That caught Dean off guard. “Kids?”
“Yeah, a ten-year-old daughter with a smart mouth and an eight-year-old son with a bad attitude.”
“I guess they’re home with their father.”
Jennifer laughed. “Dean, you’re about as subtle as a nuclear explosion, y’know that? Nah, I’m whatcha call your single mom. I got a girlfriend who takes care of ’em at night when I work, and I take care’a her kids during the day when they come home from school until she gets back from work.” She chuckled. “In fact, tomorrow I gotta take Billy to soccer practice.”
Dean raised his glass. “A regular soccer mom.”
“Damn right. Excuse me.” She went off to help another customer. Dean watched her go, surprised at how much more attractive she seemed now than she did a few minutes ago. Which made no sense at all to him, since he hated soccer moms, generally preferred younger women, wasn’t all that big a fan of kids, and despised boy bands with a fervor he usually reserved for creatures of evil.
Of course, none of that changes how hot she looks in that T-shirt.
After taking a long sip of his beer, he heard Manfred say, “Okay pals’n’gals, Scottso’s back.” Turning, Dean saw the band members gathering up their instruments and getting ready to play.
The band started to play the opening to David Essex’s “Rock On.”
As soon as he heard Manfred’s dreadful crooning of “Hey kids, rock and roll” to start the song, Dean drained most of the rest of his beer.
“Hey, it’s Dean, right?”
Whirling around, Dean saw Janine, still wearing her Iona sweatshirt. Only now did Dean notice how tight her hip-hugging jeans were, and how short the sweatshirt was. She had a blue belly-button piercing that actually sparkled in the dim light of the bar.
“Uh, yeah—Janine.”
“You remembered!” She stared past Dean at the stage area and said, just as the drummer went completely off the rails, “God, they’re so good.”
Dean decided there just wasn’t enough beer in the world.
NINE
Shamrock Bar & Grill
Yonkers, New York
Saturday 18 November 2006
Over the course of his life, Sam Winchester had had many occasions to ponder on the exact nature of hell.
Raised more or less Christian—Dad was surprisingly devout, all things considered—Sam believed in God and in most things that your average, white American Christian believed in. He didn’t often make it to church on Sunday—the only times he entered a church these days was as part of an investigation for a hunt—but he prayed every day. And he’d read the Bible, both as a child and again when he was at Stanford, taking a comparative religion class as a theology elective.
But the Bible wasn’t particularly helpful on the subject of what hell was like. In the New Testament there was plenty of stuff about the kingdom of heaven—though, again, specifics were avoided.
Was hell a place? The evidence he had seen indicated that it was, as the demons had to come from somewhere. And, while he’d seen his share of restless spirits who couldn’t move on, they were a tiny fraction of the number of people who actually had died—which meant that most people had moved on, which implied that they went somewhere. Of course, it was possible they just faded into the ether, but he couldn’t believe that. After all, he knew there were Reapers—they’d encountered one in Nebraska, and Dean had met another one when he was in the hospital after the car crash—and their existence led one to believe that they were preparing the dead for something. After all, if people were just going to fade away, why bother having Reapers?
And then there were the demons who’d taunted them. The one on the plane who told him how much Jess was suffering, and the crossroad demon who’d said something similar to Dean about Dad. Now, demons lied, but still and all, there might have been some truth to it. Sam hated the idea that Jess was suffering in some weird nether realm just because she was stupid enough to fall in love with him.
In fact, that was the focus of most of his daily prayers.
Even if he knew there was some place that resembled the hell that folks like Pastor Jim always talked about, he had less evidence of heaven. But Sam had gotten a lot out of that comparative religion class, which he took for the same reason that he took “American Hauntings”—he wanted to see how people in the normal world dealt with the abnormal that had been part and parcel of his life since he was six months old. What particularly intrigued him was the concept of yin and yang from Eastern belief systems. It was impossible to have black without an equal amount of white—and there was a little white in the black and a little black in the white.
