“Shut up. You don’t hear me out. I give you ten for it, I promise not to sell it for three months. You pay me back the ten, you can have it. You can’t, I sell it and give you ten more.”
In other words, he was going to loan me the money on the Matador for three months, interest free. Which was a pretty damn decent thing for him to do. I didn’t say that, of course, because it only would have pissed him off. And I haggled too, because if I hadn’t he would have been mortally insulted. Orban wouldn’t front me any more money, but he did up the back end two thousand bucks, which confirmed to me that the Matador must be worth about thirty big ones. He’s not stupid, even when he’s doing somebody a solid. He also threw in a couple of dozen high-velocity silver slugs for my Belgian FN automatic. If I bumped into Smyler again I wanted to be ready.
I immediately gave him back two thousand of the money for an ugly, unarmored banger, an ancient stock Datsun 510 with so much bondo on the fenders it looked like it had mange. (The Super Sport had a brand new L78 under the hood, so it wound up being a little out of my price range.) Still, the old 510s could be zippy little cars, and Orban said the engine was good. I signed the papers, left the office while he opened his safe, then took the rest of my money in cash. Orban didn’t much believe in banks. Eighty benjamins makes too thick a stack to fit in a wallet, not to mention that wallets can be dropped or lifted, so I put the money in my underwear. Yes, I did. Deal with it.
The boxy little car handled surprisingly well. People used to customize the 510s for racing, although nobody’d ever bothered with this one. I stopped to grab some takeout at a burger place in the neighborhood, then I parked the new ride around the corner from my building under a streetlight which had just come on for the evening. I was locking it up when something smashed into me from behind, cracking my head against the doorframe so hard that I saw nothing but flashing sparkles for a few seconds. Then I realized I was lying on my back and something was squatting on my chest.
“Where is feather?” my attacker whispered. “Where? Hided somewhere?” The streetlight was just above us so I couldn’t see the face beneath the shadowing hood, but I could smell its breath, smell the rot. I carefully shifted my weight to get some leverage, but then I felt something press against my lower eyelid, sharp and steady as a doctor’s needle. “It going to find out. Yes, it will.”
six:
broken
I KEPT VERY still. A door opened somewhere nearby, and the thing raised its head. The small movement made the blade glint with reflected streetlight, its point only a thin width of skin from my eye and the brain behind it. The door closed again, and the street was silent. I cursed myself for having parked in a residential neighborhood instead of the busier street in front of my building, but I’d thought I was being careful. How had the little bastard spotted me in an unfamiliar car?
“Feather. Tell it.”
“What feather?”
The tip of the knife, or whatever it was, pushed down until I felt it pierce the first layer of flesh. I sucked in a breath. “It say question. You say answer.”
“I don’t have it with me.” Which was mostly a lie—I wouldn’t leave a crucial object like that sitting around unprotected—but not completely. The feather was in my jacket pocket, as it always was, but since my buddy Sam had used special angelic powers to hide it there, even I couldn’t reach it. See, it wasn’t just in the pocket, it was in a version of the pocket that had existed several weeks earlier. Yeah, it’s weird, but all you need to remember is: Feather in jacket pocket but not within reach by any normal methods. “The feather’s hidden far away,” I told the withered horror-monkey on my chest. “I have to get it.”
Smyler giggled. It was all I could do not to throw up. Knowing something that should have been dead was perched on top of me was one thing; hearing that papery chuckle again was another altogether. God in His Heaven, I’d seen this thing burn!
“Go? You not go. You tell. Then it find.”
It. Smyler called himself “it.”
“Why would I tell you the truth? You’ll just kill me anyway.”
Again the whispery laugh. “Because it see your friends. It see who you like. It very smart.”
I wanted to believe that he meant he would just do plain old physical harm to Monica and Clarence and the rest, as he’d done to Walter Sanders. Then again, Walter still hadn’t come back. This thing on top of me apparently couldn’t be killed—was it possible he also knew how to prevent the rest of us from coming back to life? Not to mention that if he was looking for the feather, he must be working for Eligor, and only the Highest and his closest servants could say what a Duke of Hell might be able to accomplish. I couldn’t take that risk.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell if you promise not to hurt anyone else . . .” And as I said it I lifted my left hand in surrender—or at least I wanted it to look that way, because I had a lead cosh zipped into the other sleeve of my jacket. There was no way I would have time to get it out, but during the instant his hidden eyes turned toward my left hand, I swung my other arm up as hard as I could and clubbed Smyler on the side of the skull with the hidden piece of metal.
I’d hoped to smash his head in, or at least knock him cold, but I wasn’t that lucky. What I did manage was to snap his head sideways and give myself a moment to kick my way free. Then he was back on me, and we were rolling on the ground. The nasty little fucker still had that long blade, which he was doing his best to stick between my ribs. I managed to get my right arm up and took part of the blow on the hidden cosh, but it was a stab, not a slice, so it bounced off the metal and went all the way through the sleeve of my jacket and raked my belly. It burned like someone had tried to tattoo me with a soldering gun; it was all I could do to roll away and dig in my pocket before the thing came after me again. I couldn’t get my gun out in time, so I shot through the pocket, three slugs right into Smyler’s middle as he lunged at me, bang-bang-bang. If I hadn’t been paying more attention to my new ride than my own safety, those slugs would have been silver, but Orban’s new rounds were still sitting in my glove compartment, and I was still pushing plain old copper-jacketed hollow-points. Still, Smyler had a physical body, so I knew they would at least knock him down if not completely eviscerate him.
Guess what? Wrong again. The little bastard almost went to his knees, which at least gave me time to roll clear, but the three rounds I put in him didn’t do much more than make him stagger. I finally got the gun all the way out of my pocket and tried to put one right in the middle of his hood, but it was like trying to throw tennis balls at a startled cat. He zigzagged as I pulled the trigger, and I don’t think I even came close, then he was on me again. I clubbed at him with the gun barrel as that long blade slid past my chest and under my arm, slicing me again, and I realized two things at the same time: The first was that he was only trying to disable me, for now, not kill me—he still wanted to know where the feather was. But if this was Smyler holding back, I was in serious trouble, because he was fast as anything I’d ever faced. My other realization was that the only advantage I had was a little bit of size and the unusual length of his blade, which meant he had to swing his arm way back to be able to drive it home. As the momentum of his next attack brought him toward me, I dodged the thrust, lowered my head so I could smash the top of my skull into his face, then wrapped my arms around him and drove forward.
I didn’t do as well at avoiding the thrust as I’d hoped. His blade went through my coat again and took a big chunk of flesh out of my arm, which hurt even more than you’re thinking it did. I was bleeding badly now from several wounds and was going to be in a world of pain if I survived, but I was running on pure adrenaline and could only hold on and try to carry him down to the hard pavement.