The Dirty Streets of Heaven bd-1

by Tad Williams

  He said something I couldn’t quite make out-I told myself it was, “Yes, plenty!” Then I gave it all the throttle I could, and it leaped ahead. The engine was surprisingly strong; the front wheel came up off the ground for a moment, but I leaned way forward and brought it down, then blasted across the square as fast as I could, weaving in and out of startled revelers who were beginning to panic and run in different directions-perhaps because of me, perhaps because of the giant, steaming, horned terror that was chasing me.

  I almost dumped the bike getting out between a couple of official vehicles on the far side of Beeger Square but regained my balance and accelerated again along Main Street as I left the crowds behind. I was aiming for the open-air Riverside Shopping Center since it would be closed for the night, and I couldn’t really afford to dodge pedestrians much longer. The ghallu was just behind me, something I could hear even though I didn’t dare risk a look back at the speeds I was traveling. Up and down curbs and through pedestrian alleys not meant to be traversed at sixty miles an hour-I was coming damn close to killing myself and sparing the ancient demon-thing all the trouble. But somehow I bounced up an inactive escalator without popping a tire and made it to the upper esplanade of the Riverside Center. Now I risked a look back and saw the black shape coming up the escalator behind me. It had dried and was already ablaze again, flames licking its silhouette, gleaming red eyes fixed remorselessly on me.

  The upper level of the Riverside Center has shops all along one side, but the other side is open to the manicured bank of the Redwood River below. I needed to get to the far end of the shopping center where the water widened and deepened, but the roof was full of cement planters and benches and little kiosks that sold waffle cones and candy and other useful things, padlocked now, so I had to ease up on the throttle enough to slalom through them all. I could actually hear the slap of the ghallu’s feet on the esplanade behind me, still in close pursuit. The monster was all but tireless, but I definitely was not.

  There was no way to jump the iron fence at the end of the esplanade, so I did the only thing I could: at the last second, with the fence ten yards away, then five, four, three yards, I clambered up and stood on the seat, spreading my arms, then jumped as high as I could.

  The Yamaha smashed into the fence at something over forty miles an hour with an explosive, grinding clang. Carried forward by momentum, I flew through a shower of sparks as a whole length of iron pickets tore free with the motorcycle still tangled in them like a dophin in a net. The broken fence tumbled awkwardly down the embankment, carrying the bike with it. I watched it in almost slow-motion clarity, because I was plunging through the air toward the green water far below.

  I hit the water in the clumsiest, most painful cannonball dive imaginable-really, I’ve seen people land burning aircraft more gracefully. But the important thing was what happened next: I splashed down into the river at a place where it was deep enough to absorb the energy of my fall. I also somehow managed to stay conscious. When I stopped moving and began to float to the surface again I pulled the bar’s siphon hose from my belt and ripped off the little faucet, then put the end of the hose in my mouth. I held my breath as long as I could as I drifted up, then poked the other end of the hose above the surface. When I reached a place where I could put my feet on the bottom and still get the tip of the hose out of the water, I stopped moving and tried just to stay still.

  I was well out into the middle of the river, and I didn’t think that anything that had howled so much at being hosed down would wade out into so much water if it couldn’t even see me. I was hoping being underwater would hide my smell, too.

  It had been a desperate plan, and one of the things I hadn’t had a chance to consider was what it would feel like to be submerged in fifty-degree water, breathing through a plastic tube. It wasn’t so bad for the first couple of minutes, but even with my stronger-than-human constitution I was shivering so badly by the ten-minute point that I began debating whether it was really worse to be captured or killed by that creature than to die of exposure in a river full of cold water.

  I gave it one more minute, then crept slowly into the shallows and staggered ashore on the cement bank at a spot hidden under a pedestrian bridge, soaked and shivering. No sign of the ghallu, but I didn’t move any further until I saw that the police and other emergency workers were gathering along the esplanade where the bike had gone through the wrought iron fence, pointing to the spot where everything had hit the water. Some of the twisted wreckage protruded above the surface. I figured they’d be sending in divers to look for my body soon, so I clambered out on the far side of the bridge and did my best to squeeze most of the water from my clothes, hoping that when I was done I’d just look like a bum who’d had a hard, hard night. Cold and miserable? Don’t ask.