He’d heard it best expressed by a folk singer named Arlo Guthrie on an old album belonging to his freshman year roommate: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in. You can’t have one thing without the other thing.” So if there was a hell, and Sam had compelling evidence to indicate that there was, then there just had to be a heaven.
But still, there was always the question of what hell was. Was it the way Milton described it in Paradise Lost, the home of the fallen angels who had warred with God and lost? Was it the fiery pit that so many Calvinists portrayed in their brimstone-laden sermons?
Or was it the old joke about how hell is other people? Jean-Paul Sartre had embodied that in his play Huis Clos, in which hell was three people stuck in a room together.
Right here and now in the Shamrock Bar & Grill in Yonkers late Friday night—or early Saturday morning, however you looked at it—Sam was coming around to Sartre’s way of thinking, that hell was being stuck between Janine Molina and Dean. Janine had apparently called her mother, and after Manfred got on the cell phone and assured said mother that he’d get her home safe, she was given permission to join them for their after-gig drink and smoke. Dean was having trouble reconciling Janine’s looks—which, Sam freely admitted, were incredible—with her love for Scottso’s music, which meant that his usually frisky brother was trying to avoid being caught in her web. So when they came in, Dean had been careful to make sure Sam was between him and Janine.
To add insult to injury, Aldo had sat on the other side of Dean and immediately started in on the Impala: “Where the hell’d you get a ’sixty-eight Impala in such fine shape, Sam?”
“Well, it’s Dean, and it’s a ’sixty-seven.”
“S’what I said. Anyhow, it looks fantastic.”
Grinning, Dean had said, “Rebuilt it myself.”
That started the ball rolling on an in-depth conversation on the subject of motors, transmissions, various and sundry fluids, and other minutiae about cars that Sam had right near the top of his list of Conversations that Bored the Holy Crap Out of Him, just before Dean’s Favorite Music and just after Dean’s Sex Life.
This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that Janine, having been stymied in her attempts to sit next to Dean, instead decided to sit next to him. In the brighter light of the Shamrock, Sam could see that her large eyes were brown, and wouldn’t have been out of place on Bambi. In fact, the name Bambi wouldn’t have been out of place on her. She proceeded to talk to him—about Dean.
“So what’s your brother do for fun?”
Several uncharitable answers flew through Sam’s head.
He likes to flirt with women who look a lot like you and pretend to be something really impressive and sexy so he can get into bed with them.
He and I troll newspapers and the Internet looking for supernatural phenomena so we can hunt them down and destroy them before they hurt people.
He hustles pool and plays poker, which are the two legal ways we make enough money to actually survive, money that mostly goes into crappy hotels, crappy food, Laundromats, and gas for the Impala.
He could have said any of these things. While they probably would have dampened Janine’s ardor, they also would have had the ring of truth by virtue of actually being true.
But Sam was torn. A part of him didn’t want to dampen an ar
dor that was driving his brother crazy, and he was all about driving his brother crazy. But a part of him wanted her to shut up about Dean already.
Finally, he said lamely, “You know, you could just ask him.”
“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt! ’Sides, he’s talkin’ with Aldo about cars. So not my thing. All I know about cars is if you turn the key it starts and you hit the brake it stops.”
“Yeah,” Sam said with a tilt of his head, “that’s pretty much where I am.” He gulped down some more of his beer.
The Shamrock claimed to be an authentic Irish pub, but looking around at the dark furnishings, the scuffed walls, the wobbly chairs, the ragged tables, and the ethnic diversity of the clientele (to wit, not all Irish), it looked pretty much like every other bar he and Dean had been in all across the country. The only thing that made it seem in any way like an Irish pub was that it had Guinness and Killian’s on tap.
He then heard musical words: “I gotta take a dump.” It was Aldo, getting up from his chair after finishing his Coke. For whatever reason, Aldo didn’t drink—and he was the only member of Scottso who wasn’t smoking a cigarette, either. Thinking back, Sam remembered that all the band members had beers with them on stage except for Aldo, who just had ice water. Dean had singled Aldo out as the only competent person in the group, and Sam was wondering if there was a correlation there.
