forty-four:
body in the trunk
SOMETHING FINALLY pulled the blanket of darkness off me, but I couldn’t find the buttons and switches yet to make my muscles work correctly, so I lay there for a little while trying to figure out where I was.
I had left my body hale and well under a sheet in the late Edward Lynes Walker’s house, so that was where I should be, but Eligor had told me his people had searched the place without finding it. That could mean anything, not much of it good. I had to be patient, though; this long out of my earthly shell made reintegrating a bit like one of those weird dreams you get when you think you’re awake but you aren’t, or at least not entirely. You hear noises and sometimes even voices from the real world, but you just don’t care.
Not that I heard voices, because I didn’t. I could feel my body, though, or at least some body: I had the cramped, prickling muscles to prove it, and I seemed to be wrapped in the appropriate sheet I’d left my body in. I decided to hope for the best. I was going to give myself another minute or two to reintegrate properly, then get out from under the bed in the upstairs guest room at the late Edward Walker’s house and take a shower for about nine hours straight. If I was extremely lucky, Walker’s granddaughter Posie and her boyfriend Garcia would be out somewhere, and I’d have the place to myself for a while, but that wasn’t crucial. What I really wanted to do after my shower was go somewhere that had good food and alcoholic beverages and consume lots of both, then go home and do some actual sleeping—not that a few drinks and a nap was going to make me forget what I’d just been through. I also needed to check in with Heaven as soon as possible. Since I still had an earthly body to come home to, I assumed I hadn’t been cast into the outer darkness quite yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to check. At the very least, I’d probably missed a shit-ton of messages.
And, of course, I’d have to debrief with Temuel, but I didn’t want to think about that yet. I’ll be honest—the thought scared me. Yes, he’d done a lot for me, but I didn’t know where he stood with Anaita, and nobody—not even Bobby Dollar, everybody’s favorite poster boy for lack of impulse control—just jumps up and accuses a major angel and sitting ephor like Anaita of being a traitor to the Highest. Especially somebody like me, who was already on nineteen kinds of secret probation. Oh, and I had no admissible evidence whatsoever.
In fact, the more I thought, the more certain I was that I should just keep my mouth shut about most of it, even with The Mule, since I didn’t know what game he was playing or where he stood vis-a-vis not just Anaita, but also the Third Way and all the rest of this crazy shit I was floundering in. However much he’d helped me, Temuel was clearly up to his halo in secrets and weirdness, and I didn’t want to force him to choose between me and whatever else he had going on.
All this was swirling through my brain as I began to feel awake and connected enough to pull the sheet off my face and, Lazarus-like, rise from the tomb. Okay, rise from under the bed in the second guest room, the bed with the catalog coverlets and floral-print pillows, but you get the idea. I had already noted idly that the sheet wrapping me seemed to be a bit rougher and heavier than I remembered (not to mention quite a bit tighter) because of how it lay on my face, but as I tried to rise I realized that my problem was more complicated than that: it wasn’t a sheet on me at all, it was a tarp, and it wasn’t draped over me, it was wrapped around me from head to foot, so that my arms were pinned at my sides. This was not the situation I’d been in when I had last lived in this body. Not to mention that I could feel that something was moving me, bouncing me, even tilting me a bit from time to time, as though I were lying in the palm of a very, very large creature, and was being tilted at different angles while it decided which end to start eating first. (I had definitely been in Hell too long.)
Of course I kept my cool, because I knew the worst thing to do was start freaking out before I knew the facts. I calmly began shouting, “What the Jeezly fucking Christ is going on here? Somebody help me!” loudly and repeatedly. Okay, “calmly” isn’t quite the right word, but I didn’t only yell, I started pushing and scratching at the heavy tarp big time, inflating my chest and shoving outward with my arms, until I finally made enough space to get my hands up to my face.
Hands, plural. That was the first good news. Whatever else had happened to me, I had the full set of grasping implements in working order again, one attached to each wrist, with lovely bouquets of functioning fingers at the end. I could tell this because I was busily palpating my face, trying to tell if I was Bobby again, or still in the Snakestaff body. There were no stony lumps over my eyebrows or on my cheeks, and my skin felt much less sandpapery than it had in Hell, so I seemed to have returned to being B. Dollar, slightly itinerant angel. A probe of the back of my head found nothing but scalp and hair. No Doctor Teddy surgery scars either, so I was definitely out of the demon body. That calmed me down a little.
As I managed to work the canvas tarp a bit farther from my face and began to hear sounds more clearly, I finally realized that I wasn’t just rolled in a tarp, I was rolled in a tarp and riding in the trunk of a car. Okay, I’d survived repeated tortures by various finalists from Hell’s Got Talent, and pursuit by honest-to-Blind-Lemon hellhounds, so mere earthly troubles should have been no sweat. Still, I’ve watched Goodfellas and the Godfather movies often enough to know that rolled up in a tarp in somebody’s trunk is usually not a situation you want to be in.
I did everything possible to work the tarp loose so I could use my arms properly, but the thing was thick (and old, and smelly, I might as well mention while I’m feeling sorry for myself) and I could barely pull it down past my forehead. Still, I could see that I was definitely in the trunk of a car, and I could get my hands out far enough to actually try to work the lock open on the inside of the trunk lid, but the vehicle was apparently too old to have one of those emergency-release latches. If I’d had more leverage, I might have been able to rip the entire lock out—I’m pretty strong in my earthbound body—but that wasn’t happening, either, so I was left with only one heroic alternative.
As soon as I began pounding on the inside of the trunk lid the car started swerving around. Still, whoever was kidnapping me didn’t pull over or anything, so I had to start thinking about what I could try next. I wasn’t carrying my gun as far as I knew—I certainly hadn’t been when I left the body behind, because who wants to spend days or weeks lying on top of a large foreign-made pistol, even if you’re unconscious? At the very least I’d have been coming back to a body with a bunch of painful bruises, if not a few accidental gunshot wounds. So what was I going to do when they came to take me out and finish me off? And who had grabbed me, anyway? Eligor said his people hadn’t even found my body, let alone the feather. Was Anaita making sure somebody finished the job she’d originally given to Smyler?
I wouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out: the car was slowing down, the jouncing growing less. I redoubled my efforts to get free of the tarp and even the odds a bit, because wrapped in canvas I was about as dangerous as a large burrito.
I had finally worked my upper body free when the car stopped. Someone fumbled with the trunk lid. Disgusted with myself for not having hidden some kind of weapon on my body before leaving it helpless, I braced myself against the floor of the car. When the trunk popped open, I shut my eyes to keep myself from being blinded by the glare, and struck out as hard as I could with my fist. I had the deep satisfaction of hearing somebody gasp in serious discomfort and fall down, so I opened my eyes, kicked my way loose from the canvas, and started climbing out of the trunk, but slowed down a bit when I saw that instead of Luca Brasi or one of Don Corleone’s other button-men, I had instead just punched Clarence the Junior Angel right in the nuts.