The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar Read online

  DAW Books Presents

  The Finest in Imaginative Fiction by

  TAD WILLIAMS

  BOBBY DOLLAR

  THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN

  HAPPY HOUR IN HELL*

  SLEEPING LATE ON JUDGEMENT DAY*

  SHADOWMARCH

  SHADOWMARCH

  SHADOWPLAY

  SHADOWRISE

  SHADOWHEART

  TAILCHASER’S SONG

  THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS

  MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN

  THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

  STONE OF FAREWELL

  TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER

  OTHERLAND

  CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW

  RIVER OF BLUE FIRE

  MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS

  SEA OF SILVER LIGHT

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  THE

  DIRTY STREETS

  OF

  HEAVEN

  A Bobby Dollar Novel

  TAD WILLIAMS

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

  SHEILA E. GILBERT

  PUBLISHERS

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Tad Williams.

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59757-6

  Jacket art by Kamil Vojnar.

  Jacket design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1599.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First printing, September 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  This book is dedicated to my dear friend David Charles Michael Pierce.

  Dave loved stuff like this and I think he would have liked this book, too. I hope someday we’ll see each other again, and he can let me know what I got right and what I got wrong.

  Thanks for being my buddy, Dave. I miss you. We all miss you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As usual, there are far too many people whose work contributed to the writing of this book than I can ever properly thank, but these are at the top of the list:

  Much gratitude to my magical wife, Deborah Beale, and my first choice for backup in a firefight, my dangerous pal Josh Stallings, for reading the rough manuscript and offering sensible advice.

  Huge thanks as always to our assistant Dena Chavez and her husband Scott Chavez, who helped hold reality together for us during a crazy year while I wrote it. Couldn’t have done it without you guys.

  My agent, Matt Bialer, was and always is a huge source of calm in a world of stress and strange contractual language. Bless you, Matt.

  Lisa Tveit makes sense of my online life, including our website at tadwilliams.com, and I can’t thank her enough for that.

  And of course my publishers, all of them, but especially the good people at DAW Books and my editors Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, who keep reminding me that books should make sense.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Inhuman Resources

  One: An Old Testament Cinch

  Two: My Lucky Week

  Three: Different Than Sunday School

  Four: The Bloody Net

  Five: Pig Man

  Six: Waking up in Trouble

  Seven: A Lioness Comes to Drink

  Eight: Posie and G-Man

  Nine: A Hot Shadow

  Ten: That Frightened

  Eleven: Foxy Foxy

  Twelve: Black Windows

  Thirteen: Leviathan on a Hook

  Fourteen: Friends in Low Places

  Fifteen: Dead Yampy

  Sixteen: Brady Doesn’t Believe

  Seventeen: Economical with the Truth

  Eighteen: Poison Darts and Fiji Mermaids

  Nineteen: One Night Only

  Twenty: Wards and Wheels

  Twenty-One: Knife Fight in a Harem

  Twenty-Two: Cold Hands

  Twenty-Three: Assorted Blasphemies

  Twenty-Four: Slumber Party

  Twenty-Five: Misremembered

  Twenty-Six: The Pride that Goeth

  Twenty-Seven: The Atheist’s Bible

  Twenty-Eight: Going to Mecca

  Twenty-Nine: Sand Point

  Thirty: Sat on a Panda

  Thirty-One: Something to My Advantage

  Thirty-Two: Saddest Sound I Ever Heard

  Thirty-Three: The Odor of Violent Subtext

  Thirty-Four: Breathing Together

  Thirty-Five: Boom Boom

  Thirty-Six: Departed this Earth

  Thirty-Seven: Faith

  Thirty-Eight: The Third Way

  Thirty-Nine: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

  prologue

  inhuman resources

  I WAS JUST stepping out of the elevator on the 43rd floor of the Five Page Mill building when the alarms began going off—those nightmarish, clear-the-building kind like the screams of tortured robots—and I realized I’d pretty well lost any chance at the subtle approach.

  Did I mention that when I’m under stress I tend to revert to old habits? And being chased by monsters (as well as being made the fall guy for the biggest fuck-up between Heaven and Hell in the last few thousand years) will produce some stress. So that was me right then—jumpy and in need of answers. And when I’m feeling that way I tend to push on things until something happens.

  I didn’t calm down any when a husky security guard lurched out of the stairwell a few yards away, eyes adrenaline-wide, shoving his service pistol in my face. He shouted, “Get on the floor!” but instead of keeping the gun trained on me he started waving it to show me where to go, and I knew that I had him.

  “Hold on, don’t…don’t you want to see my employee badge or something?” I was doing my best to sound like a confused and innocent corporate drone. “P-p-please don’t shoot me!”

