by Holly Lisle
"Drop dead, old man," she told him. "I don't do charity." The tough-girl delivery was tentative, but Glibspet gave it a B.
"Suit yourself, dearheart," he said, and backed off.
Okay, he'd told Mom he would try to get her out of there—now he had tried. Glibspet grinned. He hadn't said anything about succeeding. What came next was going to be fun.
The Fulmen's drummer, "Dreg," shambled in from the adjoining suite and sank down on an industrial-strength hotel sofa. Mostly on it anyway—rolls of fat oozed over the cushions like high water cresting a levee. Glibspet wondered if pork sought its own level. Connie and one of the pushier groupies, an overripe and sagging brunette, darted in and started trying to undress him, but he barely seemed to notice; he was too busy carrying on an intense conversation with Jack Daniels. The girl and the older woman had his belt undone and his zipper down, but there was just too much Dreg crammed into his jeans for them to be able to force his fly button open. If they did, Glibspet thought, the levee would break for sure. He'd love to see that. But some other time. This was the perfect opening for the little scenario he'd sketched out.
Glibspet walked over to Dreg. "Hey, man."
If Dreg heard him, he gave no indication. Glibspet didn't have time to waste. Mom downstairs wouldn't have a lot of patience. He reached forward, and snagged the bottle from Dreg's slack grasp. That got Dreg's attention, and a ham-sized fist seized Glibspet's arm suddenly with a grip that wasn't slack at all.
"My Jack." Dreg's voice was a low growl, almost a gargle. "Le' go 'n live," he said and squeezed.
Glibspet made no effort to extricate himself. "You don't need any more of that crap," he said. "Not while I've got hot rocks. Primo stuff, my man. Look!" He used his free hand to reach inside his jacket pocket and pull out a long, thin clamshell case. He slid the catch and it popped open. Inside were thirty-five vials of absolutely pristine crack cocaine. Demons didn't normally operate at the delivery end of the drug pipeline—it was too easy to hurt people, and the Hellraised couldn't directly cause harm. Glibspet's original scenario had been a little more indirect, but Dreg's size gave him an out—this guy had the body mass to take a major hit. "It's all yours, man," he told Dreg. "Free. My organization wants to do business with the Fulmen. You like it, you tell me later." He handed the case over to the drummer.
Now it was the mortal's responsibility.
Dreg's bloodshot eyes lit up. He let Glibspet's arm go, and groped clumsily through the scree on the floor by the couch. Paper flew and bottles clanked. Finally he came up with a pipe. As Connie and the other girl watched with interest, Dreg loaded a vial and lit up. Glibspet stepped back; it was not going to be a safe area in a minute, and porting was work.
Dreg took a deep hit from the pipe, and almost dropped it. "Damn," he said, "this is the best shit I ever had." He repeated the process but was unable to say anything coherent the second time. He just nodded enthusiastically.
"Hey! I want some of that!" the brunette groupie said.
"Me too," Connie said, giving up her attempt on Dreg's virtue.
"There's enough for everyone in the room," Glibspet suggested. According to his watch, he'd gone past the time he had promised Dora Franklin that he would be back at the car with her daughter. He told her that he and Connie would be out there three minutes ago, unless something had "gone wrong." He'd made very sure that she thought the worst; he also made sure that she got a good look at the gun in the glove compartment. He'd also fixed the elevator lockout for the penthouse. It was easy when you could reach through walls. Nothing that he had done so far broke the rules the Hellraised had to live under. Well, he couldn't break those rules, no matter how hard he tried.
All he could do was set up situations in which people could cause their own trouble. In a matter of seconds, they were going to be doing just that. Dora would be up here just in time to see her daughter take a hit on the cocaine. The kid would die of an overdose. Then there was going to be at least one murder, possibly followed by a suicide. The suicide wasn't anywhere near as sure a thing as the murder, but he had high hopes. All in all, it was going to be quite a tasty little haul for the soul pits. And of course he'd insisted on his fee up front on this one. High-risk operation, he'd called it.