Janine was out of her own chair like a shot and was sitting next to Dean almost instantly. “Hey, Dean,” she said in a dreamy voice.
“Uh, hey, Janine.”
“So, you havin’ fun?”
Dean actually squirmed in his seat. Sam covered his huge grin by sipping more beer. “Uh, yeah, actually, this is a lot—lot of fun. Hey, listen, I was wondering, you know that bartender, Jennifer?”
“Yeah. She’s cool. She used to babysit me, and she still does for my brothers. Why?”
Blowing out a long breath, Dean said, “Uh, nothing, really, I just—”
“So what do you like to do for fun?”
“Fun?”
Sam couldn’t help himself. “Yeah, Dean, ‘fun.’ Three-letter word meaning ‘enjoyment.’”
“Thank you, Ask Jeeves,” Dean muttered. “I, uh—I like listening to music.”
Another eye roll. “Well, duh. I mean, I figured that from you bein’ at the Park in Rear. You know, I got to see Tull at Carnegie Hall last year? They rocked.”
Dean frowned. “They’re still together?”
“Duh. Of course. They tour, like, all the time. And Ian Anderson’s, like, a thousand years old, but he still prances around like—”
Manfred appeared out of nowhere. “Hey, Dean, is my niece buggin’ ya?”
Sam could just see the war on Dean’s face—tell the truth or be polite to the man in whose house he was sleeping?
The latter won out, but Sam could tell it was close to a photo finish. “Nah, she’s cool.”
Janine’s already large doe eyes went as big as saucers, and she clasped her hands between her knees. “Really?”
Okay, Sam thought, this was worth sitting between her and Dean babbling about cars.
He then heard a tinny version of “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers playing next to him. Looking over, he realized it was coming from Janine’s purse, which was still on the chair next to him. “Uh, Janine,” he said, “I think that’s your phone.”
She rolled her eyes again. “Ignore it. It’s probably Mattie.”
“Who’s Mattie?” Dean asked.
Manfred said, “Her ex.”
Letting out a dramatic breath, Janine said, “Who won’t stay ex. I so hate guys who won’t take ‘screw off and die’ for an answer. Hey, you got a cell phone?”
Slowly, Dean said, “Uh, yeah.”
“I’m thinkin’ about gettin’ a new one. Can I see what you got?”
Shrugging, Dean said, “Okay, I guess.” He took it out. It was a pretty standard flip-top model, one that looked like about seventy-five percent of the phones out there. Where Sam had gotten a Treo, preferring to have the most cutting-edge and versatile phone he could, Dean pretty much stuck with the simplest, most common model that required the least thought on his part.
She flipped it open and started pushing buttons.
Dean leaned forward nervously. “Uh, listen—”
“Cool phone.” She closed it and handed it back to him.
“Listen,” Manfred said, “I was thinkin’ we might wanna head back to the ol’ homestead.”
“Good idea.” Dean almost shot to his feet as he pocketed the phone. “Janine, it was great meeting you, really.”
Also getting to her feet, Janine’s face fell into an adorable pout that Sam just knew Dean would have to struggle to resist. “Aw, you’re leaving? C’mon, Freddie, you can stay a little while longer, can’tcha?”
Manfred shook his head. “’Fraid not, kiddo. Gotta hit the hay. Ain’t as young as I used t’be.”
Dean added, “And, uh, we actually have some stuff we gotta do tonight before we hit the hay ourselves.”
“Well, you’ll be back tomorrow night, right?” Janine asked earnestly.
This oughta be good, Sam thought, draining his beer.
“Prob’ly not.”
“I was just kinda hopin’ we could get to know each other,” she said, moving a bit closer to Dean. Then she brightened. “Listen, call me, okay? I put my number in your phone—call me anytime, day or night.”
“No problem,” Dean said.
