“What about the bodies you have access to? You Third Way guys?”
“Kephas, whatever he or she might be, only gave me access to a body to help make the whole Magians thing look legitimate.” The Magians were the group of renegade angels, like Sam, who had recruited souls for the Third Way—the neither-Heaven-nor-Hell afterlife. “You wouldn’t do any better trying to waltz into Hell dressed as the Reverend Mubari than wearing your own ugly mug. This is Hell we’re talking about, Bobby, not Disneyland.” He gave me a look that should have sent me home crying. “And even if you find a body to wear, how do you get in? There are lots of gates, but there are even more guards. Bored, mean guards who used to be murdering psychopaths when they were alive, but haven’t even got the threat of Hell hanging over their heads now. Because they’re already there, right? And they’re in charge!”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Don’t rub it in, Sam. I’ll think of something.”
“So many terrible situations have begun with those exact words, B, but I suspect this one will be special even by your famously screwed-up standards.”
Sammy-boy stood up, gave me the number of a safe phone so I could leave him messages without having to hike all the way out to Crackhouse-by-the-Sea, then took his leave. I sat for a while, thinking as I finished my beer.
Helpwise, I had struck out with both Sam and the Sollyhull Sisters, so if I was really going to try to sneak into Hell, I’d have to find another way. I supposed the Broken Boy might have an answer to that, but the problem was that I already needed to ask him a costly question about Smyler, because I was likely to get stabbed in the eye long before Sam’s psychopathic Hell guards would ever get their chance to beat me into jelly, and I couldn’t really afford to pay the Boy to answer two questions.
Either way, though, it was painfully (and expensively) obvious where I was going next.
nine:
ectoplasmic boogaloo
I LIKE TO drive. For one thing, I find it just distracting enough that it leaves my mind free for deep thinking. If you ask me just to sit down and think, all I think about is how I’m tired of sitting down, but behind the wheel of a car I just turn the driving over to the lower functions and let my thoughts loose. Also, with the exception of my bosses trying to get hold of me, or the occasional hellbeast trying to disassemble me, when I’m driving I’m safe from interruptions. I knew my phone wouldn’t ring because I was on suspension, and unless Smyler had got hold of something faster than his old VW van, he wasn’t going to trouble me on the freeway. So I drove north, thinking.
Sam was right, of course: the whole idea of trying to sneak into Hell was so stupid that nobody in his right mind would even bother with it. There was a reason we’d been fighting these guys for a million years or more, and it wasn’t because we didn’t like their national anthem. They wanted to destroy us and did their best to accomplish that every damn day. Breaking into the place—well, that would be like a Jew breaking into Buchenwald. You might accomplish it somehow, but what would you do when you got there?
But my alternatives were few. And even if I didn’t go, I’d still have to find a way to deal with Smyler, which, despite his comparatively small size and up-close choice of weaponry, had already proved pretty damn difficult. I mean, how do you kill someone who’s already died twice?
With cheerful thoughts like these in my head, and the fabulous slide work of Elmore James rasping and clanging from the car’s speakers, I drove north through the no-man’s-land of smaller communities strung along the peninsula between San Judas and San Francisco, until I reached the industrial ruins at the edge of the Bayview district in South SF. I didn’t know exactly where I was going to find the Boy, but I knew he’d be somewhere under concrete in that not very nice part of the world. Bayview was where all the black shipyard workers settled, only to be kept there by economics and prejudice after the dock work dried up. It was a poor community, defined more by what other people thought about it than anything else, a refuge for the old and vulnerable. Which, I suppose, is why the Broken Boy had never left.
I spotted the first piece of telltale graffiti on a concrete stanchion, something that looked like a vertical row of letter “D”s, or an aerial view of a pregnant chorus line:
They weren’t Ds, of course, but Bs. Two of them, for the Broken Boy, which meant I was in the right area. It’s his obscure way of advertising. He doesn’t have many customers, but the ones who need him need him real bad, so he hangs out his shingle. I parked my car, locked it, checked to make sure I’d locked it, then set out on foot to see if I could find a greater concentration of BB-tags.
Eventually, somewhere north of Bayview Park, I spotted three of the tags on the same corner under the freeway. More importantly, an African-American kid of about ten or eleven years old was sitting there on a chunk of concrete and rebar, pitching pennies by himself against a pillar. He watched me from the corner of his eye as I approached, plainly trying to decide what kind of threat I was.
“Hey,” I said when I was about ten feet away. “I’m looking for the Boy.”
The kid gave me a quick you-ain’t-much look, then went back to flicking pennies against the cement. “So?”
“I’ve got five bucks if you can take me to him. I’m an old friend of his.”
“He don’t have no friends that old.” Clink.
“Look, you can go ask first if you want. Tell him it’s Bobby Dollar. He knows me.”
The kid gave me a longer look, then scooped up his pennies and stood, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his hoodie, his shoulders up against the wind. March in San Francisco is kind of like December anywhere else. He just stood there, waiting, until I figured out what was going on. I pulled the five out of my pocket and held it out. When he still didn’t come nearer, I set it down on an old plastic paint bucket, put a rock on it to keep it from blowing away, and stepped back. He took it cautiously, watching me the whole time like a cat accepting food from strangers, then turned and disappeared up an incline beside the freeway, leaving me in the cold shadows. I sat on the bucket to wait, but it must have been a slow day at the Broken Boy’s office because the kid was back in less than ten minutes.
“C’mon,” he said, jerking his head to show me which direction we were going. It was a bit of an obstacle course, uphill through dirt and ancient ice plant spiked with plastic bags and food wrappers, then through a culvert. I had to get down on my knees to get through, and couldn’t help but reflect on what a great target for a mugging I was, but there just wasn’t any other way to see the Broken Boy. It’s not like he has a phone and takes reservations.
I followed the kid through this obstacle course long enough that if I’d been trying to figure out where we were, I probably would have given up. We emerged at last in an even darker, bleaker, and more windswept area beneath another part of the freeway, outside what had once been some kind of maintenance door, its little safety cage still intact, although the light bulb it protected had long since disappeared. It looked rusted shut, but swung open surprisingly easily, revealing a set of steps leading down. The kid produced a flashlight from his hoodie and led me into the depths like a midget Virgil.
The maintenance tunnel was cluttered with old rusted breaker boxes jammed with grubby wires, dumped there when their day had ended. A few more turns and then the kid stepped aside and waved for me to walk past him. As soon as I did, he turned his flashlight off and everything went dark.
“Who goes there?” asked a voice that could not possibly have belonged to anyone past puberty. “Friend or foe?”
“What is this, a road company of Peter Pan? It’s me, Bobby Dollar. Tell the Boy I’m here.”
One by one lights began to flick on, each one a flashlight held by a kid no older than the one who had led me. It really looked like they were on a camping trip, getting ready to tell ghost stories. There was even a campfire, of a sort—a hibachi in the middle of the room, full of hot coals. The little barbecue was mostly covered with an iron lid, only little bits of red light leaking out to splash the grimy cement walls. One of the junior soldiers went and kicked the lid off, and all of a sudden I could see properly. Not that there was much to be seen, just the half-dozen kids and the damp, ugly nexus of concrete tunnels.