The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar (25 page)

I swallowed all of the dozen or so questions that burbled up, picked the one that seemed most germane. “So who
does
have it?”

“Grasswax did—for a while. But obviously he got rid of it.” She pulled into the Holiday Inn driveway. “And nobody knows where or to whom. Your stop, Dollar.”

I considered walking around to the driver’s side and asking her if maybe we should get a drink and talk about this some more, but as soon as I closed my door she was gone, rolling down the driveway and then pulling out into the flow of lights on Veterans like a fish tossed back alive into a swift river.

“S
O WHAT have we learned?” Sam asked me as we waited for our coffee. “Don’t march into strange buildings and kill secretaries?” He squinted up at the menu board. “Do you think one of these is that expensive kind crapped out by a weasel?”

“All of them, judging by the prices,” I said.

Clarence’s face stretched in horror, and he looked like he was seriously considering dumping his caramel macchiato in the garbage. “Eew, what? You’re joking, right?”

“He’s not joking,” I said. “You never heard that? Where did you live when you were alive, in a clothes hamper?” But I wasn’t in the mood for banter, not even with an inviting target like the kid. I turned back to Sam. “The whole thing kind of snowballed on me.”

“Yeah,” he growled. “Remember what they say about the sort of chances a snowball has when dealing with the infernal powers? You dumbshit. Why didn’t you call me?”

“I wouldn’t know about what I did when I was alive,” Clarence said loudly. A couple of the other people waiting for their drinks turned to look at him. He colored. “I mean, how would I know?” he said more quietly. “I don’t even know that I
was
alive.”

I did my best to ignore him. “Okay, Sam, you’re right, I should have called you. I was just getting a little desperate, I guess—trying to make something happen. I’ve got the boys and girls upstairs breathing all over me and down here a bighorn something-or-other seems to want
to take off my whole head and probably suck stuff out of my neck hole. And now I’ve got Vald Credit kicking me in the junk as well, so can we get off the street, please? I feel like someone’s going to recognize me any moment.”

“Relax, B,” Sam said. “You’re with me. The bad guys know us and they leave us alone!” He continued singing “I Get Around” tunelessly to himself.

“I mean, how do we know any of the story our bosses told us is even true?” Clarence asked, still off on his own little tangent. “Maybe it’s like
The Matrix
, and the computers are controlling our minds!”

“Nice faith,” I told him. “Nothing’s even
tried
to eat you and you’ve already given up on the Divine Plan?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Just assume you’re being lied to by everyone, kid. That always works for me.”

Sam’s double espresso and my latte finally arrived, and we walked out. With its motels and mini malls, Veterans Boulevard in the sunlight was like a little slice of the Anaheim resort district—yes, that charming. We climbed into Sam’s boredom wagon, and he drove me to the restaurant where I’d left my Matador parked. “Here you go,” I said to the kid, handing him the keys. “You said you’d like to drive it, so we’ll meet you in Mayfield Station parking lot.”

“Really?” Clarence said, his eyes big. But as he got out both orbs went little and mistrustful again. “Hang on, you just want me to do this in case somebody’s been watching the car, waiting for you to come get it.”

“Exactly.”

“But what if they try to grab me?” He looked like he was about to climb back in through the driver’s side window.

“Then we’ll come and help,” Sam told him. “Go on, don’t be a pussy—you’re an angel of the Lord, remember?”

He went, reluctantly.

“Not really very nice, using the kid,” Sam told me a few moments later. Despite all the things he says he’s a bit of a softy.

“Trust me, they don’t want him. Anything really dangerous probably won’t even
react
to him.”

We watched Clarence open the door, looking around as if any moment a bunch of paratrooping demons were going to come shrieking down out of the sky, but none appeared. He got in and started the engine.
Nothing exploded. He rolled out of the parking lot and headed north. We waited to see if anyone was following, then set out after him.

“Looks like the Lords of Hell refused to believe you were stupid enough to drive your own car,” Sam said, “because I can’t believe they wouldn’t have been able to find that garish piece of shit if they’d bothered looking.”

