Free Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams

somebody’s garden hedge and away into the darkness. As I struggled and failed to sit up, I could see the lights of a half dozen open doors, and people standing at their windows looking out. Then the spot from the police cruiser fell on me, filling the world with painful white light, and that was the last thing I remembered.

interlude

    I
WAS LYING
on my stomach, drifting in and out of sleep. Caz was curled up behind me, spooning me. At first I thought she was just moving randomly against me, but then I realized that she was slowly rubbing her pussy against my tailbone, an almost imperceptible grinding and tightening, slow as the movement of glaciers. I wasn’t even sure she was awake.
    I made a joke. I wish now I hadn’t. “So, is this a dominance hump? Am I your bitch, now?”
    She froze. Seriously, she went rigid, like an animal trying not to be seen. After all we’d just done with each other, I’d somehow caught her by surprise, and it was like a window had opened that looked straight backward, five hundred years into the past, to a shamed little medieval girl, a Catholic nobleman’s daughter with feelings she wasn’t supposed to have.
    “I . . . I didn’t . . .”
    “Hey,” I said. “Hey! It’s all right. Actually, it’s more than all right. I was just making a stupid joke. You may not have noticed, but I do it a lot.”
    “I was . . . I was smelling you. It just made me . . . well, you know.”
    “And what do I smell like? Napalm in the morning? A good little angel?”
    “Shut up. You smell like Bobby. I need to remember.”
    That gave me a moment’s pause. I knew why she was worried about remembering, but I didn’t really want to think about it. I went back to silliness, hoping to retrieve the moment when we had been alone in the Garden without care or knowledge. “So you’re saying it
wasn’t
a dominance thing.”
    “Don’t need to hump you for that, angel boy, it’s automatic. I’m a very high-ranking demon, remember.”
    “Oh, yeah. Like I could forget after you tried to beat the shit out of me earlier this evening.”
    “See? That was when I established my dominance.”
    “Dominance, my shiny golden halo. It seems to me that I wound up on top of you, remember?”
    “Only because I let you. We females have been using that trick for thousands of years. ‘Oh, you big strong man, you’ve overwhelmed me!’ And you always fall for it. Dumb dicks.”
    “Yeah, well, a wise man once said, ‘As the twig is bent, so dumbs the dick.’”
    For a moment she just stared at me. “That doesn’t many any sense at all.”
    I considered. “Or maybe it’s ‘A mighty fortress is our dick.’”
    She hit me. Not too hard, though. “No wonder I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m sharing my bed with a dangerous winged idiot.”

seven
    drummed out

    Y OU’D THINK getting multiple stab wounds and broken ribs from a twice-dead assassin would be enough fun for one day, but it wasn’t over yet.
    After my wrestling match with Smyler, I came back to consciousness just long enough to have some momentary sense of my physical body—which felt like a large sack of broken crockery wrapped in scalded nerves—surrounded by harsh white lights and medical machinery, then I was abruptly somewhere else.
    That somewhere else, as it turned out, was Heaven, and although being lifted right out of all that pain and suffering into the bodiless exaltation of my celestial form was at least as good as getting a massive shot of Demerol, the relief was undercut a bit by the sight of my boss, Archangel Temuel, and the expression on his not-quite-face.
    The farther up the heavenly ladder you are, by the way, the less you look like a regular person. As best I can tell, when I’m in Heaven I look like a shimmery, vaguely blurry version of my earthly self, although it’s hard to be certain because reflecting surfaces are oddly scarce upstairs. But Temuel (or “the Mule” as his underlings call him) always looks even