Glibspet watched the door as Connie grabbed the pipe from Dreg and started to reload it. Just let Mommy hold off a few more seconds—
The hall door flew open, but it wasn't Mommy. It was—Who the hell was it? Glibspet had never seen the pair before. They weren't with the band, the hotel, or the police—the only three groups who might be expected to burst into the room. One of them, the man, was big, though not as big as Dreg. He had a hick look about him and a sheepish grin on his face. The other was a small woman who looked like she had just left off sucking a lemon. The pipe smoked unnoticed in Connie's hand as she watched the new arrivals. Behind them, at the end of the hall, Glibspet saw the elevator dial move from Lobby to One. Mommy was on the way up.
"I know we probably shouldn't be here," the man said shyly as he closed the door, "and we had to sneak past the guards, but we're here all the way from Idaho for the Potato Cutworm Forum, and when we heard you Fulmen were going to be in the Triangle the same time we were, well... we just couldn't stay away. We're your biggest... Hey, look, sister! It's Dreg himself!
Glibspet stared. These people were not supposed to be here. His plan was falling apart. When Mommy got off the elevator, she was going to find her daughter holding a crack pipe and in a state of undress, but very much alive. He had to get rid of these hayseeds and get Connie back on track. The pair was making a beeline for Dreg, and Glibspet moved to head them off. Somehow, though, he tripped and crashed into the female hick and they both ended up on the floor.
"And when you've mastered walking, do they start you on sharp edges?" she snapped.
Meanwhile, the male hick had stopped in front of Dreg, who was regarding the whole proceedings with a sort of manic coke-infused bonhomie. The hick grabbed Dreg's hand and pumped it. "Man, you're the greatest," he said. "I'll never forget your solo on 'Tracheotomy.'" He stared at the brunette. "And look, sister," he called, "a groupie, just like in the magazines, with her breasts out and everything."
"If I had those breasts, I wouldn't flaunt them," the short woman said sourly, and gathered her feet to rise. Her heel found a damp beery spot on the carpet and slipped from underneath her. Her shoe drove into Glibspet's shin like a railroad spike into a tie. He cursed and gripped his shin, trying to will away the pain.
"And look," the man continued. "Drugs, just like we always heard about! Drugs! This is great!" He took the crack pipe from Connie's unresisting grasp and raised it to his lips. He inhaled, a whoosh of air that seemed to go on and on. "Man," he said finally, then suddenly his eyes rolled up in his head, and he dropped like a felled tree—right into Connie's bare lap.
She screamed and tried to bolt, but he had her pinned. His mouth was open, and drool was starting to run onto Connie's thighs. As far as Glibspet could tell, he wasn't breathing. Damn him! Glibspet finally staggered to his feet. This wouldn't do at all. The back-country bastard had gotten Connie's overdose, and with him dead in her lap, she wasn't about to take another. Probably ever.
And with the kid alive, why would ol' Mom want to kill Dreg? And where was Mom, anyway? This was the top floor, but it didn't take that long for the elevator to arrive.
Connie was still screaming as the short woman made it to her feet and raced for her brother's side. She dropped to her knees beside the stricken man and rolled him off Connie's lap. He flopped over with all the grace and volition of a week-old beached whale. "He's dead!" the woman wailed. "Oh, sweet Lord, my brother's dead!"
Something of the scene must have started to penetrate Dreg's crack-high sense of invulnerability because he sat up, waves of fat roiling like breakers through an oil slick. Before he could do any more, the woman started pummeling him with her fists. "Murderer!" she screamed. "He loved you and you killed him."
&n
bsp; The accusation apparently penetrated. "Oh shit," Glibspet heard Dreg say. The drummer lurched the rest of the way onto his feet and gathered up the vials of crack, all now destined, undoubtedly, for a quick rendezvous with hotel plumbing. Dreg left the room, and there was the definite click of a bolt homing as the suite door shut behind him. The groupies and other hangers-on panicked and headed for the hall door. The brunette didn't even stop to find her skirt and blouse; doubtless her rendezvous would be with hotel security.