  “I want you down on the floor! There!” Again he jabbed the gun toward the discreetly expensive carpeting. The alarms were making it hard to hear so I went with that, screwing up my face in fear and confusion.

  “What? I didn’t understand you! Don’t shoot…!”

  “God damn it, get down!” He grabbed my arm with his free hand. I leaned away to get him off balance, then yanked his wrist so that he staggered toward me, waving his gun hand in a desperate attempt to keep his balance. It didn’t matter much because I hit him square in the face with my forearm, jolting his head back and dropping him like a sack of laundry. Broke his nose, too, I’m pretty sure.

  I didn’t know whether Vald’s security guards were normal people on a normal payroll or soldiers of the Opposition, and I didn’t have time to search this guy for extra nipples or whatever. (To be honest, except for a few retro covens, extra nipples have pretty much fallen out of fashion as a sign of allegiance to Hell.) So I left him alive but unconscious on the floor and tossed his gun and walkie-talkie into a trash bin in case he woke up sooner than I expected.

  Everything had gone ass-up now and I knew I would be better off just leaving before anyone got killed, but I do have that problem I mentioned—when I get agit
ated I just kind of put my head down and keep shoving. Like a rhino with an itch, as my old boss delicately put it. Anyway, I decided I might as well see where this whole thing was going to lead.

  I knew I had about seven or eight minutes maximum before the building was completely overrun by people with guns who would be happy to use them on me, so I hurried up the stairs to the 44th floor where I paused for a second or two to admire the view of Stanford University’s creepy Gothic towers through the picture window at the end of the hall. The master office suite clearly took up the entire floor, so I walked through the only door and found myself standing in front of the calmest woman I have ever pointed a gun at. She was good-looking, too—slender, with Eurasian features, short, dark hair, and extremely cold eyes. I was pretty certain she’d already pushed the silent alarm.

  “Who are you?” she asked in the tone of a bored DMV clerk. She didn’t even look down at the barrel of the .38, although it was only inches from her nose. “And what do you want?”

  “I’m here to see your boss,” I explained. “Shall I just go in?”

  To her credit she didn’t bother to argue with me or even threaten me, just came over the desk hissing and clawing like a methedrined ocelot, doing her best to tear off my face with her long Big Apple Red fingernails. Within a few seconds of rolling around on the carpet with her I had determined that she was just as strong as I was, quite possibly a better fighter than I was, and—at least based on the weird things her eyes were doing as we rolled around on the floor and I struggled to keep her teeth away from my neck—almost certainly not a human being. I mean, the bitch was scary.

  Demons don’t like silver. It’s one of the few old standbys that work, at least a bit. (Holy water, for instance, is about as much use against Hell’s servants as Diet Pepsi.) Silver doesn’t always kill them, but it almost always hurts them. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another that week I didn’t have any silver bullets on me, so when I got my hand free for a moment, I just shoved the gun against her face and fired three of the ordinary kind. I had my silencer on so the .38 didn’t make too much noise, but she sure as hell did. She reeled back, screeching like a power drill and clawing at the remains of her features like someone trying to get soapy water out of their eyes, then came after me again. Any normal demon in a real-world body would have gone down just from being shot in the face, but she was one of those stubbornly murderous ones—even if you cut off her arms and legs she’d be crawling across the floor like a snake, snapping at your ankles with her teeth.

  I hate the stubborn ones.

  As soon as she had rubbed the blood out of her remaining eye she leaped forward and did her best to wrap her arms around me, dragging me back down to the floor. I didn’t want to use my last couple of bullets, so I did my best to beat her unconscious with the butt of my Smith & Wesson, but all I managed to do was push her jaw unnaturally far to the side of her face, which made her look like an extremely disturbing Popeye cosplay girl but didn’t slow her down at all. She was on top of me again, slapping and slashing with her nails at my eyes so that all I could do was cover up. Meanwhile she was also doing her best to drive her knee up through my groin and into my chest, introducing my balls to my heart, a meeting that should never take place. This gal was serious bad news and any moment now the guards were going to come busting in and it would be all over for your new friend, Bobby Dollar.

  It wasn’t the first time I ever found myself with a howling, angry she-creature on top of me—and God knows it probably wasn’t going to be the last, either—but as the crooked, fanged mouth of Kenneth Vald’s secretary snapped at my face, showering me with bloody froth, I couldn’t help reflecting on how I had yet again wound up in such an extremely unpleasant situation.

  And as usual, it had been my own stupid fault.

  one

  an old testament cinch

  LET ME go back to the beginning. It’ll make more sense then. Not a lot of sense, but more than it probably does right now.

