“Nice story,” I said after a moment. “But I’m not sure . . .”
“Hang on. Three months later, our loke refused to participate in an operation because there were hostages. Children. A demon had got into a guy, and he’d gone into a preschool with a machete and was threatening to start throwing bodies out. Raguel—that was my NCO—said let the regular mortal police handle it, because right now it was just ordinary crazy, but if we stepped in it might escalate into a Heaven-Hell thing. He thought the kids had a better chance if we let the cops handle it.”
“But you know the rules,” I said, as seriously as if I agreed with all of them myself. “You can’t choose which orders from Upstairs to obey. Our job is to protect souls, and as far as Heaven’s concerned, that was the important part. You don’t let a demon go once it’s broken cover on Earth.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been an advocate too, just like you, Bobby. I deal with souls, including a lot more children than I like. None of us wanted any dead kids, no matter how much confetti they were going to throw at them when they showed up in Heaven. But my loke got cashiered for that. I never saw him again. When I found out, I decided that what Heaven wanted wasn’t always right, and I’ve never seen anything since that convinced me otherwise. Scared the shit out of me at the time, but I don’t get surprised much anymore.”
Clarence reached over and squeezed his hand.
I honestly didn’t know what to do, whether to trust this guy or not. If Sam had answered the two or three messages I’d left him in an attempt to reconnect, I could have asked his opinion. Sam’s advice is almost always good—not that I follow it most of the time, but it’s nice to know why I’m about to fuck up. Without him, I was on my own. Of course, I wasn’t completely sure of Sam, either. Did it really even matter whether Wendell was on the up and up? If our bosses wanted to bust me, they already had enough evidence to bag me, wrap me, and send me straight to Hades. And if Wendell was working for Anaita, instead—well, that was different, but it might still be better to have him on the inside where I could keep an eye on him. This was assuming that if he was crooked, Clarence didn’t know. But maybe Clarence was in on it, too.
I swear, this is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. Because I have to. No wonder people say I don’t play well with the other kids.
“Fortune favors the brave,” had become my official motto lately. I was hoping the full version was something like, “Fortune favors the brave, the stupid, and the hopeless-but-at-least-entertaining,” because “brave” isn’t my best trick. But if I was going for broke (and that was pretty definitely what I was doing) there was no point holding back at the last moment. I mean, you can say, “Okay, I’ll run out in front of the motorcade and shoot the Pope, but only in the arm.” They’re still going to be picking Swiss Guard machine-gun bullets out of your corpse afterward.
“Give me a ride back to my place,” I told Clarence. “Wendell might as well meet the rest of the gang.”
So that was me—signed up and in for the long haul. Sergeant Dollar and His Howling LGBT Commandos against Heaven itself.
• • •
After Clarence had shown Wendell around and they’d both had a chance to catch their breath about the decor, I let Wendell have Caz’s computer to see if he could crack the Black Sun’s drive encryption. Meanwhile, I filled Clarence in on my last few hours. He was suitably agog.
“Anaita?” He said it almost in a whisper. “You’re joking. You went to her house?”
“Hey, I just brought my second crooked angel to our safehouse, Junior. I live dangerously.”
“Harrison, remember? And are you calling Wendell crooked? Hang on, are you calling me crooked?”
“One way or another, babe. You two are now officially either cheating Heaven or cheating me. Take your pick. Now help me examine these pictures from Anaita’s stately pleasure dome.”
It was slow going because we had to do it all on Oxana’s phone. She’d taken a couple of hundred pictures, and although the first dozen or so seemed to be pieces of expensive furniture, and Oxana herself could only explain that she’d thought they were interesting, we quickly got to Anaita’s visitors’ waiting room—not the place I’d been, but something a bit more official in another part of the house. The room was large and tasteful, but the walls were covered in photos, and Oxana, bless her shuriken-loving little heart, had taken close-ups of almost all of them. Unfortunately, the photographs seemed, if not useless, at least not immediately helpful. Most of them were staged publicity shots from various dinners and awards ceremonies or even less formal public situations, rich people’s parties and things like that. The number of faces I didn’t recognize outnumbered those I did, despite the fact that Anaita/Donya clearly knew a buttload of important and even famous people. She had a picture of herself with Jon Bon Jovi, for God’s sake. I mean, isn’t that about the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard? A goddess turned angel thousands of years old at the minimum, and she puts up a picture of herself with Bon Jovi? I supposed it was all part of her desire to create a human persona. Yes, I guess if you were a rich Iranian exile, you might well display pictures of yourself with rock stars and Ronald Reagan.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Clarence asked after a while.
“I don’t think she would keep the horn at her house,” I explained. “It just doesn’t make sense. The one place everyone would look.”
“But you said she had a private army of guards.”
“She does, but think about it. Who’s she hiding this from?”
“Everybody.” Clarence frowned. “I mean, everybody in Heaven.”
“Yeah, of course, which is why she wouldn’t keep it in Heaven. But who does she really need to keep it from?” He was still thinking. “Come on, Junior—who did it belong to in the first place?” I looked over at Wendell, but he was at least pretending not to be listening too closely.
Clarence nodded. “Eligor, of course.”
“Yep. And if there’s anyone who could get around guards—or under them, or even through them if he wanted, it’s Eligor. Hell, those fucking Black Sun chumps got a bugbear into my car with the windows closed! How hard could it be for one of the most powerful demons in Hell to get access to Anaita’s place? At the very least, she’d have to be constantly on guard. Some vacation from the stresses of Heaven that would make! And I got the distinct impression she likes pretending to be a mortal and lady of the manor.”
“So what are you looking for?”
“No, it’s what you’re looking for, Sunny Jim. Remember, you’re in this with me, right up to your collar buttons. I need you to figure out where all these pictures were taken, when, and who was there.”
“And what are you going to be doing, Bobby? Strapping on your pearl-handled six-shooters and calling out the Black Sun Brotherhood? High noon in the middle of Centennial Avenue?”
I kind of liked the idea, actually, but I shook my head. “No, I’ll deal with them later. I’m going to be making a systematic check on all of Donya Sepanta’s holdings. Because if she’s got another property, and she’s probably got more than a few, then that’s where I’m going to start looking for Mr. Eligor’s lost noggin-topper.” I thought I might get a little help out of Gustibus on that, since the private lives of Heaven’s biggest stars was his vocation, but I didn’t want to announce that to everybody here, which would only make them think I wasn’t going to be working as hard as they were.
“Mr. Dollar?”
I never really have got used to being called “Mister.” If I knew my father, I’d probably be one of those guys who says, “No, Mr. Dollar’s my dad.” But of course, I don’t. “Yeah, Wendell?”