Happy Hour in Hell Page 4

Of course I couldn’t stay that lucky very long. Sweetheart, large, bald, and fabulously angelic, spotted me and rolled over to give me a frighteningly detailed account of all the cheap punks and overdressed poseurs in the club he’d visited the previous night, and to quiz me on my latest trip through the Pearly Gates. And of course, a few minutes later Young Elvis showed up, and I had to tell it all over again, or at least the abbreviated and sanitized version I’d cobbled up for public consumption. Most of the Choir didn’t even know that Sam was gone. The official word was that he was on some kind of administrative leave, and although the rumors had been flying in the Compasses ever since he disappeared, as far as I knew, nobody but Clarence and me knew what had really happened.

  Later in the evening, Monica came in with Teddy Nebraska, an angel I didn’t know too well because he worked the other end of town and tended to hang out there, too. Monica was relatively sober, or at least sober enough to remember that I had been kind of a shit to her lately, so after she got the bare bones of what had gone down with me and the bigwig angels she floated off to find more entertaining company. This was an immense relief, even though it left Teddy Nebraska sitting in my booth making awkward chitchat until he thought of an excuse to follow her, or at least to get out of my morose vicinity.

  Monica Naber and I have history. She’s a wonderful woman (or angel, or angel-woman) but I’ve hardly dared to talk to her since the thing with Caz started, not because it would be cheating on Monica—we’ve always been a lot more casual than that—but because she knows me well, and I’m scared to death she’d sort of metaphorically sniff the scent of another woman on me. Normally that wouldn’t bother me; many of my other relationships have twined in and out of my weird off-and-on thing with Monica. But if anyone in Heaven found out about Caz there would be nothing left of me but a scorched hole in the sidewalk and the whiff of dispersing ozone.

  I decided I’d made a mistake showing up at the Compasses instead of just going to some ordinary bar. My fellow angels wanted to socialize, but what I really wanted to do was sit in stoic, self-pitying silence until I had enough of a buzz on to stagger home. I’d cursed my job for years, being roused at all hours of the day and night and sent skittering across Jude to take up the fight for somebody’s immortal soul, but now I was beginning to realize how much I missed it. Being on administrative leave, or whatever bureaucratic limbo I was inhabiting at the moment, was too much like being a prisoner of my own mind. I needed distractions, but not the other-people’s-problems kind. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really that type of guy. I mean, I care about people, really I do, but to be honest I’d rather not have to hear too much about them.

  I guess you’re beginning to understand why I’ve never been one of Heaven’s model angels.

  I had just paid my tab and was heading for the door when Walter Sanders came in. Walter looked like he’d had a couple of drinks or more himself, which wasn’t all that common. I’d seen him nurse a single beer through a whole evening while others were downing them in wholesale quantities. He’s one of the angels I like, a reserved fellow with a sharp, slightly bittersweet sense of humor. I’d often wondered if he had been English in his pre-angelic life.

  He recognized me and stopped in the doorway, swaying almost imperceptibly. “Bobby. Bobby D, I was hoping to find you here. Want to talk to you. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “To be honest, I think I’ve had enough, Walter. I was just on my way out.”

  “Okay, fine.” He shook his head and smiled crookedly. “I think I’ve probably had enough myself, and I don’t really want to talk in here anyway.” He looked around. “Too many ears. I’ll walk you out to your car. If you don’t mind, we can chat for a few minutes in the parking lot.”

  “I don’t have a car,” I said. “I’m walking.”

  “Then I’ll walk with you, at least for a block or two.” Again the semi-apologetic smile. “The air will do me good.”

  We made our way out, ignoring Jimmy and the other guys up at the bar who were shocked to see anyone leaving before midnight. A few ordinary humans came out of the pizza place next door just as we passed and there was a little jostling, but they moved along to the parking lot and we turned onto Walnut Street, which was quiet and empty except for a homeless guy sitting huddled against the wall halfway down the block, asleep with his black hoodie pulled down over his head like a monk at prayer.

  “So what’s up?” I asked.

