Tad Williams - The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Before I got to the Walker house I had been pretty certain I would drop by The Compasses on my way back, but now I felt unsettled right down to the soles of my feet, and I just wanted to go home and bathe myself in holy water. Since I didn’t have any holy water, vodka would have to serve, and the bath would have to be on the inside rather than the outside. I kept a bottle of 42 Below in the freezer for just these kinds of spiritual emergencies.

Monica had left a message on my phone wanting to know how things had gone, and I also had a reminder from Sam that we were getting together after work tomorrow for our monthly dinner (an old custom of ours I’ll tell you about another time) but I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. I wanted to get quickly and quietly blotto because I felt like a garage full of car alarms right after a major earthquake.

When I got through the door of my apartment I pulled out the vodka, cracked the cap, then poured myself a couple of fingers in a glass and put on some Miles as thinking music. As “So What” began to curl around my living room like cigarette smoke I took a fiercely cold swallow and tried to make sense out of everything that had happened in the last day, from the unprecedented absence of Edward Walker’s soul to the sudden passing of Prosecutor Grasswax in the grisliest fashion imaginable.

My old boss Leo used to say that when you’re working for any gigantic and corrupt bureaucracy, whether it’s the British East India Company, the Politburo, or the NCAA, the first lesson is this: Don’t wait to find out exactly how they’re going to screw you before you start protecting yourself-get to work when you spot the first signs of trouble. This whole Walker thing was full of holes, and from long experience I felt sure more weird things were going to be crawling out of those holes very soon.

In fact this particular little clusterfuck, with its missing souls and dead demon-prosecutors, had all the warning signs of one of the worst snafus in recent memory, and if I wasn’t smack in the middle of it I was close enough to feel the heat most unpleasantly. It was time to start the counter-offensive-if I could do so without making things worse for myself, that is.

I poured myself another glass of numbness and thought about where to start.

About an hour later I noticed I had finished my third drink but had never poured myself a fourth. I got up to rectify that, noted that Miles had gone quiet, and put on some Robert Johnson. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Seemed like an appropriate night for Mr. Johnson and his crossroads bargain.

Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door

Early this mornin’, ooh, when you knocked upon my door

And I said, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.”

Even in a body that wasn’t one hundred percent my own, I couldn’t repress a shiver. It looked like I’d be doing a lot of things I wouldn’t much like in the next few days, including having a conversation with my best friend Sam about why he wasn’t being entirely honest with me. Alice in the office had said when she gave me the case that Edward Walker was supposed to be Sam’s client, and if our situations had been reversed I certainly would have explained to my old buddy by now why I missed taking a client that landed him deep in the shit.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed more information about everything-about dead Mr. Walker, even about Grasswax. But information about Hell’s labor force wasn’t easy to come by through regular channels. I was going to have to pay a visit to Fatback.

Ordinary work kept me busy much of the next day. Alice sent me a downtown client, a hit and run on the 84 over by Shell Mound Road. It was pretty much a slam dunk case-the victim was a twelve-year-old school kid crossing the intersection on the way home for lunch. The prosecutor, a new guy named Weepslug took one look at the scene and rolled his eye in disgust. (He only had one, more or less in the middle.) In fact it would all have been over in a very short time indeed-this wasn’t the kind of kid hiding any ugly secrets-but the rules about children are very, very strict, and we had to go through every formality. By the time the judge ruled, and I could finally leave the pathetic scene behind-the whole time we were arguing the case the kid’s twisted bicycle and one shoe were still lying in the middle of the road-my day was pretty much shot. Even winning the case wasn’t going to wipe away the memories of that child crying when he realized he wasn’t going home to his mom and dad.

Sometimes I hate what I do.

At one point, while the judge was questioning the deceased-they do that when it’s a minor-Weepslug turned to me and said, “You heard about Grasswax?”

I wondered if he really didn’t know. “Oh, yeah, I heard.”

“He was a bastard, but trust me, nobody deserves that.”

“I was under the impression you guys thought being a bastard was good.”

He gave me a strange look. For a demon I kind of liked him-his single, bleary eye had a bemused expression, and although he was almost twice my height he didn’t use that to intimidate. Not that I trusted him an inch, of course. “There’s good bad and then there’s bad bad,” he said. “G-Wax made some enemies on both sides.”

“You think somebody on my side of the scrimmage line might have done this?” This was a new idea. It wasn’t in character for our side, but that could be exactly how someone wanted it to seem. Still, the Bloody Net…!

The prosecutor’s forehead wrinkled in distress; it made his face look like someone had sat on a Christmas ham. “I’m not saying anything,” Weepslug declared, quick and loud. “I don’t know anything.”

“Neither do I,” I assured him. “There’s no greater bliss than ignorance.”

“Oh, look!” yelled Sweetheart when I walked into The Compasses just before six, “It’s Heaven’s Most Wanted!”

“Yeah, cute, very cute.”

Sam was at the bar with a ginger ale and a San Judas Courier spread out across the counter. Newspapers were another way my buddy liked to cultivate his old-school act. “Check it out,” he said as I approached. “His working name was Darko Grazuvac.”

It took me a moment. “Grasswax? He got an obituary?”

“Obituary, hell-he got an above-the-fold story. After all, he did just turn up drowned at the scene of a headline suicide. What did you expect?”

This was making me more and more uneasy. Neither our side nor the Opposition liked publicity, especially not this kind-having reporters digging into the backgrounds of people whose pasts were largely invented is never a good thing for either of us. “So, why would anyone bump him off right there at the Walker guy’s house?”

Sam shrugged and downed his ginger ale. “Sending a message? Dunno. Let’s go eat.”

You could get a meal of sorts at The Compasses but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to do if you were going to keep living in the same body afterward, so we wandered across Beeger Square to Boxer Rebellion, my favorite Chinese place. It’s small and unpretentious, and for a Chinese restaurant (which tend to the businesslike over the sentimental in my experience) also quite friendly.

Normally having a pair of chopsticks in my fist and a plate of their sesame seed mutton in front of me is enough to convince me that the Highest is on His throne and all’s right with the world, but tonight it wasn’t working.

“So what’s going on?” I asked Sam. “Where were you yesterday? Why did I get what should have been your client, and how come you didn’t say anything about it when I saw you?”