If I hadn’t known better, I might have said that what scurried silently back into the darkness behind a dumpster had, just for an instant, looked like a spider as big as a bicycle wheel. But that could have just been my eyes playing tricks on my twitchy, extremely stressed brain.
three:
archangelic aftershave
I COULD SEE the crusty old man all the way across Beeger Square. He had the bench to himself, which wasn’t much of a surprise.
“You’ve got the smell down.” I seated myself, but not too close.
Any doubt I might still have had vanished at his shy smile. “Good? I didn’t overdo it?”
“You sure didn’t underdo it.” I stretched my legs out. One useful thing—nobody was going to sit down here and interrupt us. The aromatic top notes of aftershave-strained-through-a-sock nestled atop a deeper tang of rancid sweat with just a fruity hint of human urine. “I was just in the Compasses. I saw Walter Sanders.”
“Ah,” said Temuel.
“Yeah—‘Ah.’ What happened to him?”
“He’s back to work. Back to normal.”
“Bullshit! That guy’s been cored like an apple, memories lifted right out. And it’s because of me, as we both damn well know. Because he knew something about why this shit is happening to me.” Something about Anaita, I wanted to say, that hellbitch everyone else calls an angel. But Temuel had made it very clear in the past that he didn’t want to talk names. “Last time I saw Walter, he was working on a slave ship in . . . well, let’s just say a very unpleasant place. Did you spring him?”
No eye contact this time as Temuel watched some pigeons fighting over a tortilla chip. “Your information was acted on. Walter . . . Advocate Angel Vatriel . . . was returned to active duty. That’s all I can tell you.”
Which was clearly a big yellow Dead End sign. “Okay, let’s try something else. If it’s not about Walter. then why did you want to talk to me today? Why hand me your little mystery rebus?”
He gave me an irritated look. The cross-hatching of purplish veins on his cheeks and the bridge of his nose were as realistic as his odor. “Because I can’t talk to you in Heaven. And I can’t be seen talking to you anywhere else. But you need to know that things are bad, Bobby. Some important people Upstairs are losing patience with you.”
It was still odd to hear him use my Earth-name, though outside of Heaven he hardly seemed to use anything else, which puzzled me. I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with this “my supervisor, my secret protector” bit either, although without him I’d never have got to Hell and had a chance to rescue Caz. Not his fault that hadn’t worked out, at least as far as I knew, but I still had too many unanswered questions about Temuel for my liking. “What does that mean? How bad?”
“Bad. It wasn’t easy covering for your long absence. And it’s not just the Ephorate asking questions, now it’s other higher-ups, too. You don’t have any idea how hard it is to keep something from Powers and Principalities.”
I was getting tired of being made to feel guilty. “So why do it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s in it for you, Archangel? Why should you lift a finger to help me? Why risk your own soul? Because you like me? That seems strange, because nobody else does.”
“I do like you, Bobby, I suppose.” He gave me a grandfatherly look, or it would have been if the grandfather in question were a piss-soaked degenerate. “But of course that’s not all that’s going on. Of course not. Karael, Terentia, Anaita, they’re all much, much more powerful than I am—and they’re not even part of the High Host, His most important servants. They’re just Third Sphere like the rest of us, watching over Earth. There are powers above the Powers, you know.” He spread his blackened, crack-nailed fingers as if to illustrate the universe as a string game. “My goodness, it goes up and up and up!”
“Yeah, I get it, I don’t want the higher-ups thinking about me so much. So what am I supposed to do about this unwanted attention? Get down on my knees and stay there?”
“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea, at least for the moment.” He was stern again, an Old Testament prophet in a grimy pea coat. “Just try to keep a low profile for a while, will you? Don’t ask for time off. Don’t draw attention. And stop moving around, for goodness’ sake. You’ve had several apartments in the last year, not to mention your tour of various unsavory motels.”
“I could have stayed in better ones if Heaven paid us anything decent to live on.” As you can guess, I wasn’t the biggest team player even before all this nutty Third-Way, angels-and-demons clusterfuck got going. “Look, I know you’re trying to help me. I get that, and I’m grateful. But you know why I had to move all those times, right? You remember the various things that were trying with extreme prejudice to kill my ass?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t matter to Heaven, because it doesn’t happen to the other advocates. It’s you, Bobby. You’re a magnet for trouble, and even the Powers that want . . . even the Powers that don’t have anything against you are beginning to wonder why your name comes up so often.”
“Yeah, I get it—don’t make waves, don’t do anything weird. But it’s the weird that keeps coming after me.”
Disappointment, this time. I was getting the full treatment. “You know there’s more to it than that.”
And he was right. Yes, crazy shit does keep happening to me, but a big part of that is because instead of minding my own business, I go over to crazy shit’s house and say, “Hey, wanna come out and play?”
“But the stakes are too high for me just to quit,” I said. “You know why I went where I went. To that place.” To Hell, I meant. “And why it didn’t work out.”
“Don’t tell me anything.” Temuel lifted his hands as if to cover his ears. He looked like that Munch Scream painting. “Just, please, whatever else you do, stay out of trouble. Stay visible to the folks upstairs. Stay in one place. And do your job, your real job. I’ll help when I can.” And then he abruptly got up and walked away across the square.
You know your life is pretty screwed up when even the winos turn their backs on you.
four:
too hot
I WOKE UP twice in the night, the first time because I thought I heard something tapping at my window. I took a flashlight and my gun, just to be prepared, but found nothing. The second jolt into wakefulness a few hours later was for no reason I could put my finger on. Still, as I lay there listening to the silent darkness, I couldn’t help noticing a very bad smell, as if a large rat had gotten into the apartment heating ducts and died.
Wouldn’t that be just my luck?
I woke for the third time about five minutes before the alarm went off, and lay there thinking about some of the bad decisions I’d made in the last year. Then my phone rang. It was Alice, of course, with her usual impeccable timing. She had work for me, an eighty-eight year old lady who had just died in the Orchard District west of Spanishtown. I had time only to chug a cup of reheated coffee before going out, and my head felt like it was full of wet grit.
It could have been worse, I guess. The job itself wasn’t too bad. Everything about the deceased’s life proved to be ordinary and even praiseworthy, and I saw her soul off to Heaven about eleven o’clock (or at least that’s what it was when I returned to Earth Time).
Since I had nothing I immediately needed to do, I parked at the San Judas Amtrak station—what some old timers in Jude still referred to as “the Depot”—then walked through the Station Arcade, first built at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the railroad station was the heart of the city. I badly needed some stimulants and there’s a coffee place there I like, not because they serve anything other than the high-priced stuff you can get everywhere else these days, but because the manager or somebody likes jazz, and it’s usually playing on the sound system.