Tad Williams - The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Javier was putting the remains of his own dinner into the kitchen garbage can. When I told him what his boss wanted he lifted out the liner bag and trundled the whole mess out to the pig barn. I decided I didn’t need to watch Fatback getting fed, so I stayed in the kitchen listening idly to Spanish chatter on the television for a while, then when that got boring, I stepped out onto the back porch and was serenaded by the other pigs snorting sleepily in their own barn a short distance down the slope.

Javier finally came back. “He ready for you now, Mr. Dollar.”

“I think I’ve got what you need,” George told me when I approached his pen. He was looking up at the screen on the wall and a whole column of addresses, ears twitching. “I can’t find an address or any hint of home turf for her. The bad guys move around more than you guys do. But I’ve got something that might work just as well. Try a place called The Water Hole on the Camino Real by the university’s north gates.”

“Really? The Water Hole?” I knew of the place and to be honest it seemed a little lightweight for a heavy hitter like the Countess.

“Yeah, really-at least if it’s the Countess of Cold Hands you’re talking about.” He showed me a blurry image that looked like it had been shot from concealment without a sufficient lens, but even so it was impossible to mistake that small, pale, extremely alluring form.

“Yep. That’s her. But The Water Hole? I thought it was a student place.”

“Whatever. It’s the only spot I’ve managed to find a sighting of her that you also might have a chance of getting out of.”

“Don’t you mean ‘into’”?

“Oh, I doubt you’ll have any problems getting in , Bobby.” His snout curled in that sour little smile again.

“Cute.”

“That’s me. I’ll send you the rest of the stuff when it’s ready.”

“Thanks, George. Don’t forget to bill me.”

“No worries there.” He grunted and settled down into the mud. “On your way out will you ask Javier to bring me Meredith? I’m feeling the need of a little company.”

“Meredith?” I didn’t get it. “Who’s Meredith?”

“A very, very nice young lady. Of the four-footed variety.”

I was glad to hear he’d finally found someone. “A were-hog like you?”

He was silent for a moment, but then he laughed. There are few things odder than hearing a pig laugh in the middle of the night. “No, no, just an ordinary American Landrace sow, but she has a sweet disposition-a certain tenderness-and a lovely shape.” His look became stern. “Don’t judge me, sir. Don’t you dare judge me.”

Not judging, I thanked him, and made my way quickly back to my car. I had my windows open all the way down Alpine but didn’t get rid of the smell until I reached the bottom of the hills.

It was still dark outside when my bladder woke me. That’s pretty much how it works: use a body, become slave to various unpleasant internal systems. By the way, there are no bathrooms in Heaven, although angels eat and drink there, after a fashion. Which, now that I think of it, is pretty weird.

Generally my earthly bodies are in reasonable working order, thirtyish in appearance but a good bit stronger and more durable than your average human of that age. So the fact that I was trying to find my way to the john in the dark meant one of two things: either my kidneys were failing or I’d had far too much to drink the previous night. The way my head felt suggested that it was the latter.

The suspicion was strengthened when I couldn’t recognize the bathroom floor under my bare feet. My apartment had cheap tiles, but this was carpeted. Misadventure was confirmed when I got back and realized someone else was in the bed.

“You done crashing around like a fucking rhinoceros?” asked Monica, mush-mouthed with sleep. “Shut up already.”

I wanted to ask her what I was doing at her place but I was beginning to remember just enough to guess. I’d got back to The Compasses about half an hour before closing time and had done my best to drink away the smell of pig shit and the memory of Fatback’s eyes, both the sad ones in his pig face and the mindless, nasty ones in his human face. At some point Monica had been sitting in a booth drinking with me, and we had been breathing tipsily in each other’s faces as we talked. Q.E.D.

That was as much thinking as I could do with a head that felt like a used sweat sock stuffed with wet cement. I crawled in beside Monica, spent a minute getting used to the unfamiliar feeling of a bed with relatively clean sheets, then tumbled back into sleep.

“Wake up, Laughing Boy.” Monica was standing at the bedroom window, sipping from a glass of water and looking through the slats of the blinds. She was pretty much naked. I could see just enough of Cedar Street outside to know it was morning, the gray kind, the stay-in-bed kind, but it was more interesting looking at Monica. If only she wasn’t so damn cute , I thought: “cute” is one of my many, many weaknesses. “The refrigerator’s empty, and the only coffee’s instant, B.” She turned to survey me. “I think you’re going to buy me breakfast.”

Wasn’t much I could say to that except, “Yes, Ma’am.” Besides, I really needed the coffee. I swear, you don’t understand what slaves humans are to these meat sacks until you’ve spent some time not wearing one. And like I said, it was nice to look at Monica standing there, her graceful long back and wide hips. She wasn’t skinny like the woman on Friends , and her curves always looked good on her. Of course, the fact that she was showing me all this after the way our previous relationship had ended meant I needed to be careful. A drunken slip was one thing, but I was very far away from wanting to start all over with her.

“Your phone’s been ringing and ringing for over an hour,” she said. “Anything going on?”

Research coming in from Fatback, I guessed, but something about her interest didn’t feel entirely natural. I wondered if that was jealousy making its way back into the Bobby-and-Monica equation or something else-paranoia on my part? Or was I being too hard on myself, when a certain amount of paranoia was sensible? After all, it had been a pretty interesting week.

“Nothing too interesting,” I said as casually as I could, then groaned as I sat up and began hunting around on the floor for some pants. “My skull hurts. Hell, even my hair hurts. How much did we drink?”

She looked at me over one shoulder as she pulled on a clingy sweater. She didn’t seem as badly off as I was. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying herself. “Enough to make Chico cry. Where do you want to go? That pancake place still open?”

She said it lightly but my alarms went off. Monica and I used to go to the pancake place on Sunday mornings in the midst of our most domestic phase, when one of us was sleeping at the other one’s place most nights of the week. “Nah. This time of the day we’d have to wait half an hour for a table. Let’s go to Oyster Bill’s.”

“Oyster Bill’s? Their French toast tastes like cardboard.” She frowned. “You’re not freaking out on me already, are you, Dollar? One drunken fuck, and you’re getting ready to run for the hills again? I just wanted some decent pancakes.”

“No, no, that’s fine,” I said, although not entirely truthfully, “but at Bill’s they serve alcohol in the morning, and there’s a Pay and Save on the way there.” At that moment I needed a handful of aspirin and then a Bloody Mary more than anyone who hadn’t recently seen the flensed and unpleasantly disarticulated corpse of one of Hell’s prosecutors could possibly understand.