“Naw, they just knew I’d be coming with backup this time. You know, a couple of local tough guys.”

“Yeah, me and the Tiniest Angel. Oh, and that female demon who’s got a crush on you. By the way, I can’t believe she did all that for you.” He turned down California Avenue, heading for the station. “She must have mistaken you for me.”

“You wish. It’s my natural charm—even Hell itself isn’t immune.” But I didn’t really want to talk about her even with Sam. The Countess was a bit too complicated a subject. “Speaking of Clarence, how’s the kid doing? Any hope for him as an advocate?”

“Well, as you saw, he gets whiny and he’s going through a bit of an existential crisis,” Sam said. “Like we all do. But he’s not all bad. If he really is a snitch for the House, they’ve used worse.” Sam had always been convinced that we were surrounded by our bosses’ spies. He was probably right but I couldn’t really live that way myself. “By the way,” he asked, “what are your ideas for the afternoon? Not planning on storming the gates of Tartarus or anything, are you?”

I frowned. “If nobody dies on my watch today, I thought I’d see if I can talk to the Sollyhulls, get a few more answers. I’m sure not going to figure out this puzzle with the pieces I’ve got so far.”

“Hey, that would be perfect for the kid,” Sam said. “You could take him along, couldn’t you? He’s always asking about the big picture—you know that kind of stuff bores the shit out of me. And I’ve got some other things I’d like to get done without having to answer questions the whole time.” His voice rose to an imitation of his young protegé:
“Sam, why don’t the nice Buddhists go to Heaven?”

“Don’t they?”

“Fuck if I know. I’m just telling you: questions, questions, questions. Like someone else I used to know.” He glanced over at me. “That would be you.”

“Yeah, I got it, Mr. Sentimental. Everybody’s like that at first. You probably were, too, Sammy-boy.”

“I have never, for one instant, been a millimeter less than cool. Look, just take him off my hands for the afternoon, will you? Because I swear, B, he ain’t a bad kid, but I’ll go back to drinking if I don’t get some time away from him.”

This from a man who’d previously boozed two bodies to death, so it wasn’t a completely idle threat.

“But doesn’t this stuff bother you, Bobby?” Clarence asked me as we left the drugstore parking lot. I stashed the Thrifty bag in my jacket pocket and took the ramp onto the 84, headed west. In the last decade or so, a lot of tall buildings had sprung up around what had been the old Woodside Expressway, but when the traffic was moving slowly you could still see between them to the flatlands of Spanishtown on either side, block after block of two- and three-story apartment buildings. “I mean, that there are so many questions about what we do—questions without answers?”

“I got enough of those already, Junior, and mine are going to get me killed if I don’t answer ’em, so I don’t really have time for the other kind. Look, like I said, it turned out that there really is a Heaven, there really is a Hell, and this is what happens after we die. What’s so hard about that?”

He scowled. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”

I hit the brakes hard as some moron tried to catch the yellow at Valota Road, missed it by three seconds, and would have t-boned me if I hadn’t seen him coming and waited to start into the intersection. “I hope when you kill yourself they send Young Elvis to plead your case, asshole!” I yelled after him. “No, check this, Clarence—I
do
get it. Because I had more questions than you when I started, and I still ask questions all the time. But some things we may just never know. As living beings, humans don’t understand completely how the universe works, and as angels there’s still stuff that hasn’t been revealed to us yet. I decided I can live with that.” Which was not entirely true. I was pretty sick of unanswered questions, but you can only bang your head against so many walls before you either rethink your approach or knock your brains out once and for all.

“But what about the religious thing? Why is it that the whole operation is run by Christians and Jews? Were they right about everything all along? Were the Buddhists and—and the Ba’hai, and Muslims and everyone else wrong? That just seems so…American.”

I laughed as I swung into the coffee shop parking lot. “Hold on, kid. Who’s saying everyone else is wrong? Who’s saying the Christians or the Jews are right?”

