by Tad Williams
It was an odd setup for a college bar, that was clear right away. In some ways The Water Hole looked more like a nightclub, including a scarred dance floor and a small stage at one end of the room, but it was the patrons who really confused me. Usually student joints are low on ambience and even lower on mystery but big on picnic tables and pitchers of cheap beer. The Water Hole had more of the feel of your sleazy lounge rendezvous, the kind of place where businessmen in town for the weekend went looking for drunk and lonely hausfraus. Not that there weren’t any students in the place, but they weren’t acting very student-y, if you know what I mean. Instead of the groups of three or four or more I would have expected, the patrons were mostly huddled in pairs, but plenty of drinkers, both at the bar and in the dark narrow booths, were obviously on their own and drinking pretty seriously as well—the unsocial kind of drinking that I’d done a few times myself and which left no cheerful memories.
To be honest, I couldn’t quite get a handle on anything about the place, and that was beginning to bug me. I contemplated ordering a beer from the sour, tattooed, and shaven-headed bartender, then checking out the exits and the restrooms in a conscientious manner so I’d know the layout when I came back in the evening, but for some reason I didn’t relish the idea of becoming one of those solitary afternoon drinkers, even in the service of proper reconnaissance. Instead I turned around and slipped back out to the parking lot.
I still hadn’t received any work calls, and I didn’t want to have to deal with the questions that seeing Monica would raise, so I decided to avoid The Compasses. I stopped instead at my other place of business, the second-floor office on Arch Street that we local advocates share, a place we use to prop up our real-world identities as insurance adjusters, reporters, or whatever other guises help us to snoop around effectively as we perform our angelic chores. The only person who works there is our secretary, the angelic functionary named Alice. Like me, most of the rest of the advocates look like they’re in their twenties or thirties. I’m not sure how Alice pulled duty that had her looking like she was fifty-five and lived on fast food (unless she really did live on fast food and had done this to herself) but it didn’t seem like she could be very happy about it. And in fact, she never gave any indication that she was happy.
“Hi, Alice,” I said. “Anything happening I should know about?”
She barely looked up from her computer. “Other than you screwing the pooch with that Walker thing?”
“Thanks, nice to see you too. You’re the one who sent me that, right?”
She raised a penciled-on eyebrow. “Do you see anyone else here? Your big stupid buddy was offline, so I gave it to you. Then you messed it up all on your own.”
All of which I already knew. “You’re a treasure, Alice. Sam said he lost connection. Is that usual? Was there anything else strange about the call?”
“It happens occasionally. It’s because of the weather Outside—well, it’s not weather, exactly…” She shook her head, opened a drawer, and took out a bag of M&Ms. She poured herself a generous handful and put the bag away without offering me any. “As far as the call, Mr. Detective Guy Full of Questions,” she said through a clicking mouthful, “it came right down from Central Dispatch, same as usual.”
I left Alice typing and crunching and headed back to my place, planning to settle in with a cup of coffee and the files Fatback had sent me. It was late afternoon, and Stambaugh Street was bustling with people on their way home. Every tenant in my building seemed have entered the lobby at the same time, so I waited for another elevator instead of crushing myself into the first with everyone else.
As I walked down the fourth-floor hallway I noticed something strange—a sour, slightly alarming odor that made my eyes and nostrils itch. Before I figured it out by scent alone I reached my door and saw the source. A handprint roughly the size of a car’s steering wheel had been scorched into the door, the wood blackened and charred and the paint bubbled round it—a handprint distorted by what looked like trailing scars made by long claws. My heart bumped and stuttered in my chest just like a real, terrified living person’s heart, and my skin went icy cold with shock. I darted a look around, but I was alone in the corridor.
The Burning Hand. Somebody had marked my own personal door with the Burning Hand, Hell’s way of letting you know that you were living on borrowed time. I’d been taught that the only people who received this sign of infernal displeasure were poor, doomed fools who’d tried to cheat the Devil himself.
Apparently someone thought yours truly was just that kind of fool.
seven
a lioness comes to drink
THE INSIDE of my apartment was as hot as an oven, sticky-hot, and pretty much a continuation of the obvious message left on the front door. Furniture was upside down, small stuff had been smashed, drawers had been pulled out and dumped, and what few papers and books I had were strewn all across the floor. Even my CDs—no, I haven’t gone all-MP3 yet—had been dragged out, opened, and scattered. I looked down at the faces on the floor, Monk, Buddy Guy, Cannonball Adderley, staring up at me like a frozen crowd scene. What had the visitors been looking for?
And yes, of course it occurred to me that this had to be connected to the current mess of the missing soul and the dead prosecutor, but the fact that somebody was upset enough about it to trash my place and leave a burning symbol of their discontent on my front door didn’t get me any nearer to understanding the why of it. The who wasn’t real clear either, although from the blackened, Kong-size print, those guys with the pitchforks were leading contenders.