Connie sat stock still, looking at the dead man. Glibspet didn't think she'd breathed during the last three minutes. Her thin shoulders shook and tears ran down her pale cheeks. Glibspet considered: obviously, for whatever reason, Mom wasn't coming, and his initial plan was shot all to Heaven anyway. He could still port off and call in the cops, though—that ought to be good for some anguish. He started to prepare for the jump, but quit in mid-port as the corpse's sister grabbed Connie's hand.
"Come child," the meddling bitch said, and draped a jacket over Connie's shoulders. "We've got to get out of here. That fiend may come back and kill the witnesses too." Connie held on like a drowner to a life preserver, and the woman hustled her into the hall. "Elevator's broken," Glibspet heard. "We'll take the stairs." The stair door opened and shut, and suddenly Glibspet was alone in the room with the dead man. At the end of the hall, the elevator pointer twitched spastically between Four and Five, obviously stuck. Then suddenly it moved down to Four, and then to Three, then Two, and finally Lobby. Glibspet began to smell a rat. He walked purposefully out of the room and to the stairwell where he opened the door and stepped onto the landing. Below, he could hear several sets of footsteps, but he didn't follow them. Instead, he counted thirty, then exited once more into the hallway. The Fulmen suite was just as he had left it—except that the body was gone.
Damn! Glibspet raised his hands and ported back down to the Lincoln. It was empty, of course. He could imagine the scene in the lobby when the elevator opened and Mommy rushed out to take her sobbing baby in her arms. Never mind that Mommy had a pistol in her handbag or that baby wasn't wearing a bra or panties. There would be tearful talk of lessons learned, and promises never to do anything like this again—Connie's promises made sincere by having had a dead man in her lap. It made Glibspet's stomach churn just thinking about the sweetness of it all.
Glibspet put the Lincoln into reverse and backed out carefully. He took the opportunity to rearrange the grillwork of a Hyundai, and that made him feel a little better, but there was nothing he could do about the central problem. He should have started worrying when Mom went into her praying spasm. If it was enough to get on his nerves, maybe it was enough to get Someone Else's attention. Angels in North Carolina: Who would have guessed it?
Chapter 26
Judge Rules Border Divining "Unsafe Work"
Raleigh—Raleigh News & Courier
Federal Circuit Court Judge Marilyn Foster ruled against North Carolina-based survey firm God's Acre on Friday, finding that its use of gargoyles and imps to settle North Carolina border disputes constituted "unsafe work" for the creatures, and was in violation of federal OSHA rules.
After two days of lurid testimony, during which several demons described the events following any Unchained's crossing North Carolina's border, Judge Foster refused to lift an injunction against the company and ruled that God's Acre's survey methods, which involved pushing an Unchained towards the presumed border until it was observed to disappear, were "unacceptable in a civilized society."
God's Acre has vowed to appeal, but sources in Raleigh say that the state government will not rehire the firm, regardless of the eventual outcome.
God's Acre based its divining methods on the well-known, but not often applied, fact that the Hellraised are, by the terms of God's mandate, which placed them in the state in the first place, immediately and painfully disincorporated upon crossing the border and returned to Hell without benefit of appeal.
Judge Foster declined to rule on the related issue of God's Acre's claim that the borders it had surveyed prior to the injunction were "ordained by God," and not susceptible to further dispute.
The storm was over when Rhea left the Angus Barn—the young hostess would be disappointed, but Rhea wasn't sorry in the least. Thunder and lightning might be calling cards from Heaven, but they reminded her of too many other things, things she'd seen that were far from Heaven indeed. She patted her briefcase to reassure herself and took a deep breath of the clean-washed air. Ozone-fresh, it was intoxicating, or maybe that was just her mood. She felt like a bobcat in a world of wiener dogs—she was having a hard time choosing which one to tip over first. She threw the briefcase onto the passenger's seat and slid under the wheel. The office first, she decided. Get the contract in the safe, and start lining up things to move on in the morning. All the little things—and some big ones—that had been hanging fire, waiting for cash. Rhea put the top down and let the slipstream tug at her hair, and drove with Adam Ant's "Goody Twoshoes" blasting from the stereo.
