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Back Happy Hour In Hell
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

“Fabulous. I’ll pass it along.” And then she hung up. Hung up! Some bloody personal assistant, treating Eligor’s associates like that. Of course, it hadn’t been that long ago that her boss was busy setting all my nerve endings on fire, so I guess it wasn’t that rude, given the context. I even wondered a little if it might be the same secretary I’d killed, just re-bodied (and with an English accent this time for extra zing).

Now I needed a place to do the exchange. Even if Eligor actually meant to honor the bargain (something I wasn’t taking for granted) I was going to need help.

I left a message on the phone number Sam had given me, then got on with my other post-Hell errands. I went down to the Compasses to see my angel friends and made up crazy stories about where I’d been for the last three weeks. (Yep. It turned out I’d only been gone three weeks. Like I said, time runs differently in Hell. They sure could pack a lifetime’s misery into twenty-something days.) But I was so pale from lying in a closet all that time that I had an inverse suntan, so I told them I’d gone up to Seattle to visit a friend. Monica, who knew me better than anyone now Sam was gone, treated this fiction with the contempt it deserved, but she didn’t press me for the actual details. She probably assumed I’d been shacked up with someone. I had a few questions for her, however, and waited until we had a table to ourselves for a few minutes while Young Elvis and Teddy Nebraska arm-wrestled at the bar and everyone else made fun of them.

“What about Walter Sanders?” I asked. “Has anyone heard from him?” I knew they hadn’t because I knew where he still was, which was serving as purser on The Nagging Bitch, sailing the seas of Hell and spreading the Lifters’ message, but I was curious what people thought about his disappearance.

To her credit, Monica looked worried. “No, nobody has. I asked The Mule, but he says he thinks he’s been transferred. It’s just shit trying to get information out of the Big House.”

“Amen.” Which reminded me, I definitely had to talk to Temuel soon. The archangel deserved at least an edited report on what had happened to me, since he’d been more instrumental in getting me there (and back) than anyone else, and I in turn had quite a few questions I needed to ask him. “And you, kiddo. How are you doing?”