  I called Sam but nobody picked up, so I left a terse message to let him know I was alive. I hoped he was the same, but the creature had hit him very, very hard, and I was worried. I tried Monica, too, but also without luck. I was seriously worried that my incompetence might have gotten all my closest friends and colleagues killed, but I couldn’t worry long because I knew for a fact that the ghallu was still out there somewhere, that I had no car and no silver bullets, and that by now Eligor must have spies all over town.

  As I huddled there shivering I couldn’t even raise Clarence the trainee, which made me wonder if everyone was just avoiding me out of self-preservation. I didn’t want to try to walk dripping down brightly lit Veterans in search of a motel, and I didn’t know of even a homeless shelter I could get into at this time of night. Which left me but one option.

  I called the number I never really thought I’d use. Nobody answered that one either, but I left a message.

  Fifteen minutes later the big black car pulled to the side of Veterans near the place where, still drizzling river water, I was crouching out of sight of the road. I scrambled up the embankment and, keeping my head low, opened the passenger side door. As I pulled myself in, something hard and extremely gunlike pushed against my forehead.

  “You realize this taxi ride isn’t free, don’t you, Dollar?” The Countess of Cold Hands had a very steady grip on the pistol, no tremor. “Either you’re going to tell me everything you know and everything you think you know, or they’re going to find a floater that looks like you in the Redwood River tomorrow morning.”

  It’s hard to argue with the barrel of an automatic pressing against your glabella. “You have my angelic word on it.”

  “Lovely,” she said with perhaps just a hint of sarcasm. “Buckle up.” She removed the barrel from my forehead but kept it pointing toward me. It was a big Czech 9mm with what looked like silver plating, I was guessing platinum or chrome. Very flashy, though.

  She stared her disapproval as I arranged myself wetly on the leather upholstery, then she swung the big car out onto Veterans. “You smell like pond scum and duck shit, Dollar. I’m guessing you might have found yourself in over your head.”

  “Ha ha.” The unamused way I said it was slightly undercut by my violent shivering. “Could you turn up the heat?”

  “I’m not sure you can take it any hotter,” she said, but dialed it up a couple of notches anyway as she nosed through traffic, the gleaming automatic now tucked between her thighs. “And after you tell me what I want to know, where will I be taking you?”

  “Right now Hell itself would make a nice change.”

  She frowned. “You have no idea how unfunny that is.”

  twenty-one

  knife fight in a harem

  I haven’t met that many women, human or angelic, who actually like to drive. In my experience they seem to be much more pragmatic about the whole thing than we are. For most males, driving is an extension of their masculinity; they have little fantasy scenarios going all the time-races, chases, and dramatic combat with other drivers. Females, on the other hand, generally seem to view driving as something you do to get somewhere. I know, crazy.

  As we sped away
from the scene of my most recent escape from the ghallu, I noted with interest that the Countess of Cold Hands was not one of that usual type. She was aggressive, and she drove fast, but with a self-assured inattention, too. She also drove mostly one-handed, but that might have been because her not-so-dainty CZ 75 automatic was in her left hand now, resting on her thigh but pointing in my direction.

  “So why did you have a chauffeur before? Because you seem to like doing this.”

  “You mean Cinnamon? Most of the time I’ve got better things to do than drive. But as I told you before, things have changed-I’ve been forced to downsize a bit.” She knifed between two trucks and then slid neatly to the right into the exit lane. We had been on the Bayshore, but as we pulled off and headed west on University my Dollar-sense started tingling. I thought for a moment we might be heading toward the Walker place, home to Posie and her idiot boyfriend, and I wondered if I was about to find out I had been a bigger sap than I already thought I was-that the Countess had set me up from the beginning for some reason I couldn’t yet see. But then again, why would she need a reason? We were on different sides, weren’t we? We were blood enemies.