  Pretty much everybody was already in the bar the night it all started—Monica Naber, big old Sweetheart, Young Elvis, and all the rest of the Whole Sick Choir. Oh, except that because of recent changes in the local ordinances Kool Filter was stuck downstairs, smoking out on the sidewalk. Yes, some of us angels smoke. (I used to do it, but I don’t anymore.) Our bodies are loaners, after all, and it’s not like we’re too worried about dying. Anyway, it was a pretty normal late February night in The Compasses until my friend Sam came in towing an overcoat full of new meat.

  “Fuck the poor and all their excuses,” he shouted to the room. “Somebody get me a drink!” He dragged over this young guy I’ve never seen before and shoved him into a chair beside me. “Here’s someone you need to know, kid,” he said. “Meet Bobby Dollar, king of the assholes.” Sam dropped into a seat on the other side of him. The youngster was trapped, but he wasn’t panicking yet. He grinned at me like he was glad to see me—big, stupid, slightly sickly grin. The rest of him was thin, white, and kind of bookish, with a haircut that on anyone but an angel would have screamed, “Mom did this!” A beginner with lots of theories, I guessed, but if he was hanging out with my pal Sam he’d be getting some rude lessons in Practical Theology.

  “Who’s your little chum, Sammy?” I knew the kid was one of us—we can recognize each other—but he sure looked uncomfortable wearing a body. “Amateur or visiting pro?”

  Junior immediately put on what I think of as the Intelligent Dog look: I don’t know what you’re saying, but I’m sure as hell trying to seem like I do. It didn’t impress me a whole lot more than his nervous smile.

  “Go ahead, guess.” Sam craned around. “Hey, Slowpoke Rodriguez,” he yelled at Chico the bartender, “how come you’ll gobble my knob for free, but you won’t pour me a drink for money?”

  “Shut up, Riley, you’re boring me,” Chico said, but he dropped his bar rag and turned to the glasses cabinet.

  “Sammy boy, you’re even more charming than usual,” I observed. “So who’s this? I’m guessing trainee.”

  “Of course he fuckin’ is, B. Can’t you just smell the House on him?” That’s how Sam talks about what most people refer to as “Heaven”—“up at the House.” As in, the rest of us work on the Plantation.

  “Really?” Monica Naber stood up in the next booth so gracefully you probably wouldn’t guess she’d been drinking tequila slams since sundown. “Did you hear that, folks? We’ve got a rookie!”

  “Oh, yeah!” That from Young Elvis. He’d been the designated New Guy for two years now and he was obviously thrilled. “Kick his newbie ass!”

  “Shut your talk-hole,” said Walter Sanders without looking up from his glass. “Just because you were a stupid rookie doesn’t mean they all are.”

  Sam’s new kid squirmed in the chair beside me. “I’m not really a total rookie….”

  “Yeah?” Sanders looked up this time. He’s kind of an intense guy, and he stared at the kid like he was going to dissect him. “Where did you guardian? How long?”

  “Guardian? But…I didn’t…” The kid blinked. “I was in the Records Halls…”

  “Records?” Sanders scowled like he’d drunk curdled milk. “You were a file clerk? And now you’re an advocate? Congratulations—that’s quite a jump.”

  Right on cue, Chico banged the register closed—it went “ting!” “Look, Daddy,” said Sam in a squeaky little child voice. “Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”

  “Don’t be mean,” Monica Naber said. “It’s not the kid’s fault.”

  Junior looked grateful for her support, but there were things he didn’t know. With Monica, you live by her logic but you die by her logic, too. Women, even female angels, can be colder than men in some really scary ways.

  The uproar died away after a bit and most of the drinkers went back to their private conversations or solitary musings. Sam went off to pick up his drink order. I looked at the new kid, who was no longer grinning like everything
was great. “So how did you wind up here?” I asked. “Who pulled strings for you?”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “Look, you know what we do, right?”

  “Advocates? Sure.” He nodded vigorously. “I’m really looking forward to—”

  “Shut up and try to follow me. How did you get jumped into a position that takes most of us years to get into?”

  Headlights, comma, deer in. “I…I don’t know. They just told me…”

  “Uh huh. So who’s watching out for your career? Somebody must be. Think hard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Sam returned with his drinks, a shot glass full of bitters liberally dosed with Tabasco and a root beer to chase it with. Sam’s been sober for a few years now. Doesn’t keep him out of The Compasses. “Is he cryin’ yet, B?”

  “No, but I’m working on it. How did you pick up this wet sock, Sammy?”

  “I was just up at the House. They dropped him on me.” His pocket started to buzz. “Shit. A client already?” He scowled at his phone, then downed the bitters and sucked in air like someone had poured kerosene on his crotch. “Want to tag along?” he asked me. “A favor to me. You can explain things to little Clarence the Trainee Angel here.”

  “Clarence?” I drew back. “He’s not really called that, is he?”