Free The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams Page A

Go.”
    And go I did. After all, Grasswax’s hideously mangled form was still hanging between the trees, the sightless eyes watching me with what seemed like disappointment.
    Don’t know what you were expecting from me, Brother Demon,
I thought as I stepped back into the world of time.
I don’t want anything to do with the heavy hitters, either my side’s or yours.
    Before I got to the Walker house I had been pretty certain I would drop by The Compasses on my way back, but now I felt unsettled right down to the soles of my feet, and I just wanted to go home and bathe myself in holy water. Since I didn’t have any holy water, vodka would have to serve, and the bath would have to be on the inside rather than the outside. I kept a bottle of 42 Below in the freezer for just these kinds of spiritual emergencies.

    Monica had left a message on my phone wanting to know how things had gone, and I also had a reminder from Sam that we were getting together after work tomorrow for our monthly dinner (an old custom of ours I’ll tell you about another time) but I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. I wanted to get quickly and quietly blotto because I felt like a garage full of car alarms right after a major earthquake.
    When I got through the door of my apartment I pulled out the vodka, cracked the cap, then poured myself a couple of fingers in a glass and put on some Miles as thinking music. As “So What” began to curl around my living room like cigarette smoke I took a fiercely cold swallow and tried to make sense out of everything that had happened in the last day, from the unprecedented absence of Edward Walker’s soul to the sudden passing of Prosecutor Grasswax in the grisliest fashion imaginable.
    My old boss Leo used to say that when you’re working for any gigantic and corrupt bureaucracy, whether it’s the British East India Company, the Politburo, or the NCAA, the first lesson is this: Don’t wait to find out exactly how they’re going to screw you before you start protecting yourself—get to work when you spot the first signs of trouble. This whole Walker thing was full of holes, and from long experience I felt sure more weird things were going to be crawling out of those holes very soon.
    In fact this particular little clusterfuck, with its missing souls and dead demon-prosecutors, had all the warning signs of one of the worst snafus in recent memory, and if I wasn’t smack in the middle of it I was close enough to feel the heat most unpleasantly. It was time to start the counter-offensive—if I could do so without making things worse for myself, that is.
    I poured myself another glass of numbness and thought about where to start.
    About an hour later I noticed I had finished my third drink but had never poured myself a fourth. I got up to rectify that, noted that Miles had gone quiet, and put on some Robert Johnson. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Seemed like an appropriate night for Mr. Johnson and his crossroads bargain.
    Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door
    Early this mornin’, ooh, when you knocked upon my door
    And I said, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.”
    Even in a body that wasn’t one hundred percent my own, I couldn’t repress a shiver. It looked like I’d be doing a lot of things I wouldn’t much like in the next few days, including having a conversation with my best friend Sam about why he wasn’t being entirely honest with me. Alice in the office had said when she gave me the case that Edward Walker was supposed to be Sam’s client, and if our situations had been reversed I certainly would have explained to
my
old buddy by now why I missed taking a client that landed him deep in the shit.
    The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed more information about everything—about dead Mr. Walker, even about Grasswax. But information about Hell’s labor force wasn’t easy to come by through regular channels. I was going to have to pay a visit to