“What the fuck are you doing here?” I shouted. “In fact, what are you doing period? Why am I in the trunk of a car?” This might have been a bit unfair to Clarence, who was lying on his back, curled up like a dying insect, moaning with pain and nausea, and not in the best position to answer questions.
I heard the driver’s side door slam. A moment later Garcia Windhover, aka “G-Man,” aka “World’s Most Useless Human” came trotting around the side, dressed in his usual gangster drag, like he’d put together his Young Jeezy outfit during a sale at Hot Topic. He’d added to it this time with a black eye patch, which made him look less like a pirate or Nick Fury than like a fourth-grader being treated for lazy eye. “Whoa!” he said, looking worriedly at Clarence, who was lying in the road next to the car quietly retching and panting like a woman in painful labor. “Bobby, dude, why’d you do that?”
“Why’d I do that? No, why am I in the trunk of a car?” I looked at the gaudiness and unnecessary chrome and winced. “Even worse, your car? I don’t want even my dead body in this car, ever. And what’s Clarence doing here, Windhover? He wasn’t supposed to know about this.”
“I needed some help.”
“You’re going to. That’s a promise. I didn’t mean to sock Clarence in the balls, I was just defending myself against kidnappers, but you . . .” I glared at G-Man so direfully that he actually took a couple of steps back. “I’m going to punch you in the manfruit over and over again until you’re ringing like the bells of Notre Dame when the hunchback bought caffeinated by mistake.”
I actually felt better after I said all that. More like my old self. I sat for a moment on the edge of the open trunk, then bent to help Clarence off the ground. He didn’t want to get up at first, but after a moment let himself be coaxed into, if not standing, at least being partially upright.
“Oh, oh, oh,” he moaned, still holding his crotch. “Bodies suck. I think one of them popped.” We were on a side street just off the Camino Real, and a few pedestrians were checking us out, probably wondering whether someone was peddling stolen goods out of the back of their car. Which Clarence and G-Man were, in a sense, since I had stolen myself right out of Niloch’s clammy hands. Thanks to Smyler, of course. It felt very weird to think that, I’m sure you can imagine.
“Sorry, Junior,” I said. “Honest, I didn’t know it was you. All I knew was someone had wrapped me up in a tarp. I figured some bad guys were going to dump me in the baylands or something.”
Clarence winced and shook his head. “We were taking you back to Garcia’s house.”
“You mean Garcia’s sort-of-grandfather-in-law’s house? The place I already was? Where he was supposed to keep my body safe and sound and not put it in the trunk of his godawful embarrassment of a car and drive it around San Judas like I was a bunch of Mexican dress shirts heading to a flea market?”
“You sound pissed, dude,” G-Man said.
Always quick on the uptake, that lad. “Just a little. And I’ll probably get over it. But right now I’d like to be somewhere other than by the side of a road, so why don’t we go back to Posie’s granddad’s house, Windhover, and you can explain to me what exactly is going on?”
G-Man nodded. “Okay. They probably took the tent down by now.”
It turned out that Edward Walker’s nice house in the Palo Alto district, where G-Man and Posie had been squatting for the last few months, was going on the market. As part of that process, the real estate agent had informed Posie that the place would have to be tented for termite fumigation. I suppose I should have been grateful that G-Man had the brains at least to figure out that a massive dose of pesticide might be bad for my body, but he handled it in typical idiotic fashion. I was too heavy for him to carry, he said, so he’d recruited Clarence—who, you may remember, I had intentionally not told about any of this—to wrap me up in the tarp, carry me out, and drive me in G-Man’s car over to the place in Brittan Heights where Clarence rented a room. I’d spent the last few days in a toolshed that Clarence’s landlords never used. The Littlest Angel at least had the wit to look embarrassed about this.
“A toolshed? Really? What, just propped up with the spiders and earwigs and whatevers crawling all over me?” I knew I was being unpleasant about it, but I wasn’t ready to care yet. Maybe having just spent a massive amount of time undergoing torture in Hell had something to do with that.
“No!” said Clarence. “No, Bobby, I put you on an old pool table. I kind of made a space and then stacked some other stuff on you. You weren’t just propped up or anything. And I didn’t see any spiders.”
“Thanks for that. It’s nice to know I was so well cared-for.”
Clarence frowned. “You don’t have to be so bitchy, Bobby. You already punched me in the testicles.”
“True.” I nodded, downed the rest of the bottle of pisswater that Garcia kept in the late Edward Walker’s refrigerator, some weak-ass hipster beer that used to be drunk by blue-collar guys because it was the only weak-ass crap they could afford, and was now supported almost entirely by nostalgics with tattoos and semi-expensive bicycles. Still, that stuff was better than no beer, although the contest was closer than you might think. “Sorry about that again, Clarence. Really truly. Self-defense, disoriented and confused, probably even PTSD. Put that together and make an excuse out of it you can live with, okay?”
He gave me one of his looks, somewhere between “hurt puppy” and “irritated older brother.” I might not have wanted to trust him, although I was going to have to now, at least to an extent, but how could I dislike anyone who was so easy to annoy and so profitable to tease?
“So . . . what were you doing, Bobby?” he asked.
“Crazy shit. Don’t try it at home,” I said. “Seriously, don’t try it anywhere else, either. Let’s go find me some real food instead of this box of Triscuits and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“You want to ride in my whip?” G-Man asked.
“You were not included in the invitation,” I said. Because it was going to be hard enough talking to Clarence, who at least knew I was an angel, being one himself. There was no way I was going to include Garcia Windhover in the discussion.
G-Man’s expression, though, was so much that of the kid who not only doesn’t get picked, but also the team that gets stuck with him then demands compensation, that I felt sorry for him. “Okay, you’re right, Garcia, I at least owe you dinner. I mean, you may have carried me around in your trunk like a deer you ran over on the road and were trying to sneak home to make venison jerky, but I survived.” I would come up with some sanitized, non-terrifying-to-ordinary-humans version of what had been going on, although I’d need at least another couple of drinks in me before I could imagine what that version might be.
After the explanations-obligations were disposed of, I’d get back to my real job: getting Caz out of Eligor’s clutches. I hadn’t forgotten that for a second, especially because I was now wearing my jacket again, the one with the secret angel-feather pocket which happened to be in another space/time continuum. Eligor had actually told the truth about not being able to find it, because if he had, there was no way he’d have let me escape Hell. “And then afterward, you, Clarence my man, can drive me back to my charming apartment, assuming my landlord hasn’t already rented it to some wife-beating crackhead, and I’ll catch you up on company business on the way.”
“I’m down wit’ that!” said G-Man. “You want to hit the Chinese place down in Whisky Gulch?”
“Sure. But one thing, Windhover. If you’re going to hang around with me, you may not wear that eye patch. Not in public.” It reminded me too much of the Broken Boy’s helper, little Tico. That kid hadn’t been covering up to look cool; he had been hiding something ugly and painful.
“But it’s a tribute to Slick Rick!”
“And Rick would agree with me. For one thing, Slick is actually missing an eye. You aren’t.”