They all said their good-byes—Robbie, the keyboard player, promised to drop Janine off at home—and then the three of them went out to the municipal lot across the street from the bar. At this time of night the parking was free, but there were parking meters that needed to be filled during the day.
As soon as they got in the car, Dean said, “Just shut up, Sammy.”
“I didn’t say a word, Dean. Though if I did say a word, that word would be, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you fell for the can-I-see-your-cell-phone trick.’”
Dean angrily slammed the key into the ignition and turned it. “That was at least a dozen words.”
“Well, I still can’t believe you fell for it. And what’s the big deal, anyhow? She was into you, man.” He leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head. “She was tuned in to Dean-TV.”
Turning around to back out of the parking space, Dean said, “I will kill you with my hands.”
Lowering his hands, Sam said, “Seriously, Dean, what was the big deal about her? I mean, I’ve seen you hit on girls a lot younger.”
“Yeah, but they all had taste.”
Sam muttered, “That’s arguable.”
Dean pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road right behind Manfred’s four-by-four, and then they followed him onto various back streets that Sam had a hard time keeping track of in the dark until they wound up on 248th and in front of the house. There weren’t any parking spaces to be found, and Manfred just pulled farther into the driveway so the Impala could fit behind it.
Once they were parked, they shrugged out of their coats—yes, it was chilly at two-thirty in the morning in November in the Bronx, but they needed the freedom of movement—and tossed them into the backseat. Dean opened the trunk and pulled out two shotguns, one each for Sam and him. Sam took his and immediately opened it up to make sure both barrels were filled.
Walking down the driveway, Manfred looked at the two weapons with more than a little apprehension. “Uh, fellas?”
“It’s okay,” Sam said quickly. “These have rock-salt rounds.”
“Rock salt? What, you wanna make sure the ghost don’t slip on the ice?”
Sam closed his shotgun with a snap. “Spirits are vulnerable to rock salt. It dissipates them.”
Manfred frowned. “What’s that mean, ‘dissipates’?”
“Means they go away for a while.”
“I don’t want it goin’ away for a while, I want it gone.”
Dean closed the trunk. “Only way to
do that is to find the body the spirit belonged to and salt it and burn it.”
“Again with the salt.” Manfred shook his head. “All right, whatever, man, just get that damn thing outta my house.”
“That’s what we do. We see the ghost tonight, we blast it with the rock salt, we figure out who it is, and we salt and burn the body it belonged to. Nothin’ to it.”
Manfred stared at them a second. “You fellas do this every day?”
“Not every day,” Dean said.
Sam added, “Just most of them.”
They started walking toward the front porch. Sam put a hand on Manfred’s shoulder. “Maybe you better stay out here.”
Manfred hesitated, then said, “Yeah, prob’ly.” He chuckled. “Hell, I ain’t been stayin’ in the house when I see this broad anyhow.”
Leaving Manfred to lean against the Impala, Dean and Sam slowly worked their way toward the front door, shotguns in a low ready position. As soon as they moved, Sam’s body went on autopilot, the drills Dad had worked with them so many times when they were kids coming as easily as breathing. Dean hung back while Sam moved to the porch, Dean keeping an eye on the door while he did so, then moving to the door.
Of course, the front door was locked. They’d been standing next to Manfred when he locked it.
Dean turned to Manfred and mouthed the word Keys!
Manfred frowned, and mouthed the word What?
Sam sighed.
“Keys,” Dean said in an intense whisper.
The lightbulb went off over Manfred’s head. “Oh, right!” He dug into his jeans pocket, pulled out a huge key chain, and tossed it toward the porch.
It landed about a foot in front of the porch, skidding on the concrete path.
Dean let out a breath through his teeth and jumped down off the porch to get the keys. Sam saw that the keys were all labeled: House, Car, Garage, Locker, and so on. Given the various substances Manfred had drunk, ingested, and smoked in his time, labeling the keys made sense.
First, Dean tried one of the ones labeled House, which didn’t fit, but the second one did. It unlocked the bottom lock. The first one he tried got the top lock that was right next to the small stained-glass window.
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