“That’s all you want? You just want me to find a guy and tell him that?”
“I want you to find someone in Hell, Bobby. It’s not all that easy.”
“But still . . .” I shook my head. Questions were good—questions would keep me alive—but too many questions might lose me this chance. Yes, of course, every bit of self-preservation in me was screaming “trap!” but how could it be? I mean, if the rest of my superiors knew as much about me as Temuel seemed to, I’d already given them enough rope to hang me and the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir, too. No, the Mule claimed he was doing this alone, and so far that was the only explanation that made sense.
“Just tell me how you found out,” I said. “About Hell, I mean.” Then it came to me. “My phone. Clarence said he tapped it or bugged it somehow when he was tailing Sam. The bug is still there.”
Temuel shook his head, but he didn’t outright deny it.
“Tell me you’re the only one in Heaven who knows.”
“I’m the only one, Bobby. For now. But I can’t guarantee you’ll get away with this forever.”
We talked for a while longer, and he gave me the rest of the details—you’ll get them too, but not yet—and then he stood, our little chat beside Rocket Jude apparently at an end. I wasn’t holding the gun anymore as we walked back across the broad square, but I wasn’t feeling much safer than I had on the way over. I was clearly into something big and deep, in way past my ability to survive unaided, and the only person offering me a lifeline was someone who, any time he chose, could have me busted down to Unidentified Angelic Smear, Second Class.
Twilight had turned to near dark. Sidewalks were empty now, but the streets were full of cars, late commuters heading home, everyone else on their way downtown for movies or dinner. A light, misty rain swept through, just enough to prickle my jacket with little droplets and make my face damp.
As we neared the end of Main Street an angular shadow suddenly peeled itself from between a pair of dumpsters and stepped out in front of us. It was dark, no streetlights, but I knew exactly who that wiry, crouching frame belonged to.
“It so slick,” Smyler said. “It so smart. It wait and wait.”
“Shit.” I fumbled my gun out of my pocket. Temuel stared at the scrawny apparition. My boss looked frightened, which was not the thing I wanted to see just then. “Stay there,” I said to the thing with the long blade, trying to make my voice sound firm and worth obeying. “I don’t want to shoot you—I’d rather talk—but I’ll blow you into little pieces if you take even one step.”
“I can’t be here,” Temuel said in a breathless rush. “I can’t risk . . .”
And then he was gone, just gone, as if he hadn’t been standing right beside me. When I turned back a stunned second later, the killer with the underslung jaw and a four-edged knife gripped in its hand was loping toward me, a skinny shadow with the staring, excited eyes of an insane child.
eleven:
true names
THIS TIME I had a gun in my hand. This time I was pushing silver. We obviously weren’t going to get a chance to discuss Smyler’s vendetta or who had put him up to it, so I aimed at his midsection and started pulling the trigger. I put three right through him.
I mean that literally, too: as the gun bucked in my hand, I saw the streetlight at the end of the alley through the big old holes the slugs left, as if the crazy little fucker was made of stars. Then the holes were gone—maybe I just lost the angle—and Smyler suddenly went sideways up the wall, two feet and one hand sticking him there like a fly as he skittered toward me, the long, pointy thing swinging in his free hand, aimed right at my face.
I threw myself down. He just missed me, but his knife tore my collar. Was he trying to kill me or just incapacitate me? And how the hell could three silver slugs zip through him and not even slow him down?
I did my best to turn hitting the ground into rolling myself back upright. It was hard to get a fix on my attacker in the deep shadows of the alley. For a moment I thought he had vanished, then I saw him skittering down the wall toward me like a spider. What the fuck was he? Or rather, what had my enemies turned him into? He was just pissing on gravity like it didn’t matter, like I was fighting a cage match against M.C. Escher.
I wasn’t going to waste any more bullets until I could put one into his head from up close. I still had the cosh in my sleeve, but that hadn’t been a huge amount of use the last time, so I grabbed a lid off a nearby garbage can and turned around just as Smyler bounced up onto the wall once more and then dropped on me. I was able to get the lid up, but Smyler’s bayonet punched through it like a ballpoint through typing paper and the point ended up an inch from my right eye. I twisted hard on the lid, doing my best to yank the hilt of the four-edged knife out of his hand. I didn’t quite manage it, but he had to change his position on top of me to compensate, so I rolled backward and took him with me, holding tight until I heard his head hit the street. I liked that sound. I felt a surge of adrenaline, and for once it didn’t just feel like terror.
If it came to endurance, the rubbery bastard was going to outlast me, so I drove into him as hard as I could, like a lineman on a blocking sled, putting the lid right against him and plowing him back onto the concrete as he started to get up. As soon as I felt hard ground stop us I scrambled on top of him and just began hitting him as hard in the face as I could with the can lid. After smacking him with it at least a dozen times I threw the lid to the side, his blade still stuck in it, then kept on with my fist and a chunk of concrete I’d found. I beat my own knuckles bloody, cracking Smyler’s head against the pavement again and again, so loud that I could hear it echo in the narrow space. He was scratching at me, but not accomplishing much more. I dropped once on his belly with my knee, then got up and began kicking. I could hear sirens—someone had finally called the police.
At a certain point there’s no explaining. I think it was the red mist, like the Vikings used to get. Everything that had happened to me, everything that had seeped in and painfully corroded me, the frustration, the anger, most of all the terror, it all came out. I kicked that horrible little thing until I swear I kicked all its bones to pieces. I kicked his head the same way. I kicked blood into the air. I kicked until the limp thing that had been Smyler just snagged the end of my foot each time like a broken kite. Then I fell back against the alley wall between two garbage cans, gasping and wheezing and trying not to cry. Even after what I’d just done, I felt like the victim of a prison shower rape.
Then the crushed, misshapen head lifted on the broken neck. It contorted, seemed to pull its entire body up toward the disjointed neck, then began to shrug it all back into shape as the bones knitted together and the creature remade itself. It took only seconds to happen, and it shook me so much I could only stare gape-jawed. I couldn’t even guess how much power Eligor must be burning to let Smyler do this. Just to get me? Fucking Bobby Dollar, tiny little thorn in the grand duke’s very vast side? It was like smuggling in a nuclear weapon to bump off a squealer.
His body almost normal already, my enemy stared at me. The blood-soaked hood still framed it, but the face was healed, the dead gray skin gone tight over the mummy bones. Those ugly little bottom teeth jutted—Smyler was smiling.
“Oh, it like this, Bobby Dollar! Said he don’t give up. Yes! More! It want your heart.” And then he pulled his crazy knife out of the garbage can lid and leaped up onto the wall and stuck there like a lizard basking in a Tijuana courtyard.