  “I’m just—” He stopped, thought about it for a few steps. “Sorry. I’m not even certain it’s anything, and you’ve probably got enough to worry about, but it just seemed really strange . . .” He trailed off again, this time to step over the homeless guy’s skinny legs, which stuck halfway out onto the sidewalk. The guy had bare feet, thin and white, and even though it was spring I didn’t envy him spending a night on the street without shoes.

  I was getting the tiniest bit impatient, wondering if Walter was going to walk all the way home with me before he figured out how to tell me whatever it was he wanted to tell me. “You were saying?”

  “Right.” He laughed a little. “Okay, I suppose it’s best if I just—”

  Perhaps because of drink, perhaps because he’d stepped on something, Walter lost his footing for a moment and bumped into me, just enough to throw us both a little off balance, so that we stumbled toward the street side of the sidewalk. He put his hand up on my shoulder to steady himself, and just as he did so he made a strange sound: tchaaaa, a huff of air like a cat trying to offload a hairball. And then the stumble became a collapse, and he fell heavily against my legs, almost knocking me off the sidewalk. I spun around to keep my balance, and as I did I found myself staring across Walter Sanders’ slumped form at the homeless man, who was standing right behind us, bent in an insectlike crouch with something long, sharp, and gleaming clutched in one hand.

  “It waited and waited,” the hooded figure said in a strange, creaky little voice, and for just a moment I had a glimpse of the face in the depth of his hood. Then a car came around the corner behind me, and its headlights splashed him. He squirmed away from the glare. An instant later he was sprinting away down Marshall Street, his bare feet slapping the pavement like raindrops on a window. I hesitated only a moment, trying to decide whether to chase him, but the guy was very fast, and within a couple of seconds he was around the corner and gone, headed toward Beeger Square. I dropped to my knees to help Walter stand up, but he was limp and didn’t respond when I asked him if he was hurt.

  I rolled him over. His shirt and coat were soaked in blood, purple beneath the streetlights, and it was pooling where he had lain, some of it already running over the curb and into the gutter like spilled paint. His face was white, his lips blue. The people in the car pulled to a stop beside us so I begged them to call 911, then I ran back to the Compasses to get help. By the time I got back to Walter the first SJPD squad car had arrived, and the fire department emergency van showed up only a minute or two later from their new station a few blocks away. It didn’t make any difference, though. My angel co-worker had already stopped breathing, and although the paramedics did what they could to field-dress him and bundle him quickly into their ambulance and head off toward Sequoia Emergency, lights flashing and siren moaning, it wasn’t going to change anything. Walter Sanders, or at least the body he’d been given, was as dead as vaudeville.

  But as I stood there letting the shocked questions of the Compasses’ regulars wash over me, I was hardly even thinking about Walter. I assumed he’d be back, maybe as soon as tomorrow, decanted into new flesh by the boys upstairs and with a story to tell that would fascinate anyone who hadn’t been around tonight. As it happened I was wrong, but I wasn’t to know that for a while.

  No, the reason I was standing there in the whirling red and blue strobes of the cop cars, waiting as witlessly to be questioned as any normal human victim of a normal human tragedy, was because I had recognized the thing that stabbed Walter, recognized the whispery voice and the mome
ntary glimpse of tiny, misshapen teeth. I knew without having seen it what the wound just under Walter Sanders’ ribs was going to look like—a four-pointed star, a puncture made by something more like a bayonet than any normal dagger. But even that wasn’t what was bugging the shit out of me. Not only had I seen that creature before, I had been present when it died. Died the real death, the not-coming-back kind of death that only an immortal fears. And yet it had come back.

  It had come back.

  four

  cloke and knyfe

  “NO OFFENSE, but isn’t it a bit early to be drinking?”

  I would have laughed if I’d been able to. Instead, I took another sip. “It’s a Bloody Mary. There’s tomato juice in it. That makes it breakfast.”

  Clarence looked concerned, which made me want to order a couple more, but to be honest the puddle of red that had collected around the bottom of the glass was making me a little queasy, reminding me unpleasantly of the night before.

