Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“I told you, Ana —none of that is why I’m here.”

“Then why, exactly, are you here?”

“I’m here because Danny’s in some kind of trouble.”

“And you think that you can help him.”

“Something like that.”

“You do so like to play the savior, don’t you, Sam?” Her eyes drifted over to the woman lying still beside us, to the Collector trapped within. “It’s a shame you’re so goddamn lousy at it.”

“I don’t have time for this verbal sparring bullshit,” I said. “Danny’s missing, and I aim to find him. Now are you going to help me or not?”

She stared at me for a long moment, eyes narrowing in thought. “Why, Sam, I misread you! You’re not helping Danny —you’re hunting him. What, pray tell, did he do to piss you off so much?”

I considered lying to her, but at that moment, there was a rasping in the corner. A massive, bulbous wasp —too large by half for Alabama, but dead-on for the jungles of the Amazon —was skittering along the joint between ceiling and wall. The dry rat-a-tat of its wings against the plaster was like a death rattle. I wondered how long I had before its friends arrived.

“He stole something from me,” I said. “A soul that I was sent to collect. And now I want it back.”

“He stole a soul.”

“That’s right.”

Ana shook her head in weary resignation. “Daniel, you idiot,” she muttered, more to herself than to me.

“You don’t sound too surprised.”

“I wish I was. Truth is, I’ve seen something like this coming for a while, now. It’s why he and I are no longer together. Although even I’m surprised he would have brought you into all of this…”

“All of what ? Ana, what the hell is Danny up to?”

“Sam, Danny’s a junkie.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting her to say, but that sure as hell wasn’t it. “Come again?”

“You heard me fine the first time. He’s been skimming for a couple years now.”

Jesus —skimming? This shit with Danny was even worse than I thought.

The skim-trade is big business in the demon world. It’s sort of a black market for happy memories. Demons like to play all big and scary and superior, but the truth is, when it comes to humankind, the Fallen are jealous as all get-out. See, when they fell, they were removed from the light of God’s grace, and doomed to an eternity of darkness and despair. Skimming’s their way of reversing that —for a time, anyway. If a demon with the proper set of skills can get his hands on a human soul before it’s interred, he can shave off tiny fragments of life experience. This process is, of course, forbidden in the underworld, and it’s dangerous as hell —word is, one slip of the hand and the soul could crack, releasing enough raw energy to level a city block. But done properly, those skimmed fragments provide a high no demon could attain on their own: the high of love, of life; the warm embrace of a moment in God’s grace.

“But I thought skim was just for demons,” I said. "I didn’t think they’d deign to deal to humans —alive or otherwise.”

“That’s mostly true, I guess —but they’ve got to get their product somewhere, right?”

I frowned. “You’re saying Danny was funneling them souls? But why? How’d he get involved?”

“About three years back, he was approached by a demon who runs a skim-joint outside of Las Cruces. Somehow —I don’t know how —he’d found out about Danny’s relationship with me, and he exploited it for all it was worth. He said it would be a shame if our handlers found out about us —especially when such a discovery could be so easily avoided. He offered us protection —that, and access to all the creature comforts we could ever want. In return, all he asked for was a day or so to tinker with whatever soul Danny had collected. Once he extracted what he needed from the soul, he returned it to Danny for interment, and no one was ever the wiser. The system worked well enough for a while —and I confess, distasteful as the demon’s protection racket was, the nights Danny and I spent dining and drinking in the finest hotels without fear of discovery were among the happiest I’ve ever known. But then somewhere along the way, Danny’s method of payment changed.”

My face twisted in disgust. “Do you have any idea how fucking stupid you two were not to simply break it off with one another? What if you’d been caught? Or what if Danny’s demon-friend fucked up and cracked the soul Danny was assigned to inter? What do you suppose his handler would do then, huh? You want him to end up like Quinn? ’Cause make no mistake —if he were caught failing to perform his duties as a Collector, that’s exactly what’d happen.”

“Of course it was stupid, Sam. I knew it; Danny knew it. But can you even remember what it’s like being happy —even if for just a moment? Danny knew the risks, and as he told me a thousand times, even if he was caught, he wasn’t hurting anybody but himself. Of course, when he started using, everything changed. He retreated into himself, and shut me out entirely.”

“So when your gravy train runs out, you up and bail, huh?”

Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. “You’re a bastard, you know that? You have no idea what it was like. You have no idea what that shit did to him. When he was skimming, it’s like he wasn’t even there —and when he came down, it was even worse. He was hollowed out. A ghost. After a year of trying to reason with him, of begging him to give it up, I couldn’t take it anymore. So finally, I left. You know a thing or two about leaving, don’t you, Sam?”

I let that comment pass. “Still, Danny’s actions don’t track. I mean, the bigwigs only tolerate the skim-joints because they stay below the radar —they don’t disturb the status quo. You said yourself, they borrowed Danny’s souls, they didn’t steal them. So where’s the upside in having Danny snatching Varela?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe demand is on the rise, and the usual methods for obtaining skim can’t keep up. Maybe the recent unrest between heaven and hell has disrupted the skim-joint’s regular supply, forcing them to look elsewhere. Or maybe Danny’s just desperate. Maybe he needed a fix, and figured you for the sucker he could take it from.”

I shook my head. “You know full well only a demon’s got the reflexes to pull a successful skim. Danny wouldn’t stand a chance —he’d crack the soul, and blow his meat-suit all to shit.”

“That’s assuming he’s still in his right mind.”

“Come on, Ana, this is Danny we’re talking about. Junkie or not, you know he’s working some kind of angle.”

“Maybe. But I certainly couldn’t tell you what it is.”

I thought a moment, played the angles in my head. “This demon who’s been pulling Danny’s strings,” I said, “he got a name?”

Ana’s gaze, which until now had met my own, dropped. She stared at the floor a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was scarcely more than a whisper.

“Dumas,” she said, her voice tinged with shame and regret. “The demon’s name is Dumas.”

“So,” Gio said, “you gonna tell me what the hell happened back there?”

He twisted in the Fiesta’s passenger seat to look at me, his worried frown rendered sickly green by the pale dashboard light. Our tires clattered against the blacktop as we barreled west on 20, the speedometer pushing eighty as I chased the sunset that had long since dipped beneath the horizon before us. The lights of Shreveport were fast receding in the rearview, which meant that there were damn near two states between me and my meeting with Ana. In my opinion, that was still a couple states too few. I pressed the pedal to the floor mat and felt the whole car shudder as the needle climbed to ninety.