When she pulled into the parking lot at Celestial, Rhea saw lights on the second floor. Jack must still be here, she thought. She put the top up and slammed the car door a little harder than necessary. He was going to have to start taking better care of himself. Or maybe she would...
Still, she reflected as she shut the lobby door behind her, she was glad to find him here. It gave her someone to share the good news with.
Rhea padded up the stairs to her office, and carefully deposited the contract in her second safe, the hidden one. It was advertised as uncrackable, but it wouldn't keep out anyone who could reach through steel. Unfortunately, she didn't dare expend the Hellawatts to have one of the sort that other Hellraised in North Carolina used. Just the simple act of drawing a document out of a Hellish safe, if she were unshielded, might be enough to tip off Lucifer to her location.
She headed up to the second floor to tell Jack the news. Almost at his office, elated to the point that she wanted to tap-dance down the hall, Rhea rapped against a wall-mounted fire extinguisher with her knuckles. It rang out with a cheerful, brassy sound that echoed up and down the empty hallway. Rhea started to smile, but frowned as the corner of her eye picked up movement. Had something darted into the doorway of Jack's office? It didn't seem likely. Certainly there wasn't any indication that Jack had heard her. She wished she dared expend the Hellawatts to just read the area. But she didn't.
Jack was sitting at his lab bench when she walked in. He was staring fixedly at a circuit board and scowling as if he could glare the electrons into their proper paths.
"Hi, Jack," she said, very softly.
After he had picked up his lab stool, and after she had stopped laughing, Rhea gave him the news. "We did it. I've got our funding locked in; we can finish this thing."
Jack smiled, but it was a wan smile that didn't reach his eyes. He said, "I'm glad to hear that," but he didn't look glad.
Rhea put her hand on his shoulder. "What's wrong?"
Jack sighed. "I just don't think I can do it. I've tried six ways from Sunday to get this board working, and when that didn't do it, I pulled two more ways from Monday, and five from Wednesday." He waved the board in front of her. "I'm at the point where I've either got to say that your design is wrong, and I've seen too much of your oddball stuff work to think that, or that it is just not in Jack Halloran to get that design on silicon and wire. You'd better give it to someone else."
"If I thought there were anyone else better, I would." She took her hand from his shoulder and crossed her arms over her chest. "Look, Jack, I'm far from perfect. I can screw up just as well as the next guy—but I don't think I screwed up when I hired you and I don't think I screwed up when I gave you this task."
"But—"
"But nothing. Let's look over the diagram and figure out where I did screw up. We'll take it component by component, connection by connection, and we'll verify against the board while we go."
Rhea took the printout, g
ot a pencil from her purse and stared making marks. "First connection," she said, "from pin one of the PAL to the pull-down resistor in grid A-twenty-seven?"
"Check!" Jack said.
An hour and a half later, they had gone through every component and trace on the board. Everything checked out, but Rhea wasn't satisfied. "Something's wrong here," she said.
"No kidding, Rhea," Jack replied.
"No," she said, "that's not what I mean. Everything we've checked is right, I know it is, but there's something missing." She held up the diagram. "Something's screwy here. Can you bring up the original on-screen?"
"Sure, if you want." Jack stepped over to his workstation, and brought up the CAD program. It spewed the diagram over the screen like Technicolor roadkill.
"Wow." Rhea winced. "It does get flashy, doesn't it? I see why you prefer the printout." She sat down in front of the screen, put the printout in her lap and started tracing circuits onscreen with the mouse, comparing them to the hard-copy diagram. It took her about ten minutes to hit a discrepancy. "I don't believe it." She looked up at Jack, who had been leaning over her shoulder, and said, "You've got to see this."
"What?"
"Look! This circuit. There's a lead from here to here," she pointed, "and it's not on the printout." She felt Jack press close as he looked over her shoulder.
"No," he said finally, "it's not. Print that puppy, would you?"
Rhea clicked on Print, and Jack's laser printer started to hum. He grabbed the warm paper as it came out and compared it to the screen. "Same thing," he said excitedly. "It's missing again! And look, the line that should be there is perfectly horizontal, and looks like it would be about one pixel high. Print something else. Some text file."