  “Interesting place.” Clarence looked around the joint. His eyes stopped on a man hunched over huevos rancheros and a nearly empty beer. The top of the man’s fedora had been cut off, none too neatly. Greasy gray hair stuck up through the hole like an untended garden. “Interesting clientele.”

  “That’s Jupiter,” I said. “He’s solar powered.”

  “What?” Clarence blinked and sneaked another glance. “Solar . . . ?”

  “That’s what he thinks, anyway. He cuts the top off all his hats so the sun can keep him strong.” I shrugged. “He’s harmless.”

  The ambience of Oyster Bill’s was a bit seedy at the best of times, from the drunks on the sidewalk outside to the streaks of seagull shit on the windows, but particularly so in the morning. That’s one reason I don’t like mornings—it’s life without the grace of shadows, that blessed fuzziness that lets us ignore some of the depressing stuff. But I hadn’t slept much, and once the sun snuck through the chink in my curtains and slapped me in the face I was awake for good. At this time of the day Bill’s legitimate breakfast crowd had all moved on, so the only people in there were people like me and Jupiter, just looking to get a little buzzed while we ate. And, Lord, did I need to get a little buzzed.

  “So you said you wanted to talk.”

  I had, and with Sam gone my choices were limited. I could have talked to Monica but, as I’ve said, that’s a little dodgy for me right now. I had settled on Clarence the Rookie Angel because I was thinking of tapping him for a favor, and he had connections in the Hall of Records upstairs. But now that I was sitting there peering over my omelette at his alert, scrubbed face, I wasn’t so sure. Talking to the kid about anything complicated usually felt like trying to discuss hangovers with a Mormon missionary: What you got was a combination of ignorance and disapproval. Plus, though the kid undoubtedly thought he was doing the right thing, I hadn’t forgiven him for working undercover for our bosses to bust my pal Sam. He might have thought he was doing the right thing, and he might be having second thoughts about it now, but I wasn’t certain I was ever going to shed that grudge.

  He tried again. “Is it about Walter Sanders getting stabbed? Wow, that was crazy! Right in front of the Compasses! I heard you were there.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was there.”

  “Scary. But he’ll be okay. They’ll reprocess him, and he’ll be back good as new. You know that as well as anyone, Bobby.”

  Because it had happened to me. And I also knew that reprocessing wasn’t the jaunt in the park he seemed to think it was. “To be honest, Clarence my man, I’m not worrying about Walter. I’m worrying about me.”

  He frowned at the nickname, which he hated. His true name was Haraheliel, and our bosses had given him the Earth name “Harrison Ely,” but Sam had dubbed him Clarence after the movie angel, and now everybody at the Compasses called him that. “I don’t understand. Do you think the mugger meant to get you instead?”

  “Oh, I can practically guarantee it. See, I recognized him.”

  “Somebody with a grudge against you?”

  “Maybe. But that’s not why I think he was after me.” I took another drink but the Bloody Mary tasted metallic now, and I put it down and suppressed a sigh. I was going to have to file a report on it anyway, but I felt a need to share it with someone or something other than the glaring, emotionless light of Heaven. My first choice would have been Sam, but Sam wasn’t available to me anymore—and, man, did I miss him.

  “Okay,” I began, “so this started back in the ’70s—”

  “Hold on.” Clarence gave me that serious junior angel look that always made me want to smack him. “You’ve only been an angel since the ’90s, Bobby. You told me.”

  “Kid, shut up. Shut up and listen.”

  It started back in the 1970s. No, I wasn’t around then, or if I was, I was still alive and I don’t remember. Bodies started turning up in odd places in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that separates San Judas from the Pacific Ocean. Usually dumped beside a highway overpass, all of them stabbed repeatedly by a four-edged blade like a bayonet. After the third turned up with the same M.O., someone noticed that all the dumping locations had graffiti on them, and that the same piece of graffiti was always there: a single word, “SMYLE.” It was a tag even the gang experts down in LA hadn’t seen before, and as a nickname for known criminals it didn’t connect with anything in the records. Some reporter remembered his college lit courses and suggested in a column that it might have something to do with Chaucer’s description of a murderer as “the smyler with the knyfe beneath his cloke.” For a few weeks the press was off to the races with that, but even after the murders were solved nobody ever confirmed it had anything to do with old Geoffrey C.

