When I did finally sleep I didn’t travel anywhere but deeper into that darkness. I woke with the faint taste of blood in my mouth.
twelve:
an angel in my ear
WHEN I got up it was past noon, and I could hardly believe any of the previous night had happened. I mean, it just seemed too much like a dream—my boss the archangel telling me he was going to help me get into Hell to save my demon girlfriend. But your pal Bobby Dollar never lets facts or good sense stand in the way of a suicidally foolish course of action, so after I’d caffeinated my body to a functional level, I started thinking through the arrangements I’d have to make if I was actually going to do this thing.
I was on indefinite leave from work and didn’t need to let Heaven know where I’d be, so that bit was all right. Besides, I was going to trust Temuel to run that interference for me if necessary, since he knew a lot more about Heaven than I did. I didn’t want the folks at the Compasses asking too many questions, though, so I called both Monica and young Clarence to tell them I was going out of town. I hinted I wanted to get lost for a while, just think things through, and that I’d get in touch when I got back.
While I was on the phone with them I had a look through the latest stuff Fatback had sent me, but it was mostly a rehash of what I already knew, the original murders in the 1970s and then Smyler’s Greatest Hits tour when he came back and we finally (as I’d thought) finished him. There was nothing about him more recent than a year or so old, and the only new information consisted of a few rumors about his first return culled from various spooky internet backwaters. None of it advanced my knowledge one damn bit about why he was now trying to perforate me or why he wouldn’t stay dead.
There wasn’t any need to pack to go to Hell, since I wasn’t going to be able to carry any actual baggage. Only my soul was going, not my Earth body, though I did have to think of something to do with that body while I wasn’t using it. I’d put the first and last down on my current apartment, but the landlord was a nosy older guy, and I could just imagine him letting himself in to “inspect,” finding my apparently lifeless corpse, and then calling the police. Even if I got back before somebody decided to cremate my remains, it was still going to be hard to explain. What I needed to do was stash my body where it would be safe until I could get back into it.
Here my options were limited. It wasn’t that the body itself needed any care. It was one of Heaven’s special production numbers, and would stay alive and motionless and perfectly healthy for as long as I was out of it. Where to leave it, though, was the hard part: I wouldn’t know what was happening to it, and I wouldn’t be able to return to it suddenly even if I did. I needed a protector—a Renfield, if you know what I mean, somebody to protect my physical shell while I wasn’t using it.
At last, and extremely grudgingly, I came up with a name. As with most of the other ideas I’d been having lately, it was so damn awful that I wanted to kick myself all the way around San Judas, but after wrestling with the problem all afternoon it was still the best I could come up with. Which will, unfortunately, give you an idea of the quality of my options.
My candidate picked up the phone and dropped it on the floor twice before he managed to say, “Yo. G-Man here.”
I took a deep breath, still wondering if I should just hang up and leave my body in the middle of the road somewhere—surely it would be safer, because if there was a more annoying, less competent person on the round green Earth than Garcia “G-Man” Windhover, I had yet to meet him. I became acquainted with G-Man while trying to figure out how his girlfriend’s late grandfather had been involved with Sam’s Third Way (although I hadn’t known Sam was part of it at the time). Unfortunately, young Garcia had proved harder to get rid of afterward than a tar baby in a Velcro romper. Believe me, he was literally the last person I wanted to involve, but love and desperation often make for strange bedfellows.
“Hey, G-Man,” I said. “Bobby Dollar here.”
“Bobby! Long time no see, brah! Whassup?” He had fantasies that he was my driver or my operative or something. I’d done my best to convince him otherwise, but it was like talking to a crazy person. What the fuck am I talking about? It was talking to a crazy person. But G-Man had access to an otherwise empty house, so pride (and good sense) would have to be swallowed.
I made an arrangement to drop by Posie’s grandfather’s place that afternoon and ascertained that G-Man would be there and Posie wouldn’t, which was good. She wasn’t any dumber than her boyfriend (I’m not sure that’s scientifically possible) but she wasn’t really a good security risk. I was stuck with G-Man already, since Clarence had dragged him along to the Shootout at Shoreline Park, but there was no reason to add more bodies to this clusterfuck.
I made a few more arrangements, then called Sam on the number he’d given me and left a message, explaining what I was doing. It never hurts to have one competent person know what’s going on, and I was clearly short-handed in the intelligent accomplices department. It wasn’t that I needed Sam to do anything specific, but I was just sunk so deep in lies, complexities, and other people’s agendas that I wanted someone who’d be on my side when it all went tits up, as things usually did. Sam might have lied to me about a bunch of things, but as far as I could tell, he was still my friend.
Next I drove down to the Palo Alto district to Edward Walker’s big old house, where his granddaughter and her idiot boyfriend were currently camped out. G-Man opened the door, dressed like Hip-Hop’s Worst Nightmare. I’ve got nothing against white kids who want to dress like black kids—street culture is like that, especially appealing to haves who want to look like have-nots—but Garcia Windhover had a really striking absence of good taste. He was draped in oversized chains and necklaces like he’d ordered “Rap Star” from a novelty costume catalog. He wore a black San Judas Cougars minor league baseball cap turned sideways (I’m sure he pretended the “C” was for “Crips”) and the waistband of his pants was around his thighs.
I left his fist-bump hanging as I walked into the house. “Is there an upstairs guest room?” I asked him.
“Whoa. You need a secret hideout?”
“Something like that. Is there one here?”
Turned out that G-Man didn’t really know much about the house except for the kitchen, the living room (where the television was) and the downstairs room where he and Posie slept. We finally located an upstairs bedroom that suited my purposes, tricked out for guests but clearly not used in a while. I couldn’t very well tell G-Man that I needed to leave my regular body here while I visited Hell, so I spun him a ridiculous story about how I was going to be testing a top-secret drug, but that I couldn’t do it in the government lab because my employers were afraid there was a spy in the facility. Garcia Windhover flopped back and forth between believing I was a private detective or a government agent, but either way he didn’t seem to think this latest thing was beyond belief, which just goes to show you how scary his ignorance was. I mean, if it was you, wouldn’t you at least want a better reason why somebody was going to hide in your house while deep in an apparent coma? Of course you would. And that’s why you will never be the G-Man.
His only concern seemed to be that his girlfriend might come in and find me there. “I mean, Posie’s cool, man, you know she’s cool, but she’s like a girl, you know? I mean, dangerous shit just freaks her right out. If I wasn’t here, she might, like, call the police or something.”
Which, I had to admit, was a genuine concern. “Don’t worry, G-Man,” I said, soothing him with his self-selected nickname. “I can be under the bed. We’ll just drape a sheet over me to keep off the dust and the spiders, and I’ll be good to go.”