“What do you mean? It’s obvious that if…”

“
Nothing’s
obvious,” I said, cutting him off. “Have you bumped into Moses or Jesus hanging around upstairs? You haven’t, have you? We see what we see, and that isn’t much.” I sighed. “Look, kid, for all we know the Highest—the one who gives us all the orders—also calls Himself Allah, or Ahura Mazda, or Jade Emperor or even Brahma. Maybe we’ve been told we’re ‘angels’ because that’s all we can understand, even after we’re dead. We don’t really know
anything
, and as you should have learned by now, you can’t trust the way things look, either.” I got out of the car. “You’re about to learn
that
lesson all over again.”

He got out, still frowning like he wanted to argue some more. “Who are these people I’m going to see, anyway?”

I shook my head. “First, you’re just tagging along, a quiet observer. Second of all, they’re not people. Third, you may not see anything at all—unless they decide they like you.”

“Huh?”

“Just shut up for a change, okay? Let’s get some lunch.”

I could understand Walter Sanders’ less than enthusiastic review of the Superior Grill when we got inside. The place was your garden-variety greasy spoon with menus printed in the seventies and waitresses who looked like they had been working there a lot longer than that. Even the pies behind the glass counter had a slightly embalmed look, like the corpses of Communist leaders on public display. Our waitress resembled Wallace Beery in one of his prizefighter movies—definitely the punch-drunk phase of the story. She didn’t seem all that crazy about having to serve anybody, but took our orders without actual argument, hung the slip on the roundy-roundy thing, then went back to talking to the other waitress (who could have passed for Lon Chaney Jr. with a beehive hair-do).

“I don’t get it,” Clarence whispered to me. “We’re the only ones in the place. When are your friends supposed to get here?”

“Why, bab?” asked the cream pitcher, its top opening and closing like a tiny silver mouth. “Are you thinking about asking one of the waitresses out instead?” The chuckle that followed was a little coarser
than the silvery-bell variety one usually expects from invisible spirits. Clarence let out a yelp like a dog whose tail has just found its way under a foot and was halfway to the front door before I could convince him to come back. At the other end of the long room the waitresses looked up without interest, then went back to discussing particle physics or whatever else was keeping them from bringing me a glass of water.

“Who said that?”
Clarence asked me, eyes wide.

“I did, bab,” said the cream pitcher in a broad West Midlands dialect. “Didn’t mean to put the wind up you.”

“She did, though,” said the coffee thermos, its own lid also bouncing up and down as it spoke, like a cheap overseas cartoon. “She loves it when they jump.”

I rolled my eyes. Both sisters enjoyed this sort of childishness way more than they should have after all so many years of afterlife. “This is Haraheliel, ladies,” I said. “But we call him Clarence. Clarence, these are the Sollyhull Sisters, Betty and Doris. They know everybody who used to be anybody.”

“He looks like a nice young one,” said the cream pitcher. “Not an old grump like you, Bobby-love.”

“Oh, but our Bob’s got reason to be grumpy, doesn’t he?” said the coffee pot. “Look at his face—the poor dear’s all over cuts and bruises!”

The bell above the door tinkled and a couple of delivery drivers in uniform walked in. They waited a minute for the waitresses to finish up their review of quantum field theory, then when that didn’t happen, they chose a booth not far from ours and sat down.

“Is this a trick?” asked Clarence in a loud whisper, still looking around for the source of the bodiless voices. “Who’s doing this?”

“He’s not thick, is he?” Betty asked. “I mean any more than normal, young-lad thick?”

“Oh, is he one of those unfortunates?” her sister said. “That’s a shame.”

“Just new,” I told the ladies. “Betty and Doris are earthbound spirits,” I explained to Clarence. “They exist both here and the spiritual plane, although it’s more like they’re just visiting here. Where they come from is sort of another part of Outside—through the Zippers, except it’s actually part of Purgatory. I think.” I shrugged. “It’s confusing.”