I was getting the tiniest bit impatient, wondering if Walter was going to walk all the way home with me before he figured out how to tell me whatever it was he wanted to tell me. “You were saying?”
“Right.” He laughed a little. “Okay, I suppose it’s best if I just—”
Perhaps because of drink, perhaps because he’d stepped on something, Walter lost his footing for a moment and bumped into me, just enough to throw us both a little off balance, so that we stumbled toward the street side of the sidewalk. He put his hand up on my shoulder to steady himself, and just as he did so he made a strange sound: tchaaaa, a huff of air like a cat trying to offload a hairball. And then the stumble became a collapse, and he fell heavily against my legs, almost knocking me off the sidewalk. I spun around to keep my balance, and as I did I found myself staring across Walter Sanders’ slumped form at the homeless man, who was standing right behind us, bent in an insectlike crouch with something long, sharp, and gleaming clutched in one hand.
“It waited and waited,” the hooded figure said in a strange, creaky little voice, and for just a moment I had a glimpse of the face in the depth of his hood. Then a car came around the corner behind me, and its headlights splashed him. He squirmed away from the glare. An instant later he was sprinting away down Marshall Street, his bare feet slapping the pavement like raindrops on a window. I hesitated only a moment, trying to decide whether to chase him, but the guy was very fast, and within a couple of seconds he was around the corner and gone, headed toward Beeger Square. I dropped to my knees to help Walter stand up, but he was limp and didn’t respond when I asked him if he was hurt.
I rolled him over. His shirt and coat were soaked in blood, purple beneath the streetlights, and it was pooling where he had lain, some of it already running over the curb and into the gutter like spilled paint. His face was white, his lips blue. The people in the car pulled to a stop beside us so I begged them to call 911, then I ran back to the Compasses to get help. By the time I got back to Walter the first SJPD squad car had arrived, and the fire department emergency van showed up only a minute or two later from their new station a few blocks away. It didn’t make any difference, though. My angel co-worker had already stopped breathing, and although the paramedics did what they could to field-dress him and bundle him quickly into their ambulance and head off toward Sequoia Emergency, lights flashing and siren moaning, it wasn’t going to change anything. Walter Sanders, or at least the body he’d been given, was as dead as vaudeville.
But as I stood there letting the shocked questions of the Compasses’ regulars wash over me, I was hardly even thinking about Walter. I assumed he’d be back, maybe as soon as tomorrow, decanted into new flesh by the boys upstairs and with a story to tell that would fascinate anyone who hadn’t been around tonight. As it happened I was wrong, but I wasn’t to know that for a while.
No, the reason I was standing there in the whirling red and blue strobes of the cop cars, waiting as witlessly to be questioned as any normal human victim of a normal human tragedy, was because I had recognized the thing that stabbed Walter, recognized the whispery voice and the momentary glimpse of tiny, misshapen teeth. I knew without having seen it what the wound just under Walter Sanders’ ribs was going to look like—a four-pointed star, a puncture made by something more like a bayonet than any normal dagger. But even that wasn’t what was bugging the shit out of me. Not only had I seen that creature before, I had been present when it died. Died the real death, the not-coming-back kind of death that only an immortal fears. And yet it had come back.
It had come back.
four:
cloke and knyfe
“NO OFFENSE, but isn’t it a bit early to be drinking?”
I would have laughed if I’d been able to. Instead, I took another sip. “It’s a Bloody Mary. There’s tomato juice in it. That makes it breakfast.”
Clarence looked concerned, which made me want to order a couple more, but to be honest the puddle of red that had collected around the bottom of the glass was making me a little queasy, reminding me unpleasantly of the night before.
“Interesting place.” Clarence looked around the joint. His eyes stopped on a man hunched over huevos rancheros and a nearly empty beer. The top of the man’s fedora had been cut off, none too neatly. Greasy gray hair stuck up through the hole like an untended garden. “Interesting clientele.”
“That’s Jupiter,” I said. “He’s solar powered.”
“What?” Clarence blinked and sneaked another glance. “Solar . . . ?”
“That’s what he thinks, anyway. He cuts the top off all his hats so the sun can keep him strong.” I shrugged. “He’s harmless.”
The ambience of Oyster Bill’s was a bit seedy at the best of times, from the drunks on the sidewalk outside to the streaks of seagull shit on the windows, but particularly so in the morning. That’s one reason I don’t like mornings—it’s life without the grace of shadows, that blessed fuzziness that lets us ignore some of the depressing stuff. But I hadn’t slept much, and once the sun snuck through the chink in my curtains and slapped me in the face I was awake for good. At this time of the day Bill’s legitimate breakfast crowd had all moved on, so the only people in there were people like me and Jupiter, just looking to get a little buzzed while we ate. And, Lord, did I need to get a little buzzed.
“So you said you wanted to talk.”
I had, and with Sam gone my choices were limited. I could have talked to Monica but, as I’ve said, that’s a little dodgy for me right now. I had settled on Clarence the Rookie Angel because I was thinking of tapping him for a favor, and he had connections in the Hall of Records upstairs. But now that I was sitting there peering over my omelette at his alert, scrubbed face, I wasn’t so sure. Talking to the kid about anything complicated usually felt like trying to discuss hangovers with a Mormon missionary: What you got was a combination of ignorance and disapproval. Plus, though the kid undoubtedly thought he was doing the right thing, I hadn’t forgiven him for working undercover for our bosses to bust my pal Sam. He might have thought he was doing the right thing, and he might be having second thoughts about it now, but I wasn’t certain I was ever going to shed that grudge.
He tried again. “Is it about Walter Sanders getting stabbed? Wow, that was crazy! Right in front of the Compasses! I heard you were there.”
“Oh, yeah. I was there.”
“Scary. But he’ll be okay. They’ll reprocess him, and he’ll be back good as new. You know that as well as anyone, Bobby.”
Because it had happened to me. And I also knew that reprocessing wasn’t the jaunt in the park he seemed to think it was. “To be honest, Clarence my man, I’m not worrying about Walter. I’m worrying about me.”
He frowned at the nickname, which he hated. His true name was Haraheliel, and our bosses had given him the Earth name “Harrison Ely,” but Sam had dubbed him Clarence after the movie angel, and now everybody at the Compasses called him that. “I don’t understand. Do you think the mugger meant to get you instead?”
“Oh, I can practically guarantee it. See, I recognized him.”
“Somebody with a grudge against you?”
“Maybe. But that’s not why I think he was after me.” I took another drink but the Bloody Mary tasted metallic now, and I put it down and suppressed a sigh. I was going to have to file a report on it anyway, but I felt a need to share it with someone or something other than the glaring, emotionless light of Heaven. My first choice would have been Sam, but Sam wasn’t available to me anymore—and, man, did I miss him.
“Okay,” I began, “so this started back in the ’70s—”
“Hold on.” Clarence gave me that serious junior angel look that always made me want to smack him. “You’ve only been an angel since the ’90s, Bobby. You told me.”