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

Fatback.

five
pig man

O RDINARY WORK kept me busy much of the next day. Alice sent me a downtown client, a hit and run on the 84 over by Shell Mound Road. It was pretty much a slam dunk case—the victim was a twelve-year-old school kid crossing the intersection on the way home for lunch. The prosecutor, a new guy named Weepslug took one look at the scene and rolled his eye in disgust. (He only had one, more or less in the middle.) In fact it would all have been over in a very short time indeed—this wasn’t the kind of kid hiding any ugly secrets—but the rules about children are very, very strict, and we had to go through every formality. By the time the judge ruled, and I could finally leave the pathetic scene behind—the whole time we were arguing the case the kid’s twisted bicycle and one shoe were still lying in the middle of the road—my day was pretty much shot. Even winning the case wasn’t going to wipe away the memories of that child crying when he realized he wasn’t going home to his mom and dad.
    Sometimes I hate what I do.
    At one point, while the judge was questioning the deceased—they do that when it’s a minor—Weepslug turned to me and said, “You heard about Grasswax?”
    I wondered if he really didn’t know. “Oh, yeah, I heard.”
    “He was a bastard, but trust me, nobody deserves that.”
    “I was under the impression you guys thought being a bastard was good.”
    He gave me a strange look. For a demon I kind of liked him—his single, bleary eye had a bemused expression, and although he was almost twice my height he didn’t use that to intimidate. Not that I trusted him an inch, of course. “There’s good bad and then there’s
bad
bad,” he said. “G-Wax made some enemies on both sides.”
    “You think somebody on
my
side of the scrimmage line might have done this?” This was a new idea. It wasn’t in character for our side, but that could be exactly how someone wanted it to seem. Still, the Bloody Net…!
    The prosecutor’s forehead wrinkled in distress; it made his face look like someone had sat on a Christmas ham. “I’m not saying anything,” Weepslug declared, quick and loud. “I don’t know anything.”
    “Neither do I,” I assured him. “There’s no greater bliss than ignorance.”
    “Oh, look!” yelled Sweetheart when I walked into The Compasses just before six, “It’s Heaven’s Most Wanted!”
    “Yeah, cute, very cute.”
    Sam was at the bar with a ginger ale and a
San Judas Courier
spread out across the counter. Newspapers were another way my buddy liked to cultivate his old-school act. “Check it out,” he said as I approached. “His working name was Darko Grazuvac.”
    It took me a moment. “Grasswax? He got an obituary?”
    “Obituary, hell—he got an above-the-fold story. After all, he did just turn up drowned at the scene of a headline suicide. What did you expect?”
    This was making me more and more uneasy. Neither our side nor the Opposition liked publicity, especially not this kind—having reporters digging into the backgrounds of people whose pasts were largely invented is never a good thing for either of us. “So, why would anyone bump him off right there at the Walker guy’s house?”
    Sam shrugged and downed his ginger ale. “Sending a message? Dunno. Let’s go eat.”
    You could get a meal of sorts at The Compasses but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to do if you were going to keep living in the same body afterward, so we wandered across Beeger Square to Boxer Rebellion, my favorite Chinese place. It’s small and unpretentious, andfor a Chinese restaurant (which tend to the businesslike over the sentimental in my experience) also quite friendly.
    Normally having a pair of chopsticks in my fist and a plate of their sesame seed mutton in front of me is enough to convince me that the Highest is on His throne and all’s right with the world, but tonight it wasn’t working.
    “So what’s going on?” I asked Sam.