The little kid named Kayshawn was back in the main chamber, waiting to guide me out. I looked back as I reached the corridor. Tico was staring at me, arms crossed, frowning past his piratical bandana. “You made him dance twice,” he said. “Don’t want to see you back for a long time.”

I don’t particularly like being told off by eleven year olds, but he was right. I shrugged and followed Kayshawn back toward the daylight.

On the way back down the peninsula I was no longer in the mood for anything quite so brisk and bustling as Elmore James, so I put on Chet In Paris. Baker’s aching blue notes were about right for the mood of someone who’d just spent a lot of money to learn a complicated and extremely painful way to commit suicide. I rolled up the windows and let “Alone Together” fill the car like a remembered perfume.

So was I really going to try to make a trip into Hell? It was worse than suicide, of course, like sending a belly dancer into a Mujahideen rape camp. And even assuming I could get into the place, how could any disguise possibly hold up long enough to get me close to Eligor . . . and Caz? Because from what I knew of Hell, the high rollers lived in ways that even Jude’s Young Republicans could never hope to match, each one with his own little fiefdom, fortress, private army. A wig and a fake mustache were hardly going to get me through all that.

As I reached the outskirts of San Judas I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. After my long adventure in the Bayview district it was well into the afternoon, and I hadn’t had any lunch, or much breakfast for that matter, and for once I had a pocket full of money. I wouldn’t get to spend any of it in Hell, and Orban would probably auction off my car anyway, so I took the exit to Redwood Shores and headed for an expensive Japanese place I knew out there, on the water.