THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN

Down on the ground the harbor police and the regular cops looked like they had arrived in a hurry; a couple of tow trucks and a fire engine were also parked along the pier at odd angles. Below them a harbor diver had just surfaced after attaching cables to something; at his thumbs-up the winches on the tow trucks started turning. The cables went rigid, the motors whined, and after a long moment the back end of a large white vehicle broke the surface, but almost immediately one of the motors stuttered and died. The other strained and coughed for a few more seconds, then it gave up too. The tow truck drivers and several harbor police began to shout back and forth at each other as we climbed out of Sam’s car.

“Why don’t they pull it the rest of the way out?” Clarence asked, eyes wide. “That poor woman!”

“Because it’s probably too heavy—full of water,” I told him. “But the driver’s already dead, or we wouldn’t have got the call, so it doesn’t matter how long she sits there. Do you know about going Outside?”

“Of course!” He was offended.

“Oh, he’s a pistol, this one.” Sam was already walking toward the shimmer in the air, like a vertical mirage, that announced a way out. The official term for them is “egress,” but down here we call them Zippers. We make them when we need them, and we simple Earthbound angels don’t really know how they work, just that they do.

As the kid and I fell in behind Sam, a couple of bystanders looked briefly in our direction but then sort of lost interest. We’re not easy to notice when we’re working, I’ve learned over the years. We’re still there, if you know what I mean—we have real bodies—but if we don’t want you to see us then you probably won’t, or at least you won’t remember it afterward.

Sam and the kid vanished into the shimmering line down the middle of the air and I stepped through after them.

As always, it was the quiet of Outside that struck me first, a great, heavy hush as if we had suddenly dropped into the biggest, most silent library in the universe. But in most ways we were still where we had begun—the docks, with the cop cars and safety vehicles burning the darkness with red and blue lights and the downtown skyline stretching skyward behind them like a mountain range. But the police spotlights weren’t moving, nor were the cops’ mouths, a helicopter over the Intel Tower, a diver floating on green jelly swells, or even the few seagulls who had been startled off the pilings by all the activity and were now frozen in mid air like stuffed displays hung from a museum ceiling. Only one thing was different Outside: a woman with short gray hair and a dark raincoat stood in the midst of the petrified policemen, though none of them could see her.

“That’s her,” Sam said. “You want to walk the kid through meeting the client while I’m waiting for the guardian, B? That way he can learn from the best.”

“Lying bastard,” I said, but I got the facts I needed from him and then led the kid down to the puddle-glazed dock.

“We look the same here,” the kid said, staring at his hands. “I mean, we do, don’t we? Like our earth-bodies?”

“Pretty much.”

“I thought we’d look more…angelic.” He looked embarrassed. “Like in Heaven.”

“This isn’t Heaven—we’re still on the plane of earthly existence, more or less. We just stepped out of Time. But we don’t have to look the same here, it’s just sort of a tradition. The Other Side folk prefer to make themselves more intimidating. You’ll see.”

As we approached our new client, she stared at us with an expression I had seen on a lot of faces in a lot of similar situations—total, utter confusion.

“Silvia Martino,” I said. “God loves you.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Who are you?” She flapped her hands at the motionless cops and firefighters. “What’s wrong with these people?”

“They’re alive, Mrs. Martino. I’m afraid you’re not.” I’ve dumbed down my explanations over the years. I used to think breaking it to them slowly was the kindest way, but I learned differently. “You apparently drove your car into the bay. Any reason?”

She was more than a bit beyond sixty but no old lady. In fact, she looked like someone who might get old but would never really get old, if you know what I mean. Then I remembered that she would never get any older than this moment.

“Drove my car…?” She looked at the white bulk of her SUV hanging at the end of the straining tow truck cables like Moby Dick, decorated with fantails of glassy, motionless water. “Oh, dear. That’s my car, isn’t it?” Her eyes widened. She was beginning to do the math. “I was trying to turn around, and I guess I got…confused.” She blinked. “Am I…am I really…?”

“I’m afraid so.”