The Compasses was predictably loud, with the usual suspects in residence—the Whole Sick Choir as we sometimes called ourselves. (We’d even put it on softball shirts once, but dropped out of the local league when we found out we were actually expected to show up and play softball.) Chico was behind the bar, looking his usual combination of Mexican biker and aloof Confucian scholar, fiddling with his mustache while deciding which of the guys singing off-key at the bar he was going to cut off first. The serenaders were led by Jimmy the Table, a portly fellow who liked to wear old-fashioned gangster suits and looked like he should be out helping Nathan Detroit find a place to hold his famous floating craps game. He waved to me when I went past, but he didn’t stop singing, being well into the middle verses of “Roll Me Over,” a song that’s always more fun to sing than to listen to. I didn’t intend to do either. I had Chico get me a Stoli, and then I crept off to one of the back booths. For about ten minutes nobody noticed me, and I just sat and watched God’s warriors at rest and play. Pretty horrifying sight, if I do say so myself, but good for some laughs.

Of course I couldn’t stay that lucky very long. Sweetheart, large, bald, and fabulously angelic, spotted me and rolled over to give me a frighteningly detailed account of all the cheap punks and overdressed poseurs in the club he’d visited the previous night, and to quiz me on my latest trip through the Pearly Gates. And of course, a few minutes later Young Elvis showed up, and I had to tell it all over again, or at least the abbreviated and sanitized version I’d cobbled up for public consumption. Most of the Choir didn’t even know that Sam was gone. The official word was that he was on some kind of administrative leave, and although the rumors had been flying in the Compasses ever since he disappeared, as far as I knew, nobody but Clarence and me knew what had really happened.

Later in the evening, Monica came in with Teddy Nebraska, an angel I didn’t know too well because he worked the other end of town and tended to hang out there, too. Monica was relatively sober, or at least sober enough to remember that I had been kind of a shit to her lately, so after she got the bare bones of what had gone down with me and the bigwig angels she floated off to find more entertaining company. This was an immense relief, even though it left Teddy Nebraska sitting in my booth making awkward chitchat until he thought of an excuse to follow her, or at least to get out of my morose vicinity.