The fountain in front had actually been salvaged from a derelict, early twentieth-century office building that had stood on another part of the property. When they tore the office building down, some local artist had rescued the maze of copper piping from the fire sprinkler system, then rebuilt part of it in the open space in front of the museum. It was as if the walls of the office building were still there but invisible; the pipes formed empty geometric shapes and drizzled water from sprinkler heads on every level. (It always reminded me of one of those Visible Man models where you can see the circulatory system through the clear plastic skin.)

I was looking up at the fountain when someone approached me from behind. I was a little nervous, what with my run-ins with Smyler lately, and I must have spun around quite quickly. The skinny young African-American kid raised his hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Just wanted to know if you could tell me the time.”

I looked at my watch. “Ten o’clock on the dot.” But when I looked back at him he was smiling in a sort of odd way. “Something wrong?”

“It’s me, Bobby. Temuel.”

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t get out of Heaven much, do you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re having too much fun with disguises.”

He looked a little hurt. “I’m being careful. You want me to be careful, don’t you? You don’t want everyone to know what we’re doing, do you?”

Why is almost everybody I know so touchy? “No, no, of course not.”

“Good.” He looked around. We seemed to be the only people in the vicinity. The Mule reached up and made a Zipper appear in the air. (If I haven’t explained recently, these are what we use to step Outside, which means outside of Time itself. That’s where we do our job, at least the part where we defend the souls of recently dead customers from the spin-doctoring of Hell.) He stepped into it, then beckoned for me to follow.

Unlike most of what I encounter Outside (because I’m usually at deathbeds or accident scenes) the view inside this Zipper wasn’t really any different than the view outside. Temuel and I were still alone, the museum was still closed, and it was still night. The only thing different was that the water from the fountain was frozen, thousands of individual drops arrested in midair. It would have been interesting to look at them up close, but my archangel had other ideas.

He reached up and plucked something out of nowhere. When he held it out to me, it was only a spark of light on his palm.