THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN

Demons don’t like silver. It’s one of the few old standbys that work, at least a bit. (Holy water, for instance, is about as much use against Hell’s servants as Diet Pepsi.) Silver doesn’t always kill them, but it almost always hurts them. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another that week I didn’t have any silver bullets on me, so when I got my hand free for a moment, I just shoved the gun against her face and fired three of the ordinary kind. I had my silencer on so the .38 didn’t make too much noise, but she sure as hell did. She reeled back, screeching like a power drill and clawing at the remains of her features like someone trying to get soapy water out of their eyes, then came after me again. Any normal demon in a real-world body would have gone down just from being shot in the face, but she was one of those stubbornly murderous ones—even if you cut off her arms and legs she’d be crawling across the floor like a snake, snapping at your ankles with her teeth.

I hate the stubborn ones.

As soon as she had rubbed the blood out of her remaining eye she leaped forward and did her best to wrap her arms around me, dragging me back down to the floor. I didn’t want to use my last couple of bullets, so I did my best to beat her unconscious with the butt of my Smith & Wesson, but all I managed to do was push her jaw unnaturally far to the side of her face, which made her look like an extremely disturbing Popeye cosplay girl but didn’t slow her down at all. She was on top of me again, slapping and slashing with her nails at my eyes so that all I could do was cover up. Meanwhile she was also doing her best to drive her knee up through my groin and into my chest, introducing my balls to my heart, a meeting that should never take place. This gal was serious bad news and any moment now the guards were going to come busting in and it would be all over for your new friend, Bobby Dollar.

It wasn’t the first time I ever found myself with a howling, angry she-creature on top of me—and God knows it probably wasn’t going to be the last, either—but as the crooked, fanged mouth of Kenneth Vald’s secretary snapped at my face, showering me with bloody froth, I couldn’t help reflecting on how I had yet again wound up in such an extremely unpleasant situation.

And as usual, it had been my own stupid fault.

one: an old testament cinch

LET ME go back to the beginning. It’ll make more sense then. Not a lot of sense, but more than it probably does right now.

Pretty much everybody was already in the bar the night it all started—Monica Naber, big old Sweetheart, Young Elvis, and all the rest of the Whole Sick Choir. Oh, except that because of recent changes in the local ordinances Kool Filter was stuck downstairs, smoking out on the sidewalk. Yes, some of us angels smoke. (I used to do it, but I don’t anymore.) Our bodies are loaners, after all, and it’s not like we’re too worried about dying. Anyway, it was a pretty normal late February night in The Compasses until my friend Sam came in towing an overcoat full of new meat.

“Fuck the poor and all their excuses,” he shouted to the room. “Somebody get me a drink!” He dragged over this young guy I’ve never seen before and shoved him into a chair beside me. “Here’s someone you need to know, kid,” he said. “Meet Bobby Dollar, king of the assholes.” Sam dropped into a seat on the other side of him. The youngster was trapped, but he wasn’t panicking yet. He grinned at me like he was glad to see me—big, stupid, slightly sickly grin. The rest of him was thin, white, and kind of bookish, with a haircut that on anyone but an angel would have screamed, “Mom did this!” A beginner with lots of theories, I guessed, but if he was hanging out with my pal Sam he’d be getting some rude lessons in Practical Theology.

“Who’s your little chum, Sammy?” I knew the kid was one of us—we can recognize each other—but he sure looked uncomfortable wearing a body. “Amateur or visiting pro?”

Junior immediately put on what I think of as the Intelligent Dog look: I don’t know what you’re saying, but I’m sure as hell trying to seem like I do. It didn’t impress me a whole lot more than his nervous smile.

“Go ahead, guess.” Sam craned around. “Hey, Slowpoke Rodriguez,” he yelled at Chico the bartender, “how come you’ll gobble my knob for free, but you won’t pour me a drink for money?”

“Shut up, Riley, you’re boring me,” Chico said, but he dropped his bar rag and turned to the glasses cabinet.

“Sammy boy, you’re even more charming than usual,” I observed. “So who’s this? I’m guessing trainee.”

“Of course he fuckin’ is, B. Can’t you just smell the House on him?” That’s how Sam talks about what most people refer to as “Heaven”—“up at the House.” As in, the rest of us work on the Plantation.

“Really?” Monica Naber stood up in the next booth so gracefully you probably wouldn’t guess she’d been drinking tequila slams since sundown. “Did you hear that, folks? We’ve got a rookie!”