  Just as I was planning my escape (or my counterattack, if that sounds more manly) she made a sharp turn off the main thoroughfare toward the brightly lit but seedy little district known as Whisky Gulch, an oasis just outside the legal limits of the Stanford family’s anti-booze crusade. It had been the hub of the local jazz scene in the 1950s and revived briefly with a couple of discos in the seventies, but had fallen on hard times since then. Still, some of the clubs like The Glo-Worm had been there since the Great Depression, and scarcely a one hadn’t seen some important San Judas citizen arrested or shot on its premises over the years. It was funny to think that this den of revelry and bad behavior stood so close to the manicured, leaf-blowered streets of Edward L. Walker and his neighbors.

  “Slouch down,” she said suddenly as we tooled down the main drag. “Too many eyes on this street.”

  “This car has got tinted windows.”

  “I’m not worrying about human eyes.”

  I slid down until my head was level with the glove compartment. From this close proximity I couldn’t help looking over at my driver, who I realized for the first time was not wearing some kind of exotic wrap-around dress but a silk dressing gown. It had slid entirely off her left leg, and I watched her slender but muscular thigh and calf muscles bunch and relax as she worked the accelerator and brake pedals. It was very interesting.

  “Keep your eyes to yourself, Wings,” she said after some moments.

  “You really don’t want me to look? I thought you lady demons were all about seduction.”

  “What you don’t know about lady demons would fill several books too long for you to read, Dollar.”

  I laughed despite myself, despite my broken ribs and the gun pointing at me. “Whatever. Where are you taking me?”

  “Someplace to get you dried off and less conspicuous while I think about where to dump you. And so you’ll have a chance to tell me what you know in private.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “Don’t you ever just shut up?”

  I get that a lot.

  We drove through a dark neighborhood of tall apartment buildings, not the nice kind they had out on University Avenue with their gleaming frontages and doormen in uniforms but the kind where people dried their washing on their balconies, and broken children’s toys slowly turned into bleached fossils on patches of crabgrass-studded dirt that had once been lawns. The sidewalks were empty, of course-it was well after two in the morning-but the litter suggested they were usually full of people with nothing much to do. Our tires crunched through bottle glass as we turned into a downsloping driveway.

  “I’m spending a lot more time than I’d like in underground garages these days,” I said as she nosed the big car down the ramp into a five- or six-story apartment building that, as far as I could see, was indistinguishable from its neighbors along the quiet, dark, depressed-looking street.

  “You won’t be in this one long.” She passed several empty parking spaces and drove right toward the back wall of the garage. As we approached it she reached up and thumbed a device on her sunshade; the entire wall lifted up like a magic trick. We drove through and it slid quietly down behind us again.

  “Whoa.” I was impressed. “How did you find this?”

  “It’s mine. I had it built. And all the contractors are dead.” She gave me a look-I honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “Going to keep your mouth shut about it?”

  “You’re taking me to your place?” I had a moment of what I imagine is teenage excitement-“imagine” because I can’t remember the actual thing and “teenage” because suddenly I felt like I was growing hair all over my body and could no longer create articulate speech. I’m telling you, it may have been pheromones or just Hell’s nastiest magic, but the Countess of Cold Hands could have made an actual stiff stiff. If you know what I mean.

  “Yes, it’s my place, but it’s not the only one I have so don’t think you can sell me out. It’s a very small piece of information. And you’re not the only one who has it.”

  That had several strange resonances, but I didn’t bother to follow up as we got out of the car. “Thanks. You have a way of making a guy feel right at home.” I followed her up a dark, narrow stairway from her hidden parking spot. “Speaking of, are you still pointing that gun at me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  She unlocked the door at the top of the stairs-I couldn’t help noticing the door itself was as heavy as the kind they use in government air raid shelters-then led me into a really surprising place.