  Anyway, the killings kept happening, I think there were six altogether, and after a while the police began to put a few things together. The guy had to have a car, and seemed to find his victims at night. All of them were young people from the coastal towns, and the theory was that he was taking them right off the sidewalks, either by offering them rides or simply forcing them into his vehicle.

  Making a long story shorter, the police in Santa Cruz and Monterey and other coast cities began keeping an eye on the local universities and junior colleges, and one night an officer scoped a guy in a battered old VW van acting suspicious, driving back and forth along the road outside Cabrillo College. The driver spooked and ran, the officer called in backup, and it turned into a chase. It didn’t last long—you don’t outrun a police cruiser in a VW—and the van lost it on a turn and crashed into a streetlight. The driver’s side glass was broken and there was no sign of the driver, but the officers smelled gasoline so they approached carefully. Then the van exploded. The huge fireball shook windows for blocks. Burned two of the cops but not critically.

  They found the driver’s body, or at least they were pretty sure it was the driver’s body. It was burned too badly to be certain, and they couldn’t get an ID from the dental records, but all the officers on scene swore nobody got out of the van. They also found a weapon in the wreckage, twisted and melted by the heat but pretty obviously the blade that had killed those half-dozen victims; a nasty, handmade thing about eighteen inches long, capable of making a wound that wouldn’t close up. In other words, he liked to see people bleed. They found a few things in the ashes that suggested the killer had been living in the van. Apparently he had also been carrying several cans of gasoline in the back and decided to go out that way instead of being taken to jail.

  The murders stopped after that. End of story, right?

  Twenty-two years later, they started again, here in San Judas. Same M.O., except the guy was burning his victims’ bodies this time, but one of the bodies was discovered by a passing motorist who had a fire extinguisher, and when they got the remains to the medical examiner there it was, that four-sided wound. And of course the tags were showing up again too, a little smaller this time and in odd places, hard to see, but the word “SMYLE” was spray-painted somewhere near each body. By
the time the fourth victim was found out by the Salt Piers, the police had decided it must be a copycat. The length of time, and the fact that they were so certain the body in the van had been the murderer’s, didn’t really admit any other possibility.

  But they were wrong. It was the same guy. They were right about one thing, though. He was definitely dead.

  This was when I was in Counterstrike, the paramilitary unit where I first trained, and word came down to us that our superiors suspected the hairy hand of Hell. If “Smyler” had come back from the dead, then there was only one explanation, and it had horns and carried a pitchfork. That seemed pretty weird from our end, because the murderer’s M.O. was exactly the same as before, students and other young people. See, normally, if the Opposition have an asset like that they put him or her to work doing something more useful than just random killing. Leo, my old top-kicker, said they might be using Smyler to shake people up, improve the climate for Hell’s other operations, if you get what I’m saying. Like they taught us in Angel Training, the Opposition thrives in chaos, and it was pretty clear that chaos was what this guy was causing. The newspapers persuaded someone on the force to talk about the “SMYLE” tags and soon it was “Graffiti Murderer Returns!” and “Ghost or Copycat?” and all that bullshit. For months it was like Son of Sam had come to Jude. A couple of cruising dumbasses got shot at by scared college girls carrying their daddies’ guns, and half the waterfront tourist business dried up.

  I won’t bore you with all the details of how we tracked the guy down. Counterstrike Unit Lyrae, also known as the Harps, have methods the cops don’t even dream of, and that was necessary, because Smyler was no longer a living man. Not that finding him was easy, even for us. Whatever made him into a psychopathic murderer had been refined and polished by Hell, and San Judas was a fuck of a lot bigger and easier to hide in than the little Pacific Coast towns he’d been haunting in the ’70s. He actually killed another one after we started looking for him, a paperboy out on his morning rounds, and that burned all of us in the Harps like fire. Also, he was beginning to spread his net wider now, and the papers picked up on it. It was like the whole city was going mental. We had to deal with him quickly. We got a lucky break, a tip from an informant that put us right on his tail.