One good thing: whoever had been there wasn’t smart enough to find my gun safe, and since I’m not going to explain where it’s hidden, you won’t find it either if you happen by some day. I don’t need a gun in my daily job, and I don’t usually carry, but things had just changed—drastically—so I grabbed my S&W revolver, a couple of speed loaders, and a few extra boxes of hollow points. Then I called Alice over at the office. “Tell headquarters I’m going to move out for a few days,” I said.
“It’s cheaper just to give in and wash the dishes,” she said.
“Ha ha. Somebody tossed my place. Just tell them.”
I heard her making a note, or at least banging on her keyboard. “Where you gonna be, Dollar?”
“I’ll let them know when I’ve decided,” I said.
“They won’t like that.” She almost sounded human. I wondered what her history might have been. “They don’t like to guess. And it doesn’t seem like a good time to make the bosses nervous.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know where I’m going yet.”
“You want me to give you the safe house information? I thought you knew ’em all by heart.”
“Email them. I’ll pick a nice one, get cozy, and think of you.”
I hung up before she told me to get bent or something and ruined the illusion that, just for a minute, she actually cared whether I did or didn’t exist. Alice was right—the Mule and his supervisors were not going to like me moving out without leaving them a forwarding address, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t get in touch with me if they wanted. I wasn’t going to one of their safe houses. Just for the moment I wanted to be the only person who knew where Bobby Dollar might lay his weary head. The Burning Hand thing had shaken me pretty good.
As I sat waiting in The Water Hole I nursed a beer and tried to figure out what had made someone so mad at me personally. It almost had to be about be the Walker thing. Even if the late Grasswax had been venal enough to want to take a shot at the folks who had witnessed his humiliation (as he’d put it) with the Martino case the day before, Sam, and especially young Clarence, would surely have been on his list ahead of me. But if it was the Walker thing, what had I done other than be on the scene when the soul in question failed to show? And what had I done after that except answer official questions from my superiors and Hell’s chancellor, then request some information from Fatback? Had my visit to the pig man triggered som
e kind of information-search alarm? If so, that didn’t narrow things down much because I’d asked him for information about lots of different stuff, including the lovely hellspawn I was hoping to meet here tonight.
Suddenly feeling a touch vulnerable, I slid along the bench until my back and left side were against the corner of the booth. Fatback’s information had sent me here, and here I sat. Did my enemies know that? Had the flaming handprint across my door been meant to convince me not to do exactly what I was doing? I looked around, but though the afternoon’s solitary drinkers and college students had been augmented by what looked like some after-work gatherings and a few solos grabbing a beer at the bar on their way home (most of whom were staring up at the college basketball game on the big screen) I didn’t see anyone who looked out of place or seemed to be clocking me in turn. Still, I loosened my coat a little in case I had to get at my .38 in a hurry. My quarry tonight was a high-ranking minister of Hell itself, and those sort of people were not known for their sweet tempers and reasonable dispositions. Of course, they weren’t known for being particularly afraid of guns, either.
Maybe ten minutes later there was a little stir that I felt more than heard. A very, very large man had just shouldered through the door, followed quickly by another even larger man. My heart sped. I had seen both of them before, although not in these earthly bodies—the Countess’s bodyguards, the things with the gray, nerveless skin that had accompanied her Outside on the day Edward Walker died. Sure enough, after they stood in the doorway looking around for a moment the one in back stepped out. When he returned a couple of seconds later he was following the very creature I had been waiting for—the Countess of Cold Hands herself.
As they escorted her across the room you could tell which patrons had never seen her before by how openly and unself-consciously they stared. I didn’t blame even the most obvious, since her earthly form was almost exactly the same as I had seen before and almost exactly as compelling. She was dressed a bit more discreetly tonight than the fetish schoolgirl look I’d seen before—if you could call red-streaked blonde hair, a bright pink designer sweatsuit, and large, visible diamonds discreet. She could have been the teenage daughter of an extremely wealthy Hollywood producer.
I was relieved to see that her bodyguards were smaller than they had been on the far side of the Zipper, but they were still both considerably larger than me or anyone else in the place. A couple of college dudes who looked like football players eyed them speculatively—not so much “Can we take them?” I suspect, as “Hmmm, wonder what kind of ‘roids they’re taking?”
The Countess walked across the room slowly but completely without self-consciousness, and even the men who weren’t looking at her shivered as she went past and turned to see what had just happened. Remember how I talked about the chesty, small-dog walk? Apparently that was how she moved when she was doing “busy” and “hard at work”; here she moved more languorously and seemed even more dangerous because of it, like a lioness coming down to drink.
Obviously this particular Water Hole drew some pretty big game.
She wound up on the far side of the room from me, in another booth facing perpendicularly to mine. As soon as she slid into her seat everyone sort of lost track of her, the same way folks don’t notice me and the other advocates when we open a midair Zipper—she just fell right off their mental radar. One of the bodyguards crammed himself into the booth next to her as the other one asked her something. She nodded and he headed off toward the bar.
Fortune favors the brave, I told myself and stood up. I think that kind of stuff often enough that I figure when I was alive I must have been an English teacher. Either that or just an annoying dickhead.
