring your men in and I’ll have my boys stand down.” He clicked off the phone and turned to Howlingfell. His expression could have removed paint from a battleship hull. “We’re going to let them have him. Too much shit to clean up, otherwise.”

Howlingfell scuttled over. As he dragged me up off the floor he gave my arm a not-too-friendly squeeze just to let me know he remembered our previous meeting. I swear the bones squeaked as they rubbed together. “But if you want to question him, Master, can’t we just take him Outside? Then you’ll have all the time you want. As long as he’s alive and still breathing when we turn him over to the cops….”

Eligor cursed, or at least that’s what I assume he did. I couldn’t understand the words, but at the sound of his sharp exclamation a wind suddenly rose that made the windows shudder and several of the papers on his long teak desk caught fire. “Did I advertise for stupid? Because that’s the only way you could have been the top candidate.” He glared. Howlingfell cringed. “You
can’t
take one of our kind out of Time unwillingly without turning the whole apple cart upside down. That’s a major breach of the Conventions—it’ll set off alarms from the top floor of Creation down to the basement, alert his overlords
and
mine, and probably start a war. Do you think that’s a good idea, you fucking idiot?
Do you?”