  Surprise number one was when she flipped the switch and light bloomed everywhere, a half-rainbow of muted reds, yellows, and sunset oranges. The apartment had no windows at all as far as I could see, as if we were underground, which we weren’t. The other surprise was that, based on how the Countess dressed and talked, I would have expected some kind of serious stark modernism or at least a sort of bohemian informality. Instead, her hideaway looked like some antique version of a sultan’s harem-you could almost imagine it as the setting for some romance novel about a sultan’s seraglio. The walls were covered by streaming gauze, with little lights set in alcoves or hung on the walls glowing through the fabric. A huge bronze mirror stood in a corner, draped with what looked like very expensive versions of Carnival beads, and across from it stood a curtained bed. The filmy red draperies were drawn and several layers deep, so I couldn’t make out what the bed itself looked like, but just being near it carried a strong erotic charge.

  Bad angel, I told myself. Stupid angel. Snares of the enemy, remember?

  I realized I was staring at the bed. Instead of reveling in this demonstration of the effect she had even on a battle-hardened enemy, my hostess seemed irritated and maybe even a bit embarrassed.

  “Nice place,” I said. “Who was your decorator, Cecil B. DeMille?”

  “I happen to like it.” She sounded angry. “If you want a shower the bathroom’s through there.” She pointed at a door half-hidden by more filmy drapery, then settled herself in an overstuffed antique chair in front of an equally old-fashioned writing desk, the picture only spoiled by the open laptop on top of it and the nest of cords snaking out from beneath. “You should be able to find some clothes that will fit you in the closet. Take anything you want.” She turned to her monitor screen as if I had ceased to exist.

  I couldn’t figure out anything about this woman.

  No, I reminded myself. Not a woman. Maybe once upon a time, but not for a while. She’s part of the ruling class of Hell-a demon, sworn to destruction and the perversion of everything good, and if she’s helping you, it’s only because it suits her. Don’t trust a single thing she says or does.

  Still, when I stepped out of the tiled, gloriously hot shower and began rummaging through the carpeted walk-in clo
set, I wasn’t thrilled to find an entire row of hangers full of khakis, expensive bespoke sports coats, slacks, and collarless dress shirts, as well as polo shirts in all the colors of a blooming tropical forest. It made my gut clench, because I’d met someone with just this kind of wealthy-preppie taste recently. A Grand Duke of Hell, to be precise. I checked the monogram on the inside pocket of one of the coats. As I suspected, it was KV-Kenneth Vald.

  I picked out what was least offensive to my eye, black slacks and a white button shirt, and returned to the main room. “Nice closet. Whose clothes?”

  “None of your business, Dollar.”

  “Are you sure about that? Maybe it’s someone I know.”

  “I’m asking the questions, remember. Unless you’d like to leave now, but this isn’t a great area at this time of the night-especially if you’re a wanted man on foot.”

  Stalemate. I fell into a chair not far from her desk and solaced myself by digging my toes into the thick, fleecy rug and thinking how much better this was than crouching in a cold river breathing through a tube that smelled of tonic water. “Okay, Countess, I definitely owe you one. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.” She pinned me with those pale blue eyes. I couldn’t help remembering the ones she’d had the first time I saw her-scarlet as an Amsterdam whore’s window. “Tell me everything that’s happened to you since you’ve been caught up in this.”

  “And if I do, will you answer some questions of mine?”

  “No guarantees, Dollar. Like you said, you owe me.”

  So I told her where I’d been and what I’d done. I might have shaved off an uncomfortable rough edge here or there, and I certainly didn’t go into minute detail about how badly the ghallu had scared me. I also kept a few facts about Heaven and The Compasses secret too-after all, I was just paying back a favor, not selling out my side of the ancient war. I didn’t stop to point out where I was leaving things unsaid because I could tell she knew, and the Countess had the good grace not to task me on any of them until I got to the most recent stuff I’d heard from my friend Fatback.