The beady little eyes of Bodyguard Number One, who was shaven-headed and had a spiderweb tattooed under one eye, pinned me as soon as I rose, then stayed fixed on me for my lengthy journey across the floor. I say “lengthy” because the entire twenty yards or so I was thinking there was a good chance he might recognize me and just shoot me in the gut or something. Like I’ve said, dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an embodied angel, but it’s certainly high on any list of painful, joyless ways to spend an evening.
Halfway across I realized I still had my beer, which showed how clearly I wasn’t thinking—I was even carrying it in my shooting hand. I’d like to blame that bit of idiocy on the tension of the moment—this kind of confrontation just doesn’t happen very often—but I’m afraid it was probably entirely to do with the fact that the Countess of Cold Hands was so disturbingly gorgeous, a woman for whom you might risk not just your freedom but literally your immortal soul. Yeah. She was that fine.
But not on the inside, stupid, I told myself. Stop thinking with Little Bobby and remember that.
I stopped in front of the table. The bald bodyguard tensed his arm-muscles but didn’t move. He kept his hands out in plain view, so I did the same. One of my hands was holding a beer mug, anyway. You’re right, I really hadn’t thought this through too well.
“Countess,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”
“We’ve met?” The only difference between her Outside and Inside appearance, I could see now, were her eyes. Here in the so-called real world they weren’t bloody red but a pale, icy blue. She smiled, but it was hard, hard, hard. “Remind me.”
“Just the other day. Outside the Walker house.”
“Walker house?” She could make even two such ordinary words sound as if I’d said something crude and suggestive. “I don’t know any such place, and I don’t know you.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “I’m willing to believe you didn’t know me before that, Countess, but I think everybody knows who was there by now. It’s become kind of talked-about in certain circles. My name is Bobby Dollar.”
She stared at me for a long second, chilly as a core sample pulled from the polar ice. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Dollar. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m expecting someone.”
“That’s okay. I’m willing to share,” I said, then a hand gripped my right arm so hard that the heavy mug dropped from my nerveless fingers and fell onto the table, fountaining beer and froth.
“The lady said go,” Number One, the guy with the web tattoo, informed me in a breathy whisper. “Now do it. Or I’ll pull your arm out of—”
I didn’t bother to wait and find out what he was going to pull it out of, or what he was going to do with it afterward. Instead I snatched up the dropped mug with my left hand and brought the heavy glass down as hard as I could on his fingers where they were splayed on the table. He let go of my arm and gave out a short, sharp grunt of pain that I derailed by backhanding him across the face with the mug, hard as I could swing it. As he toppled awkwardly to the floor, gushing blood from his nose, I heard footsteps right behind me. I dropped the mug and spun around; by the time I finished the turn my .38 was in my hand and pointing right at Number Two’s face. He was still fumbling for his own piece. I guess he hadn’t expected so much excitement at The Water Hole tonight. If it had been me running to protect my boss, I would have drawn long before I got so close, but that’s because I’m not that strong compared to some of these bruisers, and I really hate pain.
“Fuck you, tough guy,” said Number Two. He had a military haircut, a huge mustache, and a really deep voice. Other than that, he could have been any death row triple-murderer. “Go ahead, shoot me. She’ll kill you worse than I ever could. Then she’ll take you home and kill you some more.”
“I don’t want to shoot you, sunshine. I don’t even want to damage you badly enough to interrupt your gay porn career.” I turned to the Countess, who was watching with something like amusement despite the blood and beer splashed across the table and threatening to drip onto what was probably five thousand dollars worth of designer workout gear. “Well, Ma’am? Do you and I talk, or are they going to have to move the tables to mop up all the red stuff?”
She gave me a bored look, then leaned over a bit so she could see
the guy on the floor. “Candy?”
Number One looked up. Blood was still bubbling out from underneath his hand, and his eyes were swelling closed. I’d done a pretty good job on his nose. “I can still kill him if you want me to, Countess,” he said, grinning red.
“No, that’s not necessary. Cinnamon, take Candy out to the car and stop the bleeding.”
The guy looking down the barrel of my Smith & Wesson seemed disturbed for the first time. “No way! We’re not leaving you!”
She frowned. “You’re not doing me any good right now anyway. Go on. As you pointed out, I can take care of myself.”
Grumbling like an idling big rig, Cinnamon helped his bloody pal up off the floor. During the initial moments of the fray everyone in the bar had turned to look, but now they were losing interest rapidly, as they always do when us embodied folks make a public fuss. My old mentor Leo used to call this protective effect “the Cloud of Unknowing,” but I don’t know where he got that.
As Cinnamon helped his friend toward the door, leaving a trail of red drips across the concrete tiles, the Countess gave me a look from which all amusement had packed up and moved out. “You’ve got about two minutes, angel, so sit down and start talking. Then either I’ll tear your head off myself because you didn’t impress me, or those two will get nervous enough to call for backup.”
“Yeah. But you never got your drink.”
She looked at me like I must be kidding. “That two minutes was an outside estimate.” She watched me not sitting down, then the smile came back, one of the grudging, I admire your bravery but you’re still going to be dead as vaudeville kind. I get them more often than I’d like. “It’s still sitting on the bar—the one with the celery stick.”