I realized that if I pulled the trigger in my present, rather impaired condition, my aim might not be good enough to get off a fatal shot. It would, however, go BLAM really loud right next to my ear. Then Sam would kick in the door, BANG BANG CRUNCH. Might as well set my own nervous system on fire and try to put it out with a tenderizing mallet. I started to crawl toward the door, got stuck behind the cheap sofa, then finally levered myself onto my feet and staggered to where I could let the noisy, heartless bastard in.
I still had the gun in my hand. Sam looked down, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Happy to see me?”
“Shut up. Never speak again. Come in if you have to.”
“Can’t. I’m waiting for Clarence. He’s parking the car.”
“Clarence?” I groaned and stumbled to the couch. “You brought him here? Et fucking tu, Brute?” Just thinking about the rookie’s cheerful, boyish questions made me want to throw up inside my skull. “Just go away. Both of you.” I closed my eyes and wished I would die faster.
“Not going to happen.” I smelled something and opened them again. Sam was waving some kind of huge venti-trenti-giganti coffee under my nose. “Drink this. You’ve been locked in here for six days, B. It’s bad, I know, but you can’t just give up.”
I laughed, but even I didn’t like the way it sounded. “I can’t? Just watch me, baby, and you’ll get a master class in total surrender.”
Clarence came stomping into the room like a mastodon in steel-toed boots. “Man, it stinks in here!” was the first thing he said.
“Nice to see you too, kid.” I swirled a little of the hot coffee around in my mouth. I knew if I swallowed I was agreeing to live for at least a few more hours, and I wasn’t in any hurry to sign that deal. Still, it tasted good. Well, it tasted hot and it tasted like coffee. Same thing. “Now why don’t you both just fuck on off?”
“Because we’re not going to let you drink yourself to death, Bobby,” Clarence explained.
“Then you’re too late. Because I’m already dead, remember? Now that that’s solved, it really is fucking-off time for both of you. Drop by again soon. Early twenty-second century would be good.”
Sam stood looking around the room. “And this, Clarence my young friend, is a perfect example of the power of self-pity. You can see it, you can hear it in his voice, and the Highest knows, you can smell it.”
“Bite me, Sam. Seriously.”
“Honestly, we know you’re upset. We completely understand.” Clarence came closer, stepping through the empties and the food bags as carefully as a minesweeper. I was terrified that he might sit near me and try to be helpful, but he stopped a few feet away so I didn’t have to shoot him in the foot or anything. “But don’t give up, Bobby. You know what they say—it’s better . . .”
“If any of the next words out of your mouth are ‘loved and lost,’ kid,” I told him, “I will hit you in the face so hard that your eyes and ears and all your other facial features will run around to the back of your head to hide and never come back. Never ever. You’ll spend the rest of your angel life looking like a Mister Potato Head someone dropped from a tall building.”
“See! You’re still funny.”
I closed my eyes again. “I’ve been to Hell already. Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because we want to get you out of here,” said Clarence. “You need to get cleaned up. You need some air.”
“What I really need—well, you’ll know it’s happening about the time you realize that screaming isn’t helping you any.”
Clarence sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sam, can you get through to him?”
Sam laughed. “Shit, he never listens to me. He wouldn’t be in this situation if he did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I was still keeping my eyes closed. I hadn’t entirely given up hope that these people talking so loudly in my apartment were just another nightmare of the kind I’d been having plenty of. “Seriously, you give the worst advice since someone suggested Lincoln take in a play on his night off.”
“That’s an old one, you pathetic lush.” He turned to the kid. “You can tell he’s perking up when he starts thinking he’s amusing again. Don’t tell him the truth or he might panic. Let’s get him into the shower.”
It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d remembered to pay my utilities. There would have been hot water.
We went to Oyster Bill’s, on the waterfront.
I wasn’t really going to be revived that easily, but I’d run out of mixers a couple of days earlier and the combination of straight booze and leftover bits of congealed fast food was killing me. Since I’d been in no condition to find my car, I’d started cutting the vodka with things like maraschino cherry juice. I made White Russians with little tubs of coffee creamer. After all that, I was more than ready to have a few drinks mixed by a professional. (Actually, this is slightly overstating the skills of the bartender at Oyster Bill’s. Both he and the cook are obviously either relatives of Bill’s or his old prison buddies, and both know just enough not to kill any of their customers. But on the plus side, the place also has a jukebox full of agonizingly horrible seventies and eighties pop music.)
Getting clean and leaving the house had definitely been a step forward, but if I was going to live, I’d need to find something worth living for, which meant finding something about myself worth living for. The failure side of the ledger was pretty impressive, and all I could come up with on the other side was Gob. I hadn’t managed anything a real hero should have, like getting the poor kid out of Hell, but I’d at least helped him out of a terrible situation and into a slightly better one, with Riprash. That might count for something. Yeah, Bobby Dollar, demi-mini-quasi-hero.
Every time I tried to think of good things I’d accomplished, the rest of my failures wailed out at me like cartoon ghosts. The latest and biggest failure of all was Caz, of course. Even the idea of her was a scorched, radioactive hole in the middle of my thoughts—I couldn’t ignore it, but I had to stay as far away as possible or I’d go crazy. But not thinking about her was really just another way of thinking about her, and then it all started over again.
Like I said, the failure side of the ledger was pretty impressive, maybe even spectacular. Case in point: I’d gone through everything Hell could throw at me and somehow managed to survive, but I’d lost the one thing I should have held onto at any cost—lost her because I was arrogant and careless, because I trusted my own ability to anticipate Eligor’s tricks. Orpheus went all the way to Hades for his girlfriend, then lost her when he looked at her too soon. I lost my love because I hadn’t looked carefully enough.
“I should have known,” I said for what must have been the three hundredth time since the parking garage. “I should have never left Hell without her. He was setting me up way back in Flesh Horse—showing me a fake Caz and telling me he’d release her. He was already planning it then! He hands the fake over, and he’s not breaking his word. He didn’t even need to, but he had one last chance to torture me, and he took it.”
My stomach felt curdled. I looked down at my Bloody Mary. Now that I was drinking one—well, my second, to be completely honest—I wondered if I really wanted any more alcohol. Oblivion was the only thing that had allowed me to survive the first few days, but even drinking wasn’t helping much anymore. Unless I seriously intended to nosedive into the big black, I had to start thinking about other strategies. Tomorrow. I decided I would definitely start being alive again tomorrow. Or the next day. No, maybe I could do tomorrow.
Trying to care sucked.
“The thing is,” said Clarence, “I still don’t get what was so important about that feather. I mean, even if it was from one of our bosses, why should Eligor care? Is there something he can use it for? And why would he want it so much he’d give up the demon woman? Well, I guess not give her up, but at least pretend he was going to.” He saw my face. “Sorry, Bobby.”